This is fascinating, I had no idea it worked this way. I just always sort of assumed people happened upon random places that eventually make the news, not that there's a backlog of places to explore.
The backlog has actually gotten really bad in the last decade because of all the LIDAR surveys. There are many large settlements in the jungles of Central and South America that have been discovered in recent years that are both more expensive to study because they're so inaccessible and much larger so they're difficult to keep secret.
