Megalithic Marvels - He Discovered a Lost Maya City on Page 16 of Google

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

A simple Google search led to one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in recent history. In this episode, we uncover how a PhD student identified a previously unknown Maya city hidden beneath the forests of Mexico using LiDAR imagery found on page 16 of Google search results. We explore the technology behind the discovery, what archaeologists found at the site of Valeriana, and why this forgotten city could reshape our understanding of the ancient Maya civilization.JOIN ME ON A TOURSources: one, two, three

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results? Well, this is exactly how archaeologist Luke Ald Thomas encountered the information that led to the discovery of Valeriana, a previously undocumented Maya city concealed beneath the forest of Compeche, Mexico. And according to Al Thomas, the crucial result was buried somewhere around page 16 of Google. Yes, page 16, the part of Google where almost no one ever goes. So I'm going to break down this fascinating story for you. But first, a quick reminder. to please subscribe to my channels from wherever you are watching or listening, whether that's YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And while you're at it, give me that five-star review or rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts that really helps me out. And consider joining me on one of my

upcoming tours. I'm going to Peru and Bolivia this September, Egypt this December, and Cambodia this January. I've also got some 2027 tours on. on tap so you can go to megalithic marvels.com slash tours or click the link in the show notes below to learn more. And at the end of this episode, I'll come back with a special guest to tell you a little bit more about my tours. So archaeologist Luke Al-Thomas was studying ancient Mayan settlement patterns as a doctoral student at Tulane University. He wanted to know whether any existing laser surveys of southern Mexico might contain useful archaeology. information. After experimenting with different search terms and digging unusually deep into the results,

he found a survey conducted by a Mexican environmental project. However, this specific LIDAR survey was not actually created to find ancient ruins. It had been flown in 2013 to measure Mexico's forests, particularly the amount of vegetation and carbon stored above ground. The resulting data was published, made available, and then largely left alone by archaeologists. Al Thomas later described it as the digital equivalent of something sitting forgotten on a high, dusty shelf. But when he opened the files, he realized that the survey had accidentally captured more than just trees. hidden inside the data were the shapes of platforms, plazas, buildings, and monumental architecture. The forest survey had flown directly over an ancient Mayan city, not just a small village,

not a handful of isolated foundations. It had flown over a major urban center containing pyramids, public spaces, residential neighborhoods, a ball court, a reservoir, and engineered causeways. And it was only located about 15 minutes from a modern highway. Now researchers named the city Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon. And this is where the story becomes truly remarkable. Because people had been living and farming in the surrounding area for years. Some individual mounds near the highway had even been noted. But no one in the scientific community understood that those scattered features belonged to a vast,

densely settled urban landscape extending beneath the trees. The city was hidden in plain sight. The jungle did not erase it. It simply covered it so completely that the true scale could no longer be seen. from ground level. So how did the researchers see through the forest? Well, they used a technology known as LIDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging. It essentially works like this. An aircraft carrying LIDAR equipment fires enormous amounts of laser pulses toward the landscape below. Most of these strike leaves and branches and tree tops, but some pass through tiny gas,

in the canopy and reach the ground. By measuring how quickly those pulses return, researchers can construct an extremely detailed three-dimensional model of the terrain. The vegetation disappears from the computer model leaving behind the shape of the ground and anything constructed upon it. To an untrained observer, an ancient Maya building covered by soil and vegetation might look like an ordinary hill. But to an archaeologist examining processed LiDAR imagery, its straight edges and raised platform, an unnatural slope can become immediately visible.

So it's almost like giving an archaeologist X-ray vision. But in this case, the environmental data had originally been processed to study trees, not ruins. Some of the tallest ancient buildings were so, steep that the original software mistakenly treated their upper sections as just vegetation or errors and removed them. The team therefore reprocessed the original data with algorithms specifically designed for an archaeological excavation. Structures that had been effectively been sliced off in the earlier models suddenly reappeared. And get this, across the entire data set,

The researchers recorded 6,764 possible pre-Hispanic structures. That number is sometimes reported as though every structure belonged to Valeriana itself, but in reality it represents the complete area analyzed, including several different survey blocks and long, narrow strips of terrain. Even with that clarification, the results were extraordinary. The survey revealed everything from sparsely occupied countryside to moderately dense settlements, and then, unexpectedly, a major city. Valeriana contains two large concentrations of monumental architecture located approximately two kilometers apart, and between them lies continuous settlement, an extensive modification of the surrounding. landscape. Its larger ceremonial center includes enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, temple pyramids, a ball court, and a reservoir created by damning a seasonal water course.

Researchers also identified what may be an e-group, a distinctive arrangement of Maya structures often associated with ceremonial observations of the sun. This particular archaeological feature may suggest that Valeriana may have been founded before approximately AD 150, giving the city roots potentially stretching back almost 2,000 years. And I would argue it may be even much older than that. And the mapped area may show only just part of it. Now Valeriana's most important architectural center lies near the edge of the edge of the the LIDAR survey. Similar settlement density continues several miles to the north, outside the fully mapped block. In other words, the lasers may have revealed only a window into a much larger

city, or perhaps a sprawling network of connected settlements. This discovery matters because it challenges an older image of the Maya world. For generations, Popular culture portrayed many Maya cities as isolated ceremonial centers scattered throughout an almost empty rainforest. But Lidar is revealing something very different. Large portions of the Maya lowlands were filled with cities, towns, homes, agricultural terraces, reservoirs and causeways, and engineered landscapes. The forest we see today may appear wild and untouched, but in the ancient past, portions of it supported dense populations and highly organized urban societies. Valeriana was not necessarily a lonely city surrounded by emptiness. It may have been one component of a vast inhabited landscape.

