It was covered in a thousand years of jungle growth. There are entire Mayan cities still unexplored because of their vegetation covering..................
You know, it upsets some, but all their famous pyramids, cities like Machu Pichu etc were covered in dirt and vegetation, and looked like hills to them until white explorers and archaeologists discovered them, uncovered them and returned them to what we see today.
Now they go out of their way to act snooty to us and tell us how sacred they are, and how our presence profanes them.
“Many of these can be attributed to LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing technology that uses laser light to reveal a world hidden from the naked eye. It uses reflected light to generate information about the shape and characteristics of objects that might otherwise be hidden by vegetation, the ground, or other structures. It’s proved to be especially fruitful in tropical regions where long-lost archaeological features have become swamped by vegetation.”
This technology is enabling that exploration. Quite an amazing technology!