The other "debunker" pointed out that we don't know what constellations the Maya recognized. While true, that is also misleading. If the kid managed to match up the locations of 117 Maya sites with apparent-to-the-naked-eye star patterns, that would seem to
me to be fairly good evidence that he's discovered at least some of the "lost" Mayan constellations.
Apparently the kid used the descriptions of the constellations from the various surviving Mayan codices <
http://www.mayacodices.org/discovery.asp>, which despite being astronomically
oriented texts densely packed with information for determining festivals and propitious times for sacrifice and the like, mentions nowhere ‘Hey it’s a good idea to put temples/cities here, here and here, to match the stars’, which you would think it would
do if it was truly that obsessively important to the Mayans.
Searching google images for ‘Mayan constellations’ brings up a ton of images showing that they used the exact same stars we did! Obviously these are very important stars!
Where they helpfully show western constellations on the map, which is entirely and completely irrelevant and misleading. Pareidola in action, published even!
As for determining whether that rectangle is an old cornfield or a city, that would actually be fairly simple to determine if they put a scale on the image…which is conspicuously missing. The two have a rather different scale, after all.
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs