Archaeologists report that Valeriana contains significant features of a Classic Maya capital ... city near the ...

An analysis of data covering an understudied area has revealed thousands of previously unknown Maya structures.

WIRED spoke with the researchers responsible for the discovery of Valeriana, a lost Maya city in the middle of the jungle of Campeche.

Ruins of cities keep turning up in the forests of central America. How have these structures stayed standing for millennia?

Archaeologists have long known about ancient urban sites in the Maya Lowlands of southern Mexico. But this discovery was somewhat unexpected. Luke Auld-Thomas, an archaeologist at Tulane University, ...

The previous team's aim was to map above-ground ... in the jungles of Guatemala. In 2022, human burial grounds and bullets from Spanish guns were discovered at a Maya city site in the country.

Lasers revealed that the city spanned roughly the same area as Beijing and may have been among the most densely populated in the region.

The newly described city, named Valeriana, features a crowded urban landscape and rural fringes that surpass any known Maya cities found in Belize or Guatemala. Researchers from the US and Mexico ...