Researchers have found more proof of our forgotten history with the rediscovery of buried settlements in Central America and Central Asia dating back to antiquity.
Using a laser-based mapping technology known as aerial light detection and ranging (lidar), a team from Tulane University in the US has announced they have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico.
Led by Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, the discovery was made by analysing a publicly-available lidar survey taken in 2013.
“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” Auld-Thomas told BBC.
Auld-Thomas and his team processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed, range of unstudied Maya settlements.
One is a vast city, dubbed by researchers as ‘Valeriana’ after a nearby reservoir, encompasses two major hubs of ‘monumental’ architecture including temple pyramids; a ballcourt and curved, ‘amphitheatre’ residential patios.
The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity and the team say the findings could lead to a “better understanding of the ancient civilization’s extent and complexity.”
The Mayan findings came a week after researchers working on a US-Uzbek project announced the tracing of “two newly documented cities” in mountains along the old Silk Road trade route connecting Europe and China.
A team from the University of Washington in St. Louis and the National Center of Archaeology in Uzbekistan used “drone-based lidar” to help with mapping “the archaeological scale and layout of two recently discovered high-elevation sites” around 2,000 metres above sea-level in the former Soviet republic.
Tashbulak, the smaller of the two rediscovered towns, takes up about 12 hectares. The second one, Tugunbulak, was 10 times bigger – “making it one of the largest regional cities of its time,” according to Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at the University of Washington.
“The medieval cities are among the largest ever documented in the mountainous parts of the Silk Road,” Frachetti’s team said, adding that the scans “provided remarkably detailed views of the plazas, fortifications, roads and habitations that shaped the lives and economies of highland communities, traders, and travelers.”
Earlier this year a team led by the National Centre for Scientific Research in France announced they found a long-lost city that was home to possibly hundreds of thousands of people in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle after using lidar to scan the region.
The laser tech arguably first came to prominence around a decade ago with the charting of the vast settlement buried by jungle around Angkor Wat, a world-famous temple ruin in Cambodia.
Such rediscoveries suggest there are layers of history and archaeology around the world that remain hidden and forgotten beneath dense jungle, shallow seas or literal layers of mud and rock.
The Tulane researchers believe scientists and archaeologists have only scratched the surface of Central America’s lost history.
“We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it,” said Tulane researcher Luke Auld-Thomas.
The charting of the Mayan settlements “puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered,” Thomas added.
