Archaeologists have uncovered an ancient Mayan city within the Mexican jungle that had remained untouched for greater than a millennium.
The positioning, covered by thick vegetation within the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, has been named Minanbé – which implies ‘there isn’t a path’ in Yucatec Maya.
It was discovered by a team of Mexican and Slovenian specialists, led by archaeologist Dr Ivan Šprajc who has spent three many years researching the region.
He has focused on surveying the Central Maya Lowlands, an enormous archaeological landscape that was home to between nine and 11 million people in the course of the Late Classic period between AD 600 and 900.
The most recent field season, authorised by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), took researchers into the northern sector of the reserve.
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The team was investigating an area west of Chactún, a serious Maya centre first identified by the identical project in 2013, using airborne laser scanning technology often called LiDAR.
To achieve the positioning, archaeologists and native staff from the community of Constitución cleared a 5km route through the forest with machetes before travelling further by all-terrain vehicles and on foot in intense heat.
For Dr Šprajc, the dearth of old logging tracks – known locally as alleyways – proved significant.
‘In comparison with other places where we did surface surveys, access here was way more difficult; nonetheless, within the last three years, that is the primary one we’ve found intact, with no signs of looting. It was a discovery, a fantastic surprise for us.’
He added: ‘That’s why we selected the name Minanbé, which comes from Yucatec Maya ( mina’an , ‘there isn’t a’, and be , ‘path’).
‘Thus, we follow the tradition in Mayan archaeology of naming some sites based on some characteristic of the place or in allusion to the circumstances of the invention.’
Using LiDAR data, researchers had initially identified what seemed to be a 15-hectare settlement concealed beneath the forest cover.
Ground surveys later confirmed the presence of a considerable urban centre featuring plazas, palatial and spiritual structures, terraces and wetlands connected by hydraulic channels.
Archaeologists Atasta Flores Esquivel, Israel Chato López, Quintín Hernández Gómez and Vitan Vujanović took part within the reconnaissance work.
Some of the striking structures is a pyramidal temple standing greater than 13 metres high.
In response to Vujanović, the constructing displays characteristics of the Río Bec architectural style, including finely crafted masonry, smooth façade panels, a steep staircase and ornamental mouldings.
He said: ‘That is the primary time I actually have recorded a temple that’s roughly well-preserved, and a stela still bearing glyphs.’
Researchers also identified Stela 1, a monument engraved with a decapitation scene.
It was the primary monument noticed by the team and forms a part of a set of 14 stelae and altars, several of which contain iconographic imagery and hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Archaeologist Quintín Hernández said the team discovered a line of monuments within the northern section of the positioning. Several positioned on the southern end of a causeway linking the central and north-eastern sectors were cleared for detailed recording.
Using around 500 photographs, researchers created three-dimensional models of every of the 14 monuments. These were analysed by the project’s epigraphist, Octavio Esparza Olguín, who used advanced digital imaging techniques to discover key features despite extensive erosion.
Esparza said a calendrical inscription at the highest of Stela 1 appears to record the date 5 Ajaw, corresponding to AD 849. The monument depicts a figure wielding what appears to be a knife or axe while decapitating one other individual.
‘That is a crucial clue because we will assume that the whole group of monuments, or a few of them, were erected during that period of the Terminal Classic, near the abandonment of the sites within the region, which occurred within the tenth century AD.’
The team also uncovered several round altars and an oblong altar. Their arrangement suggests some can have been deliberately altered in antiquity.
One notable example, often called Monument 6, is broken but preserves hieroglyphic cartouches on its sides and a picture of a ruler wearing a feathered headdress, jewellery and ceremonial dress.
One inscription comprises a part of a Long Count date believed to confer with the late seventh century, potentially making it the oldest recorded monument in the encircling area.
Dr Šprajc said the invention of Minanbé supports existing evidence that the region was heavily transformed for agricultural production in the course of the Late Classic Mayan era.
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