Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

[lurch234]

Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle

 

 

Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Mayan ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough.

Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications.

 

The landscape, near already-known Mayan cities, is thought to have been home to millions more Mayans than other research had previously suggested.

 

The researchers mapped over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten.

 

 

Results from the research using "revolutionary" Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China, National Geographic reports.

 

"The Lidar images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated," Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist, told the magazine.
 

Described as "magic" by some archaeologists, Lidar is unveiling archaeological finds almost invisible to the naked eye.

 

The group of scholars who worked on this project beamed laser pulses at the ground from a plane and measured the wavelengths as they bounced back, which is not unlike how bats use sonar to hunt.

 

Lidar enabled them to digitally remove the tree canopy and create a detailed three-dimensional image of what is really under the surface of the now-uninhabited landscape.

 

"Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy," Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist, told National Geographic. "We'll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we're seeing."

 

 

Archaeologists excavating a Maya site called El Zotz in northern Guatemala, painstakingly mapped the landscape for years. But the Lidar survey revealed a 30-foot-long (9m) fortification wall that the team had never noticed before.

 

"Maybe, eventually, we would have gotten to this hilltop where this fortress is, but I was within about 150 feet of it in 2010 and didn't see anything," Maya expert Tom Garrison told Live Science.

 

In recent years Lidar technology has also been used to reveal previously hidden cities near the iconic ancient temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

 

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[rasbridge]

Wow, that is absolutely awesome...