Lost Mayan city with pyramids, temples and plazas discovered in Mexico | Mexico

After replacing machetes and binoculars with computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers has found a lost Maya city of temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all hidden for centuries in the Mexican jungle.

The discovery in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche came after Luke Auld Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of modern laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

“For the longest time, our Maya sample area was a few hundred square kilometers,” Old Thomas said. “Archaeologists painstakingly obtained this specimen, painstakingly walking over every square meter, cutting down plants with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been home to someone 1,500 years ago.”

Lidar is a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed lasers and other data acquired by flying over a location to generate 3D information about the shape of surface features.

Although Old Thomas knew it could help, he also knew it was not a cheap tool. Funders are reluctant to pay for lidar surveys in areas without clear traces of the Maya civilization, which peaked between 250 and 900 AD.

It occurred to the anthropologist that others might already have been mapping the area for various reasons. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering use lidar surveys to study some of these areas for completely separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas said. “So what if lidar scanning of this area already exists?”

He was lucky. In 2013, a forest monitoring project conducted a detailed lidar survey of 122 square kilometers of the area. In collaboration with researchers from Tulane University, the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, and the National Airborne Laser Mapping Center at the University of Houston, Old Thomas began analyzing survey data to explore 50 square miles of Campeche that had not been investigated by archaeologists.

Their analysis showed a dense and diverse collection of unstudied Maya settlements, including an entire city they named Valeriana, after a nearby freshwater lake.

“The two largest archaeological areas at Valeriana contain all the hallmarks of a classic Maya political capital: multiple enclosed plazas connected by a wide bridge, temple pyramids, a ball court, a reservoir formed by an arroyo (seasonal watercourse), and a possible stream.” …architectural arrangement that generally suggests a founding date before 150 AD,” the researchers wrote in their study Published in the journal Antiquity.

According to Old Thomas, the team’s findings show how many undiscovered treasures the area could yield.

“We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements,” he said. “We also found a large city with pyramids next to the only highway in the area, near a town where people had been farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it, and the scientific community never knew about it. That puts an exclamation mark behind the phrase ‘No,’ “We haven’t found everything, and yes, there is a lot to be discovered.”

The team plans to follow up their lidar analysis with field work at newly discovered sites, which they say could offer valuable lessons as parts of the planet deal with the demands of mass urbanization.

“The ancient world is full of examples of cities very different from the ones we have today,” Old Thomas said. “There were sprawling cities with very dense agricultural patches; There were cities that were both highly egalitarian and highly unequal. Given the environmental and social challenges we face due to rapid population growth, studying ancient cities can only help us and expand our vision of what urban life could look like.

Six years ago, some of the same researchers used lidar technology to uncover tens of thousands of previously undiscovered Maya homes, buildings, defense works and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala’s Petén region, suggesting that millions more people lived there than previously thought.

The finds, which included industrial-sized agricultural fields and irrigation canals, were announced in 2018 by a coalition of American, European and Guatemalan archaeologists working with the Maya Heritage and Nature Foundation in Guatemala.

The study estimated that 10 million people may have been living in the Maya lowlands, meaning there may have been a need for large-scale food production.