Tunneling into the ruins, his team discovered construction and burial practices, ceramics, and weaponry typical of early fourth-century Teotihuacan. Guided by the LiDAR images, Edwin Román-Ramírez, the director of the South Tikal Archaeological Project, began a series of excavations last summer. On closer examination, the complex appeared to be a half-size replica of an enormous square at Teotihuacan known as the Citadel, which includes the six-level Feathered Serpent Pyramid. They had the distinct shape, orientation, and other features of architecture typically found in Teotihuacan, the ancient superpower near what is now Mexico City, more than 800 miles to the west of Tikal.
But these structures were different from any others known to exist at Tikal.
The building-a pyramid, it turned out-was part of an ancient neighborhood that included a large enclosed courtyard fringed with smaller buildings. But when researchers zoomed in on an aerial image made with laser scanning equipment called LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), they could clearly see the shape of a human-made structure hidden under centuries of accumulated soil and vegetation. To the naked eye-and on archeologists’ maps-it looked like just another hill amid the undulating landscape of Tikal, the ancient Maya city-state in the lowlands of northern Guatemala.