ALBERT: I should be just a few feet away from the edge of this thing,
but you can't even see it.
We're in the thickest jungle I've ever been in,
and yet it's just a stone's throw away
from the iconic city of Tikal.
Maybe this is it.
I can see this rise right here.
I think I'm standing on this pyramid right here.
I don't know what to say.
I mean we're here right like within a few hundred feet of the main site of Tikal.
And now we're standing on what the archaeologists have just recently
identified as a possible pyramid.
A newly discovered pyramid right at the heart of Tikal,
one of the most famous Maya cities of all,
revealed for the very first time, by technology.
I'm Albert Lin...
Down there, in the wild and the jungle,
the discoveries just keep coming.
Engineer and National Geographic explorer.
The frontier of the Maya world is actually right under our feet.
I'm on a mission to uncover the secrets of one of the
world's most mysterious ancient civilizations,
the Maya.
And right now, technology is revealing a whole new story,
using LiDAR mapping that can see through
dense jungle like an X-ray.
Okay, are you ready to see it without the trees?
More than 60,000 man-made structures.
TOM: This is the most important development in Maya archaeology in a 100 years.
ALBERT: Brought to light in an incredible new treasure map.
ARCHAEOLOGIST: Very narrow.
ALBERT: Now, armed with the new map.
(speaking Spanish).
ALBERT: Some of the world's most intrepid archaeologists...
LAILA: It's going to be dangerous.
ALBERT: Are taking on the jungle.
FRANCISCO: We have a skeleton.
ALBERT: In search of its secrets.
FRANCISCO: It's a sun god.
ALBERT: All on a quest
to rewrite the astonishing story of the Maya.
The dense jungles of Northern Guatemala.
Right down there archaeologist are revealing pyramids, tombs,
even entire cities that have been lost
for thousands of years.
These ancient cities were once kingdoms,
with Maya rulers of unimaginable power.
This time, I'm on a search to uncover the forgotten kings and queens of the Maya.
I'll be following divers as they search for a sacred cave
beneath the great city of Chichen Itza.
I'll be taking on the jungle to hunt down
one of the biggest Maya finds of all time.
Think about how many backs where whipped to make this thing.
And I'll be seeing stunning treasures.
Oh, yes, there is a painted pot.
Unearthed from deep within an ancient tomb.
Archaeologist and National Geographic explorer, Francisco Estrada-Belli,
is battling through dense Guatemalan jungle.
FRANCISCO: There's this huge mud pit.
Might have to push.
ALBERT: He's heading for remote Maya ruins
to search for the tombs of ancient kings.
Francisco is exploring an ancient city called Holmul in Northern Guatemala.
Over 17 years of field work he's unearthed stunning royal treasures.
And he knows there's more to discover.
Because this lavishly carved wall
contains the story of undiscovered Maya kings
who ruled Holmul 1500 years ago.
FRANCISCO: What we see in the center is the portrait of a Maya king.
In Maya belief, kings when they die, after a while they are reborn as sun gods,
and that's exactly what we see here.
He's rising from the sacred mountain wearing the bird headdress of the sun god.
ALBERT: And there's an inscription, revealing
the secret history of these god-like kings.
FRANCISCO: The most astonishing piece of information came from
this band at the bottom, which has an entire king
list for the site, up until the year 600.
ALBERT: Beneath the central king a series of names of five kings,
the founding fathers of a royal dynasty that would reign here for over 400 years.
Each great Maya city was its own kingdom ruling over
neighboring settlements and the land around them.
In all, these kingdoms dominated a massive part of what is now central America,
stretching from Honduras to Southern Mexico.
Ever since discovering the carved wall,
Francisco has been searching for the tombs of the five Holmul kings.
Finding any royal tomb is rare.
Many have disintegrated over time in the harsh environment of the jungle.
And others are found long destroyed by looters hunting for treasure.
And yet, over years of excavation,
Francisco has already found two of the Holmul kings.
And right now he thinks he's closing in on another.
