Remains of the ancient Maya culture, mysteriously destroyed at the height of its reign in the ninth century, have been hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years. Now, NASA and University of New Hampshire scientists are using space- and aircraft-based “remote-sensing” technology to uncover those ruins, using the chemical signature of the civilization’s ancient building materials.
[Tom] Sever has explored the capacity of remote sensing technology and the science of collecting information about the Earth’s surface using aerial or space-based photography to serve archeology. He and [Dan] Irwin provided [William] Saturno with high-resolution commercial satellite images of the rainforest, and collected data from NASA’s Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, an instrument flown aboard a high-altitude weather plane, capable of penetrating clouds, snow and forest canopies.
In 2004, the team ground-tested the data. Hiking deep into the jungle to locations guided by the satellite images, they uncovered a series of Maya settlements exactly where the technology had predicted they would be found. Integrating cutting-edge remote sensing technology as a vital research tool enabled the scientists to expand their study of the jungle.
The cause of the floral discoloration discerned in the imagery quickly became clear to the team. The Maya built their cities and towns with excavated limestone and lime plasters. As these structures crumbled, the lack of moisture and nutritional elements inside the ruins kept some plant species at bay, while others were discolored or killed off altogether as disintegrating plaster changed the chemical content of the soil around each structure.
“Over the centuries, the changes became dramatic,” Saturno said. “This pattern of small details, impossible to see from the forest floor or low-altitude planes, turned out to be a virtual roadmap to ancient Maya sites when seen from space.”
Bravo!
The Maya dominated all of Central America, from mid- Mexico to the upper portion of South America. Technically they were very advanced, including being far better astronomers than the Europeans. That was just a few centuries ago. Then all of a sudden… pooof… they were gone… as a culture. We can barely find them now.
Why? Nobody is really sure, but it seems that the most likely reason is that their government ruled too powerfully over their people, expecting them to pay far too much for supporting the elite, asking for too many sacrifices to support the system. So people just moved out into the hills, the powerful could not support the military that then disbanded, and the culture just basicaly crumbled, becoming small village based. All over a period of a couple dozen years.
Now the only reason that we know anything about their exixtence is because they built in stone and kept their writtings as stone carvings.
In this digital age, will we be remembered 500 years from now by some archeologist that finds some of our DVD’s? And will our governemnt be the eventual undoing of our current civilization? If we stopped supporting the bureaucrats of our own government, how long would our civilization last?
The Mayan culture is alive and well in the Yutacan and other areas of southern Mexico. Maybe they aren’t building grand palaces, but the culutre is alive. Secondly, the independent city states most likely grew to large to support food and water wise for the farming technology of the times. Couple that with almost constant war, it was a matter of time before they abandonded the cities. The many city states didn’t all fall at once, it took many years for them all to be left to the jungle, some as long as 100 years after the first of them was left. Several were still quite large and going strong even after the Spanish extermination of the Aztec civilization.
oh….and I forgot to mention that there were several different periods of Mayan greatness. The middle one being probably the most advanced, and the one talked about here in this article. The last was no where near as advanced as the middle or even the first Maya.