The Lost Inca Gold
AI Meets Space Archaeology
By William R Wood Jr
Fun Stuff
Below are fun notes. You do not need to read them to enjoy the story. They are there for those who may want to mount their own expedition into the Llanganatis.
The Legend
From Wikipedia - The Incas did not have a written language but did keep detailed records with knotted strings. Most of Quipi were destroyed by the Spanish as sacrilegious. No one has been able to completely decipher their meaning.
The Tutor
Valverde's Gold by Mark Honigsbaum
In 1887, two British sailors landed on the coast of Ecuador and set off across the Andes on a secret mission. Their task was to locate an immense hoard of Inca gold which had been lost for hundreds of years. A botanist who had recently returned from Ecuador had provided them with documents proving it still existed and gave them the route to find it. And find it they did - but both perished before they could make their way back to the cave a second time.
In Valverde's Gold, Mark Honigsbaum attempts to unravel a riddle that has inspired frustrating and fatal treasure hunts for centuries. When he delves into the botanist's life and discovers an ancient Spanish treasure guide buried in his notebook, he cannot help but be drawn into the mystery. Undeterred by the cursed history of the gold, Honigsbaum embarks on an epic journey into the last uncharted range in the Andes-the Llanganati Mountains of eastern Ecuador. This is the story of how the lure of gold intoxicates even the most level-headed of historians, and of how men-and women-are seized with the desire to claim treasure from one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the world. Honigsbaum battles through mountains, jungles, and conflicting stories, and, as he draws closer to the hidden cache, illuminates the allure of lost gold and the hold it has on our imagination.
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From https://www.amazon.com/Valverdes-Gold-Search-Great-Treasure
Press release issued by the United States Department of Justice on July 5, 2017, outlining the agreement reached with Hobby Lobby.
​​Space Archaeologist Sarah Parcak Uses Satellites to Uncover Ancient Egyptian Ruins
Photography by Melissa Golden; Satellite image courtesy of Sarah Parcak
Don Campbell is a popular Maine winning Maine’s Best Singer-Songwriter from 2004-2009 in the Maine Sunday Telegram Readers’ Poll. Tom uses part of the refrain from the song You and Me at 1:01 for Jenny’s text tone.
From doncampbellmusic.com
Nice source of maps and an English translation of the Derrotero. SPRUCE, Richard On the Mountains of Llanganati in the Eastern Cordillera of the Quitonian Andes Illustrated by a Map Constructed by the Late Don Atansio Guzman, Vol. 31, Isha Books, 1861, pp. 177-178.
“Students can see for themselves how the cutting down of rainforests in Central America is affecting the illegal antiquities market, or how archaeological sites in Iraq have changed in appearance to look like “waffles” due to the extensive looting taking place there.” — Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology by Sarah H. Parcak
A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a network architecture for deep learning which learns directly from data, eliminating the need for manual feature extraction. CNNs are particularly useful for finding patterns in images to recognize objects, faces, and scenes. They can also be quite effective for classifying non-image data such as audio, time series, and signal data. Applications that call for object recognition and computer vision — such as self-driving vehicles and face-recognition applications — rely heavily on CNNs.
From https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/convolutional-neural-network-matlab.html
Eight-minute clip of interview of Dr. Sarah Parcak by Stephen Colbert after her 2016 TED Prize. Nice overview of satellite imagery and archeology.
Happy New Year
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Treasure seeker Barth Blake followed up Spruce's discovery in 1886. If his writings are to be believed, Blake was the last person to find the gold. In one letter he wrote: "There are thousands of gold and silver pieces of Inca and pre-Inca handicraft, the most beautiful goldsmith works you are not able to imagine." He detailed life-size human figurines, birds and other animals, flowers, and cornstalks, as well as "the most incredible jewelry" and "golden vases full of emeralds." But, Blake claimed, "I could not remove it alone, nor could thousands of men."
From https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/lost-inca-gold
Tom used an Excel spreadsheet to organize the dispersion pattern. Each square was a meter, the size of a Depth Cam image. An eleven-by-eleven-meter grid captured all the edges at a depth of ten meters, with about 70 percent of the items within a five by five meter circle. All the cells add up to 119 items.
Tom realizes that water absorbs different wavelengths of light to different degrees. The longest wavelengths, with the lowest energy like red, are absorbed first followed by orange and yellow. The colors disappear underwater in the same order as they appear in the color spectrum (ROY G BIV). Even water at five feet will have a noticeable loss of red. Yellow disappears at thirty five to forty five feet.
John Howe was a remarkable man with many passions besides skiing. His obituary is worth a read.
The song Night Sail by the Folk-Rock group Devonsquare. This clip is from Maine Public Broadcasting Exit 13 show from 1986. Night Sail is also part of the sound track of Maltese Flamingo, a ski movie by Greg Stump from 1986.
Photography by Nina Fuller
Lourie, Peter Sweat of the Sun, Tears of the Moon
A Chronicle of an Incan Treasure
Eight billion dollars’ worth of Inca gold and silver are rumored to be hidden in an unmapped region of the Andes. This is the captivating story of that fabled treasure and the centuries-old spell it has cast on many, including a young American student, Peter Lourie.
While completing anthropological fieldwork in Ecuador, Lourie heard the legend of Atahualpa’s ransom. The Incas gathered seven-hundred tons of gold (Sweat of the Sun) and silver (Tears of the Moon) to purchase the freedom of their king, Atahualpa, from Pizarro and his conquistadors. After the Inca ruler’s murder, the treasure vanished into the forsaken Llanganati range of the Andes.
