Everything we thought we knew about the ancient Maya is being upended
The world the Maya made has been shrouded by jungle for centuries. Now, a tool called lidar is revealing its staggering scale and sophistication.
The two archaeologists, both National Geographic Explorers with research posts at Tulane University, had collectively spent decades working in the jungles of Central America. Grueling heat and humidity, as well as encounters with deadly wildlife and armed looters, were inextricably part of discovering the treasures of the ancient Maya, a civilization that flourished for thousands of years and then mysteriously vanished beneath the dense forest. And so, it seemed ironic—almost unfair—that their biggest discovery would come while huddling around a computer in an air-conditioned office in New Orleans. While his colleague Francisco Estrada-Belli looked on, Marcello Canuto opened an aerial image of a tract of forest in northern Guatemala. At first, the screen showed nothing but treetops. But this image had been made with a technology called lidar (short for “light detection and ranging”). Lidar devices mounted on aircraft shoot billions of laser bursts downward and then measure the ones that reflect back. The small fraction of pulses that penetrate the foliage provide enough data points to assemble an image of the jungle floor.
With a few keyboard clicks, Canuto digitally peeled away the vegetation to reveal a three-dimensional image of the ground. Far from any population centers, the region they were viewing was thought to have been mostly uninhabited, even at the peak of Maya civilization more than 1,100 years ago. But suddenly, what had looked like ordinary hillsides were shown to have been carved with human-built reservoirs, agricultural terraces, and irrigation canals. What had appeared to be small mountains were in fact large pyramids, topped with ceremonial buildings. Settlements that generations of archaeologists had assumed to be regional capitals were mere suburbs of far larger pre-Columbian cities, connected by paved, raised highways.
Archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer Thomas Garrison, who viewed the data around the same time, was stunned by what he saw. “I think we were feeling something similar to what astronomers felt the first time they looked through the Hubble Telescope and saw all those empty spaces suddenly teeming with stars and galaxies,” he says. “Here was this vast jungle that everyone thought was nearly empty. And then, when we peeled off the trees, there were human signatures everywhere.”
(Laser scans reveal Maya megalopolis beneath the jungle.)
The use of lidar is revolutionizing Maya archaeology, not only guiding researchers to promising sites but also giving them a big-picture view of the ancient landscape. Dozens of lidar surveys—including the breakthrough project unveiled in New Orleans in 2018, funded by the Guatemalan Foundation for Maya Cultural and Natural Heritage (Pacunam)—have upended long-established impressions of a civilization that thrived in one of Earth’s least hospitable regions.
“It’s almost impossible to overstate the extent to which lidar is energizing Maya archaeology,” says Guatemalan archaeologist Edwin Román-Ramírez. “We’ll always need to go in and dig to understand the people who built these structures, but this technology is showing us exactly where and how to dig.”
In particular, the imagery overturns the idea that the Maya lowlands were a sparsely populated landscape peppered with a few scattered and autonomous city-states. Each new lidar survey makes it increasingly clear that the Maya were an interconnected civilization of dazzling scale and complexity—a Maya megalopolis, with millions of farmers and fighters and builders of infrastructure more extraordinary than anyone had previously imagined. The revelation has the power to not only rewrite the region’s past but also radically reshape its future.
(Who were the Maya? Decoding the ancient civilization's secrets.)
For Guatemala, economically impoverished but rich in cultural and ecological treasures, the discoveries offer an exciting prospect: Many of the new sites could become the centerpiece of a cultural and ecotourism industry that could help the nation blaze a sustainable path out of poverty. But for Estrada-Belli, Román-Ramírez, and other Guatemalan archaeologists and conservationists, the high-tech imagery has also exposed a more troubling development that could render those plans moot: the telltale marks of looters, loggers, land-grabbers, and narco-traffickers who are laying siege to the second largest remaining tropical rainforest in the Americas. Many Guatemalans fear that they may lose the high-stakes race to protect the landscapes and treasures that could illuminate even more lessons the ancient Maya have to teach us.
Much of the country’s most important cultural patrimony is sheltered within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a jumble of national parks, wildlife reserves, and forestry concessions where residents harvest timber and other forest products. Comprising about a fifth of Guatemala’s territory, the reserve is home to jaguars and scarlet macaws, as well as hundreds of other species of birds, butterflies, reptiles, and mammals.
In contrast to more arid cradles of civilization such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, Central America’s humid forests have rarely given up their buried secrets easily. In the mid-19th century, American writer John Lloyd Stephens and his British companion, the artist Frederick Catherwood, explored some of the abandoned Maya cities on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Their descriptions and drawings of overgrown pyramids and palaces drew other researchers, but after decades of digging, archaeologists managed to open only a few small windows into the Maya world.
In 2009 archaeologists Diane and Arlen Chase, currently with the University of Houston, tried something new at Caracol, an ancient city in Belize they’d been excavating since 1985. Lidar scanners, initially used for meteorology and tracking celestial bodies, were increasingly being mounted to aircraft to aid mapping and surveying.
