![]() ![]() While LiDAR saves time in the research process - in some cases one day in the air can replace a lifetime’s work of an archaeologist on the ground - Šprajc says the work he pursues is still costly. Šprajc said people left these cities for a combination of reasons - soil depletion, overpopulation, depression, prolonged drought and warfare - but the researchers don’t know which was the main cause or the sequence of events.Ī stone block with a relief, reused in a stairway in the city of Ocumtun. Many once densely populated settlements, particularly in the southern and central Yucatan Peninsula, were abandoned in the space of about 200 years in the ninth and 10th centuries, he said. It could take years to fully excavate Ocomtun and get a deeper understanding of the site and why it was abandoned. In the case of the newly discovered city, though, many questions remain unanswered. Understanding sites like these can shed light on the origins of cities and community life and whether large construction projects in the past required the support of powerful elites and centralized authority of some kind. He’s mapped more than 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 square miles) of Central American jungle and been involved in 45 archaeological projects, including the discovery of the largest and oldest Maya temple near Tabasco, Mexico, and tens of thousands of Maya structures and settlements in the Guatemalan jungle. And because it’s a laser, it’s traveling at the speed of light,” Fernandez-Diaz explained. “The simplest analogy is like playing tennis, you know, you basically throw a ball to the wall and see the ball come back and basically measure the time it (takes to go) to the wall and come back. ![]() Pictured here are the remains of a building with a staircase in the city of Ocumtun. They plan to return next year for further investigation. Perhaps marketplaces,” he said.ĭuring the six-week survey, Šprajc and his colleagues conducted archaeological reconnaissance and dug a 2-meter by 2-meter test pit and the pottery fragments they found helped them understand the age of the site. So we are only guessing what this could be. “For example, we have several very curious architecture complexes of structures which are arranged in almost concentric circles. He said that the city resembles other Maya cities from the same period, but there are “certain peculiar features.” Šprajc and his team found three plazas complete with large buildings and a ball game field. Maya civilization is best known for its pyramid temples and impressive stone structures that have been found across southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. “When we got there we saw that the buildings were truly massive,” he said. ![]() ![]() Unused tracks and roads that got them fairly close to the site, but the researchers had to hack their way through thick jungle, using machetes and chainsaws to cut down trees and slash through other vegetation to reach what Šprajc describes as a “major site.” While LiDAR revealed the location of structures, archaeologist Ivan Šprajc - a researcher at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) - still faced an enormous hurdle when he and his team went to survey the area. “When we see the (LiDAR) images, we can see that there’s something amazing the real discovery happens after a lot of investigation and exploration,” said Fernandez-Diaz, who is also the co-Investigator at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping. Juan Fernandez-Diaz examines maps on his computer. It was all in a day’s work for Juan Carlos Fernandez-Diaz, an assistant professor in civil engineering at the University of Houston, who spotted the city in March during an airborne archaeological survey of the area.įor the past decade, he’s been a trailblazer in the archaeological application of LiDAR, airborne light detection and ranging equipment that can find structures obscured by dense tree canopies and other vegetation - relics that in some cases reveal traces left by a lost civilization.Īrchaeologists subsequently surveyed the site, which they’ve named Ocomtun, for six weeks in May and June and found 50-foot-tall (15.2-meter-tall) structures resembling pyramids, pottery and engravings that they believe date back to between 600 and 900 AD - known as the Late Classic Period in the Maya Civilization. Three four-hour flights high above the jungles of Campeche on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula exposed a hidden gem on the ground below: a lost city that was likely abandoned more than 1,000 years ago. ![]()
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