Researchers aim to spark action to address rising homelessness among older people

To improve services and meet community needs policy makers and other professionals need a clearly defined and comprehensive understanding of what late life homelessness entails

University of Toronto

Homelessness among people over the age of 50 is on the rise, a phenomenon formal housing strategies often overlook -- but researchers from the University of Toronto and McGill hope to prevent this oversight in the future. 

A new study published in The Gerontologist now provides a clear definition of late life homelessness informed by the lives and experiences of older adults. Drawing on interviews with older people who are unhoused and community workers in Montreal, Canada, the researchers aim to spark action and changes in policy and practice.

“We became interested in late life homelessness in 2011 when local service organizations told us that they were witnessing increasing numbers of older people in shelters and that they felt ill prepared to address their complex needs,” says Amanda Grenier, a social work professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and researcher at Baycrest Hospital. “We soon realized that the experiences of older people were absent from Canadian housing initiatives.”

The researchers’ definition of late-life homelessness points to a host of interconnected systemic issues that restrict access to support and contribute to increased inequalities, exclusion, and unmet needs. For example, the configurations of service for seniors are organized based on age, but people who are unhoused may experience reduced mobility or health concerns in their 50s. At the same time, community services without age criteria can overlook needs that are typically associated with aging. 

The accumulation of disadvantage over time is another factor that defines late-life homelessness. Intersecting forms of oppression are well documented in research on homelessness among younger people, but often overlooked when it comes to older demographics. The researchers point to policy strategies that focus on physical health but ignore the cumulative impact of disadvantages experienced by an individual over time -- due to racism, colonialism or sexism, for example -- making the ability to bounce back from income, housing, or care setbacks a bigger challenge.

Space and place or the built form of our buildings and cities is a third component of what makes late-life homelessness unique. Older people without a residential address face challenges accessing community-based homecare programs. Additionally, programs for those who are homeless often take place in inaccessible settings. Changing mobility needs can impact the physical endurance needed to travel to shelters and safely navigate between spaces of support, leaving older people to age in places that most would consider ‘undesirable’.

The final characteristic of late-life homelessness includes patterns of non-response or inaction on the part of programs and policy that leave older people with histories of homelessness to suffer unmet needs. This includes examples of health and social systems that require clients to have an address and the practice of shuffling older people who are homeless between different programs because those programs aren’t able to address their intersecting needs. 

Grenier and her co-author, Tamara Sussman from McGill University’s School of Social Work, argue that to effectively address late-life homelessness, policy makers and other professionals need a clearly defined and comprehensive understanding of what late life homelessness entails. To this end, they propose the following definition based on research with older people and in community settings:

Late life homelessness is an experience of unequal aging produced through age-based structures and social relations that restrict access to supports, reflect disadvantages over time, is lived in places that are not conducive to aging well and result in exclusion, non-recognition and unmet need.

“While attention to late life homelessness is starting to increase, older people still often remain overlooked in official strategies and policy response,” says Grenier. “Recognition and inclusion will require continued vigilance.”

 

Amanda Grenier is the author of Late-Life Homelessness: Experiences of Disadvantage and Unequal Aging. 

---

Journal

The Gerontologist

DOI

10.1093/geront/gnae123 

Article Title

Late life homelessness: A definition to spark action and change

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2024

 AMERIKA

Up to half of Medicare beneficiaries lack financial resources to pay for a single hospital stay

American College of Physicians

Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the organization they represent.         
----------------------------         

1. Up to half of Medicare beneficiaries lack financial resources to pay for a single hospital stay

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-24-00787

URL goes live when the embargo lifts          

A nationally representative study of Medicare beneficiaries with modest incomes found that up to half of them may not have sufficient funds to cover out-of-pocket costs associated with a single hospital stay. This financial precarity was more prevalent among Black and Hispanic beneficiaries, beneficiaries with lower levels of education, and those with multiple chronic conditions. The findings are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

 

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine used data from the 2018 wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to identify Medicare-enrolled respondents who would face financial precarity if exposed to the Medicare Part A hospital deductible of $1,600. The researchers focused on respondents making greater than 100% to 400% or less of the federal poverty level, or the so-called “economic middle” of Medicare recipients. This group includes people who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but still may qualify for financial assistance in other programs. Financial precarity was defined as having insufficient funds to pay the Medicare hospital deductible and examined across 4 scenarios that considered checking and savings account balances, total liquid assets (with a reserve for future living costs), and supplemental insurance. 

