Home / From Tulane New Wave: Unprecedented study confirms massive scale of lowland Maya civilization
This story originally appeared in Tulane New Wave entitled Unprecedented study confirms massive scale of lowland Maya civilization, on September 27, 2018. Story by New Wave staff member Barri Bronston (bbronst@tulane.edu).
Tulane University researchers, documenting the discovery of dozens of ancient cities in northern Guatemala through the use of jungle-penetrating Lidar (light detection and ranging) technology, have published their results in the prestigious journal Science.
The article includes the work of Marcello Canuto, director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane, and Francisco Estrada-Belli, a research assistant professor at Tulane and director of the Holmul Archaeological Project since 2000. They worked with assistant professor of anthropology Thomas Garrison of Ithaca College as well as other scholars to make their discoveries in the Petén forest of Guatemala.
A consortium of 18 scholars from U.S., Europe and Guatemalan institutions including the Ministry of Culture and Sports were enabled by the Fundación PACUNAM (Mayan Heritage and Nature Foundation) to analyze lidar data covering over 2,100 square kilometers of the Maya Biosphere Reserve.
"Since LiDAR technology is able to pierce through thick forest canopy and map features on the earth's surface, it can be used to produce ground maps that enable us to identify human-made features on the ground, such as walls, roads or buildings," Canuto said.
The PACUNAM LiDAR INITIATIVE (PLI), is the largest single lidar survey in the history of Mesoamerican archaeology. The collaborative scientific effort has provided fine-grained quantitative data of unprecedented scope to refine long-standing debates regarding the nature of ancient lowland Maya urbanism. Specifically, the key identifications of this study are:
Both Canuto and Estrada-Belli noted that discoveries were made in a matter of minutes, compared to what would have taken years of fieldwork without the LiDAR technology.
"Seen as a whole, terraces and irrigation channels, reservoirs, fortifications and causeways reveal an astonishing amount of land modification done by the Maya over their entire landscape on a scale previously unimaginable," Estrada-Belli said.