The past is now being read before it’s dug
the past is now being read before it’s dug: ai found three hundred new nasca glyphs in six months, nearly doubling the known set, and the vesuvius challenge fully read a 2,000-year-old carbonized scroll without unrolling it. predictive models scan satellite and soil data to map buried sites without a spade.
the archaeologist’s trowel got a search index.
Context
Verified event dates: a PNAS study published Sep 24, 2024 reports AI helped find 303 previously unknown Nazca geoglyphs, nearly doubling the known figurative set (The Guardian, Sep 26, 2024). The Vesuvius Challenge announced on Jun 25, 2026 the first end-to-end reading of an entire sealed Herculaneum scroll, PHerc. 1667.
The scroll was sealed by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius and was virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end.
The Nazca finding and the scroll reading match their sources. The Nazca result is from 2024, and the post does not date it. Nazca 'in six months' and 'predictive models scanning satellite and soil data' are not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted.
Related work
Watch next
- Check the PNAS paper for the survey time span.
Sources
- PNAS, Nazca surveypnas.org
- Vesuvius Challenge, Jun 25, 2026scrollprize.org
- Forbes, Jul 1, 2026forbes.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 06:16 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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