Lasers Reveal a Maya Civilization So Dense It Blew Experts’ Minds

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Tikal, home to temples and palaces, is one of the best known Maya sites in northern Guatemala. Credit Justin Lane for The New York Times

They were hidden there, all this time, under the cover of tree canopies in the jungles of northern Guatemala: tens of thousands of structures built by the Maya over a millennium ago.
Not far from the sites tourists already know, like the towering temples of the ancient city of Tikal, laser technology has uncovered about 60,000 homes, palaces, tombs and even highways in the humid lowlands.
The findings suggested an ancient society of such density and interconnectedness that even the most experienced archaeologists were surprised.
"Everywhere that we looked, there was more settlement than we expected," said Thomas Garrison, a National Geographic explorer and an archaeologist at Ithaca University. "We knew there was going to be more, but the scale of it really blew our minds."
Researchers found the structures by shooting lasers down from planes to pierce the thick foliage and paint a 3-D picture of the ground below. The technology is called Light Detection and Ranging, or lidar.

NICARAGUA

FEB. 2, 2018
By The New York Times

The method has been used elsewhere, including around the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. But this lidar project is the largest ever undertaken. More than 800 square miles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala's Petén region have been mapped, according to an exclusive report by National Geographic, which is airing a Feb. 6 television special about the project.

"This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data," said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on the television special. "And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again."
The lasers are only the first step, he added, noting that he and archaeologists still had to trek through jungles to verify the data while contending with thick undergrowth, poisonous snakes, swarms of killer bees and the odd scorpion.

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Lidar data highlighted about 60,000 structures that had been hidden in the jungle for hundreds of years. Credit Wild Blue Media/National Geographic

The project was started by Pacunam, a Guatemalan nonprofit organization, and carried out with help from the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, which is based at the University of Houston. The lidar technology essentially allows researchers to spot bumps in the landscape. Most of the ruins look like rocky mounds — even in person, and to the naked eye — but experts can often identify a collapsed quarry, palace or street.
The Maya culture was known for its sophisticated approach to agriculture, arts and astronomy. The peak era for the civilization, which some archaeologists refer to as the Classic Period, is generally considered to have lasted from around A.D. 250 to 900.
The total population at that time was once estimated to be a few million, said Diane Davies, an archaeologist and Maya specialist based in the United Kingdom. But in light of the new lidar data, she said it could now be closer to 10 million.

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Dr. Davies was not involved in the lidar project but considered it "really big, sensational news." She said the data should encourage people not only to re-evaluate Maya civilization, but also to learn from it.
"To have such a large number of people living at such a high level for such a long period of time, it really proves the fact that these people were highly developed, and also quite environmentally conscientious," she said.
Among the structures uncovered were roads, built wide and raised high above the wetlands to connect fields to farmers and markets to metropolises. There were also small dwellings, quarries and intricate irrigation systems. "We're seeing the spaces in between, and that's where really interesting stuff was happening," Dr. Garrison said.
He added that in addition to changing people's perception of the Maya culture, lidar represented "a sea change" in the field of archaeology.
"I don't think you see a lot of discoveries happening across the sciences right now that sort of turn a discipline on its head," he said. "It's exciting to know that it can still happen."

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