Dr. James Croft

A LiDAR survey over the Mirador-Calakmul Basin in Guatemala covered more than 1,700 square kilometers of dense rainforest. When the data came back, researchers counted 964 individual settlements. They condensed that number into 417 interconnected ancient Maya cities, towns, and villages, most of them dating back to the Preclassic period — as early as 1000 BC, centuries before the Maya civilization most people picture ever existed. These weren't scattered ruins. They were linked. More than 100 miles of engineered causeways ran between them, alongside canals, dams, and reservoirs built to manage water across the entire region. That's not a collection of isolated villages stumbled into existence one at a time. That's a single, deliberately planned civilization — designed, coordinated, and built at a scale nobody had mapped, hiding under rainforest canopy the whole time. One of the largest contiguous LiDAR studies ever published in the Maya Lowlands, and it just rewrote how early, …