Discovered Mayan City More Likely to be an Abandoned Field, Experts Suggests

The report of a Canadian teen discovering a lost Mayan city quickly spread in the internet like wildfire attracting Mayan enthusiasts and a professional anthropologist. With its popularity, experts can't turn a blind eye on the discovery.

Experts, upon examining the site in question, suggest that the apparent linear pattern in the satellite imagery is not a Mayan city, but is more likely to be an abandoned field.

In a report from the Wired, anthropologist Thomas Garrison from USC Dornsife believes that the discovered linear features under the forest canopy are a relic of a corn field.

"The rectilinear nature of the feature and the secondary vegetation growing back within it are clear signs of a relic milpa. I'd guess it's been fallow for 10-15 years," said Garrison.

Other experts went so far as to consider the discovery of the Canadian teen to be "junk" science.

William Gadoury, 15, devised a theory that Mayans construct their cities in accordance to the stars in constellation. Gadoury purseude this theory and found 142 stars corresponding to the position of 177 Mayan Cities. When he reached the 23^rd constellation, Gadoury was baffled because only two out of its three stars have a corresponding city. This made Gadoury believe the existence of a yet-to-found Mayan City.

Using satellite imagery from the CSA and Google Earth, Gadoury mapped out the position of the hidden city finding a strange linear feature suggesting human intervention.

Many experts applauded Gadaury'd discovery, but they think that we can't really rely on Mayan astrology to pinpoint the locations of their cities.

"Very few Maya constellations have been identified, and even in these cases we do not know how many and which stars exactly composed each constellation. It is thus impossible to check whether there is any correspondence between the stars and the location of Maya cities. In general, since we know of several environmental facts that influenced the location of Maya settlements, the idea correlating them with stars is utterly unlikely," Ivan Šprajc, from the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia, told Gizmodo.