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Hidden pyramids and massive fortresses in the jungle. Farms and canals scattered in the marshes. Highways crossing rainforest thickets. These are among the more than 61,000 ancient Mayan structures engulfed by overgrowth in Guatemala's lowlands, which archaeologists have finally discovered using a laser mapping technology called lidar.
The findings, released on Thursday in Science, provide insight into how the ancient Mayas changed the landscape around them for more than 2,500 years, beginning around 1000 BC. at 1500 AD, and could change what archaeologists thought they knew about aspects of the size of the old society's population, farming practices and conflicts between warring dynasties.
The ancient Mayans flourished in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras. They left a rich written history painted and inscribed on wood, stone and ceramics. The stories of kings, queens and wars were detailed in their complex hieroglyphs.
"You are looking at a series of kingdoms all involved in the political history of Game of Thrones, where they marry, fight, kill and fight," said Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist from Ithaca College and author of the document. . "Lidar reveals the scene in which these dramas recorded in texts played."
The lidar is similar to sonar or radar, but uses laser light flashes to map an area.
"It's like mowing the lawn. He comes and goes, flying on very parallel lines along the jungle, "said Dr. Fernández-Díaz.
The three-dimensional map they made revealed new settlements with houses and temples, defensive fortifications such as ditches and moats, as well as terraces and farm roads.
"My jaw dropped many times by opening these images," said Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist from Tulane University in New Orleans.
For him, the biggest surprise was to discover vast areas of wetlands filled with canals and canals. "All these hundreds of square kilometers of what we thought were unusable marshes were actually some of the most productive farmland."
He said that when the Mayas were here, their farms probably looked like what we see in present-day Southeast Asia.
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The team, whose work was funded by PACUNAM, a foundation that works to preserve Mayan cultural heritage, announced its findings in February through National Geographic.
"This is the largest survey of its kind in Mesoamerica to date," said Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University.
From the data, the team estimates that there could be about 7 to 11 million people living in the central Maya lowlands during the so-called late classical period, which lasted from about 650 to about 800 days.
"When you talk about three to four times more people than you thought before, you have to reconsider how they fed, how they got along, and how overcrowded they were," said Dr. Garrison.
After building their map, the team members revisited parts of the jungle they had previously studied to verify that the structures identified with the lidar actually existed. Dr. Canuto discovered a road he could not believe before.
"I went there immediately and I thought," Oh my God, here it is! ", He said.
For Dr. Garrison, using the lidar map, it was revealed that only a hundred meters from where he had previously worked in the jungle looking, there was a fortress concealed by the foliage.
"The power of lidar has first struck me in the images," he said. "But taking it into the normal world of field work was breathtaking."
