Major Mayan city discovered by scrolling past page 1 in Google search

Except for things at the extreme ends of observation, everything of consequence has already been discovered. At least, that’s how it seems sometimes. But even without a particle collider or a next-generation telescope, exciting discoveries can still be made. Discoveries like a decent-sized Mayan city, and sometimes, all it takes is a simple Google search.

The city, which at its peak around 800 AD had up to 50,000 inhabitants, covered an area of about 6.4 square miles (16.6 km²) and featured pyramids, amphitheaters, sports fields, and causeways connecting its various districts. Yet despite being a mere 15-minute hike from a busy road near Xpujil, a bustling town in the southeast of the Mexican state of Campeche, the ruins of this unnamed Mayan metropolis had remained hidden for centuries beneath the dense canopy of the Yucatan jungle.

Scientists know Mayan civilization started collapsing from 800 AD onward and suspect both climate change and overcrowding played a part in its downfall. But where are all the Mayan cities then?
Enter Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in New Orleans. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a [Lidar] survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC.

When he processed the survey’s data, conducted by plane, with an archaeological rather than an environmental perspective, Auld-Thomas noticed manmade structures beneath the treetops. He and his colleagues dubbed it “Valeriana” after a nearby lagoon.

This is not a small place. The site contains more than 6,750 buildings of various sizes, indicating that the city at its peak must have housed more people than the entire region does today. In fact, the researchers say Valeriana was the second-densest Mayan city, after Calakmul, and has the “hallmarks of a capital city.” Their findings are detailed in an article published by Antiquity on October 29, 2024.

Valeriana had two centers about 1.2 miles (2 km) apart, featured two plazas with temple pyramids, and a court for playing ritual ball games. There is also some evidence that the Maya constructed a water reservoir to support the needs of a large urban population.

There are no ground-level pictures of Valeriana yet. All the information available is based on the Lidar images. Paradoxically, the success of Lidar imaging means Valeriana may never be explored.

Lidar has been used in Central America for about a decade, and in that period, the technique has mapped 10 times the area explored by archaeologists in a century. It seems certain Lidar will help scientists find many more Maya sites — so many, in fact, that not all of them can be excavated.

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For more on this discovery, check out the article in Antiquity: Running out of empty space: environmental lidar and the crowded ancient landscape of Campeche, Mexico, by Luke Auld-Thomas e.a.