The city is huge. It would be the second largest Mayan site in terms of density. Hidden a few kilometers from modern settlements, in the Mexican jungle, this city was abandoned thousands of years ago due to climate change.
It was by chance, during his searches on Google, that Luke Auld-Thomasa doctoral student at Tulane University in the United States, comes across a document. “I was on page 16 of Google and found a laser survey done by a Mexican environmental monitoring organization”he reports to the English media BBC. But how did a simple laser study allow man to uncover an immense city located in the Campeche region, in Mexico, where between 30,000 and 50,000 people could have lived at its peak between 750 and 850 AD?
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It was actually a study based on the remote sensing technique of lidar. It is a laser beam that allows structures buried under vegetation to be remotely scanned and mapped. The primary goal of the study was not archaeological, but to measure and monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests. But Luke Auld-Thomas, with his archaeologist’s eye, dissected this data and put his finger on what the sponsors of the study had neglected: the traces, under the vegetation, of an immense city.
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Not just a city, a capital
A city which sheltered, according to the discoveries of Luke Auld-Thomas and Professor Marcello Canuto, co-author of research published in the scientific journal Antiquitynearly 6,764 buildings of different sizes within the city which spread over nearly 16.6 km2. It would be the second largest Mayan site in terms of density after Calakmul, considered the largest site in Latin America.
In this area, which the researchers named « Valerian »pyramids, temples, traces of a reservoir and even sports fields have been identified. The study also specifies that“there are other areas where density appears to reach levels typical of urban landscapes”. These are all the characteristics of a capital, according to the professor Elizabeth Graham of the University College of London questioned by the BBC.
A map showing details of the lidar analysis of the “Valeriana” site in the state of Campeche, Mexico. (Photo: Luke Auld-Thomas/Antiquity)
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Research also suggests that when the Mayan civilizations collapsed starting around 800 AD, it was in part because they were very densely populated and could not survive climatic problems. “This suggests that the landscape was completely populated at the onset of drought conditions and not much flexibility remained. So it may be that the whole system collapsed as people moved away”explains Luke Auld-Thomas to the BBC.
