"Laser Scans Reveal Maya ‘Megalopolis’ Below Guatemalan Jungle"

by Tom Clynes

[On the NBC Nightly News on Saturday,  anchor Lester Holt presented a report on “Lost Treasures of the Maya Snake Kings,” a special airing on the National Geographic channel on Tuesday, 6 February.  The special details how lasers on planes were used to reveal a massive complex of Mayan ruins covered for centuries by jungle foliage.  With this high-tech help, scientists have found that Maya civilization was more advanced and populous than previously imagined. 

[From time to time on Rick On Theater, I run articles on subjects that simply interest me.  One of those  topics is scientific discoveries that reveal something new about our world despite decades and even centuries of exploration and examination.  It might be a previously unknown species of fish or a hitherto undiscovered fossil, but what intrigues me even more is when the discovery makes scientists change their previously-held understanding of their field, making them formulate new rules and laws or rewriting history.  That what this revelation about the Maya promises to do, even though the hidden cities have been lying unexamined for over a millennium.  The article below was originally posted on the website National Geographic on 1 February 2018 (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/).]

A vast, interconnected network of ancient cities was home to millions more people than previously thought.

*  *  *  *

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.

“The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research.

Garrison is part of a consortium of researchers who are participating in the project, which was spearheaded by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Guatemalan nonprofit that fosters scientific research, sustainable development, and cultural heritage preservation.

The project mapped more than 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set ever obtained for archaeological research.

The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.

In addition to hundreds of previously unknown structures, the LiDAR images show raised highways connecting urban centers and quarries. Complex irrigation and terracing systems supported intensive agriculture capable of feeding masses of workers who dramatically reshaped the landscape.

The ancient Maya never used the wheel or beasts of burden, yet “this was a civilization that was literally moving mountains,” said Marcello Canuto, a Tulane University archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who participated in the project.

“We’ve had this western conceit that complex civilizations can’t flourish in the tropics, that the tropics are where civilizations go to die,” said Canuto, who conducts archaeological research at a Guatemalan site known as La Corona. “But with the new LiDAR-based evidence from Central America and [Cambodia’s] Angkor Wat, we now have to consider that complex societies may have formed in the tropics and made their way outward from there.”

SURPRISING INSIGHTS

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Already, though, the survey has yielded surprising insights into settlement patterns, inter-urban connectivity, and militarization in the Maya Lowlands. At its peak in the Maya classic period (approximately A.D. 250-900), the civilization covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, but it was far more densely populated.

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multi-disciplinary 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.”

Virtually all the Mayan cities were connected by causeways wide enough to suggest that they were heavily trafficked and used for trade and other forms of regional interaction. These highways were elevated to allow easy passage even during rainy seasons. In a part of the world where there is usually too much or too little precipitation, the flow of water was meticulously planned and controlled via canals, dikes, and reservoirs.

Among the most surprising findings was the ubiquity of defensive walls, ramparts, terraces, and fortresses. “Warfare wasn’t only happening toward the end of the civilization,” said Garrison. “It was large-scale and systematic, and it endured over many years.”

The survey also revealed thousands of pits dug by modern-day looters. “Many of these new sites are only new to us; they are not new to looters,” said Marianne Hernandez, president of the PACUNAM Foundation. (Read “Losing Maya Heritage to Looters.”)

Environmental degradation is another concern. Guatemala is losing more than 10 percent of its forests annually, and habitat loss has accelerated along its border with Mexico as trespassers burn and clear land for agriculture and human settlement.

“By identifying these sites and helping to understand who these ancient people were, we hope to raise awareness of the value of protecting these places,” Hernandez said.

The survey is the first phase of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative, a three-year project that will eventually map more than 5,000 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) of Guatemala’s lowlands, part of a pre-Columbian settlement system that extended north to the Gulf of Mexico.

“The ambition and the impact of this project is just incredible,” said Kathryn Reese-Taylor, a University of Calgary archaeologist and Maya specialist who was not associated with the PACUNAM survey. “After decades of combing through the forests, no archaeologists had stumbled across these sites. More importantly, we never had the big picture that this data set gives us. It really pulls back the veil and helps us see the civilization as the ancient Maya saw it.”

