A team of archaeologists has uncovered more than 6.000 ancient Maya structures hidden beneath vegetation in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche, including a city of pyramids they named “Valeriana.”
The discovery was made accidentally thanks to LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a technology that uses lasers to map and analyze archaeological landscapes.
The dataset used for the study comes from approximately 122 square kilometers of high-quality airborne LiDAR data collected in 2013 as part of a forest monitoring project called Alianza, aimed at reducing emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation.
When researchers processed the data using archaeological methods, they found something others had missed: a vast ancient city that may have housed between 30.000 and 50.000 people at its peak between 750 and 850 AD.
“Our analysis revealed not only a picture of a densely populated region but also a lot of variability,” stated the study’s lead author, Luke Auld-Thomas from Northern Arizona University, in a press release.
“We found not just rural areas and small settlements but also a large city with pyramids right next to the only road in the area, near a village where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” Auld-Thomas explained.
The researcher emphasized that “there is still much to discover” in the so-called Central Maya Lowlands, a region in the southern part of the Yucatan Peninsula that includes parts of modern-day Guatemala, Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo.
In recent years, LiDAR has become a powerful tool in the archaeologist’s arsenal, capable of documenting entire landscapes down to the finest details, even under dense forest cover.
