ALBERT: Let's see if we can find the central mound.
EDWIN: Si. Yes.
ALBERT: You got it? EDWIN: Yeah, he got it.
ALBERT: Haha.
EDWIN: Fantastic job, eh?
ALBERT: We found it.
EDWIN: We found it. ALBERT: Oh, man.
This massive new discovery is just one of an incredible 60,000 ancient buildings,
all revealed from the jungle by technology.
I'm Albert Lin. Engineer...
There's a forgotten world down there.
Lost cities hidden in the jungle.
And National Geographicexplorer.
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 writing a whole new story,
using LiDAR mapping which can see through dense jungle like an X-ray.
Okay, are you ready to see it without the trees?
An entire ancient world.
TOM: This is the most important development
in Maya archaeology in 100 years.
ALBERT: Revealed 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.
High above the jungles of Northern Guatemala...
This is incredible!
Long abandoned cities.
Once we thought they were home to perhaps a million ancient Maya.
But we were wrong.
Today, for the first time, archaeologists from Guatemala, Mexico,
the US are on a race to uncover some of this jungle's greatest secrets.
Because right now, discoveries are being made that suggest
the Maya population here was ten times bigger
than anyone had ever thought before.
And that has stunned the world.
JAIME: Yeah, here's a scorpion.
ALBERT: This time...
JAIME: There's always a scorpion.
ALBERT: I'll be seeing fragile treasures unearthed...
JAIME: It's been hidden from view for over 1,000 years.
ALBERT: From the site of a bloody Maya ball game.
Woo!
I'll be battling the jungle
to seek out long hidden parts of an ancient city.
All this is new.
This is new, this is new, this is new.
These are all new structures never before seen.
And I'll be following archaeologists...
MARCELLO: These almost look like nails, right.
ALBERT: As they investigate one of tens of thousands of astonishing new discoveries,
all revealing for the veryfirst time the incredible
epic civilization of the ancient Maya.
Archaeologist and National Geographic explorer, Marcello Canuto,
is in the Guatemalan rain forest, battling the elements in search of ancient secrets.
MARCELLO: It is the afternoon and just like it normally does
around this time of year, it's starting to thunder.
ALBERT: His mission: to investigate a group of unexplored structures
built by the Maya.
But he has to wait for the rain to pass.
MARCELLO: Of course, it brings a whole new set of complications.
ALBERT: The Maya tamed the rain forest of Central America
from around 3,000 years ago,
across what is now Guatemala, Southern Mexico,
Belize and other adjoining countries.
Within this seemingly hostile world they thrived,
building astonishing cities and forging a spectacular civilization.
Marcello is excavating a Maya city called La Corona
in the far north of Guatemala.
MARCELLO: Serious rain. Serious rain.
ALBERT: For over a decade he and his team have become familiar
with the challenges of the jungle.
ALBERT: But this season, one thing is different.
Because for the first time,
archaeologists here have an incredible new treasure map,
and it's revealing a long hidden secret of La Corona.
A previously unknown road running nearly half a mile
to a group of completely unexplored ancient buildings.
Rain storm over,
Marcello has come to the new site to check on progress
of the first ever excavations here.
MARCELLO: That's cool, let's go take a look over there,
see where they're coming from.
ALBERT: Something unusual immediately catches his eye.
MARCELLO: That's a big stone, that's a very large stone.
ALBERT: This carved stone is a sign that these buildings were important.
MARCELLO: It's not an everyday kind of item that you find, right.
ALBERT: It's clear that this new site is a significant discovery.
Marcello's find was made possible by an ambitious survey
called the Pacunum LiDAR Initiative,
charting 800 square miles of dense unexplored rain forest from the air.
By firing billions of laser pulses at the jungle canopy,
experts can build up a 3D map
exposing the hidden jungle floor, like an X-ray.
Without LiDAR you see only trees.
Turn the LiDAR on and the entire ancient world is laid bare.
More than 60,000 ancient structures have been identified,
expanding the size of the great Maya cities,
but also revealing totallyunknown cities and settlements,
sprawling out across vast areas of what was previously
thought to be uninhabited wilderness.
