All posts by Archaeology World Team

WORLD

Excitement over wooden shipwreck found in Antigua’s seabed

Excitement over wooden shipwreck found in Antigua’s seabed

“It’s the best thing I’ve found in 31 years of diving,” says Maurice Belgrave, pointing to the spot where a centuries-old shipwreck lay hidden under the water for more than 200 years.

A Treasure is hidden For hundreds of years in the mud
The boat’s timber frame will be analysed to gauge where and when the wood was cut

Here at the Antigua Naval Dockyard, historic anchors, cannons and capstans are on bountiful display, testimony to the pivotal role it played as a safe harbour for Royal Navy warships protecting Britain’s valuable sugar-producing islands. The murky waters around it, however, conceal a wealth of secrets. Over the years, commercial diver Mr Belgrave has found everything from 18th Century tobacco pipes to live cannon balls deep in the sediment beneath.

“Most of the real history is on the seabed,” he tells the BBC. In 2013, a routine job cleaning an anchor chain unearthed his most impressive discovery to date: the remarkably well-preserved remains of a 250-year-old naval vessel.

Maurice Belgrave has been diving in the area for more than three decades

“Whenever I’m down there, I run my hands through the mud,” he explains. “I saw the lumbers and realised it was the skeleton of a real big boat.”

The presence of the 40-metre (130-ft) wooden ship was finally confirmed last month by a team of visiting archaeologists. Not only does its sheer size set it apart from other wrecks around the Caribbean island, but local historians also believe it to be the 1762 Beaumont, a French merchant ship later bought by a private individual, renamed the Lyon and used in the American Revolutionary War.

The mud which kept it concealed just feet below the surface, traversed by hundreds of yachts a year, is credited with keeping it intact, offering archaeologists a veritable time capsule to explore. Historians had long suspected the Beaumont was there – and a hydrographic survey, also in 2013, had given weight to that – but poor visibility made it tricky to locate.

Lack of funds hindered efforts to professionally scour the identified spot until recently when the French and Martinique governments – as well as the US-based Richard Lounsbery Foundation – paid for a visit by a group of international experts. The timing was impeccable too, preceding celebrations for this month’s fifth anniversary of the dockyard’s award of Unesco World Heritage Site status. Dr Reginald Murphy, Antigua’s Unesco representative, says this is a “major historical find”.

The Antigua Naval Dockyard is the only working Georgian dockyard in the Western Hemisphere

“You read about the Age of Sail and the size of the ships, but it’s not until you actually see one that you realise how massive and powerful they were; it’s a way of reaching into history,” he says.

“We have many artefacts and buildings from that era but nothing compared to this. It’s a real touch of reality.”

The six-day excavation revealed the vessel’s measurements to match the dimensions of the 900-ton Beaumont. Further research is required but if it is indeed the Beaumont, it could be the only shipwreck of its kind in the world, explains Antigua-based archaeologist Dr Christopher Waters.

Historians believe the wreck to be the 1762 Beaumont, a heavily armed French merchant ship

The Beaumont was built by the French East India Company, an imperial commercial enterprise founded in 1664 to compete with English and Dutch trading firms in what is today east Asia.

While there are other wrecks of vessels built by the company, there are no known ones with an intact hull, Dr Waters says. Its discovery is comparable to the Mary Rose “in terms of its size and the stories we may be able to tell of it”, he adds.

Leading the underwater team was Jean-Sebastian Guibert, an associate professor at the University of the Antilles in Martinique. He describes finding the ship – using high-tech sonar equipment and a magnetometer – as “like hitting the jackpot”.

Mr Guibert says it is the largest wreck he has seen in 15 years working in the region.

One thing researchers are not expecting to find as investigations continue is a “treasure trove”, Dr Waters says, as the vessel was likely stripped down. Neither will it be raised due to the expense and complexity of doing so.

But the ship could offer new insight into 18th Century wooden ship construction.

As a heavily armed merchant ship, the Beaumont was designed to travel from France to the Indian and Pacific oceans. After the collapse of the French East India Company, it served as a 56-gun warship in the French Navy from 1770 to 1772 before being bought and renamed. It was later captured by HMS Maidstone in 1778 while supporting the Thirteen Colonies in the American War of Independence.

“We know it was brought here; we just don’t know what happened to it,” Dr Waters says. “But it was very badly damaged and probably never left the harbour again.”

