Aguada Fénix is a place that Google Earth does not know. The “Phoenix potions” is located in the extreme East of the Mexican state of Tabasco, near the border with Guatemala, around twenty kilometers to the East of the mouth of the Rio San Pedro in the Usumacinta. But who venture quite real, there is nothing to see except fields and the remnants of jungle that remained between them.
Ulf von rauchhaupt
Responsible for the Department of “science,” the Frankfurt General Sunday newspaper.
F. A. Z.
Still, reported researchers to the archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona last Thursday in the journal “Nature”, you would have discovered there the remains of a previously unknown ceremonial center of the Mayan civilization and that’s where the largest Mayan building: a platform, almost 399 meters wide, 1413 metres long and ten to fifteen feet high.
This was moved to its establishment more Material than the pyramid of the “La Danta” in the ruins of El Mirador in Northern Guatemala, the largest pyramid of the Maya, and also more than the pyramid of Cheops, the largest of the ancient Egyptians. However, the platform of Aguada Fénix and their ancillary structures – including nine on, you feed the end of the dam, roads as well as a smaller, but up to 18 meters high platform, there are not blocks of stone, but mainly of clay and earth.
a further Twenty monumental centers discovered
this is Also why you would have had little Chance to distinguish their vegetation-covered flanks on the ground of natural terrain forms. So the buildings were only on the computer screens of the researchers to the fore, as you were evaluating it from the air collected Lidar data. Lidar is an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging – is not related only by name to their sound and the Radar. Here, as there distances by Sending and electric field measured by magnetic radiation, only Lidar uses a laser beams instead of radio waves. Therefore, it can penetrate even the smallest gaps in the foliage of trees and bushes to the ground and at a sufficiently high density of measurement points calculate the Vegetation by means of suitable Software in the images.
This electronic defoliation has become a procedure that is about to revolutionize the field of archaeology as it did with the radio carbon Dating of organic remains. In fact, Inomata and his Team for your flights have not discovered about Tabasco only Aguada Fénix, but also twenty more, if less monumental centres of the same culture. And only two years ago, the Lidar measurements had revealed that the famous Maya site of Tikal was in Guatemala, not a densely built-up urban centre, but a vast agglomerate of farms, fields and gardens around the stone temples and rulers ‘ palaces.
Tikal, however, is a city of the classic Maya period between 250 and 900 after Christ, and thus much younger than Aguada Fénix and the other Enclosures on the Rio Usumacinta. Archaeological excavations and radio carbon Dating showed that with the Building of the platforms in Aguada Fénix around the year 1000 before Christ started must have been the Work of about two hundred years later, completed.
