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Lost Maya city discovered in Mexico

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2024-11-05 12:00:16

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For more than 1,000 years, dense forests in the Mexican state of Campeche concealed the region’s ancient human history.

Scientists called Campeche an archaeological “blank spot” in the Maya Lowlands, an area spanning what is now Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and southeastern Mexico, and which the Maya inhabited from about 1000 BC to AD 1500.

But part of that region is blank no longer. Archaeologists have found thousands of never-before-seen Maya structures as well as a large city that they named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Antiquity.

The sleuthing that led to the discovery took place from nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away, using aerial LiDAR — light detection and ranging equipment — that penetrated eastern Campeche’s thick forest cover from above, pinging the surface with lasers and revealing what lay beneath the leafy canopy. Encompassing about 47 square miles (122 square kilometers), the LiDAR scans were collected in 2013 for a forest survey by The Nature Conservancy of Mexico.

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