Researchers at a US university have discovered an immense complex of previously unexplored Mayan settlements in Mexico. The findings include over 6,500 structures, pyramids and evidence of a city, which were made with the help of new analysis methods and a laser-based detection system called “lidar”.
Published in Antiquity journal by Tulane University doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor Professor Marcello Canuto, the new study explains that they used remote analysis of lidar survey images to home in on around 130 square km (50 square miles) of land in Campeche in southeast Mexico.
Found by accident
Auld-Thomas told the BBC that he was drawn to the area after coming across environmental lidar surveys by accident during a Google search. He processed the image using archaeological methods and found “a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability.”
“Lidar is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” Canuto said. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society.”
The Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane has developed a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) lab that can uncover anomalies in the landscape – work that is having a major impact on our understanding of Mayan culture.
“A lot more to be discovered”
“Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge,’” Auld-Thomas said. The team’s estimates have put the former Mayan population somewhere between 30-50,000 people in its heyday from 750 to 850 AD, more than the current number of people living in the region.
As well as “rural areas and smaller settlements” the team also found “a large city with pyramids” that they have baptised Valeriana. Extraordinarily, it is situated “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. 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.”
