<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/29/lost-maya-city-valeriana-mexico-temple-pyramids-plazas>
"After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping,
a team of researchers have stumbled on a lost Maya city of temple pyramids,
enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by
the Mexican jungle.
The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after
Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began
wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping
known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.
“For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of
hundred square kilometres total,” Auld-Thomas said. “That sample was hard won
by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking
away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of
rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”
Lidar is a remote sensing technique that uses a pulsed laser and other data
obtained by flying over a site to generate three-dimensional information about
the shape of surface characteristics.
Although Auld-Thomas knew that it could help, he also knew it was not a cheap
tool. Funders are reluctant to pay for lidar surveys in areas without obvious
traces of the Maya civilisation, which reached its height between AD250 and
AD900.
It occurred to the anthropologist that others may already have mapped the area
for different reasons. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering
have been using lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate
purposes,” Auld-Thomas said. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already
existed?”
He was in luck. In 2013, a forest monitoring project had undertaken a detailed
lidar survey of 122 square kilometres of the area. Together with researchers
from Tulane University, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and
History, and the University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser
Mapping, Auld-Thomas began analysing the survey’s data to explore 50 square
miles of Campeche that had never been investigated by archaeologists.
Their analysis turned up a dense and diverse range of unstudied Maya
settlements, including an entire city they named Valeriana, after a nearby
freshwater lagoon."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
