TEEN MAY HAVE FOUND MAYA RUIN
A Quebec teen became an international media sensation this week after his science fair project led to claims of a possible discovery of an ancient Maya ruin deep in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
The boy’s theory promises to have unlocked a method of finding more settlements too, but scholars are suggesting he may have just gotten lucky — if he found anything at all.
At a 2014 Quebec science fair, William Gadoury, now 15, unveiled his unusual theory about Maya settlements after noticing that their locations on a map formed the shapes that were almost identical to constellations.
Gadoury looked at a set of 22 constellations, finding that each shape was mimicked by a set of Maya ruins on the ground — the five points of Cassiopeia’s “W” shape, for example, were mirrored by known Maya cities in Mexico.
The theory earned Gadoury a prize at the science fair, and a trip to an international symposium in Quebec City, where his display was beside the Canadian Space Agency’s booth. Gadoury started talking with Daniel De Lisle, a project officer with the space agency, about something that was puzzling him. One of the constellations he looked at, Orion’s Triangle, was missing a corresponding point on the ground, Gadoury said.
So the space agency offered to help, and requested NASA and Japanese satellite images of the area where the point should be. In analyzing the area, researchers found formations that they believe to be human-made structures.
“These aren’t natural structures,” De Lisle said, adding he’s 70 per cent sure the images show a forgotten Maya civilization. But archaeologists say it would take exploration on the ground to know with any certainty.
Since announcing the project, the teen has been inundated with interview requests from international media at his home in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, an hour north of Montreal.
“It’s hard,” Gadoury told the Post on Tuesday afternoon. “I never thought it would go like that.”
Gadoury said he started looking into the Maya, and “how they were geniuses,” in 2012, around the time when some used the Maya calendar to fuel doomsday predictions. He found himself fascinated by the Maya’s choice of placement for settlements, often in inhospitable areas — a question that has perplexed scholars, too.
Now, the boy is intent on getting to the site with a team of archeologists to investigate — an endeavour that could cost millions of dollars.
“That’s my dream.”
Maya scholars are skeptical about the potential discovery in the Yucatan, noting that locals tend to bristle at faraway claims of “uncharted” areas in their backyard.
David Pendergast — a veteran archeologist who spent three decades focusing on the Maya with the Royal Ontario Museum — noted that the Maya weren’t organized enough to have pulled off the massive feat of plotting settlements based on constellations. What is now known as the Maya people, he said, weren’t a cohesive unit, more of a collection of isolated nation states.
“There wasn’t a central government,” he said. “To look for some sort of magic key is a fools’ errand I’m afraid.
“There are quite a few sites that would probably not fit the (constellation) pattern ... That doesn’t say, of course, that this boy hasn’t pinpointed a site.”
Also, in the few surviving Maya texts there aren’t references to constellations — making it difficult to know exactly which ones the Maya would be adhering to, Pendergast said.
There are, however, many undocumented ruins in the region, and with the rate of excavations slowing due to overbearing costs, it’s still likely to make a discovery. In fact, Pendergast said, you could chose a point on the map without any ruin discoveries, and probably find one.