 

The researchers found that between 34.6% and 50.7% of the beneficiaries studied would face financial precarity if hospitalized because they would not have sufficient resources or supplemental insurance to cover associated out-of-pocket costs. While the prevalence of financial precarity varied by scenario, the proportion of beneficiaries who could not pay their hospital bill across all four scenarios exceeded 30%. Considering that just one hospitalization could deplete the financial resources of a large proportion of Medicare beneficiaries, these findings suggest a need to broaden financial protections for those with moderate incomes and limited assets. 

 

Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Angela Collom at acollom@acponline.org. To speak with corresponding author Paula Chatterjee, MD, MPH, please email pchat@pennmedicine.upenn.edu.

----------------------------    

2. Novel blood-based screening for colorectal cancer less effective, less cost-effective compared to colonoscopies or stool tests

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-24-00910

URL goes live when the embargo lifts   

A projected impact and cost-effectiveness analysis estimated reductions in colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence and mortality with novel blood-based and stool-based CRC screening tests versus established alternatives. The results revealed that first-generation novel cell free blood DNA (cf-bDNA) tests have the potential to meaningfully decrease the incidence and mortality of CRC compared with no screening, but substantially less profoundly than colonoscopy or stool tests. The findings can inform the implementation of novel screening methods in clinical practice. This study is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. 

 

Despite the emergence of multiple noninvasive screening methods, screening adherence among eligible people and follow up colonoscopy rates after an abnormal screen remain low. Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and colleagues used the Model of Screening and Surveillance for Colorectal Cancer (MOSIAC) to estimate the long-term clinical and economic impacts of novel CRC screening tests. The researchers compared CRC cases, CRC deaths, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and costs among patients using established screening methods of fecal immunochemical tests (FIT), colonoscopies or multitarget stool DNA test (Exact Sciences Cologuard) vs. four emerging screening methods: two novel cell-free DNA blood tests (Guardant Shield and Freenome), an enhanced, next generation multitarget stool test, and a novel FIT-RNA test (Geneoscopy ColoSense). The researchers modeled idealized 100% adherence and colonoscopy completion after an abnormal noninvasive screening, as well as multiple dimensions of non-ideal participation in CRC screening. They also included the possibility of the blood test being taken by those who consistently declined colonoscopy or stool tests as well as substituting the blood test for other screening alternatives. 

 

The researchers found that assuming 100% participation in all steps of screening, colonoscopy and FIT yielded reductions of more than 70% in CRC incidence and 75% in CRC mortality versus no screening. CRC incidence and mortality reductions were 68% and 73% with a multi-target stool DNA test, and similar rates were found for the enhanced multi-target stool DNA test and FIT-RNA test compared with no screening. The blood tests saw CRC incidence and mortality reductions of 42% and 56%. FIT and colonoscopy were more effective and less costly than blood and multi-target stool DNA tests, and the multi-target stool DNA test was more effective and less costly than the blood test. Participation rates through the various steps in the screening continuum substantially affected the estimated benefits. Achieving blood-based screening among persons unwilling or unable to undergo stool-based screening or colonoscopy improved population-level outcomes.  However, substituting first generation blood-based screening in persons who would otherwise undergo stool-based screening or colonoscopy worsened population-level outcomes.

 

These findings suggest that consideration of all the attributes of novel screening methods, including performance and cost, and the need for colonoscopy follow-up after an abnormal noninvasive screening test must be emphasized when determining the best screening options in clinical settings. 

 

Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Angela Collom at acollom@acponline.org. To speak with corresponding author Uri Ladabaum, MD, MS please email Lorraine Benigno Ibana at  libana12@stanford.edu.

