US students discover the long-lost Mayan City hidden deep inside the forest in Mexico.
According to the Independent, the American students studied public data that came from laser scans of the Campeche region to find the hidden world named "Valeriana," with nearly 6,700 undiscovered structures.
Archaeologists have been using laser scanning lidar technology in Central America to study pyramids, ancient houses, and other Mayan infrastructure.
Luke Auld-Thomas, PhD candidate at Northern Arizona University, analyzed data from a 2019 lidar project that monitored and measured CO2 in Mexican forests to see what is underneath 50 square miles of Campeche.
He told BBC, “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring.”
He further added, “The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, No, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”
The study published in the journal Antiquity revealed that the lost city has all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital and a large city with pyramids, causeways connecting districts, two plazas, and amphitheaters.
The researchers believe that Maya civilizations collapsed from 800 AD onwards because they were densely populated and were unable to deal with climate change problems.
