Middels de aangepaste Lidar 'mapping techniek' ontdekte men dat de stad onder het oerwoud veel groter was dan eerder verondersteld. De stad moet bewoond zijn geweest van 1.000 jaar voor onze jaartelling tot 900 jaar daarna.
Bij mijn weten was er nergens anders ter wereld een stad zo groot in die tijd en men heeft al ontdekt hoe men een dergelijke bevolking kon voeden en dat was voor die tijd een huzarenstuk.
Niet verder geluld, lees het verhaal over de hoogwaardige cultuur die een dergelijke stad bouwde en haar bewoners goed moet hebben weten te dienen:
Scientists Discover Ancient Mayan City of 10 Million People Hidden Under Jungle
February
9, 2018 at 8:06 am
Written
by Amanda
Froelich
(TMU) —The
Earth is so vast, archaeologists are still finding
remnants of lost civilizations. Most recently, researchers discovered
a Mayan city, hidden in the Guatemalan jungle, which is estimated to
have been home to approximately 10 million citizens.
The
Guardian reports
that the researchers used a high-tech aerial mapping technique to
find tens of thousands of hidden structures. They include Mayan
houses, buildings, defense works, pyramids, an industrial-sized
agricultural field and irrigation canals. At least four major Mayan
ceremonial centers with plazas were also detected by the mapping
technique.
News
of the lost city, which was hidden in the jungle of Guatemala’s
Peten region, was announced on Thursday by an alliance of US,
European and Guatemalan archaeologists who have been working in
conjunction with Guatemala’s Mayan Heritage and Nature Foundation.
To
supply the 10 million Mayan residents, massive food production would
have been essential. Marcello A Canuto, a professor of anthropology
at Tulane University, commented on this when he said, “That
is two to three times more [inhabitants] than people were saying
there were.”
The
mapping technique is called Lidar, which stands for light detection
and ranging. Contours hidden by dense foliage are found as the
technology bounces pulsed laser light off the ground. The resulting
images revealed that the Mayans altered the landscape in a drastic
way. In some areas, 95 percent of the land was cultivated.
Said
Francisco Estrada-Belli, a research assistant professor at Tulane
University, “Their
agriculture is much more intensive and therefore sustainable than we
thought, and they were cultivating every inch of the
land.” Estrada-Belli
added that the ancient Mayas partly drained swampy road that hasn’t
been farmed since.
Researchers
suggest the civilization had a highly organized workforce. They
predicted this based on the extensive defensive fences,
ditch-and-rampart systems, and the constructed irrigation canals.
This
unprocessed image of the jungle reveals the groundworks and buildings
beneath the dense foliage. Credit: Depositphotos
As The
Guardian reports,
the mapping — which revealed 810 square miles (or 2,100 square
kilometers) of hidden civilization — expands the area that was
intensively occupied by the Maya. The culture flourished between
roughly 1,000 BC and 900 AD. Many descendants still inhabit the
region.
Thomas
Garrison, assistant professor of anthropology at Ithaca College in
New York, used the Lidar data to look for one of the roads.
“I
found it, but if I had not had the Lidar and known that that’s what
it was, I would have walked right over it, because of how dense the
jungle is.”
Tikal.
The ancient ruins are located in the rainforests of Guatemala.
Credit: DepositPhotos
Garrison
noted that the jungle grew over the abandoned Maya field and
structures, rather than destroyed them. This is unlike some other
ancient cities, whose fields, roads and outbuildings have been all
but destroyed by the elements.
“The
jungle, which has hindered us in our discovery efforts for so long,
has actually worked as this great preservative tool of the impact the
culture had across the
landscape,” noted
Garrison. The assistant professor says the finding “can’t be
called anything other than a Maya fortress.”
To
the researchers’ surprise, the structures were hiding in plain
sight. “As
soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish,” said
Canuto, “because
these were things that we had been walking over all the time.”
What
else might be discovered with the Lidar technology? Only time will
tell!
