A Mayan city identified by a team of archaeologists headed by the academic of the University of Northern Arizona, Luke Auld-Thomasthey published a scientific article in the magazine Antiquity where they detail the identification of Valerian, A territorial delimitation thus called by its proximity to a fresh water lagoon of that name in the Yucatan Peninsula.
A limit of said settlement, which extends over 16.6 square kilometers, could even be prior to the Mayan classic period (250-900 AD). Archaeologists detail that in the 1970s, a series of investigations pointed out that near the Xpuhil archaeological zone to the southwest of Campeche was full of settlements and modifications in the landscape, finding terraces and field walls.
However, few were the subsequent archaeological studies that were carried out in the center-east of Campeche and Quintana Roo adjacent, and whose databases of known and geo sites located show vast regions of practically unexplored earth.
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Laser radar technology that allowed its location
The location of the city Valerian was possible to Technology called Lidar, a laser radar that allows mapping, with aerial approach, large areas of land. The background to this scientific study are reports of 2013 as part of the M-REDD+Alliance, led by the organization The Nature Conservancywhich sought to make forest monitoring together with other reports from the Civil Engineering field under the same technology and that implied great advance for this finding because the use of this type of technology is expensive.
From the data set that was made available to specialists, there is a selection of 122 square kilometers, in which more 6 thousand structures were identified with a density of 52.9 architectural elements per square kilometer. «In the last decade, a growing number of field research projects in Campeche have used Lidar as a powerful tool for settlement archeology, capable of documenting entire landscapes with thorough detail, even under a dense forest cover,» said specialists in the publication of the publication of the publication of the Cambridge University Press: Running Out of Emty Space: Environmento Lidar and The Crowded Ancient Landscape of Campeche, Mexico.