----------------------------         

3. Rosuvastatin associated with better cardiovascular and mortality benefits compared to atorvastatin

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M24-0178  

URL goes live when the embargo lifts   

A real-world study comparing the effectiveness and safety of rosuvastatin versus atorvastatin found that initiation of rosuvastatin treatment was associated with slightly lower risks of mortality, major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs), and major adverse liver outcomes (MALOs). While the differences between treatments are relatively small, clinicians may want to consider these outcomes when prescribing one of these drugs to individual patients. The findings are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

 

Researchers from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China studied data from 285,680 patients using the China Renal Data System (CRDS) and UK Biobank (UKB) databases to compare the real-world effectiveness and safety of rosuvastatin and atorvastatin. The researchers compared all-cause mortality, MACEs, MALOs, development of chronic kidney disease (CKD), development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and occurrence of other statin-related adverse effects between the two treatments using nationally available data. The researchers found that compared with atorvastatin initiation, participants with rosuvastatin initiation had lower risk for all-cause mortality, MACEs and MALOs, but no important differences were observed for risks for developing CKD and other statin-related adverse effects. In the UKB database, initiation of rosuvastatin led to a higher risk of T2DM compared to atorvastatin initiation. The results suggest that clinical outcomes associated with starting rosuvastatin differ from the outcomes associated with starting atorvastatin, and clinicians should consider these differences when prescribing to individual patients. However, many differences were relatively small and did not meet traditional standards for statistical significance, and further research is warranted to use these findings confidently in clinical practice.

  

Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Angela Collom at acollom@acponline.org. To speak with corresponding authors Sheng Nie, MD, please email niesheng0202@126.com or Xin Xu, MD, PhD, please email xux007@163.com

----------------------------    

4. VA and DoD publish revised headache treatment advice to include recently approved therapeutics

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-24-00551

URL goes live when the embargo lifts       

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have updated their clinical practice guidelines for the management of headache to include several treatments recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The guidelines were revised earlier than the standard 5-year cycle due to the unprecedented expansion of headache medicine and therapeutics that took place since 2020 when the last guidelines were issued. A summary of these guidelines relevant to internal medicine physicians is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

 

Researchers reviewed evidence from systematic reviews and studies published between 2019 and 2022 on the benefits and harms of drugs and nondrug options for the prevention and treatment of all types of headaches. The group considered the strength and quality of the evidence, input about value and care from a patient focus group and benefits versus harms on critical outcomes before making consensus recommendations. Since the last guideline update in 2020, two new classes of medications and several devices have been approved for headache indications by the FDA. The revised guidelines include 52 recommendations on evaluation, pharmacotherapy, invasive interventions, and nonpharmacologic interventions for selected primary and secondary headache disorders, including 17 new recommendations.

 

For acute migraines, primary care clinicians can consider triptans, aspirin-acetaminophen-caffeine, and newer CGRP inhibitors (gepants). To prevent episodic migraines, options include angiotensin-receptor blockers, lisinopril, topiramate, valproate, eptinezumab, and atogepant. AbobotulinumtoxinA is recommended for chronic migraines, but not for episodic migraines. Gabapentin is not recommended for episodic migraine prevention. Ibuprofen (400 mg) and acetaminophen (1000 mg) are suggested for treating tension-type headaches, with amitriptyline for chronic tension headache prevention. Aerobic exercise or physical therapy can also help manage tension headaches and migraines. Clinicians should work with their patients in crafting treatment plans that account for headache type or types, comorbid conditions, values and preferences.

---------------------------- 

Also new in this issue:

A New Horizon: The Promise of the National Institutes of Health’s Landmark Designation of Persons With Disabilities as a Population With Health Disparities

Shahin A. Saberi, BS; Angela Zhang, BA; and Dorothy W. Tolchin, MD, EdM

Ideas and Opinions

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-24-00676

---

Journal

Annals of Internal Medicine

DOI

10.7326/ANNALS-24-00787 

Method of Research

News article

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Risk for Financial Precarity From Hospitalization: Implications for Targeting Financial Assistance in Medicare

Article Publication Date

29-Oct-2024

 

What animal societies can teach us about ageing

University of Leeds

Red deer may become less sociable as they grow old to reduce the risk of picking up diseases, while older house sparrows seem to have fewer social interactions as their peers die off, according to new research which shows humans are not the only animals to change our social behaviour as we age. 

A collection of 16 studies, including six from the University of Leeds, have been published today as part of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, investigating ageing and society across the natural world.   

One study into red deer shows that as older female deer become less and less social with age, cutting down on competition and reducing their risk of parasite infection. The study used data from a long-running project tracking a wild herd on the Scottish island of Rum. 

