LOST MAYAN CITY DISCOVERED IN THE JUNGLE BY A GROUP OF STUDENTS BY ACCIDENT

The discovery was made by accident, and it is part of a series of discoveries that are currently changing our understanding of ancient Latin American society. In what will probably become the ultimate travel tale, a small team of archaeologists found a city from an ancient civilization and were able to name it.

The discovery was made in the southeastern Mexican state of Campeche by Luke Auld-Thomas, an archaeology Ph.D. candidate at Tulane University. In the ancient Maya city, which they named Valeriana, he and the archaeologists discovered pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts, and amphitheatres. The city was named after a nearby lagoon by him and his associates.

In a survey area the size of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, the team found three sites in total. They claimed to have done so "by accident" while looking through data online.

"I was on about page 16 of a Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring," Auld-Thomas stated. To put it simply, the archaeologists discovered a Lidar survey, though I'm not entirely sure how the technology operates. Thousands of laser pulses are fired from an aircraft in this remote sensing method, which uses the return time of the signal to map objects below.

Fortunately, Auld-Thomas noticed what others had overlooked when he processed the data. They had overlooked a massive city that, according to a BBC report, at its height, which has been estimated to have occurred between 750 and 850 AD, was home to between 30 and 50,000 people.

Speaking to the BBC, Auld-Thomas discussed what the city might have looked like in light of the discovery itself and the information we currently know. "It would have been an extremely colorful, lush, and striking environment to move through," he said. Palaces and temple pyramids, for example, would have been covered in lime plaster before being painted in shades of red, pink, yellow, and black.

“There would have been clusters of buildings where people mostly spent their time making ceramics or mostly spent their time shaping stone tools. There is also some indication of marketplaces in this region of the world."