37 ms·

Hundreds of ancient Maya sites hidden under Mexico reveal a mysterious blueprint

218 points by stareatgoats 5y ago

sydthrowaway 5y ago
I firmly believe that one day we will find out the ancient world has a much bigger and overarching story than is currently known. And it will blow your mind. The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to mind.
- fedreserved 5y ago
  Go down the Robert sepehr (has a channel on youtube) rabbit hole my friend. He's an anthropologist who has connected the dots in an interesting way if true.
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    If nothing else his content generally stimulates my imagination.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Or read “A Story Waiting to Pierce You” by classical scholar Peter Kingsley. He gives evidence for shamanic influences at the origin of western civilization, namely through the friendship of Abaris and Pythagoras. Abaris was from the Steppes—and potentially from as far as Mongolia. He then speculates further about the shared cultural lineage between the Americas, which was populated by the steppe people circa up to 10k BCE, and the emergence of complex society around the Black Sea. A lot of speculation but all grounded in well-cited evidence. A short but fun read.
    - fedreserved 5y ago
      You would definitely enjoy the Robert sepehr rabbit hole. He hits on what you described and a whole lot more. Watching him, I'm like how is this information not more widely known. But I never have the time to do independent digging, to confirm or deny his research. But super entertaining.
- amar-laksh 5y ago
  Try the dawn of everything by david graeber. It does show the vibrant nature of the historic and pre-historic world. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  [dead]
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  The thing that many modern people believe (incorrectly), is that primitive folks are not as smart as more developed people. They are every bit as smart (some might say, “smarter”); they just don’t have the social, physical, and logical infrastructure, or access to resources, that more developed societies have. I think that was the premise of Guns, Germs and Steel.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    There's also a different integration of skills. Knowing how to craft a reliable spear, how to operate it efficiently and how to lockdown prey to aim at is a serious set of skills. It's just not categorized as such in our era but its a blend of primitive mechanochemistry (glueing and tying sharp rocks to staff with ropelike fibers) merged with advanced survival Olympics and 24/7 without much of a safety net. All of these require more depth of focus than what most of us do on a daily basis.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    You are only as capable as the society around you. Maybe that is something the rugged individualists among us should take to note.
    - trinsic2 5y ago
      We wouldn't have a civilization with out the pioneering work of individuals. Individualism and collectivism are tightly woven together. Both are needed, its a mistake to think that you can have one without the other. And actually many of the pioneering individuals had to transcend the boundaries of collectivism to actual make the world better. Tesla comes to mind.
      - colordrops 5y ago
        Sure, I don't think the comment you are responding to is advocating for pure collectivism though, just speaking to those who completely reject any aspects of it.
    - oliv__ 5y ago
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/s?k=graham+hancock https://www.amazon.com/s?k=graham+hancock is Graham Hancock, who has written several famous books about the questions of what the loss of the library at Alexandria, to fire, did to the current ideas of history.
  - zokula 5y ago
    Lol Graham Hancock is one of the biggest frauds and a liars.
    - Artistry121 5y ago
      Evidence?
- ink_13 5y ago
  > The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to mind This one doesn't seem to have a lot behind it. There are a handful of nice coincidences, but that's all.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Any museum will show you that the ancient world was very big and very interconnected. And Mayans are positively modern by the ancient timelines (e.g. Egypt is more ancient).
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  The Dravido-Koreanic hypothesis is probably a bad example as it’s considered to be complete quackery by pretty much everyone who studies language. It was first suggested in 1905 and was based off the Turanian language hypothesis, which was found to be completely incorrect long ago.
- peter303 5y ago
  Thats a part of the Greaber hypothesis in his new book The Dawn of Everything. He says anthropologists have had a too simplistic view of prehistory and people were more sophisticated than pop history gives them credit for.
WalterGR 5y ago
Lidar reveals hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial centers (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundreds-of-long-lost-maya-and-olmec-ceremonial-centers/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundre...) 104 points|samizdis|7 days ago|12 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048229
drawqrtz 5y ago
I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Feels like a good place to visit, not live. My sneaking suspicion is that subsistance farming feels pretty similar no matter what century and empire you do it in, and that’s the boring stuff that doesn’t make it into the history books.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Feels like a good place to visit, not live. " I am pretty sure if you came "to visit" aka a tourist, you likely would not have lived too long there to settle down. Unless you brought some modern day magic, like a gun or a smartphone, to convince them you are send from the gods and not to be sacrificed just yet. They literally murdered babies regulary. Why would one want to visit those, except for hardcore anthropologic studies? And subsistence farming probably did differ, depending how far away the next empire was. Some lived in total slavery and dependency and some quite undisturbed pretty much on their own (there are some villages in remote greece areas for example, claiming to never have been conquered.).
