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Dense forests in the Mexican state of Campeche concealed the region’s ancient human history for more than 1,000 years.

Scholars have called Campeche an archaeological “blank spot” in the Maya Lowlands, which now encompass Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and southeastern Mexico, and where Mayans lived from 1000 BCE to 1500 CE.

However, part of that area is no longer empty. Archaeologists found thousands of never-before-seen Mayan structures as well as a large city they named Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon, researchers reported Monday in the journal antiquity.

The sleuthing that led to the discovery was carried out from a distance of nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) using airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging equipment) that penetrated eastern Campeche’s thick forest canopy from above, sending signals with lasers to the surface and revealing what lay beneath the forest. leafy canopy. Covering approximately 47 square miles (122 square kilometers), the LiDAR scans were collected by the Mexican Nature Conservancy for a forest survey in 2013.

Like other major capitals in the Mayan regions, Valeriana had a reservoir, a ball field, temple pyramids, and a wide road connecting covered plazas. Researchers identified a total of 6,764 structures of different sizes in Valeriana and other rural and urban settlements. The density of settlements in the area rivals other known sites in the Maya Lowlands, scientists reported, and archaeologists suspected that large numbers of Maya ruins had been hidden in Campeche since at least the 1940s.

“On the one hand, it was surprising; You see it and you are impressed. On the other hand, it actually confirmed what I expected to find,” said the study’s lead author and archaeologist. Luke Auld-ThomasDr. conducted the research as a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department of Tulane University.

“Based on what I know about my archaeology, my sense of this part of the Maya Lowlands is that if you throw darts there, you find urban areas,” Auld-Thomas said. “And it was gratifying and exciting to see that that was actually the case.”

Campeche is sandwiched between two relatively well-explored areas — the northern Yucatán and the southern Maya Lowlands — but archaeologists had previously ignored this, the study’s co-author said. Marcello CanutoHe’s a professor in Tulane’s anthropology department.

To the north, Mayan sites such as Chichén Itzá are highly visible. “It’s very easy to recognize them in the landscape, and accessibility is also very easy,” Canuto said. Canuto said sites in the southern Maya Lowlands are also familiar to archaeologists as sources of Maya hieroglyphs, texts and altars; “the sort of thing that has long been sought by scientists”.

For decades, Campeche was not easily accessible and was not known for his works. But this new study and other LiDAR-focused research is changing that.

“This is a new dawn for all of us, because we can now see places we could never see,” Canuto said.

The new LiDAR scans also highlight connections between Mayan sites and point to the complexity of Mayan cities, regardless of their size. Carlos Morales-Aguilaris a landscape archaeologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the research. Morales-Aguilar said in an email to CNN that his study of Mayan settlements in Guatemala is closely aligned with the new findings.

“Dense settlement patterns indicate that the Maya were highly organized in managing their territory, with extensive networks of roads or passes, settlements, agricultural terraces and defensive structures,” he said. The Antiquity study also shows that the Mayans adapted their infrastructure to fit the natural landscape, “using sinkholes, ridges, and depressions as part of their urban planning and water management strategies.”

“These findings challenge the traditional view that Maya cities, including their hinterlands, were isolated city-states or regional kingdoms,” Morales-Aguilar said. Instead, they paint a picture of “a vast, interconnected network of urban and rural areas that spread throughout their territory throughout their history of occupation.”

As LiDAR scans reveal more of these previously hidden cities, the data will reshape previous interpretations of the scale and diversity of Mayan settlements; “which is a good thing!” in question Tomás Gallareta Cerverais an assistant professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Kenyon College in Ohio, who was not involved in the research.

“LiDAR analysis has pushed the study of urbanism and layout forward in unprecedented ways; Some even call it the LiDAR revolution,” Gallareta Cervera noted in an email. “Archaeologists now have a new framework for investigating how these ancient people adapted to their environment and evolved over thousands of years. And that’s very exciting!”

While these remnants of Maya culture have existed for millennia, determining and examining the full size of Maya settlements (which could include larger cities) will be critical to safeguarding the future of these ancient sites, according to Auld-Thomas.

“We don’t yet fully understand what this means for our understanding of these places as environments and how to care for them and how to protect them,” he said. “It’s important to understand that these have always been places of varying degrees of human habitation, and that people have an important role to play in their preservation.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American, and How It Works magazines.