A US doctoral student browsing environmental data on Google spotted what turned out to be a Maya city the size of Edinburgh hidden for centuries under the jungle canopy in Mexico.
Archaeologist Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US, said: “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring.”
The BBC reports that when Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed − a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.
The environmental data was from a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.
Archaeologists went on to find pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the complex, which they have called Valeriana. It is located in the southeastern state of Campeche.
According to the BBC, the archaeologists believe the city is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America. The new site has yet to be photographed.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/azwegers/14364450242/in/photostream/]