Back at La Corona, Guatemalan archaeologist, Marissa Lopez,
is excavating one of the newly revealed buildings for the very first time.
MARISSA: We could have seen a step here, going up another one,
and then there would have been another one here, coming off into here.
ALBERT: Inside, Marissa's finding the remains of an elaborate workmanship.
MARISSA: This tall building would have been decorated with many designs.
MARCELLO: What we're seeing here is obviously a piece of stucco decoration.
These almost look like nails, right?
MARISSA: Yeah, yeah.
MARCELLO: Whatever it was, it's of a relatively large size,
it's certainly larger than a human hand.
MARISSA: So and these elaborate pieces would have been on the entrance of a
building, which you can still see some black paint here.
ALBERT: To find such a grand building here is stunning.
And as well as the buildings the LiDAR has revealed an ancient Maya road,
a causeway connecting the city center to the new site.
MARISSA: That would be where the floor was once.
This is one of the sides of the causeway.
ALBERT: Hidden in plain sight for more than a 1,000 years,
Marissa is only now able to trace its path.
MARISSA: You can see that the stones are aligned like this one,
this one and this one.
And that gives you, or that was what gave me a hint that it goes through here.
This was all clear, this was a floor surface and people
are walking towards the group that's at the end.
ALBERT: Marcello and Marissa believe that over 1,000 years ago
this would have been a grand Maya home.
MARCELLO: All of these kinds of clues give me the impression that the
folks who lived here must have been important.
We're not quite sure what to make of it.
It's sort of surprising to find it here.
ALBERT: Marcello's new site is astonishing and intriguing.
One of tens of thousands of new discoveries
that are completely rewriting the size
and sophistication of Maya civilization.
Here in San Diego, I use digital technology to uncover ancient secrets,
and I've been given special access to explore the new LiDAR data on a massive scale.
Joining me, are two of the project leaders,
National Geographic explorers Marcello Canuto and Tom Garrison.
LiDAR.
ALL: Wow!
ALBERT: The great Maya cities are revealed in an amazing way.
Wow!
But just like Marcello's new site at La Corona, it's the space outside the
city centers that's revealed the biggest surprises.
MARCELLO: You see the little bumps and then you see some of these rectangular shapes,
these are all built up and they're all formed by human labor.
ALBERT: Everything with a straight edge is almost certainly man-made,
and they're showing up everywhere.
TOM: For me, the LiDAR puts the whole picture together here.
It shows us it's not just all these new pyramids and, you know,
these massive Maya centers, it's the fact that you can go to a place where you thought
there were a couple of dozen structures and now there's almost a 1,000.
ALBERT: Wow!
Before the LiDAR survey, these restored pyramids are all that we could see
of one of the greatest Maya cities of all, Tikal.
Now trees removed, an incredible and vast metropolis is revealed,
and the same pattern is being repeated,
across the entire LiDAR survey area.
One site has been utterly transformed by the LiDAR.
A particularly ancient city called El Palmar.
Above the jungle canopy, this is all we once saw.
Built beside a large lagoon, El Palmar itself is almost totally invisible,
but then, with LiDAR...
Boom.
TOM: Wow. MARCELLO: It's big.
ALBERT: El Palmar is revealed to have been huge, spreading out from the lagoon.
TOM: If you look right over here at the edge of this lagoon,
this is what we called El Palmar, just these large structures
right here on the edge of the lagoon.
ALBERT: You didn't know about all this?
TOM: Well, now when we see this it's obvious that this is all just one huge site.
MARCELLO: Yes, it really was hidden to us before the LiDAR and you can just see this
wonderful expanse of not just big buildings,
not monumental buildings,
but also just the houses.
ALBERT: Before LiDAR, experts had identified a total of 60 buildings at El Palmar.
Now they can see almost 1,000 stretching over a vast area.
TOM: It's 40 times larger than we thought it was.
ALBERT: 40 times larger than you thought?
TOM: Exactly.
ALBERT: It's all so new that almost all the finds remain unexplored by archaeology.
And you haven't even been there yet.
TOM: Not at all.
