lost maya city A 15-year-old just discovered a lost Maya city in the Mexican jungle

[Reefa]

Quote

What did you do when you were 15?

 

William Gadoury, a 15-year-old school student from Quebec, Canada, has found something that’s been hidden from archaeologists for centuries - a lost city of the Maya civilisation, buried deep in the Yucatan jungle of southeastern Mexico.

 

He didn’t do it by hiring a bunch of expensive equipment, hopping on a plane, and slaving away on an excavation site - he discovered the incredible ruins from the comfort of his own home, by figuring out that the ancient cities were built in alignment with the stars above.

 

"I did not understand why the Maya built their cities away from rivers, on marginal lands and in the mountains," Gadoury told French-Canadian magazine, Journal de Montréal. "They had to have another reason, and as they worshiped the stars, the idea came to me to verify my hypothesis. I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities."

 

Gadoury had been studying 22 Maya constellations for years before releasing that he could line up the positions of 117 Maya cities on the ground with maps of stars and constellations above -  something that no one had pieced together before. 

 

With this in mind, he located a 23rd constellation, which included just three stars. According to his sky map, he could only link up two cities with the three stars, so suspected that a third city remained undetected in that spot.  

 

Unfortunately, the location on the ground that matched up with the third star wasn’t exactly somewhere that Gadoury could just go visit - it’s right in the heart of the jungle, in the inaccessible and remote region of Mexico’s southern Yucatán Peninsula.

 

Not that that stopped Gadoury - he knew that a fire had stripped much of the forest in the area back in 2005, which meant that from above, you might have an easier time spotting ancient ruins than if the canopy had been thriving for the past couple of thousand years.

 

All he needed to do was access satellite imagery of the area from the Canadian Space Agency, which he mapped onto Google Earth images to see if there were any signs of his lost city.

 

Further analyses from satellites belonging to NASA and the Japanese Space Agency revealed what looks like a pyramid and 30 buildings at the location mapped by the star, Yucatan Expat Life reports. "Not only has he discovered a new Maya city, but it is one of the five largest on record."

 

Quote

Killing. It.

 

As Daniel De Lisle from the Canadian Space Agency told Samuel Osborne at The Independent, the satellite images revealed certain linear features on the forest floor that looked anything but natural. "There are enough items to suggest it could be a man-made structure," he said. 

 

Gadoury has tentatively named the lost city K’àak’ Chi’, meaning "fire mouth", and will be working with researchers from the Canadian Space Agency to get his discovery published in a peer-reviewed journal. He’ll also be presenting his findings at Brazil's International Science fair in 2017.

 

Now, we don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble here, but while things look incredibly promising from those satellite images, including the shapes of buildings that archaeologists were able to make out, nothing can be confirmed until experts can access the site and see the remains up close.

 

A team of archaeologists is now figuring out how to make that happen, and one of the researchers involved in the project, Armand LaRocque from the University of New Brunswick, told the Journal de Montréal that if they can get the funds to organise an excavation, they’ll be taking Gadoury along for sure. 

 

"It would be the culmination of my three years of work and the dream of my life," said Gadoury, and suddenly we feel incredibly inadequate that the best thing we did at 15 was hand in most of our assignments on time.

 

source

[dMog]

how cool is this...wow

[Reefa]

4 minutes ago, dMog said:

how cool is this...wow

 

Exactly my thoughts when i read it ..Amazing..

[Sylence]

[Reefa]

Quote

15 Year Old Didn't Discover Mayan City After All

Unfortunately, when something seems too good to be true, all too often that’s because it is in fact not true at all. And that, alas, appears to be the case with a feel-good story that did the rounds this week: that of a 15-year-old Quebec boy who used ingenuity and application to find the ruins of a previously unknown Mayan city.

 

The young man’s ingenuity and application are beyond doubt, even if the story’s ending may not be quite what it appeared. And that story, to recap, went like this: It occurred to William Gadoury, of Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, a self-taught student of Mayan civilization, that the distribution of that ancient culture’s settlements mirrored the constellations they drew among the stars.

 

He overlaid 22 such constellations on a map and used them to locate 117 known ancient cities. But he found that one star in a 23rd constellation didn’t have a corresponding city. So, using the resources of both the Canadian Space Agency and Google Earth, he located what appeared to be a man-made structure beneath the forest canopy.

 

It was a story that was too good to resist – including for us here at Discovery News — but shortly after the story caught fire, a number of Mayan experts emerged to pour cold water on it all.

 

One of the first was David Stuart, an anthropologist from The Mesoamerica Center-University of Texas at Austin, who in a now-deleted Facebook post vented that, “the whole thing is a mess — a terrible example of junk science hitting the Internet in free-fall. The ancient Maya didn’t plot their ancient cities according to constellations. Seeing such patterns is a Rorschach process, since sites are everywhere and so are stars.”

 

That post was reported by George Dvorsky at Gizmodo, who also procured the opinion of Thomas Garrison, an anthropologist at USC Dornsife and an expert in remote sensing, that what the satellite images reveal is in fact a relic cornfield, or milpa. “I’d guess it’s been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands,” he told Dvorsky.

 

Dvorsky further solicited the view of Ivan Šprajc from the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia, who said that, “Very few Maya constellations have been identified, and even in these cases we do not know how many and which stars exactly composed each constellation. It is thus impossible to check whether there is any correspondence between the stars and the location of Maya cities.”

 

Over at Wired, Susan Zhang reached out to Susan Milbrath, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, who emailed her to say that, “The Maya area was so densely occupied in Classic Maya times that many years ago a well known archaeologist, Ed Kurjack, told me that the area looked much like the Ohio Valley, denuded of trees and full of towns that were fairly close to one another. So at any given point you would be likely to find an archaeological site.”

 

And Rachel Feltman at the Washington Post published an email from University of California at San Diego archaeologist Geoffrey Braswell, who said he has been to the sites in the satellite images and that they are in fact old fields filled with weeds (and perhaps marijuana) and a seasonally drained patch of swamp — although an interesting colonial archaeological site is nearby.

 

All of which feels a little like disproving the existence of Santa while eating the Easter Bunny, but it can not be emphasized enough that the fault here does not lie with Gadoury, who is to be commended for his original thinking and self-motivation. As Garrison said, “I applaud the young kid’s effort and it’s exciting to see such interest in the ancient Maya and remote sensing technology in such a young person … I hope that this young scholar will consider his pursuits at the university level so that his next discovery (and there are plenty to be made) will be a meaningful one.”

 

It is, however, a cautionary lesson to those of us in the science journalism and popularization business to be perpetually cautious and skeptical in our reporting. As Feltman noted at the Washington Post: “Without a formal, peer-reviewed study of the stars-and-cities hypothesis (and even with one), it’s a bit reckless to run with the conclusion that it has been proven.” That finding was echoed by an anonymous researcher who told Vice that, “the media really ought to wait until after a finding has passed through peer review before making announcements; this discovery would be unlikely to pass such review.”

 

Feltman had a particularly thoughtful and sensitive final word: “Citizen science is great, and it’s even more exciting when a teen does it,” she wrote. “And maybe there’s some nugget of something in Gadoury’s research that will go somewhere. But that doesn’t mean we’re doing him — or the researchers who have devoted their lives to studying this stuff — any favors by letting this story run wild.”

 

source