Lasers reveal a 3,000-year-old secret Mayan city with more than 6,500 structures

Scientists have uncovered a secret Mayan city in Mexico that once had an urban landscape of more than 6,500 structures.

The team used lidar technology to create three-dimensional models over 80 kilometers of land in Campeche, allowing them to map areas not visible to the naked eye.

The method revealed a metropolis of 21 square kilometers with iconic stone pyramids, houses and other infrastructure that have remained hidden for more than 3,000 years.

There are hundreds of documented Mayan sites, but the latest find revealed that researchers are far from finding all the major Mayan cities.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region with many settlements, but also revealed a lot of variability,” said study co-author Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University.

‘We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right off the only highway in the area, near a city where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” Auld-Thomas said.

There are hundreds of documented Mayan sites, but the latest find revealed that researchers are far from finding all the major Mayan cities

The team conducted an airborne lidar survey uses laser pulses to measure distances and create three-dimensional models of specific areas.

It has allowed scientists to scan large swathes of land from the comfort of a computer lab, revealing anomalies in the landscape that often turn out to be pyramids, family homes and other examples of Mayan infrastructure.

“Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly and with a very high accuracy and level of detail, we responded, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings we didn’t know about, the population must be enormous,'” said Auld- Thomas.

‘The counterargument was that lidar surveys were still too closely linked to known, large sites, such as Tikal, and had therefore developed a distorted view of the Maya lowlands.

‘What if the rest of the Maya area was much more rural and what we had mapped so far was the exception rather than the rule?’

The team discovered two blocks of the Mayan city, one of which contained a separate pseudo-pyramid identical to the one found at Rio Bec – a pre-Columbian Mayan archaeological site near the Guatemalan border on the Yucatan Peninsula.

The town, called Valeriana, bordered a freshwater lagoon and included two major architectural areas, including a dam, ball field, houses and terraces.

Valeriana also contained an arched amphitheater, temple pyramids and a reservoir that “has all the hallmarks of a Classic Mayan political capital,” the study said.

The survey was conducted near a highway and revealed the hidden city of more than 6,5000 structures

The Mayan city was discovered near Campeche in Mexico and covers approximately 21 square kilometers

“The discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that major gaps still exist in our knowledge about the existence or absence of major sites in unmapped areas of the Maya Lowlands,” researchers shared.

A third region of the city was classified as a ‘sparse and modest settlement, consisting of scattered or loosely clustered housing without monumental architecture and with limited investment in water storage.

Tulane professor and co-author Marcello Canuto said, “Lidar tells us that the Lowland Maya, like many other ancient civilizations, built a diverse tapestry of cities and communities across their tropical landscape.”

He continued: “While some areas are full of vast agricultural areas and dense populations, others have only small communities.

“Nevertheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society.”

Although hundreds of sites have been found, it is impossible to determine exactly how many Mayan cities remain to be explored.

However, lidar technology is helping researchers unearth them much faster, especially in regions of southern Mexico and Guatemala.

‘The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point on the statement: no, we haven’t found everything, and yes, there is a lot more to discover,” Auld-Thomas said.