It's tragic how little we know about the Maya compared to what we could have known. Thousands of books were destroyed, primarily by one Spanish bishop, and only four survive today[1]. If that hadn't of happened, it's possible we could have known as much about the Maya as we do about the Ancient Greeks.
The destruction of those codixes is, without a doubt, one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in history. Absolutely tragic.
At the same time, I've read a bit more about that incident, and... this is probably not politically correct to say, but I did develop some sympathy for that bishop. Yes, he was a religious zealot who couldn't distinguish other cultures from "satanism". But also, well, the Maya were in a pretty rough state when he encountered them. They'd been experiencing severe drought and civil war and plagues brought by the Europeans and more. Their way of dealing with this was mass human sacrifice. The Maya didn't have a sacrificial-industrial complex the way that the Aztecs did, but when nothing else would appease the gods, that's what they'd do.
So anyhow, the Bishop had apparently witnessed a mass human sacrifice. Of children. And it really got to him, convincing him that their religion was strictly satanic. Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed, it's hard for me to say that I would have done any differently under the circumstances. That would've gotten under my skin too. Hard to say I would've kept perspective after that.
That's a pretty fair stance. I've actually been to Southern Mexico where their descendants live today. Even today, to my American frame, the indigenous people are strange. But that's what drew me to check out some of their villages.
I highly recommend these places out! Their churches which mix Catholicism with their own believes are very far out.
You don't even need to go to Southern Mexico for that. There's a small enclave town in Phoenix, Arizona, called Guadalupe. It's a Mexican / native community. In the centre of town, there's a public square flanked by two Catholic churches.[1] One is a very traditional Catholic church. The other is a syncretic church which (according to people I knew in the community) mixed in many elements of Yaqui spirituality.
The survival of native spirituality, even within syncretic religion, is always somehow reassuring to me, given how much cultural vandalism occurred during the colonisation of the Americas.
> Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed
This type of fashionable moral relativism can be used to justify any atrocity. From an objective point of view, he could've stopped the child sacrifices without committing genocide, both cultural and literal. Sure, it may be that from his perspective that the genocide was necessary, but that is the case for every perpetrator of genocide in history. I take it that many in this forum feel no connection to the Maya people, and are therefore comfortable empathizing with their abusers. I have seen your exact same logic used to express sympathy for the Nazis by people who have no personal connection to the West. If that bothers you then you should reconsider your perspective on what happened to the Mayans.
You’re mixing cultural genocide with actual genocide.
Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today? That may seem abhorrent and or impossible, but other ideologies have been erased from history and outside of the academic context that could be a net positive.
Ideology’s that promote ritual human sacrifice could be inherently dangerous by attracting a tiny number of people to actually carry through with such acts. Diverse cultural history has real value, but those cultures can come with heavy baggage.
> You’re mixing cultural genocide with actual genocide.
The Spanish conquest of the New World was undeniably a genocide in the literal mass murder sense. In a sense it was a continuation of the same genocide against Muslims and Jews that the Spanish committed during the Reconquista. However you want to categorize what he and other Spaniards did, it was undeniably and objectively morally wrong.
> Going from the other direction, if all information on Nazi ideology where removed from history, would we have Neo Nazis today?
Your analogy does not hold, the equivalent to de Landa's actions would be to destroy the entire Western canon and any written trace of the German language in response to the Holocaust. From your comments you seem to treat the entirety of Maya culture as atomic and inseperable from human sacrifice, while conversely you have conveniently seperated out Nazism from the whole of German culture. This double standard where the faults of Western cultures are treated as redeemable while the faults of other cultures are treated as immutable traits inherent to that culture is what led to de Landa's actions in the first place.
An individual priest did a specific thing which is separate from an actual genocide that took place. He could have just as easily done something else which would not have impacted the genocide. It’s simply sloppy thinking to associate them.
Maya culture is a sub set of South American cultures. So, the scope is narrower than your suggesting. Still let’s go with removing all of Germanic culture and language, the point still stands.
Fine, an individual priest committed cultural genocide and torture. It's still morally wrong and indefensible.
It's even sloppier thinking to somehow justify this by treating one small aspect of a culture as immutable and inherent to the whole of that culture, while hypocritically not doing the same for a culture you're more familiar with.
EDIT: GP added a second paragraph.
> Maya culture is a sub set of South American cultures. So, the scope is narrower than your suggesting. Still let’s go with removing all of Germanic culture and language, the point still stands
You have no point. Nazism has been removed without the destruction of German culture and language, human sacrifice could've been removed without the destruction of Mayan culture.
