LiDAR Technology Helps Unveil Lost Maya City of Monumental Proportions

By employing LiDAR technology to peer through the thick jungle canopy of Guatemala, researchers have unearthed an enormous network of ancient Mayan ruins that had remained hidden for centuries.

This groundbreaking discovery, initially reported by National Geographic, challenges our previous understanding of the Maya civilization, revealing it to be far more extensive, advanced, and intricate than once thought. According to the publication, researchers found over 60,000 structures, including homes, palaces, roads, and other manmade features. A press release from the University of Houston, home to the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), describes the area as spanning 811 square miles (2,100 square kilometers), which is 1.7 times the size of modern-day Los Angeles.

National Geographic reports that the discovery points to a remarkably advanced Maya civilization that flourished over 1,200 years ago. CNN adds that the findings include a towering 90-foot (27-meter) pyramid, alongside evidence of agricultural systems, quarries, fortifications, and a vast road network linking settlements. Researchers now estimate the region once housed 10 million people, a number far exceeding earlier predictions.

'These discoveries are crucial because they reveal an entire civilization that remained untouched by modern-day development,' says Thomas Garrison, a Maya archaeologist and assistant professor at Ithaca College, who collaborated with other experts on the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative. PACUNAM is a Guatemalan nonprofit that supports scientific and archaeological research, as well as efforts to preserve the country's cultural heritage.

'We're not just identifying major sites,' Garrison writes in an email. 'What we're uncovering is the entire infrastructure that sustained the Maya civilization—the ways they produced food, traveled, and defended themselves.'

Garrison explains that the density of the settlement reveals that the ancient Maya managed to support a population in this region far larger than today’s, and they achieved this for over 1,000 years.

Diane Davies, a British archaeologist and Maya expert, believes the discovery of such extensive ruins could challenge common perceptions about Maya culture, particularly the notion that the rainforest environment would have limited their population size.

'The Maya thrived in this region for more than 1,500 years, with a population in the millions,' she writes in an email. 'Their long existence and large numbers suggest they were not only efficient with their agricultural systems but also environmentally conscious, understanding the limits of their surroundings and taking measures to protect it.'

These new discoveries complement existing evidence of the Maya civilization's sophistication, including their writing system, mathematical knowledge, and intricate calendars. According to Davies, 'The Maya constructed some of the largest temple-pyramids in the world, all without metal tools, the wheel, or pack animals. These accomplishments are just a glimpse of why people must reconsider their view of the Maya.'

LiDAR Revolutionizes Archaeology

This discovery is yet another example of how LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is transforming archaeology. Rather than laboriously cutting through dense jungle to uncover ruins, researchers can now soar above in aircraft equipped with lasers and other advanced tools. By emitting hundreds of thousands of laser pulses each second, they can capture data and generate a three-dimensional map of the terrain and its features.

As explained in a 2016 article from The Conversation by British archaeologist Mark Horton, LiDAR was initially developed by NASA in the early 1970s for space exploration. During the 1971 Apollo 15 mission, the first LiDAR instrument was used to map the moon’s surface from orbit, and afterward, scientists applied it to study Mars and map an asteroid, as noted in a 2010 NASA document.

Archaeologists later figured out how to repurpose the technology to discover ancient ruins in remote locations. In the early 2010s, as reported in a New Yorker article, researchers used LiDAR to locate la Ciudad Blanca, the 'White City' in Honduras, whose existence had been shrouded in myth and legend dating back to the time of Hernán Cortés. More recently, LiDAR was employed to scan the jungles of Cambodia, uncovering a 1,400-year-old city that could have rivaled Phnom Penh in size, according to a 2016 Guardian article.

Ramesh L. Shrestha, director of NCALM, notes that LiDAR technology has significantly improved since he first began using it in the late 1990s. In that time, the equipment has advanced from firing 3,000 pulses per second to 900,000 today, resulting in much more detailed maps and greatly reducing the time needed to survey areas like the Maya site.

'These advancements made it possible to undertake a project of this magnitude,' says Shrestha.

Shrestha suggests that the Maya megalopolis may eventually be overshadowed by even larger LiDAR projects. He mentioned that researchers aim to map regions spanning nearly 5,800 square miles (15,000 kilometers) across Guatemala and Mexico in the future.