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Hidden beneath the vast canopy is a lost world of the ancient Maya.
Nearly 2 million square miles of lush green hide centuries-old cities riddled with mysteries.
But today, lasers in the sky are helping to expose these secrets.
It's kind of like having x-ray vision and seeing beneath the canopy without having the touch of a single leaf.
Archaeologists are using this new superpower to unearth treasures on the ground.
We are starting to get information from all kinds of places where we knew absolutely nothing.
It's changing our understanding of the Maya and helping to create a treasure map of Maya's lost world.
Today, what escapes eyes on the ground is often clear to hundreds of more powerful eyes in the sky.
New technologies are being applied to archaeology, and it's gathering more information than ever thought possible. 2018 was an exciting year for the Maya.
Across the Guatemala landscape, thousands of new ruins were popping up.
Once-hidden structures are being revealed through satellites and a laser-scanning technology called LiDAR.
One of the most exciting tools that we have in our hands that we're just beginning to use in the Amazon is LiDAR.
LiDAR scanning lets us see through the forest canopy to what lies below.
LiDAR means light detection and ranging.
It works by firing streams of light pulses from an aircraft to the ground and timing the return of the pulse when it bounces back to the sensor.
This reconstructs shapes under the canopy, almost like seeing with x-ray vision.
Every time that we have found a new set of tools, we get an insight into something that we've never imagined possible in the Amazon.
And I think LiDAR is one of these things that's going to completely change how we understand the landscape.
The trees have always been what's kept us from understanding what's happening in the Amazon, and now we can see through them.
More than 800 square miles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve have been mapped to reveal massive feats of engineering for the very first time.
Taken together, the images point to a far more sprawling and sophisticated society.
Man-made structures appear, complex roads, temples, and palaces.
Engineering like this would make today's city planners proud.
So, what happened?
How could such a great society fail?
Could it have been war?
Religious cults and mass sacrifice?
Drought?
Laser mapping is the latest tool used to help unlock mysteries of the ancient Maya world.
For decades, archaeologists have pieced together clues from ruins discovered the old-fashioned way, on foot.
Ten years ago, in the heart of Mexico's Yucatan region, the ruins of a forgotten Maya town called Kiwik emerged from the jungle, without the help of aerial LiDAR.
In 800 A.D., a local king ruled here and built an impressive pyramid shrine. 20,000 rocks, cut and stacked 30 feet high.
The ancient Maya often placed royal tombs under pyramids.
So, on a hunch, archaeologist George Bay decides to sink a shaft straight through Kiwik's pyramid.
This building represents an artifact that provides us with information about the evolution of Maya society.
By examining it, we hope to understand how Kiwik evolved.
Bay has been working in the Yucatan for three decades, coaxing from the earth a snapshot of what life must have been like for the little-known Maya who lived here, called the Northern or Poop Maya.
Surprises.
We have surprises. 21 feet into the hole, Bay and his team make an important find.
Though, to the untrained eye, it just looks like another piece of rubble.
Oh, yeah.
Look at that.
This is fantastic.
This is a vault stone.
And so, for us, this is a very distinctive type of stone.
Here's the face of it.
This is the flat face.
And this back part of it is cut like this, angled, and that would have stuck into the wall.
These special vault stones were not used to build pyramids, but to hold up the ceilings of buildings.
Yet, inexplicably, here is one deep in the pyramid.
And when they dig under the base of the pyramid, they find something even more out of place, the foundation of an ancient building.
This structure is completely new.
It consists of several steps in a talud shape.
Do you have an idea of when this might date to?
400, 500.
Wow.
The pyramid dates to 800 A.D., but analysis of pottery fragments confirms the foundation under the pyramid is 300 years older, dating to 500 A.D.
But that is an impossible date.
To understand why requires a trip south, back to Guatemala, 600 B.C., the earliest days of Maya civilization.
Scholars always believed it was here, in a region called the Mirador Basin, that Maya civilization was born.
Early kings raised the jungles and built monumental cities.
Over the next thousand years, the Maya civilization became the most advanced in the Americas.
They mastered mathematics and astronomy, perfected the first written language of the Western Hemisphere, and produced stunning works of art.
But in 700 A.D., there was a massive breakdown.
War, political strife, and famine rocked the Maya world.
Cities abandoned, and hordes of refugees escape fleeing north.
As part of this wave, one refugee king sets down roots in Kiwi, founds the town, and soon after, builds a pyramid.
At least, that's what scientists had always thought.
Until now.
With the discovery of the ancient building foundation, the dates don't add up.
The foundation dates from 500 A.D., but Maya refugees don't arrive here until at least two centuries later.