FRANCISCO: So I found the burial of the last one
and I found the burial of his father,
now I need to find the other three,
and that will be incredibly awesome.
And not because it's a tomb and, you know, it's got some glamour,
but it's because it's history.
ALBERT: Before these amazing royal discoveries,
Francisco had no idea that Holmul had been so important.
It seemed much smaller than other great Maya cities.
But now Holmul is being revealed in a whole new way,
by the LiDAR map.
In San Diego, where I work,
I've been given very special access
to explore the new LiDAR data on a giant scale.
Today, I'm being joined by Francisco and his fellow project leader,
Marcello Canuto, to see what the LiDAR reveals about Holmul.
This is Holmul?
FRANCISCO: What you would see if you flew over this area on a helicopter or an airplane.
ALBERT: The new map is a result of a massive survey
charting over 800 square miles of jungle,
bringing together an international consortium of experts.
It's called the Pacunum LiDAR Initiative.
The forest is scanned by lasers from the air,
and billions of reflected pulses
enable engineers to expose the hidden jungle floor.
From above, without LiDAR, we see only trees.
Switch it on, and an entire ancient world appears.
This new map is fully revealing Holmul for the very first time.
Let's remove the trees.
Wow.
Stripping away the trees reveals features in the landscape with straight edges,
structures built by the Maya over 1,000 years ago.
FRANCISCO: There's some ceremonial centers, there's big architecture,
those are palaces at the top of the hill, and there are fortifications behind them.
We knew almost nothing about this, and I have been
digging and surveying this area for 17 years.
ALBERT: Before the LiDAR we only knew about a small fraction of Holmul.
Now the city matches the might and majesty of its rulers
with hundreds of buildings newly revealed.
So you expanded this by orders of magnitude?
FRANCISCO: Yes, the LiDAR did.
ALBERT: Unbelievable.
Back in Holmul, Francisco enters a pyramid that he
suspects contains undiscovered royal tombs.
Digging deeper with archaeologist Berenice Vasquez,
he's looking for signs of hidden chambers.
FRANCISCO: More ceramics.
ALBERT: It's cramped, brutally hot work, and after so many years working here,
Francisco knows it's often fraught with failure.
FRANCISCO: You can never tell what the Maya do.
They sure played a lot of tricks to me over the years.
This wouldn't be the first time I find a burial full of rocks.
ALBERT: But then in a shallow pit...
FRANCISCO: This is an obsidian blade.
It's glass, volcanic glass.
It's very sharp.
I almost cut myself.
ALBERT: The blade is razor sharp for a reason.
The Maya would have used it to draw blood for an offering.
FRANCISCO: You could puncture your skin and draw a little bit of blood
and collect it on some paper and then burn it
and send it off to the gods in a cloud of smoke.
ALBERT: The blade is also a clue that he could be close to a burial.
Then teasing through layers of undisturbed dirt,
there's a discovery.
FRANCISCO: We have two fingers.
ALBERT: Francisco has discovered human remains.
Berenice delicately excavates deeper.
And then...
FRANCISCO: We have a skeleton.
ALBERT: It is a burial.
FRANCISCO: It looks like it's in a fetal position,
so the knees are up against the chest.
I can see parts of the skull, I can see some leg bones,
and I can see some ribs.
ALBERT: The location of the skeleton leaves Francisco in no doubt it must be royal.
FRANCISCO: It looks like the shape of the pelvis suggests that this was
a female individual, a queen or someone closely related to a queen.
ALBERT: A Maya queen who lived around 1500 years ago,
and the discovery leads Francisco to think
there could be more intact tombs nearby.
FRANCISCO: The location is right for a royal person,
but we also have another burial on this other side.
ALBERT: Where there's the burial of a Maya queen, there could also be a king.
FRANCISCO: The burial could be the most important we have found yet
because it's in the main location at the site.
It's at the very top of the biggest pyramid,
so this could be one of the kings we've been looking for,
one of the kings that are listed in the Holmul frieze inscription,
so I'm really hopeful.
ALBERT: But the second possible tomb will have to wait for next day's dig.
