The PhD student at Tulane University in the United States, Luke Auld-Thomas, discovered a centuries-old Mexican city by accident. The massive Maya city had disappeared under a jungle canopy in Mexico.
The student stumbled across the site while conducting a deep Google search, which he shared with other archaeologists and researchers to learn more about the location of the discovery. This find could change the way we view the site’s history.
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He was doing research when he found it
In speaking with the BBC, Auld-Thomas said, “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring.”
The laser survey he talks about is a lidar survey.
A technology that maps objects
The lidar survey is a remote sensing technique that sends out pulses of laser from a plane to map objects underground by calculating the time it takes the signal to hit something and return.
Auld-Thomas found that an environmental monitoring organization had done this survey.
He processed the data
After finding the laser survey, the student processed the data using methods used by archaeologists, which helped highlight what had been in plain sight.
He found an ancient city the size of the Scotland capital Edinburgh which he and his colleagues later named Valeriana.
Valeriana was a popular location
From the analysis, it appeared that the ancient city may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its highest yielding time which was around 750 to 850 AD.
Researchers said that there are more people than those who live in that same area today.
The area is believed to be a Mayan city
The archaeologists said that Valeriana is likely a Maya city from a civilization over 3,000 years ago.
Although Mayans are known for the centuries-old yet still currently standing temples and cities in Mexico, this specific city is a new discovery.
The city had faded
It is not determined exactly what caused the huge Maya city of Valeriana to fade away, but it is likely to have been war, disease, and climate change.
Researchers say that Valeriana holds the “hallmarks of a capital city,” which is seriously fascinating.
Valeriana is easy to get to
Auld-Thomas and other researchers explained that the ancient Maya city is only a 15-minute hike from a major Mexico road.
Despite this, there aren’t any known pictures of the city, even though it once housed so many people.
The city was an active location
It is estimated that the city was around 16.6 sq km, with two large major centers within it. These centers held pyramids, which were temples for the Maya people to practice worship and bury their dead.
Archeologists say that the ancient Maya city also held sports venues.
The student explained why the city faded
Auld-Thomas explained the effects of climate change on the city and how it may have caused it to wither away, saying, “It’s suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions, and it didn’t have a lot of flexibility left.”
The archaeologist wishes to visit the place
Auld-Thomas expressed his fascination with the city saying, “I’ve got to go to Valeriana at some point. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I can’t say we will do a project there.”
“One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he added.