The ship’s size means far more funding is needed to continue the research. But its mere existence enhances the profile of the dockyard, the only working Georgian dockyard in the Western Hemisphere and a cornerstone of Antigua’s tourism industry.

For Mr Belgrave, the significance goes deeper still. As historians continue to piece together the stories of the enslaved Africans who built the dockyard 300 years ago and from whom many Antiguans are descended, this particular discovery has a special resonance.

“There’s a sweet music to this one,” he says. “I feel delighted that something so significant was rediscovered by me as an African.”

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

This Gorgeous Ice Cavern Has An Ancient Forest Underneath

This Gorgeous Ice Cavern Has An Ancient Forest Underneath

Mendenhall Glacier is one of the most picturesque places that is situated in Southeast Alaska. It is whoppingly 13.6 miles long. There is a number of ice caves that can be located in this Glacier. Also, an ancient forest was revealed beneath the glacier in the last decade due to rapidly melting ice.

This Gorgeous Ice Cavern Has An Ancient Forest Underneath

Basically, a glacier is a very large amount of snow piled up together and then turned into ice. Sadly, global warming is causing glaciers around the globe to melt at a speed that has never been seen before, and Mendenhall Glacier is a victim too.

Mendenhall Glacier has shrunk 1.75 miles since 1929 and will continue to do so unless there is a proper solution implemented for global warming.

As the glacier is continuously retreating, remains of an ancient forest have been revealed underneath the glacier.

Well, preserved stumps and trunks can be now seen clearly after more than 2000 years.

Some of those trees still have their roots intact to the ground. The preservation is that good! Some of those still have the bark with them. It is quite possible to determine the age of those trees because most of them are in a growth position.

The research team that worked on these trees are calling them spruce or hemlock based on their diameter of the trunk and the trees growing in the region present day.

The Earth has passed different ice ages since its beginning. In those ice ages, glaciers have grown, advanced, and also shrunken and retreated. During those different periods, they send out liquefied ice streams that push aprons of gravel beyond the edge of glaciers. 

A similar thing happened with this uncovered ancient forest; it was sealed in what can be called the Tomb of Gravel.

This melting of ice is something that we should be highly concerned about. But at the same time, we can also spend our time learning about the climate of the old ages thanks to these kinds of events.

ANTARCTICA, WORLD

Remains of 90 million-year-old rainforest discovered under Antarctic ice

Remains of 90 million-year-old rainforest discovered under Antarctic ice

This artist’s illustration shows a young Purussaurus attacking a ground sloth in Amazonia 13 million years ago.

When dinosaurs roamed the Earth 90 million years ago, the planet was much warmer, including Antarctica at the South Pole. But in a surprising twist, researchers have discovered evidence that Antarctica also supported a swampy rainforest at the time, according to a new study.

Researchers captured a slice of the seafloor using a drill rig aboard a polar research vessel on West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea between February and March in 2017. The sediment core sample was taken near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.

CT scans of the sediment core revealed pristine samples of forest soil, pollen, spores and even root systems so well preserved that they could identify cell structures. The soil included examples of pollen from the first flowering plants found this close to the South Pole.

Tina van de Flierdt and Johann Klages work on the sample of ancient soil.

They dated the soil, its fine-grained clay and silt to 90 million years ago. Their study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“During the initial shipboard assessments, the unusual colouration of the sediment layer quickly caught our attention; it clearly differed from the layers above it,” said Johann Klages, study author and geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. “We had found a layer originally formed on land, not in the ocean.”

Scientists know that during the age of the dinosaurs, conditions were warmer. The mid-Cretaceous era, from 80 million to 115 million years ago, was the warmest period for Earth in the past 140 million years, the researchers said. The surface of the sea likely reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in tropical areas. And the sea level was 558 feet higher than it is now.

But there has been no evidence about what conditions were like at the South Pole. This is the southernmost sample of the Cretaceous period collected so far, revealing what Antarctica was like between 83 and 93 million years ago.

This map shows how the continents were arranged 90 million years ago. A red X marks the drill site.

“The preservation of this 90-million-year-old forest is exceptional, but even more surprising is the world it reveals,” said Tina van de Flierdt, study co-author and professor in the Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering. “Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”

Sediment cores can record a lot of information about climate, acting as a time capsule for average temperature, rainfall and vegetation.

