Laser Scanning Reveals Mayan Complex Hidden for Centuries
Laser mapping reveals nearly 500 ancient ceremonial sites hiding just under the landscape of modern-day Mexico and leads scientists to revise their understandings of the origins of the Maya Civilization.
Eastern Mexico is home to the ancient Maya, renowned for their striking pyramids, written language, and complex calendar system. It is there that scientists first discovered Aquada Fénix, the largest and oldest-known Mayan construction.
Professor Takeshi Inomata is an archeologist at the University of Arizona who led the study. “We did LiDAR, which is an airborne laser marking technique. Using this technique we found Aguada Fénix, which is the oldest monumental construction in the Maya area,” Inomata said. “It has a huge artificial plateau which has a perfect, rectangular shape measuring 1.4 km long and 400m wide, which represents the largest construction in the entire Maya history. It dates to probably 1,100 – 700 BC, which makes it the oldest monumental construction in the Maya area. So the interesting part is that the largest building happened at the very beginning or oldest stage of Maya civilization.”
Having made this extraordinary find, the team recently expanded their search to a broader area using the same cutting-edge LiDAR technology. They were specifically hoping to find sites built by the Olmec people, an older civilization thought to have influenced the development of the Maya. What LiDAR revealed was groundbreaking.
“We found nearly 500 ceremonial complexes, which look like Aguada Fénix, although they are not as big. This distribution shows they shared similar concepts of space, ritual, and probably worldview. It tells us the people in the Olmec area and the Maya area really exchanged ideas and that kind of interaction was very important for the initial development of Mesoamerican civilizations,” Inomata said.
“This is the earliest evidence for the gathering of a really large number of people. Those people probably did not have too many hierarchical organizations, they most likely did not have kings. They didn’t have much marked social inequalities, so those people gathered and organized themselves, then made these huge constructions. This really makes us think about the development and possibility of human societies, not just about Mesoamerica, but about human societies in general.”
Freddy Silva is a researcher and author who has extensively studied these ancient people, tracing their routes to a much older civilization.
“There was a big remnant of a very large civilization, which began after this island continent in the middle of the Eastern ocean, called ‘Atl’ back in the day, sank and we received the survivors in 9,600 BC,” Silva said. “It’s a very specific date at the end of the great flood, but it’s not just that they came from the Atlantic, the survivors also came from the Pacific. So now we’re looking at something much bigger as a story because not only are these cities being discovered by LiDAR as a remnant of a civilization that came from the East, they also came from the West as well; we have the migration of two different groups of people which made up the Maya culture into what it became.”
What is known about these groups of people?
“These people arrived in groups of seven, there were various teachers who were experts in their field. These were people who were really more into the nuts and bolts of what the spiritual system was all about, they would know more than the average person,” Silva said. “So, they became part of a priesthood that was open to men, women, and anyone who was curious, and they would spend years, anywhere between five to 10 years learning the mysteries. These are people who settled down and spread the culture across the whole of Yucatan and into Guatemala, and I quote, ‘[A]s a mirror image of the sunken homelands of the Gods.’ So what we see today in the jungle are essentially copies of the originals which are now thousands of feet under the ocean.”
Much more remains to be known about the history of these fascinating civilizations and plans are underway for further research.
“You can’t get away from digging. Discovering the past is a very difficult and time-involved process, as a researcher, I can tell you it’s not easy unless you look at the past from different lenses.” Silva said “You have to look at it from the point of view of mythology, folklore, climatology, and how people were thinking at the time, and that requires talking to a lot of people with an open mind to bring a kind of consensus. From my part, I would like to see the LiDAR and the archeology go to the deepest parts of Guatemala because that’s where the Itz (Mayan people) eventually settled. And I suspect as this LiDAR becomes more of a tool we’re going to find some very big news coming out of Guatemala, Belize, and even further south. This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as I’m concerned.”
The Tall, Red-Headed Demi-Gods From Orion
Humans through millennia have gazed into the night’s sky at Orion’s three outstanding stars. Among them was the Greek poet Homer who made mention of the constellation in the Odyssey;. the writers of the Old Testament referenced Orion in two of its books, Job and Amos; and the Egyptian mathematician Ptolemy, who cataloged Orion in his astronomical studies.
Named after the Greek hunter, the constellation of Orion is one of the most famous of all constellations, with nearly every ancient civilization forming an affinity to it from the Middle East to Africa and across the Americas. It is even said that the ancient Egyptians and Mayans used the three stars of Orion’s belt as a guide for positioning the pyramids, to mimic what they had seen in the heavens above.
And modern-day researchers, including Freddy Silva, are putting together the pieces embedded in the myths of the ancient world, asserting that the “gods” descended from the belt of Orion, came to Earth, and became our ancestors.
Many have questioned the origins of humans on Earth, as there seems to be no definitive starting point, but several researchers, such as Graham Hancock, Freddy Silva, and others, have concluded that mainstream science is way off the mark.
Silva cites several interesting sites and cultures that point to extraterrestrial origins of the human race, and his evidence is worldwide. The gods, Silva suggests, may have been more literal than mythical. A god, he says, “was considered any being who had control over the laws of nature… a god is a force of nature.” The gods who descended from Orion and came to planet Earth were human-like, but not quite human.
Much of this mystery has to do with the great flood occurring around 12,000 years ago that is written about in the oldest literature of myriad cultures. Following the flood, the gods seem to have moved on from this world, leaving their children behind to procreate with human women. The offspring were known as Nephila, translating to “the children of Orion.”
