Archaeologists discovered an ancient Maya city that was hidden in the Mexican jungle for more than a millennium. Located in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche, at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula, the city is uniquely intact.
No old logging paths lead to this site—unlike others in the jungle—says excavation leader Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist who specializes in finding ancient Maya sites, in a translated statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). It was very difficult to access, he says. Researchers named the place “Minanbé,” a combination of Yucatec Mayan words meaning, roughly, “there is no road.”
Minanbé’s remoteness worked in the archaeologists’ favor. Šprajc says it’s the first intact, seemingly unlooted ancient city his team has found in three years.
The Yucatán Peninsula is home to the Central Maya Lowlands—the territory of the Indigenous civilization known for building monumental cities like Chichén Itzá, Palenque and Tulum. Maya history stretches back all the way to 1500 B.C.E., when the people were living in villages, farming beans, maize and squash. By around the third century C.E., they’d begun building stone cities that included ball courts, pyramid temples, plazas and palaces.
The Maya developed into a civilization of city-states, each ruled by its own king or queen. During the Late Classic period, between 600 and 900 C.E., most of Minanbé was built. At the time, the Lowlands were home to between 9 million and 11 million people, per the statement.
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