And no, the scope is not narrower. Mayan culture has as about as much in common with other South American cultures like the Inca as Western culture has to do with East-Asian culture.
We are talking about a continuation of a huge line of the same thing that happened in Europe of thousands of years. It’s not really a question foreign cultures, just the clash between different cultures.
> Nazism has been removed without the destruction of German culture and language
Nope, you can still read Mein Kampf today and many still believe in it.
> We are talking about a continuation of a huge line of the same thing that happened in Europe of thousands of years. It’s not really a question foreign cultures, just the clash between different cultures.
I'm not really sure what you're referring to by "the same thing", but if you're referring to the cultural genocide committed against pagans in Europe by Christians, then ironically that helped fuel the type of German nationalism that gave rise to Nazism. The Nazis famously used the Massacre of Verden committed by Charlemagne against the Saxons as historical justification for their ideology[0].
> Nope, you can still read Mein Kampf today and many still believe in it.
Nazism is not practiced to any significant extent, unless you want to argue that the existence of neo-Nazis warrants the destruction of all Germanic languages.
I am referring to the likely thousands of local religions that unlike say classical Greek myths we have zero direct evidence of. Looking back to say 2000 BCE cultures survived or died out more often than not through direct military action. The deaths of most oral traditions was through conquest, enslavement of the population, and spreading the remnants across an empire.
> unless you want to argue that the existence of neo-Nazis warrants the destruction of all Germanic languages.
It’s at least a trade worth considering. Was say southern culture in the US worth preserving after the civil war? I am not suggesting an answer just framing the question. Edit: To do otherwise is to presume the answer without consideration.
Hey, I'm neither a Catholic nor a monotheist. I've got no personal dog in this fight, except that as a rule, my sympathies are generally aligned with indigenous peoples. And yeah, people can be super hypocritical: mote in your eye vs. the beam in my own, et cetera. And yeah, I agree that the genocidal excess commited by the conquistadores was, taken as a whole, the worst thing happening in the Americas at the time.
But Diego de Landa wasn't taking it in as a whole. He was just having his personal experience. There's little reason to doubt the child sacrifice incident: that kind of thing absolutely did occur, and is well-attested both textually and archeologically. He didn't have the 10,000' view of the American genocide: he had a personal view, and he acted accordingly.
Usually I'm not this sympathetic. When I read first-hand accounts of Pizzaro's conquest of the Inca at Cajamarca, for example, I'm appalled. Pizzaro's guys take umbrage at the Incan' Emporer disrespecting a bible by throwing it, incomprehending, on the ground. In retribution for this, they delight -- positively delight -- in immediately slaughtering several thousand unarmed members of the emperor's court. It's absolutely sick and indefensible, driven by a religious zealotry that (IMHO) had stripped them of their basic humanity.
I'd always assumed that Diego de Landa was a similar kind of zealot, but when I read more, I found that it wasn't so simple. That's all I'm saying. Even when things are black and white at a high level, there can be greys in the details.
I read your original comment as a simple historical statement that did it's best to make it clear that it was speculation about a possible cause and not a justification. Not sure why the GP is reading a moral stance into it.
"...this is probably not politically correct to say, but I did develop some sympathy for that bishop."
Sympathy implies justification. Also, I clearly explained what caused the bishop's inquisition.
Lets switch it up. Imagine after reading mein kampf or a biography on hitler, nkoren wrote the following.
"...this is probably not politically correct to say, but I did develop some sympathy for that fuhrer."
I bet I wouldn't have gotten flagged and mass downvoted. nkoren's pathetic post is just carefully repackaged white supremacy/white man's burden. I'm surprised nkoren didn't come back with "it was cultural genocide not real genocide". There are a handful oft-repeated racist genocide denial.
The Mayans did leave lots of stelae around, and recorded a wealth of chronological information on them using a rather precise calendrical system. Consequently, we actually know more about the Classical Maya than contemporary Europe in this regard, the latter being in the midst of the Dark Ages.
Sorry about that. I just repeated what I heard from a professor that was around. And he is a historian. It seems that having higher education sometimes doesn't mean much
I suggest reading the Book of Mormon. It's a fascinating record of the peoples of ancient America, specifically the Nephites, Lamanites and Jaredites. Where these civilizations lived and fought (there are lots of battles in the book) is uncertain, but it's believed to be mainly Central and South America.
