What a great article - it’s to the point.
They uncovered the hidden complex - which they have called Valeriana - using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.
They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.
The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.
“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.
Lidar needs to appear an horror movie. Something like this - For a thousand years evil was left undisturbed…
this is so cool. it’s like if those weird geoguesser savants did something worthwhile with their obsessive focus on google maps lmao.
OP - you might want to change the link - it probably has tracking. Here’s the direct link…
delete the .amp: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmznzkly3go
The article is good but it’s so funny to read articles like this as someone with a decent understanding of Mayan society. Some of the conclusions in this article and statements from researchers are so incredibly basic 😭. I get that it has to be because the target audience is mostly people who do not have my insight and a short quote from a researcher can only contain so much information but it can get really funny when every other paragraph exclaims something that to you is already quite obvious as if it were a grand discovery.
This felt like a humblebrag to write and I hate that, maybe it’s the edible making me paranoid but I feel the need to append this clarifying that I am not doing that. I’m sure y’all know what I mean?
dudes rock
