Lost Mayan City Found Using Laser Mapping

Mayan city Lost in the dense jungles of southern Mexico has been discovered. The discovery took place in the southeastern state of Campeche, and archaeologists named it Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon.

“The larger of the two monumental territories of Valeriana has all the hallmarks of a classic Mayan political capital: enclosed plazas connected by a wide causeway; temple pyramids; ball court; a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (seasonal watercourse); and the probable E-Group assembly, an architectural structure that generally places a founding date before 150 AD,” according to the study, published in the journal E-Group. magazine Antiquity.

Discovering the city did not require hacking through the jungle with a machete or patiently digging with brushes and spatulas. The explorers also didn’t need tape measures, binoculars or compasses to find their way through the dense foliage. Instead, they used the latest technology: lasers, drones and satellite maps. Using these tools, they discovered a city hidden for centuries beneath the dense Mexican jungle, unearthing pyramids, gated plazas and an ancient reservoir.

The discovery was made by Luke Old-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University. His analysis revealed a huge network of previously unexplored settlements.

Old Thomas and his fellow researchers were able to map the jungle city thanks to airborne laser scanning, better known as lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), a remote sensing technique that uses pulsed lasers and other data collected through trestles that can create accurate three-dimensional models of surface features, revolutionizing the way archaeologists explore the hidden past.

The laser pulses create a topographic map in a similar way to how a bat uses echolocation: laser light is emitted from the aircraft, reflected off objects on the ground, and returned to a detector located on the underside of the aircraft. In Mexico, although only a small fraction of the pulses travel through the dense jungle, the large number of pulses emitted allows enough light to reach the ground, creating a map with a resolution of up to 1 meter. Depending on the timing and intensity of the returning pulses, the detector can map the contours of the area, revealing hills, ditches and ancient ruins covered in vegetation. This technology is also integrated into autonomous cars that will help them avoid accidents.

“For a long time, our understanding of the Maya civilization was limited to an area of ​​a few hundred square kilometers,” says Old-Thomas. “This limited sample was obtained with enormous effort: archaeologists painstakingly combed every square meter, cutting down vegetation with machetes, only to discover that they were standing on a pile of stones that may have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”