A 15-year-old student in Canada says that he has discovered a lost Maya city in Central America using a rather unconventional technique which involves matching stars to the location of temples on Earth. Satellite images of the location he has discovered reveal that the teen might actually be on to something as they show a site of a pyramid that’s hidden in foliage. The teen, William Gadoury, became interested in archaeology after the Maya calendar was published which announced that the world would end in 2012.
He studied diagrams of constellations and maps of known Maya cities for hours and eventually noticed that the two are linked, the brightest stars of the constellations were overlaid almost perfectly with the locations of the largest known Maya cities. The Telegraph reports that no other archaeologist discovered this correlation.
Gadoury discovered the lost city by studying 22 different constellations which corresponded perfectly to locations of 117 Mayan cities in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. He was able to match two stars in the 23rd constellations to known cities but one star remained unmatched, so he used transparent overlays to pinpoint a location that’s deep inside the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Following his discovery the teen got in touch with the Canadian Space Agency which gave him images taken from space, these satellite images show what appears to be a pyramid hidden under the thick canopy of the jungle. It’s now believed to be an ancient Maya pyramid surrounded by 30 smaller structures.
Now that a discovery has seemingly been made, the next step is to organise a ground expedition, which isn’t exactly going to be cheap as the location is in one of the most remote regions of Mexico. Gadoury has got in touch with a team of Mexican archaeologists and hopes to take part in any missions to the site he’s discovered.
Update: This story has been received with some skepticism, experts on the matter say that the ancient Maya didn’t plot their cities according to constellations and that what we see in the images is actually an old fallow cornfield or milpa.
Filed in ..