New Mayan City Discovered

Wednesday, 11 May, 2016

What a great story - a 15 year old with a passion for Mayan civilisation discovers a lost city on the Yucatan peninsula using satellite imagery, hitherto unknown to archaeologists! This has been rumbling on for a couple of years after he hypothesised that the Mayan cities were laid out, spatially, based upon star constellations. One of the maps he used had one star with no known city located on the border of Belize/Mexico, The dense forest showed no obvious signs of inhabitation so the obvious choice is radar imagery which can penetrate some depth through the tree canopy. The Canadian Space Agency provided some Radarsat-2 data and with the friendly help of an academic, was able to identify 30 buildings and calculate the height of the pyramid at 86m. Really great example of moving from hypothesis to testing, incorporating open access data and then some serious image processing.

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