Lidar reveals over 60,000 Maya structures in Guatemala

City/town/settlement3000 - 1500 BC
Exploring the Collapse of Ancient Mexico
Source: Exploring the Collapse of Ancient Mexico by Luke Caverns

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📄 Calakmul🌍 Show on the globe

Aerial lidar surveying in Guatemala’s Petén forest revealed more than 60,000 Maya structures, including houses, palaces, fortifications, causeways and ceremonial buildings. The finding was not a scan around Calakmul, which lies in Mexico. The video argues that the wider region could contain hundreds of thousands of structures and that its jungle cities belonged to broad settlement networks. 📡🌴 The Maya lowlands are still rewriting the map.

Key facts

  • Aerial lidar surveying in Guatemala’s Petén region revealed more than 60,000 Maya structures, including houses, palaces, fortifications, causeways and ceremonial buildings.
  • The widely reported 60,000-structure survey was in Guatemala, not around Calakmul, which is in Mexico.
  • The video extrapolates from the lidar count to hundreds of thousands of structures across a wider area; that figure and interpretation are the presenter’s argument, not the survey result.

More about Calakmul

Sources

Ancient Maya City Uncovered by Lidar in Southern Mexicomexicosoul.substack.com
A remarkably preserved Maya city, untouched by looters for over 1000 years, was just uncovered by lidar technology in southern Mexico.
Laser Scans Reveal 60000 Hidden Maya Structures in ...smithsonianmag.com
Laser Scans Reveal 60,000 Hidden Maya Structures in Guatemala · Houses, fortifications, pyramids and causeways were among the discoveries.
Archaeologists use lidar technology to map wealth and ...news.tulane.edu
The discovery in the Peten forest of Guatemala included more than 60,000 structures, including isolated houses, large palaces, ceremonial ...
Exclusive: Laser Scans Reveal Maya "Megalopolis" Below ...nationalgeographic.com
Laser scans revealed more than 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures that were part of a vast network of cities, fortifications, farms, and ...
Tikalen.wikipedia.org
Tikal is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. One of the largest archaeological ...
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