Laser mapping takes place of machetes as archaeologists find hidden Maya city in jungles of Mexico

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have discovered a lost Maya city containing temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

- Sam Jones

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

"For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total," Auld-Thomas said. "That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone's home 1,500 years ago."

Lidar is a remote sensing technique that uses a pulsed laser and other data obtained by flying over a site to generate three-dimensional information about the shape of surface characteristics.

Although Auld-Thomas knew that it could help, he also knew it was not a cheap tool. Funders are reluctant to pay for lidar surveys in areas without obvious traces of the Maya civilisation, which reached its height between AD250 and AD900.