On February 1st 2018, archaeologists in Guatemala announced that they have discovered the ruins of a previously undetected Mayan city. Their findings have yielded evidence of at least 60,000 unknown structures. Their discovery is being hailed as a, "major breakthrough," in Mayan archaeology, that reveals the pre-Colombian civilization as a more connected and complex society than most Mayan scholars had believed.
The discovery was made possible through the use of Light Detection and Ranging or LiDAR. The archaeologists made aerial surveys of over 800 square miles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala. The LiDAR system fires as many as 150,000 pulses of light a second when it scans a surface. Repeated scans gave the researchers the ability to create a topographical map of the region.
From the data that was retrieved, the archaeologists were able to determine that the region supported a civilization that was equal to that of the ancient Greeks or the Chinese. Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist from Tulane University said, the area was more densely populated than previously believed. He said, "It's no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there."
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