Cidades do tempo Maya descobertas - Ancient Mayan cities discovered

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The ancient Mayan cities discovered deep in the Mexican jungle — and the secrets they hold

Ja em 1970 um explorador Americano a tinha encontrado e fez desenhos do que viu. Imagens que ele nunca publicou. Apos varias tentativas, nunca mais foi possivel encontrar essa cidade, ate agora.

 In the 1970s, an American explorer named Eric Von Euw ventured into unexplored forest at the base of the Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula near the border of Guatemala. Called the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, it’s a sweeping expanse of trees and river that extends 2,800 square miles. What Von Euw returned with was remarkable. He had drawn images of an “extraordinary facade with an entrance representing open jaws of the earth monster,” as would later be written of it.

Von Euw would never publish the drawings. And despite several attempts to once again locate the “open jaws of the earth monster,” no one ever could. The site and the city that held it — which came to be known as “Lagunita” — was lost. It would become, according to Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, “a mystery.”

Now, four decades later, another explorer has ventured into the Yucatan jungle to find Lagunita. After a two-month expedition, archaeologist Ivan Sprajc of the Slovenian Academy emerged from the jungle with more than drawings. He had pictures. Along with another previously unknown city he named Tamchen, Sprajc had rediscovered Lagunita. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to have been “the seat of a relatively powerful polity,” a researcher said.
Why had it remained hidden for so long? “The information about Lagunita were vague and totally useless,” he told Discovery News. “In the jungle you can be as little as 600 feet from a large site and do not even suspect it might be there. Small mounds are all over the place, but they give you no idea about where an urban center might be.”
Though his expedition trudged into the forests with machetes, trucks and tortillas, a bird’s eye view is what discovered Lagunita. “We found the site with the aid of aerial photographs,” he explained in a statement, “but were able to identify it with Lagunita only after we saw the facade and the monuments and compared them with Von Euw’s drawings.”

That sounds fairly profound. But what does it mean? “It represents a Maya earth deity related with fertility,” Sprajc explained in his interview with Discovery News. “These doorways symbolize the entrance to a cave and, in general, to the watery underworld, place of mythologized origin of maize and abode of ancestors.”
The abode of ancestors. Yes, that.
Just six kilometers away from Lagunita lay Tamchen. It’s home to several plazas rimmed by “voluminous buildings,” an “acropolis” and a pyramid-type temple. Some of the findings there signify that the city was first inhabited as long ago as 300 B.C., researchers contend. There were also more than 30 chultuns — chambers as deep as 43 feet that collected rainwater.
The archaeologists said both ancient cities are ripe for further research — as is the greater forest.
“Only future research in the extensive archaeologically unsurveyed region to the north may reveal whether such characteristics, which at the moment appear to be rather unique, were in fact common in a wider area,” the Slovenian Academy said.
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Outra noticia de 25 de Agosto de 2014: Another info about discoveries, dated 8/25/2014.

Archaeologists have found two ancient Mayan cities hidden in the jungle of southeastern Mexico, and the lead researcher says he believes there are 'dozens' more to be found in the region.
Ivan Sprajc, associate professor at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, said his team found the ancient cities in April.
They made the startling discovery of the two cities of Lagunita and Tamchen on the Yucatan peninsula by examining aerial photographs of the region. Sprajc said the two cities reached their heyday in the Late and Terminal Classic periods (600-1000 AD).
At each site, researchers found palace-like buildings, pyramids and plazas. One of the pyramids is almost 20 meters (65 feet) high. They also found a facade featuring a monster-mouth doorway, which probably marked one of the main entrances to the center of the city.
Sprajc said his team mapped 10-12 hectares (25-30 acres) at each site, but the cities were probably larger. 'We elaborated a map but only of the religious and administrative centers of the two sites,' he said, 'that's only like downtown.'
His team has not yet excavated the sites. 'There are dozens of sites that I already have seen on the aerial photographs,' he added, noting that additional discoveries depend on further funding. Last summer, Sprajc discovered another ancient Mayan city, Chactun, 10 km (6 miles) north of Lagunita and 6 km (4 miles) northwest of Tamchen.

Fonte - source - Thenation.com.pk - MSN - photos de Ivan Sprajc- Y tube - net