The lost city of Maya was found in the Mexican jungle by accident

A huge Mayan city has been discovered centuries after disappearing under the canopy of the jungle in Mexico.

Archaeologists have found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and an amphitheater in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They found the hidden complex – which they called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of radar survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in size only to Calakmul, believed to be the largest Mayan site in ancient Latin America.

The discovery of the city, which is the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, was made “by accident” when an archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in the US, explains: “I was on page 16 of a Google search and found a radar survey by a US environmental monitoring organization. Mexico made.

That’s Lidar surveying, a remote sensing technique that emits thousands of radar pulses from a plane and maps objects below using signal return times.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data using methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city that could have been home to 30 people. -50,000 people at its peak between 750 and 850 AD.

Researchers say this number is more than the number of people living in the area today.

Mr. Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

Professor Marcello Canuto, co-author of the study, said the discovery helps change the view in Western thinking that the Tropics are places where “civilizations died”.

Instead, this part of the world is home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the city’s collapse and eventual abandonment, but archaeologists think climate change was the main cause.

Valeriana has “the hallmarks of a capital” and is second only in building density to the spectacular Calakmul site, about 100 km (62 miles) away.

Archaeologists say it is “hidden in plain sight” because it is just a 15-minute walk from the main road near Xhipul, where most of the Maya lived.

The researchers said no photos of the city were lost because “no one had ever been there”, although locals may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds.

The city covers an area of ​​about 16.6 square kilometers, with two large centers with large buildings about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) apart, connected by dense houses and causeways.

It has two squares with temple pyramids where the Maya worshiped, hid treasures like jade masks, and buried their dead.

It also has a court where people can play an ancient ball game.

There is also evidence of a reservoir, suggesting that humans used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Professor Canuto surveyed three different locations in the forest. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the study, said the study supports the claim that the Maya lived in complex cities or towns rather than isolated villages.

“The problem is that the landscape is certainly settled – that is, settled in the past – and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild,’” she says.

Research shows that when the Maya civilization collapsed from 800 AD onwards, it was partly because they were overpopulated and could not survive climate problems.

“It shows that the landscape was completely packed with people at the start of the drought and it didn’t have much flexibility left,” Mr Auld-Thomas said. And so perhaps the whole system has essentially broken down as people move further and further away.” .

War and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to the destruction of the Mayan city-states.

Lidar technology has revolutionized the way archaeologists survey areas covered with vegetation, such as the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilizations, Professor Canuto explains.

During the early years of his career, surveys were carried out by foot and hand, using simple instruments to examine the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar has been used in Central America, he says it has mapped about 10 times the area that archaeologists have covered in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas said his research shows there are many sites out there that archaeologists don’t know about.

In fact, so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

“At some point I have to go to Valeriana,” Mr. Auld-Thomas said. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I cannot say that we will do a project there.”

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

The research was published in the academic journal Antiquity.