a mayan city Lost in the dense jungle of southern Mexico has been revealed. The discovery occurred in the southeastern state of Campeche, and archaeologists named it Valeriana, after a nearby freshwater lagoon.
“The largest of the two monumental sites at Valeriana has all the characteristics of a classic Mayan political capital: closed plazas connected by a wide road; temple pyramids; a ball game; a reservoir formed by damming a stream (a seasonal watercourse); and a probable assembly of Group E, an architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date before 150 AD,” says the study, published in the journal diary Antique.
The discovery of the city did not require traversing the jungle with machetes or patiently digging with brushes and spatulas. The researchers also didn’t need tape measures, binoculars or compasses to find their way through the thick foliage. Instead, they used cutting-edge technology: Lasers, drones and satellite maps.. With these tools, they discovered a city hidden for centuries under the thick Mexican jungle, unearthing pyramids, closed plazas and an ancient reservoir.
Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, made the discovery. Their analysis revealed a huge network of previously unexplored settlements.
Auld-Thomas and his fellow researchers have managed to map the city beneath the jungle thanks to aerial laser scanning, better known as lidar (light detection and ranging), a remote sensing technique that uses pulsed lasers and other data collected at through flyovers that can generate accurate three-dimensional models of surface features, revolutionizing the way archaeologists explore the hidden past.
The laser pulses generate a topographic map in a similar way to how a bat uses echolocation: laser light is fired from an airplane, bounces off objects on the ground, and returns to the detector located at the bottom of the plane. In Mexico, although only a small fraction of the pulses pass through the dense jungle, the large number of pulses emitted allows enough light to reach the ground, creating a map with a resolution of up to 1 meter. Depending on the timing and intensity of the returning pulses, the detector can map the contours of the terrain, revealing hills, ditches and ancient ruins covered in vegetation. Technology is also being integrated into self-driving cars to help them avoid accidents.
“For a long time, our understanding of the Mayan 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 painstakingly going through every square meter, cutting through vegetation with machetes, only to discover that they were on a pile of rocks that could have been someone’s house 1,500 years ago.”