Was someone already occupying Kiwi when the refugees arrived?
Seventeen miles away, another discovery raises more questions.
Its location is being kept a closely guarded secret, for fear of looters.
Few archaeologists have seen the discovery in person, including Farimat Tekpul.
Getting to this discovery is no easy task.
It's 230 feet underground, in the bottom of a cave.
The tunnel is narrow, and only one person can fit through at a time.
HIDDEN TREASURE There is a wall here, marking an entrance that separates the two areas, a public space and a sacred space.
He notices something curious.
It appears that countless torches and ritual fires once burned here.
The Maya believed that caves were the dwelling place of gods.
Maya priests made pilgrimage here on special religious holidays, consuming hallucinogenic plants to commune with the deities.
The chamber is cluttered with broken pottery.
Here is an intentional deposit of ceramics where the Maya broke vessels as part of an offering.
They broke the vessel as part of an offering.
Scholars suspect that breaking ceramics released the power of the offering.
They would break the vessel and scatter it around the cave.
There is almost always one piece missing.
So we think that the Maya took one piece with them and perhaps buried it outside the cave.
The team pushes deeper into the cave.
Maya priests relied on ropes made of vines to get here.
But even with modern climbing gear, Fatima's journey still takes three hours.
She finally reaches the cave's most sacred point and discovers an extraordinary underworld.
Ancient Maya paintings adorn the walls of the cave's burial tomb.
One image uses the contours of the cave to create a unique three-dimensional jaguar.
Another portrays a mythical hunt with a ghost-like jaguar and deer.
What's striking about this painting is that the representations are not real.
They are in the underworld, in the world of death.
Look at the body of the jaguar.
It's skinny.
It hasn't been well fed.
And it has a deliberate mark in the middle.
We think these marks represent illness.
Fatima has studied art in many Maya caves, but never has seen paintings like these.
They are clearly Maya, but their unusual style suggests that whoever painted them was not part of the Maya civilization of the south.
Stylistic analysis of the paintings and the ceramic artwork and the offerings in the chamber indicate the murals were painted around 100 B.C.
That makes them among the oldest Maya paintings ever discovered in Mexico.
The paintings date to the dawn of the Maya civilization.
Scholars call it the pre-classic period.
That was 800 years before the refugees from the south arrived in the Yucatan.
So who painted these murals?
Discoveries at another extraordinary new site may answer that question.
Just outside the modern Yucatan city of Mirta, excavation for a new road network is unearthing scores of sites just by chance. 190 new Maya towns to date and counting.
The map of the ancient Yucatan is shifting rapidly, exploding with previously unknown cities and towns.
We found that there's a lot more people, a lot more agriculture, and a lot more happening here than we ever imagined, and at a much earlier date than we ever imagined.
We thought there were just little hamlets out here.
Now we have very complex towns, and we might even have urban centers.
The whole idea of a much more complex society is emerging up here, and it's on a par, I think, with Guatemala.
We were walking right by these sites for decades without understanding them.
It wasn't like we had to go dig for these places.
They were right under our noses.
We just weren't seeing them, which is amazing if you think about it.
George Bay and his team resume their work in Kiwi, clearing stones from the side of the pyramid.
They're doing detective work, trying to figure out why a vault stone, typically used to hold up the ceiling of a building, was found buried inside the pyramid.
Another clue emerges, suggesting something is very different about this pyramid.
This is something the workers found, and they happened to, at the last second before they threw it away, they turned it over, and noticed that, in fact, it's a piece of sculpture, a sculptured face.
Here's the face with the nose and the upper part of the mouth.
So then you have to ask yourself, what's this that's over this face?
And what it is, is part of a large headdress and mask that this lord would have been wearing.
The ancient Maya often attached sculptures like this one to the facades of royal buildings.
It's a watershed clue.
Further excavation reveals the corner of a building.
This is the upper part of the preserved building, and this is what we call a broken molding over the doorway.
This pile of rubble here is still filling the doorway.
You can see remnants of the stucco here, probably modeled and painted.
As the team peels back the pyramid, a royal palace emerges.
It consists of three buildings, a temple on one side, the royal family's residential quarters on the other, and a throne room in the middle.
But why would the king of Kiwik build a pyramid on top of a palace?
The Maya like to see spaces as having power.
It's not an idea.
It's not uncommon to see in many different forms the building of one building on top of another because sacred spaces, important places, are powerful.
Our argument is that this is attempts to legitimize power.
George believes an early king of Kiwik, perhaps even the founder of the town's royal dynasty, built the palace.
