(ORDO NEWS) — A network of stone paths that connected the settlements of the early Maya about 2 thousand years ago was discovered in the rainforests in northern Guatemala.
These structures point to the complex organization of the life of the ancient Mesoamericans.
A vast area in the Mirador-Calakmul karst basin was surveyed using a laser mapping system (LiDAR). It allows you to detect structures, usually hidden by dense vegetation, using light waves.
On an area of about 1.7 thousand square meters. km, scientists counted 964 settlements, divided into 417 interconnected cities, towns and villages of the Maya.
The settlements were connected by a network of trails or dams, 177 km long, which indicates a more complex Maya community than previously thought.
“This is the first superhighway system in the world that we know of,” said study lead author Richard Hansen, professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho.
Dams, he says, link all settlements together like a web, and are one of the earliest and first public societies in the Western Hemisphere.
The existence of such a network means “social, political and economic interactions” and complex “management strategies”.
The Maya built dams that towered over an area with seasonal swamps and densely overgrown lowlands. The building materials were a mixture of mud with quarry stone and limestone cement.
The width of some dams reached 40 m, they were covered with white plaster, visible in the dark, and were called “white roads”.
The Maya didn’t have pack animals and probably didn’t have chariots, but dams were definitely built for human interaction, communication, and probably travel.
We are talking about complex work projects that required “coordination and some form of hierarchy,” scientists believe.
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