Rise and Fall of the Mayas

The Origins (1x1)

Ausstrahlung: Jan 04, 2023

In June 2020, a scientific and archaeological discovery calls into question the certainties we had about the origins of the great Maya civilization. Thanks to LIDAR technology, which consists in sending light pulses to the ground, and thus revealing the reliefs buried under the densest vegetation, the oldest and largest Maya site is discovered: Aguada Fenix, a monumental structure 3000 years old, in the heart of ancient Maya territory. In this episode, we follow in exclusive access a team of archaeologists, scientists, and biologists, working on this site. The discovery of this structure immerses them in the traces of the origins of the first Mayas. Because the architecture of Aguada Fenix is as immense as it is unexpected: one and a half kilometers long and four hundred meters wide, it is fifteen meters high. It is finally dated to more than a thousand years before the first golden age of this civilization. A temporal inconsistency