I have no doubt that I inherited my interest – passive though it may be – in archaeology from my mother. Not that dad wasn’t interested, but I think mom had the passion for learning the stories behind all the old artifacts, digs, and everything that went with it, starting with the old National Geographics. So it’s too bad that neither one of them is around to see this report on the Maya civilization in WaPo:
Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Maya civilization that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.
But the latest discovery — one archaeologists are calling a “game changer” — didn’t even require a can of bug spray.
Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya: defense works, houses, buildings, industrial-size agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings, announced Thursday, are already reshaping long-held views about the size and scope of the Maya civilization.
“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on a television special about the new find. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again,” he told the New York Times.
An early result?
“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multidisciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data, it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there — including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”
Wow. And what happened to that civilization? It just makes the blood race!
