Ancient Maya Cities Found in Jungle

discovery.com ^ | Aug 15, 2014 12:01 PM ET // by | Rossella Lorenzi

[BenLurkin]

Sprajc and his team found the massive remains as they further explored the area around Chactun, a large Maya city discovered by the Slovenian archaeologist in 2013.

No other site has so far been located in this area, which extends over some 1800 square miles, between the so-called Rio Bec and Chenes regions, both known for their characteristic architectural styles fashioned during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, around 600 - 1000 A.D.

One of the cities featured an extraordinary facade with an entrance representing the open jaws of an earth monster.

The site was actually visited in the 1970s by the American archaeologist Eric Von Euw, who documented the facade and other stone monuments with yet unpublished drawings.

However, the exact location of the city, referred to as Lagunita by Von Euw, remained lost. All the attempts at relocating it failed.

"The information about Lagunita were vague and totally useless," Sprajc told Discovery News.

"In the jungle you can be as little as 600 feet from a large site and do not even suspect it might be there; small mounds are all over the place, but they give you no idea about where an urban center might be," he added.

Laguinita was identified only after the archaeologists compared the newly found facade and monuments with Von Euw's drawings.

The monster-mouth facade turned to be one of the best preserved examples of this type of doorways, which are common in the Late-Terminal Classic Rio Bec architectural style, in the nearby region to the south.

"It represents a Maya earth deity related with fertility. These doorways symbolize the entrance to a cave and, in general, to the watery underworld, place of mythological origin of maize and abode of ancestors," Sprajc said.

[freedomlover]

I dunno. A little paint, a few flowers, couple of throw pillows...

[wildbill]

That’s why it is abandoned. The inhabitants all moved north to live the good life in the U.S.

I mean, after all, who wants to live in a jungle or try to make a living in the tropics when you can get all the goodies of modern life by simply moving north.

[OldNewYork]

Very interesting. Did their civilization collapse when they started electing foreigners?

[trebb]

Good thing that city is abandoned. Otherwise the inhabitants would be heading to the Texas border just like all of their descendants.

When I was stationed in OK in the late '70's, a female bartender at the club told a joke: "Do you know what a Texan is?" "A Mexican on his way to Oklahoma."

[Bernard Marx]

I have heard that pilots flying over the jungle see tops of pyramids from abandoned and undiscovered Maya ruins quite a bit.

Few years back I flew in a light plane from Lake Peten in Guatemala to Belize City. We were at fairly low altitude and the pilot pointed out several Mayan sites he said were not yet visited and mapped. It's a very large, heavily forested region.

Having hiked a bit through the dense jungle with a guide near Tikal, I can easily understand how difficult it is to see and access those ruins from the ground. I visited Caracol in Belize, which is only partly excavated, and there are several large pyramids you can't see from the ground until you practically walk into them.