Archaeologists have uncovered a 3,000-year-old Maya site so massive it can be seen from space. According to a new study, it wasn’t a city at all. It was a map of the universe.

Known as Aguada Fénix, the site stretches nearly six miles across Tabasco, Mexico, and dates back to around 1050 B.C. Researchers describe it as a cosmogram, a sort of blueprint for how ancient people believed the cosmos was arranged. “They probably thought the universe is ordered according to the north-south and east-west axes,” said lead author Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to Live Science. “The east-west axis was tied to the movement of the sun and was probably related to the passage of time.”

Using lidar scans, the team found a network of canals, causeways, and dams

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