Mayan city lost in the dense jungle of southern Mexico has been revealed. The discovery was made in the southeastern state of Campeche, and archaeologists named it Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon.
“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental districts has all the features of a classic Mayan political capital: enclosed plazas connected by a wide causeway; temple pyramids; football field; a reservoir created by damming an arroyo (seasonal watercourse); and the probable E-Group complex, an architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date before 150 AD,” says the study published in the journal journal Antique.
Discovering the city didn’t require hacking through the jungle with machetes or patient digging with brushes and spatulas. The researchers also didn’t need a measuring tape, binoculars or compass to find their way through the dense foliage. Instead, they used cutting-edge technology: lasers, drones and satellite maps. Using these tools, they discovered a city hidden for centuries beneath the dense Mexican jungle, unearthing pyramids, enclosed plazas, and an old reservoir.
The discovery was made by Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University. His analysis revealed a enormous network of previously unexplored settlements.
Auld-Thomas and his colleagues managed to map the city beneath the jungle using on-board laser scanning, better known as lidar (lithe detection and ranging), a remote sensing technique using pulsed lasers and other data collected by viaducts that can generate right three-dimensional models of surface features , revolutionizing the way archaeologists explore the hidden past.
The laser pulses generate a topographic map in a way similar to how a bat uses echolocation: laser lithe is fired from an aircraft, reflects off objects on the ground and returns to a detector on the underside of the aircraft. In Mexico, although only a diminutive fraction of the pulses pass through the dense jungle, the enormous number of pulses emitted allows enough lithe to reach the ground, creating a map with a resolution of up to 1 meter. Based on the timing and intensity of the returning pulses, the detector can map the contours of the terrain, revealing hills, ditches and old ruins covered with vegetation. This technology is also being implemented in autonomous cars to lend a hand them avoid accidents.
“For a long time, our understanding of Maya civilization was limited to an area of a few hundred square kilometers,” says Auld-Thomas. “This limited sample was obtained with great effort, with archaeologists meticulously searching every square meter, cutting down vegetation with machetes, only to discover they are standing on a pile of stones that may have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”