After analyzing old surveys of forests in southeast Mexico, archaeologists have discovered a previously unrecorded Maya city.
The city is located in the state of Campeche in the central Maya Lowlands and once was home to impressive pyramids and plazas.
The central Maya Lowlands is a region in the southern part of the Yucatán Peninsula. It consists of parts of Guatemala, Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo. The region is characterized by tropical forests, seasonal wetlands, and limestone plains.
The archaeologists named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon. It covers about 50 square miles. In 2013, the area was mapped with lidar, a remote-sensing technology, for a non-archaeological purpose. The data had been collected for measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests.
Before lidar was invented, archaeologists had to explore vast landscapes on foot, which was a tedious and slow-going task. With lidar, the survey process is sped up.
When the researchers examined the survey, they noticed the ancient city. More than 6,500 structures were identified, and many of them are close to modern settlements, hidden in plain sight.
“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it,” said Luke Auld-Thomas, the lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Northern Arizona University.
The lost city is even near the only highway in the area, which is next to a farming town where people have been living for years.
According to Valeriana’s architecture, it seems that parts of the city were built before 150 C.E. It thrived during the Classic period, which occurred between roughly 250 and 900 C.E. It was a golden age of the Maya empire.
Alfredo – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only – pictured above is Calakmul, which is one of the most well-known structures built by the Maya
The city encompasses two “monumental precincts” about a mile away from each other. They are linked by continuous dense settlement patterns and signs of landscape engineering. The larger of the precincts appeared to be a Classic Maya political capital in every way.
It contained numerous enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, a ball court where the Maya played games with rubber balls, temple pyramids, and a freshwater reservoir that was formed by damming a dry creek bed that fills with water after heavy rainfall or flash floods.
The available evidence suggests that the settled area within the city may even extend beyond the space covered by the lidar survey.
“The discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that there are still major gaps in our knowledge of the existence or absence of large sites within as-yet unmapped areas of the Maya Lowlands,” wrote the author of the study.
The researchers are now planning to visit Valeriana and the surrounding settlements to learn more about the population that lived there. The in-person investigation may help broaden their view of what urban life can look like.
The study was published in the journal Antiquity.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.