A team of archaeologists has discovered more than 6,000 ancient Mayan structures hidden by vegetation in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche, including a city of pyramids they have dubbed "Valeriana."
The city was discovered by chance thanks to Lidar, or light detection and ranging, a technology that uses lasers to map and analyze archaeological landscapes.
The dataset used for the study came from about 122 square kilometers of high-quality airborne Lidar data collected in 2013 as part of a forest monitoring project called Alianza, which aims to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
When researchers processed the data using archaeological methods, they saw what others had missed: A huge ancient city that may have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people at its peak between 750 and 850 AD.
"Our analysis revealed not only a picture of a densely settled region, but also a lot of variability," said the study's lead author, Luke Auld-Thomas of Northern Arizona University, in a press release.
"Not only did we find rural areas and smaller settlements, we also found a large city with pyramids right next to the only road in the area, near a village where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years," Auld-Thomas said.
The researcher noted that "there is much more to be discovered" in the so-called Central Maya Lowlands, a region in the southern part of the Yucatan Peninsula that includes parts of present-day Guatemala, Belize and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo.
