Scientist-Explorer Albert Lin on Lost Civilizations and Rethinking Time

Albert Lin says he has one foot in the past and one in the future. As an explorer and scientist, he's traveled the globe searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan and the lost capital of the Kingdom of Kush, and he's employed cutting edge technology like drone-mounted LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar to aid in the hunt. The approach earned him distinction as a National Geographic 2009 Adventurer of the Year and inspired an ongoing documentary TV series about his exploits.

Lin also means it literally. In 2016 a four-wheeling accident left him with an amputated leg below the right knee. The event changed his approach to exploration but not his drive for it—he was looking for undiscovered temples in Guatemala shortly after surgery—and now prosthetics, not just for walking but for skiing, diving, and surfing, are among the array of leading edge tech he uses to understand the past—and propel him forward.

Time and design have always been on Albert’s mind, even before he earned a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and set out to scour the most remote corners of the Earth in search of lost civilizations. With an astrophysicist for a father and a musician for a mother, these concepts were omnipresent. "I remember having conversations about the dawn of our reality, the dawn of everything, the Big Bang," Albert tells me on a recent evening in New York. “And that the concept of time was not something to take for granted.”

The opportunity to speak with Albert aligned with a new role, as a “friend of the brand” of Hamilton. The relationship between the explorer and the American heritage watch company is a fitting one. Founded in 1892 with deep roots in making timepieces for aviators, sailors, and soldiers, Hamilton has long supported brave explorers while also embracing technology—they created the first digital watch in 1970 in fact.

The more time Lin spends engrossed in matters of the ancient world, the more he's adjusted his own theory of time, and how he understands the present. What is there to learn from Icelandic manuscripts that say a giant began time, or the Mayan notion that time is like a spiraling vortex?

During our conversation, Lin shares how these ancient concepts have collided with his distinctly modern life, alongside captivating stories from a career in exploration—an all-amputee climbing expedition up an Ecuadoran volcano to participating in ceremonial rites in Micronesia.

Photo courtesy Albert Lin

Technology like LiDAR has been fundamental to your work, but can it also take away from the excitement you get from good old fashioned field work?

The idea of getting out into wild places, searching for something that's not been seen for centuries is inherently exciting. The first time you actually find something, when you hold a piece of pottery in your hand that's been missing for a thousand years and you can place your thumb in the exact imprint of someone's thumb who made it, maybe 500, maybe a thousand, maybe more years ago, you get transported into a superposition with their presence. It's like all of a sudden it awakened something in you that was missing, a lost chapter of who you were. When you press your hand into that person's hand, you reach out and across time and all of a sudden you're there with them across a thousand years. All the tech aside, that's when it becomes really special.

You exist as somebody very much in 2025, but you're also time traveling when interacting with these sites. How has that shifted your understanding of time?

The more I go into different cultures and find out not just about the buildings that they left behind or the artifacts, but the stories and the philosophies, the more I realize that time is a lot weirder than we think. Icelandic manuscripts talk about [the death of] a giant beginning time, I believe. But in the Mayan culture, they think of time as cyclical but evolving, almost like a spiraling vortex, continuing back in these cycles that are returning to events, but in a slightly evolved way. That completely changed my understanding of time. Sometimes when I reach into the deep past now having experienced those philosophies, it feels like we're actually just part of this continuing cyclical vortex that we're returning to, but slightly changing each time.

So when you're stuck in traffic, can you tap into that understanding of time’s cyclical nature to relieve the stress of being late somewhere?

No, haha. Traffic gets you every time.

Can you share with us a story of how your work and travels shape the way you move through the world today?

There's this one memory I have recently where I was on a volcano on the equator in Ecuador. At the center of the earth, basically. It's the same place that the likes of Alexander von Humboldt climbed when he figured out that everything was interconnected. And this one mountain in particular, because it's on the equatorial bulge, it's the farthest point from the center of the earth. So on its axis, it spins faster than anywhere else on the planet. So you're sitting there and you're floating around in the cosmos at ultimate speed.

