Actual image of the Yucatan, c. 600 A.D.

Here is the article introducing yet another large Mayan urban center stumbled upon in the jungle through the use of LIDAR technology.

As the authors say in their Conclusion,

As archaeologists work to document and characterise ancient settlement systems throughout the tropics, local scale ‘dense pasts’ are proliferating. It is increasingly clear that dense palimpsests of human modification are not exceptional in these settings, despite long-standing biases that presumed them to be. The field of archaeology now confronts the twin tasks of understanding how these settlement palimpsests accrued through time, and of charting how they varied across space—the better to appreciate just how crowded tropical antiquity may have been.

Luke Auld-Thomas et. al., published online by Cambridge University Press, Oct. 29 2024

This expectation that, when we see a sparsely populated tropical jungle, it has always been a sparsely populated tropical jungle, is coming from a perfect storm of factors.

For one thing, there is the evolutionary picture of human history, which asserts that people started out, as, essentially, animals, and then became hunter-gatherers before, after a long, agonizing process, we developed agriculture and then all our technology flowed from that. This is over against the picture presented in Genesis, where man develops civilization right away. Christians who take their Bibles seriously might have resisted this false evolutionary picture of human history, but they’ve been few and far between. We were just too intimidated. But archaeological discoveries like this one are continually confirming Genesis.

Secondly, we have the Rousseauian idea of the “noble savage.” Rousseau just comes right out and says that, although history does not show it happening this way, he’s just going to assert that all people started out in a utopian “state of nature,” that only became corrupted when we came up with the horrible, destructive idea of Private Property. (Rousseau is, of course, not the only one who has painted this picture of history.) He also says that people living in a “state of nature,” without clothes, medicine, or a reliable diet due to agriculture, would be stronger and more healthy than people living in civilization. This attractive and totally erroneous picture has led a lot of explorers and anthropologists to expect–nay, hope for–small populations of noble hunter-gatherers, rather than civilizations, in what to them constituted the far-flung corners of the world. (“We don’t have any Noble Savages in Europe, but they must exist somewhere!”)

The third factor is physical. Outsiders (and even locals) didn’t see the Mayan cities because they were literally hard to see. The jungle grows over the ruins and destroys them to boot. Even this LIDAR data wasn’t immediately obvious and had to be looked at by an archaeologist who knew what to look for.

This other article speculates that “climate change” might have been responsible for the downfall of the Mayan civilization. (I guess that’s their interpretation of the original article’s use of the word “drought.”) What we know from history is that the collapse of civilizations is usually owing to a long process and multiple external and internal factors, and that like bankruptcy, it happens gradually, then suddenly. In the case of the Maya, besides the drought and perhaps disease that had filtered its way over from Europe, I might name internal warfare, the neighboring Aztec Empire, and oh yes–the human sacrifice.