Just 25 miles to the west of Holmul is the ancient city of Tikal,
one of the greatest Maya capitals.
Tikal city center has been restored and studied by
archaeologists for over a century.
Experts thought they knew Tikal inside out.
But even here secrets are being revealed by the new LiDAR map.
Now, archaeologists Tom Garrison and Francisco
are seeing how LiDAR is revealing Tikal.
So this is the great site of Tikal.
TOM: This is how we're used to seeing it.
You can see the trees.
You can see some stuff poking through where it's been cleared.
ALBERT: Let's remove the trees. Ready?
TOM: Okay.
ALBERT: Wow.
TOM: Yeah, so...
ALBERT: Right.
TOM: It's a lot bigger.
ALBERT: The LiDAR map slices through the jungle revealing that this great city is far
bigger than anyone had ever realized,
helping archaeologists to identify
thousands of newly discovered buildings.
And it's also uncovered something else even more extraordinary.
FRANCISCO: That's the Great Wall of Tikal.
It's kilometers long, and it goes up and down the hills, through the drainages.
ALBERT: This fine line revealed by LiDAR is, in fact, a colossal wall stretching
over 15 miles that may even surround the entire city.
FRANCISCO: In some places it is 9 meters tall, so
it will be a formidable defense feature.
TOM: This is Tikal putting up boundaries against their nearest neighbors.
ALBERT: The wall is so long it even continues beyond the edge of the LiDAR survey.
TOM: It's so massive that it runs off of our data,
both to the East and the West.
We thought that we had captured the whole city when we flew LiDAR over this area.
And the wall shows that, no, they were a bigger kingdom than we thought.
ALBERT: It just kind of reminds me of the Great Wall of China,
right, how much human effort went into building something of this scale.
I want to investigate the Great Wall of Tikal myself,
to understand how something so massive
needed technology to fully reveal it.
So I'm taking the LiDAR map into the field.
So right now I'm headed up this little road, headed north from Tikal.
And at some point I'm going to bisect this long linear feature.
From above it kind of looks like a road.
But on closer inspection you realize that it's not a road.
You think it's a massive ancient wall.
We reach a place where the map shows that the ancient wall should cross our road.
With all the trees there's nothing to be seen.
But I'm hoping to reveal the wall using technology.
We're at the north end of the Tikal area,
and we've taken the LiDAR data and we've put it on an
overlay of this geographical location right here,
and all of a sudden you get an augmented reality map,
where you can see the road,
see, this is the road that we're on, without the trees.
Then all of a sudden,
just going off in to the distance, there's this feature.
Even using my augmented reality model the wall leaves only a faint trace.
But it is enough for me to follow,
which means bushwhacking into the wild jungle.
They have big guns.
ALBERT: It's for jaguars?
ALBERT: Less than four miles from the center of the great Maya city of Tikal,
I'm looking for one of the biggest things the Maya ever built,
a giant city wall.
After centuries of erosion, and in this dense jungle it's almost invisible.
But the LiDAR data reveals I'm walking right next to it.
I mean it's so subtle.
This rise right here, and then this gully.
And you'd miss it, I mean you could really miss it, just walking through the jungle.
But viewed on the LiDAR map the scale is astonishing.
Once up to three stories high, it would have run for miles.
An incredible engineering effort built entirely by hand.
Think about how many backs were whipped to make this thing.
I mean it looks subtle from here, right, but there's nothing subtle about it.
Surrounded by deep jungle without LiDAR the true scale of the
Great Wall of Tikal might have remained hidden forever.
Almost 300 miles to the north of Tikal in Mexico is another great Maya site,
the city of Chichen Itza.
Like Tikal, these stunningly restored pyramids astonish thousands of visitors.
And Chichen Itza might also hide a secret of its own.
One that Mexican dive archaeologist and National Geographic explorer,
Guillermo de Anda, is on a mission to uncover.
Recent scientific scans suggest there might be a cavernous void
directly below the most important and sacred
pyramid at the heart of the city.
