Sagitario, La Mina, Quintana Roo , Mexico
| General Attributes |
DOI| 10.34946/D6ZS3J | |
| Project Name | Sagitario, La Mina, Quintana Roo |
| Country | Mexico |
| Status | Upcoming |
| Citation |
| Julien, Sam Meacham, Fred Devos, Dominque Rissolo, Holly Moyes, Scott McAvoy, Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI), CINDAQ 2026: Sagitario, La Mina, Quintana Roo - LiDAR - Aerial, LiDAR - Mobile, Photogrammetry - Terrestrial, Data Derivatives - 3D photogrammetry. Distributed by Open Heritage 3D. https://doi.org/10.34946/D6ZS3J |
| Download |
| Spatial Data | Coming Soon |
| Data Type |
Size |
Device Name |
Device Type |
| LiDAR - Aerial | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| LiDAR - Mobile | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Photogrammetry - Terrestrial | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Data Derivatives - 3D photogrammetry | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Background |
| Site Description | Sagitario La Mina is a now-submerged cave near Akumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico, on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. CINDAQ cave divers Fred Devos, Christophe Le Maillot and Sam Meacham found it in 2017 while exploring new passages. Inside they found the oldest known red ochre mine system in the Americas.
Radiocarbon dates from charcoal show that people mined ochre here over a period of nearly 2,000 years, roughly 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, when the caves were still dry (MacDonald et al., 2020, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba1219). The miners left behind:
excavated pits, with spoil piled along the passage walls
stone cairns marking routes through the dark
makeshift stone tools
the hearths whose charcoal provided the dates
Red ochre was widely used for pigment, adornment and hide processing. Sagitario shows that some of the earliest people in the Americas went deep underground and organized sustained work to obtain it. As sea levels rose after the Ice Age, the caves flooded, sealing the mine almost undisturbed. Today the site lies at an average depth of about 9 to 10 m.
Sagitario belongs to the same submerged landscape as Hoyo Negro, where the remains of the Paleoindian girl known as Naia were found. Together, these caves are among the richest records of the early human presence in the Americas. Because the site can be reached only by specialized cave divers, high-resolution 3D documentation is the main way most researchers and the public can study it. | |
| Project Description | The Sagitario La Mina project documents a submerged Paleoindian ochre mine and the land surface above it by combining four survey methods, each tied to a shared spatial framework. The work is a collaboration between the Centro Investigador del Sistema Acuífero de Quintana Roo (CINDAQ) and the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) at UC San Diego. Underwater archaeological research at the site was led by INAH’s Subdireccion de Arqueología Subacuática.
The dataset brings together:
Cave survey (2017 to 2026). Line survey with the MNemo, a semi-automated survey instrument. The survey has 1,079 stations in 111 sections, constrained by 28 loop closures, covering about 8.7 km of surveyed line (7.6 km underwater). Over 250 stations carry standardized observations of human activity, including suspected mining areas, charcoal, cairns and ochre.
Underwater photogrammetry (2017 to 2026). 24 models of mined areas, cairns, hammerstones, charcoal deposits, a fire pit and wider cave passages. They were captured with Sony mirrorless, GoPro and Insta360 cameras on compact rigs designed for confined cave diving.
Mobile LiDAR (26 September 2022). Handheld SLAM scanning with an Emesent Hovermap 100 of the collapse depression and its four dry and partly flooded entrance chambers, linked by a surface scan around the depression.
Aerial LiDAR (2026). DJI Matrice 400 with a Zenmuse L3 sensor, flown at 50, 100, 200 and 300 m altitude. The flights cover about 1.5 km² around the site, plus a high-density flight over the cenote area.
All data are delivered in WGS 84 / UTM zone 16N. Together they connect the forest surface, the cave entrances and the submerged passages in a single georeferenced record. Each modality follows a documented workflow from acquisition to publication, and original data are preserved so that processing can be repeated. Field notes for the 2022 mobile LiDAR campaign are available in McAvoy, Rissolo and Kuester (2022), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3v56748x, and the acquisition and processing of each dataset are described in Fortin et al. | |
| Collection Date | 0001-01-01 to 0001-01-01 |
| Publication Date | 2026-10-11 |
| License Type | CC BY-NC |
| Model Information |
| Reuse Score | B - High-Quality Model without Georeferencing |
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