# Archaeologists uncover vast Maya urban landscape in Campeche using old lidar data

*By IO Digest Desk*

A set of airborne laser scans collected more than a decade earlier has revealed what researchers describe as a major lost Maya city in southeastern Mexico, along with thousands of surrounding structures. On event date 2024-10-28, archaeologists announced that lidar analysis had exposed more than 6,000 ancient structures in Campeche state, including a city of pyramids they named Valeriana [Source 1096].

The scale of the find is the first reason it stands out. According to the supplied DW extract, the urban centre may have housed between 30,000 and 50,000 people at its peak between 750 and 850 AD. That estimate places Valeriana among the more substantial urban settlements in the Maya world and suggests that a densely settled, highly built landscape remained hidden not because it was small, but because thick vegetation concealed it from ordinary survey methods [Source 1096].

The second reason is methodological. The researchers did not discover the city by cutting a new path through jungle or launching a dedicated expedition from scratch. They reprocessed about 122 square kilometres of high-quality airborne lidar data collected in 2013 for Alianza, a forest-monitoring project designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Using archaeological techniques on an existing environmental dataset, they recognised what earlier users had missed: traces of a large urban network under the canopy [Source 1096].

That matters because lidar has become one of the most powerful tools in Mesoamerican archaeology. By using laser pulses to map terrain through vegetation, it can reveal raised platforms, causeways, terraces, pyramids and settlement patterns that are nearly impossible to identify from the ground. In this case, the technology did not simply add detail to a known site. It changed the map itself by identifying a city and a broader concentration of structures that had not been documented in the same way before [Source 1096].

DW’s extract also quotes lead author Luke Auld-Thomas of Northern Arizona University saying the analysis revealed both a densely settled region and considerable variability. That suggests a more complex landscape than a single monumental centre surrounded by empty space. Instead, the evidence points to a region containing different kinds of built environments and urban organisation, expanding the picture of how Maya populations used and transformed the terrain [Source 1096].

What the supplied evidence supports is significant even without broader speculation. Researchers found thousands of hidden structures, identified a large city, linked the discovery to reused lidar data from a 2013 forest project, and estimated that the city reached a population of tens of thousands during its peak centuries. Those facts alone make Valeriana more than a dramatic headline. They show how a technological re-reading of old data can open a new chapter in understanding the Maya world, revealing that an apparently continuous forest still contains urban histories on a scale large enough to reset assumptions about settlement in Campeche [Source 1096].