And Guillermo believes it could be an undiscovered sacred cave.
His quest is to find it.
ALBERT: This entire region is riddled with flooded underground caves,
with hundreds of openings called cenotes.
The Maya believed these were portals to the underworld, a realm of their gods.
Building this pyramid over a sacred cenote would have forged a powerful link
between the kings of Chichen Itza and the
spirit world if Guillermo's theory is correct.
ALBERT: No-one's allowed to dig under such a historic building.
So Guillermo's taking a different approach.
He's exploring the caves surrounding Chichen Itza to see if he can find a tunnel
that will lead into the cave beneath the pyramid.
ALBERT: Diver Alessandro Reato begins to rappel into a secret cenote nearby.
(yelling).
ALBERT: Alessandro is in trouble.
He's kicked a nest of wasps and has been badly stung in the face.
He needs an emergency shot of adrenaline.
Crisis over, the team makes a second attempt.
These caves run for hundreds of miles under the jungle,
and most have never been explored.
Guillermo is looking for connections that might lead him to the cave
under Chichen Itza's Great Pyramid.
He leads the team to an opening just above the water line.
ALBERT: Before Guillermo, no archaeologist had ever explored here.
ALBERT: But there are clues that someone's been here,
the ancient Maya, centuries ago.
ALBERT: Torches discarded by the ancient Maya litter the floor.
And there are tool marks on the wall.
Guillermo has discovered a mine, carved out by the Maya.
ALBERT: Mining here would have been deeply symbolic.
The rock ground to make cement used to construct the soaring pyramids of Chichen Itza,
it forged a powerful link between the city and the sacred underworld.
ALBERT: Finding an underground Maya mine is a remarkable discovery.
But Guillermo's on a greater quest,
to discover a sacred cavern beneath Chichen Itza.
Continuing his search, he dives into the flooded parts of the cave.
As he searches for hidden passages,
suddenly, out of the darkness...
ALBERT: At the bottom of a flooded cavern, a human skeleton.
A sacrificial offering,
made by the Maya to appease the gods.
Further on, a particularly grizzly result of Maya ritual,
a perfectly cut hole in the top of a skull.
This victim was turned into a human incense burner.
Guillermo leaves everything in place, the archaeology
safely preserved in these still waters.
These are astonishing finds, but Guillermo still wants to discover a passage
towards the suspected cave beneath Chichen Itza's pyramid.
This time though, there are no openings.
Guillermo's search must continue into other cenotes yet to be explored.
New discoveries are transforming the story of the great Maya rulers,
and now experts are close to unlocking the secret mythology of the very first Maya kings.
And the origin of their obsession with the gods.
US archaeologists, Heather Hurst and David Stuart are grappling with
thousands of smashed fragments of a remarkable piece of ancient art.
Heather was part of the team that found the fragments nearly 20 years ago.
They belong to a series of painted walls, found deep inside an ancient temple,
that tell the story of how the world and the first Maya kings came to be.
The discovery was made in an ancient Maya city called San Bartolo.
Ever since, Heather and David have been slowly piecing together
the shattered fragments.
HEATHER: It truly has taken us years just to physically join the fragments.
Even though we knew they went together, one by one.
ALBERT: Heather has studied San Bartolo since 2001.
Now, for the very first time, she's about to see the city fully revealed
by LiDAR on a giant scale.
Let's just remove the trees.
HEATHER: Wow, that's ridiculous.
You can see it all.
Like you just you see a city that's connected to its landscape.
ALBERT: Before the LiDAR, no-one knew how connected
San Bartolo was to other Maya kingdoms.
Now that's completed changed.
HEATHER: There's this road that's coming out, north-west.
And this other one, it looks like there might be another one headed down this way.
ALBERT: That's new. HEATHER: Yeah.
TOM: Totally. HEATHER: Totally new.
TOM: San Bartolo physically looks like a pretty small site,
but these roads coming in from all different directions tells us well,
no, this must have been a pretty important place that was connected
to other parts of the world.
