Lasers reveal sprawling Maya civilization

Saturday, February 3, 2018, 2:39 PM - The Maya civilization has long been known to historians and archaeologists, flourishing in the jungles of Central America and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula for hundreds of years.

But after its rapid decline, most traces of the Mayans' large stone cities were swallowed up by those same jungles, and though many sites, such as Chichen Itza in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala, have since been uncovered, new research has suggested the Maya civilization was even larger and more thriving than once thought.

Using laser-based technology known as LIDAR ('light detection and ranging') to pierce through the dense rainforest to reveal the structures below, researchers scanned some 2,100-square kilometers in northern Guatemala, an area which includes Tikal and other known sites.

The results, soon to be unveiled by National Geographic, were shocking: The researchers found an estimated 60,000 concealed structures, including 'unknown pyramids, palace structures, terraced fields, roadways, defensive walls and towers, and houses,' according to a release from Ithaca College.

"Everyone is seeing larger, denser sites. Everyone,”  Thomas Garrison, an assistant professor of anthropology at Ithaca, said in the release. “There's a spectrum to it, for sure, but that's a universal: everyone has missed settlement in their [previous] mapping.”

Even before archaeologists really get going on a closer look, the new images have already told researchers a lot about the Maya.

For example, they've identified more defensive fortifications, suggesting warfare was more common among the disparate Maya city states than previously thought. Even more significantly, the LIDAR images show a more extensive agricultural complex, suggesting the Maya were more populous than previously thought: As many as 10-20 million people may have lived in the civilization during its full flowering.

“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” National Geographic explorer Albert Yu-Min Lin, who worked on the upcoming National Geographic special, told the New York Times. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again.”

Some of the findings will be featured in a one-hour special, "Lost Treasures of the Maya Snake Kings,” on February 6 on the National Geographic Channel.

SOURCES: Ithaca College | New York Times | National Geographic | [Thumbnail Image Credit]