Largest, oldest Maya monument suggests importance of communal work
From the ground, it’s impossible to tell that the plateau underfoot is something extraordinary. But from the sky, with laser eyes, and beneath the surface, with radiocarbon dating, it’s clear that it is the largest and oldest Mayan monument ever discovered.
3D Image of the site of Aguada Fenix based on Lidar
Located in Tabasco, Mexico, near the northwestern border of Guatemala, the newly discovered site of Aguada Fénix lurked beneath the surface, hidden by its size and low profile until 2017. The monument measures nearly 4,600 feet long, ranges from 30 to 50 feet high and includes nine wide causeways.
The monument was discovered by an international team led by University of Arizona professors in the School of Anthropology Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, with support from the university’s Agnese Nelms Haury program and under the authorization of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico.
They used lidar—or light detection and ranging— technology, which uses laser-emitting equipment from an airplane. Laser beams penetrate the tree canopy, and their reflections off the ground’s surface reveal the three-dimensional forms of archaeological features. The team then excavated the site and radiocarbon-dated 69 samples of charcoal to determine that it was constructed sometime between 1,000 to 800 B.C. Until now, the Maya site of Ceibal, built in 950 B.C., was the oldest confirmed ceremonial center. This oldest monumental building at Aguada Fénix turned out to be the largest known in the entire Maya history, far exceeding pyramids and palaces of later periods.
The team’s findings are published today in the journal Nature. “Using low-resolution lidar collected by the Mexican government, we noticed this huge platform. Then we did high-resolution lidar and confirmed the presence of a big building,” Inomata said. “This area is developed—it’s not the jungle; people live there—but this site was not known because it is so flat and huge. It just looks like a natural landscape. But with lidar, it pops up as a very well-planned shape.”
The discovery marks a time of major change in Mesoamerica and has several implications, Inomata said. First, archaeologists traditionally thought Maya civilization developed gradually. Until now, it was thought that small Maya villages began to appear between 1000 and 350 B.C., what’s knownNas the Middle Preclassic period, along with the use of pottery and some maize cultivation.
