Ancient Maya Cities Found in Jungle

discovery.com ^ | Aug 15, 2014 12:01 PM ET // by | Rossella Lorenzi

[freedomlover]

I dunno. A little paint, a few flowers, couple of throw pillows...

[wildbill]

That’s why it is abandoned. The inhabitants all moved north to live the good life in the U.S.

I mean, after all, who wants to live in a jungle or try to make a living in the tropics when you can get all the goodies of modern life by simply moving north.

[OldNewYork]

Very interesting. Did their civilization collapse when they started electing foreigners?

[trebb]

Good thing that city is abandoned. Otherwise the inhabitants would be heading to the Texas border just like all of their descendants.

When I was stationed in OK in the late '70's, a female bartender at the club told a joke: "Do you know what a Texan is?" "A Mexican on his way to Oklahoma."

[Bernard Marx]

I have heard that pilots flying over the jungle see tops of pyramids from abandoned and undiscovered Maya ruins quite a bit.

Few years back I flew in a light plane from Lake Peten in Guatemala to Belize City. We were at fairly low altitude and the pilot pointed out several Mayan sites he said were not yet visited and mapped. It's a very large, heavily forested region.

Having hiked a bit through the dense jungle with a guide near Tikal, I can easily understand how difficult it is to see and access those ruins from the ground. I visited Caracol in Belize, which is only partly excavated, and there are several large pyramids you can't see from the ground until you practically walk into them.