“At the beginning of the project we’d thought Caracol was just a few pyramids and temple groups,” Arlen Chase says. “But when we lidar-surveyed the outlying areas, we discovered that it was actually a huge, elaborately planned city.” The metropolis likely supported at least 100,000 people, almost twice the present-day population of Belize City.
The Chases’ findings awakened other archaeologists to the technology’s potential. In 2021, excavations based on the Pacunam data yielded surprises even at Tikal, Guatemala’s largest archaeological site. The city was at least four times as big as previously thought, and partly surrounded by a massive ditch and defensive wall stretching for miles. Also revealed were a large pyramid and a mysterious compound with links to Teotihuacan, an ancient superpower more than 800 miles to the west.
“To find major new monuments in the heart of Tikal—one of the most extensively studied sites in the Maya area—reinforces how many doors lidar is opening,” says Román-Ramírez, who directs the South Tikal Archaeological Project. “We’re discovering features that we couldn’t perceive even when we were walking on top of them.”
About 40 miles northwest of Tikal, archaeologist Richard Hansen climbs a low embankment and pauses to stomp the mud off his boots. “Years ago, we relocated our supply path to this higher, drier stretch,” says Hansen, a National Geographic Explorer affiliated with Idaho State University who co-directs research at the ancient city of El Mirador. “It wasn’t until the lidar that we realized we were walking on an ancient superhighway.”
The causeway is now covered by two feet of dirt, but centuries ago it was raised six feet above the surrounding swamp and paved with stucco. Part of a complex network of roads that connect Mirador to more than 400 ancient settlements, it widens to 130 feet as it approaches the city center—the width of a modern eight-lane freeway.
“Can you imagine how many people must have been moving around here to justify committing the resources to build something like this?” Hansen asks. Carbon dating and analysis of pollen and soils suggest that the site was occupied as early as 2600 B.C. At its zenith between 300 and 100 B.C., El Mirador may have been one of the largest cities in the Americas.
Why did the Maya abandon such highly functioning communities? For now, there's no clear answer.
Nowhere in the Maya lowlands is the environment easy on humans. What few nutrients the soil contains are regularly washed away by months of torrential rains, often followed by withering droughts. Hansen’s research suggests that the rise in population at El Mirador was enabled by hauling fertile mud from low-lying swamps and depositing it on terraces cut into the hillsides. Farmers elevated the pH by adding lime to the soil, producing abundant harvests of corn, squash, beans, peppers, and cotton.
In a region often plagued by too much or too little precipitation, the flow of water was meticulously controlled via canals, dams, reservoirs, and agricultural terraces—an immense infrastructure that is now being revealed.
“You couldn’t feed as many people as the ancient Maya did with the kind of slash-and-burn agriculture people in this part of the world use today,” says Tulane’s Canuto, who models population density. He estimates that 10 million to 15 million people lived throughout the Maya realm at its peak, including many in swampy regions that most archaeologists had thought uninhabitable.
To build El Mirador’s towering 230-foot pyramid, known as La Danta, armies of workers used hammerstones and obsidian blades to cut and drill into the limestone, then pried the rectangular blocks apart. Hansen and his research partners replicated the process, using tools found at the site’s quarries as models. Workers built wooden litters to carry blocks weighing an average of 900 pounds. “With enough men and the means to feed them,” Hansen says, “a king could complete it in his lifetime.”
(Who was the Red Queen, the mystery woman in the Maya tomb?)
But many of the newly discovered sites are not new to looters. “The state doesn’t have the financial resources to protect our patrimony,” says Marianne Hernández, president of the Pacunam foundation. “With the new data, we’re at least figuring out where the sites are. If we had an army of archaeologists, we could send them out to study them before they are torn apart.”
Looting is only one of the threats facing the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Illegal settlers often set fires to clear land for cattle ranches—frequently used by narco-traffickers for money laundering. Many have cut airstrips out of the jungle to land smugglers’ planes.
Guatemala’s government is making some effort to stop deforestation—which has diminished the country’s old-growth forests by about 20 percent over the past two decades—and reclaim illegally occupied territory. But its work is hampered by a lack of equipment, fuel, reliable intelligence, and clear approaches to dealing with invading communities.
“The park guards are on a mission impossible,” says Roan Balas McNab, who until recently directed the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Guatemala office. “They just don’t have the resources.”
Tourism may be one way to boost those resources. Across the border in southeastern Mexico, Maya sites like Chichén Itzá and Palenque draw millions of visitors each year and are major drivers of local economies. Mexico is also constructing a controversial railway—the so-called Maya Train—to connect beachgoers and cruise ship passengers with inland ruins.
Hansen would also like to build a railway. He envisions a miniature train that would shuttle tourists and researchers to El Mirador and eight other sites while barring unwanted intruders. “We need to let in the people who want to see and study these ancient wonders and keep out the looters and settlers, the narco-traffickers and loggers,” he says.
He has proposed a binational sanctuary that would be Latin America’s first wilderness area, free of roads, vehicles, and aircraft but accessible via rail.