And so these would be the first places we would want to visit
going out there on the ground.
ALBERT: I'm going to explore this vast hidden city for myself.
It's wilderness, jungle everywhere.
It's amazing to think that the wild jungle below me was once teeming with people.
Right underneath us, right here, are lost worlds, lost cities,
lost temples, pyramids.
Here we go. We're going in.
ALBERT: Woo!
Deep in the Guatemalan rain forest
I'm setting out on a two day journey
into the remote jungle.
I want to find out for myself what structures the LiDAR data is revealing.
I'm heading for the ancient city of El Palmar in Northern Guatemala.
Out here, after heavy rains, it's tough going.
We're totally caught in this huge bog, completely bogged down from all this rain.
This road is proving to be somewhat impassable.
We're gonna use one truck to pull this other truck
out of the deepest mud I've ever seen.
Watch out guys, we're about to pull and this thing could snap back.
Here, back up, back up, back up, back up.
With a broken tow rope, we've got no choice but to push.
-Fuerza.
ALBERT: Super strong. Super strong. Fuerza.
The roads out here are so bad that it's taken me all day just to travel a few miles.
It's a reminder of the immense challenge of doing archaeology in the jungle.
It's late afternoon before we finally make it to camp.
We made it.
At another ancient city, on the way to El Palmar, called El Zotz.
With an hour or so before night falls I can't resist exploring
El Zotz and climbing one of its huge ruined pyramids.
Before the LiDAR survey, El Zotz was thought to have been
the biggest Maya city in the entire area.
But with technology that's changed.
From the top of the pyramid I'm looking out towards El Palmar,
all I can see is dense jungle.
But somewhere beneath these trees the LiDAR tells us that there
should be hundreds of unexplored man-made structures.
Tomorrow, I'm going to investigate them for myself.
Morning.
And at last I arrive at the center of El Palmar,
where I'm meeting up with Guatemalan archaeologist, Edwin Roman-Ramirez.
Edwin. EDWIN: Hey.
ALBERT: Good to see you, my friend.
ALBERT: Hola.
ALBERT: Yeah, awesome.
Hopefully this is a day of discoveries.
ALBERT: Before the LiDAR map, archaeologists had only known the very center of this city.
Edwin has been excavating one of its main pyramids.
ALBERT: This is a building? EDWIN: Yeah!
ALBERT: Wow!
Now the LiDAR map is revealing that El Palmar holds hundreds of completely new secrets,
not at its center, but outside, stretching out in all directions.
ALBERT: Today, with Edwin, I'm going to investigate.
Okay, this is El Palmar, and we're here right now.
The site was originally thought to be about 60 structures,
but LiDAR has shown that it's actually more like 980.
The extent of it all is simply phenomenal.
And all this is new.
This is new, this is new, this is new.
These are all new structures never before seen.
I'm going to head there and see what I can find.
ALBERT: Equipped with GPS and the LiDAR map,
Edwin and I set off into the jungle in search
of totally unexplored parts of this city.
Edwin's one of the premier Guatemalan archaeologists out here.
He spent years studying this site,
but only recently, having seen the LiDAR data,
realized that there's so much more than he could have ever imagined.
Heading deeper, we could be the first people here since the time of the Maya.
Many of the sights and sounds of the jungle have barely changed.
ALBERT: Ahhhh.
It's an anteater.
It's so slowly moving along, just hanging out of the trees.
And you hear the howler monkeys close by.
So cool.
This is the wild, wild jungles of Guatemala.
I'm searching for a remote group of unexplored structures
at the end of an ancient track made visible by the LiDAR map.
ALBERT: It's crazy because you can't see anything.
EDWIN: No.
ALBERT: But I can use technology.
Check this out.
I've taken the LIDAR data and built an augmented reality platform that should let me
see through the dense jungle and get a view of my target.
To give us trees and then...
ALBERT: Revealed beyond the trees a group of ancient buildings
completely unknown until the LiDAR survey.
ALBERT: It's crazy, right.
ALBERT: It looks so cool from here, right.
This rise, these two little points and then this big rise in the middle.
ALBERT: It should just be right through there.
