AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Researchers have discovered a Mayan site hidden deep in the jungle on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. They've named the site Valeriana, and it's thought to have been built over a thousand years ago. Surveying an area of 50 square miles, the study revealed more than 6,000 structures, including stone pyramids similar to those found at the most famous sites of Mayan ruins.
The dense jungle kept Valeriana hidden from the scientific community, but archaeologists found the settlements with an aerial mapping technology called Lidar. Marcello Canuto is a professor of anthropology at Tulane University and a coauthor on the study. He joins us now. Welcome, and congratulations for discovering an ancient Mayan settlement, yeah (laughter)?
MARCELLO CANUTO: Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation.
CHANG: Of course. So can you just first paint a picture of what Valeriana probably looked like at its height? Like, what kind of structures did you find? How was this settlement laid out?
CANUTO: This was a hilly landscape. And on top of these hills are these large temples, these large pyramids, and all around would have been other small settlements or other houses. The landscape would be a mosaic of some forest patches, agricultural features and even roads and/or trails. So you could walk from one house to another and then eventually come to the center of the city, where there would be maybe a market or a ball court, where they would be playing the rubber ball game, right? And you would go and visit the center for particular economic activities or because of rituals, and then maybe, in the afternoon, go home.
CHANG: And just for context, in terms of its size, how would you compare the size of Valeriana compared to other prominent Mayan settlements that have already been discovered?
CANUTO: There are a lot of very famous lowland Maya sites - such as Tikal in Guatemala or Calakmul in Mexico, that's nearby - that are these really behemoths. This site isn't that size. These medium-sized sites would have been administrative and religious centers and very likely also centers where people came and traded.
CHANG: So the story is, it was actually one of your students who discovered this site with data that he found on Google, right?
CANUTO: That's right.
CHANG: Tell us about how he stumbled on that data, and what was this data that you all eventually analyzed?
CANUTO: So Luke, my Ph.D. student, Luke Auld-Thomas, had been reading about lidar data that had been recently published. And lidar, it's basically a pulse of light that's sent from a sensor, and it measures the distance between the sensor and the phenomenon that's bouncing back the light. And so years earlier, a research group had done a lidar survey of this area for completely different reasons that had nothing to do with archaeology. And so we downloaded the data and began to analyze it for archaeological purposes.
CHANG: Did you ever imagine that your job as an archaeologist and anthropologist would look like this - sifting through mounds and mounds of data on a computer, instead of hacking through the jungle with a machete like Indiana Jones?
CANUTO: (Laughter) The answer is unequivocally no, I never imagined this. You know, you're a kid...
CHANG: (Laughter) You would rather be Indiana Jones.
CANUTO: Exactly. You're a kid. You're just like, OK, I'm going to go out there and so forth. But I'll tell you this. What's really exciting about this is not that suddenly we just sit in front of computer screens only, right? What the computer screens allow us to do, and all the data that we can see, allow us to be really efficient in the field. We know where we need to go. We know what we need to see. Whereas before, we would go to the jungle, but we would be always worried that we're missing something...
CHANG: Yeah.
CANUTO: ...Right? Now we are a bit more armed with information.
CHANG: Yeah.
CANUTO: So, to a certain extent, I think it makes me want to go there more, right? In other words, I know that I am going to have a really fruitful...
CHANG: Exactly.
CANUTO: ...Month or two in the jungle.
CHANG: Anthropology professor Marcello Canuto of Tulane University, thank you so much.
CANUTO: You're very welcome. Thank you.
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