Maya civilization discovered in the jungles of Guatemala

An international team of archaeologists has discovered a large 2,000-year-old Maya civilization in northern Guatemala. 

The scientists announced their discovery in a recent article published in the Cambridge University Press journal Ancient Mesoamerica. 

The researchers, led by Richard D. Hansen, discovered the new Maya kingdom using LIDAR (light detection and ranging), an airborne laser scanner that reveals structures beneath the dense jungle vegetation and was also used to discover lost areas in the Amazon.

The new kingdom from the pre-classic Maya period (1000 BC – 150 AD) consisted of 964 settlements. Of these, 775 sites were in the El Mirador-Calakmul karst basin and the remaining 189 in the surrounding mountain ranges. All settlements together covered an area of about 1,685 square kilometers, the study said.

The sites were connected by several roads, which together formed a road network about 70 miles (117 kilometers) long. 

This close contact would have made it easier for the ancient Maya to move easily from one settlement to another and would have allowed for collective labor efforts. 

Evidence has also been found of large platforms and pyramids that may have served as centers of work, politics, or recreation, as well as canals and water reservoirs that enabled their use. 

All these features show that the settlements in this area were densely populated and apparently had a complex dynamic, contradicting the hypothesis that the people of the Preclassic Maya period were primitive and lacked building skills.

“The uniformity of architectural forms and patterns, pottery, statuary, architectural patterns, and unifying dam designs within a given geographic area suggests an organic, centralized, political, social, and economic solidarity among residents,” the authors explain.

With information from latinapress