Valeriana Revealed: 6,500 Hidden Maya Structures Change History

by Schoen Christian · Published 2025/07/04 · Updated 2025/07/04

It was after midnight when doctoral student Luke Auld‑Thomas hit page 16 of a routine Google search and froze. A decade‑old forest‑carbon LiDAR survey—filed away and forgotten—showed a ghostly patchwork of plazas and pyramids shimmering beneath Campeche’s jungle canopy. By dawn he had traced 6,500 stone buildings sprawled across nearly 50 square miles, a metropolis the world had never mapped. The discovery, later christened Valeriana, sat astonishingly close to Highway 261, where farmers had tilled maize among its temples for years, unaware of the Classic‑period city sleeping under their feet.

Detail of Valeriana site core, in the north-east corner of Block 2 - Figure 4 from Auld-Thomas et al. 2024, Antiquity 98(401): 1340-58, CC BY 4.0 — Detail of Valeriana site core, in the north-east corner of Block 2 – Figure 4 from Auld-Thomas et al. 2024, Antiquity 98(401): 1340-58, CC BY 4.0

The LiDAR Detective Story

When Auld‑Thomas began his dissertation on rural Maya landscapes, funding a custom airborne laser scan felt impossible. Instead, he gambled on serendipity: someone, somewhere, must have flown this stretch of forest already. The bet paid off. A 2013 monitoring project for The Nature Conservancy had flown a RIEGL Q780 laser over the region to model carbon stocks. The raw data—2 billion points strong—landed on an obscure FTP server and gathered digital dust.

Working from Tulane University’s remote‑sensing lab, Auld‑Thomas stripped away vegetation returns, revealing a razor‑sharp terrain model that leapt from his screen: twin monumental precincts, interlaced causeways, and an E‑Group solar observatory aligned to solstice sunrises. “It was the archaeology equivalent of a Google‑Earth moment,” he later told Smithsonian Magazine.

Colleagues Marcello Canuto (Tulane) and Katherine Hahn (INAH Campeche) helped ground‑truth a few features: weathered limestone blocks peeking through leaf litter matched the digital outlines perfectly. Soon, the team had charted 47 mi² of settlement density rivaling Calakmul, long considered the region’s urban heavyweight. Population models—extrapolating 6–8 residents per household—yielded 30,000–50,000 inhabitants at Valeriana’s peak.

“That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.” — Luke Auld‑Thomas

LiDAR in Action: Valeriana vs. Ocomtún

A quick comparison of two recent discoveries unlocked by laser mapping:

	Valeriana	Ocomtún
Year announced	2024	2023
LiDAR source	Archived 2013 forestry scan	2023 bespoke survey over Balamkú Reserve
Terrain	Highway‑adjacent, low relief	Remote karst ‘peninsula’, wetlands
Size	6,500 structures / 130 km²	50 ha monumental core
What LiDAR revealed	Dual precincts, sacbé, dammed reservoir	Concentric plazas, columned halls
Lesson	Old datasets can hide megacities	New flights fill blank map spaces

Take‑away: Whether unearthed on a forgotten hard drive or flown just last year, LiDAR’s canopy‑piercing pulses are rewriting Maya geography at lightning speed.

Sites and settlement densities in the Alianza survey area (figure by authors). Figure 10 from Auld-Thomas et al. 2024, Antiquity 98(401): 1340-58, CC BY 4.0”.

Anatomy of Valeriana

Monumental Precincts

The southern precinct is pure Classic‑period showmanship: three stacked plazas crowned by a 25‑m pyramid, flanked by twin shrines echoing Tikal’s Twin‑Pyramid Complexes. A ball court nestles just east, its playing alley still discernible in the hill‑shade. LiDAR intensity values hint at stucco‑plaster remnants, suggesting the court once gleamed white in the tropical sun.

The northern precinct rewrites urban textbooks. Instead of axial symmetry, architects knitted curved amphitheater seating into the plaza edge—an extremely rare feature outside Chichen Itza. Combined with an E‑Group observatory, it signals an experimental civic‑ritual hub pushing the boundaries of Maya city planning.

Infrastructure

Between precincts, a 2‑km sacbé (raised causeway) functions like a ceremonial boulevard, its 5‑m width still measurable. Off‑shoots connect household clusters, terraced fields, and chultun‑style cisterns. Most striking is a dammed reservoir on Valeriana’s eastern flank: LiDAR cross‑sections show an earthen wall 140 m long, impounding seasonal rains into a lake‑sized tank—early civil‑engineering on par with hydraulic feats at Tikal.

