During the two centuries Western archaeologists have excavated and investigated ancient Maya sites, comparatively little time has been spent understanding the structures that kept cities functioning for centuries. "Unfortunately, there's this almost 200 year legacy of people focused on burial chambers and temples and hieroglyphics," says Kenneth Tankersley, an archaeological geologist at the University of Cincinnati.
As research continued over the years, archaeologists began to reconsider their assumptions. In the 1970s, attempts to map Tikal, a major Maya city in Guatemala, showed that it was so densely populated that the inhabitants must have relied on a kind of agriculture that farmed the same plots of land repeatedly. It seemed to be the only way to feed a relatively packed metropolis.
With this technology, archaeologists started to see the landscape features, reservoirs and terraces with exceptional detail. They also saw buried infrastructure they didn’t necessarily know to search for. “Looking through the vegetation and actually looking at the landscape,” Tankersley says, “wow — it's overwhelming.”
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