By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | February 1, 2018
Lidar surveys in Guatemala have revealed thousands of Maya structures, including pyramids, fortification walls and the foundations of homes.
Credit: Courtesy Wild Blue Media/National Geographic
An aerial survey over northern Guatemala has turned up over 60,000 new Maya structures, including pyramids, causeways, house foundations and defensive fortifications.
It's a watershed discovery that has already led archaeologists to new sites to excavate and explore. The findings may also revise estimates of how many ancient Maya once lived in the region upward by "multiple factors," said Tom Garrison, an archaeologist who specializes in the Maya culture and is part of the consortium that funded and organized the survey. Far more ancient Maya lived on the landscape than there are people in the region today, Garrison told Live Science, and they did it without the destructive slash-and-burn agriculture that is crippling the jungle in modern times.
The finding of a sprawling Maya population shows there are means of supporting people in the area without destroying the forest, said Lisa Lucero, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the new survey.
Clearing the way
Seeing the evidence of that sprawling population requires stripping away the forest — at least virtually. The new survey used a technology called lidar, which stands for "light detection and ranging." It works by beaming laser pulses at the ground — in this case, from airplanes — and measuring the wavelengths as they bounce back to create a detailed three-dimensional image of the stuff on the ground. It's a little bit like the sonar that bats use to hunt, except it uses light waves instead of sound.
"Lidar is magic," Lucero told Live Science. In the densely forested Maya lowlands of Guatemala, it's easy to walk right by an archaeological mound or feature and miss it entirely. Lidar maps the topography with such precision that rectangular features — like roads, house foundations and plazas — just "pop out," said David Stuart, a University of Texas at Austin anthropologist who has followed the new lidar mapping project closely.
Garrison's experience bears that out. He and his colleagues have been excavating a Maya site called El Zotz in northern Guatemala, painstakingly mapping the landscape for years. The lidar survey revealed a 30-foot-long (9 meters) fortification wall that the team had never noticed before.
"Maybe, eventually, we would have gotten to this hilltop where this fortress is, but I was within about 150 feet [46 m] of it in 2010 and didn't see anything," he told Live Science.
Garrison visited the dirt wall in person in June, and he and his team are now seeking funding to excavate there, he said. The discovery of the fortification suggests that Maya warfare was not a matter of small, intermittent skirmishes, but serious battles.
"This is investment in the landscape," he said of the wall.
Finding hidden treasures
Lidar was first used in archaeology in 1985 in Costa Rica, but it wasn't until 2009, when researchers used it to survey a site in Belize, that it came to the region the Maya once inhabited.
Lidar "is to the 21st century what radiocarbon dating was to archaeology in the last century," said Payson Sheets, who led the Costa Rica excavation where lidar was first deployed. "It's revolutionary," said Sheets, who is a Mesoamerica anthropologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The new effort was led by Guatemala's PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative and was funded by the PACUNAM Foundation. Aerial surveys scanned 810 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) over 10 separate areas of northern Guatemala, some of which had been mapped by hand and some of which were largely unexplored. They found more than 60,000 architectural mound structures. Most, Garrison said, are probably stone platforms that supported the pole-and-thatch homes of average Maya people. But the surveys also turned up features that are probably pyramids, causeways and defenses.
A National Geographic special, "Lost Treasures of the Maya Snake Kings," will focus on some of these finds, including a seven-story pyramid so covered in vegetation that it practically melts into the jungle. The documentary premieres Tuesday, Feb. 6 at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST.
One intriguing feature on the lidar maps, Lucero said, is how many roads the Maya built. They did not use beasts of burden, she said, so these roads wouldn't have served as pathways for carts or wagons. They may have functioned as causeways during the swampy rainy season, she said, or as platforms for processions.
Also fascinating, Stuart said, are the blank spots on the lidar — the places the Maya chose not to live. No one wants to survey a blank area, he said, but the Maya were sophisticated users of the landscape, and their choices about where to settle might reveal more about how they farmed and used water.
