Mayan constellations map to Mayan cities, helping find a new one

May 9, 2016 3:01 PM

"During his research, Gadoury examined 22 Mayan constellations and discovered that if he projected those constellations onto a map, the shapes corresponded perfectly with the locations of 117 Mayan cities. Incredibly, the 15-year-old was the first person to establish this important correlation, reported the Journal de Montreal over the weekend. Then Gadoury took it one step further. He examined a twenty-third constellation which contained three stars, yet only two corresponded to known cities."

Source article en français.

posted by clawsoon (51 comments total)

Some dude on reddit says this article is bullshit. This other dude too.
posted by ND¢ at 3:03 PM on May 9, 2016 [12 favorites]

I saw this reported uncritically on Kottke earlier today, and it set my BS detector off so hard. I'd love to see the actual examples of "perfect mapping" of cities to constellations.
posted by designbot at 3:05 PM on May 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

I want to believe...yet, this sounds like bs.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 3:08 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm going to speculate wildly... Viral marketing for Indy 5?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:15 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

See also: The Virgo Cathedrals of Northern France and The Pyramids of Orion.
posted by designbot at 3:17 PM on May 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

They'd have to make Indy 4 first, which doesn't and never will exist.
posted by adept256 at 3:17 PM on May 9, 2016 [21 favorites]

Well, obviously there wouldn't even be constellations unless God Kukulcan put them there.

Yeah, this sounds impressive but I am very skeptical. When Yahoo News tells us:

Scientists across the board have been blown away by Gadoury’s discovery,

I can only think about how the Weekly World News would report on the discovery of Noah's Ark on Ararat, or a B-17 bomber being spotted on the moon and make reference to "baffled scientists" or "astonished experts."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:19 PM on May 9, 2016 [13 favorites]

those "scientists" think they're such know-it-alls, but what is their book learning compared to a child's wonder
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:22 PM on May 9, 2016 [78 favorites]

“We know so little about the ancient Woolworth stores,” he explains, “but we do still know their locations. I thought that if we analysed the sites we could learn more about what life was like in 2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs.”

The results revealed an exact and precise geometric placement of the Woolworths locations. “Three stores around Birmingham formed an exact equilateral triangle (Wolverhampton, Lichfield and Birmingham stores) and if the base of the triangle is extended, it forms a 173.8 mile line linking the Conwy and Luton stores. Despite the 173.8 mile distance involved, the Conway Woolworths store is only 40 feet off the exact line and the Luton site is within 30 feet. All four stores align with an accuracy of 0.05%.”

posted by howfar at 3:29 PM on May 9, 2016 [69 favorites]

See also 'ley lines' for similar wOOooOO ...
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:31 PM on May 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

those "scientists" think they're such know-it-alls, but what is their book learning compared to a child's wonder

Well, the book learning is more often reproducible, and it tends to withstand the jading blows of bitter bitter experience (and grad school) better than wonder. Your millage may, of course, vary.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:16 PM on May 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yep, put me on the "that's not how science works" pile. Given sufficiently dense data sets, you can make anything fit anything if you cherry-pick hard enough.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:17 PM on May 9, 2016

Dammit, you mean I trusted Yahoo's Daily Buzz for nothing??
posted by clawsoon at 4:17 PM on May 9, 2016 [6 favorites]

Well, the book learning is more often reproducible, and it tends to withstand the jading blows of bitter bitter experience (and grad school) better than wonder. Your millage may, of course, vary.

I think that might have been a joke. It was pretty funny, so I hope it was meant to be.
posted by clockzero at 4:25 PM on May 9, 2016 [7 favorites]

To be honest as far as I'm concerned this is all just fodder for the Savage Rifts game I'm going to run when I get my PDFs. Especially the Woolworthses.
posted by howfar at 4:41 PM on May 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I was in high school, the school library, for some reason, included a (presumably self-published) book titled “Harmonic 33”, which postulated a similar theory. The upshot seemed to be that UFOs were zapping down antennae at precisely located grid points at the bottom of the ocean to channel energy waves/ley lines/the hidden network that runs the universe. It started with an anecdote of a UFO sighting, and the rest of the book was filled with pseudoscientific theorising, following leaps of speculation to grand, overarching conclusions.
posted by acb at 4:48 PM on May 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh come on, all you beautifully perfect curmudgeons. In this age of snotty kids and their smart phones and tight jeans and social medias and Justin Biebers, this nerd has been heavy into learning about the Mayans for years and entered a science fair with a project that is far more thought provoking than a potato powered social media.