Dr Josh Firth from the University of Leeds’ School of Biology, an editor of the Special Issue, said that while previous research has often considered the process of becoming less social with age, known as “social ageing,” as potentially negative, these studies show changing habits could in fact bring benefits. 

Dr Firth said: “These kinds of effects might be expected across societies, where individuals might avoid social interactions as they become more vulnerable to the costs of infection. 

“Animal populations are a great way of considering the fundamental rules of how ageing may shape societies.” 

Like older humans who cut down their social interactions to avoid infections like Covid-19 – “shielding” during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 – the less sociable older does are less likely to pick up certain parasite infections. 

“Wild animals provide a good model system for considering the costs and benefits of changing social behaviour with age, and in this case may provide an example of ageing individuals reducing their social connections to avoid disease,” Dr Firth added. 

The special edition is an international collaboration and looks at how individuals of different species age, how this shapes their social interactions, and what this means for their societies. 

Dr Greg Albery from Trinity College Dublin, a co-editor on the Special Issue, said: "Because ageing is a universal process, and all animals live in some sort of social context, the topics that we discuss in detail can have really far-ranging implications. The hope is that in understanding the diversity of ageing and sociality across lots of different species, we can shine a light on the processes governing our own society in a time when understanding ageing is particularly important.” 

Even the common garden bird the house sparrow changes its social behaviour as it ages, according to another paper in the collection. Co-author of this research, Dr Jamie Dunning said: 

“Our study is one of the first to suggest that birds, like mammals, also reduce the size of their social network as they age. Specifically, the number of friendships, and how central a bird is to the wider social network, declined with age.” 

The results may be driven by existing friends of same cohort groups dying as they age, and because it takes more effort for older birds to make friendships with fewer same-age individuals available to bond with. Conversely, the benefits of social connections may be lower than they are for younger individuals, who may come to rely on those connections for things like reproduction or information later in life, Dr Dunning added.  

The house sparrow study was led by Dr Julia Schroeder at Imperial College London, the academic lead of the long-term house sparrow study on the English island of Lundy. With no sparrows either arriving in the remote island population or leaving it, researchers can monitor the whole population from birth to death and everything in between in exceptional detail. In future, Dr Schroeder said they are interested in investigating how and when individual friendships are formed. 

The research collection shows that the social effects of ageing are a very general biological phenomenon, extending even to fruit flies. 

The new Special Issue also considers the social lives of insects. Research leader Professor Amanda Bretman3 said: “In humans, a poor social environment can have the same level of impact as smoking or obesity on healthy ageing. We also know that the same is true for other animals, but most of the work is focussed on animals we think have complex societies like chimps or bees. We systematically reviewed evidence that even in insects we don’t usually think of as having complex social lives, their social environment has some big impacts on their lifespan and ageing.” 

The studies reveal interesting patterns, she added, showing that sexes can respond differently, that the social environment during development or adulthood can have different impacts, and that the age of social partners is important. 

The subjects Prof Bretman’s team worked with, Drosophila fruit flies, were easy to manipulate in the laboratory meaning they could get a much more detailed and mechanistic understanding of why social ageing happens, which could eventually lead to new interventions to support healthy ageing in humans. 

Animal systems are now widely considered as well placed for developing our fundamental understanding of ageing societies, Dr Firth added. 

---

Journal

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

DOI

10.1098/rstb.2022.0469 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Understanding age and society using natural populations

Article Publication Date

28-Oct-2024

Dinosaurs thrived after ice, not fire, says a new study of ancient volcanism

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction was a very sudden event, researchers assert

Columbia Climate School

 

image: 

Deposits in Morocco associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction, 201.6 million years ago. Red sediments in many locations around the world contain Triassic-era fossils. The white band on top of them is where the sediments were altered by massive volcanism, as evidenced by the gray/black basalt layers topping the assemblage.

view more 

Credit: Paul Olsen/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

201.6 million years ago, one of the Earth's five great mass extinctions took place, when three-quarters of all living species suddenly disappeared. The wipeout coincided with massive volcanic eruptions that split apart Pangaea, a giant continent then comprising almost all the planet's land. Millions of cubic miles of lava erupted over some 600,000 years, separating what are now the Americas, Europe and North Africa. It marked the end of the Triassic period and the beginning of the Jurassic, the period when dinosaurs arose to take the place of Triassic creatures and dominate the planet.

