They have called her Valerianin honor of an adjacent freshwater lagoon, although the original name of the lost Mayan city that archaeologists have discovered in Mexico, hidden under the dense jungle of southern Campeche, is unknown. They have not located it walking over every square meter, cutting the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were on a pile of rocks that could have been someone’s house 1,500 years ago, as was done in the past. He lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), a technology that uses lasers to map and analyze archaeological landscapes, has allowed scientists to scan under the dense vegetation of a hitherto unexplored area of Campeche, revealing up to 6,674 hidden structuressome of them pyramids like those of Chichén Itzá or Tikal.
With the goal of measuring and reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in Mexico, the M-REDD+ Alliance project led by the Nature Conservancy collected high-quality Lidar data from 122 square kilometers that Luke Auld-Thomas, from the University of North Arizona, decided to study from an archaeological point of view, together with researchers from Tulane University, the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and the National Airborne Laser Mapping Center of the University of Houston.
They discovered a dense and diverse array of previously unknown Mayan settlements spread across the region, including an entire city dating back to the Classic period (250-900 AD), when the Mayans transformed the rugged interior of the Mexican state of Campeche. in a densely populated and extensively landscaped landscape.
“Lidar data show a range of ancient settlement densities comparable to those documented by archaeological studies focused on the region, from nearly empty rural landscapes to dense urban areas,” the researchers note in the study, published in the journal Antiquity.
These findings could resolve a heated archaeological debate that has raged since the emergence of Lidar.
“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was packed with settlements, but also revealed a lot of variability,” says Auld-Thomas, lead author of the study. «We not only find rural areas and smaller settlements. “We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the only road in the area, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” adds the researcher.
Neither the government nor the scientific community knew of its existence. “This really puts an exclamation point behind the claim that No, we haven’t found everything, and yes, there is much more to discover», says Auld-Thomas.
Lessons for the future
Future research will focus on field work at the newly discovered sites remotely. They could be instrumental in solving modern problems facing urban development.
“The ancient world is full of examples of cities that are completely different from the ones we have today», concludes Auld-Thomas. «There were cities that were extensive and hyperdense agricultural mosaics; There were cities that were highly egalitarian and extremely unequal.
“Given the environmental and social challenges we face due to rapid population growth, studying ancient cities and expanding our vision of what urban life can be like can only help,” considers the anthropologist, convinced that having a broader historical record ” could give us the freedom to imagine better, more sustainable ways of being urban now and in the future».
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