An unexpected architectural tradition linked many Olmec and Maya societies of Mesoamerica, an ancient cultural area that ran from central Mexico to Central America.
Starting as early as around 3,400 years ago and for roughly the next two millennia, those communities constructed ceremonial centers based on a common blueprint. That plan was grounded in ideas about space, the calendar and possibly beliefs about the universe, researchers report October 25 in Nature Human Behavior.
An airborne remote-sensing technique called light detection and ranging, or lidar, revealed 478 rectangular and square ceremonial centers across Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast, over an area roughly the size of Ireland. Lidar maps detected remnants of
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