Researchers have discovered a previously unknown Maya city in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula after they used laser imaging of the rainforests to find thousands of ancient structures.
The results from the researchers were published on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity. Researchers shared how they were able to discover the ancient city lying unbothered beneath the Yucatan rainforest and right next to a local highway.
With the help of aircraft passing over the jungle in the Mexican state of Campeche, researchers hit trees with laser pulses, which helped reveal the ruins of a dense city and its crowded suburban hinterlands, the study showed.
The new sites described in the study are rural farming villages, regional market towns, and a “large city with pyramids,” coauthor Luke Auld-Thomas shared in a statement.
Auld-Thomas added that LiDAR has allowed them “to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge.’”
The importance of LiDAR is helping lead to several discoveries across the globe, including in the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia and Ecuador, where lost cities were recently discovered. These discoveries are reshaping how historians viewed the populations of certain regions throughout history.
“LiDAR is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” coauthor Marcello Canuto, a professor of anthropology at Tulane, said in a statement.
The newly discovered areas could help researchers learn more about ancient rural life of the Maya people, Canuto shared. The areas include Maya fields and farming villages.
Auld-Thomas shared that the sites announced on Tuesday are pretty much in plain sight, being “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”
Even though locals knew of the sites, Auld-Thomas said, “the government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it.”
He said the discovery “really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”