"It's going to change our views of population and just on how the Maya lived on that landscape," Stuart said. "By having this more accurate picture of what is there, we can start to talk about community organization, agricultural systems land use, roadways and communication."
Source:https://www.livescience.com/61616-mysterious-maya-structures-discovered.html
Thousands of Mysterious Maya Structures Discovered in Guatemala
- Edge Guerrero
- Posts: 8408
- Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2013 7:14 am
- Reputation: 3104
- Location: Smackdown Hotel at "the corner of Know Your Role Blvd
Thousands of Mysterious Maya Structures Discovered in Guatemala
- I rent this space for advertising
Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
- Edge Guerrero
- Posts: 8408
- Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2013 7:14 am
- Reputation: 3104
- Location: Smackdown Hotel at "the corner of Know Your Role Blvd
- I rent this space for advertising
Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
Fun fact, when the ancient mystical Mayans were rolling the heads of babies down their oh so advanced STAIRS England already has Oxford University.
- Canuckster
- Posts: 6745
- Joined: Wed Jul 04, 2012 5:24 pm
- Reputation: 3083
OK oill take the bait mate.
I'm guessing more englishman from fine upstanding houses of finer education killed more people than the Mayans could dream of
I'm guessing more englishman from fine upstanding houses of finer education killed more people than the Mayans could dream of
People say they all want the truth, but when they are confronted with a truth that disagrees with them, they balk at it as if it were an unwanted zombie apocalypse come to destroy civilization.
Vutulaki wrote:Fun fact, when the ancient mystical Mayans were rolling the heads of babies down their oh so advanced STAIRS England already has Oxford University.
Is that true? Fuck my timeline of history is so rough, lol
I would have guessed Mayan culture was way before any such thing. Lets get some dates in here, that is interesting.
The debate is a good one, imo... is a culture really more 'civilized' or evolved, if they behave so violently? Is it far fetched to think maybe 'primitives' like the Mayans had knowledge/wisdoms etc that far surpassed even the best from Oxford? But of a different kind?
- Megaterio Llamas
- Posts: 4079
- Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2014 7:56 pm
- Reputation: 2552
Masato wrote:Vutulaki wrote:Fun fact, when the ancient mystical Mayans were rolling the heads of babies down their oh so advanced STAIRS England already has Oxford University.
Is that true? Fuck my timeline of history is so rough, lol
I would have guessed Mayan culture was way before any such thing. Lets get some dates in here, that is interesting.
The debate is a good one, imo... is a culture really more 'civilized' or evolved, if they behave so violently? Is it far fetched to think maybe 'primitives' like the Mayans had knowledge/wisdoms etc that far surpassed even the best from Oxford? But of a different kind?
Mayan civilization probably begins about the time of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Britain interestingly.
el rey del mambo
Megaterio Llamas wrote:Masato wrote:Vutulaki wrote:Fun fact, when the ancient mystical Mayans were rolling the heads of babies down their oh so advanced STAIRS England already has Oxford University.
Is that true? Fuck my timeline of history is so rough, lol
I would have guessed Mayan culture was way before any such thing. Lets get some dates in here, that is interesting.
The debate is a good one, imo... is a culture really more 'civilized' or evolved, if they behave so violently? Is it far fetched to think maybe 'primitives' like the Mayans had knowledge/wisdoms etc that far surpassed even the best from Oxford? But of a different kind?
Mayan civilization probably begins about the time of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Britain interestingly.
Youre right, it turns out that I meant the aztecs not the Mayans.
Oxford came into being in 1096 and while the city of Tenochtitlán on the shores of lake Texcoco wasnt founded until 1325.
Oxford isnt the oldest University either, Nalanda University was founded in India half a millennium earlier than Oxford but was raised to the ground by you guessed it the Muslims thus making Oxford the oldest continuously operating Uni on earth.
Im sure the Chinese had rote learning schools older than Nalanda too.
Canuckster wrote:OK oill take the bait mate.
I'm guessing more englishman from fine upstanding houses of finer education killed more people than the Mayans could dream of
Efficiency.
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 90 guests