Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth

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A Maya vase.

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A replica of a painting on pottery depicting a woman on a jaguar-skin throne.

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A plate with bird imagery thought to have had mythological importance to the ancient Maya. The sophostication of El Mirador's inhabitants is reflected not only in their art, but in the precision of their calendars, the fact that they imported such exotic items as seashells from the Caribbean and Pacific Coast and from evidence they developed terraced farming to feed some 200,000 residents.

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Logging and cattle rancing threaten the Mirador basin. Says Hansen: "Any use of this particular area of forest other than [for] ecotourism would be, to me, the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump."

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Nightfall at La Danta pyramid. "When the Maya walked away, they left everything in place," says Hansen, who believes El Mirador's residents abandoned the city after they ruined their ecosystem by clearing too much of the forest.