The world the Maya made has been shrouded by jungle for centuries. Now, a tool call lidar is revealing its staggering scale and sophistication.
An aerial view hardly hints at the true size of Dzibanche in Mexico’s Yucatan. Lidar—laser technology that digitally removes the forest canopy—reveals that the Maya city sprawled more than seven square miles.
“It’s almost impossible to overstate the extent to which lidar is energizing Maya archaeology,” says Guatemalan archaeologist Edwin Román-Ramírez. “We’ll always need to go in and dig to understand the people who built these structures, but this technology is showing us exactly where and how to dig.” In contrast to more arid cradles of civilization such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, Central America’s humid forests have rarely given up their buried secrets easily. In the mid-19th century, American writer John Lloyd Stephens and his British companion, the artist Frederick Catherwood, explored some of the abandoned Maya cities on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
“To find major new monuments in the heart of Tikal—one of the most extensively studied sites in the Maya area—reinforces how many doors lidar is opening,” says Román-Ramírez, who directs the South Tikal Archaeological Project. “We’re discovering features that we couldn’t perceive even when we were walking on top of them.
“You couldn’t feed as many people as the ancient Maya did with the kind of slash-and-burn agriculture people in this part of the world use today,” says Tulane’s Canuto, who models population density. He estimates that 10 million to 15 million people lived throughout the Maya realm at its peak, including many in swampy regions that most archaeologists had thought uninhabitable.
Guatemala’s government is making some effort to stop deforestation—which has diminished the country’s old-growth forests by about 20 percent over the past two decades—and reclaim illegally occupied territory. But its work is hampered by a lack of equipment, fuel, reliable intelligence, and clear approaches to dealing with invading communities.
He has proposed a binational sanctuary that would be Latin America’s first wilderness area, free of roads, vehicles, and aircraft but accessible via rail. Hansen counters that his proposal has been grossly misrepresented by critics who want to tar him as a “gringo colonizer.” He doesn’t want to develop a Maya theme park, he says, “and I have no private interest whatsoever economically in anything in the Mirador Basin.”
But Pacunam has also come under fire from some Guatemalans who point to the organization’s proposals to develop roads and other infrastructure in the fragile region. To find major new monuments ... reinforces how many doors lidar is opening. We're discovering features that we couldn't perceive even when we were walking on top of them.A turbulent pattern of collapse, rebuilding, and revival was followed in the mid to late ninth century by a series of severe droughts that likely slashed crop yields throughout the region.
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