Star pupil finds lost Mayan city by studying ancient charts of the night sky from his bedroom

UK Telegraph ^ | 10 May 16 | Telegraph Reporters

[aMorePerfectUnion]

(Title was shortened. Add: "of the night sky from his bedroom ")

A Canadian schoolboy appears to have discovered a lost Mayan city hidden deep in the jungles of Mexico using a new method of matching stars to the location of temples on earth.

William Gadoury, 15, was fascinated by the ancient Central American civilization and spent hours poring over diagrams of constellations and maps of known Mayan cities.

And then he made a startling realisation: the two appeared to be linked.

“I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities,” he told the Journal de Montréal.

In hundreds of years of scholarship, no other scientist had ever found such a correlation.

Studying 22 different constellations, William found that they matched the location of 117 Mayan cities scattered throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

(Cont'd at link)

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

When did Canada join the EU?

[21twelve]

“...they are just laid out in relation to each other, to form a pattern that matches the stars.”

Still - quite a feat. (Or “feet” - as I imagine a lot of pacing was going on. “Okay - now lets walk 512,789 paces THAT way.”) And I imagine they couldn’t just walk it in a straight line. It takes a lot of effort to get to a specific spot while zig-zagging across the terrain and navigating by the sun and stars.

[glock rocks]

bkmk

[husky ed]

Someone should put this kid on meds before he injures himself ;-)

Ed

[Daffynition]

The bar was not set very high

[Zack Attack]

Meanwhile, American students are learning somewhat less lofty things.

Don't dismiss the importance of students learning why they should be able to choose which bathroom they feel like using on a particular day.

[rovenstinez]

King of like the Lords Prayer... Your Will be done on Earth.

[catnipman]

“The unasked question (so far as I’ve seen): What technology did they use to site the cities? GPS would be real handy for that, but of course, Garmin was just a recent start-up in those times...”

Do keep in mind that this is the Telegraph promoting this notion, after all.

And doesn’t anyone find it a bit suspicious that the Telegraph showed only a couple of google earth pics, and not a star map overlaid with a space shot of the supposedly 117 similarly terrestrially located cities? And besides, doesn’t the axial precession cause a shift in the appearance of the celestial sphere over time impacting this supposed citing of cities?

Looks to me like the kid may have just been pouring over google earth maps and noted a bump in the jungle that no one else had.

[AFreeBird]

Correct. The Nile is the milky way, and the Giza plateau is layed out as the three stars in Orion’s Belt.

As above, so below.

And the Sphinx looks to Leo. Been a while since I read that book.

Sounds like this kid took a lesson from that book and applied it to the Myans.

[jaydubya2]

http://www.businessinsider.com/ancient-mayan-city-may-be-corn-field-2016-5

However, experts are now voicing skepticism about that idea.

George Dvorsky, a contributing editor at Gizmodo, reached out to two anthropologists — and both cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the site without on-the-ground confirmation.

Thomas Garrison, an expert in satellite imagery (also called remote sensing), told Dvorsky that it's probably an old cornfield: "I'd guess [the field has] been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands."

David Stuart, an archaeologist and director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin, took to Facebook to share a frank assessment.

"The whole thing is a mess -- a terrible example of junk science hitting the internet in free-fall," he wrote. "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."

Both scientists commend William on his efforts and enthusiasm, but say the media has run away with a specious story.

[Boogieman]

Well, it’s in this news story, they just didn’t really state it very clearly. However, as others have noted in the thread, this type of placement isn’t a novel thing, people have speculated that other sites like the Giza pyramids have a similar arrangement, so I was already familiar with the idea.

[Boogieman]

Yes, I’d say it indicates more about their skill as surveyors than any particular astronomical knowledge.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks aMorePerfectUnion.

[lonevoice]

Cool story!

[wildbill]

There is a lady professor from the U. of Alabama who is finding new pyramid sites all over Egypt using infared picture technology from sattelites.