“To get a better idea of what the climate was like in this warmest phase of the Cretaceous, we first assessed the climatic conditions under which the plants’ modern descendants live,” Klages said.

The findings paint an unusual portrait of the South Pole, where West Antarctica’s coast was free of the ice caps that cover it now and swampy rainforests covered the area instead.

The average daytime temperature was 53 degrees Fahrenheit. While that sounds mild to us, this is incredibly warm for a location near the South Pole, where current daytime temperatures hover between negative 76 degrees to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. And, as the researchers point out, it’s only two degrees warmer than Germany at the moment in March.

The Antarctic ice sheet didn’t exist at the time. River and swamp temperatures were likely around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And the Antarctic summer temperature was likely around 66 degrees Fahrenheit. They estimate rainfall reached about 97 inches per year — about the same as Wales today.

The forests were similar to those now found on New Zealand’s South Island, the researchers said.

But how did Antarctica sustain temperate rainforests without year-round sunlight? Even millions of years ago, the South Pole endured what’s known as a four-month polar night when no sunlight can be seen.
The researchers investigated the levels of carbon dioxide that would have been in the atmosphere at the time.

They found atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher than expected based on existing climate models. Carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the atmosphere and the planet, creating a greenhouse effect by trapping heat from the sun.

The high amount of carbon dioxide, combined with an ice sheet-less Antarctica covered in vegetation created the right conditions for a rainforest environment.

“We now know that there could easily be four straight months without sunlight in the Cretaceous. But because the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the climate around the South Pole was nevertheless temperate, without ice masses,” said Torsten Bickert, study co-author and geoscientist at the University of Bremen’s MARUM research centre.

But the scientists still don’t know what caused Antarctica to cool off enough to form ice sheets, which leads them to their next challenge.

ASIA, IRAN, WORLD

Massive Ancient Wall Discovered in Iran Belongs to Unknown Ancient Civilization

Massive Ancient Wall Discovered in Iran Belongs to Unknown Ancient Civilization

Archaeologists have identified the remains of a stone wall in Iran about the length of the famous Hadrian’s Wall that was built across England by the Romans. 

The wall, which extends about 71 miles (115 kilometres), was found in Sar Pol-e Zahab County in western Iran.

“With an estimated volume of approximately one million cubic meters [35,314,667 cubic feet] of stone, it would have required significant resources in terms of workforce, materials and time,” wrote Sajjad Alibaigi, an assistant professor of Iranian Archaeology at Razi University in Kermanshah, Iran, in an article published online in the journal Antiquity.

This satellite image was taken on July 31, 2019, by the WorldView-2 satellite. The red arrows show a surviving section of the Gawri Wall.

The structure runs north-south from the Bamu Mountains in the north to an area near Zhaw Marg village in the south, Alibaigi wrote. 

Pottery found along the wall suggests that it was built sometime between the fourth century B.C. and sixth century A.D., Alibaigi wrote. “Remnants of structures, now destroyed, are visible in places along the wall.

These may have been associated turrets [small towers] or buildings,” wrote Alibaigi, noting that the wall itself is made from “natural local materials, such as cobbles and boulders, with gypsum mortar surviving in places.”

Though the wall’s existence was unknown to archaeologists, those living near it have long known about the wall, calling it the “Gawri Wall,” Alibaigi wrote. 

The Gawri Wall in the western mountains of Sar Pol-e Zahab; arrows indicate the wall’s line.

A spokesperson for Antiquity said that since Alibaigi’s paper was published, the journal has learned that another group of archaeologists carried out earlier research on the wall; that research was never published in a journal. 

Mysterious wall

Archaeologists are not certain who built the structure, and for what purpose. Because of the poor preservation of the barrier, the scientists aren’t even sure of its exact width and height. Their best estimates put it at 13 feet (4 meters) wide and about 10 feet (3 m) high, he said.

“It is unclear whether it was defensive or symbolic,” wrote Alibaigi, noting that it might mark the border for an ancient empire, perhaps the Parthians (who flourished between 247 B.C. and A.D. 224) or the Sassanians (A.D. 224-651).

Both empires in western Iran built large castles, cities and irrigation systems, so it’s likely that both had the resources to build the Gawri Wall, wrote Alibaigi. 

The newly discovered Gawri Wall is not the only ancient long wall in Iran. Archaeologists have previously found similar structures in the north and northeastern parts of Iran. Those may have had a defensive purpose. 

