(CN) — Tulane University researchers uncovered sprawling, long-lost Maya settlements hidden deep in Mexico’s dense jungles using laser-guided technology, leading them to believe that there are untold structures still awaiting discovery.
The research, published in Antiquity Wednesday, was led by Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student in anthropology at Tulane, with support from his adviser and professor, Marcello Canuto.
Auld-Thomas and his team identified more than 6,500 structures, including what appears to be a large, previously unknown city complete with towering stone pyramids. They surveyed a 50-square-mile area in Campeche, Mexico — a region they say is often overlooked by archaeologists — with the help of lidar, a laser-based scanning technology.
“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That 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,” Auld-Thomas said in a news release.
The researchers say the area is rich in structures.
“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Auld-Thomas, who also teaches at Northern Arizona University. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”
This study is part of a larger push by the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane, which has been pioneering the use of lidar technology in archaeology. Over the past decade, the institute has established a state-of-the-art Geographic Information Systems lab to analyze lidar and other remote-sensing data.
Lidar works by sending laser pulses from the air to the ground, where they measure distances and generate 3D models of the area. This technique allows researchers to uncover structures that would otherwise remain hidden beneath the thick canopy of the rainforest.
Auld-Thomas said the findings in Campeche may help address long-standing debates about the true extent and density of Maya settlements.
“Because lidar allows us 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,’” he said.
Some scholars had argued that previous lidar surveys were skewed toward known, large sites like Tikal, giving a potentially distorted view of Maya settlement patterns.
The Campeche lidar surveys give researchers a more balanced picture of the Maya lowlands and how the society was built.
“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,” Canuto said in a news release. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society.”