Category: Maya

15 year old William Gadoury draws a link between the location of Mayan cities and the civilization’s major constellations to discover a Mayan city in Central America using Google Earth

On By A.P.In Kebmodee, MayaLeave a comment

A 15-year-old boy believes he has discovered a forgotten Mayan city using satellite photos and Mayan astronomy.

William Gadoury, from Quebec, came up with the theory that the Maya civilization chose the location of its towns and cities according to its star constellations.

He found Mayan cities lined up exactly with stars in the civilization’s major constellations.

Studying the star map further, he discovered one city was missing from a constellation of three stars.

Using satellite images provided by the Canadian Space Agency and then mapped on to Google Earth, he discovered the city where the third star of the constellation suggested it would be.

William has named the yet-to-be explored city in the Yucatan jungle K’aak Chi, or Mouth of Fire.

Daniel De Lisle, from the Canadian Space Agency, said the area had been difficult to study because of its dense vegetation.

However, satellite scans of the area found linear features which “stuck out”.

“There are linear features that would suggest there is something underneath that big canopy,” he told The Independent.

“There are enough items to suggest it could be a man made structure.”

Doctor Armand La Rocque, from the University of New Brunswick, said one image showed a street network and a large square which could possibly be a pyramid.

He told The Independent: “A square is not natural, it is mostly artificial and can hardly be attributed to natural phenomena.

“If we add these together, we have a lot of indication there might be a Mayan city in the area.”

Dr La Rocque said William’s discovery could lead archaeologists to find other Mayan cities using similar techniques.

William’s discovery will be published in a scientific journal and he will present his findings at Brazil’s International Science fair in 2017.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/forgotten-mayan-city-discovered-in-central-america-by-15-year-old-a7021291.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Maya Blue Paint Recipe Deciphered

On By A.P.In Antonio Doménech, copal resin, dehydroindigo, indigo, LiveScience, Maya, Maya Blue Paint, Mayan secret ingredient, Microporous and Mesoporous Materials, palygorskite, Sacred Cenote, Science, Spain, University of ValenciaLeave a comment

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The ancient Maya used a vivid, remarkably durable blue paint to cover their palace walls, codices, pottery and maybe even the bodies of human sacrifices who were thrown to their deaths down sacred wells. Now a group of chemists claim to have cracked the recipe of Maya Blue. Scientists have long known the two chief ingredients of the intense blue pigment: indigo, a plant dye that’s used today to color denim; and palygorskite, a type of clay. But how the Maya cooked up the unfading paint remained a mystery. Now Spanish researchers report that they found traces of another pigment in Maya Blue, which they say gives clues about how the color was made.

“We detected a second pigment in the samples, dehydroindigo, which must have formed through oxidation of the indigo when it underwent exposure to the heat that is required to prepare Maya Blue,” Antonio Doménech, a researcher from the University of Valencia, said in a statement.

“Indigo is blue and dehydroindigo is yellow, therefore the presence of both pigments in variable proportions would justify the more or less greenish tone of Maya Blue,” Doménech explained. “It is possible that the Maya knew how to obtain the desired hue by varying the preparation temperature, for example heating the mixture for more or less time or adding more of less wood to the fire.”

American researchers in 2008 claimed that copal resin, which was used for incense, may have been the third secret ingredient for Maya Blue. Their research was based on a study of a bowl that had traces of the pigment and was used to burn incense. But Doménech’s team didn’t buy those findings. “The bowl contained Maya Blue mixed with copal incense, so the simplified conclusion was that it was only prepared by warming incense,” Doménech said in a statement.

The Spanish researchers say they are now investigating the chemical bonds that bind the paint’s organic component (indigo) to the inorganic component (clay), which is key to Maya Blue’s resilience.

Among the more remarkable discoveries of the paint in context was a 14-foot thick (4 meters) layer of blue mud at the bottom of a naturally formed sinkhole, called the Sacred Cenote, at the famous Pre-Columbian Maya site Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. When the Sacred Cenote was first dredged in 1904, it puzzled researchers, but some scientists now believe it was probably left over from blue-coated human sacrifices thrown into the well as part of a Maya ritual.

The research was detailed this year in the journal Microporous and Mesoporous Materials.

http://www.livescience.com/28381-maya-blue-paint-recipe-discovered.html