![]() No residential buildings have been found on or around the structure, so it is unclear how many people may have lived nearby. “ a place of gathering, possibly involving processions and other rituals we can only imagine.” “We think this was a ceremonial center,” Inomata says. He also calculated that it would have taken 5,000 people more than six years of full-time work to build. Inomata estimates that the total volume of the platform and the buildings on top is at least 130 million cubic feet, meaning it is bigger even than the largest Egyptian pyramid. The groundbreaking laser technology typically is used from aircraft to “see” structures beneath dense tree canopy below, but in this case it revealed a stunning discovery sitting unnoticed in plain sight in Tabasco’s semi-forested ranch lands for centuries, if not millennia. In 2017, researchers conducted a LiDAR survey that detected the platform and at least nine causeways leading up to it. It is in a region known as the Maya lowlands, from which the Maya civilization began to emerge. The discovery took place in Mexico’s Tabasco State at the site of Aguada Fénix, about 850 miles east of Mexico City. It’s the latest discovery to support the emerging view that some of the earliest structures built in the Maya region were significantly larger than those built more than a millennium later during the Classic Maya period (250-900 A.D.), when the empire was at its peak. An enormous 3,000-year-old earthen platform topped with a series of structures, including a 13-foot-high pyramid, has been identified as the oldest and largest monumental construction discovered in the Maya region, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature.
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