Keep in mind that The Book of Mormon is a primarily a spiritual book: another testament of Jesus Christ. The Lord expects readers to accept the book on faith. When the time is right, the Spirit will testify of its truthfulness and the Lord will bring forth further evidence. For some, this recent discovery is further evidence.
"The bare facts of the matter are that nothing, absolutely nothing, has ever shown up in any New World excavation which would suggest to a dispassionate observer that the Book of Mormon, as claimed by Joseph Smith, is a historical document relating to the history of early immigrants to our hemisphere." http://mit.irr.org/book-of-mormon-archaeology-full
Luckily, bias of the researcher is irrelevant, as this is science and the facts are published. Despite 7 decades of endavours, no evidence whatsoever confirming Smiths claims has been found.
That's a very narrow and biased paper. "nothing, absolutely nothing, has ever" are loaded emotional words. It would be much more accurate to say "nothing that they know of, in their interpretation, and according to the two theories they cherrypicked and considered would suggest to them, yada yada yada". They seem to consider themselves dispassionate observers, but their analysis indicates otherwise. I am always disappointed, but not surprised, when individuals who consider themselves to be scientists fail to recognize their personal bias.
There are lots of other theories, interpretations, and excavations, some obvious, that they do not consider, and which they either wilfully, or ignorantly, ignore. But that is inexcusable when they use such strong language in an obviously biased analysis, based on their personal belief. As a scientist, it is always healthy to be aware, and open, that you may not know everything, and you might be missing something obvious-- even when dealing with something that you may personally dismiss as incredible.
Due to the obvious interest of Mormons, this isn't exactly an underresearched field. This single quote is obviously just that, a single quote of a single researcher, but to my knowledge it sums up the state of research pretty well.
Good grief, even the Mormons in my town (I'm a few hours from Salt Lake City, my area is heavily LDS) don't try to use the Book of Mormon as a history text. Nothing has been validated, none of the cities listed have been found. Keep in mind, we have the Mayan writings and can read them...it is nothing like what is written in the Book of Mormon. Then there is DNA evidence, and nothing matches up there as well.
Other things you could accept on faith is that these are airfields; not monstrously huge ritual grounds.
It's nice to be passionate about something and letting one's imagination run wild, but trying to pull others into it with reference to blind faith comes off as cultish.
Again shows what you can do with lidar images. I'm not sure how widely they are publicly available but if you can get lidar footage of an area you (think) you know definitely check it out. There's a lot of man-made things to discover.
E.g. here's a little story from my area: we were on a walk once and someone pointed to a certain plant which is known to only thrive on very limey soil. And acoording to her used in the past by people as indicator for figuring out where they could get lime for making mortar. Nothing special to see though. A couple of months later, unrelated, a geologist showed lidar images of that area and in a spot close to where said plant was found, there was obvisouly a quite huge round sink in the terrain. Turns out this was once, many centuries ago, essentially a lime mine (which the geologist knew because of history). Nice how history, biology, geology can all come together like that. Yet if you don't know it it's pretty much invisible. Sattelite also doesn't give even the slightest hint. But with a height model and applying some shade it suddenly becomes quite obvious.
I unironically thought this was about Maya the 3d modelling software when I first read the headline, like that the maximum size limit for a Maya model had been found out or something like that. ️
Some wheeled toys have been found in Mexico, it’s not like the wheel was never invented. But The Americas didn’t have domesticable large animals that could be used to pull wheeled carriages (bisons were not domesticated at the time), that’s why the wheel was never used for that purpose.
Indeed it’s very impressive how much they accomplished by themselves without the wheel, without big domesticated animals and without contact with other civilizations.
Furthermore the land in southeast mexico is very hilly, and when it's not, it's often swampy or waterlogged (or was at the time of the maya). It's certainly more straightforward to use barges.
Related, I very much recommend the book "Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs".
I second this book too, it's a great introduction to Mesoamerican civilization. The author, Michael D. Coe, also has another excellent book "Breaking the Maya Code" on the decipherment of the Maya glyphs The fundamentals were done in 1950-60's by Knorozov and Proskouriakoff, but the decipherment was only widely accepted until as recently as the 1970's[1]!
Human pulled carts are common, too. I live on a very steep hill, and use a dolly a lot to bring something up. It's a heluva lot easier than carrying stuff. Not even close. I can easily manage 4-5 times the weight on the dolly than I could carry.