The exact mechanisms of the End Triassic Extinction have long been debated, but most prominent: Carbon dioxide surfaced by the eruptions built up over many millennia, raising temperatures to unsustainable levels for many creatures, and acidifying the oceans. But a new study says the opposite: cold, not warmth was the main culprit. The study presents evidence that instead of stretching over hundreds of thousands of years, the first pulses of lava that ended the Triassic were stupendous events lasting less than a century each. In this condensed time frame, sunlight-reflecting sulfate particles were spewed into the atmosphere, cooling the planet and freezing many of its inhabitants. Gradually rising temperatures in an environment that was hot to begin with—atmospheric carbon dioxide in the late Triassic was already three times today's level—may have finished the job later on, but it was volcanic winters that did the most damage, say the researchers.

"Carbon dioxide and sulfates act not just in opposite ways, but opposite time frames," said lead author Dennis Kent of the Columbia Climate School's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It takes a long time for carbon dioxide to build up and heat things, but the effect of sulfates is pretty much instant. It brings us into the realm of what humans can grasp. These events happened in the span of a lifetime."

The study was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction has long been thought tied to the eruption of the so-called Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, or CAMP. In a groundbreaking 2013 study, Kent and colleagues provided perhaps the most definitive link. Kent, who studies paleomagnetism, identified a consistent polarity reversal in sediments just below the initial CAMP eruptions, which showed they all happened at the same time across what are now widespread parts of the world. Colleagues then used radioactive isotopes to date the start of volcanism to 201,564,000 years ago, give or take a few tens of thousands of years. Scientists were unable to say how big the initial eruptions were, but it was assumed by many that the massive CAMP deposits must have taken many millennia to build up.

In the new study, Kent and colleagues correlated data from CAMP deposits in the mountains of Morocco, along Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, and New Jersey's Newark Basin. Their key evidence: the alignments of magnetic particles in the rocks that recorded the past drifting of Earth's magnetic pole at the time of the eruptions. Due to a complex set of processes, this pole is offset from the planet's unchanging axis of rotation—true north—and to boot, changes position by a few tenths of a degree each year. (The reason that compasses do not point exactly north.) Because of this phenomenon, magnetic particles in lavas that were emplaced within a few decades of each other will all point in the same direction, while ones emplaced, say, thousands of years later will point 20 or 30 degrees in a different direction.

What the researchers found was five successive initial CAMP lava pulses spread over about 40,000 years—each with the magnetic particles aligned in a single direction, indicating the lava pulse had emerged in less than 100 years, before drift of the magnetic pole could manifest itself. They say that these huge eruptions released so many sulfates so quickly that the sun was largely blocked out, causing temperatures to plunge. Unlike carbon dioxide, which hangs around for centuries, volcanic sulfate aerosols tend to rain out of the atmosphere within years, so resulting cold spells don't last very long. But due to the rapidity and size of the eruptions, these volcanic winters were devastating. The researchers compared the CAMP series to sulfates from the 1783 eruption of Iceland's Laki volcano, which caused widespread crop failures; just the initial CAMP pulses were hundreds of times greater, they say.

In sediments just below the CAMP layers lie Triassic-era fossils: large terrestrial and semiaquatic relatives of crocodiles, strange tree lizards, giant, flat-headed amphibians, and many tropical plants. Then they disappear with the CAMP eruptions. Small feathered dinosaurs had been around for tens of millions of years before this, and survived, eventually to thrive and get much larger, along with turtles, true lizards, and mammals, possibly because they were small and could survive in burrows.

"The magnitude of the environmental effects are related to how concentrated the events are," said study coauthor Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at Lamont-Doherty. "Small events spread out over [tens of thousands of years] produce much less of an effect than the same total volume of volcanism concentrated in less than a century. The overarching implication being that the CAMP lavas represent extraordinarily concentrated events."

* * * * *

The study was coauthored by Huapei Wang of China University of Geosciences, Morgan Schaller of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mohammed Et-Touhami of Morocco's Université Mohamed Premier.

