Photo: Supplied
It took Luke Auld-Thomas about 16 pages of trawling through Google before he stumbled across an obscure piece of mapping that would lead to the discovery of a huge Maya city.
It was carbon mapping done by a group of ecologists some 11 years before using light detection and ranging technology - known as LiDAR. Luke and his team were able to strip back the LiDAR data and reprocess it to expose the land profile where the ancient Maya city they have named Valeriana was to be found. Luke and co-author Marcello Canuto say the city is hidden in plain sight, just 15 minutes walk from the main road near Xpujil in the southeast of Mexico, near the borders with Belize and Guatemala.
The two published a paper on their findings in archaeology journal Antiquity on October 29. Luke is a PhD student at Tulane University in New Orleans where he works in the Middle American Research Institute.