Alibaigi hopes to carry out more research on the Gawri Wall in the future, he wrote. He did not respond to requests for comment. 

EUROPE, WORLD

The Bosnian Pyramids: One of the Greatest Finds ever

The Bosnian Pyramids: One of the Greatest Finds ever

It’s either one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of our time, or man has made a giant pyramid out of a molehill.

In the wake of recent news that evidence of colossal pyramids had been found in the small Bosnian town of Visoko, many in the archaeological community are speaking out and dismissing both the discovery and the man who made it, businessman Semir Osmanagic.

Some critics have gone as far as to call the pyramid an absurd publicity stunt.

But Osmanagic stands by his claim.

“They are jealous,” Osmanagic told LiveScience in a telephone interview. “These people are going crazy because they’ve been teaching students that these [Bosnians] were cavemen and all of a sudden they are finding complex structures here.”

Something is there

Osmanagic first noticed the irregularly shaped hills on a trip to the town, located 18 miles north of Sarajevo. Preliminary digging uncovered mysterious slabs in a stone not native to the immediate area.

Further excavation of the hills in April of this year, along with the incredible announcement that one would be much larger than the great pyramid of Cheops at Giza, Egypt, prompted the most recent news release.

Satellite images, thermal analysis and radar studies have been performed at the site, all independently confirming the existence of pyramid-shaped architecture, according to Osmanagic. More importantly, he said, the tests suggest that the layout could not have been man-made.

Photos released by the media and made available on Osmanagic’s website show a series of stone plates buried just beneath the top layer of soil and vegetation. Despite the tests and pictures, some archaeologists aren’t convinced by his claims.

“Clearly there are voids or something similar in the rock, but that is a long way from saying these are man-made,” said Anthony Harding, president of the European Association of Archaeologists.

The pyramids could be upwards of 12,000 years old, Osmanagic has deduced, based on geological knowledge of the area. That is a main point of contention for specialists concerned with archaeology in the Balkan region.

“Europe was in the late Upper Paleolithic at this point and no one was building anything except flimsy huts,” Harding said.

Workers at Visoko are spending this dig season sending twelve probing wells into different spots on the hill. Radiocarbon dating on organic material taken from the site may be performed as early as this fall, Osmanagic said.

No formal training

Whatever the outcome of the tests, critics also charge that the media did not do enough research into the background of Osmanagic, who has no formal archaeological training.

“A self-described archaeologist, who believes the Maya and others are descended from Atlanteans … has been accepted as a legitimate researcher by many news outlets,” writes Archaeology magazine online editor Mark Rose, in reference to Osmanagic’s somewhat unorthodox interpretation of the Mayan culture found in his book, “The World of the Maya” (Gorgias Press, Euphrates imprint, 2005).

The Bosnians spent fifteen years studying pyramids throughout the world and much of that time was in Mexico and Central America.

Many of those conducting the fieldwork at Visoko are local volunteers, not professionals. Experts worry that the often arduous scientific process is being eschewed in favour of some quick publicity for the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been hungry for the good press after years of civil conflict dogged it in the 1990s.

“It adds insult to injury when rich outsiders can come in and spend large sums pursuing their absurd theories (the construction of a colossal pyramid so large that it dwarfs even those of Egypt or Mesoamerica? 12,000 years ago?), in ways that most other countries would never countenance,” Harding wrote in an April 25 letter to the editor of The London Times.

Work is slated to continue at Visoko, by which time Osmanagic believes the research will have vindicated his theories. Meanwhile, he isn’t worried that what he’s found does not mesh with current thinking.

“We laugh at the people who said that the world was flat, and they laughed at Galileo,” he said. “The history books will just have to be rewritten from scratch, that’s all.”

Visiting tourists can dine on pyramid-shaped pizza, stay in the Motel Pyramid of the Sun or purchase pyramid-themed statues, wood carvings and piggy banks.
AFRICA, WORLD

The most dangerous place on Earth 100 million years ago

The most dangerous place on Earth 100 million years ago

The world feels like a scary place these days, but a recently published paleontology study helps put things in perspective. A review of 100 years of fossil evidence reveals that 100 million years ago a portion of the Sahara Desert was arguably the most dangerous place on the planet, with a concentration of large predatory dinosaurs unmatched in any comparable modern terrestrial ecosystem.

