Teen’s Star-Map “Lost Maya City” Was an Old Cornfield

A Teen’s “Lost Maya City” Was an Old Cornfield, Experts Said

The circled patch in the Yucatán forest that made headlines in May 2016. (Image: Google Earth, Canadian Space Agency)

In May 2016 a 15-year-old from Quebec, William Gadoury, made world news with a bold claim: by comparing Maya star charts with a map of known Maya cities, he had located a lost city hidden in the forest of the Yucatán Peninsula. Within about a day, specialists in Maya archaeology had looked at the same satellite image and given a much plainer answer. The square feature was almost certainly an old maize field, a milpa, left to grow back after a few seasons of farming.

So the short answer to the question behind the headlines is no, a teenager did not find a lost Maya city with star maps. The longer story is still worth telling, because it shows how satellite images are read, why archaeologists insist on checking on the ground, and how real discoveries of hidden Maya settlements have been made since then.

What the student claimed

Gadoury, from Saint-Jean-de-Matha in the Lanaudière region, said his interest began with the 2012 "end of the world" stories built around the Maya calendar. He spent long hours comparing drawings of Maya constellations with the locations of known cities and came to believe that the brightest stars lined up with the largest sites. By his account the pattern held for 22 constellations and 117 cities across Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

A 23rd constellation, he said, had three bright stars but only two matching cities. He looked for the missing third in the jungle and found a rectangular shape on the satellite imagery, with what he took to be a pyramid and some 30 smaller buildings around it. He even gave it a name, K'aak Chi, or "mouth of fire."

Side-by-side views of the same area: ordinary satellite colour on the left, radar-style processing on the right. (Image: Google Earth, Canadian Space Agency)

Why the story spread so fast

The young man had real help. The Canadian Space Agency supplied him with satellite imagery, and Armand LaRocque, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of New Brunswick, said the straight lines and right angles looked hard to explain by nature alone. A project officer at the agency, Daniel De Lisle, praised the depth of the work and said the linear features suggested something man-made under the canopy. The story was reported first by Le Journal de Montréal and then by The Telegraph, The Independent, the BBC and many others.

It had every ingredient of a viral hit: a likeable teenager, an ancient civilisation, space technology and the promise of an expedition. What it did not have was a single Maya archaeologist on record supporting the idea.

Gadoury studying a map at the Canadian Space Agency in 2016. (Image: Canadian Space Agency)

The student presenting his theory to agency scientists. (Image: Canadian Space Agency)

What Maya experts said

Three specialists answered quickly, and their verdicts were reported by Gizmodo on 11 May 2016.

David Stuart, a leading epigrapher at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote on Facebook that the story was false and called it "junk science." His point was simple: Maya sites are everywhere in the region, and so are stars, so with enough of both you can always find a pattern. He agreed the square was man-made, but said it was a fallow cornfield.

Thomas Garrison, then at the University of Southern California and an expert in remote sensing, said the straight edges and the younger vegetation growing inside them were the classic signs of a relic milpa, abandoned perhaps 10 to 15 years earlier. He praised the student's enthusiasm but stressed that "ground-truthing is the key to remote sensing research." He also sent an image of a similar field from his own work area in Guatemala.

A recently abandoned field in Guatemala, shared by Thomas Garrison for comparison. The square clearing looks much like the "lost city." (Image: Thomas Garrison)

Ivan Šprajc of the Slovenian Academy's Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, who has mapped many sites in Campeche himself, pointed out that very few Maya constellations have been identified with any certainty, and nobody knows exactly which stars belonged to them. Without that, there is nothing reliable to compare. He also noted that the coordinates actually fall in southern Campeche, Mexico.

What a milpa is, and why it looks like ruins from space

A milpa is the traditional field system of Mesoamerica, still common across the Yucatán Peninsula today. Farmers clear a patch of forest and grow maize together with beans and squash, often adding chilis, tomatoes and other crops. The beans add the amino acids that maize lacks, and the squash adds vitamins, which is why the trio has fed the region for thousands of years.

A common rhythm is a couple of years of planting followed by a long fallow, often around eight years, while the forest recovers. That cycle leaves neat, straight-edged clearings that slowly fill with shorter, younger trees. From above, the contrast between the regrowth and the older canopy around it can look a lot like the outline of walls or platforms. Experienced field workers in the Maya lowlands see these shapes all the time.

Did the Maya place cities by the stars?

The Maya were superb sky-watchers. They tracked Venus, built "E-Group" complexes that framed sunrise at the solstices and equinoxes, and kept the 260-day ritual calendar that is still used by some communities in highland Guatemala and Chiapas. Many buildings were oriented to astronomical events.

But orienting a temple is very different from choosing where to build a city. Archaeology shows that Maya settlement followed practical needs: reliable water such as lakes and seasonal ponds, good farmland, defence, and control of trade goods like salt and obsidian. In the northern Yucatán, for example, the most powerful cities controlled salt sources. That is why specialists found the star-map idea so unlikely: the known reasons for where cities grew already explain the pattern.

It is also worth remembering a basic problem of method. If you are free to choose which stars form a constellation and which sites count as "large," you can make almost any sky fit almost any map. A real test would set the rules first and then check whether the matches beat chance.

How real lost Maya cities are being found

Hidden Maya settlements do exist in large numbers, and the tool that reveals them is lidar, a laser scanner flown on aircraft that measures the ground beneath the trees. In 2018 a survey led by Guatemala's PACUNAM Foundation mapped about 2,100 square kilometres of the Maya Biosphere Reserve and found more than 60,000 previously unknown structures, including houses, palaces, defensive works and raised causeways.

One of the researchers on that project was Thomas Garrison, the same specialist who identified the 2016 square as a cornfield. The contrast says a lot: lidar data was checked against excavation and field survey, and that is why it changed the picture of how many people lived in the Maya lowlands.

Lessons from the episode

Curiosity is a good start, not proof. The student asked a fair question and did a lot of work. The mistake was the leap from a pattern to a discovery.
Ask the specialists in the field. Remote-sensing experts can spot straight lines; Maya archaeologists know which straight lines are cornfields.
Satellite shapes need checking on the ground. No expedition ever confirmed K'aak Chi, and no ruin was reported at the site.
Treat "teen solves ancient mystery" headlines with care. The first reports rarely include the experts who later correct them.

Gadoury said at the time that seeing the site would be "the dream of my life." The city he hoped for was not there, but the real search for the Maya past, led by people trained to read the forest, has turned up far more than one hidden pyramid.

Sources: Gizmodo: Experts doubt that a teen found a lost Maya city (11 May 2016); National Geographic: Laser scans reveal Maya "megalopolis" below Guatemalan jungle (2018); Wikipedia: Milpa; Wikipedia: Maya civilization. Original 2016 reports: Le Journal de Montréal, The Telegraph, The Independent and Gizmodo. Images: Google Earth, Canadian Space Agency, Thomas Garrison.

Related: