Ancient lost Mayan city found in Mexican jungle 'by accident'
30 October 2024, 09:15
An ancient lost city has been found in the Mexican jungle by accident.
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Researchers discovered the city, dubbed Valeriana, by chance with a laser technology that maps and analyses archaeological landscapes. They also discovered smaller villages and rural areas.
Valeriana contains 6,000 ancient structures that may have housed a population of between 30,000 and 50,000 people between 750 and 850AD, several hundred years before European colonisers arrived.
The Maya were a central American people whose era spanned from around 2,000 BC to the 17th century AD. They were colonised by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. The Maya are considered among the most sophisticated civilisations in America before the conquests.
Researchers said the find may suggest that there are many more lost Mayan cities to be found.
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Luke Auld-Thomas, a researcher on the project, said that the analysis "not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability."
He added: “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids 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.”
Only a sample of "a couple of hundred square kilometres" of Mayan settlements have previously been discovered.
That was related to the way that researchers previously worked, according to Auld-Thomas, of Northern Arizona University.
He said: "That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square meter, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”
The new technology, called lidar, has enabled archaeologists over the past decade to discover new cities, farming terraces and other traces of the Maya civilisation.
But lidar is expensive, which puts off some organisations that offer grants to researchers.
In fact, lidar is used by people working in several other fields, such as forestry and climate science. Climate researchers had come across Valeriana before, but no one paid attention to the archaeological find.
Auld-Thomas was looking through the carbon monitoring survey when he made the stunning discovery.
And he said the new find could suggest the current knowledge of the Maya people is just the tip of the iceberg.
Auld-Thomas said: “Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that gave us a sudden sense of, ‘Oh my god, there’s so much stuff out there we didn’t know about...
"What if that means everything we’re mapping is still the exception, not the rule?”
