PhD Student’s Reveals Hidden Mayan City With Temple Pyramids and Plazas by Accident, Using Laser Mapping Data
31st Oct 2024
Using LiDAR data, a PhD student at Tulane University, US, has discovered the location of a lost Mayan city covered by a dense jungle forest. The team behind this discovery used lidar technology to survey a 50-square-mile area of dense, overgrown terrain in Campeche, Mexico.
PhD Student’s Accidental Click on Google Reveals Hidden Mayan City
The research was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto. The study was published in the journal Antiquity. The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.
According to him, he “was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring.”

Driven by a desire to uncover more insights from LiDAR imaging, the observant PhD student began processing the data using a specialized archaeological method.
This led him to discover a huge ancient settlement which was a home to over 50,000 people between 750 and 850 AD.
Lidar technology, which uses laser pulses to measure distances, creates precise 3D models of landscapes. This method enables scientists to scan extensive areas remotely, detecting hidden structures like pyramids, homes, and other features of ancient Maya infrastructure buried beneath dense vegetation.
Following this discovery, Luke Auld-Thomas and his team named this city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon. Over time, this vast area of formerly inhabited land has been covered by earth and vegetation, hence being hidden from onlookers.
The discovery of the lost Mayan settlement reveals facts about the lost civilisation
Following the discovery of the lost Mayan city by Luke Auld-Thomas and his team, Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London had a few things to chip in.
Despite not being part of the research into this lost city, Professor Elizabeth Graham says that it supports claims that Maya people lived in complex cities or towns.

“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. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.
This discovery proves untrue the popular ideology that the Tropics was a location for the death of civilization.
Thanks to Luke Auld-Thomas’ research and findings, it is now clear that Maya was once a well-civilised region.
“For a long time, our understanding of the Mayan civilization was limited to an area of a few hundred square kilometers,” Auld-Thomas says. “This limited sample was obtained with great effort, with archaeologists painstakingly scouring every square meter, hacking away at vegetation with machetes, only to discover they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s house 1,500 years ago.”
“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts has all the hallmarks of a classic Mayan political capital: enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway; temple pyramids; a ball court; a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse); and a probable E-Group assemblage, an architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date prior to AD 150,” says the study.
Researchers say that collapse of the Maya civilization happened in 800 AD, fuelled by a dense population and climate crisis. Another factor that could have led to the fall of this civilization was war during the Spanish invasion in the 16th century.
Thank you for your comment! It will be visible on the site after moderation.