Laser research has uncovered a centuries-old Mayan city in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
The city is home to up to 6,674 structures, including pyramids like Chichen Itza and Tikal, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity on Tuesday (October 29). Researchers used previously created lidar (light detection and ranging) maps created by firing laser pulses into the ground to reveal the potentially 1,500-year-old ruins.
Advances in lidar technology over the past few decades have dramatically increased the discovery of ancient settlements. But the technology is expensive and often unavailable to early scientists like Luke Old Thomas, an archaeologist at Northern Arizona University and the study’s lead author. However, researchers were thinking of ways to get around this barrier.
“Scientists in ecology, forestry, and civil engineering are using lidar surveying to study some of these fields for completely different purposes,” Old-Thomas said in a statement. “So what if a LIDAR survey of this region already exists?”
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Old Thomas combed through previously commissioned lidar studies and identified one created to measure and monitor carbon in Mexican forests. By analyzing a 50-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) area of east-central Mexico’s Campeche, where Mayan structures had never before been explored, Old Thomas and his colleagues discovered that Mayan structures could be found among modern-day farms and highways. Found traces of a hidden Mayan city.
The city, which researchers named Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon, dates back to the Classic period (250-900 AD) and features “classical It has all the characteristics of a Mayan political capital.” Researchers noted that there was a temple pyramid and a ball court. Further away from Valeriana’s city center, terraces and houses dot the hillsides, suggesting a dense urban sprawl. This study is the first to reveal the structure of the Maya civilization in the central-eastern state of Campeche.
Mayan cities like this one could help solve modern urban development problems. (Image credit: Luke Auld-Thomas, Antiquity Publications Ltd; CC BY 4.0)
“The government didn’t know anything about it. The scientific community didn’t know about it either,” Old Thomas said. “This really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we haven’t found everything, and yes, there’s still a lot to be discovered.”
“Wherever this kind of work is done, there will be more settlements. [discovered]” Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. “Everything provides more pieces to this huge puzzle, and every piece of the puzzle is important,” Garrison said, adding that the archaeologists will be on-site to see the city.
Studying this period will become even more important as the diversity and density of the Maya civilization gradually becomes clearer, Old-Thomas noted.
“Given the environmental and social challenges we face due to rapid population growth, studying ancient cities and broadening our view of what urban life was like can only help. “It will be,” said Mr. Old Thomas. “Bigger samples of human careers, longer records of the accumulated residues of people’s lives, could give us scope to imagine better, more sustainable ways of building cities now and in the future.” there is.”