[A National Geographic Explorer is a scientist, conservationist, educator, or storyteller funded and supported by the National Geographic Society.  According to the organization’s own description, “Every one of them is infinitely curious about our planet, committed to understanding it, and passionate about helping make it better.”

[Tom Clynes is an author and photojournalist who travels the world covering the adventurous sides of science, the environment, and education for publications such as National Geographic, Nature, the New York Times, and Popular Science.  His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Newsweek,  Scientific American, the Sunday Times Magazine of London, and many other publications.]

"A Mirror of Subterranean Wonders"

by  Alissa J. Rubin

[Art has been an endeavor of humankind almost since their predecessors crawled out of the sea.  Before inventing the wheel, before creating the alphabet, before domesticating animals or discovering agriculture, humans were doing performances and painting on cave walls.  Long before the historical record of our exploits and progress, the story of human beings was told in cave paintings.  New discoveries of and from such ancient finds, even from ones we were already examining, has always fascinated me.  (Just a few days before I prepared this introduction, a new rock structure near Stonehenge in England was found under the ground.  Archeologists are bound to be learning new things about the builders—and the still-mysterious Stonehenge as well—for decades to come.  New interpretations of what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, have been advanced in the past few weeks.  We never stop learning about our own past and the history of the Earth.)  Alissa J. Rubin's “A Mirror of Subterranean Wonders,” originally published in “The Arts” section of the New York Times of 25 April 2015, reports on one of those old discoveries, the 32-36,000-year-old paintings at Chauvet Cave in France.  What she describes is almost as remarkable as the initial discovery in 1992.]

CHAUVET CAVE, France — After the retreat of Neanderthals across the European continent, modern humans made their way to this cave and began to create the first known works of pictorial art: buffalos surging across the rock background, rhinoceroses doing battle, lions searching for mates and dark-maned horses cantering.

Twenty years after these cave paintings were discovered near the Ardèche River in south-central France, they remain closed to the public for preservation’s sake. But on Saturday, a replica built nearby at a cost of $59 million will open, allowing the public to approximate the experience of the cave explorers who found the paintings.

The rock art in the Chauvet cave, created 32,000 to 36,000 years ago, puts flesh and fur and character onto a world previously known largely through fossil remains. Although archaeologists have recorded the impulse to create art in markings on rock and carved beads as far back as 75,000 years ago, the workmanship in these cave paintings is of another order. The subject matter, the animal world, is familiar, creating a remarkable feeling of connection with the distant past. The paintings are among the world’s most celebrated prehistoric artworks, featured in Werner Herzog’s 2011 3-Dmovie, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

“The skill of these artists, the painting, is amazing,” said Jean Clottes, the French archaeologist who first authenticated the cave for France’s Culture Ministry.

“The walls are covered with engravings; the bison here appears to have eight legs — it’s as if he’s running,” Mr. Clottes said, gesturing toward a figure on the rock behind him as he walked through the replica of the cave with journalists before its official opening.

The first step in making the replica was erecting scaffolding and then covering it with a mortar that simulated the rock surface of the original cave. Photographs of the original paintings were projected onto the surface of the newly created rock. Artists led by, among others, Gilles Tosello, an expert in this prehistoric era who is also trained in the plastic arts, painstakingly copied the paintings with the same materials the original artists also used, charcoal made from Sylvester pine trees and ocher paint made from minerals.

While the paintings have been reproduced at the same size as the originals, the replica over all is slightly less than half the size of the 91,000-square-foot Chauvet cave. Kléber Rossillon, the company that manages the replica site, is planning to have groups of up to 30 enter every few minutes with a guide.

Marie Badisa, the Culture Ministry’s curator for the cave, views the Chauvet paintings as “a true conceptual artistic representation.” The sense of movement the artists captured has been described as “prehistoric cinema,” she said as she led four journalists on a rare visit to the original cave.

Like other researchers who have studied the work, she sees the art’s sophistication as a testament that civilization and culture appeared far earlier in human history than was previously thought.

