Archaeology Student Discovers Lost Maya City on Page 16 of Google Search

A Discovery on Page 16 of Google

The find began when Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University, was deep in a web search and stumbled upon data that had already been collected by an environmental monitoring organization. The organization that originally gathered the data was tracking the environment and had no idea they had flown over an entire ancient city. The survey utilized LiDAR, a mapping technique that fires laser pulses from a plane or satellite to measure distances to the ground. By stripping away the tree canopy from the digital data, researchers revealed thousands of structures, including pyramids, causeways, sports fields, and amphitheaters. Auld-Thomas and a fellow archaeologist named the site Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, according to Yahoo News Canada.

Scale and Population of Valeriana

The newly discovered urban center is estimated to have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people between roughly 750 and 850 AD, surpassing the modern population of the region today. According to reporting from Upworthy, Valeriana’s density ranks second only to Calakmul, the largest known Mayan site in Latin America, which is located about 100 kilometers away. Researchers believe the site may have served as a capital. Instead, the findings show that these environments were densely settled, intensely developed, and home to sophisticated urban centers. Across three jungle sites surveyed by the team, researchers identified more than 6,674 buildings.

The Broader Revolution of LiDAR Mapping

The identification of Valeriana forms part of a broader technological shift in archaeology over the past decade. LiDAR allows researchers to digitally deforest landscapes that would otherwise take lifetimes to survey on foot. Similar techniques were used in a 2013 study to reveal massive urban networks around Angkor in Cambodia, and in 2018 to find more than 60,000 structures in the Guatemalan jungle, according to Yahoo News Canada. What distinguishes Valeriana is that no one had to visit the site to find it, as the data was already sitting in an online file. Canuto noted that no photographs of Valeriana exist because no one has visited the location in person yet, leaving the city preserved as laser points on a researcher’s screen. Professor Elizabeth Graham of University College London noted to Upworthy, The point is that the landscape is definitely settled, that is, settled in the past, and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild.’

Future Prospects for Jungle Mapping

Canuto is seeking additional funding and more drone-based mapping to expand archaeological surveys over the next decade. According to Upworthy, Canuto stated, It would be wonderful over the next 10, 20 years. We should have double the amount of ground covered in LiDAR. Such efforts suggest that additional ancient cities remain hidden in plain sight, waiting for further analysis of existing or newly captured environmental data.