The tale of a precocious 15 year-old Canadian discovering a long-lost Maya city using his unique insight about constellations and satellite photos makes for a great story and made headlines the world over.

But archaeologists and other experts are now saying what William Gadoury really "discovered" with the help of Google Earth is an abandoned cornfield or an old "milpa" left to fallow only years and not centuries ago. They do, however, praise the young Quebecois for his efforts but said findings have no support in science.

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Gadoury from Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec made headlines when he announced the discovery of what he believed to be the ruins of a lost 4,600 year-old Maya city in Mexico. The Grade 10 student astounded people by saying he used ancient star charts and the positions of known Mayan ruins to locate this possible Mayan city shown as a hazy green rectangle in satellite photos.

"The rectangle on the published image, supposedly a Maya site, is but an old milpa or cultivation plot, abandoned years ago, but definitely not centuries ago," said Ivan Sprajc, an archeologist and Mayan expert based in Slovenia.

As for Gadoury's claim the Maya built their cities by referencing the stars, Sprajc said this is nothing more than conjecture.

"In general, since we know of several environmental facts that conditioned the location of Maya settlements, the idea correlating them with stars is utterly unlikely."

Sprajc noted "it's impossible to check whether there is any correspondence between the stars and the location of Maya cities."

Sprajc's views were seconded by Anthony Aveni, a founder of the field of archeoastronomy.

"Maya constellations that we know of, with the exception of Scorpio, bear no relation to those we find on modern star maps," said Aveni.

An even more scathing indictment of Gadoury was made by David Stuart, an anthropologist from the Mesoamerica Center-University of Texas at Austin, who said Gadoury's work was "junk science."

"Seeing such patterns is a rorschach process, since sites are everywhere, and so are the stars," Stuart wrote on his Facebook page.

"The square feature that was found on Google Earth is indeed man-made, but it's an old fallow cornfield, or milpa."

A milpa is a crop-growing system used throughout Mesoamerica, mostly in the Yucatan peninsula where Gadoury located this alleged Maya city. The word milpa comes from the Nahuatl term for maize field.

Thomas Garrison, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California: Dornsife, said the rectangular nature of the feature and the secondary vegetation growing back within it are "clear signs" of a relic milpa.

TagsWilliam Gadoury, Maya, Mayan city, Quebec, Canada, Mexico, Ivan Sprajc, Anthony Aveni, Thomas Garrison, David Stuart