Hidden beneath the forested regions of southern Mexico was a vast Mayan landscape.
A newly discovered city called Valeriana; The area is roughly equivalent to the size of Beijing. It had “all the hallmarks of a classical Maya political capital,” researchers reported in October. relics. The plazas connected by great passages, temple pyramids and reservoirs would have impressed the Mayans 1,500 years ago.
Archaeologists have long known that the Mayan lowlands of southernmost Mexico harbor ancient urban environments.SN: 10/25/21). Luke Auld-Thomas, an archaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, was searching for random data online when he came across a dataset that the Nature Conservancy of Mexico (TNC Mexico) uses to study carbon intake and emissions in the region. He saw that the organization was investigating a site with high archaeological potential and had a hunch that there might be a structure there.
Further analysis showed that the intuition was correct. Auld-Thomas “hit the target blindfolded,” says Tulane anthropologist Marcello Canuto. “I didn’t expect to find such a large site with such a small data set.”
TNC Mexico’s environmental analysis used a technology called LiDAR to estimate tree height and canopy volume in southern Mexico. Researchers use LiDAR to map the relief of the landscape using laser beams from aircraft. It has been used to discover many archaeological sites, such as high-altitude Silk Road cities, large ancient urban complexes in Ecuador, and long-forgotten urban sprawl in the Amazon.SN: 10/23/24; SN: January 11, 2020; SN: May 25, 22).
The lidar beam that reached the forest floor was of little use for TNC Mexico to focus on tree ranges, but it provided good data for Auld-Thomas and his colleagues to create topographic maps for archaeological purposes.
Reprocessing the data revealed that valeriana may have been quite densely established in much larger lowland areas of the Maya region. Residents of the many homes surrounded by curved amphitheater-like residential patios speculate that, if not for the ceremonial pyramid temples, they would have spent their time at the nearby lagoon or the city’s ball courts.
With more than 400 structures per square kilometer, Valeriana had a building density more than seven times higher than that of most of the surrounding area at its peak. Only Calakmul, a large low-lying city near what is now the Mexico-Guatemala border, historically had a higher density, with about 770 buildings per square kilometer.
“It’s great to quantify our suspicions that this could be one of the most densely populated Mayan sites in the region,” said David Stuart, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin. New research.
Stewart said the discovery isn’t just about a site that no one knew about before. “It’s about the nature of the way the Mayans settled their landscape.”
Driving through the area, you can see the hills and pyramids that form the current agricultural landscape, as well as “ancient agricultural terraces,” he says. [that were] “It was a breadbasket for ancient agricultural activities.” This study adds more evidence that the Maya lowlands were indeed densely populated, in addition to Calakmul, which flourished during the Maya Classic period (250-900 AD) and could have had a population of over 50,000 people. “And the fact that we discovered this with environmental data shows that previous archaeological studies suggesting this density were not overestimates,” says Stuart.
Archaeologist Thomas Garrison, also at the University of Texas, agrees. He believes that LiDAR technology can help him make great strides in his field. “This study shows the value that LiDAR data can have for archeology even when acquired for other purposes,” he says. Lidar data from widely unknown areas is helping archaeologists get a clearer, more incontrovertible image of the Mayan civilization puzzle piece. But LiDAR data isn’t everything. “The next step is to visit and excavate to better understand the settlement.”
