Student accidentally discovers lost Mayan city in the jungles of Mexico

An American student analyzing publicly available data discovered a vast Mayan city of thousands undiscovered structuresincluded pyramidsunder a Mexican forest.

The data came from laser scans of the Campeche region and revealed a buried worldsince then called “Valeriana”, with almost 6,700 undiscovered structures.

Archaeologists have used it laser scanning lidar technology to assess anomalies in landscapes around the world Yucatan peninsula in Central America and came across pyramids, family homes and other Mayan infrastructure.

For a long time, surveys of ancient structures only sampled a few hundred square kilometers. “That sample was heavily mined by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square meter, hacking away at vegetation with machetes to see if it stood on a pile of stones that might have been someone’s house 1,500 years ago,” says Luke Auld. Thomas, a PhD student at Northern Arizona University who made the discovery.

In recent years, researchers have analyzed data from lidar scans taken for unrelated purposes, looking for evidence of Mayan structures.

Mr Auld-Thomas analyzed data from one such 2013 lidar project, aimed at measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests, to see what lay beneath 80 square kilometers of Campeche. “I was on page 16 of the Google search and found a laser survey conducted by a Mexican environmental monitoring organization,” he told the BBC.

Analyzing the data using modern archaeological methods revealed a dense and diverse range of Mayan settlements, including a sprawling city dating to the period between 250 and 900 AD.

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

His research was recently published in the journal Antiquity.

The Lost City has “all the hallmarks of a classic Maya political capital,” Mr Auld-Thomas noted. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the only highway in the area, near a city where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Studying such ancient cities could help solve modern problems facing urban development, researchers said. “There were towns with vast agricultural patchworks and high density,” Auld-Thomas said. “Given the environmental and social challenges we face as a result of rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and broaden our view of what urban living could be like.”