 

---

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Correlation of sub-centennial-scale pulses of initial Central Atlantic Magmatic Province lavas and the End-Triassic extinctions

Article Publication Date

28-Oct-2024

PhD student discovers lost Maya city with pyramids in Campeche, Mexico jungle

Interesting Engineering
Tue, October 29, 2024 

Archaeologists have uncovered over 6,500 previously unknown Maya structures, including a hidden city with grand pyramids, within southeast Mexico. This major discovery highlights the impressive and populous ancient Maya landscape that had long been hidden beneath dense forests and modern settlements.

Lead author Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student from Northern Arizona University noted the significance of the find, saying, “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements… We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Using LiDAR technology, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, researchers were able to peer beneath the forest canopy in eastern Campeche, a lesser-studied region of the Maya civilization.

This powerful remote-sensing technique, which fires laser pulses to generate highly accurate 3D models of the landscape, revealed intricate details of Maya urbanism in an area that had remained unexplored by archaeologists until now.
A lush, urbanized landscape

The study focused on a roughly 50-square-mile area in east-central Campeche, an “unmapped” zone in Maya archaeology. By analyzing LiDAR data initially gathered in 2013 to monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests, researchers discovered the hidden expanse of Maya settlements.

The Maya civilization thrived during the Classic Period (A.D. 250–900), and areas like the central Maya Lowlands—covering parts of Guatemala, Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo—were hubs of advanced urbanism.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” explained Auld-Thomas. Many of the newly found sites, including the urban area called Valeriana, showcase the diversity and scale of Maya settlements.

A map shows details of the Valeriana site's core in Campeche state, Mexico. Image Credit: Antiquity 2024

This “major urban area” includes two main hubs of monumental structures connected by continuous settlements, along with evidence of sophisticated landscape engineering that supported such a large population.

The Valeriana site contains multiple plazas, grand pyramids, a ball court, and a large reservoir created by damming an arroyo, or dry creek bed—a design common in Maya cities to capture seasonal rainwater for use in arid months.

The findings shed light on the Classic Maya’s ability to transform their natural surroundings into a highly organized, urban landscape. This discovery reshapes our understanding of Maya cities, showing that much of the central Maya Lowlands was as densely populated and urban as other ancient civilizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1TO7-iG8Jw
Unseen depths of the Maya civilization

The study challenges previous assumptions about the Maya civilization by unveiling a picture of a more interconnected and urbanized society than previously known. While archaeologists have long understood that the Maya occupied and engineered vast tracts of land in the region, certain areas like east-central Campeche had largely escaped scientific attention.

By focusing on this “blank spot” in Maya archaeology, Auld-Thomas’s team has opened new doors to understanding the scope and organization of the ancient Maya.

LiDAR technology has become essential in modern archaeology, especially for exploring dense forests like those covering the Maya Lowlands. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using LiDAR surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas added.

However, the technology is uniquely suited to archaeology, as it can reveal hidden structures buried under vegetation, exposing sites that would otherwise remain unknown.

The Valeriana site is a stark example of just how much more there is to uncover. The researchers wrote in the study, “The discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that there are still major gaps in our knowledge of the existence or absence of large sites within as-yet unmapped areas of the Maya Lowlands.”



They concluded that the latest findings, when added to current knowledge, indicate that dense cities and extensive settlements were common across large portions of the central Maya Lowlands.

The findings are detailed in the journal Antiquity.

PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident

Georgina Rannard -BBC  Science reporter
Tue, October 29, 2024

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They uncovered the hidden complex - which they have called Valeriana - using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.

The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland's capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed - a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

There are no pictures of the city but it had pyramid temples similar to this one in nearby Calakmul [Getty Images]

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

How ancient Maya cities have withstood the ravages of time

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

The ruins were found in eastern Mexico, in Campeche [BBC]

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

"The point is that the landscape is definitely settled - that is, settled in the past - and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’," she says.

The research suggests that when Maya civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

"It's suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn't have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away," says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Maya city states.

Evidence of the ruins were found by a plane using laser remote sensing to map beneath the jungle canopy [Getty Images]

Many more cities could be found

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

"I've got to go to Valeriana at some point. It's so close to the road, how could you not? But I can't say we will do a project there," says Mr Auld-Thomas.



"One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study," he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.


