Cool Finds

Deep in the Mexican Jungle, Archaeologists Discovered a Lost Maya City That May Yield Clues About the Civilization Just Before It Collapsed

Researchers hacked through more than three miles of vegetation to get to the site, which lies out of bounds of familiar logging tracks. There, they found unique carved stelae and altars

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

June 26, 2026 5:44 p.m.

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Archaeologists discovered an ancient Maya city, hidden in the Mexican jungle for more than a millennium. Located in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche, at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula, the city is uniquely intact.

No old logging paths lead to this site—unlike others in the jungle—says excavation leader Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist who specializes in finding ancient Maya sites, in a translated statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). It was very difficult to access, he says. Researchers named the place “Minanbé,” a combination of Yucatec Mayan words meaning, roughly, “there is no road.”

Minanbé’s remoteness worked in the archaeologists’ favor. Šprajc says it’s the first intact, seemingly unlooted ancient city his team has found in three years.

“It’s a unique, unprecedented finding,” INAH archaeologist Lino Espinoza Garcia tells Agence France-Presse.

The Yucatán Peninsula is home to the Central Maya Lowlands—the territory of the Indigenous civilization known for building monumental cities like Chichén Itzá, Palenque and Tulum. Maya history stretches back all the way to 1500 B.C.E., when the people were living in villages, farming beans, maize and squash. By around the third century C.E., they’d begun building stone cities composed of ball courts, pyramid temples, plazas and palaces.

The Maya developed into a civilization of city-states, each ruled by its own king or queen. During the Late Classic period, between 600 and 900 C.E., most of Minanbé was built. At the time, the Lowlands were home to between 9 and 11 million people, per the statement.

After examining an aerial LiDAR scan of Minanbé’s roughly 40 acres, archaeologists Atasta Flores Esquivel, Israel Chato López, Quintín Hernández Gómez and Vitan Vujanović explored it from the ground. They hacked through three miles of jungle with machetes to get there. What they found was a city composed of urban plazas surrounded by palaces, religious buildings and terraces flanked by water channels.

There’s also a massive platform made of flagstone and limestone, decorated with lines or figures and circular stones. It’s “a very particular structure,” INAH archaeologist Alberto Vázquez tells the AFP. “We don’t have any records so far of a correlation with other (ancient) sites.”

Measuring nearly five feet across and over six feet tall, the carved stone depicts a possibly religious scene involving two characters. “They have a bowl and are receiving something; we think it’s a liquid,” Espinoza Garcia tells AFP. “Obviously, in that context, it’s a divine liquid; we think it would be water.”

Minanbé’s tallest building was a temple pyramid standing more than 40 feet tall—three or four stories. Vujanović says in the statement that it was built in the Río Bec style: a type of Maya architecture characterized by fine masonry and moldings, popular during the Late Classic period.

The temple boasts a stela, a freestanding monument of carved stone, which Vujanović says is the first he’s found with uneroded symbols. In all, the researchers found 14 stelae and altars at the site, suggesting it was an important city during the Late Classic period, per the statement.

The researchers took hundreds of photos of the altars and stelae, then sent them to epigraphist Octavio Esparza Olguín for examination. Olguín says in the statement that one of the stelae depicts a figure decapitating another with a knife or ax, and it’s carved with the date 849 C.E. He says this probably means all the carved monuments were made around that time—near the collapse of the Maya civilization in the Lowlands.

Researchers found round and rectangular altars. One boasts a carving of a ruler wearing a feathered headdress, a decorated chest, bracelets and necklaces. An engraved Maya calendrical element suggests the altar was carved in the late seventh century, making it the oldest of Minanbé’s monuments.

Šprajc says in the statement that Minanbé fits into the region’s history: It was likely extensively modified to suit agricultural production and peaked in power during the Late Classic period. The Slovenian archaeologist has been uncovering such sites for a long time. Minanbé is only the latest in a series of Maya metropolises discovered by his teams, including Ocomtún.

“I’ve said to myself quite a few times that this is the last season, because it is so difficult. But it is such a reward when you find a new site,” Šprajc told the Guardian’s Jo Tuckman in 2014. “It’s tough work, but it’s dead romantic.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.