Largest And Oldest Maya Monument Ever Found Discovered Under Mexico

The oldest and largest known monument built by the Mayan civilisation has been found in Mexico. Called Aguada Fénix, it is a huge raised platform 1.4 kilometres long. Aguada Fénix was built around 1000 BC, centuries before the Maya began constructing their famous stepped design suggests that early Mayan societies were fairly egalitarian and didn’t have a powerful ruling class. The Mayan civilisation flourished in the Americas before European colonisation. The Maya built huge cities and had an advanced knowledge of astronomy, but their civilisation collapsed around 800 AD. Daniela Triadan at the University of Arizona in Tucson and her colleagues have described for the first time how they conducted an airborne survey using lidar, a remote sensing method that uses lasers to create a 3D map of the surface below, to scan the ground in Tabasco state in south-east Mexico.