OK, this is a tricky title. It’s not that a lost Maya city was in a location in the city of New Orleans.
It’s that a PhD student at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the U.S., using lidar technology, discovered the existence of a lost Maya city in eastern Mexico.
And that is rather amazing.
From a BBC article published this past October: “A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico. Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.”
This map shows the Mexican state of Campeche (in red). The location of New Orleans is also on this map but not marked, near the big peninsula protruding from the U.S. Gulf Coast:
Back to the BBC: “They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation. They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.”
Calakmul is also in the state of Campeche, not far from Valeriana.
The discovery was made by accident.
“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. ‘I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,’ explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.”
What is Lidar ?
“It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.”
The PhD student “saw what others had missed”, which if you think about it, is the essence of discovery.
“But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD. That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say. Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.”
What sort of city was it?
“Valeriana has the ‘hallmarks of a capital city’ and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles). It is ‘hidden in plain sight’, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.”
“There are no known pictures of the lost city because ‘no-one has ever been there’, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.”
That seems likely.
“The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways. It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead. It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game. There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population. In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.”
Lidar is a revolutionary technology.
“Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto. In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.”
“But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work. Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.”
“In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.”
“ ‘I’ve got to go to Valeriana at some point. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I can’t say we will do a project there,’ says Mr Auld-Thomas. ‘One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,’ he adds.”
Maybe someday somebody will be able to excavate Valeriana.