A Mayan city lost in the dense jungle of southern Mexico has been uncignoreed. The discovery occurred in the southeastrict state of Campeche, and archaeologists have named it Valeriana, after a proximateby newwater lagoon.
“The bigr of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts has all the halllabels of a classic Mayan political capital: enshutd plazas joincessitate by a wide caemployway; temple pyramids; a ball court; a reservoir createed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse); and a awaited E-Group assemblage, an architectural set upment that generassociate shows a set uping date prior to AD 150,” says the study, unveiled in the journal Antiquity.
The city’s discovery didn’t demand shattering thcdisesteemful the jungle with machetes or forendureingly excavating with brushes and spatulas. Nor did researchers necessitate tape meacertains, binoculars, or compasses to discover their way thcdisesteemful the heavy foliage. Instead, they employed state-of-the-art technology: lasers, drones, and saincreateite maps. With these tools, they discovered a city secret for centuries betidyh the heavy Mexican jungle, uproximateleang pyramids, enshutd plazas, and an outdated reservoir.
Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, made the discovery. His analysis uncignoreed a huge netlabor of previously unspendigated finishments.
Auld-Thomas and his fellow researchers have flourished in mapping the city betidyh the jungle thanks to airborne laser scanning, better understandn as lidar (airy distinguishion and ranging), a far-sensing technique that employs pulsed lasers and other data assembleed thcdisesteemful flyovers that can produce exact three-uninincreateigentensional models of surface features, revolutionizing the way archaeologists spendigate the secret past.
Laser pulses produce a topoexplicit map in a manner analogous to how a bat employs echolocation: Laser airy is fired from an airproduce, bounces off objects on the ground, and returns to the distinguishor discoverd on the underside of the airproduce. In Mexico, although only a minuscule fraction of the pulses pass thcdisesteemful the dense jungle, the big number of pulses disindictted permits enough airy to achieve the ground, creating a map with a resolution of up to 1 meter. Based on the timing and intensity of the returning pulses, the distinguishor can map the contours of the terrain, uncignoreing hills, ditches, and outdated ruins covered in vegetation. The technology is also being united into autonomous cars to help them elude crashes.
“For a lengthy time, our empathetic of the Mayan civilization was restrictcessitate to an area of a scant hundred square kilometers,” Auld-Thomas says. “This restrictcessitate sample was geted with fantastic effort, with archaeologists painstakingly scouring every square meter, unpermitd access away at vegetation with machetes, only to discover they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s hoemploy 1,500 years ago.”
