Archaeologists in Campeche, Mexico, have found an underground structure beneath a Maya ball court, as well as offerings on top of a Maya pyramid at another site.
© Visualization of the Žiga Koka LiDAR dataA lidar-created image showing the site with the ball court where parts of an underground structure were found.
Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a mysterious subterranean structure with painted walls hidden beneath a Maya ball court.The team found the building while excavating the
ball court, the playing space for the ritual ball game played by the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples.
"We located parts of an earlier building that had painted walls, but only further excavations may reveal the shape of that underlying building and what its function was," said
Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia and director of the excavation.
The finding is "evidently a very important structure, because ball courts are normally found only at major Maya sites, which were centers of the regional political organization," Šprajc told Live Science in an email. The structure could date to the Early Classic period (A.D. 200 to 600) and is covered with a layer of painted stucco, according to a translated statement from Mexico's
National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Previously, Šprajc and his colleagues surveyed a large area of the Maya Lowlands in the Mexican state of Campeche with lidar, a technique that shoots millions of laser pulses from an aircraft. These pulses then bounce off the ground and return to the machine in the aircraft, allowing researchers to map the landscape's topography.
Comment: Further reading on the Cahokia people: