I'm not sure about this specific case but generally commercial wide coverage satellite imagery is not high quality enough to reliably see these kinds of formati

I'm not sure about this specific case but generally commercial wide coverage satellite imagery is not high quality enough to reliably see these kinds of formations. I'd guess they contract some combination of imaging including LIDAR to get better images to work from. That lets you see through vegetation etc. Here's an example from Tikal: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lidar-reveals-oldest-biggest-ancient-maya-structure-found-mexico https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lidar-reveals-oldest-big...