Exploring the original cave requires a 30-minute hike to the foot of the limestone cliffs above the Ardèche River and then up a winding path to a simple rock shelter where visitors, rarely admitted, leave their belongings. At the cave’s entrance, journalists donned coveralls similar to those used in a hospital operating room, special rubber shoes, a helmet equipped with a headlamp, and a harness and belt to attach to the ladders and cables that extend into the cave’s depths. The goal is to protect the cave from contamination by anything on the visitors’ clothes or skin.

Then came the descent through a narrow opening in the rocks. As the air became cool, dark and damp, it was like entering another world. The darkness was encompassing; the light from the headlamps did little to illuminate the rock chamber’s depths, and the walls receded in darkness and shadows. The sounds of dripping water and echoing steps were magnified in this vast blackness.

Headlamps bobbed as the visitors followed metal walkways installed to protect the soft cave floor, with its prints of bear paws and the shallow depressions they dug as sleeping areas where they hibernated. The lamps revealed the cave’s extraordinary beauty: Stalactites and stalagmites sparkled as if crushed diamonds had been mixed with the sandy colored rock. The cave seemed alive, even growing, with new finger-length stalactites forming on many rock surfaces like the thinnest, most delicate of icicles. Those glittering surfaces are more recent than those of the flatter rock where humans drew their images, Ms. Badisa said.

On the walls, lions stalked, and a remarkable owl stared down from a branch, its head turned all the way around so that it was regarding us over its wings. Less familiar were the mammoths — a hairy relative of today’s elephants — and the aurochs, large horned wild cows that are also extinct today. The detailed nature of the drawings suggested how closely entwined the human and animal world must have been, allowing for close observation of the horses’ manes, an owl’s feathers and the black markings on the rhinos’ torsos. The bulk of the bodies and the play of shadow and light are reminiscent of Picasso, and it is hardly surprising that he visited other prehistoric caves and was struck by the paintings’ extraordinary life.

Of the more than 1,000 creatures inventoried on the walls of the Chauvet cave, just one appears to be human: a woman with the head of a bison, suggesting to some archaeologists that the cave was used for shamanistic practices. There are also several images of vulvas, presumably a tribute to the power to give birth.

Caves with remarkable prehistoric paintings have been discovered across southern France and northern Spain. The two most famous are at Lascauxin southwestern France and Altamira in northern Spain, but the paintings there are less than half as old as those at Chauvet.

The site at Lascaux, discovered in 1940, was initially open to the public but was closed in 1963 after tragic damage to the paintings by carbon dioxide from the breath of hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The air entering from outside allowed fungi and algae to gain a foothold, also obscuring the original drawings. Cleaning them would cause further damage. The Lascaux experience prompted Mr. Clottes, the archaeologist, to advise the French government immediately after the discovery of the Chauvet cave to close it and secure the entrance.

Altamira was closed in 2002 for fear of damage, but Spanish cultural officials began experimenting with allowing very small groups of people to enter again last year. Both sites also rely on adjacent museums with replicas to give the public a sense of what is inside.

The Chauvet cave’s discovery came in late December 1994, when Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, all experienced cavers, were exploring the limestone cliffs just above the Ardèche River and found an opening that they thought might lead to an underground chamber. They squeezed through, and as Ms. Brunel-Deschamps took in her surroundings, she cried out, “They have been here!”

Who “they” were is an irresistible question to anyone who sees this art.

Archaeologists have pondered how and why early man used the cave. Geologists and paleontologists have helped to date not just the paintings but the other artifacts found in the cave’s chambers, including bones, mostly of the bears that shared the space with humans, and the charred wood and ashes of fires that the artists made to create the charcoal they used on the walls. There have been academic disputes about the exact dating of the cave as well as different hypotheses about the purpose of the decorations.

Inevitably, the replica does not reproduce the original cave’s air of mystery and grandeur or the sense of a profound encounter with the past. But the copied paintings capture the spirit of the originals, bringing the animals to life as they pace gracefully and powerfully across the rock, a tribute to the eternal drive of artists to capture life.

[Alissa J. Rubin began covering the Middle East for the New York Times in 2007.  In August 2007, she was named the Times’ deputy Baghdad bureau chief.  Currently, she’s the paper’s bureau chief in Paris.  Previously, she had been a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.]