Hansen even hired a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and is hoping the U.S. Congress will allocate $72 million to build the railway and ecolodges that will provide jobs for Guatemalans and help stem the flow of economic migrants to the U.S. border. His proposal, he says, “would protect habitat and wildlife while facilitating a sustainable economy to employ the local communities.”
Although Hansen has garnered some support for the proposal within Guatemala’s government, some Guatemalans say he’s appropriating their country’s cultural heritage to personally profit by transforming the Maya lowlands into an archaeological theme park. Tulane’s Estrada-Belli, a Guatemalan who directs the Holmul Archaeological Project, is among many archaeologists who oppose the plan.
“I’m worried that some people who support his project genuinely believe he is working to benefit Guatemala,” says Estrada-Belli. “But the plan appears to be more about him controlling a large portion of the country than benefiting the Guatemalan people or science.”
Hansen counters that his proposal has been grossly misrepresented by critics who want to tar him as a “gringo colonizer.” He doesn’t want to develop a Maya theme park, he says, “and I have no private interest whatsoever economically in anything in the Mirador Basin.”
Environmentalists also balk at the idea of fencing off the region. “There’s a good reason why there aren’t other wilderness areas in Latin America that exclude locals who depend on natural resources, and that’s because it doesn’t work,” says McNab. “Whenever you tell local people to stay out and give them no options to sustainably harvest resources, they tend to find ways to do it illegally, and destructively.”
About a dozen forestry concessions in the reserve allow communities to harvest timber according to strict guidelines. Although mismanagement sometimes occurs in their administration, studies by conservation groups have found that logging within the concessions has had little negative impact on wildlife, and forest cover has remained constant or even increased in some cases.
Pacunam’s Hernández believes some sort of public-private approach has the best chance of success. “Ecotourism and cultural tourism are keys to protecting this extraordinary place, but we’d like to see it done respectfully and sustainably, with the involvement of local communities.”
But Pacunam has also come under fire from some Guatemalans who point to the organization’s proposals to develop roads and other infrastructure in the fragile region.
“Pacunam cannot explain how all their ideas will conserve nature,” says Alejandro Santos, director of the Rainforest Alliance’s Guatemala office. “Pacunam is talking about ecohotels, but at the end of the day the destruction of nature is the same. The hidden interest is to use the [Maya Biosphere] reserve to transport other kinds of resources, like natural gas and petroleum.”
(This Maya king transformed Palenque into a glorious center of power.)
Atop the wind-whipped El Tigre pyramid, I ask Hansen what he’d wish for at El Mirador if unhindered by budget or technology.
“A time machine,” he says. “I’d like to have even 15 minutes up here when it was in its heyday. I’d like to watch it all being built, to see the armies of workers, the scribes and the craftsmen, the farms, the royal pageants that mobilized everyone.”
Lidar imaging, with its 3D realism, has made it much easier to envision the landscape of the ancients—the terraced hillsides, the broad roads and spacious plazas, the palaces and workshops and watchtowers. All of which highlights the biggest unanswered question: Why did the Maya abandon such highly functioning communities? For now, there’s no clear answer.
To find major new monuments ... reinforces how many doors lidar is opening. We're discovering features that we couldn't perceive even when we were walking on top of them.Edwin Román-Ramírez, archaeologist
A turbulent pattern of collapse, rebuilding, and revival was followed in the mid to late ninth century by a series of severe droughts that likely slashed crop yields throughout the region. Julie Hoggarth of Baylor University, who researches the effects of drought on Maya agriculture and health, says population growth and land clearing likely led to environmental degradation in some areas.
“On top of all of this,” Hoggarth says, “the Maya kings were considered divine intermediaries with the gods, so you can imagine how their legitimacy could have been diminished if they didn’t bring the rains and how the populace could have voted with their feet and left those cities.”
Whatever the causes, by the late ninth century, the Maya were deserting their settlements. They stopped building monuments—and began smashing them in earnest. Violence and warfare seem to have been among the multiple factors that led to the society’s eventual collapse.
One evening just before sunset, I hike solo to the summit of El Tigre. An unbroken forest stretches in all directions, punctuated by bumps in the landscape—jungled-over ruins that could one day be carefully excavated and preserved or looted and lost.
Accompanied by the throaty growls of howler monkeys, I walk down to an ancient quarry near Mirador’s central complex of pyramids and palaces. In the gathering darkness a single block of cut stone lies on the ground, partially covered by roots, vines, and rubble. Whatever structure the block was destined to support remains incomplete—along with our understanding of this society, which reached heights of sophistication unrivaled in its time.
There’s still more to be discovered—especially when you change the way you look at the world.
Born in Spain and now living in Mexico, Rubén Salgado Escudero focuses on the human condition, including the realm of the ancient Maya for this feature. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide and published in outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian. He became an Explorer in 2018.
The nonprofit National Geographic Society, working to conserve Earth’s resources, helped fund this article.
This story appears in the March 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine.