Centuries later, another king built the pyramid over his ancestor's home, making a direct connection to his ancestor's power, enhancing his own.
The palace may be most remarkable for another reason.
The king who built the pyramid was not a late transplant from the south, but a descendant of a royal family that had been in Kiwik for a very long time.
It now seems clear that here in the Yucatan there was a previously unknown Maya mega-society that was just as old and just as powerful as the south.
We don't really know where the cradle or genesis of Maya society is anymore.
What we're learning is that there may have been multiple cradles.
Guatemala can no longer lay sole claim to the title birthplace of the Maya.
Now that the existence of this northern mega-society is confirmed, the questions rapidly multiply.
Who were these lost Maya?
And why were they forgotten?
The average person that thinks about Maya sees these great monumental cities.
What they don't realize is that for every one of those cities there are dozens of medium-sized towns like Kiwik that house maybe 3,000, 4,000 people.
From a lookout tower near Kiwik, it's easier to make sense out of the entire site.
In Bay's view, Kiwik was the quintessential northern town.
You're actually looking at what would have been downtown Kiwik, the city of Kiwik.
Where that small hill is, that's the center of the city.
When Bay began his research, he believed the extent of Kiwik was limited to the core area around the pyramid.
But LiDAR mapping later revealed a sprawling hilltop estate with a massive staircase across the valley, suggesting Kiwik might have been the hub of a much bigger complex.
Every morning, the excavation team climbs the 200-foot hill.
The ancient Maya would have come up that path, which would have led right to this spot.
What you see is basically a pile of rocks, but if you were standing here 850 A.D., what you'd be standing at the base of is an enormous stairway, which would have taken you up to the top of what we think is the palace or the plantation.
The plantation house or the big house, even in the modern sense, a very palatial kind of construction.
They've dubbed the site Stairway to Heaven.
A place like Stairway to Heaven is amazing in the sense that they built a 9, 10-room mansion up there.
And that's a very nice building, a 9th century McMansion, okay, living up on top of that hill.
Really.
But who would have been rich enough and audacious enough to build such over-the-top real estate?
Archaeologist Stephanie Sims is digging for answers, tearing up the floor of one of the 22 large stone buildings that make up the estate.
Under the floor, a tantalizing clue.
Here I am sitting beneath the floor, leveled in right here, of a 3-room elite residence up on the hilltop.
And here, just beneath the floor, are a few capstones covering a dedicatory offering.
The offering consists of a ceramic bowl and plate that appear to have been placed under the floor when the house was built.
It's a little suspicious that it would be odd to place the plate upside down like that covering something, so...
As the team carefully removes the plate, specks of evidence surface.
Little teeny fragments of very badly decomposed, kind of eroded, degraded bone.
Still can't tell yet whether it's human bone or animal bone, but my guess is human.
The large capstones flanking the offering may be hiding something else.
It was common practice of the Maya to rebury the defleshed bones of their deceased ancestors.
It's called secondary burial.
Our thinking with these secondary burials is that they're bringing bones or parts of family members to new locations to sanctify the structures that they're building.
The capstones under the floor of the house come off.
A human tooth.
Confirming our suspicions, this is a human burial.
This is a lower incisor right here.
There are several and we're still waiting to uncover to see how many there are.
Though badly decomposed from the acidic soil, Stephanie can make out the remains of a human skull and arm and leg bones.
So this demonstrates to us this offering as part of the burial underneath dedicating this house.
Back in the lab, Stephanie happily discovers that this skull's owner was not a daily brusher or flosser.
Embedded in the teeth, 1200-year-old plaque.
Chemical analysis of food particles in the plaque gives Stephanie a hint about what kind of wealth Stairway's owners had.
I'm finding a much greater diversity of plant food items that were consumed, ingredients in stews and soups, squash, beans, fruit foods, chili peppers.
The bounty suggests that the people who lived at Stairway were major plantation owners, operating extensive farms in the valley below their hilltop estate.
As George's team surveys nearby hills, it's clear that Stairway is not an isolated example, but one of dozens of estates.
Indicators of widespread wealth start to emerge.
Many secondary buildings at sites like Stairway, houses belonging to skilled workers like this one, are built of stone, a rarity in ancient Central America.
That's amazing.
What it suggests is that we're not looking at a large peasant population that's under the hands of a very small royal elite, but that wealth and prosperity have spread over almost half of the population.
Kiwik may be evidence of America's very first middle class, nearly a millennium before North America's colonial middle class.
These people might have had opportunities.
They might have been able to acquire land.
I mean, it's kind of fun to think about it, but they might have been living the Maya dream.
If there was such a thing as the Maya dream, this is where it happened.