Lost Mayan city discovered under Mexican jungle by accident

Sarah Knapton
Tue, October 29, 2024

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans

A lost Mayan city, complete with pyramids and a ball court, has been discovered buried deep under the Mexican jungle.

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans that had been taken in 2013 as part of a forest monitoring project in the southeastern state of Campeche.

The scans unveiled the outlines of multiple enclosed plazas, temple pyramids, a reservoir and several curved amphitheatre-like patios in the city, which is thought to be the second-largest of its kind in Latin America.



The team said Valeriana had “all the hallmarks of a Classical Maya political capital” and, at its peak, may have been home to up to 50,000 people between AD 750 and 850.

The find was initially made by Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University in New Orleans, who was browsing Google to find out if anyone had carried out a Lidar (light detecting and ranging) survey of the area.

“Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using Lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?”

Lidar works by firing a short laser pulse from a plane or satellite and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back.

Mr Auld-Thomas discovered a laser survey of around 50 square miles of dense Mexican forest which was rarely visited, even by locals.

While there are no pictures of the city, it may have looked similar to ruins in Calakmul

Working with colleagues, he studied the maps and found a dense, vast array of totally unstudied Maya settlements dotted throughout the region, comprising 6,674 undiscovered Mayan structures.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements.

“We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.



“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Scans unveil more sites discovered in the lost Mayan city

Valeriana comprised two major hubs of monumental architecture 1.2 miles apart, which were linked by continuous dense settlement and landscape engineering and watercourses. It also appears to have pyramids like those at the famous sites of Chichén Itzá or Tikal.

A ball court, where the ancient Mayan game of Pitz may have been played, was also found. The game could last two weeks, and its aim was to get the ball to the other side of the court without dropping it using only the hip, knee or elbow.

The team are now planning to conduct fieldwork in the areas identified on the survey.

The findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

Vishwam Sankaran
Wed, October 30, 2024 


Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

An American student analysing publicly available data found a sprawling Mayan city with thousands of undiscovered structures, including pyramids, under a Mexican forest.

The data came from laser scans of the Campeche region and revealed a buried world, since named “Valeriana”, with nearly 6,700 undiscovered structures.

Archeologists have been using laser scanning lidar technology to assess anomalies in landscapes across the Yucatan peninsula in Central America and stumbling upon pyramids, family houses and other Mayan infrastructure.

For a long time, surveys to find ancient structures sampled just a couple of hundred square kilometres. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago,” said Luke Auld-Thomas, PhD candidate at the Northern Arizona University who made the discovery.

In recent years, researchers have been analysing data from lidar scans taken for unrelated purposes to look for evidence of Mayan structures.

Ancient buildings and landscape modifications, including public plazas, agricultural terraces and field walls, discovered under Mexican forest (Auld-Thomas et al, Antiquity)

Mr Auld-Thomas analysed data from one such lidar project from 2013, focused on measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests, to see what lay underneath 50 square miles of Campeche. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC.

Analysing the data using modern archaeological methods revealed a dense and diverse array of Mayan settlements, including one sprawling city dating to between 250 to 900AD.

“The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered,” Mr Auld-Thomas said.

His study was recently published in the journal Antiquity.

The lost city has “all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital”, Mr Auld-Thomas noted. “We did not just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Studying such ancient cities could help solve modern problems facing urban development, researchers said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyperdense,” Mr Auld-Thomas said. “Given the environmental and social challenges we are facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

Laser archeology finds lost Maya cities hidden under forests

Saul Elbein
Tue, October 29, 2024


Laser imaging of the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have turned up thousands of ancient Maya structures — and an entire previously unknown city, a new study has found.

By flying aircraft over jungle in the Mexican state of Campeche and pummeling the trees with laser pulses, scientists have shown that beneath the forest lie the ruins of both a dense city and its crowded suburban hinterlands, according to results published on Tuesday in Antiquity.

The Yucatan is remarkable for being an essentially post-apocalyptic landscape, where over the past millennium forests returned to fill in the parks and boulevards of once-powerful Maya cities like Tikal and El Mirador after their inhabitants left them around 900 CE.

On the east side of the peninsula, for example, the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve sprawls over the ruins of the ancient city of Muyil — where crocodiles swim through straight-line creeks that were once urban canals and howler monkeys swing through the trees above lakes that were once city reservoirs.