It feels as if we're in touching distance of our goal, but I know that this dense
jungle could still have plenty of tricks to play on us.
Before the LiDAR,
we thought that there were about a million Maya
spread across this region of jungle.
But with the new map we now know that it's more like 11 million.
And the LiDAR shows how El Palmar could have become such a big city.
One resource was a plentiful supply of fresh water.
TOM: Can we put the trees back on?
Right there, that's water.
That's water in the middle of a valley in an area
where there isn't a lot of water in the landscape.
ALBERT: LiDAR back on.
But at El Palmar, water also brought challenges.
The land was swampy.
LiDAR though reveals an ingenious solution.
The buildings wereconstructed on higher ground,
connected by raised causeways.
But as well as fresh water,
the vastly expanded population of El Palmar also needed food.
For the very first time,
LiDAR is revealing the astonishing extent of Maya agriculture.
Something that National Geographic explorer and archaeologist
Francisco Estrada-Belli has been investigating.
FRANCISCO: You see those striations, those are drainage canals.
ALBERT: Canals? FRANCISCO: Yes.
They were draining the swamps literally,
to make them into agricultural fields.
ALBERT: We can now see how the Maya shaped the landscape on an almost industrial scale to
feed millions of people in cities and beyond.
FRANCISCO: This was like the valley, central valley in California for the Maya.
ALBERT: All of it was carefully planned.
FRANCISCO: You see how the canals are very long.
They make square corners.
That tells us that it wasn't just individual farmers who came up with this idea.
There was some big organization said okay,
we're going to do this entire area,
we're going to build some big canal here,
and so there's management from above.
This was a request of the leadership.
ALBERT: It feels like the LiDAR is revealing super faint tiny little details.
FRANCISCO: We missed the very small and we missed the very large features.
The very small, obviously, because, you know,
they're covered in vegetation and you can't see them.
And the very large you might see a bit of it,
but you don't realize the magnitude of it
until you see it in a big picture like this one.
ALBERT: Over the Guatemalan border, in Belize,
ancient canals are still visible.
Built by the Maya over 1,000 years ago to drain the landscape for agriculture.
Belizean archaeologist, Jaime Awe has studied here for almost 20 years.
JAIME: Here is the main canal system.
There's another canal joining it just right, you know,
about 20 meters from where we are.
ALBERT: The food produced in these fields would have fed the people
in a nearby Maya city called Xunantunich.
JAIME: There are pyramids in every direction that you go,
there are buildings and buildings and buildings.
And we've hardly scratched the surface.
ALBERT: Standing right at the heart of Xunantunich, a royal palace.
JAIME: That's where the elite lived.
If we were to have gone back in time none of the riff-raff, including us,
would have been allowed up there unless we were very special guests
of the rulers that resided up there.
And I think if we just decided to go walk up there and, you know,
on a whim, we could have paid for it dearly.
ALBERT: Jaime's excavations at Xunantunich are unearthing treasures.
JAIME: Well, I think we have a little figurine head.
Did you guys see that?
JAIME: It's a little face.
-Yeah, it's beautiful.
JAIME: There's the nose, there's the mouth.
You can actually see like little teeth.
Look at that, he's cute.
ALBERT: In fact, it's a musical wind instrument called an ocarina,
more than 1,000 years old.
JAIME: Sometimes it's the little things that you find that,
you know, makes what you do interesting.
It's certainly made my day.
ALBERT: As well as the palaces and plazas of Xunantunich,
there is also a special arena,
where two teams competed in a game that ended in ritual sacrifice.
JAIME: We're in the middle of a ball court at Xunantunich.
ALBERT: The aim was to get a ball to the opponent's
end of the court without it being returned.
Elite local warriors would play captured opponents.
But the outcome was usually fixed.
One of the captive losers would be sacrificed to the gods.
Often by decapitation.
Beneath the ball court at Xunantunich,
Jaime is unearthing symbolic offerings.
JAIME: There's always a scorpion.
CASSANDRA: They do love their scorpions.
ALBERT: Carvings of scorpions represented gods of the underworld.
JAIME: You see like the little legs of the scorpion and the claws at the front.
