A vast, interconnected network of ancient cities was home to millions more people than previously thought.
A high-tech aerial mapping technique uncovered previously undetected Mayan buildings in the jungle of Guatemala.
Photograph: Canuto and Auld-Thomas/AP
Researchers using a high-tech aerial mapping technique have found tens of thousands of previously undetected Mayan houses, buildings, defense works and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala’s Peten region, suggesting that millions more people lived there than previously thought.
The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands, meaning that kind of massive food production might have been needed.
“That is two to three times more [inhabitants] than people were saying there were,” said Marcello A Canuto, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University.
The images revealed that the Mayans altered the landscape in a much broader way than previously thought; in some areas, 95% of available land was cultivated.
“Their agriculture is much more intensive and therefore sustainable than we thought, and they were cultivating every inch of the land,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a research assistant professor at Tulane University, noting the ancient Mayas partly drained swampy areas that haven’t been considered worth farming since.
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The extensive defensive fences, ditch-and-rampart systems and irrigation canals suggest a highly organised workforce.
“There’s state involvement here, because we see large canals being dug that are re-directing natural water flows,” said Thomas Garrison, assistant professor of anthropology at Ithaca College in New York.
The 810 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of mapping done vastly expands the area that was intensively occupied by the Maya, whose culture flourished between roughly 1,000 BC and 900 AD. Their descendants still live in the region.
The mapping detected about 60,000 individual structures, including four major Mayan ceremonial centres with plazas and pyramids.
Garrison said that this year he went to the field with the Lidar data to look for one of the roads revealed. “I found it, but if I had not had the Lidar and known that that’s what it was, I would have walked right over it, because of how dense the jungle is.”
Laser technology known as LiDAR digitally removes the forest canopy to reveal ancient ruins below, showing that Maya cities such as Tikal were much larger than ground-based research had suggested.
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He noted that unlike some other ancient cultures, whose fields, roads and outbuildings have been destroyed by subsequent generations of farming, the jungle grew over abandoned Maya fields and structures, both hiding and preserving them.
“The jungle, which has hindered us in our discovery efforts for so long, has actually worked as this great preservative tool of the impact the culture had across the landscape,” noted Garrison, who worked on the project and specialises in the city of El Zotz, near Tikal.
Laser scans revealed more than 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures that were part of a vast network of cities, fortifications, farms, and highways.
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Lidar revealed a previously undetected structure between the two sites that Garrison says “can’t be called anything other than a Maya fortress”.
“It’s this hilltop citadel that has these ditch and rampart systems ... when I went there, one of these things [was] nine meters tall,” he noted.
In a way, the structures were hiding in plain sight.
The unaided eye sees only jungle and an overgrown mound, but LiDAR and augmented reality software reveal an ancient Maya pyramid.
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The unaided eye sees only jungle and an overgrown mound, but LiDAR and augmented reality software reveal an ancient Maya pyramid.
COURTESY WILD BLUE MEDIA/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Hidden deep in the jungle, the newly-discovered pyramid rises some seven stories high but is nearly invisible to the naked eye.
PHOTOGRAPH BY WILD BLUE MEDIA/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
“As soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish,” said Canuto said of the Lidar images, “because these were things that we had been walking over all the time.”
Read More Here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/03/scientists-discover-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-under-guatemalan-jungle?CMP=fb_gu