Kiwik and Stairway are nestled in a lush region of the Yucatan called the Pook.
Soil here is fertile, natural resources abundant.
It looks like an ideal place for human habitation, except for one thing.
The Pook region has no water sources, no rivers, lakes, streams, creeks.
These people depended on controlling, collecting, and managing rainwater.
So how did they do it?
Just a few hundred feet from the Stairway estate house, archaeologist Bill Ringel has found an answer.
Water falls heavily here, but only six months of the year.
For the rest of the time, it dries out and virtually no rain falls.
And this was one of the primary adaptations of the Pook Maya to this rather waterless environment.
This underground cavern is actually a man-made cistern called a chultun.
It was a work of sophisticated engineering, carved out of the limestone bedrock.
Over here we can see how these chultuns were constructed.
First of all, they would bore through the harder caprock, and then once they got to this underlying softer marl, they would excavate out and make this large chamber.
The last stage would be to cover it with stucco, and you can see the thickness of the stucco here, this pinkish material.
The stucco functioned as a waterproof lining.
The Maya expertly engineered the patios, rooftops, and plazas of Stairway to Heaven to capture every last drop of rainwater, then drained it into eight chultuns scattered throughout the estate.
The entire hilltop functioned as a giant rain barrel.
So how many people could this ingenious waterworks support?
Bill Ringel and engineer Andrew Willis use an early version of LiDAR technology to map the chultun.
The resulting 3D model allows them to calculate water capacity.
Up to 10,000 gallons in each of the Stairway's chultuns provided a reliable source of water for the entire community.
The typical family of six consumed 27 gallons a day.
So Stairway's chultuns could have supported seven families through three rainless months.
These advanced waterworks formed a liquid foundation for life on Stairway and for dozens of other wealthy kingdoms like Kiwik nearby.
And sitting at the very top of that foundation was a royal elite.
George Bay has found hints of their surprising wealth hidden in the jungle.
The ruins of a majestic palace.
It represents a time in the history of the royal family of Kiwik when great amount of wealth was being accrued by the royal family and they were expressing it through the construction of a massive new palace.
The king of Kiwik had built the pyramid over his palace so on the adjacent lot he upgraded to deluxe new accommodations.
The new palace boasted 15 major buildings and two ceremonial plazas.
From previous finds, George knows the buildings were adorned in ornate sculpture and painted stucco.
This is one of the best preserved buildings in the new palace.
You can see the remains of the stucco.
But they would have been painted sometimes with elaborate murals.
And then there would have been beams hung from certain parts of the roof for curtains or tapestries and a variety of furniture would have found its way in here.
Kings liked things like jaguar skin sofas, fancy pillows.
This simple room would have perhaps been quite luxurious.
By 800 A.D., the Northern Maya society is over 1,500 years old.
Its people have mastered this harsh landscape.
Their facility with water allows for large-scale farming and generates vast wealth for their kings and even for a new middle class.
Imagine this place 800 A.D.
You would have seen the vast landscape of towns, villages, cities, the smoke rising from thousands of cooking fires as women prepared the evening meals, men coming back from their fields.
But along with this portrait of a prosperous society, Bey's colleagues, Bill Ringel and Tomas Gallerda, are finding evidence of a disturbing political trend on the rise. 20 miles from Kiwik is the majestic city of Uzmal.
In the 800s, it rose to become the powerful political capital of the region.
Local kings, like the King of Kiwik, likely traveled here to conduct diplomacy and pay tribute to Uzmal's royalty.
Ringel wants to show Bey how these buildings underwent a peculiar modification in the 800s.
An unmistakable new image was added to their facades.
What's really interesting is that little image right there, a feathered serpent.
And actually there are two feathered serpents here, and they intertwine across the facade.
Ringel believes the serpents are a symbol of a powerful religious cult.
It was called Quetzalcoatl, or the feathered serpent.
The so-called cult of Quetzalcoatl, perhaps a better way to think about it is a political ideology, and of course it had religious overtones.
Cults perhaps are wrong because it suggests something kind of small-scale and extra-governmental.
This was political ideology, front and center.
To gain admittance into this cult, a local king, like Kiwiks, had to submit to a rigorous initiation.
The priests would very often sequester the initiate for several days.
He would undergo rituals of self-mortification.
Artwork from the time depicted rituals involving bloodletting ceremonies in which initiates pierced their penises and other body parts.
That would be a very interesting way to sacrifice yourself.
Obviously very painful.
Another image on the facade represents the journey of an initiate, a small man being spit out of the mouth of a feathered serpent.
