A Slovenian archaeologist named Ivan Šprajc has discovered the lost city of Lagunita, a Mayan city built around 700 AD which had been mysteriously abandoned four centuries.

When the 60-year old real-life Indiana Jones was asked by CNN what it felt like to be behind such an astounding find, the man voiced relief as well as some pride in the professionalism that made it all possible.

"It's a victory," explained the the archaeologist, "especially when the efforts are long.”

Šprajc noted that on several occasions his team had two or three weeks of just cutting through the bush to get to a location without at all knowing what they might find once there.

“When we get to the site it feels like a big victory, like we've done it. If it had been easy, then other people would have done it already," he said.

Šprajc and his team have, since 1996, discovered more than 80 ancient Mayan cities in the remote jungles of Mexico.

When asked how it could be that an entire city could simply vanish, Šprajc stated that the region in which he has found such treasures had gone unexplored because of its extreme inaccessibility.

"It's so hard to get there. It's a biosphere, a protected natural area that has never been densely populated since the collapse of the Classical Mayans, for the past thousand years or so," he said.

Delivering a short lesson on how and when ancient cities such as Lagunita vanished, Šprajc explained that:"Ninety-nine percent of settlements in the central and southern lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula were abandoned in a matter of 200 years.”

“By 1000 AD, practically everything was abandoned. That was the situation when the Spaniards came. But not so in the northern section of the peninsula and the Guatemala highlands, where there was no rupture until the arrival of the Spaniards."

The excavator, who seems to have come right out of the pages of a pulp novel by H. Rider Haggard, places a high priority on the more traditional methods of exploration, saying: "We can survive without computers, but not without machetes."