BBC reports on the accidental discovery of an immense, forgotten Mayan city in the Mexican jungle by an archaeology PhD student browsing the internet:
Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.
They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.
They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.
The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.
“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.
It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.
But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.
…
Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).
It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.
There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.
The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.
It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.
…
In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.
—
You can read more of the Mayan discovery here, in Antiquity.