The teen, the stars and the lost mayan city

Evie

Pronounced like Eevee
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DISCLAIMER: the following is not (yet) based on a published paper (though a paper is apparently set to be published). And it'S entirely possible that the satellite picture are just a coincidence. But it's still an interesting theory, and the fact that there appears to be *something* right where the theory predict a lost city should be is the "sit up and take notice" variety of cool stuff.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...scovers-ancient-mayan-city-lost-in-jungles-o/

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.

William took to Google Maps and projected that there must be another city hidden deep in the thick jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico
William took to Google Maps and found that there must be another city hidden in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico CREDIT: CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY
“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.

I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities
William Gadoury
When he applied his theory to a 23rd constellation, he found that two of the stars already had cities linked to them but that the third star was unmatched.

William took to Google Maps and projected that there must be another city hidden deep in the thick jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

The Canadian Space Agency agreed to train its satellite telescopes on the spot and returned with striking pictures: what appears to be an ancient Mayan pyramid and dozens of smaller structures around it.

If the satellite photographs are verified, the city would be among the largest Mayan population centers ever discovered.

It fell to William to christen the new city and he chose the name K’aak Chi, meaning Fire Mouth, and the teenager said he hoped to one day see the ruins with his own eyes.

“It would be the culmination of my three years of work and the dream of my life,” he said. He became interested in the Mayans after reading about their predictions that the world would end in 2012.

William has named the new city K’aak Chi
William has named the new city K’aak Chi CREDIT: CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY
Reaching the city will not be easy. It is in one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of Mexico and an archaeological mission would be costly.

"It's always about money. Expedition costs are horribly expensive,” said Dr. Armand LaRocque, a specialist at the University of New Brunswick.

Scientists said they were astonished by the discovery and that it had been made by someone so young.

“What is fascinating about the project of William, is the depth of his research,” said Daniel de Lisle.

“Linking the position of stars and the location of a lost city and the use of satellite images on a tiny territory to identify the remains buried under dense vegetation, is quite exceptional.”
 
It went by you that this was published in the Telegraph? And by the way, linking locations on Earth to stellar positions is not 'a new method' to discover anything. If anything, the result is pure coincidence - especially considering that stellar positions aren't fixed relative to Earth; at best they are relative Stellar positions now would differ from those when Maya temples were built - which also wasn't done simultaneously. So if this can be called a method, it's not a very reliable one. It reminds one of the theory that locations in ancient Egypt were linked to the Orion Belt, for instance.

In short, examining Google maps without any reference to stellar positions might have given the exact same result.
 
This reminds me of an Egyptologist who managed to work out that the pyramids were aligned north, but that the Egyptians used a method to find north which made it out to be a point that shifted predictably over time. She used the error in the alignment to work out the dates at which the method must have been used, dating the tombs to a few years of error, rather than the few decades that conventional methods could manage.
 
And I assume it went by you that the telegraph itself quote another source to the story (a French one)? The story has been in the Quebec medias for three days before the Telegraph picked it up ; it was merely the first english-language text I saw. At the time of posting, the Canadian CBC had a radio report (but no text) which the Canadian Space Agency linked to on their official FB page (in a post confirming their role in the whole thing).

So you'll excuse me for not considering "It's the telegraph! WHAAAAAAAA!" a damning point against the story at that time. After all, it's not my fault if the Telegraph is a little faster than the rest of your English-speaking media industry at picking up something that happens outside the English-world (or was, in this specific case).

Also, here are some more reputable sources now carrying the story in text format :

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/william-gadoury-quebec-teen-mayan-lost-city-csa-1.3575416
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36259047

So while there is room to be skeptical (the corn field explanation could well be true, and even if it's a city the star charts explanation), the quality of the source is not relevant. Despite your hurry to jump down my throat about it.

And, of course, I will point you back regarding skepticism toward the disclaimer at the very beginning of my original post. I know it could be coincidence, I know the satellite picture could show something other than a city, and I know this remains unpublished for the time being (that's supposed to change, I understand) and thus not (yet) subject to rigorous scrutiny.
 
