Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2016

ARCHAEOASTRONOMY and study Maya settlements. It is hard to believe that none of these professionals had ever tempted, during a lifetime devot- ed to these specific issues, to follow the same path followed by William in his spare time. And in fact, in the same days in which the news was going viral (around 10/11 May), Maya civilization experts began to look into the claim and the conclusions they drew must have kept the innocent William sleepless. The first bitter blow came from a comment in The Washington Post : “Gadoury’s enthu- siasm is wonderful, and he did a neat ex- periment. But how much can we conclude from his informal findings? Not much. [...] Without a formal, peer-reviewed study of the stars-and-cities hypothesis (and even with one), it’s a bit reckless to run with the conclusion that it has been proven. And now many experts have chimed in to ex- press skepticism” . In an article published by Wired magazine, Susan Milbrath, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, recalled that the famous New York archae- ologist Edward Barna Kurjack (who died two years ago) used to say that the Maya area was so densely occupied during the classic period of that civilization (250-900 AD), that in any given part of that territo- ry you were likely to find an archaeologi- cal site. Thus the apparent correlation be- tween constellations and cities could be random. Always on Wired , the science jour- nalist Sarah Zhang pointed out that, in re- ality, we do not know if and which stars have been clustered into constellations by the Mayans, and consequently those used by William may have been unknown to that culture. Among the first Mayan experts to inter- vene there was David Stuart, an anthro- pologist from the Mesoamerica Center- University of Texas at Austin: “The whole B elow, the pro- motional ma- terial of a non-dis- covery: dedicated posters, trophies, medals and the “precious” book showing Mayan constellations that not even the Mayans knew. We wish William to become a more cautious scientist than those he met so far. [Le Journal de Montréal, Mar- tin Chevalier]