With the thick vegetation of the northern Guatemala rainforests hiding its 2,000-year-old remnants, the full extent of the early Mayan way of life was once impossible to see.
The researchers detected the vast site within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin of northern Guatemala by using LiDAR technology, a laser mapping system that allows for structures to be detected below the thick tree canopies. The resulting map showed an area composed of 964 settlements broken down into 417 interconnected Mayan cities, towns and villages.
The causeways, which rise above the seasonal swamps and dense forest flora of the Maya Lowlands, formed "a web of implied social, political, and economic interactions" with further implications regarding "strategies of governance" due to how difficult they would have been to build, according to the study.The causeways were composed of a mixture of mud and quarry stone among several layers of limestone cement.
"They didn't have any pack animals in the Maya region ... and we're not thinking that they had wheeled vehicles on these causeways like Roman roads, like chariots or whatnot, but they were definitely built for people to interact, communicate and probably travel between sites," said Marcello Canuto, anthropology professor and director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University.
From an airplane flying overhead, light waves are pulsed down, and they bounce off objects below before returning to the sensor. Similar to sonar, which uses sound to locate structures, the LiDAR sensor tracks the amount of time each pulse takes to return and creates a three-dimensional map of the environment below.
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