Lost Civilizations News: Mysterious Maya City Discovered in Guatemala

By Ela Teodosio, Christian Post Contributor Monday, February 05, 2018

Over 60,000 Mayan ruins have been uncovered under a jungle in Guatemala.

Using a sophisticated technology called Lidar, or light detection and ranging, researchers mapped around 810 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of land in northern Peten.

Lidar, which digitally removed the dense jungle to create a 3D map of what lies underneath the Guatemalan forest, found that it was once a sprawling mega-city made of a 60,000 sprawling network of structures — houses, palaces, elevated highways, and even defensive fortresses.

Findings also suggest that its former inhabitants were capable of producing food "on an almost industrial scale."

The area lies near already-known Mayan cities, and was previously thought to have been inhabited by Mayans as well, but at a much lower proportions — between one and two million. Now archeologist Thomas Garrison of Ithaca College says the population density and the civilization's scale were "grossly underestimated."

The Lidar mapping revealed that it was home to up to 20 million people. Recent results also suggest that this was an advanced sophisticated civilization, similar to that of ancient Greece or China.

"I think this is one of the greatest advances in over 150 years of Maya archaelogy," Stephen Houston, Professors of Archaeology and Anthropology at Brown University, told BBC. "I know it sounds hyperbolic but when I saw the [Lidar] imagery, it did bring tears to my eyes."

The discovery was made possible by the cutting-edge technology brought by Lidar, which archeologists say work like "magic." Thanks to it, researchers believe the public would now have a different view of the Mayan empire, which reached the peak of its power in 6th century A.D.

Using Lidar, archeologists are also hoping to shed some light on other Mayan cities and structures, including the great Mayan city of Tikal and its mysterious pyramid, as well as a swampy Mayan city near the border between Guatemala and Belize.

"There are entire cities we didn't know about now showing up in the survey data," National Geographic Explorer Francisco Estrada-Belli shared. He added that there still 20,000 square kilometers of land to be explored, and there are bound to be "hundreds of cities" in there that the public does not know about.