Excerpt:

>Although the number of people who lived at Calakmul during the height of the Snake King’s rule was not a complete surprise because of previous mapping and archaeological investigations by the Autonomous University of Campeche and INAH [Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia], the team was astonished at the scale and degree of urban construction.

>Immense apartment-style residential compounds have been identified throughout the surveyed area, some with as many as 60 individual structures, the seats of large households composed of extended families and affiliated members. These large residential units were clustered around numerous temples, shrines, and possible marketplaces, making Calakmul one of the largest cities in the Americas at 700 AD.

>But that’s not all the team was able to see.

>“We were also able to see that the magnitude of landscape modification equaled the scale of the urban population,” explains [UCalgary’s] Reese-Taylor. “All available land was covered with water canals, terraces, walls, and dams, no doubt to provide maximum food and water security for the city dwellers.”