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Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Sunday, August 10th, 2025.

One of your most enjoyed episode so far this year explored the discovery of a lost Mayan city.

This episode originally aired on January 1st, 2025.

A PhD student of archaeology recently discovered an ancient lost city in southern Mexico, hidden

under a jungle canopy for centuries, just by searching on Google. Luke Old Thomas's research

on Mayan settlements had him poking around on the internet, which led him to a LiDAR survey, a laser-based technology used,

in this case for terrain mapping.

When he ran the data, he realized there was an entire city of a significant size, entirely

covered in dense vegetation.

What's it like finding a whole city without ever setting foot on the ground? And could there be more of

these ancient settlements just a few clicks away waiting to be found? To Lane doctoral student, Luke,

Old Thomas now joins us on the excerpt to share how he stumbled into the discovery of a lifetime.

Luke, thanks for being on the excerpt. Thank you for having me, Dana. I'm glad to be here.

In a video on social media, you described this experience of discovery as both deliberate and

accidental. What were you actually looking for here? I know I made it sound easy, but how did the

discovery of Valeriana unfold?

Yeah, so I'm an archaeologist and I use a variety of remote sensing and Earth observation

...