Science Thousands of Mysterious Maya Structures Discovered in Guatemala

An aerial survey over northern Guatemala has turned up over 60,000 new Maya structures, including pyramids, causeways, house foundations and defensive fortifications.

It's a watershed discovery that has already led archaeologists to new sites to excavate and explore. The findings may also revise estimates of how many ancient Maya once lived in the region upward by "multiple factors," said Tom Garrison, an archaeologist who specializes in the Maya culture and is part of the consortium that funded and organized the survey. Far more ancient Maya lived on the landscape than there are people in the region today, Garrison told Live Science, and they did it without the destructive slash-and-burn agriculture that is crippling the jungle in modern times.



https://www.livescience.com/61616-mysterious-maya-structures-discovered.html

 

Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Mayan civilization that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.

But the latest discovery — one that archaeologists are calling a “game changer” — didn't even require a can of bug spray.

...

According to the Associated Press, researchers now believe that as many as 10 million people may have lived in the area known as the Maya Lowlands — two or three times as many people as scientists had thought previously. And because all those people needed to eat, in some areas 95 percent of available land was drained — including areas that have not been farmed since Mayan civilization fell.

“Their agriculture is much more intensive and therefore sustainable than we thought, and they were cultivating every inch of the land,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Research Assistant Professor at Tulane University, told the AP.

...

A.D. 250 to 900, the civilization covered an area twice the size of medieval England, according to National Geographic, but was much more densely populated.

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multidisciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there — including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Lidar revealed a previously undetected structure between the two sites that Garrison told the AP “can’t be called anything other than a Maya fortress.”

That and other newly discovered fortresses indicate the Mayans may have been involved in more conflict — even outright warfare — than previously believed.

“It’s this hilltop citadel that has these ditch and rampart systems . . . when I went there, one of these things in nine meters (30 feet) tall,” he said.

Researchers also have a new found way of thinking about the jungle — as both impediment and preserver.

The remains of other cultures have been destroyed by generations upon generations of farming. But after the Mayans abandoned their empire in AD 900, the jungle grew over abandoned fields and structures.

It hid them, but also helped to conserve them.

“In this 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,” Garrison said.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...red-structures-reveal/?utm_term=.2c5d3e08b158

 

Not about logs man. Its about oil and gas exploration. Companies go in and cut down swathes of jungle, then dig holes to drill oil, leaving waste pits, lakes, of toxic sludge behind. The damage is extreme to both plant and animal life. Ecological systems are diminished at disturbing rates each year.

 

Maybe it was the Jonestown of their day.

barfo

 

Did Noah let loose the pair of giant marsupials here? Seems rather careless of him.

barfo