It's not. It may well be that the theory is wrong or false. IT may well be that it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It might even be that the theory turns out to be so wrong it deserves to be called BS (but it should take more than one anonymous post online to reach that conclusion).

But for a teenager to make observations, derive a theory from those observations, make a prediction from that theory, and make further observations that may (may) indicate the prediction to be valid, and potentially lead to a wortwhile historical discovery - that is not a BS story ; that's a kind of story we need and want more of.

Calling it a BS story is just about the worst possible attitude to have here. Skepticism is good ; close-mindedness and lack of respect is not. EVEN if the theory doesn't pan out, we need kids out there thinking like this.

Now if he fails to present his theory for peer review ; or if he insists on it despite severe flaws presented as a result of scholarly review (flaws that he fails to suitably account for), then THAT we can call BS on. But we are nowhere near that point yet.
 
I've read analysis from somebody who is a researcher in that field, and he claims that for this to be true, the kid would have found the tallest pyramid in the Americas, which he just doesn't believe. He also said that there are so many ruins around that it's not really that surprising that somebody would "find" one, even though it was probably found by others at some point in the past.
 
Even if that one researcher was speaking for his entire field (and he most certainly does not), it wouldn't make the story BS.

It may make the theory highly questionable, even clearly wrong, but the story of a teenager making that kind of observations, drawing a theory from it, using that theory to make a prediction, making observations in an effort to confirm that prediction and (potentially) making exactly the observation his theory called for *is a cool story whichever way you cut it*.

Unless we want to encourage conformism, uncritical thinking, and not questioning authorities, then we want more kids like this teen. That makes what he did cool, even if his results turn out to be wrong.
 
Yes, it seems a bit cruel to condemn the lad for failing to measure up to the standards expected of research by professional academics. We need to encourage people like that, so that they turn into the people who do the really world-changing work later on.
 
And again, we don't know that he failed to measure up to those standards. We know some academics think so (and that's perfectly fine, ideas should be criticed), but the statements of a few academics can hardly be taken as any sort of consensus from the field. Especially when these academics have only access to a brief media summary of the idea.

Judging the academic value of the idea should wait until the paper he has been invited to publish and is working on has been published and reviewed.
 
I don't know why you're so upset over this Oda Nobunaga, unless you know the kid personally or something. I'm just reporting what I've read. Nowhere did I say children should be discouraged from trying to make discoveries.

Here's a post from an archaeologist that touches on what I mentioned:

It is wonderful that this kid is so passionate about his interests. He clearly has a lot of drive and took a novel approach for his science project- it looks like he did a fantastic job putting it together. His poster is 3 sheets long!

Having said that, though, there are a couple of major flaws with this. First, his basic premise is simply not science: pick a constellation, pick sites that "fit" the distribution (what's the scale? which sites are the ones that fit this pattern?), and then discover a site where one star/site is missing. For every site that is included on the map in the article, there are hundreds of others that are not, and at least dozens of other sites of an equal or greater size that aren't in this constellation pattern. Using this same methodology I could choose a constellation, say Gemini, which the ancient Maya viewed as a pair of copulating peccaries, and overlay it on a map and find enough sites to fill it in. I could probably make a giant smiley face while we are at it. All this would establish is that there is a high enough density of sites across an area that you can connect the dots how you see fit, but this doesn't say anything about how they saw the world.
Secondly, he may have 'discovered' a site- I can't tell if he has or has not from the article. There are thousands of sites still out there that haven't been registered, many of which are known to local populations. So he may have found something new, and that in itself would be an incredible contribution, especially from someone his age. But if his new site is in the Belize River Valley, which it looks like it may be from the map, you can't throw a rock in that area without hitting an archaeologist. That area has been intensively studied for decades and there is unlikely to be an unknown major site anywhere near there.

