In the fall of 1929, Anna Morrow Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew over the Yucatan Peninsula. While Charles was flying the plane, Anna took photographs of the jungle beneath, the first images of Mayan buildings covered with dense vegetation. Almost a century later, surveyors made this flight again and made a detailed map of the ancient civilization. It turned out that its area includes dozens of sites, covering about 2,150 square kilometers.
The study authors describe the findings as revelations. “It's like putting on glasses when your vision is blurry,” says study author Mary Jane Acuña, director of the El Tintal archaeological project in Guatemala.
Guatemalan Tikal region, modern photo.
Image from lidar, this is how buildings hidden behind trees look.
In the past, archaeologists have argued that the Mayan civilization consisted of small, scattered city-states that dotted the lowlands. But now this concept doesn't fit.
New research has shown that the Maya exploited their environment extensively and used geographic features to their advantage. Scientists have counted 61,480 structures. These include 95 kilometers of sidewalks, roads and canals that connect cities, large corn farms, small and large homes, and defensive fortifications.
Archaeologists made a discovery using a laser lidar. In principle, it is similar to a radar, but instead of radio waves, the lidar uses a laser beam. From an airplane flying at a height of several hundred meters above the ground, surveyors "probed" every square meter with 15 lasers. These impulses penetrate the vegetation but bounce off hard stone surfaces. Using lidar, you can see the forest through the trees. This is how the ruins appeared under the dense jungle. Many ruins.
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At the same time, for all its power, lidar cannot supplant old-fashioned archaeological methods: for eight percent of the study area, archaeologists have confirmed the lidar data using face-to-face inspection of the sites.
Lidar image of the Naachtun Mayan settlement. Yellow dots and red spots are buildings, and dams are grayed out.
Extrapolating the discovery to the entire area of the Mayan lowland, archaeologists came to the conclusion that from 550 to 830 AD, on an area of 95 thousand square kilometers, there lived from seven to 11 million people. Scientists also suggest that the total number of buildings can reach up to 2.7 million structures. It is interesting that archaeologists have been studying this area for over a century, but until now they did not have such detailed data about it.