🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE From massive fortresses to sprawling suburbs, a bold new vision of the vanished Maya civilization takes shape.
In Guatemala’s Tikal, only the peaks of monuments rise above the forest. But Lidar scans reveal a complex landscape beneath the foliage. Thomas Garrison pauses in the middle of the jungle.
In the 1,000-plus years since the Maya society collapsed, the jungle has returned with a vengeance. A tide of flora has swallowed up roads and temples, turning stone structures into lumps and mounds indistinguishable from the natural topography. Rough roads and heavy rains make travel to and from Thomas Garrison's site difficult: teams must leave before the rainy season or risk getting stuck, like this truck.
Lidar scans of individual locations in northern Guatemala have revealed many hidden structures. Future scans will likely include an even broader range of site. “It gives you a sense of connections across a big area, as opposed to just little points of information from this mound or that pyramid or that temple,” says Stephen Houston, a Maya archaeologist at Brown University who works with Garrison’s team. “Suddenly everything becomes connected, everything is seen as being part of a single functional space.”To create Lidar images, airborne instruments fire at the ground millions of laser pulses, which reflect back up.
Today, some 14 miles of thick jungle separate El Zotz from Tikal’s metropolis. But in the time of the Maya, the two were almost too close for comfort. Garrison’s excavations here reveal an alternating history of aggression and allegiance with Tikal, as the dynasty at El Zotz waxed and waned in concert with their larger neighbor.
At some point, however, the Maya abandoned this temple complex, uprooted the heart of the kingdom and moved to a new location, about a half-mile downhill. Garrison thinks the sudden move was likely related to a time of great upheaval in this part of the Maya world. The result was a new era of prosperity for El Zotz still evident today. Walking through the grassy city center, we pass multiple temples, mortuary complexes and a ball court. Public markets were likely held nearby, and the city is surrounded by outlying groups of Maya homes where thatched huts once stood; what were likely cacao fields lie farther up in the hills.
Garrison exudes an understated confidence after nearly 20 years of fieldwork, but he’d been getting restless at El Zotz, which had been shaping up to be fairly unspectacular by Maya terms. Other than the royal tomb, they’d uncovered few major finds. That is, until 2016. And lidar.The new data is enough to upend some previous theories. A 2,700-year-old site called El Palmar sits not far from El Zotz, and was once thought of as a small town. Now, it appears to have been a major metropolitan area.
In addition to turning towns into cities, the lidar data occasionally reveals something even more exciting — not just new structures, but new dimensions of Maya society. On a hillside near the old temple complex at El Zotz, lidar revealed a dotted line that ended up being rudimentary fortifications, built to slow incoming attackers. Just this year, Garrison’s team uncovered a mound of sling stones at the site, potential ammo cached over 1,000 years ago by some prudent defender.
La Cuernavilla includes a temple, palace and the remains of housing platforms, as well as a moat and a massive wall some 25 feet high. One side is protected by a sheer cliff, and the other is strategically fortified with defensive terraces. A watchtower sits nearby — another first for Maya archaeologists — part of a newly discovered defensive network that spreads throughout the entire Maya lowlands.
When combined with the network of watchtowers, the fortifications look even more strategic. The defensive network seems to spread for miles around El Zotz. And if Garrison is right about this fortress’s association with Tikal, it means that the city-state was building military outposts throughout the region to consolidate control on behalf of far-away Teotihuacan.
The organized military activity hints at a new conception of Maya society. The level of resources and planning needed to build La Cuernavilla implies a society with powerful militaristic organization, something that researchers have never before suspected.This evidence of sophisticated military might could be the final piece of evidence that solidifies a theory long gestating in Maya archaeology: that they were much more hierarchically organized than previously thought.
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