That combination of dense forest atop the long-vanished cities of what was once a dense urban region has meant a succession of surprising finds for archeologists. Last year, for example, Slovenian archeologist Ivan Šprajc found a significant regional hub — which he called Ocomtun — in the “black hole” of the Balamku Biosphere Reserve, in the center of Campeche.

As it did for Šprajc, the lack of easy road access forced the Antiquity researchers to turn to a high-tech solution to penetrate the trees: aircraft using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to scan the forest, looking for obstructed and impermeable stone structures.

The new sites described in Antiquity are a combination of rural farming villages, regional market towns and “a large city with pyramids,”coathor Luke Auld-Thomas said in a statement.



LiDAR, he added, “allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge.’”

Those surprising findings — indicating huge populations in places where the conventional historical record suggests they should not have been — represent part of the promise of LiDAR‘s use in archeology. The technology has also been used to find lost cities beneath the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia and Ecuador, upending established narratives that the region lacked a deep history of dense urban life — and suggesting that vast Amazonian metropolises of the present day like Manaus and Iquitos might be less modern innovation than a return to an ancient pattern.

“LiDAR is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” coauthor Marcello Canuto, a professor of anthropology at Tulane, said in a statement.

Some newly discovered areas are Maya fields and farming villages, which offer insight about ancient rural life, Canuto said, while others once sported “dense populations.”

In 2018, Canuto and his team used LiDAR to uncover 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures beneath the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Northern Guatemala, a park that also houses the well-known site of Tikal, according to National Geographic.

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a colleague of Canuto’s at Tulane, told National Geographic at the time. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Whether the settlements discovered are big or small, in all cases, Canuto noted the new sites hidden beneath the forest show how the Maya managed their environment “to support a long-lived complex society” — urban structures that still shape the movement of animals through the forests that covered them.

The sites announced on Tuesday are, at least by the standards of the Yucatan, in plain sight. They were “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” Auld-Thomas said.

But despite that local knowledge, Auld-Thomas said, “the government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it.”

The discovery, he added, “really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

Have we found all the major Maya cities? Not even close, new research suggests

Tulane University

Using laser-guided imaging to peer through dense jungle forests, Tulane University researchers have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico and a better understanding of the ancient civilization's extent and complexity.

The new research, published in the journal Antiquity, was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto.

The team used lidar, a laser-based detection system, to survey 50 square miles of land in Campeche, Mexico, an area largely overlooked by archaeologists. Their findings included evidence of more than 6,500 pre-Hispanic structures, including a previously unknown large city complete with iconic stone pyramids.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student in Tulane’s Anthropology Department and instructor at Northern Arizona University. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

The Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane University has been pioneering the use of lidar technology in archaeological research. Over the past decade, the MARI has built a state-of-the art Geographic Information Systems (GIS) lab, managed by Francisco Estrada-Belli, to analyze remote sensing data, such as lidar.

Lidar technology uses laser pulses to measure distances and create three-dimensional models of specific areas. It has allowed scientists to scan large swaths of land from the comfort of a computer lab, uncovering anomalies in the landscape that often prove to be pyramids, family houses and other examples Maya infrastructure.

“Thanks to generous funding from the Hitz Foundation, MARI has been at the forefront of the use of lidar technology in archaeological research over the past decade,” said Canuto, director of the MARI. “Now our efforts are expanding from data analysis to data collection and acquisition. The work conducted on these data from Campeche represent how MARI’s ‘lidar footprint’ is expanding.”

This research may also help resolve ongoing debates about the true extent of Maya settlements.

"Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, 'Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn't know about, the population must have been huge,’” Auld-Thomas said. “The counterargument was that lidar surveys were still too tethered to known, large sites, such as Tikal, and therefore had developed a distorted image of the Maya lowlands. What if the rest of the Maya area was far more rural and what we had mapped so far was the exception instead of the rule?"

The study highlights the transformative power of lidar technology in unveiling the secrets of ancient civilizations. It also provides compelling evidence of a more complex and varied Maya landscape than previously thought.

"Lidar is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” Canuto said. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society."

---

Journal

Antiquity

DOI

10.15184/aqy.2024.148 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Running. out of empty space: environmental lidar and the crowded ancient landscape of Campeche, Mexico

Article Publication Date

29-Oct-2024