The studies authors concluded that dense settlement and urbanism were not. rare exceptions in the central myelolands. They may have been widespread characteristics of the region. Now perhaps the most exciting implications of this discovery have nothing to do with Valeriana alone. You see, this discovery suggests that forgotten archaeological information may already be hiding in public available data sets, originally collected for forestry and geology and construction, agriculture, and environmental research. Therefore, the next lost city to be discovered may not require a new expedition to discover it. The lasers may have already flown over it. The information may already be sitting online, waiting for someone to ask the right question,

enter the right search terms, and keep scrolling long after everyone else. has stopped because this archaeologist Luke Ald Thomas, he did not discover this site simply through luck. No, he recognized that data collected for one purpose could answer an entirely different question. And by venturing all the way to page 16 of Google, he found evidence of an ancient city that had been concealed for centuries. And it was only a short walk from a highway used by people every day. So next time someone says that all of the great archaeological discoveries have already been made, remember Valeriana, a city of pyramids, plazas, and thousands of ancient structures that remained

hidden beneath the forests of Mexico. Its buildings were covered by trees, its true scale was unknown to science, and the clue that finally exposed it was sitting right there. online on page 16 of the Google search results. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please share it with a friend. Spread the word about my channel and stick around for a few more minutes as they bring on a special guest now to tell you a little bit more about my upcoming tours.

Thank you. Well, thank you for hanging with me. Like I said, I'm bringing in a special guest to my studio here. and that is my daughter, Azariah. How are you? Hi. Good. We wanted to tell you a little bit more about my tours for those of you who may be interested. And Azariah has been with me on several of my tours all around the world.

So I wanted you to hear from my very own 10-year-old daughter how awesome these tours are. What's one of your favorite tours? It was probably Egypt. I loved the cruise. How many days was it? It was like... Three? The cruise itself was like four days.

Yeah, it was really fine. The Nile River Cruise. Yes. Yeah, so she went with me to Egypt a few years ago, and it was incredible, like 12 days. We saw the Great Pyramids, went inside the Great Pyramid, saw 20 plus sites, but her favorite was that Nile Cruise. What did you love about the Nile Cruise? Well, they were really nice to me and everyone, and there was a pool at the very, very top, and you could look down, and it was so beautiful. Beautiful and an awesome mac and cheese.

So good food. You loved the pool. Uh-huh. And you just loved being on the water and seeing animals from the shore. It was pretty cool. And they had one night they had like a dance party thing. Yeah. And my mom bought a dress for me and my dad bought a dress for me and like this cute headpiece.

That was really fun. And I got my picture taken. So it was really fun. So they made it a lot of fun. But you've also been to Machu Picchu with me. There was one year that we went to the Great Pyramids, Machu Picchu and Stonehenge all in one year. I told her you don't even know how spoiled you are.

What do you remember about Machu Picchu? I remember tons of llamas and alpacas. That was like one of my favorite parts. And there was chinchillas. And it was awesome. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there was chinchillas. They're these little creatures that hide in...

They're like a big fat mouse. It's like a giant mouse. They're adorable. It's like half mouse, half rabbit. Yeah, literally. Half mouse, half rabbit. It's adorable. And that's one of the cool things, especially for kids to look for at Machu Picchu is the animals, the llamas, alpacas, and you got these chinchillas hiding in the temple ruins. Is there anything else about Egypt? Do you remember? Well, we went in this cool underground temple and it was really, really cool and fun. I think that was the Dendera Hathor Temple.

Yeah. You and I went in the crypt beneath to go find what some call the Dendera light bulbs. Uh-huh. It was really cool. Is that famous scene where you've got the giant-looking pharaohs holding... Like big light bulbs. What looks like light bulbs. Snakes or something?

With snake coils in the way. Yeah. It was cool. That was wild. Mm-hmm. Anything else about Egypt? Do you remember? I also remember this one time when we were touring with the tourists, there was like this rock cave we went through. I don't know if you remember it, but I do.

It's where like other people were going through at the same time as us, but I just thought it was so fun. And it was like just this cool rock cave that we were doing. Yeah, that was in Kusko at Soxie Waman. We went to a part of the site, which we always do that most tourists miss, the backside of the site, where there's literally these subterranean cave systems you can walk through. and they're so tight that if you're going in one way and another group's coming the other way, you literally get stuck. Somebody has to back out.

Yeah. But it's pitch black. So we had headlamps, right? Flashlights. Yeah. We have a lot of fun on our tours. We make sure everyone feels welcome, safe. We always have about 30 people that show up on a tour.

They're the most amazing people you'd ever meet. Everyone's nice, aren't they? They're really nice, yeah. We have people from all over the world that come. Europe, Asia, the Americas, all 50 states. So we would love to have you join us on a tour. We got some pretty decent deals. You can lock in on some of the tours. So just go to megalithic marvels.com slash tours or click the link in the show notes below. My next tour is to Peru and Bolivia this September. We've got a few spots left. Then I'm going back to Egypt

this December. Then I've got our Cambodia tour with Cassie Coppersmith. This January. Well, thanks for sticking around a few more minutes to learn about the tours. Asra, thanks for coming in to talk about them. And anything else you want to say? We hope you enjoy the tours. All right. See you guys. Really fun.