Around 2,000 years ago, the Hopewell culture built a 60-mile ceremonial road connecting Newark to Chillicothe, Ohio. Most of it has been destroyed by farming, but tiny remnants might still be hiding in the landscape—parallel earthen walls just 50cm tall, visible only as subtle shadows in the right light.
There's way too much terrain for archaeologists to analyze alone. That's where you come in! This tool lets you explore high-resolution lidar data and help search for lost sections of the Great Hopewell Road.
Start exploring: Check out the known archaeological sites on the map. Click the pin icon next to each site name to fly there and see the crisp lidar imagery. Click on any of the pins on the map to learn more about the cite, and follow up on the cited references to dive further down the rabbit hole. Use the sidebar controls to customize what you see.
Hunt for the road: Right-click anywhere on the map (within Ohio) to request a tile. If someone's already requested it, you can load the interactive data instantly. Otherwise, you'll wait a bit for the processing pipeline.
Adjust the lighting: Once a tile loads, the shading sandbox opens. Change the lighting direction and exaggerate the terrain to increase contrast—this makes subtle features pop out. Click "Render Tile" to add it to the map.
Mark your finds: Found something interesting? Drop a pin using the geometry tools in the top right. Then share it on Discord with coordinates and a screenshot!
I'm Mark Kalsbeek, a web developer and researcher from the Netherlands. I was inspired to build this after watching Milo's video above. If you want to reach me, @ me on Milo's Discord : reveal {{ username }}
Special thanks to Ohio OGRIP for making high-quality lidar data freely available with an easy-to-reverse API.
Map tiles from OpenStreetMap contributors and satellite imagery from Esri.
Built with: Elixir (plug_cowboy, jason, geo, logger_file_backend, httpoison, mime), Python (laspy, scipy, numpy, pyproj), Deno (Vue, Vite, Three.js, MapLibre GL, Pinia), and of course Claude for infinite amounts of grunt work.