Remote points mark dozens of quarry pits, the presumed source of building stone, while charcoal signatures in soil cores (pending publication) hint at managed agro‑forestry rather than slash‑burn clearing. Taken together, the site’s layout illustrates a city balancing monumental grandeur with pragmatic water and food security.

Why It Matters for Maya Studies

Valeriana forces scholars to revisit long‑held gradients of Maya urbanism. Until now, southern Campeche was categorized as a hinterland—dotted with small centers feeding super‑powers like Calakmul. The new LiDAR map paints a denser, networked landscape where mid‑tier capitals flourished within day‑trip distance of one another. That challenges models of political hegemony based solely on monument size and hints at federated governance or shifting alliances.

Moreover, the amphitheater and reservoir show that experimentation wasn’t confined to “golden‑age” sites: innovation rippled across the lowlands. Environmental historians also note Valeriana’s location in a karstic zone once deemed agriculturally marginal, underscoring how the Maya engineered wetlands and thin soils into sustained productivity. As Auld‑Thomas puts it, “Ancient solutions to water stress could inspire climate‑resilient design today.”

Mapping the Neighborhood: More Hidden Cities

LiDAR hasn’t just exposed Valeriana. Southern Campeche now reads like an archipelago of forgotten centres—some beside paved roads, others deep in wetlands. A snapshot of what surrounds Valeriana:

Site / Cluster	Approx. distance*	Discovery status	Why it matters
La Carmelita group	10–20 km NW	Appears in the same 2013 forestry LiDAR; hundreds of house‑mounds, sacbés, reservoirs	Shows the highway corridor is a continuous ribbon of settlement, not an isolated city
Dzibilnocac & Chenes temples	35–50 km N‑NE	Long‑known surface ruins; now being drone‑mapped	Architectural links (Chenes façades) may date Valeriana’s earliest monuments
Calakmul super‑cluster	70–100 km S	2022‑23 LiDAR reveals suburbs and causeways	Places Valeriana within a vast polycentric urban landscape
Šprajc’s finds (Lagunitá, Tamchén, Chactún)	40–80 km SE	Purpose‑flown LiDAR + jungle treks	Prove sizable ritual‑political centres also flourished in roadless wetlands
Balamkú–Becán corridor	50–90 km E	Classic Río Bec towers; new point‑cloud work	Tracks trade roads linking Campeche to the Río Bec hills
Unnamed LiDAR targets	5–30 km	5–10 ha precincts visible in forestry scan	Likely fill demographic gaps between big capitals and hamlets

*Distances measured from Valeriana’s core.

Take‑away: Far from an outlier, Valeriana is one dense node in a regional web of mid‑tier capitals and rural outposts. Every fresh—or rediscovered—LiDAR dataset pushes that web’s boundaries outward.

FAQ

What is LiDAR?
LiDAR—Light Detection And Ranging—emits tens of thousands of laser pulses per second from an aircraft and measures the return time of each pulse to build a sub‑meter‑accurate 3‑D model of the ground. Because infrared light can slip through gaps in jungle canopy, archaeologists can digitally “strip away” vegetation and expose architecture hidden beneath.

How large is Valeriana compared with famous Maya capitals?
Covering roughly 130 km² with 6,500 mapped buildings, Valeriana rivals sprawling Calakmul and far exceeds the core precincts of Tikal or Palenque—yet it lay unnoticed beside a modern highway until 2024.

Can tourists visit Valeriana yet?
No. The site is still unexcavated, unsigned and legally protected. Visiting without an accredited INAH guide risks fines and—worse—damage to fragile limestone mounds. See the ethical‑tourism tips below for ways to support local heritage without harming it.

How reliable are the 30–50 k population estimates?
Scholars multiplied mapped residential platforms by a conservative 6–8 residents per household, a formula validated at excavated lowland sites. Ground excavations and soil‑chemistry studies may nudge those figures up or down.

Travel Note & Ethical Tourism

Valeriana lies fewer than 5 km from Highway 261, but in‑situ remains unexcavated and unprotected. The site is not open for tourists yet. If you plan to explore Campeche, base yourself in Hopelchén and visit officially interpreted sites like Dzibilnocac first. Avoid trekking to Valeriana without an accredited INAH guide; unauthorized visits risk damaging fragile limestone and violating Mexican heritage law. Instead, support local ejidos offering bird‑watching tours that funnel income back into forest stewardship. If you do encounter unmarked mounds, photograph—don’t pocket—artifacts, record GPS, and file the location with INAH’s Campeche office. Responsible travel today ensures archaeologists can investigate tomorrow!