In the dense rainforests of Mexico, an entire ancient Maya city has been hiding in plain sight - until recently. Modern researchers discovered the city of Valeriana not by machete and machete work, but from thousands of miles away using lasers and data. The jungle vegetation concealed towering temple pyramids, broad plazas, a ball court and even water reservoirs. It turns out this sprawling settlement was just a 15-minute walk from a modern highway and farmland. Today, advanced technology like LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has given archaeologists “X-ray vision” into the past, revealing ruins that ground teams might otherwise never find.
The tale of Valeriana reads like an archaeologist’s dream. Named after a nearby freshwater lagoon, Valeriana was a Classic Period Maya city (circa 250-900 AD) buried under thick jungle canopy. Archaeologists found evidence of thousands of structures (over 6,500 by one count) . The site includes what researchers describe as “all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital”: multiple temple pyramids, interconnected plazas, a ball court, and causeways linking buildings. We can imagine that when the city thrived, its stone monuments towered high above the trees. Now, thanks to LiDAR, we can see the faint outlines of those same monuments centuries later.
Key features of Valeriana include:
- Pyramidal temples and plazas: Large temple-pyramid structures with broad stairways, clustered around open plazas. These likely served religious and political purposes.
- Ball Court: A formal Maya ballgame court appears in the scans - a common feature of major Maya settlements.
- Reservoirs and dams: The city had an engineered water system, including at least one reservoir to capture rainy season water.
- Agricultural terraces and housing: Beyond the ceremonial core, thousands of smaller mounds reveal house platforms, terraced fields and farm plots, indicating a dense population supporting the city.
A Chance Discovery with LiDAR Technology
The story of how Valeriana was uncovered is almost as surprising as the city itself. In 2013, ecologists flying over the jungles of Campeche (in southern Mexico) collected LiDAR data to measure forest biomass and carbon. This project mapped roughly 50 square miles of canopy, saving the data for future analysis. Ten years later, graduate student Luke Auld-Thomas at Northern Arizona University had a hunch: What if scientists have already mapped more of the Maya region than archaeologists realize? Using Google and academic databases, he found the untouched LiDAR dataset. Opening the files on his computer, Auld-Thomas was “delighted, surprised, and amazed” to see an entire city laid out under the trees.
Rather than hacking through vines, archaeologists simply deleted the vegetation layer from the data to reveal the ground beneath. In minutes, outlines of walls, plazas and pyramids emerged. The discovery was literally made from a laptop in Houston, thanks to lasers that had quietly scanned the jungle a decade earlier. As Wired reports, it was like rediscovering Tikal (the famous Maya city rediscovered in 1848) without ever stepping into the forest. Even more astonishing, Valeriana lay right beside a highway - something locals had driven by daily, unaware of the ruins just beyond sight.
Auld-Thomas later explained that both locals and the scientific community had “never knew about it”. This underscores a striking fact: even in the 21st century, entire cities can remain hidden until we have the right tools. As archaeologist Thomas Garrison noted, wherever LiDAR is used, new settlements appear - each find adding a piece to our understanding of the ancient Maya world
How LiDAR Works: Scanning the Earth with Lasers
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is the high-tech key that unlocked Valeriana. Imagine an airplane or drone flying over a forest firing rapid laser pulses at the ground. Each pulse travels to the Earth and back up to a sensor, measuring distance by timing the laser’s return. Millions of these points create a detailed 3D map of the terrain. Crucially, some pulses penetrate gaps in the foliage, reaching the ground or lower canopy. By digitally filtering out vegetation, archaeologists obtain an almost surgical view of what lies beneath the trees.
The basic LiDAR process involves:
- Airborne scanning: An airplane or drone equipped with LiDAR lasers flies a systematic grid over the area.
- Emitting laser pulses: The system fires millions of pulses per second toward the ground. Each pulse reflects off objects (leaves, ground, ruins) and returns to the sensor.
- Data collection: The time it takes each pulse to return is recorded, building a point cloud of coordinate data.
- Digital processing: Specialized software removes the points representing trees and vegetation, leaving only ground and structural features visible.
- Visualization: The resulting model shows subtle elevations - such as mounds, walls and trenches - that can reveal ancient roads and buildings.
In effect, LiDAR gives archaeologists X-ray vision. It is especially powerful in jungles or other areas where dense plant cover hides everything. Before LiDAR, uncovering a lost city like Valeriana would have required years of on-foot surveying and maybe still gone unnoticed. Today, an entire city emerges on the computer screen. (Even smartphones now have LiDAR sensors for augmented reality, hinting at how ubiquitous the technology may become for mapping.)