    - dang 5y ago
      Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We don't need anti-Mayan flamewars any more than anti-any-other-$thing flamewars. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        Seriously? "I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting." The thread was literally about people wanting to enjoy human sacrifice and I expressed my disgust with that. I am not anti-mayan, nor anti aztec, nor anti historic-german tribes who practiced human sacrifice, too (which would be my heritage). There are many interesting things in their way of life. But I am anti to people who like those cultures today, because of the blood and gore. So anyway, expressing interest in human sacrifice, is ok here, but not expressing discomfort with that, because this might cause flame wars? Well, good to know.
akomtu 5y ago
"estimated to date from around 1,050–400 BCE, and are thought to have been used as ritual spaces, where people gathered to meet, and to watch processions" In this sentence there are 0 facts and 4 brazen speculations. Edit. Although I agree with at least one speculation: "they were representing cosmological ideas through these ceremonial spaces"
- lokimedes 5y ago
  That is the state of archeology. When thinking about how hard it is to make anthropology and sociology “proper” sciences even today with social media as datasets - just consider how hard solving the same problem, inversely, based on whatever scraps survived today is.
- hasmanean 5y ago
  Agreed. Every culture has invented A central plaza surrounded by buildings…the only cosmological idea it embodies is that “tall tightly packed buildings block the wind.” Ours is the civilization in history to build urban wind canyons, buildings with wide open roads between them. We also have less people occupying those spaces than even moderately sized European towns.
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  Did you read the underlying research? That might explain why they think this.
andrew_ 5y ago
The parallel between similarities of modern day stadiums and arenas in many major cities, and structures bearing similar size and shape to one another shared among major population centers in this part of the ancient world, is striking.
- photon-torpedo 5y ago
  Indeed, on seeing the pictures in the article I got the feeling that these might as well be structures used for playing a kind of sport, requiring a standardized shape and size like today's football pitch etc. People today like to play or watch sports, why wouldn't the ancient people like that too?
  - kijin 5y ago
    The distinction between sport and ritual human sacrifice isn't quite clear when it comes to this part of the world. But who are we kidding, the Romans also built massive structures where they could watch people kill one another and/or get eaten by lions. The shape of those structures can definitely still be seen in the design of modern football stadiums.
  - stardenburden 5y ago
    They do! I visited "El Mirador" in the forest of Guatemala. And at one of the smaller cities on our way there, our guide pointed out that one of the small squares in, what was our entrance to, the town was probably used for playing a game similar to basketball but with a hard rock. There were also elevated places around it where people (albeit smaller in size) could have comfortably sit down and watched. Edit: autocorrect is messing me up
wlll 5y ago
For those interested in these sort of things I highly recommend the incredibly well done Fall of Civilisations podcast: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/, there is an episode on the Maya civilisations.
- novaRom 5y ago
  Probably the best book on this topic is The Great Divide: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426005-the-great-divide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426005-the-great-divid...
fsiefken 5y ago
does this rectangular shape have a special mathematical property like the golden ratio or 1:4:9?
- zaik 5y ago
  If you look hard enough there is always a 'special' mathematical property to everything
icambron 5y ago
> Some of the sites are oriented to align to the sunrise on certain dates in Mesoamerican calendars, suggesting the ritual processes involved cosmological concepts tied to the movements of the seasons I always wonder how justified these inferences are. If future archeologists discover the ruins of, say, MIT's Infinite Corridor, will they conclude that it was a ceremonial site for the winter solstice? Obviously archeologists have additional historic context to feed these inferences, but you do have to wonder about the degree to which highly-visible and naturally enduring-- but possibly superficial and culturally unimportant-- features of these sites lead to skewed conclusions.
- Iv 5y ago
  An historian friend once told me that whenever you see "ritualistic" or "religious reasons" mentioned in archeology publications it basically means "we have no fucking clue why they did that".
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  Well, many ancient structures align with sunrise on Equinox: the day where the earth is perfectly aligned with the sun and not tilted (that is: neither hemisphere is closer to the sun than the other). This is the exact middle day between the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year. Others have a similar alignment on summer Solstice or winter solstice (the longest and shortest day of the year respectively) It _may_ be a coincidence, but I don't think any modern building has a window on both sides of the building where the sun rises on summer solstice and shines straight through both windows. If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design. OTOH, there's some ruins where it aligns with sunrise on _some_ random day, and that just feels like a coincidence. Like dropping a pencil on the floor and claiming the direction in which it points has some special meaning -- if you look hard enough, you'll find a meaning to give to it.
  - icambron 5y ago
