Three four-hour flights above the jungles of Campeche on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula have exposed a hidden gem beneath the ground: a lost city that was likely abandoned over 1,000 years ago.
It was all in one day’s work for Juan Carlos Fernandez-Diaz, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Houston, who spotted the city in March during an aerial archaeological survey of the area.
Over the past decade, he has pioneered the archaeological application of LiDAR, aerial light detection and ranged equipment that can find structures obscured by dense tree canopies and other vegetation – relics that, in some cases, reveal traces left by a lost civilization. .
Archaeologists later surveyed the site, which they named Ocomtun, for six weeks in May and June and found 50-foot-tall pyramid-like structures, pottery and engravings believed to date to between 600 and 900 AD. as the Late Classic period of Mayan civilization.
“When we see the images (LiDAR), we can see that there is something incredible [mas] the real discovery comes after a lot of investigation and exploration,” said Fernandez-Diaz, who is also a co-investigator at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping.
While LiDAR revealed the location of the structures, archaeologist Ivan Šprajc – a researcher at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) – still faced a huge hurdle when he and his team went to survey the area.
Ocomtun’s “Peculiar Characteristics”
Trails and unused roads got them pretty close to the site, but researchers had to cut their way through dense jungle, using machetes and chainsaws to cut down trees and other vegetation to reach what Šprajc describes as an “important site”.
“When we got there, we saw that the buildings were really huge,” he said.
The Mayan civilization is best known for its pyramidal temples and impressive stone structures that have been found in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador.
Šprajc and his team found three squares complete with large buildings and a ball field. He said the city resembles other Mayan cities from the same period, but there are “certain peculiar features”.
“We have, for example, several very curious architectural complexes of structures arranged in almost concentric circles. So we’re just guessing what that could be. Maybe markets,” he said.
During the six-week survey, Šprajc and his colleagues carried out archaeological reconnaissance and dug a test pit measuring 2 meters by 2 meters and the pottery shards they found helped them understand the age of the site. They plan to return next year for further investigation.
transformative technique
Remote sensing technology, first used in archeology at the turn of the century, has revolutionized the field, particularly for researchers working in heavily forested areas that are difficult to explore on foot, such as those in Central America, Šprajc said.
“Now we can practically see through the vegetation,” he said.
From an airplane or, in some cases, a drone, a LiDAR sensor tracks the amount of time each laser pulse takes to return and uses that information to create a three-dimensional map of the environment below.
“The simplest analogy is like playing tennis, you basically throw a ball at the wall and watch the ball bounce back and basically measure the time it takes to go to the wall and back. And since it is a laser, it travels at the speed of light”, explained Fernandez-Diaz.
He has mapped over 20,000 square kilometers of Central American jungle and has been involved in 45 archaeological projects, including the discovery of the largest and oldest Mayan temple near Tabasco, Mexico, and tens of thousands of Mayan structures and settlements in the Guatemalan jungle. .
Understanding places like these can shed light on the origins of cities and community life and whether major building projects in the past required the support of powerful elites and some sort of centralized authority. In the case of the newly discovered city, however, many questions remain unanswered.
Unraveling Ocomtun
It could take years to fully excavate Ocomtun and gain a deeper understanding of the site and why it was abandoned. Many once densely populated settlements, particularly in the south and center of the Yucatan Peninsula, were abandoned over the space of about 200 years in the 9th and 10th centuries, he said.
Šprajc said people left these cities for a combination of reasons – soil depletion, overpopulation, depression, prolonged drought and wars – but researchers don’t know what the root cause was or the sequence of events.
While LiDAR saves time in the research process – in some cases, a day in the air can replace an archaeologist’s lifetime work on the ground – Šprajc says the work he does is still expensive.
He raised funds from seven different institutions and companies to finance the fieldwork, including four Slovenian companies – publisher Založba Rokus Klett, transport company Adria kombi, lender Kreditna družba Ljubljana and travel agency AL Ars Longa – and two US organizations , Ken & Julie Jones Charitable Foundation and Milwaukee Audubon Society, as well as his own institution ZRC SAZU.
Despite the thrill of discovery, Fernandez-Diaz said it’s not glamorous work. There is no live footage to check during the flight. There is also no bathroom on board the small plane.
“It’s a bit like mowing the lawn – going in one direction, turning in a parallel direction and repeating that back and forth to get the coverage we want,” he said.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
