We shouldn't exoticize Mesoamerican cultures or south American cultures. Associating them with magic and curses and stuff feels kinda racist in a "The ethnic other has weird magic practices and stuff" way. A lot of cultures in central and south america have been really poorly portrayed in history, but the modern consensus is that in a bunch of times and places they had huge urban areas with attending rural areas on a similar scale to, like, India or China in the medieval and earlier periods.

The INAH said that aerial laser mapping technology from the University of Houston's Center for Airborne Laser Mapping aided in efforts to scan the site.

LIDAR is cool, though. Disturbed soil tends to settle differently than undisturbed soil around it, and soil accumulation is usually really slow, so old foundations or roads or buried objects sometimes leave depressions or mounds that aren't obvious from the ground, but you can find them if you look at them from high enough up in precise enough detail. Flying around with a laser can reveal patterns of ruins underground without having to dig or survey, and you can cover an area that would never be possible by traditional ground surveying.

Back in the day they used to look for ruins in crop fields - I forget how it works exactly, but I think compacted soil in old foundations or pits or trenches would be less productive than undisturbed soils, so you could ID regular, human made shapes in fields made by crops growing at different rates. You could spot them from a plane if you knew what you were looking for and came in at the right time of year. It had the same advantages - They wouldn't be visible from the ground and you could cover far larger areas than you could do ground surveying.