Researchers Stumble On Vanished Maya Cities With Pyramids Hidden Under Dense Mexican Forests Using Laser Imaging
Technological innovation has helped researchers unearth many hidden sites over the years, the most recent being ancient Mayan structures in the rainforests of Mexico, The Hill reported. Researchers incorporated laser imaging in their examination because the rainforests proved too dense to examine with conventional methods.
Experts found ruins of both a dense city and its crowded suburban hinterlands. The results of the analysis have been published in a journal named Antiquity.
Tulane University's archeology doctoral student, Luke Auld-Thomas, during his visit a decade ago, drove past some unexplored settlements between the town of Xpujil, an archaeology site, and coastal cities, CBS News reported. Suspecting similar settlements in the rainforests of the area, he and his team decided to take a closer look. Researchers quickly realized that they needed the assistance of Lidar, a remote sensing technology, to comb through the territory.
Lidar utilizes lasers to measure ranges (variable distances) to the Earth, National Ocean Service reported. The data acquired by the light pulses, helps researchers to map out the three-dimensional model of the shape of the Earth and its surface characteristics.
Auld-Thomas could not find finances to fund the use of Lidar in his project, CBS News reported. He explained that organizations are reluctant to spend money on Lidar for archaeological projects until there is solid proof of Mayan settlements in the area.
Several years later Auld-Thomas decided to analyze existing surveys to track evidence of Mayan civilizations in these areas, CBS News reported. "Scientists in ecology, forestry, and civil engineering have been using lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes," Auld-Thomas explained.
"So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?" In 2018, Auld-Thomas, now an instructor at Northern Arizona University, went through data collected by Mexico's Nature Conservancy to monitor carbon in Mexico's forests and found something interesting.
The findings produced by the analysis of Mexico's Nature Conservancy made Auld-Thomas and his team identify the site as terrain and convinced financers that it needed to be explored through Lidar, CBS News reported. For five years, the researchers analyzed everything in the area remotely, and later put it all together.
They collaborated with Mexico's Cultural Heritage Institute, local archaeologists, and the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston for this pursuit. The results provided evidence of around 6,600 Maya structures, the most prominent of them being a large city containing many iconic stone pyramids.
Researchers named the large city 'Valeriana' after a nearby freshwater lagoon, CBS News reported. Experts have found several similarities between Valeriana and other Mayan sites like Calakmul, Oxpemul, and Becán. At present, the National Institute of Anthropology and History Campeche Center is working with civilians in the area to ensure site conservation.
These findings validate past assumptions held by researchers that the Maya lowland regions were populous and urbanized, CBS News reported. "It does not reveal a different perspective on Maya urbanism and landscapes, it actually shows us that the perspective we already had is pretty accurate," Auld-Thomas said, adding, that "the number of buildings present in the entire data set is high enough to speak of genuinely high regional scale population entities."
The team does not think the finding came as a surprise to the local population, The Hill reported. Auld-Thomas suspects they already knew about the city but never shared the information with the government and scientific community.
Auld-Thomas believes that this finding implies that there is still much to be known about the Mayan civilization, The Hill reported. "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," he said.