‘Found’ Dataset Reveals Lost Maya City Full of Pyramids and Plazas, Hiding in Plain Sight Beneath a Mexican Forest

While examining old surveys of forests in Mexico, researchers have discovered a previously unrecorded Maya city. Located in the southeastern state of Campeche, the ruined city—which the researchers named Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon—once boasted plazas and pyramids.

In 2013, the 50-square-mile area was mapped with lidar, a remote-sensing technology, as part of a “non-archaeological” survey, according to a study published today in the journal Antiquity. The researchers examined this “found” dataset and spotted the ancient city hiding in plain sight in an area dense with Maya settlements. In total, they spotted evidence of more than 6,500 structures.

“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it,” says lead author Luke Auld-Thomas, an archaeologist at Northern Arizona University, in a statement. The newly discovered city is “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Valeriana’s architectural arrangements suggest that parts of the town were built before 150 C.E., per the study. It flourished during the Classic period—a golden age of the Maya Empire that occurred between roughly 250 and 900 C.E.

The city was made of two “monumental precincts,” and the larger one “has all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital,” write the researchers. It contained multiple enclosed, connected plazas; a ball court, where the Maya played games with rubber balls; temple pyramids; and a freshwater reservoir.

Valeriana is one of several lost Maya cities discovered with lidar in recent years. Before such technology, archaeologists surveyed vast landscapes on foot, “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,” as Auld-Thomas says in the statement.

But while lidar quickens and expands the survey process, it’s an expensive technology. So, rather than attempt to procure funding to conduct a new survey, Auld-Thomas investigated a hunch: Perhaps another party had already mapped the area.

Sure enough, he discovered—“on something like page 16 of [a] Google search”—that a forest monitoring project had created a detailed lidar survey of the area a decade prior, as he tells BBC News’ Georgina Rannard.

Using the survey, Auld-Thomas and other researchers from Tulane University, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History and the University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping were able to explore an area of Campeche that archaeologists had never investigated.

The researchers are now planning to visit Valeriana and the surrounding settlements in person to learn more about the ancient rural population of the Maya lowlands. As Auld-Thomas says in the statement, Maya cities are incredibly diverse in form, and studying them may “expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

“Unfailingly, everywhere that this sort of work is done, there’s more settlement [discovered],” Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who wasn’t involved in the research, tells Live Science’s Sierra Bouchér. “It all provides more pieces for this huge puzzle, and every puzzle piece counts.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.