Crossroads Roundup: PhD Student Finds Lost Maya City, Bram Stoker Story Re-Discovered, and a Totally Bananas Auction

Need a break from politics? Read this instead! The latest in art, archaeology, culture and more.

Temple I of the Calakmul Archaeological Zone in Campeche, Mexico; this site was rediscovered in 1931. The hope is that with the use of LiDAR technology, more Maya ruins will be found. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A PhD student accidentally found a Lost Maya city: 

Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in New Orleans, was scrolling through Google when he came across an intriguing link. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC. The area surveyed was near Xpujil, a town in the Mexican state of Campeche. 

But Auld-Thomas is an archaeologist, and he noticed something that others had missed in the images: the LiDAR survey revealed the ruins of an ancient Maya city buried under centuries of jungle. The city is estimated to have been home to 30,000-50,000 people at its peak in 750-850 A.D.