Hydrological Lessons From The Mayans

If you’re a civil engineer doing hydrological work, then this one’s for you. In 1999, archaeologists found a puzzling water feature while working at Palenque, the much studied Mayan city-state in the southern Mexico state of Chiapis.

It looked, they thought, like part of a system for delivering water under pressure. But that couldn’t be true. After all, it was commonly accepted that water pressure systems had come to the New World with the arrival of the Spanish. And the puzzling feature had probably been built 700 years earlier.

But archaeologist Kirk French could find no other explanation for the unusually designed feature known as the Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, so he invited hydrologist Christopher Duffy to look at it. Both men teach at Pennsylvania State University.

The aqueduct runs from a spring located on steep terrain. The elevation drops about 20 feet from the entrance to its outlet about 200 feet downhill. Its cross section decreases from about 10 square feet near the spring to about half a square foot where the water emerges.

Duffy’s conclusion? The aqueduct was engineered to create a pressurized water system.

In a paper published earlier this month, he wrote that “under natural conditions it would have been difficult for the Maya to see examples of water pressure in their world.”

“They were apparently using engineering without knowing the tools around it. This does look like a feature that controls nature.”