And even if he knowingly bent his findings in order to play the long con and a free trip to Belize, bravo kid, you made the papers. You'll go far.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 4:50 PM on May 9, 2016 [11 favorites]

Glastonbury zodiac
posted by bukvich at 4:56 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

The upshot seemed to be that UFOs were zapping down antennae at precisely located grid points at the bottom of the ocean to channel energy waves/ley lines/the hidden network that runs the universe. It started with an anecdote of a UFO sighting, and the rest of the book was filled with pseudoscientific theorising, following leaps of speculation to grand, overarching conclusions.

Leonard Nimoy was all over it.
posted by GuyZero at 4:57 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Whoops, the Ancient Astronauts episode was a different one.
posted by GuyZero at 5:00 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd buy the building layout of a single city mapping to a constellation (well, I'd want to see evidence of it), but a whole bunch of cities matching to stars in a constellation? Nah, not without extraordinary evidence.
posted by tavella at 5:04 PM on May 9, 2016

Oh come on, all you beautifully perfect curmudgeons. In this age of snotty kids and their smart phones and tight jeans and social medias and Justin Biebers, this nerd has been heavy into learning about the Mayans for years and entered a science fair with a project that is far more thought provoking than a potato powered social media.

No one's criticizing the kid. We're criticizing the terrible and overly credulous science reporting that we get from our media.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:07 PM on May 9, 2016 [12 favorites]

...and I'd be really grateful if we could stop calling people "killjoys" and "curmudgeons" and so forth when they voice skepticism about, or corrections to, dubious / misleading / poorly reported stories. Journalists don't get a free pass to play fast and loose with the truth just because it makes for a heartwarming story or somesuch.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:11 PM on May 9, 2016 [21 favorites]

I just figured that they created their constellations based on their maps, considering that they had billions of stars to work with. I imagine that you could map just about any set of points to a corresponding set of stars in the sky.
posted by clawsoon at 5:14 PM on May 9, 2016 [8 favorites]

The location of cities tends to be driven by resources; there's obviously some flexibility, but it's unlikely that you would place your cities far from water supplies and farmland or avoid putting a town in a good mining region just to match a ritual pattern. *Individual* specially holy sites, sure, but all your cities?
posted by tavella at 5:23 PM on May 9, 2016 [7 favorites]

Hm, Journal de Montreal is pretty much the Quebecois Daily Mirror.
posted by TheGoodBlood at 5:27 PM on May 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

I mean, right from the start it's pretty hard to believe that the Mayans were literally creating stars just by erecting cities.
posted by No-sword at 5:34 PM on May 9, 2016 [33 favorites]

Give the kid some slack; he's from Joliette for Pete's sake (and yes, this kind of "local kid shows hot shot scientists how it's done" story is right in the Journal's wheelhouse). The people quoted in the articles are someone from the Canadian Space Agency and a teledetection specialist. I suspect they know a good bit about satellite imagery but not that much about Maya archeology.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 5:38 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Gentlemen," he said, "I invite you to go and measure that kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is one hundred and forty-nine centimeters -- in other words, one hundred-billionth of the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters, is 3.14. The height at the front is nineteen decimeters, equal, in other words, to the number of years of the Greek lunar cycle. The sum of the heights of the two front corners and the two rear corners is one hundred and ninety times two plus one hundred seventy-six times two, which equals seven hundred and thirty-two, the date of the victory at Poitiers. The thickness of the counter is 3.10 centimeters, and the width of the cornice of the window is 8.8 centimeters. Replacing the numbers before the decimals by the corresponding letters of the alphabet, we obtain C for ten and H for eight, or C10H8, which is the formula for naphthalene."

posted by milk white peacock at 6:12 PM on May 9, 2016 [13 favorites]

How would you build a city in direct correspondence to the location of something that moves, anyway? What if the nth star in a constellation corresponded to a completely unworkable location for a city? Nothing about this really makes sense.
posted by clockzero at 6:40 PM on May 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I understood this as meaning the Mayans picked some constellations that mapped to their cities, rather than the reverse.

My colleague who works on Australian Aboriginal astronomy says there was a common method across a number of groups in Australia of memorising travel routes and teaching them to others by finding constellations that represented the journey. So, you'd say to your kid, "See this constellation here? At this time of year, it's a map of how to get to the waterhole. Where we are standing now is that bright star up there. See how the next star is directly north of it? So you start by walking north for half a day. And then the next star is west, about half as far again, so you turn west, and walk for about half as long as you walked north, and then the third star is just slightly north-east, so turn north-east and walk a little bit further and you'll find the water hole."

