Valeriana

Listen first. The forest here is never silent. Insects hum in the heat, a bird calls from somewhere high in the canopy, and the air smells of damp leaves and warm earth. Look around at the low hills under the trees. Some of those mounds are not hills at all. They are buildings. Beneath this green cover lie the remains of a Maya city that the wider world only learned about in 2024. Its name is Valeriana.

The city takes its name from a nearby freshwater lagoon, Laguna Valeriana. You are in the southern part of the state of Campeche, in the region around Xpujil, close to the border country that leads toward Calakmul. This is deep Maya land. People have farmed, hunted and travelled through these forests for thousands of years. Yet for a very long time, nobody outside the area understood what the scattered mounds really were.

Here is the first surprise. Valeriana was not found by an explorer cutting through the jungle with a machete. It was found on a computer screen. An archaeologist studying for his doctorate, Luke Auld-Thomas, was searching online for useful survey data. He came across a laser scan of this forest. It had been made years earlier for a completely different reason — an environmental study of the trees and the carbon they store.

That scan used a technology called lidar. A plane flies over the forest and sends down millions of laser pulses. Some pulses bounce off the leaves, but some reach the ground. With careful processing, researchers can remove the trees digitally and see the bare shape of the land. When Auld-Thomas and his colleagues processed this data, the shapes they saw were clearly human. There were pyramids, plazas, roads and thousands of house platforms.

The team published their findings in the archaeology journal Antiquity. The announcement travelled quickly around the world, because the scale was unexpected. Across the surveyed area, the researchers mapped more than six thousand structures. Valeriana sits at the centre of this landscape. Its density of buildings places it among the larger urban centres of the region, second in the area only to Calakmul, the great Maya capital to the south.

So what does the city actually contain? The lidar images show two main monumental zones, about two kilometres apart. A causeway connects them. The Maya built causeways like this as raised, plastered roads, often running straight through the forest. Around the central zones are plazas, temple pyramids and enclosed courtyards. Between and beyond them, smaller platforms spread outward. These were the homes of ordinary families, the farmers and craftspeople who kept the city alive.

One feature tells you that Valeriana was an important place, not just a large village. The city had a ball court. The Maya ball game was played with a heavy rubber ball, and it carried ritual and political meaning as well as sporting excitement. Archaeologists also identified a reservoir, created by damming. In a region with a long dry season, controlling water was a matter of survival. A lagoon nearby and a managed reservoir in the city would have shaped daily life completely.

Here is the second surprise. The scans also show an arrangement that archaeologists call an E-group. This is a specific layout of buildings around a plaza. In many Maya cities, an E-group lines up with the rising sun on key days of the year, such as the solstices. Researchers believe these complexes are among the oldest planned public spaces in the Maya world. This suggests that Valeriana may have roots that go back a very long way, perhaps to the Preclassic period, centuries before its later growth.

It is important to be honest about what we do not yet know. At the time of the announcement, the city had not been excavated. Nobody had dug a trench, read an inscription, or found the name the Maya themselves used for this place. Valeriana is a modern label. Dates, rulers and the story of how the city ended are still open questions. Everything described so far comes from the shape of the ground, not from objects in a museum.

That is why this place feels so different from the restored sites you may visit elsewhere in Campeche. There are no cleared stairways and no carved stelae in neat rows. Instead, you see the forest as the Maya world looks after more than a thousand years of growth. Roots grip old stones. Mounds rise under thick vegetation. Even a pyramid can look like a natural hill unless you know what you are looking for.

Think, too, about how close modern life is. Reports noted that the site lies not far from a main road and near places where people live and farm today. Local communities have long known that old stones lay in these woods. For them, ruins in the forest are part of the landscape, not a secret. What changed in 2024 was the full map — the understanding of just how large and organised this city was.

Valeriana also changes the bigger picture. For a long time, many people imagined the Maya lowlands as mostly empty jungle, with a few great cities standing alone. Lidar studies like this one show something else. They show a landscape filled with towns, farms, roads and water systems. Valeriana suggests that many more cities may still be waiting under the trees, not hidden on purpose, but simply never mapped.

Before you move on, pause for a moment. Look at the ground beneath your feet and the gentle rises in the land around you. Listen again to the insects and the birds. More than a thousand years ago, this same patch of earth carried voices, footsteps, the smoke of cooking fires and the sound of the ball game. As you walk away, notice every mound in the forest. Any one of them could be part of the city.