The LIDAR data also revealed that one Olmec site, known as San Lorenzo, had a large rectangular plaza similar to the one in Aguada Fénix. This suggests groups who preceded the Maya built those structures. The Mayans' heyday happened between about 250 and 950 CE, but that's at least 650 years after the construction date of the youngest of the 478 sites that Inomata's team discovered. DeAgostini/GettyĪrchaeologists disagree as to whether the Olmecs and Maya existed separately in time and geography, as sister cultures, or whether the former birthed the latter.īut the new findings could help clarify the two civilizations' relationship. Hiding under the tree canopyĪ temple located at Comalcalco, in Tabasco, Mexico, which dates back to the Maya civilization. Inomata and her collaborators say theirs is the most extensive archaeological study ever done of Mesoamerica using LIDAR.
"It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago," Takeshi Inomata, an anthropologist with the University of Arizona who co-authored the study, said in a press release. The sites are spread across a 32,800-square-mile area in the Mexican states of Tabasco and Vera Cruz, and they may shed light on how the Olmecs and Maya coexisted and shared ideas. In a study published Monday, researchers describe how they used this kind of laser mapping data to uncover nearly 500 Mesoamerican sites between about 2,000 and 3,000 years old. LIDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging, can reveal how close or far away the ground is from the scanner, which in turn helps reveal discrepancies in the landscape. They built massive stone pyramids and elevated rectangular plazas for rituals and ceremonies, but over time many these sites were lost to the jungle, subsumed under dense vegetation.īut over the last few years, archaeologists have started leveraging a new technology to find these hidden, Mesoamerican ruins: LIDAR, a system that can generate three-dimensional maps by bouncing lasers between a scanner in the air and the Earth below. Several millennia ago, the Olmec and Maya civilizations flourished in what are now Mexico and Guatemala. These sites shed light on the development of the Olmec and Maya civilizations. They located the ruins by analyzing 3D mapping data collected from the air using lasers. DeAgostini/GettyĪrchaeologists discovered 478 Mesoamerican monuments hidden in the jungles of southeastern Mexico. The site dates back to the Olmec civilization. A grass-covered pyramid named La Venta, in Tabasco, Mexico.
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