Using the new overhead laser imagery technology LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), researchers have been able to view the jungle floor and see structures and roads and the enormity of Mayan civilization in Guatemala like never before. National Geographic has the exclusive story of researchers and their discovery of over 60,000 previously unknown structures, from homes to roads to palaces. These discoveries greatly expand our understanding of the magnitude of Maya civilization over 1,000 years ago.
The project mapped more than 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set ever obtained for archaeological research.
The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.
In addition to hundreds of previously unknown structures, the LiDAR images show raised highways connecting urban centers and quarries. Complex irrigation and terracing systems supported intensive agriculture capable of feeding masses of workers who dramatically reshaped the landscape.
Maya civilization did not employ the wheel nor did they use beasts of burden, which has long led many to believe that there was a much lower cap on how large their civilization could have become. Previous estimates have put the number of people in Maya cities at their peak to have been no more than 5 million. Now researchers say new estimates will likely have to double or even triple that number.
The survey is the first phase of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative, a three-year project that will eventually map more than 5,000 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) of Guatemala’s lowlands, part of a pre-Columbian settlement system that extended north to the Gulf of Mexico.
There is hope that by bringing the true size of Guatemala’s buried heritage to light, researchers will be able to both inform the world of new and interesting information about the human story while also having a positive effect on the terrible deforestation going on in Guatemala.