Mayan ways of life uncovered
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jonesstyle, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Mayan civilisation that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.
But the latest discovery – one archaeologists are calling a “game-changer” – didn’t even require a can of bug spray.
Scientists using hi-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya: defence works, houses, buildings, industrial-size agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings are already reshaping longheld views about the size and scope of the Maya civilisation.
“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on a television special about the new find. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilisation is all of a sudden brand new again,” he told The New York Times.
Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College who led the project, called it monumental. “This is a gamechanger,” he said. It changed “the base level at which we do Maya archaeology”.
The findings were announced by Guatemala’s Fundación Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya (Mayan Heritage and Nature Foundation), also known as Pacunam, which has been working with the lidar system alongside a group of European and US archaeologists.
The lidar system fires rapid laser pulses at surfaces – sometimes as many as 150 000 pulses per second – and measures how long it takes that light to return to sophisticated measuring equipment.
Doing that over and over again lets scientists create a topographical map of sorts. Months of computer model- ling allowed the researchers to virtually strip away more than 200 000 hectares of jungle that has grown over the ruins. What’s left is a surprisingly clear picture of how a 10th-century Maya would see the landscape.
Scientists used similar scans to unearth a network of ancient cities in Angkor, the heart of the Khmer empire in Cambodia that includes the famed Angkor Wat.
Lidar has the potential to unearth civilisations even in the densest jungles of Brazil.
And Garrison said the lidar data can be used in other fields.
“We don’t use about 92% of the lidar data. We just throw it out to make our maps,” he told The Washington Post.
“But there is incredibly valuable information in that forestry data. You’re just seeing the archaeology part because that’s what we focused on, but that data can be used to determine how jungles recover from forest fires, what’s the carbon footprint.” – Washington Post