August 28, 2014

A Mayan city was recently rediscovered in southeastern Mexico, near El Mirador in Guatemala. (World Book map)

Archaeologists have rediscovered the “lost” Maya city of Lagunita, along with another previously unknown city called Tamchen. Both cities are hidden deep in the jungle of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in southeastern Mexico, near the border with Guatemala. The cities flourished around A.D. 600 to 950, near the end of what scholars call the Classic Period of Maya civilization. Among the ruins, archaeologists found plazas and the remains of what are thought to be palaces and stone pyramids up to 65 feet (20 meters) high. The scientists believe there are several other Maya cities in the region that remain to be discovered.

Archaeologists have known of the existence of Lagunita since the 1970′s, when American explorer Eric Von Euw returned from the region with drawings of an ancient Maya city he had discovered. However, Von Euw never published a description or the exact location of his discovery in the vast jungle reserve. Ivan Sprajc and his colleagues of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana were able to determine the location of the lost city of Lagunita as well as Tamchen by examining aerial photographs of the region. The jungle is so thick in this region that even large stone buildings can barely be seen beneath the dense foliage. The team mapped areas at each site that covered around 30 acres (12 hectares). Residential areas surrounding these city centers would have covered even more ground. At Tamchen, scientists found over 30 deep stone chambers, called chultuns, that the Maya used to collect and store rain water, suggesting a sizable population lived in the city.

Ruins of an ancient Maya temple stand at Palenque, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The temple was built about A.D. 650. The Maya civilization reached its height in Mexico and Guatemala during the Classic Period, between around A.D. 250 and 900. Ruins found recently in southeastern Mexico date to that period. (© Ales Liska, Shutterstock)

One building at the main entrance to Lagunita has a facade featuring a doorway in the shape of the mouth of a terrible monster. The facade may represent the entrance to a sacred portion of the city associated with the underworld. The entrance closely resembles a building facade drawn by Von Euw in the 1970’s, so the scientists are certain it is the same site. The team plans to conduct excavations at the site in the future. The excavations may help scholars determine why Maya civilization collapsed at the end of the Classic Period.

Beginning in the A.D. 800′s, the Maya stopped building large pyramids and temples. Over the following decades, they abandoned their major cities in the Guatemala lowlands and other regions. Some experts have linked the collapse to a combination of factors, including overpopulation, disease, exhaustion of natural resources, crop failures, warfare between cities, and the movement of other groups into the Maya area.

Additional World Book articles:

• Archaeology