ALBERT: And Heather's creation mural might be one important reason why
San Bartolo is so well connected.
TOM: What Heather and I are seeing is that there's this very clear channeling of
foot traffic from that mural building right coming into the center area.
HEATHER: Those parallel structures we don't have on the map.
ALBERT: The LiDAR map reveals a grand pathway that no-one has ever seen before.
Leading directly from the city center to the temple with the mural,
it confirms just how important the painted walls were to the city,
and to the wider Maya world.
For the Maya, the mural was the focus of worship.
They even sacrificed parts of the painting,
offering it up to the gods by smashing it to pieces.
HEATHER: It's a way of venerating the art work itself.
It's a way of, you know, they talk about ritually killing an image,
because the image itself held power.
ALBERT: An intact part of the mural depicts the very moment
the first Maya kings are crowned by the gods.
giving divine power to their rule on Earth, and ensuring that in death
they would become deities themselves.
This belief was central to the power of all Maya kings,
including the dynasty of rulers at Holmul.
Just 19 miles to the east of San Bartolo,
Francisco Estrada-Belli is venturing deep inside
one of Holmul's ancient pyramids.
He's hunting for the tombs of the dynasty of rulers
identified on a lavish carved wall.
Francisco has already found a queen.
Now he and his colleague, Berenice Vasquez, are searching for a king.
They think there's another tomb here,
but it's covered by massive slabs of rock.
It's claustrophobic and dangerous.
FRANCISCO: It's super difficult to dig here.
All these rocks don't look very stable, in fact, they're not,
and so every step of the way everything could have fallen on our head.
ALBERT: Francisco edges closer.
FRANCISCO: There's empty space, so that's good.
ALBERT: And then they make a discovery.
FRANCISCO: Oh, yes, wow.
FRANCISCO: There is a painted pot.
Berenice, there is a painted pot.
It's got an inscription.
It's perfect.
ALBERT: A priceless treasure.
FRANCISCO: That's beautiful. And these are the long bones.
It could be a leg. They're in terrible condition.
ALBERT: Around the ceramic cup badly decayed bones,
a burial hidden and untouched for 1,500 years.
FRANCISCO: Oh, wow. It's so beautiful.
This is the hummingbird god, and this is the inscription.
This is the word for cacao.
ALBERT: As well as stunning art work the rim of the pot also carries a dedication:
"here is presented his cup for drinking maize chocolate."
FRANCISCO: So it was for chocolate, for the journey to the underworld.
This is a pot worthy of a king.
ALBERT: Nothing like this has ever been found in a royal tomb before.
And it leaves Francisco in no doubt that he has made an incredible discovery,
the tomb of one of the Holmul kings.
FRANCISCO: I'm incredibly excited.
Potentially, it's the biggest find of my career.
Holmul is the gift that keeps on giving.
ALBERT: Morning.
Francisco crawls deep into the pyramid once again,
exploring the space just below the king's tomb.
It looks like there's another opening, with more treasures inside.
FRANCISCO: There are two more vases behind the back of the burial,
those slabs are vertically, they make a little compartment
and there are two more pots there.
ALBERT: In the camped space, Francisco can only just reach in with his phone to
photograph the find, revealing something amazing.
FRANCISCO: Here's the other side of the vessel, and I can recognize it.
He's got its tongue out, he's got his curled eyes, the spirals in his eyes.
He's a sun god.
It's beautiful.
And it's painted.
ALBERT: One of the pots is carved in the likeness of the Maya sun god,
placed here during construction to make sure the pyramid and
its entombed kings were blessed by the gods.
At the very heart of the royal pyramid,
Francisco has made astonishing discoveries.
And back at camp he thinks he can work out which king was buried here,
thanks to the beautiful chocolate drinking cup.
Its inscriptions reveal that the cup was a gift from a neighboring king
of a powerful nearby city called Naranjo.
FRANCISCO: The name is Ajnumsaaj, which translates
to something like the sun crosses the sky.
He's a famous king from Naranjo.
