Lost in the Jungle

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Stumbling upon an undiscovered ancient city full of gold is usually the hallmark of great action films. But in real life, it is rare to find a lost city – especially by accident.

However, that is exactly what happened when a doctoral student in anthropology was analyzing publicly available drone data of Mexico and stumbled across a huge ancient Mayan city buried beneath a dense jungle canopy.

Archeologist Luke Auld-Thomas of Tulane University in New Orleans discovered the city while surfing the internet and examining data from modern aerial mapping technology known as LiDAR (light detection and ranging).

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” Auld-Thomas told the BBC.

Auld-Thomas and co-author Marcello Canuto, in a new study, surveyed three different sites in the jungle and found 6,674 structures – essentially a huge ancient city that may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 CE, more than the population of the area today.

The city, which was about 16.6 square kilometers (6.4 square miles), had two major centers with large buildings around 1.2 miles apart, linked by dense houses and causeways, according to the study. It had two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game and possibly a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

The team named the city “Valeriana” after a nearby lagoon and said it has the “hallmarks of a capital city,” was second only to the density of the Calakmul site of the Mayans, which is about 62 miles away.

The research team also believes that the city probably collapsed between 800 and 1,000 CE, due to issues such as climate variability and adaptation struggles because of the city’s density. At the same time, warfare with other cities and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to the eradication of Maya city-states, the BBC wrote.

This study is the first to reveal Maya structures in the east-central Campeche region that runs from southeastern Mexico to Belize which the Maya inhabited from about 1000 BCE to 1500 CE. But with new technology such as laser and drone mapping, archeologists are finding more instances of ancient human activity.

Now the team has emphasized the need for more field research along with drone usage to map the region. The problem is, added Auld-Thomas, there’s much more to find and too little time.

“One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he said.