We can see the little man moving through his body to emerge as a transformed being, and he's being transformed precisely because of the rituals of initiation that involved Quetzalcoatl.
The feathered serpent carvings at Uzmal suggest the cult swept through the north in the 800s.
As local kings bought into the new ideology, political tensions started to rise.
It may have fostered competition between those who wish to adhere to this new ideology and those who wish to remain true to the traditional ideology of the Maya area.
At the new palace in Kiwik, George finds signs that in the midst of the boom times, something else seems to go wrong.
We see this big pile of rock up here in front of the building, and it makes really not too much sense at the beginning.
You have this beautiful building here on this side with these rooms.
You have a set of rooms on the other side, and right in the middle you have a big chunk of rubble.
We conclude that what we're looking at is an actual staircase that was built by workers to give them access to the upper stories of the building.
Here is a scaffold system being used by the Maya as part of their construction techniques.
Okay, now it's not gone.
The stairway is still here.
If the building was finished, they would have removed the stairway.
The indications of this scaffolding are is that you're seeing construction happening.
You're not seeing a finished building.
Another part of Kiwik's palace shows similar signs of a sudden halt in construction.
The second-story walls of the building are laid out on the ground by masons but never erected.
All of these characteristics are evidence that the city was in full bloom, that architects were employed, that the king was feeling confident and powerful about what he was doing, that the city was part of a world that was blossoming and expanding, and not this idea of the king being Miss Havisham sitting among a ruined house as things slowly fell apart.
Things fell apart for him and his world collapsed.
This is a very different kind of image for what was going on here.
So what brought Kiwik's boom times to a screeching halt?
Kiwik's Boom Times At first, war seems an obvious explanation for the stoppage.
But an exhaustive search turns up no arrowheads and no spear points.
But then, at Stairway to Heaven, the hilltop estate, the team finds clues that at the same time construction halted on the palace, this site was abruptly abandoned.
Wow, Evan, this is fantastic.
You have probably five or six vessels smashed on the floor from the time of the abandonment.
I think some of them would have been left here on the floor.
Others were probably hanging from the wall.
But these people were not running for their lives.
The evidence suggests an orderly departure.
Pots carefully hung on wall pegs are set to the sides of rooms.
They were left intact and only broke later as the abandoned building began to crumble.
But it looks like most of them are right along the edges of the interior, which really looks like they're taking some time to put these vessels somewhere to guard them at the time they're leaving them.
Kind of like making things neat right before you leave the house.
Right, kind of tidying up in some way.
So what could have caused this carefully planned abandonment of Stairway and the abrupt work stoppage at the palace?
At Stairway to Heaven, data indicates cisterns would have armed the Maya for three months without rain.
A few months longer with emergency water rationing.
But evidence from core samples suggests this would not have been enough.
We find eight of these bands that suggests, in fact, that it wasn't just like one massive drought.
It was probably a series of droughts that have durations of about three to 20 years.
And, you know, every time things would get going again, they would get pounded with a fairly long-duration drought.
At some point, the droughts overwhelmed Stairway, leaving only one option.
All it would take would be a short period of time in which there is no water in those cisterns, and those people would have to leave that hill.
It's simply impossible to live there.
The various families, elite families, they were reaching a point where they were having to make a very difficult decision, which was to leave Stairway to Heaven.
They loaded what they could of their lives onto their backs and carefully stored the rest.
When the rains returned, they fully expected they would too.
The Maya knew about droughts.
They were probably a civilization designed to respond not only to managing rainwater, but managing a lack of rainwater too.
It's not a surprise they left.
What becomes a question for us is why they don't come back.
So why didn't Stairway's residents and the King of Kiwi survive these droughts as they clearly had in the past?
The extreme intensity of these droughts was disastrous, making a carefully managed response their only hope.
But Bey and Ringel speculate the North's political establishment was falling into disarray, distracted by the cult of the Feathered Serpent.
The collapse of the Northern Maya apparently began during the 9th century, and that's also the time period during which this Feathered Serpent ideology was introduced.
And this undoubtedly led to rivalries with respect to power brokering.
Ringel thinks the political situation may have become so extreme that there was no longer any governmental system capable of organizing their return.
THE MAYA With a stable government, the Northern Maya might have survived, but it wasn't to be.
And within a century, the major cities and towns of the North, just like the South, were left in ruins.
Today, the empty jungles of the Yucatan serve as a reminder that even great civilizations can fail.
As the years passed, slowly the jungle reclaimed these magnificent buildings.
Whole towns and cities vanished under a green wave.
They became secret societies.
Only now, thanks to new technology and fieldwork, can the extent of what was lost come into view.