Laser technology shines light on Mayan ‘megalopolis’ hidden under the jungle
Archaeologists find dozens of undiscovered cities with palaces, raised highways and a 100ft pyramid
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 100ft pyramid that had previously been thought to be a mountain.
Earliest Mayan settlements were constructed around 1,000 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 15million.
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 Petén region of northern Guatemala. Their findings were revealed in National Geographic magazine.
Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College in New York, told National Geographic: “The Lidar images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated.”
Marcello Canuto, his colleague 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.”
The archaeologists said the Maya may have been more comparable to ancient civilisations in Greece or China than previously thought.
The discoveries also included fortresses, ramparts and defensive walls, suggesting that warfare was “largescale and systematic, and endured over many years”. Francisco Estrada-belli, another of the archaeological team, told National Geographic: “The fortified structures and large causeways reveal modifications to the natural landscape made by the Maya on a previously unimaginable scale.
“Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy.
“We’ll need 100 years to go through all the data and really understand what we’re seeing.”