In 2022, Richard D. Hansen led a team in Guatemala’s Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin and found Mayan structures consistently spread over a 650-square-mile area (slightly larger than modern London). They identified 964 previously unknown sites aged 1000 B.C. to A.D. 150 and 110 miles of raised causeways connecting them. While it was already known that Mayan civilization was spread throughout Central America, many assumed tropical forest settlements were an obstacle to creating complex societies.
“For too long, Maya archaeologists have been blinded by the jungle,” wrote Arlen Chase, Diane Chase, and John Weishampel, in a 2010 Archaeology article.
And now, using light detection and ranging, lidar for short, developed for NASA, archaeologists are mapping more hidden ruins than ever before.
