After setting aside machetes and binoculars in favor of computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers uncovered a long-lost Maya city featuring temple pyramids, enclosed plazas, and a reservoir, all hidden for centuries within the Mexican jungle.
The discovery, located in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche, emerged when Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began considering whether non-archaeological uses of advanced laser mapping technology, called lidar, could reveal new insights into the Maya civilization.
“For years, our understanding of the Maya was limited to just a few hundred square kilometers,” Auld-Thomas explained. “This data was painstakingly gathered by archaeologists who navigated every square meter on foot, clearing vegetation to uncover possible remnants of ancient homes.”
Lidar is a remote sensing technique that uses a pulsed laser from aircraft to create 3D images of surface features. While Auld-Thomas recognized its potential, he also knew lidar was expensive. Funders are often hesitant to invest in lidar scans in areas lacking clear signs of the Maya civilization, which reached its peak between AD 250 and AD 900.
Auld-Thomas hypothesized that lidar data for this region might already exist from studies in other fields. “Ecologists, foresters, and civil engineers have been conducting lidar surveys in some of these areas for entirely different purposes,” he noted. “What if a lidar survey for this area had already been done?”
In fact, in 2013, a forest monitoring project had conducted a lidar survey across 122 square kilometers. Working with colleagues from Tulane University, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, and the University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, Auld-Thomas analyzed data covering 50 square miles of previously unexplored Campeche territory.
Their analysis revealed a dense array of Maya sites, including an entire city they named Valeriana, after a nearby freshwater lagoon.
“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts exhibits all the features of a Classic Maya political center: multiple enclosed plazas linked by a wide causeway, temple pyramids, a ballcourt, a dammed reservoir, and an architectural configuration indicating a foundation likely predating AD 150,” the researchers report in the journal *Antiquity*.
Auld-Thomas emphasized that the findings indicate many hidden discoveries yet to be found in the area.
“We didn’t just find rural areas and small settlements,” he added. “We found a large city with pyramids adjacent to the area’s only highway, near a town where farming has continued among the ruins for years. Neither the government nor the scientific community had any idea it existed. It’s clear there’s a lot more to uncover.”
The team plans to conduct fieldwork at the newly identified sites, which they believe could offer important insights as the world faces the challenges of mass urbanization.
“The ancient world includes cities unlike anything we have today,” Auld-Thomas said. “Some cities sprawled in agricultural mosaics, others were hyper-dense, some highly egalitarian, and others deeply unequal. Given today’s rapid population growth, ancient cities could help broaden our understanding of urban living.”
Six years ago, several of these same researchers used lidar to identify tens of thousands of previously unknown Maya houses, buildings, defenses, and pyramids within Guatemala’s dense Petén jungle, suggesting a population far larger than previously believed.
That 2018 study, conducted by an alliance of U.S., European, and Guatemalan archaeologists with Guatemala’s Maya Heritage and Nature Foundation, estimated that up to 10 million people may have lived in the Maya lowlands, suggesting large-scale agriculture was required to sustain them.