Lourie abandoned his graduate school ambitions to search for Atahualpa’s ransom. His quest for clues and his journey into the heart of the Andes is an absorbing and exciting detective story. Lourie’s account is also unforgettable for its revelations about the lives and characters of seasoned treasure hunters, the obsessed few lured by the siren song of legendary gold.
From https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803279803/
Summer comes to Tyson Store! Glorious Day Lilies blossom profusely along Route 100.
Bob's Clam Hut
Kittery, Maine
Delorme, a travel planning resource. More than just a great place to purchase DeLorme mapping software, the earth mate GPS and Atlas & gazetteers for every state. You'll find a rich assortment of travel planning items, guide books, globes, maps and atlases covering the entire world. Plus geography-related gift items for travelers, perfect for graduation, retirement, father's day, and holiday gifts.
From Amazon.com
Home Plate
Mahaney Diamond
University of Maine
Orono, Maine
Bob Marley is currently the funniest man in Maine. From his web site - He lives in Maine which is the best state in the world maybe even the universe. He’s featured regularly on Sirius XM radio and he even won their Superbowl of Comedy! He has put out over 20 comedy CDs and DVDs! He was inducted into The Guinness Book of World’s Records for “the longest stand-up comedy show by an individual” at 40 hours of straight stand-up! He’s been on over 100 tv shows including Leno, Letterman, Conan, Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson, and Comedy Central to name just a few.
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Deeah means dear and refers to both men and women. Typically used in Downeast Maine as in, “How can I help you, deeah?”
The Popham Colony was the first organized attempt by the English to establish a colony on the shores of what we now know as New England. It was sited at the mouth of the Kennebec River in the summer of 1607 and lasted for little over a year until it was abandoned in the fall of 1608. To return home to England, the colonists constructed the first ship ever built in North America.
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From https://www.maine.gov/dacf/parks/discover_history_explore_nature/history/popham_colony/index.shtml
In 1994, Jeffrey Brain of the Peabody Essex Museum confirmed the site of the colony using Hunt's plan as a guide, and confirmed the accuracy of the plan. He began a larger excavation in 1997 and later uncovered the Admiral's house, the storehouse and a liquor storage building. He also proved that Hunt's map was very accurate for those buildings which were actually built. Parts of the fort, probably including the chapel and graveyard, lie on private property not open for digging and the fort's southern portion is under a public road. One major find in the later excavations was that iron smelting had been done in the Popham Colony, presumably using local bog iron. This might have been the earliest iron smelting in what is now the United States. The excavation was concluded in 2013.
From Wikipedia
Dollar Island is in southern part of Pushaw Lake
From https://www.maine.gov/ifw/docs/lake-survey-maps/penobscot/pushaw_lake.pdf
A leap into the future of sonar, Dragonfly sonar displays employ true wide-spectrum CHIRP technology. With wide-spectrum CHIRP more sonar signals are transmitted into the water, allowing Dragonfly to interpret more detail, target more fish, and image structure with unmatched clarity.
Satellite navigation devices supporting both GPS and GLONASS have more satellites available, meaning positions can be fixed more quickly and accurately, especially in built-up areas where buildings may obscure the view to some satellites.
From Wikipedia
A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc. Abstract fractals – such as the Mandelbrot Set – can be generated by a computer calculating a simple equation over and over.
From https://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/
In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. This is the remarkable true story by Michael Finkel of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality; not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own. A New York Times bestseller:
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel. Deckle Edge, March 7, 2017
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iran-backed Hezbollah has reduced its forces in Syria as fighting died down though it still has fighters all over the country, its leader said on Friday.
The heavily armed Lebanese Shi’ite movement has played a vital role in the war next door, helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reclaim much of the country.
From Reuters
Stinger MANPADS FIM-92
Tom and Jenny started from the private gate at Hurricane Island. X marks where they capsized. They then drifted back to Ferry Farm.
This is the bridge where Tom asked Jenny, "What do you think about getting an apartment together?"
Nahmakanta
Nahmakanta Public Reserve Land
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The AT runs along the western shore.
View from the campsite at Nahmakanta looking over at western shore.
Tom simply shifted the one-meter grid by half-a-meter up and over to create twenty-five unique grids (because the images are not fractals). This added 24,000 additional images to the training data set.
Novio's Bistro
130 Hammond Street
Bangor, Maine
Heady Topper is a double India Pale Ale brewed by The Alchemist in Waterbury, Vermont. It is unfiltered and contains 8% ABV. The Alchemist describes Heady Topper as having flavors of orange, tropical fruit, pink grapefruit, pine, and spice. Unpasteurized, it is kept refrigerated by authorized retailers until point of sale. It has been described as "a complex web of genius", and as of August 2018, it was rated the fourth best beer in the world by Beer Advocate.
From Wikipedia
Echo Lake Inn
Garmin device
From Google Maps
Albedo is the fraction of light that is reflected by a body or surface. Karen Ross, the main character, is looking for industrial diamonds in the lost city of Zinj. She uses albedo from satellite imagery. This was one of the books that Tom read as a youngster that stirred his interest in treasure hunting.
Michael Crichton, Congo, (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1980), 81-83.
Cotopaxi