Finally if this new site really has a 86 meter tall pyramid in it, then we are going to have to rewrite all the textbooks since we have a new record for tallest pyramid in all of the New World, bumping out the Pyramid of the Sun. I don't think this is very likely. I would believe that he found a pyramid built on top of a hill that together reach that high about the valley floor, or that the pyramid is actually a natural hill. All of this would be quickly resolved with a visit to the site, which is why archaeologists always ground truth remote sensing imagery before going public.
tl,dr: My money is on the kid identifying a real site on the satellite imagery, whether it has been previously identified and registered or not. It just doesn't have a 86m pyramid on it, and it isn't in that location because of some constellation.

Source: I'm a Mesoamerican archaeologist doing this stuff for a living.

{...}

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. The square feature that was found on Google Earth is indeed man-made, but it's an old fallow cornfield, or milpa."
 
I'm not upset.

I however dislike the fact that you seem desperate to use criticism of the idea (valid, justified, and needed) to put down the kid and his story (by calling it a BS story).

What the kid - considering his age - has done is amazing, and deserves praise, even should the idea turn out to be fatally flawed*. Something even the article you quote from recognizes (first paragraph, which praises the kid).

*Which it hasn't yet. That will come, if it does, when the idea is published in a relevant paper and scholars are given the chance to study the data at length and respond to it. Not when an unspecified archaeologist reply to a news media article on reddit or elsewhere. (Of course, the idea itself remains only an interesting thought until it has been argued for in a paper that's up for review and critics by professional).
 
He's not here to read this, trust me, his feelings aren't going to be hurt by my choice of words.

I just quoted one archaeologist, others chimed in with similar thoughts. If something smells like BS and experts in the field agree, sorry, I'm going to put it out there.

I also happen to think it's great that he's pursuing something like this, but that does not in any way contradict what I said earlier.
 
One or a handful of archaeologists posting anonymously on Reddit or personal blog *still* doesn't invalidate anything. They may raise valid questions (or maybe not ; as they don't have access to the full details beyond the suggested idea - we'll see if/when this gets to a full paper), but even if they do, they remain a few archaeologists posting their opinion in a way that invovles no accountability and no possibility for criticism whatsoever.

A researcher's post on reddit has, by and large, exactly as much credibility as an article about science in the mainstream medias.

Of course, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be shared. I mean, that's *all* the sources this discussion is going to have at this point - mainstream medias articles and reddit and blog reactions. Sharing the actual article absolutely has its place in the thread.

In any event, I still say one should distinguish between the hypotheis (or idea, or whichever term is deemed scientifically most accurate to describe the current status of the kid's ideas) and the story. The hypothesis is a historical/archaeological claim that may be valid or not. The story is how the kid came up with the idea, how he went about exploring it, what he did to advance it, and so forth.

You may not make that distinction, but since it now appears you agree with me that what the kid *did*, and the way he went about this, are generally pretty awesome, fair enough.
 
Mainstream media is garbage, sorry, they oversensationalize everything they touch, including this.

Yeah, it's awesome that some kids are getting into fields like these and are genuinely excited about them, but what is not cool is the media running with a story like this and spinning it so that they can make more money.

edit: More experts chime in, this is not just some random guy on a blog posting his doubts, I wouldn't have pointed it out if that's all it was - http://www.canada.com/life/quebec+teen+backed+canadian+space+agency+thinks+found+lost+maya/11910275/story.html
 
Just like the Orion "theory", the idea that the Mayans built cities according to star constellation is bunk.

If you overlay a bunch of dots over some other dots, move and twist the overlay around enough, eventually you're bound to find some matches. Not to be overly mean to a kid, but it's just junk science.
 
Unless we want to encourage conformism, uncritical thinking, and not questioning authorities, then we want more kids like this teen. That makes what he did cool, even if his results turn out to be wrong.

I don't want to encourage quacks either. Publishing this kind of thing on papers without fact-checking does encourage quacks. And fools some people, and afterwards (if they bother to check, of if the newspapers are honest enough to report a mistake) shakes the credibility of both archeology and newspapers with them. All bad things.

The news media is getting too desperate.
 
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