A lost Maya city surfaced almost by chance inside old lidar data, suggesting the jungle may still be hiding whole urban landscapes in datasets no archaeologist has properly read.

A previously unrecorded Maya city has been identified in eastern Campeche, Mexico, not by an expedition cutting through jungle but by a graduate student reanalysing a laser survey flown in 2013 to monitor forests. The find, named Valeriana and reported in the journal Antiquity in October 2024, had been sitting in a dataset that had [...] The post A lost Maya city surfaced almost by chance inside old lidar data, suggesting the jungle may still be hiding whole urban landscapes in datasets no archa