Even making it to the second page of Google search results is pretty rare, but going all the way to page 16 and then selecting an entry that leads to the discovery of a huge Mayan city that’s been lost for centuries under a jungle canopy… eh well, that’s really something.

“I was on page 16 of the Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican environmental monitoring organization,” Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University in Louisiana, said in comments. reported by the BBC.

The survey was carried out using Lidar, a remote sensing technology which uses laser pulses to measure distances and create precise, 3D maps of surfaces. In this case, it was deployed from an airplane to map objects on the ground.

Auld-Thomas decided to process the data using a system used by archaeologists and, to his great astonishment, discovered the remains of a large ancient city that may have been populated by up to 50,000 people around 800 AD.

After handing over his findings to archaeologists, further investigation uncovered pyramids, sports fields, roads connecting districts and amphitheatres, the BBC reported.

The city, which was now named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon, is located in the southeastern state of Campeche, about 600 miles (about 965 kilometers) east of Mexico City.

Analysis of aerial images showed that Valeriana covers an area of ​​about 6.4 square miles (16.6 square kilometers) and has two major centers with densely packed housing and roads connecting them. A total of almost 6,800 buildings were counted. Two temple pyramid squares for worship are also part of the ancient city’s landscape. The images even reveal a field where the city’s residents would have played ball games.

It is not clear why the city failed to survive, although it is suggested that drought conditions caused by climate change may have forced the inhabitants to move to more fertile areas.

As the BBC report points out, Lidar technology has completely transformed the way archaeologists survey overgrown sites, with previous surveys being done on foot and taking much longer to complete.

These are certainly exciting times for archaeologists, although Auld-Thomas commented that “one of the downsides of discovering many new Maya cities in the Lidar Age is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study.”

Although, in this case, Googling – and Auld-Thomas’ decision to go beyond page one of the results – also played a major role in Valeriana’s discovery.