Mayan city with buildings and plazas hiding in plain sight has only now been found

A Mayan city that vanished under a jungle in Mexico has been discovered accidentally. Archaeologists say it is the size of Scotland's capital Edinburgh and is lined with pyramids, sports fields, and causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They used Lidar, a type of radar survey that maps structures buried under vegetation, to find the hidden complex called Valeriana. It is massive and second only to Calakmul, believed to be the largest Mayan site in ancient Latin America.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a radar survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” said Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in the US.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

What he had found was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of radar pulses from a plane and maps objects on the ground using the time the signal takes to return. He then processed the data using archaeological methods and noticed that a huge ancient city once existed there that was once home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

The city has been named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

Also Read:THIS ancient temple is of Maya's monstrous god of farts 'The Stinking One'

The Mayan city was thriving

The Tropics have long been seen as a region where "civilisations went to die", but the latest discovery changed this notion, says co-author of the study, Professor Marcello Canuto.

He says that the region once housed more people than it does today and was home to rich and complex cultures. What led to the demise of the population and the abandonment of the city is not clear, but the archaeologists point to climate change as a possible factor.

Archaeologists say that it is "hidden in plain sight", and is just 15 minutes away from a major road near Xhipul. They state that "no one has ever been there", but locals might have suspected the presence of ruins under the mounds of earth.

The team surveyed three different sites in the jungle and found 6,764 buildings of various sizes. The huge city was likely spread over an area of 16.6 sq km. It had two major centres with large buildings around 2 km apart, with houses and causeways.

There were temple pyramids where Mayans hid treasures like jade masks and buried their dead. People of the city likely also played an ancient ball game in a court.