Laser technology uncovers ancient Mayan city hidden in Mexico jungle |

Archaeologists have discovered thousands of previously unknown ancient structures, including pyramids, hidden deep in Mexico’s jungle.

More than 6,600 structures linked to the Maya civilisation have been found in the southern state of Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Experts analysed lidar data, a method of scanning the land from above using lasers.

The Maya were one of the most dominant civilisations in Mesoamerica and built cities with elaborate ceremonial buildings and massive stone pyramids in what we now know as Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Pyramids – like those in Calakmul, in the Mexican state of Campeche – were found by researchers led by Luke Auld-Thomas from Tulane University, New Orleans.

“For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total… by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes,” he said.

But instead of deploying teams on the ground, archaeologists in his team analysed existing mapping data over an area of 47 square miles.

They uncovered anomalies in the landscape – revealing pyramids, houses and other Maya infrastructure.

Their results, published in the journal Antiquity, showed a dense, diverse array of totally unstudied Maya settlements dotted throughout the region.

It included an entire city which the team called Valeriana, named after a nearby freshwater lagoon.

The urban centre included two major hubs of “monumental architecture, linked by continuous dense settlement and landscape engineering”.