This method works really well for visualising and memorising maps, and if you forget, the map reappears in the sky again later. And when Aboriginal people told white settlers, "we use the stars as a map", that got interpreted as "we pay attention to the stars while we are navigating", not "no, actually, we literally trace maps between the stars in the sky, and then mentally project those lines onto the ground to find our way."
posted by lollusc at 8:30 PM on May 9, 2016 [36 favorites]

(Note: I am just repeating what my colleague has told me - I have made no attempt at verifying it myself. But her work is usually very solid and she has very close relationships with elders from a number of communities. If I've misinterpreted her, any mistakes are probably mine.)
posted by lollusc at 8:31 PM on May 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

im not saying it was aliens
posted by klangklangston at 10:18 PM on May 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

And in not saying that, one says so much
posted by clockzero at 11:25 PM on May 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Curmudgeonly killjoys? Why, I've never heard such flapdoodle and folderol! Cantankerous whippersnappers! Tarnation!
posted by perhapsolutely at 12:09 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Greg Nog: The ancient Mayans were such a mysterious, earthy, and powerful people, but powerful in like a weird occult way, not in a way that's like actually threatening now. Anyway, it's a shame they all dies out! Who knows what they would have to tell us if any of their descendants were still alive?

Good news, there are around 7 million Maya people living today in Mesoamerica of which 6 million speak Mayan languages.
posted by sukeban at 1:08 AM on May 10, 2016 [5 favorites]

(in case you weren't just taking the piss)
posted by sukeban at 1:14 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is there any evidence that the ancient Mayana had the surveying skills to produce an accurate map of their cities? Without that it it's doubtful they had the information to deliberately align their city locations with any specific stars.
posted by cardboard at 3:30 AM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yep, put me on the "that's not how science works" pile.

Based on this week's Last Week Tonight this is exactly how science works now.
posted by Mezentian at 4:17 AM on May 10, 2016

Damnit. I see escape from the potato planet was all over that.
Curses.
posted by Mezentian at 4:19 AM on May 10, 2016

When I was in high school, the school library, for some reason, included a (presumably self-published) book titled “Harmonic 33”, which postulated a similar theory. The upshot seemed to be that UFOs were zapping down antennae at precisely located grid points at the bottom of the ocean to channel energy waves/ley lines/the hidden network that runs the universe. It started with an anecdote of a UFO sighting, and the rest of the book was filled with pseudoscientific theorising, following leaps of speculation to grand, overarching conclusions.

You're talking about New Zealand author Bruce Cathie, whose Harmonic 33 was adamantly not self-published (it came out with respected NZ trade publisher A. H. & A. W. Reed, and later with Sphere Books in the UK). He has his own Wikipedia page and all. Cathie's schtick was that he was a Respected Airline Pilot (he flew Viscounts, Fokker Friendships, and then 737s for New Zealand's National Airways Corporation), and his testimony was therefore beyond reproach. I picked up a copy of his follow-up book Harmonic 695 at the church fair when I was about 11 and read it avidly. Harmonic 695 was full of stirring testimony about underwater UFOs and the stuff airline pilots saw every day but for some reason couldn't talk about, but I remember it then went on to accuse New Zealand's ham radio community of being in on the conspiracy, somehow, as their antennae were implicated in the grid pattern and he saw so many of them from his cockpit window that it could not all have been coincidence, right? And what about that sponge underwater transmission aerial?

My Dad was rather amused by all this. New Zealand being a small country, he actually knew Cathie—my Dad worked in logistics for the National Airways Corporation for a long time, and then Air New Zealand. According to my Dad, Cathie absolutely infuriated the logistics team by consistently refusing to land at Wellington airport if the weather was less than perfect (the weather is often less than perfect at Wellington airport), and requesting to divert to nearby Palmerston North instead. He had quite a reputation for this, apparently, and it drove my Dad and his colleagues nuts.

20-odd years later, I moved back to Wellington myself. One time, my friend Sam and I bunked off work and hung out at the Wellington Theosophical Society, where there was a spirited conversation going on about Cathie. Apparently, one TS member had been picked up while hitch-hiking by a weird old guy in a car with a bafflingly unusual propulsion system and he was convinced it was Cathie, who'd somehow found a way to apply all that UFO technology to his own personal motor vehicle and was therefore In on the Conspiracy. Good times.

Anyway, Cathie's gone now, but he was a true eccentric (if, apparently, an overly cautious pilot), and you'll be pleased to know that his work lives on. Kia Ora, Bruce; your kind does not grace this world very often.
posted by Sonny Jim at 5:55 AM on May 10, 2016 [11 favorites]

and requesting to divert to nearby Palmerston North instead

"Nearby".

(Incidentally, that less than perfect video is terrifying. I'm off to take a valium or something).
posted by Mezentian at 6:04 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm disappointed.

I came in to see whether any "boffins" were "perplexed" or "stunned", but so far I haven't seen any of that action.

You all need to up your WWN or Daily-Mail-a-like games.
posted by nonspecialist at 6:21 AM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

Maybe I should do a post on Cathie for #weirdmay ...
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:53 AM on May 10, 2016 [7 favorites]

Maybe I should do a post on Cathie for #weirdmay ...

