Mayan ‘megalopolis’ hidden under the jungle

GUATEMALA: An archaeological breakthrough has revealed that an ancient Mayan ‘‘megalopolis’’ in the Guatemalan jungle was home to millions more people than previously thought.

Using laser technology, researchers found more than 60,000 previously unknown man-made features, including homes, palaces and roads that had been hidden under foliage for hundreds of years. The discovery allowed them to map the outlines of dozens of newly discovered Mayan cities linked by elevated highways. They also found a 30.5 metre pyramid that had previously been thought to be a mountain.

Earliest Mayan settlements were constructed around 1000 BC and most of the civilisation’s cities collapsed by AD 900.

It was one of the most advanced civilisations to arise in Mesoamerica, marked by sophisticated mathematics and engineering, and spreading throughout present-day central America and southern Mexico. Around five million people were thought to have been part of the civilisation at its peak, but that estimate has now increased to 10 or even 15 million.

The new findings included raised highways connecting cities to quarries, complicated irrigation systems and terraces for agriculture.

Scientists used a technology called Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) to digitally remove the jungle canopy that had grown over the ruins in an 800 sq mile area of the Peten region of northern Guatemala. Their findings were revealed in magazine.

Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist at Ithaca College in New York, said: ‘‘This was a civilisation that was literally moving mountains. We’ve had this Western conceit that complex civilisations can’t flourish in the tropics, that the tropics are where civilisations go to die. We now have to consider that complex societies may have formed in the tropics and made their way outward from there.’’ -