Posted on 10/29/2024 6:42:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Using advanced lidar imagery, researchers from Tulane University have discovered over 6,500 unexplored ancient Mayan settlements hidden beneath dense Mexican jungle forests.
The researchers say their findings only scratch the surface of the settlements that likely populate the country's unexplored landscape.
The team involved with the historic discovery employed lidar technology to scan a 50-square-mile section of the overgrown landscape in Campeche, Mexico. Like radar, which uses radio waves to image objects, lidar employs laser pulses that bounce off different materials at different rates. These reflected pulses allow researchers to peer beneath the surface of several types of terrains, including jungle forests, by creating a three-dimensional map of hidden structures invisible to the human eye...
That analysis revealed a "vast unexplored" network of ancient Mayan settlements hidden by dense overgrowth. Among the previously unknown ancient Hispanic structures was a large city with stone pyramids reminiscent of previously discovered iconic ancient Mayan pyramids...
Along with its cultural and historical significance, the discovery of such an extensive network of ancient Mayan settlements shows how lidar technology has dramatically altered the landscape of archaeology. In this case, the technology was provided by The Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane University, which has spent the last ten years expanding and improving lidar's application.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedebrief.org ...
Yes. Very thick jungles around there.
People who write these things are idiots.
Mayans were bloodthirsty like the Aztecs.
Built pyramids to cut out People’s hearts at the top in front of big crowds.
“”Very thick jungles around there.””
I had the privilege of participating in some Mayan excavation. The jungle takes back anything, everything. Remember those ancient ruins in the first Indiana Jones movie? The jungle does not care what humans do. Fortunately, there were no native headhunters, at least none while I was there.
As we would survey on the ground, loooong before Lidar, we could see there is so much more yet to be discovered. To coin a phrase, it is, and will be, fascinating.
Yeah. I’ve been to Uxmal and Chichen Itza. Palenque. All over southeast Mexico and Yucatán.
This is a bit off subject, but your comments about the jungles reminded me of when I was a Boy Scout in the Canal Zone, around 1958.
We had Camp Chagres in the middle of the jungle. Every time we went to our site we had to clear out the jungle to use our site; in just a few months it was reclaimed by the plant life. We had to use machetes and axes, first carefully looking through the branches to avoid snakes.
After clearing, we would look for tarantula and snake holes so we wouldn’t pitch our tent over them. At night we could hear all sorts of animal life. It was an incredible experience.
I’ve read similar reports of many settlements in the Amazon jungles. The populations of these people must have been huge and their architecture was amazing. No mortar, joints were precision cut. Interesting question is why are there pyramids in many parts of the world when it is thought the builders had no contact with each other. But from what I know and have read, it’s due to the fact that a pyramid is the strongest structure to support a tall building. Any civilization that experiments with different types of building will come to the same conclusion.
I read somewhere that only about 250 species of trees out of several thousand were native to the Amazon/rainforest and the rest were introduced at some point in time, whether by birds/bats or humans. While I could be wrong, it does make one wonder if these ancient settlements engaged in the intentional cultivation of some of the thousands of “non-native” tree species, especially those of fruiting or medicinal use. At the least, the discovery of more and more connected settlements, and the implied size of the human populations that built them, lend credence to a theory that the rainforest as ‘the lungs of the planet’ appears to be a more modern phenomenon than not.
I have been saying it for years now because of my own studies. The population estimates are way way under what the true population was. The population they claim would not have required almost total cultivation of central and south America. Just the amount of salt that was mined and processed blows their estimates out of the water. Man just does not exert effort without a need and demand. It was once all populated as densely as western Europe is now...
The LIDAR keyword had a lot more (Amazon rain forest locations for example) but I only posted the ones pertaining to Mayan sites. Considering the difficulty of even looking for the abandoned sites, and how recently the writing system was cracked, with the addition of LIDAR (and probably AI analysis of LIDAR and satellite data) it’s a good guess that the next twenty years will turn up more stuff than the past 150 years has.
Better drop an email to Christopher Plain at The Debrief.
researchers from Tulane University have discovered over 6,500 unexplored ancient Mayan settlements hidden beneath dense Mexican jungle forests.
Tulane University is in Louisiana. I wonder how much grant money (from the US Government) was used in this research.
How about doing some research in the United States? Using US money in the US, perhaps?
Oh man, it is amazing technology. And it is even finding structures on top of barren bald hills with no vegetation. That in it’s self is unique, it can do what even high definition satellite imaging cannot do on bare land.
And I understand that it might have been difficult to really get a good estimate with what they had to work with prior. But every suggestion that the population might have been higher was shot down without any objective consideration of the evidence presented.
Some things are just logical because they “can’t be explained”. Such as all the missing copper from the great lakes. There was enough copper mined to give every man, woman, and child on the continent each a copper bowl or two. Yet there are actually very few native artifacts. It didn’t just disappear into thin air...
Same with the amount of salt that was extracted in South America from hundreds of sources, or the fact that evidence of cultivated land almost covers every square hector all the way to the very tops of the Andes Mountains from one end of SA to the other... Logic dictates man does not expend calories without a true demand.
So there should have already been logical suspicions rather than immediate rejection of possibilities. We are just at the tip of the iceberg down there. I would like to see them do more Lidar mapping nearer the tip of South America where it is assumed there were very few if any. Bet there is more evidence there than they think... :)
I think it is absolutely incredible, thank you for posting it!
Anytime I see a Mayan temple I wonder how many people’s heads were rolled down the steps after they had their hearts ripped out.
That’s how they invented that ball game.
I also was puzzled. Fifty square miles is a patch 5 x 10 miles, or slightly more than 7 miles square. So I strongly suspect they should have written 50 miles square.
I too have memories of my travels in Mexico in the later 1950s and ‘60s. First time traveled alone to Tenochtitlan and climbed the pyramid of the moon. Then I wandered about among the lower ruins, and eventually picked some prickly pears when I got hungry. A lot has been done since I was there as shown in pictures. Another trip then was to a village with no drivable road six miles outside San Cristobal del las Casas. I met people when we all stayed at the home of Franz Blom, an anthropologist. One man rented houses and we all rode out to this village. We asked the only Spanish speakers the Mayor and his 2 deputies for permission to take photos. We then photographed a religious celebration inside and outside a church that had not had a priest since the 1930s, Interesting mix of Christian and old religion.
A decade later my husband and I visited Oaxaca. We saw the Mixtec ruins in the lowland, and drove up to the Zapotec temples on the hilltop. My poor husband did not enjoy the view as he bent over a wall and fertilized the ground below with last nights under chilled chicken leftovers. Ah, memories! Then we drove south to Guatemala where I celebrated Montezuma’s revenge from a mistake I had made before leaving Mexico.
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