Student finds lost Mayan city by studying ancient charts of the night sky?

[Peter1469]

Student finds lost Mayan city by studying ancient charts of the night sky?

I added the question mark because other articles are not so sure. Anyway it is an interesting concept.

A

Canadian schoolboy appears to have discovered a lost Mayan city hidden deep in the jungles of Mexico using a new method of matching stars to the location of temples on earth.
William Gadoury, 15, was fascinated by the ancient Central American civilization and spent hours poring over diagrams of constellations and maps of known Mayan cities.

And then he made a startling realisation: the two appeared to be linked.

[PolWatch]

This was really great! To think a teenager developed this theory and then found possible proof it's correct. We might be seeing reports of more lost cities in the near future. I was lucky my teenagers found the dirty clothes hamper!

[waltky]

Granny had her hat & baggage ready to go when the end o' the world didn't happen...

Mayan Science Still Giving Up Secrets
August 18, 2016 - Who remembers the Mayan Calendar that ended in 2012, and how it was supposed to presage the end of the world? That was funny, Hollywood made a movie about it. Needless to say we're still here. What was arguably lost in all of the sad speculation and fear-mongering of the end-of-the-world crowd was the sheer magnificence and depth of scientific knowledge that allowed the Mayans to create their giant stone calendars.

New research on an old book

The Mayans were an ancient and long-lived civilization that flourished in parts of present-day Central America. Their civilization lasted 2,000 years, but had its cultural heyday between 300 and 900 AD in an era archaeologists call "the Classic Period." They developed a complex mathematical system based on the number 20. They had a symbol for the value of zero, a calendar-based agriculture system, an understanding of architecture, and a written language. But the Mayans were masters of the sky, which they believed had a profound effect on their daily lives. They dutifully recorded all the things they saw in their stellar neighborhood. They predicted eclipses, and used their celestial calendars to manage planting seasons and their daily and religious lives.

The ancient Mayan city of Uxmal.

But while most people are familiar with the giant round calendars, the Mayans also wrote books and filled them with information about their gods, and their lives and the movements of the stars in the sky. One of the most famous books is the Dresden Codex, named for the museum of the Saxon State Library in Dresden, Germany, where you can see it on display. The codex consists of 39 double-sided pages of information in folded book form written on an ancient form of bark paper. It's a beautiful document, and when completely folded out is almost 3.5 meters long. It consists almost entirely of astronomical information. But new research has just been released on one "chapter" of the codex called the Venus Table, which focuses on the closest planet to Earth and its movements. The new paper was written by UC Santa Barbara's Gerardo Aldana, a professor of anthropology and of Chicana and Chicano studies, and is published in The Journal of Astronomy in Culture.

Why Venus?

The Mayans kept a particularly close eye on Venus because its movement was a marker for a number of their important economic and cultural events. To the Mayans, the role of Venus was similar to the Sun's solstice and equinox, which still mark some of our modern-day rituals. Venus was so important to the Mayans that researchers like archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni from Colgate University has suggested that ancient cities like Uxmal were actually built to give their leaders good views of the morning star. The movement of Venus was used to set the dates of Mayan cultural and economic rituals. That's why the codex devotes so much time to our sister planet. Now this is where things get interesting... and really complicated.

Historians have known for over a century that the Venus table was unique in that it recorded a kind of "leap year" that 'fixed' or mathematically explained Venus' irregular movements across the sky. It's exactly like the 'leap year' in our calendars; and it's necessary because the movements of the earth and the observable planets aren't an exact match for our 24 hour day, and 365 day year. The Venus Table is impressive because, using only their eyes and their understanding of math, the Mayans were able to both predict and record this weirdness in the orbit of Venus. But Aldana says it is important to realize that Mayan astronomers weren't just counting the days it took Venus to cross the sky. He says that's just numerology, like counting down the days until your birthday.

MORE

[waltky]

Mayan treasures discovered in underwater cave...

Explorers in Mexico Discover World's Largest Underwater Cave and It's Filled With Ancient Mayan Treasures 1/18/18 - Divers in Mexico have discovered the largest known underwater, flooded cave in the world. The discovery could reveal more about the pre-Hispanic, ancient community that existed in the region. The Yucatan Peninsula, where the cave is located, still holds treasures from the ancient Mayan community.

The cave is made of two massive underwater caverns that are connected. The cave stretches across 216 miles, according to the Gran Acuífero Maya (GAM), the team of explorers who discovered the cave. The cave was discovered near the beach resort of Tulum, reported Reuters. The two caves, Sac Actun and Dos Ojos, measured at 163 miles and 52 miles, respectively. Until the discovery of the connection between the two caves, the largest underwater cave in the world was the Ox Bel Ha, which stretched 168 miles long, according to the National Speleological Society. But now, the Sac Actun cave system is the largest known underwater cave on Earth.

Tourists enjoy the beach in Tulum National Park, Quintana Roo state, Mexico

The discovery "allows us to appreciate much more clearly how the rituals, the pilgrimage sites and ultimately the great pre-Hispanic settlements that we know emerged," Guillermo de Anda, director of the GAM, told Reuters. He called it an "amazing" find that would help us to better understand the Maya civilization. The discovery is the result of decades of work touring hundreds of miles of underwater caves in the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico, according to the exploration director, Robert Schmittner. Schmittner has been exploring the Sac Actun cave for 14 years. "Now," Schmittner said in a statement, "everyone's job is to conserve it."

Tourists enjoy the water inside a cenote in Tulum National Park, Quintana Roo state, Mexico, on March 23, 2017. Tulum was a walled city of Mayan culture southeast of Mexico, on the coast of the Caribbean Sea. It is currently a major tourist attraction of the Riviera Maya and next to it is the modern population of the same name, Tulum.

Finding a cave such as this one would have required "painstaking exploration," according to Thomas Iliffe, marine biologist who studies marine life in underwater caves from the University of Texas A&M at Galveston. The complex tunnels branch off in different directions, there are lower and upper level passages and getting lost can be fatal. “These are really maze-like systems,” Iliffe, who was not involved with this discovery, told Newsweek. To avoid getting lost, explorers create maps of the underwater passages. The divers often compare the maps of different caves by overlaying them in an attempt find locations where connections between caves might exist, according to Iliffe. They focus on exploring those areas to find passages where caves connect. The underwater caves are often linked to sinkholes or underground natural wells, which are known as cenotes. The Sac Actun cave system is, in part, a massive network of cenotes that are essentially flooded sinkholes—hence why the caves are called flooded caves. The spectacular network of the cenotes throughout the Yucatan Peninsula has monumental relics from the ancient civilization, according to Reuters. In 2014, human bones were discovered in a cenote, where archaeologists suspect the ancient dead were buried, reported National Geographic at the time. Other human remains discoveries have had evidence of being sacrificed in the cenotes. Artifacts including water pitchers, jade beads, shells and stone tools have also been discovered in the depths of the underwater sites.

The largest underwater cave in the world was discovered in Mexico by explorers from the Gran Acuífero Maya.

Explorers from GAM hope to find a connection between another 11-mile cenote system and the Sac Actun—which would make the largest underwater cave's size slightly bigger. The 11-mile cenote system has been dubbed "the mother of all cenotes," located north of the Sac Actun cave. That system of cenotes hasn't been connected to the Sac Actun, but according to GAM, explorers are close to discovering the connection between these two systems as well. "This immense cave represents the most important submerged archaeological site in the world," de Anda said in a statement. This cave system has "documented evidence of the first settlers of America, as well as extinct fauna and, of course, the Mayan culture."

http://www.newsweek.com/explorers-me...-filled-783905