hello this is bbc news. the headlines... millions of people in england and wales are told to stay at home on the first day of tough, new coronavirus restrictions — as action is taken on a new variant of the virus. the new variant is out of control, we need to bring it under control and this news about the new variant has been an incredibly and two a frankly awful year. the health secretary labels crowded scenes at london stations last night as "irresponsible" — the transport secretary says extra police officers will be deployed to enforce the rules. france and germany are among

the latest countries to ban travel to and from the uk — as european officials prepare to discuss a coordinated travel response tomorrow morning long waits for some shoppers — as only essential retail can be open in england's tier 4 and in wales. now on bbc news, amanda ruggeri explores the new technology that is allowing archaeologists to explore the hundreds of mayan structures that are still hidden beneath the amazon. located in northern guatemala, the maya biosphere reserve is the largest rainforest north of the amazon and one of the world's most important hotspots for biodiversity. it also was once the heart of the maya civilisation. today, hundreds of houses, fortifications, temples and other structures lie hidden

beneath the jungle. i like this part. but some archaeologists are determined to change that. they've devoted their careers to getting the jungle to give up its secrets, and new technology has revealed that, despite decades of work, they have only begun to scratch the surface. there's a deep hole, and that's where they're digging right now. car starting. don't let me down. the maya city of holmul has been an obsession of archaeologist francisco estrada belli's for the last 20 years. he calls it the gift that keeps on giving.

let's try not to get stuck. yeah. in recent years, his work has been aided by the use of lidar, a technology currently transforming archaeology. i've come to holmul, on the border with belize, to learn more about what estrada belli has discovered. this was one of the most populous places on earth a thousand years ago, if you think about it. we're already estimating eight to 11 million people in an area of 9,000 km2. and yet they were using very sustainable practices so that they could do this for 2,000 years. and so, you started excavating... ..in holmul in 2000.

that was our first season, yeah. it was very adventurous. we worked for two weeks, and then it started raining. we didn't have any cars and the roads were all flooded, so we got on out on horses. the city of holmul dates back to 800 bc. it was abandoned 1,700 years later. one of its mysteries that estrada belli has been trying to solve — its empty tomb. i think i know why they abandoned it, because the date of the building matches with a guy who's supposed to be from here, being sacrificed at tikal, in the year 748. 0k... and after that, pretty much all monumental construction stopped here. so, tell me what that would have meant. so, tikal was defeating its archenemy, the snake kingdom, and they already defeated the actual snake kings and now they were going

after its former allies. this is historical archaeology. we don't just talk about processes any more and theories, now we talk about specific events, specific people. because we can read the inscription. and yet, this tomb was almost destroyed before estrada belli, or any another archaeologist, were able to discover it. and here is the tomb chamber. wow. looters came and dug a hole right behind this doorway. and they missed by the structure with the freeze by 27 metres, i'll show you. so that's the freeze right there... whoa! so that's the corner image of one of the dead kings.

you can imagine what they would have done. they would have said, oh, my gosh, there's definitely something cool behind this and they would just blast through it. it's all there and it goes for eight metres that way and another five this way, has been damaged on purpose by the ancient maya. nothing else, really, is damaged in the whole carving. just his face, his necklace, a little ceremonial head. the maya believed everyone had a soul, including images of people and things. and so when they were burying something, they would let the soul out by killing the image. that's the god of the underworld. and he's holding something. he's holding a hieroglyph. it's two syllables. two words, really. 0ne means the first, and one means the food. so he's holding the first of it

and he's offering it to him. i love the faces on this. so that's the eye? that's the spiral eye. he's got blue under the eyes. he's tired. laughter. he's been up all night because he's the god of the night sky. and this here is the glyph that says... he's the vessel of the snake kings. what did you feel in that moment when you realised that? when i saw the glyph, i thought, well, my career just made a big turn. exactly! it's like, jackpot! estrada belli was lucky to find this freeze. the jungle doesn't make for especially easy archaeology. 100 years ago, an archaeologist from harvard first came to holmul and discovered these temples, but he missed the oldest carving which dates all

the way back to 350 bc. the notes were rather incomplete because the archaeologist died shortly after working here, by a mysterious disease that he contracted here. he returned from here with a massive sore on his nose which never healed. that's what happens with this bug. eventually he died, he never finished his reports. it was actually published by one of his friends at harvard, posthumously. they forgot to mention this tunnel, and he had found the window of an earlier pyramid and stopped. so, we kept digging and there's this massive carving that explained what the temple is all about. so are these beetles still around? yes. 0h, great! it's called the assassin bug. good, i'm glad we're going in now. welcome to the underworld. it even made a sound. turn the light on. watch your step.