I was with a bunch of other amputees that were raising funds for people who couldn't afford prosthetics. (Less than I think 5% of amputees can afford access to prosthetics in the world.) A storm stopped everybody in their tracks and it was this really intense moment, and all this beauty was happening in that moment because we were all leaning on each other for support and yet nature was saying, Okay, hold off for a second. Then all the skies opened up and we just had this giant snowball fight up at the highest point on the Earth, spinning around in the cosmos faster than anywhere else. A bunch of amputees having a snowball fight going faster than everyone.

And this old local climber hands me this Aya Huma mask. The Aya Huma mask has two faces on it, it's this pre-Inca, pre-colonial, pre-everything, cultural deity that represents the duality of our experience, the dark and the light. And this deity tells everybody to keep dancing through that duality. So when I'm sitting in some California traffic or you know, just have some moment where I'm down, I just take a deep breath and realize that there's a duality to everything and your only real shot is to keep dancing through it all.

How did you first get into exploration and adventure?

I'm an Eagle Scout. My first job was in a fly shop in the Bay Area. I saved up every penny I had and got my first fly rod at the age of 16—it was a Winston with a Galvan reel. Basically all my extra time, whenever I could get a ride or anything, I would spend in the mountains. I'd backpack, and first it was 50 milers and then it was 100 miles and then it was 150 miles. The realization that I had through all my travels into date time, into the human journey, into all the ancestors of our collective past, is that we don't escape to nature, we return to it.

Switching gears a bit, what are five pieces of gear that you bring with you wherever you're traveling?

1. I've got my passport.
2. I've got this Hamilton Khaki Expedition watch; it's got a handy solar compass to it. I love this watch; I actually changed out this strap recently because I've worn down the other strap
3. I've got my necklace that my daughter makes me—every time it falls off, she makes another one for good luck. I'm kind of a high wear-and-tear guy.
4. And then of course my extra legs.
5. And a number four Allen wrench to tune myself up. All my bolts are number four, so that's kind of how it works.

How many extra legs do you travel with?

Depends on where we're going. I've got a ski foot, I've got a dive foot, I've got a surf foot, and then I carry a spare when I'm deep in the hard stuff, just in case. A couple years ago I was climbing a boulder to get to this archeological site in Israel. And this thing came loose and this giant boulder I'm on, barn doors open, and I jump out of the way just in time for it to crush my foot off again. So I've lost this leg twice now, which is pretty weird. Like, what kind of karma was my leg holding? But it was a good thing I had a spare!

It actually ends up being an advantage, you know? Besides getting better parking than everybody else for the rest of your life, I've got 50% less chance of getting bitten by a snake than everybody else. When I cross a river, I can just stick it in a puddle and hop over the river and I don't have wet socks.

In your expeditions, you uncover lost artifacts to learn how ancient civilizations once lived. Do you keep personal artifacts from your own life and career as well?

I've got my fly rods. I've got a machete from my first days in the jungle. I've got my climbing gear from back when I used to climb all the time. You look at those objects and you feel something because you have your memories with all them, and all the memories that they carry. We have many chapters of reality in one lifetime. Oftentimes it's hard to remember what it felt like to be in those chapters, but now when I look up at my wall and I see all these different trinkets of my past, whether it's my legs that no longer fit or the watch I wore in that moment, I get to remember that I'm more than any one moment.

Is there any one moment from your adventures or from making your National Geographic TV show that is particularly wild, where you really had to let the cosmos take control?

Maybe all of them, haha. What you see in the TV shows is what makes it into the edit. But the in-betweens are the nights, the parts where we're sleeping in camp with the Bedouins or interacting with the community that still lives in these places and holds those truths.

If you had to press me for one… I was in Micronesia drinking the sakau drink. I had to sit with this chief, what's called a Nahnmwarki, to ask for permission to enter this sacred site called Nan Madol, which is a really spooky, weird site in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Giant stone log buildings, basically. The locals believe it was built by the spirits of giants. And so to get access to this place, I had to drink sakau with this chief, and kind of went all in. It wasn't a little sip, it was a lot. It makes your tongue numb, you can't see anymore really, everything goes crossey. But that was a communion with somebody to get onto the same plane. All cultures have these rituals, these pathways to altered states that are about creating moments of neuroplasticity, you know, where you can let go of your default, let go of your ego for a moment. That was a big night.

Were you granted passage to explore?

Yeah. But I'll never drink that drink again.