The mayan culture It developed between 2000 BC. C. and 1697 in what currently comprises the territories of Guatemala, MexicoBelize and the western part of Honduras and El Salvador. Within Mexican territory they spread through Chiapas, Tabasco and the Yucatan Peninsula, in the southeast of the country. Part of the latter was what is called Campeche today. There and “by accident” they discovered a great Mayan city that remained hidden for the vegetation.
A team of archaeologists has found more than 6,600 ancient Mayan structures hidden by vegetation in the state of Campeche. Many of these structures were until now unknown. And they have done it, almost by chance, thanks to data that was published on the internet.
Among what was discovered there is even a city with pyramids, which they have called Valerian, which could have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people at its peak, between 750 and 850 AD. C. These experts believe that this urban center may be the main Mayan archaeological site by number of structures after Calakmul, which is considered the largest.
Luke Auld-Thomas, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, analyzed this little studied corner of the Mayan civilization. He did so together with colleagues from Tulane University, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston, and the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. The study written by all of them is published in the magazine Antiquity.
The area of Campeche where the study was carried out is characterized by tropical forests, limestone plains and seasonal wetlands and It was a nerve center of the Mayan civilizationparticularly during the Classic Period (250 to 900 AD). There, the scientists analyzed 130 square kilometers of narrow strips and large blocks of land.
Auld-Thomas’ team found evidence of 6,674 Mayan structures that archaeologists have never seen before. Some appeared scattered; others densely arranged; and others even constituted the remains of a great unknown city, with emblematic stone pyramids such as those of the famous sites of Chichén Itzá or Tikal. That is what they have called Valerian.
“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense in settlementsbut also revealed a lot of variability,” explained the lead author of the study.
They did not use satellites or fly drones to take new images, but they studied data obtained years ago with the laser detection technique called LIDAR (Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging). Thus, they discovered “by accident” the existence of an “ancient populated and urban Mayan landscape.”
LIDAR is a remote sensing technique that fires thousands of laser pulses from an aircraft and maps objects below using the time it takes for the signal to return. The curious thing is that the LIDAR data they analyzed were compiled in 2013 by a group of environmental scientists to study carbon in the forests of Mexico.
We found a large city with pyramids next to the only road in the area, near a town where people have actively farmed among the ruins for years.”
When the anthropologist processed the data with the methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had overlooked: Valerian and those thousands of Mayan structures. “We found a big city with pyramids right next to the only road in the area, near a village where people have been farming actively among the ruins for years,” says Auld-Thomas.
The usefulness of pseudorandom surveys
The study welcomes the use of “‘found’ remote sensing data sets conducted for non-archaeological purposes,” because “they are not subject to the bias of archaeological sites”, as has been the case. They call them pseudo-random surveys.
Or in another way, the sampling that is done for archaeological purposes “leads to inflated estimates of urban extension and population magnitude.” The authors claim that “archaeologically motivated LIDAR studies have inflated estimates of regional settlement density.”
The work of Auld-Thomas and his colleagues concludes that archeology “is now faced with the dual task of understanding how these settlement structures accumulated over time and of charting their variation in space, in order to better appreciate how crowded tropical antiquity could have been”.
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