Mayan City from 2,000 Years Ago Found Under Guatemala's Rainforest

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Metro News says that when researchers flew over northern Guatemala, they found the ruins of a large Mayan town that had been buried by the rainforest.
The news source says that the area is called the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin. It is close to the Mexican border and covers a huge 650 square miles. Archaeologists think that the city, which would have been around 2,000 years ago, would have been made up of about 1,000 settlements linked by 110 miles of causeways. The navigable causeways, which were raised beds that had been cleared and used as roads, were 110 miles long and made it easy for people to get to nearby settlements.

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Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) was used by a group of researchers from several American universities as well as France and Guatemala to make the discovery.

According to Interesting Engineering, LiDAR is a detection system that works like radar but uses laser light instead of radio waves. Researchers chose to use it because LiDAR can see through rainforests and show what’s there.

2,000-Year-Old Mayan City Discovered Beneath Guatemala's Rainforest https://t.co/xqeJsjDrS8 pic.twitter.com/l90PC3Zsza

— NDTV News feed (@ndtvfeed) January 14, 2023

In their study, which was published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, the researchers wrote, “This study uses airborne Lidar data to show how complex societies set up their infrastructure to show how they ran their businesses and who was in charge of the government.”

According to the news release, the researchers also found evidence of large platforms and pyramids in some of the settlements. This suggests that some of the settlements were hubs where work, play, and politics took place, they say. They also say that some of the settlements had ball courts, which research from the past has shown were used for a variety of local sports.