Real History: Lost Maya city with temple pyramids and plazas discovered in Mexico

Another day and another lost Mayan city has been discovered: 

“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts has all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital: multiple enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, temple pyramids, a ballcourt, a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse), and a probable … architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date prior to AD150,”

“The ancient world is full of examples of cities that are completely different than the cities we have today,” Auld-Thomas said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyper-dense; there were cities that were highly egalitarian and extremely unequal. Given the environmental and social challenges we’re facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

You can read the article here:

Lost Maya city with temple pyramids and plazas discovered in Mexico

Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 is out now on Netflix

 

 

Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 is available to watch on Netflix. I've only watched the first episode and it's very light on details, but then I've read a bunch of Graham's book and listened to many interviews so I'm quite familiar with his hypotheses. In any case it still provides ample inspiration for my Sword & Sorcery setting.

The first episode includes Graham visiting the Amazon to see large earthworks. The the concept of Garden Urbanism is very interesting to me. The idea that large complex societies could exist in rain-forest or tropical environments.

In recent years researchers have found huge earthen structures, including platforms, mounds and causeways, across the Amazon, from Venezuela to central Brazil. But the infrastructure in Upano, described in a study published on Thursday in Science, “is completely unprecedented in Amazonia and in Andean prehistory,” says archaeologist José Iriarte of the University of Exeter in England, who studies pre-Columbian earth-builder cultures in Brazil and was not involved in the new study. “We don’t see an equivalent to these plazas elsewhere in Amazonia.” The nearest similar urban layout is in Maya territory in Central America.

Scientific American: Ancient Amazon Civilization Developed Unique Form of ‘Garden Urbanism’