The analysis of fossils from the so-called Kem Kem beds — rock formations in southeastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, dating back to the Cretaceous period — shows the presence in the area of large scale carnivorous dinosaurs, flying predatory reptiles, and crocodile-like hunters, all living together in what was at the time a river system full of very large fish, rather than a desert.

The creatures found in the Kem Kem beds roamed the Earth some 95 million years before early humans appeared on the planet, but “if you had a time machine and could travel to this place, you probably wouldn’t last very long,” said palaeontologist Nizar Ibrahim, lead author of the study.

Ibrahim told CNN that the Kem Kem ecosystem was “a really mysterious place, ecologically speaking,” since typical ecosystems present a larger number of plant-eating animals than predators, and predators themselves will come in a variety of sizes, with one larger predator being dominant.

In the Kem Kem, fossils of predators outnumber those of plant-eating dinosaurs, and several of the predators living together in the area, such as the Carcharodontosaurus, the Spinosaurus, the Abelisaur and the Deltadromeus, were as big as a Tyrannosaurus rex.

This is unusual “even for dinosaur standards,” according to Ibrahim, since the T. rex, which was present in North America tens of millions of years later, was “the undisputed ruler of its ancient ecosystem.”

This is unusual “even for dinosaur standards,” according to Ibrahim, since the T. rex, which was present in North America tens of millions of years later, was “the undisputed ruler of its ancient ecosystem.”

An abelisaur, a predatory dinosaur, rests while several pterosaurs fight over leftovers from a carcass. Artwork by Davide Bonadonna, under the scientific supervision of Simone Maganuco and Nizar Ibrahim.

It is unlikely that the large predators in the Kem Kem ate one another.

What’s more realistic, according to Ibrahim, is that they ate the abundant and supersized fish present in the area — fish like coelacanths “the size of a car” and sawfish that could reach 25 feet in length.

What did some of the large predators in the Kem Kem ecosystem look like?

Matthew Lamanna, a palaeontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, said the meat-eating Carcharodontosaurus would resemble a Tyrannosaurus rex in shape and size, but “with a proportionally narrower head, somewhat longer arms, and three fingers (rather than two) on each hand.”

The even larger Spinosaurus would look somewhat like “the unholy love child of Carcharodontosaurus and a crocodile,” said Lamanna, with a crocodile-like skull and teeth and a body that is a mix of both, but with longer forelimbs. A fish-eating water creature, the Spinosaurus’ most distinctive feature is “a six-foot-tall sail running the length of its back.”
The Abelisaur would be smaller than a Spinosaurus, and “vaguely bulldog-faced,” according to Lamanna.

The Deltadromeus, known only from an incomplete skeleton, was also presumably similar in size to a T. rex, said Lamanna. According to Ibrahim, the Deltadromeus presents very slender proportions in its legs and a very long tail, and it remains mysterious in the absence of fossil evidence of its neck and skull.

Among the other species present in the Kem Kem were “predatory crocodiles that would be at least as big as any that are alive today” and flying reptiles like Pterosaurs “that would dwarf any modern flying bird,” Lamanna told CNN.

The study of the Kem Kem beds carried out by Ibrahim and a group of international researchers across the US, UK, Europe and Africa draws attention to the importance of learning more about the palaeontology of Africa, among other areas of the Southern Hemisphere.
Forgotten continent

“Africa, in many ways, remains palaeontology’s forgotten continent,” said Ibrahim, and this study “addresses this bias.” Even though the accessibility of evidence and its degree of preservation in the African continent varies widely, there remains so much more to be discovered in Africa.

What the Kem Kem research shows is that African ecosystems “do not simply replicate the ones we know from North America, or Europe, or other better-known places,” and it also reveals clues about what happens to life when dramatic changes in climate come into play.

Evidence in the rock layers in the Kem Kem Group shows that the river system where predators and large fish thrived eventually became flooded with seawater, turning the area into a warm, shallow sea. Fast forward to today and that same area is in the largest hot desert in the world.

Palaeontology can help us understand “the long term consequences of biodiversity loss, which we are experiencing right now,” said Ibrahim.

ASIA, EUROPE, RUSSIA, WORLD

Extremely Well-Preserved Woolly Rhino Is Discovered in Siberia’s Melting Permafrost

Extremely Well-Preserved Woolly Rhino Is Discovered in Siberia’s Melting Permafrost

Melting permafrost in the icy north of Siberia is revealing a veritable graveyard of frozen prehistoric animals.

