Matt Gagarin

3 October 2019

Anthropology

Little, Becky. “Lasers Reveal 60,000 Ancient Maya Structures in Guatemala.” ​History.com​,

A&E Television Networks, 28 Sept. 2018,

https://www.history.com/news/ancient-maya-structures-guatemala-lasers.

Research Assessment #3

An entire Mayan city has been discovered in an area that was previously thought to be

just a few rural buildings in Guatemala. Using a laser technology called lidar, light detection and

ranging, archaeologists were able to use satellites to scan the area and determined that there was

more to the rural ruins than previously thought. Scanning over 60 miles and discovering 60,000

structures, this survey is the largest land covered in history. This discovery changed all pretenses

about the Mayans and this city is estimated to have held seven to eleven million people. In

comparison to New York City, which has 8 million people, this city housed more people than

modern day NYC. For the time of the Late Classic Period, this is humongously large for a

population. In retrospect, the Mayans and other South American civilizations did not discover

the wheel and had to use other means for transporting goods and people.

New groundbreaking discoveries are being unearth every day. The use of magazines,

articles, and websites document daily progress in the world of anthropology, but the most

popular of the collections is archaeology. Searching archives of information on discoveries is a

convenient way for finding new and old research studies. I found this article archived on a
website that stores daily accomplishments, and this was one of the biggest discoveries of 2018,

so it is recent.

Recent archaeological advancements are viewed by society as stagnant or very rare, but

even though many great things have been discovered, there has been a constant stream of new

and exciting finds. As technology advances, so does the number of discoveries. The Maya area

was thought to have been relatively sparse outside of the main city. But thanks to laser

technology, places previously thought to be barren have been rediscovered as bountiful, as in the

case with this entire city.