Valeriana: Enormous Mayan City Discovered in Mexico

Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula is famed for its Mayan ruins, great cities and carved pyramids which, along with the famous sites in Guatemala, formed the heartlands of this lost civilization. You may be forgiven for thinking that everything of import has been found, but it seems you would be very wrong indeed.

A new study of existing surveys of the area performed using LiDAR (a top-down laser scan of the terrain) have revealed an enormous and completely unknown Mayan city. The new city, which the study names Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, is second only in size to mighty Calakmul, the largest known Mayan site. 

The discovery was made by graduate student Luke Auld-Thomas from Northern Arizona University and published in Antiquity. The find did not even require a new survey, but was made using existing data: the city was hiding in plain sight, all along.

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Valeriana is made up of two separate centers some 2km from each other, with a continuous dense urban environment between and surrounding them. The city boasts temple pyramids to rival those at famous sites like Chichen Itza, as well as Mayan residential patios in a curved amphitheater, a reservoir, and a ballcourt for the Mayans’ favorite sport.

The arrangement and some of the structures suggest that this city may be two millennia old, with a possible founding date of around 150 AD. The city, now partially obscured by modern farms and highways, would have supported tens of thousands of people, a higher population density even than today.

Overall Mr. Auld-Thomas and his team have found some 6,674 structures across three sites simply by looking at the freely-available information in a new way. It is hoped that there are many more such population centers out there, waiting to be uncovered.

The collapse of the Mayan civilization in around 800 AD has long been a puzzle, with climate change and drought being long suspected as the root cause. This find would further support this theory, as it appears that Mayan population density may have been surprisingly high: this was no sparse rural region but a network of clustered cities requiring complex irrigation.

The site is thought to extend far beyond the surveyed area, and many other sites such as this one are thought to lie hidden out there. The use of LiDAR has, in the last decade, revolutionized archaeological surveys with vast unknown sites found as far apart as the Amazon rainforest and the deserts of Egypt.

All of this adds up to a crowded landscape entirely at odds with the traditional (and somewhat condescending) view held by previous generations of archaeologists that Latin America was only home to primitive cultures. As the study succinctly puts it, with each new find we have more and more evidence that Mayan archaeology is everywhere in the region, and we are simply running out of space.

Header Image: The most impressive structures are right next to the limit of the existing LiDAR survey. We should probably break out the lasers again and see what’s next door. Source: Antiquity / CC BY 4.0.

Social Media Text: An unknown and enormous Mayan city has been found in Mexico. The city, named Valeriana, includes great pyramids and urban terraces and offers further proof that the Mayans once lived in dense populations.

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