Lost Maya city with temple pyramids and plazas discovered in Mexico

Source: The Guardian

Lost Maya city with temple pyramids and plazas discovered in Mexico

Archaeologists draw on laser mapping to find city they have named Valeriana, thought to have been founded pre-AD150

Sam Jones
Tue 29 Oct 2024 12.33 GMT
Last modified on Tue 29 Oct 2024 12.58 GMT

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have stumbled on a lost Maya city of temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

“For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total,” Auld-Thomas said. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”

Lidar is a remote sensing technique that uses a pulsed laser and other data obtained by flying over a site to generate three-dimensional information about the shape of surface characteristics.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/29/lost-maya-city-valeriana-mexico-temple-pyramids-plazas