CASSANDRA: So this is our sixth scorpion.
JAIME: Yeah.
ALBERT: It's thought they were buried here to sanctify the arena.
One offering in particular has caught Jaime's attention.
JAIME: It's been hidden from view for over 1,000 years
and we get to see it for the first time.
ALBERT: It's a precious piece of naturally occurring glass, called obsidian.
Important to the Maya because it's sharp and can be used to make knives.
JAIME: Obsidian was to the Maya as steel is to us.
It's the best blades you can find.
ALBERT: But this obsidian could only have come from a volcanic region of Guatemala,
over 200 miles south of Xunantunich.
JAIME: Obsidian is an important rock, so it had to be brought in from the
highlands of Guatemala, it's volcanic, we have no volcanoes in Belize.
And it was traded all over Mesoamerica.
ALBERT: Trade between distant jungle cities was far from straightforward.
The Maya did not have access to pack animals, like horses or cows,
so archaeologists always thought that goods were transported by foot.
But new LiDAR discoveries are now suggesting that the Maya might have also used rivers.
80 miles from Xunantunich, back in Guatemala,
US archaeologist Damien Marken is excavating
at the center of a Maya trading hub, called El Peru.
DAMIEN: We have nice plates, we actually have all this polychrome pottery,
very fancy late classic so, you know,
we're talking 6th, 7th, 8th century.
This is a large dish, a serving dish.
A lot of the stuff might actually fit back together.
So we have this nice fancy stuff here.
ALBERT: Astonishing domestic treasures,
unseen for almost 1500 years.
DAMIEN: Oh, oh, my gosh!
ALBERT: From domestic discarded remains,
fragments of Maya life are emerging.
DAMIEN: Alright, this is a little vessel,
it seems a little large to be a figurine,
but you can see the spots and you've got the whole little jaguar paw.
What we're getting out of this, you know, garbage dump essentially,
is really fancy stuff.
And we are getting a lot of gorgeous figurines.
Oh, this one's one of the nicer ones.
This is an important individual with a huge headdress.
So I'm actually kinda flabbergasted right now about some of this pottery.
This isn't your average person's dumping ground.
It's coming from the elites that are living right behind me here.
ALBERT: Damien believes that some of the elite's wealth came from trade.
That El Peru's success might have had something to do with its location.
The city sits close to a huge river, the Rio San Pedro,
connecting it right across Northern Guatemala.
Experts have long suspected that rivers might have played a crucial role in Maya trade.
But at cities like El Peru, little evidence has been found until the LiDAR.
About a mile from the city center mysterious structures,
high on an isolated hill.
US archaeologist, Zack Cooper, is following the map to
investigate for the very first time.
ZACK: What we have here is cut stone.
ALBERT: Evidence of a man-made structure.
ZACK: It's very exciting to see a site that hasn't been touched yet.
ALBERT: And this structure could have had a very particular purpose.
ZACK: It seems like a very good spot to have as a look out.
It's a great way to be able to view and control possibly
what comes up and what comes down the river.
A very good vantage point.
ALBERT: Zack believes he's discovered the ruins of a checkpoint
used to watch over the flow of trade along the river.
Along with fine domestic goods the new LiDAR discovery
supports the theory that El Peru grew rich on trade,
controlling goods and materials from across the Maya world.
All new evidence of the incredible size and sophistication
of the Maya's jungle civilization.
45 miles southeast of El Peru, I'm with
Guatemalan archaeologist Edwin Roman-Ramirez
on a mission to make some totally new discoveries.
We're on the outskirts of an early Maya city called El Palmar.
The LiDAR map has revealed nearly 1,000 ancient structures
in a 2,000 year old city
that's 40 times the size anyone had previously thought.
And so far, no archaeologist has ever been here.
Even with GPS and the new map we're struggling.
So we were just here, right?
EDWIN: Yeah.
ALBERT: But that thing's moving a little bit weirdly.
EDWIN: Yeah.
ALBERT: I'm using my compass because we're having problems
getting any kind of signal through the forest.