we're going to walk around the exterior and go to the front. and this is the front of the building. whoa! god, it's a lot bigger than i was expecting. yeah, it's all perfectly preserved. wow. ..for 2,400 years. and what you have is a massive head of an earth monster with the mouth open, these are the teeth. and here inside the mouth of this monster is the face of an old man. and even today the maya in guatemala that worship an old man, it has the same wrinkles, the teeth like that. it's the image of the god of the underworld. it's not going to change. jungle creatures and diseases are just two of the problems that archaeologists have had to face.

but historically, the bigger threats to the rain forest and its archaeology have been logging and looting. this is el diablo. the devil. the devil, yeah. laughs. we don't know why they choose that name. it's an early classic building, we call it between 300 ad to 600 ad. wow. now we're going to go and try to see some of the earliest version of this building. and what was it used for? this was the funerary temple. here's where the remains of the fierce king of el zotz rests. this devil temple was allegedly named because the sides are dangerously steep. but maybe more fitting is that its king who ruled in the fourth century ad was buried with the remains of six sacrificed children. two metres below here, that's where we found the tomb.

yeah, that's where we found the tomb, two metres away. so i'm standing on top of a king's tomb? yes, from 370.380 ad. but nothing's in there any more? no, we removed, we excavated, and everything now is in a national museum. the looters hadn't gotten to it, so everything was still there? everything still there, we found it, we found it, the chamber was completely sealed. when we open, we still feel that cold breeze and like a smell, like something was in the putrefaction process, when we open it. in 2010, when we found the tomb of the fierce king of el zotz, we were working on it. unfortunately, looters can come and they are really well organised and can take everything from you.

one day we hired a group of guards to protect it, but it didn't work because some of them tried to too. i confronted them, one of them put his gun shot. at the time, i think i was a good liar. itold him, you know, this is a computer. we have internet, which we don't have, and we are filming everything. and that's when it stopped. another major challenge for the maya biosphere reserve is illegal logging, often tied to drug trafficking. and when the jungle is cleared, it doesn't just affect the animals in the rainforest, but the maya sites, which are often irretrievably damaged. they will clear the forest around archaeological sites, plant the marijuana, loot the sites while the marijuana was growing and then collect to harvest. and put all they got on small planes to go to the us.

several illegal activities are still going on in guatemala. illegal logging, which is not a problem here specifically, but in other parts of this region, it's a big problem. drug trafficking. we're fortunate here at holmul, but out at western guatamala, they cut the forest to build airstrips, airplanes from columbia, land there, and it's a trans shipment place to go across to mexico and from there to the us, and they burnt all the forest in the process. whereas this area has done much better because it was given in concession to local communities for sustainable logging. so in the last 20 years, the local communities have stopped the drug trafficking, the land invasions, the deforestation, and that's why sites like this are still covered by forest.

we think what we have in place here works much better because the local communities are empowered and have an incentive to protect the forest. which is the sustainable logging. for as long as they can continue, they will protect the forest. this man is vice president of the arbol verde concession which has been given to local residents for sustainable logging. like logging might seem an anathema to the forest, it turns out that concessions like these can have quite the opposite effect. by being run with strict adherence to sustainable management principles, community concessions like this one have actually protected the reserve. one of the biggest challenges to archaeologists in the maya biosphere reserve isn't logging or even looting.

one of the biggest challenges to archaeologists in the maya biosphere reserve isn't logging or even looting. it's a fact that it's extremely difficult to find or identify

structures in a jungle as thick and wild as this one. and that's where a technology that's relatively new to archaeology, lidar, has been transformative. so, this hill is supposedly a pyramid. they think it might be may be as big as the great pyramid, the mundo perdido, it's definitely steep. it looks like a hill. so, it's pretty amazing that they're able to find that out through lidar. we're right here. 0nly10% of tikal has actually been excavated and discovered ? this feels very indiana jones.

lidar is a type of remote sensing technology that's used to create extraordinarily detailed 3d maps and representations. in the reserve, lidar is being employed in two ways, from air craft to create topological maps, and from hand—held scanners to build better 30 models of a particular site or structure. the process of beaming lasers from aircraft, is the initiative of the foundation for mayan cultural and natural heritage. it's amazing. probably a classic structure. it's massive. this is one of the bigger temples of tikal.

what is lidar exactly? what makes it such a great tool? it really strips off the forest canopy with billions of laser beams that map individually its return, every time they hit something on the surface. that will give tremendous use for the rain forests and the biomass. and you said billions of laser beams. how many billions of laser beams? i think our first data said 60 billion returns. so, it's an incredible amount of data. how long did it take to collect that? only a couple of weeks. it was something like eight flights. 2100 km2 of area is covered in that amount of time. you obviously have a great appreciation for an understanding

how sophisticated the mayans were. but did the lidar increase that understanding? yes, the lidar showed without any doubt that we totally underestimated their engineering capabilities in terms of landscape modifications to make the land for sustainable to irrigation, bringing water to places to cultivate, to stop erosion. it's pretty mind blowing. that's how i felt. i thought they were sophisticated already, but not at this scale. one of the sites where lidar has been especially helpful is here, el zotz. lidar is the first step. it shows us everything. it gives us the footprint, but then archaeologists have to check it.

