A 12-Year-Old Girl Accidentally Discovered a Mayan City While Browsing Google Maps

William Gadoury, the 15-year-old Quebec boy who famously discovered a Mayan city using star maps in 2016, has finally been upstaged—by a 12-year-old girl with a Google Maps tab and a bored Tuesday afternoon.

Isabella "Izzy" Chen, a seventh grader from Vancouver, British Columbia, was not looking for ancient ruins. She was looking for a place to build a virtual fort in Minecraft, and she had decided that a jungle peninsula in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula would be an ideal location. But when she zoomed in on the satellite imagery, she noticed something strange: a faint, rectangular discoloration in the canopy, like a grid pattern just barely visible through the leaves.

"The Minecraft world was not working right, so I started scrolling around," Izzy said, sitting cross-legged on her parents' couch, a laptop open on her knees. "And I saw this square. It was not a field or a road or a fire break. It was too perfect. Squares do not happen in nature unless something made them."

She took a screenshot and showed her father, an architect who enjoys armchair archaeology as a hobby. He thought it might be a camera artifact, but he agreed to help her check other satellite sources. The same pattern appeared in images from 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Whatever it was, it was persistent.

Izzy then did something that professional archaeologists often fail to do: she cross-referenced the coordinates with LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data from a Mexican government environmental survey that had been publicly available for three years. The LiDAR data, which uses laser pulses to map ground elevation through tree cover, revealed clear evidence of human-made structures: a stepped pyramid about 15 meters high, two plazas, and a network of causeways connecting at least a dozen smaller platforms.

"I could not believe what I was seeing," said Dr. Jaime Awe, a Belize-based Mayanist who agreed to examine Izzy's findings after being contacted by her father. "The LiDAR signature was textbook Mayan classic period—roughly 600 to 800 CE. But the site was in a region that had been surveyed by aerial photography twice, in 1981 and 1998. No one saw anything. A 12-year-old saw what two generations of experts missed because she was not looking for a city. She was looking for a fort in a video game."

A Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) ground team visited the site in November, following the coordinates Izzy had provided. They confirmed the existence of a previously unrecorded settlement, tentatively named "Chentle" after a nearby water feature. The settlement includes a ceremonial core, residential platforms, and what appears to be a ball court. INAH estimates the site covers roughly 12 hectares, making it a medium-sized Mayan city rather than a minor village.

"This is not a once-in-a-lifetime discovery," Awe said. "This is a once-in-a-century discovery. And it was made by a child who was supposed to be doing math homework."

Izzy has been invited to present her findings at the annual Maya at the Playa conference in February, making her the youngest presenter in the conference's 20-year history. She is nervous. "I do not like public speaking," she said. "But I like the idea that there are still cities hiding in the jungle. It makes the world feel bigger. Most adults think everything is already found. That is not true. You just need to zoom in more."

The discovery has already changed how some archaeologists approach satellite survey work. The traditional method involves scanning imagery for obvious geometric patterns: right angles, straight lines, circles. Izzy's success suggests that subtler patterns—grid-like variations in canopy color, slight differences in tree height, even changes in leaf orientation—can also indicate hidden structures. These features are invisible to the naked eye but detectable by machine learning algorithms, which several research teams are now training on LiDAR data using Izzy's discovery as a validation dataset.

As for Minecraft, Izzy has not yet built her virtual fort. "I kind of lost interest after I found the real city," she admitted. "Also, my mom said I am not allowed to play Minecraft on school nights anymore because I stay up too late looking at satellite maps. So I guess I am a real archaeologist now? That is fine. I will just find another city during summer break."

When asked if she has any advice for other kids who might want to discover an ancient civilization from their bedroom, Izzy shrugged. "Do not try to be an archaeologist," she said. "Just be bored. Boredom is the secret. When you are bored, you look at weird stuff. Weird stuff is where the surprises live."