The trees they block our connection to the satellites that enable GPS,
so now it's kinda just like old school dead reckoning with a compass,
but with new school maps.
And we're looking for a ridge that I think runs this way.
In the dense jungle it's almost impossible to get our bearings.
But then, a clue.
If we find the...
Oh, yeah, look, all the rocks here.
This is definitely a creek, right?
EDWIN: Yeah. Over here.
ALBERT: Okay, so we follow the creek.
I think we went too far north.
EDWIN: Yeah.
ALBERT: So we need to take the creek back a little bit and look for the rise.
EDWIN: Yeah.
ALBERT: That might be the ridge right there.
EDWIN: Yeah?
ALBERT: The outer edge, yeah.
Finally, after hours of searching,
we can make out a small but crucial rise in the ground.
EDWIN: Si. Yes. ALBERT: You got it?
EDWIN: Yeah, he got it. ALBERT: Ha-huh.
EDWIN: Fantastic job, eh?
ALBERT: We found it. EDWIN: We found it.
ALBERT: Awesome.
It's a startling new discovery.
Wow, look at this.
Oh, man, look at all these bricks.
Maya ruins.
Edwin starts to investigate.
ALBERT: Identified by LiDAR we've reached our goal.
And it appears that this ancient structure was enormous.
We're on top of it.
ALBERT: From the top of these new discovered structures...
Check this out.
We just came from El Palmar.
Beyond these trees is the pyramid where we started,
right in the center of the city.
ALBERT: I was waiting.
EDWIN: That would be easier, yeah.
ALBERT: We're the first ones here.
EDWIN: Yeah, yeah.
ALBERT: Since the time of the Maya.
EDWIN: Look at that. ALBERT: Ah, man.
As Edwin continues exploring he realizes that this is a major discovery.
There are buildings everywhere.
ALBERT: We're in another plaza.
ALBERT: I see it.
And scattered around the jungle floor.
EDWIN: Look at this.
ALBERT: Whoa, look at that.
Evidence that these buildings are very old, even by Maya standards.
ALBERT: You're telling me somebody painted this piece of ceramic,
a human being, over 2000 years ago?
EDWIN: Yes, I am telling you that.
ALBERT: And we might be the first people to hold it since the time of this?
EDWIN: Yes.
ALBERT: At every step, more remains.
ALBERT: Wow.
ALBERT: Reached for the first time today,
we've explored a massive new site.
Edwin's trained eye has identified a whole range of buildings,
built over 2,000 years ago.
And they were all connected to the center of this city
by their own road, signifying their importance.
ALBERT: Our new buildings are just a handful of nearly 1,000 previously unknown
structures at El Palmar, shown up by the LiDAR survey.
All waiting to be explored.
I could spend hours exploring here,
but we are finally losing light and this is not a
place you want to be when it gets dark.
This, it's a fresh snake skin.
Look at that.
Back at camp I'm still stunned by what Edwin and I have found.
We just bushwhacked our way through some of the most
dense jungle I've ever been in in my entire life,
guided by a map created from the LiDAR to find something
completely unknown to archaeologists until today.
Yeah, today was a good day.
Today was an amazing day.
Before the LiDAR survey, archaeologists only ever knew
a tiny fraction of the Maya world.
Now suddenly its full extent is being revealed,
and it's astonishing.
For the first time, we're able to see how the Maya
tamed and shaped the hostile jungle on a
massive scale, building sprawling cities...
EDWIN: That's crazy.
ALBERT: And creating vast agricultural lands.
FRANCISCO: They probably had enough food to feed everyone who lived here
and then people living in some big city nearby.
ALBERT: To sustain a previouslyunimaginable population
of up to 11 million people,
all connected by a complex trading network.
DAMIEN: What we're getting is really fancy stuff.
TOM: The Maya need to be put right up there with
any of these other great cultures that we study.
ALBERT: Thanks to the LiDAR treasure map the Maya have finally been
revealed from the jungle and placed in the very top tier
of the world's greatest ancient civilizations.
So I guess we're getting for the very first time the full picture,
a big window into the entire Maya world.
MARCELLO: Yes, exactly.
ALBERT: And it was epic.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.