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Canadian kid plays real life Indiana Jones, discovers ancient Mayan city from his couch
William Gadoury set out on a modern day quest with only 1 question in mind -Why did the Mayans always settle far away from water and in hard-to-reach places such as mountain ranges? Satellite images, constellations and some help later he discovered a long lost Mayan city.
At 15 years of age we often hear teens come up with fascinating people they would love to become when they grow up. Not uncommon are astronaut, archaeologist, movie star, researcher, Indiana Jones but this kid has taken Indiana Jones one level too far. This 15-year-old from Quebec has actually found an unknown city half way across the world right from his home without using Indiana Jones's book, hat or even the whip.
William Gadoury’s modern day tools in his quest were maps and satellite imagery. And he did what is generally beyond kids his own age discovered the fourth-largest Mayan city ever.
The starting point of his quest was a question coupled with his longstanding fascination with Mayan history and a curious mind: Why did the Mayans always settle far away from water and in hard-to-reach places such as mountain ranges?
Gadoury’s research threw up 22 Mayan constellations which he proceeded to plot on a map and it led to the jaw-dropping discovery that they corresponded with 117 known Mayan cities. Gadoury is the first to determine this relation. Then, sifting through the constellations, a particular constellation of 3 starts caught his eye, one that had yet to be correlated to any known city.
All that was left was to confirm this theory with the help of satellite images, which he did after reaching out to the Canadian Space Agency, which in turn obtained satellites from NASA and JAXA, the Japanese agency.
“What makes William’s project fascinating is the depth of his research,” says Canadian Space Agency liaison officer Daniel de Lisle in a Yahoo! News article. “Linking the positions of stars to the location of a lost city along with the use of satellite images on a tiny territory to identify the remains buried under dense vegetation is quite exceptional.”
As is the norm, the discoverer gets the honour of naming the discovery, the 15-year-old has settled for K'ÀAK ‘CHI, a Mayan phrase that means “fire mouth” in English.
It goes without saying that he will visit the city sometime soon. “It would be the culmination of 3 years of work and the dream of a lifetime,” Gadoury says.
In the words of Indiana Jones: “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”
Unfortunately, there seems to be a fly in the ointment. There’s been some speculation that not the entire story’s true. Archaeologists are also hesitant to buy into the story after doing some investigating of their own.