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This paper reports the initial results of a pilot study investigating the relationships among long-term land use, settlements, historic population, and their potential influence for understanding and evaluating current and future land use. Most of our work to date has been focused on evaluating chang- ing patterns of historic settlement and its relationship to what we know about the historic environment and landscape. Here, we instead rely on remotely-sensed big data as a first step to see how patterns of past land use are correlated with what we know about current land use and land cover. The pilot study initiates a broader research agenda that better incorporates what we know about past landscapes into contemporary land use decisions and to offer critical insights into how the future could be shaped by integrating information about the past. As a first step, the analysis is intentionally broad so that our next steps can provide the fidelity and resolution to offer place based information for design and planning. Nevertheless, it offers a unique window of perception into current land use and a platform for operationalizing evolutionary uses of the past for better managing, designing, and planning complex land systems and moving beyond analogic uses. 

Airborne laser scanning has proven useful for rapid and extensive documentation of historic cultural landscapes after years of applications mapping natural landscapes and the built environment. The recent integration of unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) with LiDAR systems is potentially transformative and offers complementary data for mapping targeted areas with high precision and systematic study of coupled natural and human systems. We report the results of data capture, analysis, and processing of UAV LiDAR data collected in the Maya Lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico in 2019 for a comparative landscape study. Six areas of archaeological settlement and long-term land-use reflecting a diversity of environments, land cover, and archaeological features were studied. These missions were characterized by areas that were variably forested, rugged, or flat, and included pre-Hispanic settlements and agrarian landscapes. Our study confirms that UAV LiDAR systems have great potential for broader application in high-precision archaeological mapping applications. We also conclude that these studies offer an important opportunity for multi-disciplinary collaboration. UAV LiDAR offers high-precision information that is not only useful for mapping archaeological features, but also provides critical information about long-term land use and landscape change in the context of archaeological resources.