Most great archaeological discoveries involve years of field work, dense jungle, and lots of excavation. In this case it was a guy clicking through page after page of Google results, the kind of Internet rabbit hole most of us only fall into when we’re bored at home. Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University, was immersed in a search when he found it. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and I found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC in 2024. That laser survey turned out to contain an entire ancient Mayan city, hidden under forest cover for centuries. The study used LiDAR, a mapping technique that fires laser pulses from an airplane or satellite to measure distances to the ground. When you remove the treetops from the data, you can see what’s underneath: in this case, pyramids, causeways, sports fields, amphitheaters and thousands of structures in the state of Campeche in southeastern Mexico. The organization that originally collected the data was monitoring the environment. They had no idea that they had flown over a lost city. Auld-Thomas and a fellow archaeologist named it Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon. Welcome to a lost Mayan metropolis The figures are astonishing. The city is believed to have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people between approximately 750 and 850 AD, which is more than the population of the region today. Its density ranks second only to Calakmul, the largest known Mayan site in Latin America, located about 100 kilometers away. Researchers believe that Valerian may have served as a capital. Professor Marcello Canuto, co-author of the research study and professor of anthropology at Tulane, said the discovery challenges a long-held Western assumption that tropical regions were places “where civilization went to die.” The opposite seems to be true. These environments were densely populated, intensely developed, and home to sophisticated urban centers. Across the three jungle sites the team surveyed, they identified more than 6,674 buildings. The find is part of a broader revolution in archaeology. LiDAR has been quietly rewriting what we know about ancient civilizations for more than a decade. A 2013 study used the same technique to reveal massive urban networks around Angkor in Cambodia. In 2018, researchers used it to find more than 60,000 structures in the Guatemalan jungle. The technology allows archaeologists to “digitally deforest” landscapes that would take lifetimes to explore on foot. A discovery hidden in plain sight What makes Valeriana surprising is that no one had to go anywhere to find it. The data had already been collected. It was simply sitting in an online archive, waiting for someone curious enough to click on page 16. Canuto noted that there are no actual photographs of Valeriana, only LiDAR maps, because no one has visited the site in person yet. As far as anyone knows, the city remains exactly as it has been for centuries, swallowed by the forest, now plotted with laser dots on a researcher’s screen. “The point is that the landscape is definitely populated, that is, populated in the past, and not, as it appears at first glance, uninhabited or ‘wild’,” said Professor Elizabeth Graham of University College London. There are probably more out there. Canuto hopes to secure more funding and more drone-based mapping in the coming years. “It would be wonderful for the next 10 or 20 years,” he said. “We should have twice as much land covered with LiDAR.” This means there are almost certainly more Valerians hiding in plain sight, waiting for the next bored grad student to wander far enough. This article originally appeared in May. It has been updated. The post Archeology Student Found a Lost Mayan City on Page 16 of a Google Search appeared first on Upworthy.