Even navigating stairs with a dolly is easier than carrying a heavy weight, and much safer, too.
I'm utterly unconvinced by Jared Diamond's claim that lack of pack animals made the wheel irrelevant.
Oh, and any significant construction site would find it useful to make a road to it, even if they only were carrying things.
Even when barging heavy loads, to get the load off the barge and up to the site a dolly is still highly useful.
I don't believe we even have evidence whether or not the olmec culture had a state. If you're looking for a better narrative, "time" is a decent one. I don't believe there's much evidence of ergonomic hand carts until pretty much modern times. Personally I'm not holding my breath for a decent explanation, ever, especially when the wheel toys are concentrated in an area known for not preserving wood well sans mudslide.
In any case, the baggage cart like you're describing, or maybe a hand truck, seem to be both artifacts coming out of industrialized society. I'm not sure how useful one would be on a steep hill if the cart itself, including the axle and wheels, were made of wood. You don't really see modern, usable baggage carts until the industrialized production of steel (I'd love to be corrected). Hand carts? Sure, but of a more significant weight:load ratio meant for longer distance, heavy load, flat hauling—remember these suckers often have brakes you wouldn't want to engage on a runaway cart, like a peg through the spoke or axle or a wedge under the wheels.
I'd think some kind of carrying + strap frame like you see today would be a better fit for personal hauling and balsa might even work well for it.
I’m not quite sure of your point—the cart was obviously found in a swamp and would have been poorly suited to hauling things up “steep hills”. I would at least have used a spoked wheel if I were arguing the obvious need of a handcart, the weight and stability difference over rough terrain is quite large. That, or provided video evidence you want to haul a solid wood cart up a steep hill with groceries.
I’m pointing out projecting modern needs backwards out of speculation isn’t likely to yield much understanding of why someone didn’t invent a handcart in precolumbian mesoamerica. Jared Diamond at least compares the material conditions of the two sets of continents—that seems like a decent tactic for approaching the past, even if I do have large complaints with his confident narratives.
Just think: every single ounce of dirt and stone that comprises that structure was picked, carried, and placed with only human calories expended, likely in baskets carried on backs. I wonder what the amount of total calories expended to complete the project would be? Incredible to think about.
It's a yes and no kinda thing, last time I checked in on it. There are examples of children's toys with wheels made by Mayans, but examples of wheeled vehicles don't exist. There's an argument that they lacked suitable beasts of burden to pull vehicles (at best is a llama, which isn't really great at pulling), so that might be why, but that's ultimately conjecture.
You're right that Llamas are South American (though they weren't always - the fossil record shows Llama-like animals as far north as the southern states ~20K years ago), but mexico is so much more than just tropical jungles! Some parts see snow every year, and there are piles of mountains all over the country. It's such an incredible place.
No; a conventional wheelbarrow rests its weight on a wheel at the front and on the human holding the handles at the other end (since it's impossible to balance on the front wheel).
The sailbarrow has a large central wheel that bears the weight, relieving the human of the need to personally support the weight of whatever's being carried.
In the case of the Chinese wheelbarrow, that is correct, but the sail is an improvement added later to the existing conventional design of the region and era which happened to use a central wheel.
I'm no expert on international wheelbarrow histories, but assume that the term "sailbarrow" being so general applies to any wheelbarrow having a sail. The historic precedent of the Chinese incarnation is literally their conventional wheelbarrow with a sail added.
I assume the same approach can be (and probably has been) used on any wheelbarrow in appropriate conditions.
It's a domestic species, just like, say, modern cattle are domesticated aurochs. The wild equivalents are the guanacoes. They may be physically very similar, but they're different behaviourally.
There was civilization in the Andes for thousands of years before the Inka. We just know little about them. Likewise in the Maya homelands.
People who live in Peru and study the ruins distinguish three megalithic stonework traditions, with the Inka the least sophisticated. The Inka's predecessors routinely handled rocks of tens, and up to hundreds of tons, slicing them into non-convex polygonal shapes and fitting them like puzzle pieces. The Inka worked only much smaller rocks.
Originally, the king was the Inka. No name for the civilization he ruled has surfaced.
IIRC Viking used logs as well to transport their ships between rivers, so they can raid the usually very surprised towns and vilages downstream, especially for rivers going south.
It is also worth pondering why wheel+axle was invented so late even in Eurasia (after bronze alloys were invented and adopted, only around 5.5 kya, many thousands of years after agriculture).