ALBERT: For Maya elite, chocolate was a ceremonial drink.
And the exchange of pots could signify friendship or allegiance.
Experts know when the King of Naranjo ruled,
so it's possible to match that with dates on the
frieze at Holmul, and so identify the ruler buried in the tomb.
Francisco has unearthed Ch'amab K'uh,
the third King of the great Holmul dynasty.
In a matter of days Francisco has found two new royal burials,
alongside incredible treasures.
New secrets of the Maya unearthed for the very first time.
At the great city of Tikal, 25 miles away,
many more relics could still lie undisturbed.
Because the new LiDAR map reveals something astonishing
right in the heart of one of the most famous
and spectacular cities in the entire Maya world.
ALBERT: Right in the heart of Tikal, the new LiDAR map
has revealed an undiscovered pyramid.
FRANCISCO: Right here, in the middle, next to the plaza,
when you look at it in the LiDAR is actually
a hill with a rectangular wall in front of it.
It's actually a pyramid.
ALBERT: And this newly found pyramid could be one of the oldest of all,
perhaps the resting place of a founding king.
It's not alone either, another two structures nearby also
look as if they could be pyramids.
So possibly three new pyramids identified.
FRANCISCO: Just here, yeah.
ALBERT: At the site of Tikal. TOM: Yeah.
ALBERT: For the project leaders, these potential pyramids are one of the
biggest discoveries of all the 60,000 structures
identified on the LiDAR map.
FRANCISCO: They're probably very important ones,
because they're so close to the most sacred area of the site.
ALBERT: It's just mind blowing to think that a site that's been as studied
and as well trodden as Tikal might still have secrets like this.
I'm heading to Tikal to try to find
one of the newly discovered pyramids for myself.
It's incredible.
It almost feels like you're back there in the time of the Maya.
To succeed, I'm going to need the new LiDAR map as a guide.
To the naked eye it just looks like we're surrounded by a solid wall of trees.
But I know that my augmented reality model can pierce right through this jungle.
When you move around you get the temples and then boom.
I mean just through these trees, according to this data, a stone's thrown from the
guided tours there might be a new pyramid.
It's only moments before Tikal's soaring temples disappear behind me.
And it feels that I'm in a completely untamed world.
It's so hard to keep track of where you're going here, you know.
I mean I've already lost sight of what we just left,
I don't know, maybe 30 seconds ago.
But guided by the map...
There's something here. Maybe this is it.
I see this rise right here. There's a platform.
I think I'm standing on this pyramid right here.
I don't know what to say.
I mean we're here, like within a few hundred feet of the main sites at Tikal,
and now we're standing on what the archaeologists
have just recently identified as a possible pyramid.
And then, just a few feet away.
Look at this.
This is a perfectly rectangular brick.
This is the evidence we're standing on some structure built by the Maya.
You would think that at some point they would have found everything,
but yet right next to the main plazas, just a stone's throw away,
you can find something like this.
It's an unforgettable feeling.
This is clearly man-made.
In the center of the most studied Maya city of all,
a vast structure completely unexplored by archaeologists.
And the most exciting thing is that all these new discoveries could be
far older than any of the other pyramids at Tikal.
In the next few years, archaeologists will begin
the epic task of excavating these new finds.
Perhaps revealing the secrets of the most ancient kings of this great city.
Science and archaeology are gradually revealing
the mysteries of the incredible civilization of the Maya.
And right now, the new LiDAR map is turbo charging that discovery.
TOM: The LiDAR sets up so many new questions for us,
and now we get to go back to the field and start
trying to figure out these new things and ask new questions of
the ancient Maya that we haven't really been able to do before.
HEATHER: The LiDAR brings everything into sharper focus.
Things that we missed that were right in front of us.
ALBERT: And with more LiDAR planned, there's so much more yet to come.
HEATHER: The LiDAR makes a map of what's under the jungle,
but it also is very much a map of
everything we have to now do as archaeologists.
TOM: It's a little daunting, but it's also exciting.
HEATHER: It's really exciting.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.