the archaeological community agrees that climate change played a role in the collapse of Maya civilization in the Classic Lowlands. However, it was not a total disappearance. The Maya culture survived, and today many people continue to speak Mayan ...

Using advanced scanning technology, researchers have located a major Maya site in the thick jungle of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. This newly identified settlement is believed to have been a political center.

A city with temple pyramids not far from the road and a site with a Maya complex built alongside a sinkhole lend to evidence that the Maya civilization was even more sprawling than known.

Tulane researchers uncovered over 6,500 Maya structures in Mexico using lidar, revealing a complex settlement landscape and challenging previous assumptions about the Maya civilization’s urban and rural distribution.

Using lidar technology, researchers surveyed 50 square miles of Campeche, Mexico, discovering an entire previously unknown city of the Maya empire.

Auld-Thomas and his colleagues, who published their findings Monday in the journal Antiquity, call the city Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon. They estimate that it may have had a population of as many as 50,000 people at its peak, which was most likely around the end of the late Classic Maya era, probably between about A.D. 750 and 850.