Scientists Use 2013 Map to Reveal Ancient Mayan City

Xpujil, Mexico —(Map)

Scientists have discovered thousands of ancient Mayan buildings, including the ruins of a large city, in southern Mexico. The buildings and the city were unheard of before. The discovery suggests that there may still be many more ancient Mayan buildings waiting to be found.

The Maya were an ancient people who lived in what is now Southern Mexico and Central America over 1,000 years ago. They lived in large cities with a system of roads, and built amazing stone buildings, including temples, palaces, and pyramids.

The Mayan people left behind many buildings, but much of what they built is still hidden in the jungle. Archeologists have been studying Mayan ruins for a long time. But until recently, they could only explore small areas at a time. Finding ruins by walking through jungles was hard and took a lot of time.

In the last 10 years or so, archeologists have begun to use a technology called lidar, which stands for “Light Detection and Ranging”. To use lidar, scientists fly an airplane over the area they want to study. The plane sends out thousands of laser beams. By measuring how long it takes for the beams to bounce back, scientists can make a 3D map of the ground below. With lidar, archeologists can easily spot ruins, even if they are covered by trees or other plants.

But lidar is expensive. So archeologists normally only use it in areas where they already believe there are Mayan ruins – like areas close to well-known sites.

Luke Auld-Thomas is an archeologist who teaches at Northern Arizona University. He wondered if there might be lidar maps for areas farther away from famous Mayan sites, too.

He searched online and found lidar information from 2013 for a large area in Campeche, Mexico. The data had been collected by a group studying carbon in Mexico’s forests. But the information had never been studied by archeologists.

When Mr. Auld-Thomas and his team studied the lidar data, they were surprised by what they found. The researchers discovered 6,674 different Mayan buildings. Some were in large groups, and some were farther apart. The lidar information showed that one of the groups was a large city.

The researchers named the city Valeriana. They think that around 1,200 years ago, Valeriana may have been home to 30,000 to 50,000 people. That’s more people than live in the area today.

The researchers say the city is only a short hike from the area where people have been farming for years. And yet no one knew the city was there.

To learn more about the city and the other ruins in the area, the researchers will need to visit the site. In some ways, the discovery is a challenge. There are now so many Mayan sites that scientists can’t study them all.

But the new discovery seems to have proved at least one thing: there are still many Mayan sites yet to be found. Mr. Auld-Thomas says, “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.”

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