{"id":5653,"date":"2024-10-29T14:00:39","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/29\/laser-technology-uncovers-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-in-mexico-jungle\/"},"modified":"2024-10-29T14:00:39","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T14:00:39","slug":"laser-technology-uncovers-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-in-mexico-jungle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/29\/laser-technology-uncovers-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-in-mexico-jungle\/","title":{"rendered":"Laser technology uncovers ancient Mayan city hidden in Mexico jungle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Archaeologists have discovered thousands of previously unknown ancient structures, including pyramids, hidden deep in Mexico\u2019s jungle.<\/p>\n<p>More than 6,600 structures linked to the Maya civilisation have been found in the southern state of Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula.<\/p>\n<div class=\"sdc-site-outbrain sdc-site-outbrain--AR_6\">    <\/div>\n<p>Experts analysed lidar data, a method of scanning the land from above using lasers.<\/p>\n<p>The Maya were one of the most dominant civilisations in Mesoamerica and built cities with elaborate ceremonial buildings and massive stone pyramids in what we now know as <strong>Mexico<\/strong>, <strong>Honduras<\/strong>, <strong>Guatemala<\/strong> and <strong>El Salvador<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Pyramids \u2013 like those in Calakmul, in the Mexican state of Campeche \u2013 were found by researchers led by Luke Auld-Thomas from Tulane University, <strong>New Orleans<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad ad--teads\">        <\/div>\n<p>\u201cFor the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total\u2026 by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>But instead of deploying teams on the ground, archaeologists in his team analysed existing mapping data over an area of 47 square miles.<\/p>\n<p>They uncovered anomalies in the landscape \u2013 revealing pyramids, houses and other Maya infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>Their results, published in the journal Antiquity, showed a dense, diverse array of totally unstudied Maya settlements dotted throughout the region.<\/p>\n<p>It included an entire city which the team called Valeriana, named after a nearby freshwater lagoon.<\/p>\n<p>The urban centre included two major hubs of \u201cmonumental architecture, linked by continuous dense settlement and landscape engineering\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe didn\u2019t just find rural areas and smaller settlements,\u201d Mr Auld-Thomas said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area\u2019s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it,\u201d and he predicted, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot more to be discovered\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Last year a Mexican team <strong>found an ancient Mayan city<\/strong> thought to date back to 1,000AD in the same region.<\/p>\n<p>But unlike the US researchers, that group did not benefit from lidar technology. They trekked through 60km of roads covered in thick vegetation to discover the ancient site.<\/p>\n<p>The ancient Mayan civilisation reached its peak from 300AD to 900AD, and descendants are said to still live in the region.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div>This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Archaeologists have discovered thousands of previously unknown ancient structures, including pyramids, hidden deep in Mexico\u2019s&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}