Airborne Lidar Surveys 32,800-Square-Mile Area, Revealing Hundreds of Long-Lost Maya and Olmec Ceremonial Sites

The 32,800-square-mile area recently surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geográfia revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites.

A WIRED report said data from the recent Airborne Lidar survey of the ceremonial sites in Southern Mexico was made public.

When Takeshi Inomata, a University of Arizona archeologist, and his colleague examined the site, spanning the Olmec heartland along the Bay of Campeche and the western Maya Lowlands, just north of the Guatemala border.

In that site, they were able to identify the outlines of more than 470 ceremonial sites that had been more often than not hidden underneath vegetation or were extremely large to locate from the ground.

ALSO READ: Your Pee Can Save the Environment, Here's How

(Photo: Bernard DUPONT on Wikimedia Commons)
The Coast north of Campeche from Fuerte San Jose

Lidar Survey

Inomata explained it was unthinkable to survey "an area this large" until a few years back. Publicly available lidar has been transforming archeology, he added.

Over the past several years, lidar surveys have uncovered tens of thousands of irrigation channels, fortresses, and causeways across Maya territory, now spanning the borders of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico, Ars Technica reported in 2018.

Essentially, Infrared beams can penetrate dense foliage to measure the ground's height, which frequently uncovers features such as long-abandoned plazas or canals.

Survey results have revealed that Maya civilization was more extensive, not to mention more densely populated than what was previously realized.

This latest survey with results published in Nature Human Behaviour has suggested that the Maya civilization has inherited some of its cultural notions from the earlier Olmecs, who succeeded along southern Mexico's coastal plains from roughly 1500 BC to approximately 400 BC.

Ideas Linking Civilizations

The oldest identified Olmec site is a ceremonial complex located at San Lorenzo in the Tabasco State of Mexico. It enjoyed a three-century heyday from approximately 1400 to 1100 BC, making it a few hundreds of years older than the Maya ceremonial site at Aguada Fenix.

Until recently, archeologists believed the pair of sites was extremely different, although while poring over the new lidar survey, Inomata, together and his colleagues, observed something that everyone else had missed.

Specifically, they noticed a "rectangular plaza lined on two sides with earthen platforms," like those at Aguada Fenix and the hundreds of other sites uncovered by the lidar. No one had been able to notice it from the ground in the past.

Inomata explained that the survey result is telling that San Lorenzo is essential for the beginning of some of these ideas used by the Maya later.

If the Olmec were constructing ritual centers with the rectangular platform-lined plazas pointed at sunrise on important days, at least three centuries before the Maya did so, then the Maya possibly inherited such ideas, and perhaps, their religious underpinnings from the Olmec. Nonetheless, other evidence has proposed that the Maya may not have borrowed everything from the Olmec.

Different Constructions

At San Lorenzo, sculptures depict the Olmec rulers who directed the monument's construction. However, at Aguada Fenix, there is no sign of that social hierarchy type, which is unusual, as later Maya elites were anything but unassertive about their public works projects, a similar NY Press News specified.

This has led Inomata's team to speculate that a more egalitarian, cooperative effort may have constructed the earliest monuments of the Maya.

In approximately 1100 BC, the Maya people were only starting to adopt agriculture and settle in the permanent villages.

Hunting, not to mention gathering, usually does not lend itself well to wealth differences and the political and social power hierarchies that come with them.

The team thinks people were still, in some way, mobile, as they had just started using ceramics and lived in ephemeral structures on the ground level.

People were transitioning to more established or developed lifeways, and many of those sites perhaps did not have much hierarchical organization, explained Inomata.

Related information about this recent discovery is shown on MegalithomaniaUK's YouTube video below:

RELATED ARTICLE: How Sun-Powered Chemistry Can Transform Carbon Dioxide Into Essential Products

Check out more news and information on Environment & Climate in Science Times.