Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.For more than 1,000 years, dense forests in the Mexican state of Campeche concealed the region’s ancient human history.Scientists called Campeche an archaeological “blank spot” in the Maya Lowlands, an area spanning what is now Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and southeastern Mexico, and which the Maya inhabited from about 1000 BC to AD 1500.But part of that region is blank no longer. Archaeologists have found thousands of never-before-seen Maya structures as well as a large city that they named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Antiquity.The sleuthing that led to the discovery took place from nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away, using aerial LiDAR — light detection and ranging equipment — that penetrated eastern Campeche’s thick forest cover from above, pinging the surface with lasers and revealing what lay beneath the leafy canopy. Encompassing about 47 square miles (122 square kilometers), the LiDAR scans were collected in 2013 for a forest survey by The Nature Conservancy of Mexico.Like other large capital cities from Maya sites, Valeriana had a reservoir, a ball court, temple pyramids and a broad road connecting enclosed plazas. In total, the researchers identified 6,764 structures in Valeriana and in other rural and urban settlements of varying sizes. The density of the settlements in the area rivals that of other known locations in the Maya Lowlands, and archaeologists had suspected that numerous Maya ruins were hidden in Campeche since at least the 1940s, the scientists reported.“On the one hand it was surprising; you see it and you’re struck by it. On the other hand, it actually confirmed what I expected to find,” said lead study author and archaeologist Luke Auld-Thomas, …
