Armed with machetes and chainsaws, chopping through fallen trees and wading through bushes, archaeologists clear the path down rocky trails.
They finally reached their destination in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula: a hidden city where pyramids and palaces rose above the crowds more than 1,000 years ago, with a ballpark and terraces now buried and overgrown.
Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History praise their work late last month, said they had discovered an ancient Maya city in “a vast area unknown to archeology”.
Simon Martin, a political anthropologist who wasn’t involved in the work, said: “Stories about ‘lost cities in the woods’ – usually pretty minor things or filmed by journalists. However, this is much closer to the real deal.
The team of archaeologists who discovered these ruins named them Ocomtún, using the Yucatec Maya word for the stone columns found around the ancient city.
The Mexican Institute described the site, in Canton of Campeche, as was once a major center of Maya life. For at least part of the Classic Maya era – around 250 to 900 AD – it was a densely populated area. Today, it is part of a vast ecological reserve, where vines and tropical plants grow, and fresh water flows through the porous limestone terrain.
“I’m often asked why nobody goes there, and I say, ‘Well, maybe because you need to be a little crazy to get there,” said Ivan Sprajc, the survey’s lead archaeologist and professor at a Slovenian research centre. ZRC SAZU. “It’s not an easy job.”
Work has been revolutionized in recent times decade with lidar, a technology that uses lasers in the air to wait dense vegetation and disclosure the ancient structure And landscape is changed by people under. But in the end, there are still arduous journeys.
“Sprajc is doing exactly the right thing; Rosemary Joyce, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says lidar is used as a survey tool but does not interpret the results without a factual basis.
She said in an email that it’s unlikely any newly recorded sites could “significantly change historical narratives,” but such work could help researchers see “more variation in how different Maya communities conducted life during the Classical period.”
Scott Hutson, an archaeologist at the University of Kentucky, said: ‘It’s unusual to find such a large site that no one knows about.
For decades, archaeologists have relied on the help of Mayan descendants to identify and excavate ancient sites familiar to them. But because this part of Campeche has been preserved for decades, Dr. Hutson said, “simply no archaeologists have passed through the area.”
Dr. Martin calls the area a “blank area” on archaeologists’ maps.
Dr Sprajc, 67, said the expedition to Ocomtún took about a month and a half, “relatively short” compared to the usual two months or more. Itineraries are made during the dry season, which can be daunting — but less challenging than long treks in the wet season.
Surrounded by wetlands, Ocomtún is comprised of pyramids, squares, elite settlements and “strange” combinations of structures arranged almost in concentric circles, Dr Sprajc said. “We don’t know anything about that from the rest of the Maya lowlands,” he said.
The largest structure on record in Ocomtún is a pyramid about 50 feet high, which Dr Sprajc thinks may have been a temple. It and several other structures stand on a large rectangular pedestal, about 30 feet above the ground and with sides more than 250 feet long.
Charles Golden, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, said: “Just in terms of its size, its location, it has to be an important site. He said the excavations could help answer a series of questions about the people who lived there and their relationship to other Mayan cities and settlements.
People seem to have left Ocomtún around the same time as other Maya cities, from around 800 to 1000 AD, a decline that researchers attribute to factors such as drought and political conflict.
A hint to those conflicts could have been found at the site. While most of the structures are not decorated, the team found, upside down in a staircase, a block with pictograms seems to have come from another Mayan settlement.
Dr Sprajc said such monuments are sometimes “brought up as spoils from other sites, and this is what seems to have happened in this case”.
Dr Joyce said that the image of the bloc’s conquest is normal, “so we may have evidence here that Ocomtún was part of the great wars revolving around the great powers” of the Maya world.
The team also found several agricultural terraces, which archaeologists call signs of extensive Mayan modification to make difficult environments richer for humans. Dr Martin said that, using hydraulics, water conservation and capture as well as landscape techniques such as rice terraces, the Mayans managed to inhabit “areas that seem quite inhospitable today”.
For modern groups to pass through, water must be carried by truck. Dr Sprajc said that even after his team had carved about 37 miles of driveable trails to Ocomtún, it still took five to 10 hours to reach the site because the terrain was so difficult to walk.
Such expeditions entail huge expenses, both for the field work and before anyone sets foot in the forest. Lidar scanning alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Dr. Sprajc has found funding not only from himself organizationbut also four Slovenian companies and two American charities: publishers Založba Rokus Klettrailway service Adria kombicredit company Credit družba Ljubljanatravel agency AL Ars LongaKen & Julie Jones Charitable Foundation and Audubon Milwaukee Society.
Other researchers can currently seek the funding, permits and supplies needed to excavate Ocomtún, but Dr Sprajc will not be among them. He said he is busy planning a new expedition, next March or April, to another part of Yucatán, where the image of the lidar has appeared.
Fellow scientists, excited about the work at Ocomtún, are looking forward to what his team might find next.
“This shows that in places like Campeche, which is on the one hand fairly close to places like Cancún and the major tourist attractions, there are still places that have not been really documented,” said Dr. Golden, anthropologist Brandeis. “So it’s interesting that these places still have secrets to reveal.”
