Scientists unearth building in Mexico near Tikal

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To the naked eye—and on archeologists’ maps—it looked like just another hill amid the undulating landscape of Tikal, the ancient Maya city-state in the lowlands of northern Guatemala. But when researchers zoomed in on an aerial image made with laser scanning equipment called LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), they could clearly see the shape of a human-made structure hidden under centuries of accumulated soil and vegetation.

The building—a pyramid, it turned out—was part of an ancient neighborhood that included a large enclosed courtyard fringed with smaller buildings. But these structures were different from any others known to exist at Tikal. They had the distinct shape, orientation, and other features of architecture typically found in Teotihuacan, the ancient superpower near what is now Mexico City, more than 800 miles to the west of Tikal. 

Guided by the LiDAR images, Edwin Román-Ramírez, the director of the South Tikal Archaeological Project, began a series of excavations last summer. Tunneling into the ruins, his team discovered construction and burial practices, ceramics, and weaponry typical of early fourth-century Teotihuacan. From an incense burner decorated with an image of the Teotihuacan rain god to darts made from green obsidian from central Mexico, the artifacts suggest that the site could have been a quasi-autonomous settlement at the center of Tikal, tied to the distant imperial capital.

“We knew that the Teotihuacanos had at least some presence and influence in Tikal and nearby Maya areas prior to the year 378,” says Román-Ramírez. “But it wasn’t clear whether the Maya were just emulating aspects of the region’s most powerful kingdom. Now there’s evidence that the relationship was much more than that.”

Thomas Garrison, a geographer at the University of Texas-Austin who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research, says that the findings demonstrate how, in some ways, the ancient cities of the Americas may not have been so different from cosmopolitan cities today. “There was a melting pot of cultures and people with different backgrounds and languages co-existing, retaining their identities.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/archaeologists-discover-mayan-monument-hidden-plain-sight

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So proud to have been born in such rich and full of history country.

Chocolate/cacao, vanilla, avocado, the number 0, complex and impressive arquitecture, etc, a lot of good has come out of my beautiful Mexico.