Lost Maya city revealed through laser mapping

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have discovered a lost Maya city containing temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

- Sam Jones

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

"For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total," Auld-Thomas said. "That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone's home 1,500 years ago."