This fact has changed my perspective on how much infrastructure already must exist to enable large wheels that rotate smoothly around an axis. Knowing that, it is no longer shocking that one might make toy wheels, and never scale them up to large ones.
It has been demonstrated linguistically that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had oxcarts with solid wheels. (Spokes came later.) They are estimated to have spread out over all of Europe and southern Asia sometime around 6-9 thousand years ago. Most languages in those areas trace directly to theirs. English has brought back together numerous words from various other descendants of it.
Notable exceptions from the PIE family are semitic languages, and Hungarian, Basque, and Finnish.
I once visited a Maya site in the Jungle, off the beaten path, away from the usual tourist site. It was probably the most amazing experience I've ever had. It was almost magical.
Speaking of Lost Cities, I've been watching the 80s cartoon Mysterious Cities of Gold with my kids. Highly recommended. It's a lost gem about the time of conquistadors in southern and central America - well written for a kids show, entertaining for adults, continuous story arc like modern shows, and a nice mix of history and science fiction.
> Abstract: Archaeologists have traditionally thought that the development of Maya civilization was gradual, assuming that small villages began to emerge during the Middle Preclassic period (1000–350 BC; dates are calibrated throughout) along with the use of ceramics and the adoption of sedentism1. Recent finds of early ceremonial complexes are beginning to challenge this model. Here we describe an airborne lidar survey and excavations of the previously unknown site of Aguada Fénix (Tabasco, Mexico) with an artificial plateau, which measures 1,400 m in length and 10 to 15 m in height and has 9 causeways radiating out from it. We dated this construction to between 1000 and 800 BC using a Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates. To our knowledge, this is the oldest monumental construction ever found in the Maya area and the largest in the entire pre-Hispanic history of the region. Although the site exhibits some similarities to the earlier Olmec centre of San Lorenzo, the community of Aguada Fénix probably did not have marked social inequality comparable to that of San Lorenzo. Aguada Fénix and other ceremonial complexes of the same period suggest the importance of communal work in the initial development of Maya civilization.
The "the community of Aguada Fénix probably did not have marked social inequality comparable to that of San Lorenzo" claim seems to be explained by:
> It is also likely that social inequality at Aguada Fénix was not as pronounced as at San Lorenzo and La Venta. Unlike those Olmec centres, Aguada Fénix does not exhibit clear indicators of marked social inequality, such as sculptures representing high-status individuals. The only stone sculpture found so far at Aguada Fénix depicts an animal (Extended Data Fig. 10).
This seems like a stretch to me considering the excavation is not complete (?), but at least the limestone peccary was named 'Choco' :)
> Cache AF1, found in operation AF1D. It contained a limestone sculpture—possibly representing a white-lipped peccary—that we named ‘Choco’.
The consistent underestimation of the capabilities and development of historic indigenous peoples outside Europe and the Middle East is both absurd and tragic. You’d think that by now archaeologists might have adjusted their assumptions.
I am not sure if you are aware, but you replied to one of a few HN moderators.
> You make it sound like posters should write some epic multi-paragraph thumbsucker
He doesn't 'sound' like it. He enforces the rules about how it should be. And I agree with the judgement - the comment he replied to had no real substance. It's a kind of thing you post on a reddit meme thread as a first comment in order to accumulate "likes".
A one-word comment referencing an extremely sensational theme clearly is shallow. Even if it was rooted in deep thought on your part, that's a distinction without a difference, because the issue is the effects on the future thread (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
How do you feel about people in the streets with signs that just say, "BLM?" They don't even use a full word.
Mark Twain once said: The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
It sounds like you just don't want people discussing aliens. Sorry, but I think that massive construction projects like that are best explained with extraterristrial assistance. I wish I had lots of data to bolster this opinion, but I don't. If someone could prove a negative, I would listen but we just don't know. So that's why I think a one word thesis statement is best.
I think there's not much evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence and what exists is rather incomplete, but it sure makes more sense to me than there was some massive slave economy that wasted all of that slave labor moving big rocks.
Remember all of those slaves had to eat. So every calorie expended pushing those rocks into place had to be raised by an even bigger team of farming slaves who also had to eat. The cost in calories to raise those rocks is staggering.
But you can go on dismissing this conclusion as flippant. It's not like anyone will ever really know because the security cameras weren't turned back then.
One thing to consider is this didn’t have to me made in a short time frame. Just like cathedrals have been built over hundreds of years so could these structures.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices