Hidden Mayan city discovered in Mexican jungle by doctoral student: “More to be discovered”

The spread The city of the Maya with palaces and pyramids discovered in the thick jungle of Mexico by a medical student who unknowingly drove through the area years ago while visiting Mexico.

Tulane University archeology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas was in Mexico about a decade ago traveling between the town of Xpujil, an archaeological site, and coastal towns, passing through unexplored, heavily submerged areas in the area.

But combing through those dense forests requires the help of Lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses lasers to measure the distances of objects on the ground.

And this can be very expensive. Funders are often reluctant to invest in Lidar surveys in areas where there is no visible evidence of Mayan settlements, Auld-Thomas said.

But, a few years later Auld-Thomas had an idea. He would use pre-existing surveys to determine if the Mayan civilization could exist in these areas.

“Environmental, forestry and civil engineering scientists have been using lidar research to study some of these areas for completely different purposes,” Auld-Thomas said in a news release on Tuesday. “Then what if a lidar survey of this area already exists?”

In 2018, Auld-Thomas, a professor at Northern Arizona University, obtained data collected in 2013 from a project led by Mexico’s Nature Conservancy to monitor carbon in Mexican forests. The team’s previous goal was to map above-ground carbon in forests.

The publicly available dataset allowed Auld-Thomas’ research team to identify the site as suitable for further archaeological investigation.

Over a period of five years, Auld-Thomas and his team analyzed everything remotely, using technology and analytics. And when Auld-Thomas analyzed that data, he got a big surprise — evidence of more than 6,600 Maya structures, including a previously unknown megacity full of iconic stone towers.

The team did not expect to find an ancient city that would end lingering doubts among researchers that the lowland Maya region may not have been as densely populated and urbanized as researchers believed. It also confirms previous research and poses an unending question.

“It doesn’t show a different view of the urban areas and the Maya, in fact it shows us that the view we already had is correct,” he said adding “the number of buildings that exist in the entire data set is high enough to talk about honestly. businesses with a high regional average.”

The researchers published their findings on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity, describing the buildings and structures that comprise the ancient city called “Valeriana” behind a nearby fresh water lake. The team collaborated with Mexico’s Cultural Heritage Institute, local archaeologists, and the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston which allowed them to conduct the research remotely.

“This figure is comparable to that of Mayan sites such as Calakmul, Oxpemul and Becán,” said Adriana Velázquez Morlet, director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History Campeche Center, and one of the study’s co-authors, in a statement.

He added that their center is working with local people to ensure the conservation of the new area.

Auld-Thomas said archaeologists who know the region well have been able to improve the team’s analysis and provide “a deeper view of the region.”

“The kind of ruins, the archaeological structures that were there — they were huge and immediately recognizable as the kind of things that mark a political capital of the Classic Maya period,” Auld-Thomas told CBS News.

The height of the Maya empire was the Classic period, which started from about 250 AD to at least 900 AD, when they developed astronomy, hieroglyphic writing and the calendar system.

Most definitely advanced civilization in the Americas, this kingdom once occupied what is now southern Mexico and northern Central America, including the countries of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. About 7 to 11 million people lived in the Maya civilization at this time, according to a 2018 study in the journal Science.

Auld-Thomas said his team analyzed 50 square kilometers, and found that the city of Valeriana – which was built before 150 AD – contained thousands of buildings including palaces, temple towers, public plazas, a football field, a reservoir and family homes. The technology has allowed researchers to look for archaeological settlements even in dense forest conditions in southeastern Mexico’s Campeche.

Archaeologists in 2018 not covered a vast network of Mayan ruins hidden for centuries in the jungles of Guatemala. In 2022, there were burials of people and ammunition from Spanish guns found in the Mayan city area in the country.

Auld-Thomas said that the reason why large parts of the Mayan world are unknown in terms of archeology is because the area is so large, leaving much of it unexplored by the researchers who have documented its existence. Auld-Thomas said the local people may have known about these structures, but the government and the larger scientific community did not.

“That puts a dramatic point behind the statement that, no, we don’t have everything figured out, and yes, there’s still more to be discovered,” Auld-Thomas said in a Tulane University press release.

He also said the study underscores the importance of open data in science, and that data collected by someone in one field may prove useful to someone in a completely different field of research.

“What I hope is that this encourages not only open data in general, but also collaboration between archeologists and environmental scientists going forward.”