In recent decades, locals and scientists in the Russian Republic of Yakutia have uncovered the ancient carcasses of two cave lion cubs, a bison, a horse, a baby woolly rhinoceros, and the most intact woolly mammoth ever found. 

As climate change continues to pull back this crucial carpet of ice, we’re bound to uncover more. Close to where the world’s first and, reportedly only, the baby woolly rhino was found, residents have now discovered another of its kind, and this time, the carcass is almost 80 per cent intact.

Extremely Well-Preserved Woolly Rhino Is Discovered in Siberia’s Melting Permafrost
Extremely Well-Preserved Woolly Rhino Is Discovered in Siberia’s Melting Permafrost

Preserved in ice for tens of thousands of years, this juvenile woolly rhino still has its thick, reddish-brown hair, all of its limbs, and most of its internal organs, including its intestines.

The rhino’s horn was found next to the carcass

To date, this furry little creature is the best-preserved woolly rhino found in the Arctic Yakutia and may even be the most intact ever discovered anywhere in the world.

“The young rhino was between three and four years old and lived separately from its mother when it died, most likely by drowning,” palaeontologist Valery Plotnikov from the Russian Academy of Sciences, who made the first description of the find, told The Siberian Times. 

“The gender of the animal is still unknown. We are waiting for the radiocarbon analyses to define when it lived, the most likely range of dates is between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago.” 

The hair on this long-dead creature might look patchy and bedraggled now, but it speaks of a much thicker and luscious past. Looking at the layout of the hairs, scientists think the animal most likely died with its summer coat, although further lab analysis is needed. 

To do that, however, more ice needs to form. Found downstream of the Tirekhtyakh River in August, the rhino carcass is in a particularly tricky spot to access.

The carcass was found by a local resident on the banks of a river in eastern Siberia in August

Yakutia’s vast, remote territory only has a few roads, and in the summertime, many places are only accessible by boat or by air. Not until winter does things start to open up.

This is when a network of temporary ice roads begin to form, allowing truckers to transport goods to the region’s northernmost settlements.

Yet, even without a closer examination of the carcass, it’s clear this find is a big one. Previously, the only other woolly rhino found in this region was an even younger baby named Sasha, and her hair was more strawberry blonde.

Both discoveries have Plotnikov thinking woolly rhinos were already adapted to the freezing climate from a young age. Marks on the horns of this recent one suggest it foraged for food.

“There are soft tissues in the back of the carcass, possibly genitals and part of the intestine,” he told RT. 

“This makes it possible to study the excreta, which will allow us to reconstruct the paleoenvironment of that period.”

The team already has plans to send the rhino to the capital of Yakutia for further analysis. The carcass will then be sent to Sweden, where researchers are working to sequence the genomes of multiple rhinos to better understand their history and why they went extinct.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Maya Farmers May Have Planned for Population Growth

Maya Farmers May Have Planned for Population Growth

For years, experts in climate science and ecology have held up the agricultural practices of the ancient Maya as prime examples of what not to do. 

Maya Farmers May Have Planned for Population Growth
The research team surveyed a small area in the Western Maya Lowlands situated at today’s border between Mexico and Guatemala, shown in context here.

“There’s a narrative that depicts the Maya as people who engaged in unchecked agricultural development,” said Andrew Scherer, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown University. “The narrative goes: The population grew too large, the agriculture scaled up, and then everything fell apart.”

But a new study, authored by Scherer, students at Brown and scholars at other institutions, suggests that that narrative doesn’t tell the full story. Using drones and lidar, a remote sensing technology, a team led by Scherer and Charles Golden of Brandeis University surveyed a small area in the Western Maya Lowlands situated at today’s border between Mexico and Guatemala.

Scherer’s lidar survey — and, later, boots-on-the-ground surveying — revealed extensive systems of sophisticated irrigation and terracing in and outside the region’s towns, but no huge population booms to match.

The findings demonstrate that between 350 and 900 A.D., some Maya kingdoms were living comfortably, with sustainable agricultural systems and no demonstrated food insecurity. “It’s exciting to talk about the really large populations that the Maya maintained in some places; to survive for so long with such density was a testament to their technological accomplishments,” Scherer said.

“But it’s important to understand that that narrative doesn’t translate across the whole of the Maya region. People weren’t always living cheek to jowl. Some areas that had the potential for agricultural development were never even occupied.”

