Hidden Maya City discovered in the jungle of Mexico by doctoral student: “There

An extensive Mayan city With Palacios and Pyramids, he was discovered in a dense Mexican Jungle by a doctoral student who, without knowing it, spent the site for years on a visit to Mexico.

The doctoral student of the Archeology of the University of Tulane, Luke Auld-Thomas, was in Mexico approximately a decade traveling between the city of Xpujil, a site of archeology, and coastal cities, when it went through the unexplored settlements deeply buried in the landscape.

But the hairstyle through those dense jungles needed the help of Lidar, a television technology that uses lasers to measure the distances of the objects on the surface of the earth.

And this can be very expensive. Finanters are often reluctant to invest in Lidar surveys in areas where there is no visible evidence of Mayan settlements, said Auld-Thomas.

But, several years later, Auld-Thomas had an idea. He would use pre -existing surveys to find out if Mayan civilizations could be located in these areas.

“Scientists in Ecology, Silviculture and Civil Engineering have been using Lidar surveys to study some of these areas for fully separated purposes,” says Auld-Thomas in a press release on Tuesday. “And what if there was already a Lidar survey of this area?”

In 2018, Auld-Thomas, instructor at the University of Northern Arizona, located data collected in 2013 in a project headed by Nature Conservancy of Mexico to monitor carbon in the forests of Mexico. The objective of the previous team was to map the carbon on the ground in the forests.

The publicly available data set allowed the AULD-Thomas Research Team to identify the site as a land that deserves additional archaeological investigation.

For a period of five years, Auld-Thomas and his team analyzed everything remotely, using technology and analysis. And when Auld-Thomas analyzed that data, he ran into a big surprise, evidence of more than 6,600 Mayan structures, including a large previously unknown city with iconic stone pyramids.

The team had not anticipated discovering an ancient city that would rest for persistent doubts among researchers that the Mayan lowland region was not as populated and urbanized as researchers believed. It also validates previous research and puts a lasting question to rest.

“It does not reveal a different perspective on urbanism and Mayan landscapes, in reality it shows us that the perspective we already had is quite precise,” he said that “the number of buildings present throughout the data set is high enough to talk about genuinely high regional population entities.”

The researchers published their findings on Tuesday in the Tiquity magazine, describing the vast structures and buildings that comprise the old city called “Valeriana” after a nearby lagoon of fresh water. The team collaborated with the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Mexico, local archaeologists and the National Center for Laser mapping in the air at the University of Houston that allowed them to conduct the investigation remotely.

“This density is comparable to that of Mayan sites such as Calakmul, Oxpemul and Becán,” said Adriana Velázquez Morlet, director of the Campeche Center of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of the History of Mexico, and one of the co -authors of the investigation, in a statement.

He added that his institute is working with local populations to guarantee the conservation of the new site.

Auld-Thomas said that archaeologists who know the region well could improve equipment analysis and provide “a really deep perspective in this region.”

“The nature of the ruins, the archaeological buildings that were there, were large and were instantly recognizable as the type of things that mark the political capital of the Mayan classic period,” said Auld-Thomas to News themezone.

The height of the Mayan Empire was the classic period, which ranged from approximately 250 AD to at least 900 AD, when they made advances in astronomy, hieroglyphic writings and the calendar system.

Possibly the most Advanced civilization In the Americas, the Empire once occupied what is now the southern Mexico and northern Central America, including the countries of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Approximately 7 to 11 million people lived in the Mayan civilization during this time, according to a 2018 study in Science magazine.

Auld-Thomas said his team analyzed 50 square miles and discovered that the city of Valeriana, which was built before the year 150 AD, contains thousands of structures, including palaces, temples pyramids, public squares, a trap, a deposit and family homes. Technology allowed researchers to see archaeological settlements even under dense forests in the state of the Mexican southeast of Campeche.

Archaeologists in 2018 uncovered A massive network of hidden Mayan ruins for centuries in the jungles of Guatemala. In 2022, the human cemetery and the bullets of Spanish weapons were uncovered in a site of the Mayan city in the country.

Auld-Thomas said that the reason why large parts of the Mayan world are archaeologically unknown is because the region is so vast, leaving great strips unexplored by researchers who then document their existence. Auld-Thomas said the premises could have known about the structures, but the largest government and the most did.

“That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there is much more to discover,” said Auld-Thomas in a press release from the University of Tulane.

He also said that the investigation stressed the value of open data in science, and that the data collected by someone in a discipline could be useful for someone in a completely different field of research.

“What I hope is that this fosters not only open data in general, but also the collaboration between archaeologists and environmental scientists in the future.”

• Mexico
• Archaeologist