ADVANCED WATER FILTRATION SYSTEM DISCOVERED IN ANCIENT MAYAN CITY

When the first cities were born in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, water systems became essential to continue supplying the ever-growing urban population. The ancient Romans built a giant aqueduct. The Greeks developed pressurised water pipes. Perhaps best known for  the Step Pyramid, the Maya are one of the ancient civilisations that developed ingenious uses of water. A new paper published in Scientific Reports has discovered a highly sophisticated filtration system in the Coriental Reservoir, which supplied water to the Mayan city of Tikal. Neither quartz nor zeolite deposits are found near the reservoir, suggesting that the Maya used these minerals to purify  drinking water. These two minerals are an important part of modern filtration, suggesting that the Maya were  centuries ahead of their time. The Mayan engineer used water pressure and he was one of the first societies to use this technology as well as the Greeks.

Because many Mayan cities were built on porous limestone foundations,  groundwater often had to be pumped from elsewhere. Some Mayan cities, such as Palenque, had water networks. In the Mayan city of Tikal in what is now Guatemala, water was collected in his ten reservoirs to supply the city. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati sampled and tested sediments at one of those locations, Coriental Reservoir. They were amazed by the  minerals  found in the samples.