Do it!
posted by clawsoon at 7:13 AM on May 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

MetaFilter: (in case you weren't just taking the piss)
MetaFilter: (i was indeed taking the piss)
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:09 AM on May 10, 2016 [7 favorites]

Poe's law is a bitch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by sukeban at 11:58 AM on May 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Gizmodo has added updates to their report on this from Maya experts. What the kid found was abandoned corn fields, which are known as "milpa". They aren't ancient; they date back a couple of decades.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:13 PM on May 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wonderful, yet another example of the same damn story that is always obviously bullshit just from the title, none of them are ever real. The story is always actually: "Kid's non-professional parents make discovery/contraption/process where whatever is original is not any good while whatever is good is not at all original," "Kid's parents pass off their own or someone else's work as the kid's," "Kid shows scientists trivial thing that anyone with a basic working knowledge of the subject can see as either obvious or inherently flawed," or "Rich, white, western kid shows people in the third world how to live better in some way that falls apart with a moments thought or has already been done for generations," every time. It is just yet another function of that strange kind of science reporting where journalists, lacking any real education in science themselves, ignore real scientists to find children operating on a level they can understand. Facebook is full of this shit, and the whatever always inevitably boils down to nothing of real inherent value with some middle school science teacher or well connected parent pulling the strings, but it never matters because neither the journalists nor the audience have any background to know any better. The only way to learn science is to do science, which even grade school kids are perfectly capable of doing, but it is a strange kind of crankery that presents what they accomplish as having value it does not have.

The toxic dynamic created by imposing a science themed hero's journey narrative that never fits onto children is only more depressing for how there really are a lot of kids doing good and useful citizen science, from the HHMI's phage hunters to kids participating in a wide array of honest ecology projects. Child scientists are just not a remotely appropriate demographic for this kind of attention, particularly when it comes from journalists who are too dishonest to allow themselves the most basic of critical thinking. This should be recognized as the unambiguous journalistic misconduct that it is. The author of the original article in the Quebecois tabloid that started all of this, Michel Harnois, should have his name attached to this deeply shameful thing he did. He is at least supposedly a professional, and one who we can expect to not be so conveniently naive as to not even question whether this story as what all of the stories like it really are.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of modern Mayan scholarship he could have asked would have known that the Classic period Maya with the monumental architecture and Long Count calendar that he seems to be talking about had a political landscape similar to Renaissance Italy or Classical Greece, with multiple city-states engaged in a complex network of alliances and enmities, not even plausibly capable of organizing anything over a wide geographic area, much less massive and arbitrarily placed cities. Just like modern cities ancient and classical cities grew up in the places they did for practical reasons, and it smacks of a peculiar kind of racism to suggest that the Classical Maya were just so mysterious and inhuman that they built their pyramids and astronomical calendar not because they were clever and industrious but because they were driven by fantastical and fundamentally unrelatable motivations. This is the kind of failure we can expect from an awesome and motivated 15 year old, however it is not one we should expect from an adult with a duty to verify the truth of what they report but who keeps their job.

This man shouldn't.
posted by Blasdelb at 1:10 AM on May 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

This is from the reddit thread about it:

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.

EDIT: Obligatory edit- gold, wow, thanks! My first. This after I finished telling my wife that my post was going to be downvoted to oblivion because I was shitting on a kid's science fair project. The truth is that I would love nothing more than to be absolutely 100% wrong on this one, and I'm looking forward to following this story to see what comes out of it.

EDIT 2: Here's an article from the Independent on it with some pictures of the imagery.

EDIT 3: The story has been picked up by many English-speaking sources. Redditor /u/diser55 has identified the location in the imagery as Laguna El Civalon. The square-ish object highlighted in the Independent article, as well as the second rectangle immediately to the south are the remains of clearings made for planting corn. You can actually see the square cleared if you go back in the imagery on Google Earth. I don't see anything in this location that looks to be the remains of a site. If you follow the landform to the southwest about 2.7 km, you'll see a peninsula surrounded by a swamp (bajo). It looks like there may be some rectilinear forms on this spot, from what I can see with free imagery, though it doesn't show up on the historic images. But then again I'm just an old codger who is salty because a kid is revolutionizing our understanding of the ancient world /s. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

FINAL EDIT: The great news story that isn't news. David Stuart (referenced below by Redditor /u/SqBlkRndHole) posted on Facebook saying "This current news story of an ancient Maya city being discovered is false. I was trying to ignore it (and the media inquiries I've been getting) but now that it's up on the BBC's website I feel I ought to say something.

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."

posted by Blasdelb at 1:11 AM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Here's Ken M's take on the whole sorry business
posted by Cantdosleepy at 1:47 AM on May 11, 2016