The research group’s findings were published in the journal Remote Sensing. When Scherer’s team embarked on the lidar survey, they weren’t necessarily attempting to debunk long-held assumptions about Maya agricultural practices. Rather, their primary motivation was to learn more about the infrastructure of a relatively understudied region.

While some parts of the western Maya area are well studied, such as the well-known site of Palenque, others are less understood, owing to the dense tropical canopy that has long hidden ancient communities from view.  It wasn’t until 2019, in fact, that Scherer and colleagues uncovered the kingdom of Sak T’zi’, which archaeologists had been trying to find for decades.

Lidar scans of the research area revealed the relative density of structures in Piedras Negras, La Mar and Lacanjá Tzeltal, providing hints at these cities’ respective populations and food needs.

The team chose to survey a rectangle of land connecting three Maya kingdoms: Piedras Negras, La Mar and Sak Tz’i’, whose political capital was centred on the archaeological site of  Lacanjá Tzeltal.  Despite being roughly 15 miles away from one another as the crow flies, these three urban centres had very different population sizes and governing power, Scherer said.

“Today, the world has hundreds of different nation-states, but they’re not really each other’s equals in terms of the leverage they have in the geopolitical landscape,” Scherer said. “This is what we see in the Maya empire as well.”

Scherer explained that all three kingdoms were governed by an ajaw, or a lord — positioning them as equals, in theory. But Piedras Negras, the largest kingdom, was led by a k’uhul ajaw, a “holy lord,” a special honorific not claimed by the lords of La Mar and Sak Tz’i’. La Mar and Sak Tz’i’ weren’t exactly equal peers, either: While La Mar was much more populous than the Sak T’zi’ capital Lacanjá Tzeltal, the latter was more independent, often switching alliances and never appearing to be subordinate to other kingdoms, suggesting it had greater political autonomy.

The lidar survey showed that, despite their differences, these three kingdoms boasted one major similarity: agriculture that yielded a food surplus.

“What we found in the lidar survey points to strategic thinking on the Maya’s part in this area,” Scherer said.

“We saw evidence of long-term agricultural infrastructure in an area with relatively low population density — suggesting that they didn’t create some crop fields late in the game as a last-ditch attempt to increase yields, but rather that they thought a few steps ahead.”

The lidar — along with boots-on-the-ground surveying (left) and aerial photography (right) — showed evidence of expansive irrigation channels across the region. The depression with dark soil at the left shows the remains of an ancient channel.

In all three kingdoms, the lidar revealed signs of what the researchers call “agricultural intensification” — the modification of land to increase the volume and predictability of crop yields. Agricultural intensification methods in these Maya kingdoms, where the primary crop was maize, included building terraces and creating water management systems with dams and channelled fields. Penetrating through the often-dense jungle, the lidar showed evidence of extensive terracing and expansive irrigation channels across the region, suggesting that these kingdoms were not only prepared for population growth but also likely saw food surpluses every year.

“It suggests that by the Late Classic Period, around 600 to 800 A.D., the area’s farmers were producing more food than they were consuming,” Scherer said. “It’s likely that much of the surplus food was sold at urban marketplaces, both as producer and as part of prepared foods like tamales and gruel, and used to pay tribute, a tax of sorts, to local lords.”

Scherer said he hopes the study provides scholars with a more nuanced view of the ancient Maya — and perhaps even offers inspiration for members of the modern-day agricultural sector who are looking for sustainable ways to grow food for an ever-growing global population. Today, he said, significant parts of the region are being cleared for cattle ranching and palm oil plantations. But in areas where people still raise corn and other crops, they report that they have three harvests a year — and it’s likely that those high yields may be due in part to the channelling and other modifications that the ancient Maya made to the landscape. 

“In conversations about contemporary climate or ecological crises, the Maya are often brought up as a cautionary tale: ‘They screwed up; we don’t want to repeat their mistakes,’” Scherer said. “But maybe the Maya were more forward-thinking than we give them credit for. Our survey shows there’s a good argument to be made that their agricultural practices were very much sustainable.”

Aside from Scherer and Golden, study authors include Brown PhD students Mark Agostini, Morgan Clark, Joshua Schnell and Bethany Whitlock; recent Brown PhD graduates Mallory Matsumoto, now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Alejandra Roche Recinos, now a visiting assistant professor at Reed College; and researchers from McMaster University and the University of Florida. The research was funded in part by the Alphawood Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.