Emily Chan
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.
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