The BBC has a story about the accidental discovery of a huge Maya city.  Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US, came across a laser survey by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring and noticed something interesting… a lost city deep in the jungle of the Mexican state of Campeche.  The cuty, referred to as Valeriana, was home to maybe 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.  The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.