A sprawling Mayan city with palaces and pyramids was discovered in a dense Mexican jungle by a doctoral student who unknowingly passed the site years ago during a visit to Mexico.
Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student in archeology at Tulane University, was in Mexico about a decade ago, traveling between the town of Xpujil, an archaeological site, and coastal towns, when he passed unexplored settlements buried deep in the landscape.
But navigating these dense jungles required the help of Lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses lasers to measure the distances of objects on the Earth’s surface.
And it 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. It would use pre-existing surveys to find out whether Mayan civilizations could be located in these areas.
“Ecology, forestry and civil engineering scientists have used lidar surveys to study some of these areas for entirely separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas said in a press release Tuesday. “What if a lidar study of this area already existed?”
Tulane University
In 2018, Auld-Thomas, an instructor at Northern Arizona University, located data collected in 2013 as part of a project led by the Mexican Nature Conservancy to monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests. The previous team’s goal was to map above-ground carbon in forests.
The publicly available dataset allowed the Auld-Thomas research team to identify the site as land worthy of further archaeological investigation.
For five years, Auld-Thomas and his team analyzed everything remotely, using technology and analytics. And when Auld-Thomas analyzed this data, he came across a huge surprise: evidence of more than 6,600 Mayan structures, including a previously unknown large city with iconic stone pyramids.
The team did not anticipate discovering an ancient city that would dispel lingering doubts among researchers that the Mayan Lowlands region was potentially not as populated and urbanized as researchers thought. It also validates previous research and puts to rest a lingering question.
“This doesn’t reveal a different perspective on Mayan urban planning and landscapes, it actually shows us that the perspective we already had is quite accurate,” he said, adding that “the number of buildings present in the data set is high enough to speak of real demographic entities on a large regional scale.
The researchers published their findings on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity, describing the vast structures and buildings making up the ancient city named “Valeriana”, in homage to a nearby freshwater lagoon. The team collaborated with Mexico’s Cultural Heritage Institute, local archaeologists and the University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, allowing them to conduct the research remotely.
“This density is comparable to that of Mayan sites such as Calakmul, Oxpemul and Becán,” said Adriana Velázquez Morlet, director of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History at the Campeche Center and one of the co-authors of research, in a press release.
He added that their institute is working with local people to ensure the conservation of the new site.
Auld-Thomas said archaeologists who know the area well were able to enhance the team’s analysis and provide “a very in-depth perspective on this area.”
Tulane University
“The nature of the ruins, the archaeological buildings that were there — they were large and immediately recognizable as the kinds of things that mark the political capital of the Classic Maya period,” Auld-Thomas told CBS News.
The height of the Mayan Empire was the Classic Period, which extended from about 250 AD to at least 900 AD, when they made breakthroughs in astronomy, hieroglyphic writing, and the calendar system.
Without doubt the most advanced civilization In the Americas, the empire 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 Mayan civilization at that time, according to a 2018 study in the journal Science.
Auld-Thomas said his team analyzed 50 square miles and discovered that the city of Valeriana – which was built before 150 AD – contained thousands of structures, including palaces, pyramid temples, public squares, a field ball, a reservoir and family homes. The technology has allowed researchers to view archaeological sites even in dense forest conditions in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche.
Archaeologists in 2018 discovered a vast network of Mayan ruins hidden for centuries in the jungles of Guatemala. In 2022, human cemeteries and bullets from Spanish weapons were destroyed. discovered on the site of a Mayan city in the country.
Auld-Thomas said the reason large parts of the Mayan world are archaeologically unknown is because the region is so vast, leaving large parts unexplored by researchers who then document its existence. Auld-Thomas said locals may have been aware of the structures, but not the government and the scientific community at large.
“It really puts an exclamation point behind the claim that no, we haven’t found everything, and yes, there is a lot more to discover,” Auld-Thomas said in a press release from the Tulane University.
He also said the research highlights the value of open data in science and that data collected by someone in one discipline could prove useful to someone in a completely different area of research.
“What I hope is that this will not only encourage openness of data in general, but also collaboration between archaeologists and environmental scientists in the future.”