Other Ancient Cities Revealed by Laser Mapping
Valeriana is not an isolated case - it’s part of a LiDAR revolution in archaeology. In the mid-2010s, LiDAR surveys over Cambodia’s Angkor region unveiled vast medieval cities and urban networks previously hidden in the jungle. Researchers found entire city layouts (even the long-lost city of Mahendraparvata) extending beyond the famous Angkor temples. Similar breakthroughs have occurred in Central America and beyond. For example, LiDAR has revealed unrecorded Maya cities in Guatemala and Honduras, as well as ancient road networks and fortifications. In the Amazon, LiDAR is even detecting remnants of millennia-old civilizations beneath the rainforest.
These discoveries share common themes: massive population centers, engineered landscapes, and advanced infrastructure were far more widespread than written history had shown. As one archaeologist put it, the earth holds a “huge puzzle”, and each LiDAR-assisted find adds a crucial puzzle piece. For instance, Valeriana’s discovery challenges assumptions about Maya settlement density - showing that Maya civilization had even more large urban centers than previously thought.
Other highlights of LiDAR archaeology include:
- Angkor Wat and Beyond (Cambodia): LiDAR scans in 2012-2015 revealed that the Angkor empire covered much more area, with hidden cities and reservoirs in the jungle.
- Guatemalan Lowlands (Petén): Extensive LiDAR mapping uncovered tens of thousands of Maya structures and causeways, fundamentally changing estimates of Maya population and urbanization.
- Bolivia (Amazon Basin): Researchers using LiDAR found remains of pre-Columbian settlements and networks in the rainforest that had been unknown.
- UK and Europe: Even in forests and grasslands, LiDAR has revealed Iron Age forts, Roman roads, and medieval villages buried by time.
In short, wherever humans walked, LiDAR is showing us they left a lasting mark. These projects also highlight the power of reusing data. The equipment and flights are expensive, so using an existing LiDAR survey (as with Valeriana) is a cost-effective way to hunt for lost history.
What Valeriana Means for History and Archaeology
The uncovering of Valeriana is more than a cool story - it has real impact on our understanding of the ancient world. First, the city itself offers clues about Maya life. With thousands of structures mapped, archaeologists can study everything from the grand architecture to everyday dwellings and farms. The site even contains an “E-Group” complex - a group of buildings aligned for astronomical observations, showing the Maya’s knowledge of celestial cycles. The terrain’s engineered dams and reservoirs reflect how the Maya adapted to seasonal floods and dry spells. All these details together will help researchers reconstruct social, economic and religious life in Valeriana.
Beyond Valeriana, the find sends a clear message: “We have not found everything” about ancient Mesoamerica. Even well-traveled countries like Mexico still hide secrets. The remark from lead archaeologist Luke Auld-Thomas resonates: the government and scholars “never knew” this city was there. It underscores that large swaths of the earth remain unexcavated. Each new discovery could rewrite history chapters, reveal unknown trade routes, or show that ancient populations were larger and more complex than thought. For the Maya specifically, sites like Valeriana help fill gaps between famous centers like Chichén Itzá or Palenque, showing a fuller picture of Maya civilization.
Valeriana’s discovery also has broader implications. The archaeologymag article notes that studying these diverse Maya cities provides insight into sustainable living and planning. Ancient Maya engineers managed water and land in challenging environments - lessons that modern planners might learn from. Also, these finds inspire public interest and tourism (in the long run, once sites are excavated and made accessible). From a heritage perspective, knowing what exists helps protect it. Forest clearing or construction could destroy ruins unknowingly; mapping them offers a chance at conservation.
The Future of Exploring Hidden Worlds
The Valeriana story demonstrates how technology can rewrite archaeology. It also hints at an exciting future: imagine archaeologists routinely scanning satellite or drone imagery with machine learning to flag potential ruins. It might become common for data science students, not just field teams, to “discover” new sites. The professor Auld-Thomas jokingly said the discovery came by searching “page 16 of Google”. Soon, advanced AI might find the right dataset pages for us, speeding up such breakthroughs.
We can expect more landscapes to be mapped and re-examined. Government projects and private companies are increasingly collecting high-resolution LiDAR over forests, deserts, and cities - all ripe for archaeological retroactive analysis. Social media or news stories highlighting finds like Valeriana can inspire new projects and interest in archaeology among tech enthusiasts.
Of course, technology is just a tool. Field verification will still be needed: archaeologists plan to visit Valeriana on the ground, confirm structures, and uncover artifacts. But the initial discovery opens the door. Future researchers may even use other sensors (like ground-penetrating radar, drones with multispectral cameras, or advanced satellite imagery) to complement LiDAR.
In the end, the jungle concealing Valeriana has given way to an even greater truth: our world has many hidden chapters, waiting for science to reveal them. As one Maya archaeologist put it, everywhere this tech is applied “there’s more settlement discovered - every puzzle piece counts”. For curious minds in the U.S. and worldwide, the hunt for lost history has never been more thrilling. The lasers have turned into torches lighting up the ruins of the past, inviting us to explore deeper into time and see the past with fresh eyes.