A PhD student accidentally discovered a hidden Mexican city while searching on Google.
Luke Auld-Thomas, who studies at Tulane university in the United States, was on page 16 of a Google search when he came across a lidar survey – a technique that uses lasers to scan structures buried under vegetation – carried out by a Mexican organisation in the country’s Yucatan peninsula.
Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data and found an ancient city that was home to 30-50,000 people between 750 and 850 AD.
This means its population from that period is greater than the number of inhabitants there are today.
Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues decided to name the city Valeriana, after a lagoon located near to the site. The city is just a 15 minute walk from a major road, making it even more remarkable that it took this long to find.
According Mr Auld-Thomas, the lost city ‘has all the hallmarks of a classic Maya political capital’ and spans around 16.6 square kilometres – around the same size as Edinburgh. It is now the second largest Maya site in Latin America, behind Calakmul in Campeche.
There appear to be two plazas, each with a temple pyramid like those found in the site of Calakmul, along with a court used for sport.
Study of the site suggests there was also a reservoir inside the city, meaning it was likely home to a large number of inhabitants who were capable of manipulating the landscape.
Although questions remain as to why the city was eventually abandoned, archeologists believe climate change was a likely cause.
Speaking about the discovery, Mr Auld-Thomas said: ‘The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.’
Mr Auld-Thomas also spoke of how studying cities likes these can help solve modern day issues in urban areas: ‘There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyper dense.
‘Given the environmental and social challenges we are facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.’
Lidar technology has massively helped archeologists in their ability to scan huge areas of land. At one point people had to survey areas by foot, whereas now sensors can be attached to planes and helicopters that can cover far more land in one go.
As a result of this technology, more and more cities of this kind have been found. Earlier this year, archeologists used lidar to uncover a sprawling settlement in Guatemala that dates back almost 2000 years. In 2023, an ancient Maya city was found in the jungles of southern Mexico – once again lidar technology was key to this discovery.
The results of Mr Auld-Thomas’s findings have been published in the journal Antiquity and show a high density of buildings ranging from houses to other larger structures.