No, this isn’t a plot from Indiana Jones: An ancient Maya city that’s been lost for centuries was just uncovered in Mexico.
Scientists discovered over 6,500 pre-Hispanic Maya structures within a metropolis that’s been dubbed Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon, in the Mexican state of Campeche, according to CNN. The area’s dense forests had hidden the city over time, leaving an archaeological “blank spot” in the region known as the Maya Lowlands, which includes Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, and southeastern Mexico.
Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas figured out a way to pierce through the canopy, though, and piece together a fuller picture of the area: by referring back to a 2013 forest survey for the Nature Conservancy of Mexico.
The terrain where the Maya ruins are located is covered by dense vegetation and ample treetops.
Marcello Canuto/Tulane
That research involved a technology called LiDAR (light detection and ranging equipment), which uses aerial lasers to penetrate the thick canopy, The New York Times reports. The equipment works by sending out pulses to measure distances, which are then used to create 3-D models, altogether bypassing treetops and other vegetation that would normally make such mapping impossible. Auld-Thomas went on to use that pre-existing forest data to uncover Valeriana.
“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” the scientist said in a statement. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”
Much like other Maya capitals, Valeriana was equipped with a reservoir, a ball court for sports and leisure, temple pyramids and a road that connected enclosed plazas. The researchers also found evidence of terraces, field gardens, and residential buildings, according to the NYT. Auld-Thomas and his team believe the city could have been home to up to 50,000 people at its peak, which they’ve estimated took place between about 750 and 850 CE.
“Lidar is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” Professor Marcello A. Canuto, Auld-Thomas’s advisor, said in a statement. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society.”
And though Campeche sits between two well-explored regions, the northern Yucatán and the southern Maya Lowlands, the area had been largely ignored until now, CNN says. But LiDAR has changed that, and the tech has the potential to discover even more hidden gems buried deep in forests across Mexico, Central America, and South America—and teach us more about ancient civilizations as a result.
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Publish date : 2024-11-06 11:04:00
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