Mayan Capital City Has Been Hiding 'in Plain Sight'

A presumed capital city of the Maya has been discovered "hidden in plain sight" under vegetation in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The hidden complex—showing evidence of pyramids, amphitheaters, sports fields, and causeways connecting districts—is made up of three sites in the southeastern state of Campeche, per the BBC. It was discovered "by accident" when Tulane University doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas stumbled upon a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) survey of the area. The survey had been ordered by a Mexican company for environmental monitoring. But when Auld-Thomas processed the data to look for buried structures, he discovered an ancient city that may have once housed up to 50,000 people.

Dubbed Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon, the site is just a 15-minute hike from a major road near Xpujil. Researchers say it has the "hallmarks of a capital city," with a density of buildings second only to the nearby site of Calakmul, potentially the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America. Valeriana includes 6,764 buildings over 6.5 square miles, with two major centers situated a little over a mile apart, per Live Science. It also has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped and buried their dead. Researchers believe the city was at its peak from 750 to 850 AD before climate change took a toll. Auld-Thomas suggests there were too many people to support amid drought conditions and the city was abandoned.

"The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it," Auld-Thomas, lead author of a study published Tuesday in Antiquity, tells Live Science. "That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there's a lot more to be discovered." Experts say Valeriana's discovery supports the idea that Maya lived in complex cities, even if the landscape might now appear wild. Though Valeriana may hold lessons for how modern humans can improve urban living, it's not clear whether it will ever be excavated. "One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of LiDAR is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study," Auld-Thomas tells the BBC. (More discoveries stories.)