A Canadian teenager used the position of a constellation to identify the location of a possible Maya city where an anomaly, shown above on Google Earth (left) and as a satellite image (right) was identified. Scholars argue whether it represents Maya construction or simply an abandoned corn field.
For gee-whiz value, the announcement has been hard to beat: A Canadian teenager discovers a lost Maya city without even stepping foot in the Central American jungle.Unfortunately, this "discovery" appears to be the well-intentioned, albeit faulty, result of modern Western education colliding with an ancient civilization that saw the world in a very different way.
According to the original news report, 15-year-old William Gadoury correlated more than 20 Maya constellations against a map of known Maya cities. The cities lined up perfectly with the star map, with the exception of a "missing" settlement in a constellation that includes the sites of Calakmul and El Mirador.
Imposing Western Maps on Maya Landscapes
To Anthony Aveni, an astronomer and anthropologist who is widely considered the "father of archaeoastronomy," trying to impose a one-to-one correspondence between a modern star map and a large number of ancient man-made features—whether it's Maya cities or the Nazca Lines— is simply an act of creative imagination."The idea of a map as we know it, as a scaled representation of geographic reality, is a modern Western concept," says Aveni, who adds that the cosmos is "certainly involved" in patterning how we build things on earth, but not to the degree of precision claimed by Gadoury.
In addition, while we know that the Maya recognized 13 zodiacal constellations, there are several different theories on what they represent and even how they're arranged, he adds.
"It's an interesting Western fantasy… we tend to look at these modern star maps and see things in the way we might see patterns in clouds," says Aveni, who cautions that he can't "close the door" on Gadoury's hypothesis until he sees the complete data.
The archaeoastronomist praises the teenager's imagination and initiative. "I think he's a very bright young man and an independent thinker. I hope he gets a college scholarship for his work."
Analyzing the Imagery
Some media reports were quick to dismiss one of the anomalies on the satellite and Google Earth images outright as an abandoned cornfield, butNational Geographic Society grantee Francisco Estrada-Belli, who specializes in Maya archaeology and remote sensing, says that the available imagery doesn't provide any conclusive evidence one way or another."They don't show anything that jumps out to me as pyramids; it could be a jungle clearance, it could be many things. What I see are polygonal shapes in the forest canopy," says Belli.
While satellite imagery can show anomalies in the plant canopy, only a remote-sensing tool like LiDAR can "see" through the vegetation to give researchers a better idea of what's on the ground.
