Lost Mayan City Discovered by Student during Google Search
Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University, has accidentally discovered a massive, lost Mayan city while browsing the internet. While scrolling through page 16 of a Google search, Auld-Thomas stumbled upon a legacy lidar survey originally commissioned for environmental monitoring by a Mexican organization. Upon closer inspection of this publicly available data, he realized the laser pulses had captured more than just vegetation. Buried beneath the dense canopy of Mexico’s Campeche region lay “Valeriana,” an ancient urban center packed with pyramids, sports fields, causeways, and amphitheaters that had been hidden for centuries.
This discovery is a monumental win for remote sensing and digital archaeology. Valeriana is estimated to have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people during its peak from 750 to 850 AD, making it second in density only to Calakmul. The finding challenges long-held assumptions that the tropics were inhospitable to large-scale civilizations and suggests that “wild” landscapes may actually be rich with anthropogenic history. It underscores the immense value of revisiting existing datasets with fresh eyes; what was just noise to environmentalists became a sprawling metropolis to an archaeologist. This “digital deforestation” allows researchers to peer through the canopy without a single machete swing, revealing that human footprints in the jungle are far more common than previously thought.
For those eager to dig deeper, this event highlights the democratizing power of open data in earth sciences. The survey covered three jungle sites, revealing over 6,674 distinct buildings. Experts like Professor Marcello Canuto are now calling for a doubling of lidar coverage over the next decade to further map these regions. This accidental find serves as a reminder to technical readers to check the raw data. The intersection of big data, laser scanning, and historical inquiry is rapidly rewriting our understanding of the ancient world.
Written by Adam Clark. Adam has spent the past 13 years exploring the world from above by using drones, satellites, and mapping tools to better understand our landscapes. Connect with him on LinkedIn: Adam Clark
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