Archaeologists have discovered an ancient Maya City that may hold clues to the cause of the civilization's collapse about 1,000 years ago.
The researchers found 15 pyramids (one of which stands 75 feet tall), plazas, ball courts, and stone shafts called stelae, Reuters reported. The team named the city Chactun, roughly meaning "Red Rock. Chactun peaked between 600 and 900 A.D., it was most likely home to between 30,000 and 40,000 people.
The city was found in a remote nature reserve in the Eastern Mexican rain forests. Ivan Sprajc, associate professor at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, who led the team, said the city covers about 54 acres, and is one of the largest Maya cities found in Yucatan's central lowlands.
"The whole site is covered by the jungle," said Sprajc in Spanish.
Sprajc hopes the discovery will give researchers new ideas about the relations between different regions of the empire. There was evidence on the site of people having visited the ruins about 20 or 30 years ago.
"Lumberjacks and gum extractors were certainly already there, because we saw cuts on the trees," Sprajc said. "What happened is they never told anyone."
The research team spotted the city on an aerial photograph that had been taken 15 years ago for park monitoring purposes. They marked the coordinates and spent six weeks cutting a 10-mile path through the jungle to reach the site.
The team studied and documented the ancient city for three weeks before resealing the path to keep people out.
Sprajc believes the presence of multiple ball game courts means the city was important. Nobody knows exactly what caused the collapse of the Maya empire, but the city could have been abandoned by "demographic pressure, climate change, wars and rebellions."
The Maya civilization was one of the most advanced of its time, and ruled over the, Belize, Yucatan, Honduras, and Guatemala, when it was most powerful. The city of Chactun was only slightly smaller than the large city of Tikai, in Guatemala, thought to house 90,000 people.
