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On February 1, 2018, Guatemalan, U.S., and European archaeologists announced the discovery via LIDAR of about 60,000 new individual Mayan structures in the reserve.[SUP][10][/SUP] The structures, hidden under dense foliage, include four major Mayan ceremonial centers with plazas and pyramids.[SUP][10][/SUP] Other structures include elevated highways, complex irrigation and terracing systems, defensive walls, ramparts and fortresses, although signs of looting were also found.[SUP][11][/SUP] The LIDAR imagery also showed that the Mayans altered the landscape more significantly than previously thought; in some areas, 95% of available land was cultivated.[SUP][10][/SUP] The discovery has been described as a major breakthrough in Maya archaeology; it suggested that Central America supported an advanced civilization that, at its peak, was more comparable to the advanced cultures of ancient Greece or China rather than to the disparate city states that ground-based research had long suggested.[SUP][11][/SUP] Over 800 sq mi (2,100 sq km) of the reserve were surveyed, producing the largest LIDAR data set ever made for archaeological research.[SUP][11][/SUP]
