The Mayan city found by a schoolboy turned out to be a field

Geoffrey Braswell, an archaeologist who works on the history of Central America (from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua), refuted the idea presented by a Canadian schoolboy on the basis of studying maps from Google and imposing constellations on them. What the schoolboy took for the lost Mayan city is, according to the archeologist, a field cultivated by the locals.

Braswell and his students from the University of California at San Diego were just working in an area caught in the news due to the “find”. Therefore, they immediately recognized familiar places presented in satellite photographs.
')
The first photo shows the Laguna cyclones [Laguna El Civalón], and the rectangular shapes that are visible in the picture are either uncultivated fields or fields of marijuana (judging by the amount of vegetation). The second image shows only a dried up swamp.

True, to the south of this place lies an interesting archaeological find - Mexican archaeologists have found there something that may turn out to be the ruins of a church. True, they have no relation to the Maya - on this place there was a town that stood on the so-called. " royal road " - the missionary path, which took place in these places from the 17th to the 19th century.

A few days ago in the media there were reports of a Canadian schoolboy , who hypothesized that the Mayans built their cities in accordance with the location of the stars in the sky. The boy made a map of settlements, put it on the constellation map - and was able to predict where another unknown city is located.

Of course, the so-called cosmic archeology, that is, the search for places of residence of ancient peoples with the help of satellite images, has the right to life. Archaeologist Sarah Parsak [Sarah Parcak] from the University of Alabama in Birmingham recently discovered a new Viking settlement in the south of Newfoundland.

But the “discovery” of the schoolchild was immediately challenged by archaeologists. On geektimes they have already written that if you use the Google Earth Engine service, which allows you to trace the dynamics of satellite images, it becomes clear that the mysterious rectangle appears on this place in 1999.