Teenager discovers lost Mayan city using the stars and Google Earth

A teenage boy in Quebec has discovered a lost Mayan city in the middle of the Mexican rainforest—and all without leaving his city.

15-year-old William Gadoury has been passionate about the Maya since 2012, when there was a big kerfuffle over the Mayan calendar announcing the end of the world, according to Le Journal de Montréal. He’s been eagerly studying them ever since, and recently he made a connection that no other scientist over the past few centuries ever has: He linked the arrangement of the biggest cities of the Maya to the stars.

It all started with a question.

“I didn’t understand why the Mayas had constructed their cities far from rivers, on lands with little fertility and in the mountains,” Gadoury told Le Journal*.

Searching through Mayan literature

Which is when he turned to the Madrid Codex—one of three extant Mayan books that date before the arrival of the Spaniards.

“There had to be another reason, and since they loved the stars, the idea came to me to verify my hypothesis,” he said*.

After looking through the codex, he came up with 22 Mayan constellations. He then created a transparent map of them and placed it over a map of Google Earth, and realized that the constellations corresponded to the layout of Mayan cities on the Yucatán Peninsula.

“I was truly surprised and excited when I realized that the brightest stars of the constellations corresponded to the largest Mayan cities,” he added*.

This discovery is enormous on its own—according to Le Journal, William’s method also works with the Aztecs, Incas, and Harappa in India—but it didn’t stop there. After poking around another Mayan reference book, he discovered a 23^rd constellation, which was made of three stars. When this was added to the map, two more cities fit—but the third was absent.

He knew where the third city was supposed to be, however, and contacted the Canadian Space Agency for help. They gave him satellite images from NASA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency, of the site. He also visited websites that distribute satellite images, where he was able to get his hands on pictures of the area from 2005, when a fire devastated the area—but left parts of the potential city visible to satellites.

All in all, this means that Gadoury has correlated 142 stars with 118 Mayan cities.

Preliminary verification

Dr. Armand LaRocque, who specializes in remote sensing at the University of New Brunswick, was able to look at the images for Le Journal.

“The geometric shapes, like squares and rectangles, are apparent in these images, shapes which are difficult to attribute to natural phenomena,” he said*.

For the time being, no one will be going out to verify the satellite images of the city, which Gadoury has named K’àak’ Chi’ (“fire mouth”)—it’s prohibitively expensive to create an expedition to the remote area at the moment. But two Mexican archaeologists have promised Gadoury to bring him in the future.

“That would be the result of my three years of work and my life’s dream,” Gadoury said.

Gadoury isn’t resting on his laurels until then, though. His work is to be published in the upcoming months, and he is looking to attend the Expo-Sciences International conference in Brazil in 2017, where he would represent Quebec.

Currently, his school has paid half the fees, but he needs some help with the rest—about $774 in U.S. currency. If you would like to help him out, please reach out to redOrbit on Facebook or Twitter, and we’ll get you connected.

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Image credit: Le Journal de Montréal.

*Translated from French by Susanna Pilny

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