American Student Discovers Sprawling Mayan City Buried in Mexico

An American student scanning pages and pages of mind-numbing laser images on Google was rewarded with the discovery of a sprawling Mayan city buried under a forest in Mexico. Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD candidate at Northern Arizona University, was analyzing laser imaging surveys in search of landscape anomalies that could point to buried ruins. He was “on something like page 16 of Google search” when he found a laser survey done in 2013 to measure and monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests, he told The Independent. Analyzing the data, researchers discovered a large city on the Yucatan peninsula with thousands of buildings, including pyramids, that has “all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital,” Auld-Thomas said. The discovery, which dates to between 250 and 900 AD, was published in the journal Antiquity. The pyramids are buried near a highway and agricultural fields. The buried city could shed light on how ancient civilizations dealt with the same environmental and social challenges societies face today—including rapid population growth, Auld-Thomas said.