they have to get there. lidar makes it so that as archaeologists, we don't have to spend all her time figuring out what's there and instead, we can focus in and excavate and addressing questions we want to. so much of our time is spent mapping and just trying to find places, and lidar showed us we weren't very good at it. a lot of sites around here were abandoned at the end of what we call the classic period. around 900, something like that. el zotz had people living here up till the 1300s. we're probably somewhere near the old communal royal, the new spanish road that passed down through central america and supposedly was built on top of a major pre—columbian three way. but no one has actually pinpointed where that ran through. we wonder will lidar eventually reveal that for us. that will be amazing. the first king of el zotz was such

an important character that a temple was created for him so he would never be forgotten. when you are here, be careful. they are supporting the roof. if you fall, fall this way. so, don't fall on the sculpture. this was all from one king? yes. for the first king. this king not only was powerful. we know about his extension of power. lidar is helping us recognise everything this king did to preserve him, his family and his legacy. the creation of a dynasty. a find like this tells you there is a king, then the lidar helps you realise what the whole context is. and how much even more there is, and how powerful he was.

everything they built, we can make more sense of it. you have been coming here for 20 years and knew the area very well, but you still hadn't suspected that this was a major mall. when you see it in the context of lidar, it makes more sense. myjob is typically two things. i think it was a 100 metre long wall, i had no idea it continued for several kilometres. when you got that lidar data back and started to see all that, what'd you say? i was like oh my god, my god for hours. oh my god, look at this! oh my god, look at that! it's very humbling.

you'll be mappin, you think you know what you're doing for all my career, and this thing is so much better than what any of us can do. we can do what we do in 20 years in two days. same work and it's better. the lidar shows how big the rain forest is and how many trees there are with much greater precision. which can be instrumental in conserving the rainforest.

hello, good evening. after a weekend of sunshine and showers, there is some more rain in the forecast over the next couple of days — not great news for those areas that already have flood warnings enforced across parts of england and wales. but as we head through the week towards christmas, it will turn drier, but it will also turn a bit colder. now, on the satellite picture from earlier on, you can see this big hook of cloud.

this is going to provide wet weather, really, for the first half of this week across southern parts. you can see this frontal system approaching during tonight. further north, some clear spells, but also some showers. some pretty chilly air in northern areas, but very mild air is going to be pushing its way in towards the south, so a real split in our temperature fortunes. as we head through tonight, it'll be turning milder as the night wears on across the south as this cloud and rain works its way in. by the end of the night, temperatures in the southwest of england likely to be up at around 11 degrees, chillierfurther north with some clear skies, still some showers across parts of western scotland particularly. now, as we head into tomorrow, much of england and wales will start off cloudy and wet, that rain pushing its way eastwards, some of it getting into northern ireland and southern scotland for a time. some brighter spells for northern scotland, but with some heavy showers as well, starting to turn wintry over high ground as some colder air digs its way in. temperatures for aberdeen and glasgow six or seven degrees, whereas further south, 15 the high in london, exceptionally mild for this time of year.

as we head through monday night, the rain in the south doesn't just clear away nicely, it lingers — could well push back northwards into parts of the midlands and wales. clearer skies further north, still some showers across parts of northwest scotland. again, some of those wintry over the high ground on tuesday. we keep our area of cloud with some patchy rain further south, but i think in between, there'll be a slice of sunshine for parts of northern england, northern ireland, southern scotland, for example. still a bit of a split in temperature fortunes, the mildest weather down towards the south. now, as this area of low pressure swings its way through, it's going to be another wet day across the southern half of the uk on wednesday, but drier conditions further north as this area of high pressure starts to topple its way in. that high pressure will topple its way right across the british isles as we head through christmas eve and into christmas day. so, after more rain in the south, particularly on wednesday, things will turn drier for the end of the week, but rather chilly by day with some overnight frosts.

applause

a race to curb the mutant strain of coronavirus — millions of people are now living under tougher restrictions. england's new tier 4 sees shops close, streets empty and christmas bubbles abandoned — ministers say it could last for months. the new variant is out of control and we need to bring it under control. and this news about the new variant has been an incredibly difficult end to, frankly, an awful year. tonight, the ports of dover and folkestone are closing to outgoing traffic, as france — and other countries — suspend travel from the uk because of the spread of the virus. we'll be looking at how the government can respond,