Imagine discovering a lost city while you are pulling an all-nighter to finish your history paper. That’s what happened to an archeology student studying in Tulane University in Louisiana. Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane spotted the ancient Mayan site in the scans collected by NASA using lidar, a technology that uses airborne lasers to penetrate dense vegetation. The ruins were unknown to archaeologists, but some farmers living in that region of Mexico were aware of the site‘s existence. Luke and his colleagues named the lost city Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon. They estimated the city may have had a population of as many as 50,000 people at its peak between AD 750-850. Researchers expect to discover more ancient Mayan cities in the future. The findings will make the collapse of Mayan civilization even more mysterious: The more people there were, the more difficult it is to explain the massive depopulation later on.

🤨隨著古瑪雅遺址被發現得越多，能解釋文明崩解的真相就越來越遠？

pull an all-nighter 熬夜做作業
lidar 光學雷達掃描儀
doctoral student 博士班學生
scan 掃描
airborne 空氣傳播的
penetrate 滲透
dense vegetation 茂密的植被

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