GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – A new high-tech survey has revealed nearly 1,000 ancient Mayan settlements, including 417 previously unknown cities, linked by what may be the world’s first highway network and hidden for millennia by the dense jungles of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico.
It’s the latest discovery of roughly 3,000-year-old Mayan centers and associated infrastructure, according to a statement Monday by a team from Guatemala’s FARES Anthropological Research Foundation, which oversees so-called LiDAR surveys.
The findings were first published last month in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
All of the newly identified structures were built centuries before the largest Maya city-states emerged, ushering in major human advances in mathematics and writing.
LiDAR technology uses aircraft to fire pulses of light into dense forest, allowing researchers to remove vegetation and map the ancient structures beneath.
Among the details revealed in the latest analysis are the first extensive system of stone “highways or super-highways” in the ancient world, according to the researchers.
About 110 miles (177 km) of spacious roads have been uncovered so far, with some measuring as much as 130 feet (40 meters) wide and raised as much as 16 feet (5 meters) above the ground.
As part of the Cuenca Karstica Mirador-Calakmul survey, which stretches from the Petén Jungle in northern Guatemala to the state of Campeche in southern Mexico, researchers have also identified pyramids, ball courts plus significant water engineering, including reservoirs, dams and irrigation canals.
“It shows the economic, political and social complexity of what was happening simultaneously throughout this area,” said lead researcher Richard Hansen.
The latest finds date from the so-called Middle to Late Preclassic Maya period, from about 1000-350 BC, with many of the settlements thought to have been controlled by the metropolis known today as El Mirador. This was more than five centuries before the classical height of civilization, when dozens of large urban centers flourished in present-day Mexico and Central America.
(Reporting by Sofia Menchu and David Alire Garcia Editing by Deepa Babington)
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