“As soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish,” said Canuto said of the Lidar images, “because these were things that we had been walking over all the time. In a way, the structures were hiding in plain sight. when I went there, one of these things nine meters tall,” he noted. “It’s this hilltop citadel that has these ditch and rampart systems. Lidar revealed a previously undetected structure between the two sites that Garrison says “can’t be called anything other than a Maya fortress”. “The jungle, which has hindered us in our discovery efforts for so long, has actually worked as this great preservative tool of the impact the culture had across the landscape,” noted Garrison, who worked on the project and specialises in the city of El Zotz, near Tikal. He noted that unlike some other ancient cultures, whose fields, roads and outbuildings have been destroyed by subsequent generations of farming, the jungle grew over abandoned Maya fields and structures, both hiding and preserving them. “I found it, but if I had not had the Lidar and known that that’s what it was, I would have walked right over it, because of how dense the jungle is.”
This small city on the southern shore of the Pasin River (Ro La Pasin is a popular jumping-off. Garrison said that this year he went to the field with the Lidar data to look for one of the roads revealed. El Zotz is at Guatemala Map, GPS 17.243421,-89.804161. The mapping detected about 60,000 individual structures, including four major Mayan ceremonial centres with plazas and pyramids.
Their descendants still live in the region. The 810 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of mapping done vastly expands the area that was intensively occupied by the Maya, whose culture flourished between roughly 1,000 BC and 900 AD. “There’s state involvement here, because we see large canals being dug that are re-directing natural water flows,” said Thomas Garrison, assistant professor of anthropology at Ithaca College in New York. The extensive defensive fences, ditch-and-rampart systems and irrigation canals suggest a highly organised workforce. “Their agriculture is much more intensive and therefore sustainable than we thought, and they were cultivating every inch of the land,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a research assistant professor at Tulane University, noting the ancient Mayas partly drained swampy areas that haven’t been considered worth farming since. The images revealed that the Mayans altered the landscape in a much broader way than previously thought in some areas, 95% of available land was cultivated. It bounces pulsed laser light off the ground, revealing contours hidden by dense foliage. El Zotz thus has the potential to serve as a model for promoting conservation and community engagement, and for ensuring the protection of this important piece of Guatemala’s cultural heritage for generations to come.Researchers used a mapping technique called Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging. En 2010 los arqueólogos que trabajan en una colina cerca del centro de la ciudad antigua descubrieron a 45 pies de altura (13 metros de altura) la Pirámide del Diablo. Such ecotourism, which is operated by guides from the local community, presents an important opportunity for enhanced and integrated stewardship of the archaeological and natural resources. El Zotz, en lo que hoy es Guatemala, fue uno de los reinos más pequeños, pero al parecer, empeñado en hacer una gran impresión.
Many tourists visit El Zotz as part of eco-tours to Tikal, which is nearby and was the city’s historic rival. Deforestation and looting pose constant challenges, a pyramid is in danger of collapse from unstable trees, and the progressive erosion in a looters’ trench is damaging the stucco façades of structures within El Diablo. A preserve for several endangered species, the Biotopo is under acute threat from agriculture, poaching, forest-fires, and illegal extraction of non-timber forest products all of these activities impact the archaeological resources as well. El Zotz, the Mayan word for bat, is also known for one of the very few carved wooden lintels, with hieroglyphic text, to have survived from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Occupied from the Preclassic to the Early Postclassic period of Maya civilization, the most spectacular constructions date to the Early Classic and include the acropolis known as El Diablo, which incorporates a temple richly adorned with stucco reliefs and polychromy. Nestled in the dense forest of the Biotopo San Miguel la Palotada in the foothills of the Buenavista escarpment, the Maya archaeological site of El Zotz features pyramids, palaces, plazas, and a ball court.
0 kommentar(er)