    I'm not saying it isn't by design; I'm saying it may not be an essential feature of the building, just one that's easy to see for modern archeologists. > If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design. Right, so imagine you found a contemporary building with this feature. Would you conclude that the building's purpose likely involved cosmological rituals, or that the architect thought the alignment was neat? It's possible for something to be a custom but still be superficial. The sun can be very important to the Mayan people and cause them to design their buildings around its schedule, without the building being specifically meant for sun-related rituals. Imagine being an archeologist in the year 2650 and discovering all those decorative lions on large buildings built in the 1900s. What lion-oriented purpose did these buildings serve?
motohagiography 5y ago
Knowing little about this, I wonder would it change how we thought about these if we didn't call everything ceremonial and ritual? It's like it's to put some kind of figleaf over these people other people who were probably a lot like us. I suppose my reaction is that popular archeological articles seem to effectively defy economics as a force in their explanations, and seem to prefer treating the cultures as being under an impaired superstition about the world. It seems like uncovering a stadium, airport, or the Washington Mall from our world today and saying it was for rituals and ceremonies, which sure, abstractly it is, but it seems a bit filtered through a lens of studying them as primitive pagans. Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic. If you start with the loop of necessity that nothing is ever more than it needs to be, we can bootstrap the question of for what was this necessary? It's even more plausible to say pyramids were the product of a policy of Ancient Keynesianism, than to treat megalithic builders as primitive. Maybe I'm just as curious as archeologists are, but if we applied how mystified some modern academics can seem about trade and economics today and then apply that back to studying ancient cultures, I'd wonder if there were some opportunities to reduce some blind spots.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse? "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were very real and important. If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >Think about all the huge temples ancient temples. Modern temples look more like shopping malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of old.
oblib 5y ago
I've been to a few dozen sites there over the 3 trips I've taken to the Yucatan area. I climbed a pyramid in Guatemala a few years ago on a trip there and chatted with the park rangers there. At first they were kinda of standoffish, which is common, but I learned that when I took out my little "Spanish for Dummies" handbook and cracked a joke about me needing it they'd laughed and warm up to me. Being humble made an amazing difference. It can get pretty hot there during our winter months here in the US when I went there and I finally realized just a few days before at a different site on that trip that on all of my trips the one thing in common when you climb those is a wonderfully refreshing and cooling breeze, whereas in the forest below them it was hot and muggy, and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park rangers. They instantly became excited to talk to me about that. They told me that is exactly why they were built and what they were used for, and emphatically pointed out they were not built for "chopping off their enemies heads" like the archeologists that come from the US and Europe like to opine and imagine they were used for. I was kind of shocked by that, and their disdain for those foreign archeologists that keep saying they were, which they made very clear to me. I got fairly well torched the last time I mentioned this here but I think it's important to share because it's so easy to overlook. I overlooked it for quite a long time myself. Just a few years ago my wife and visited the Chokia site near St. Louis, MO on a vicious hot and humid summer day and it's there too. So you don't have to go to the Yucatan to experience that wonderful cooling breeze on a pyramid because climbing that big mound offers the same cool breezy relief, and it's undeniably there while just below it is not. Now... to put this into proper prospective you have to spend some time below those pyramids working a bit. Working up a sweat for a few hours in the sun like real labor does for you. Then go climb that mound. It's the equivalent to modern A/C. The Mayans will tell you that's why they were built. It's fair to say some were modified over the years to be more ceremonial, like Uxmal for example, but all around even that one are many lesser structures with perfect places to sit and refresh in the cool breeze to be found on them. If you go to Tulum you'll notice that in the parking lot it's hot and humid and the air is dead still and there are no tall structures anywhere. But if you walk to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean you'll find the cooling breeze. They didn't need a tall structure there. That was where they took their work breaks. We need to update our take on those because that is too common and too easy to prove and it's what the Mayans themselves say is the reason those structures were built.

218 points by stareatgoats 5y ago

I firmly believe that one day we will find out the ancient world has a much bigger and overarching story than is currently known. And it will blow your mind. The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to mind.

fedreserved 5y ago
Go down the Robert sepehr (has a channel on youtube) rabbit hole my friend. He's an anthropologist who has connected the dots in an interesting way if true.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  If nothing else his content generally stimulates my imagination.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Or read “A Story Waiting to Pierce You” by classical scholar Peter Kingsley. He gives evidence for shamanic influences at the origin of western civilization, namely through the friendship of Abaris and Pythagoras. Abaris was from the Steppes—and potentially from as far as Mongolia. He then speculates further about the shared cultural lineage between the Americas, which was populated by the steppe people circa up to 10k BCE, and the emergence of complex society around the Black Sea. A lot of speculation but all grounded in well-cited evidence. A short but fun read.
  - fedreserved 5y ago
    You would definitely enjoy the Robert sepehr rabbit hole. He hits on what you described and a whole lot more. Watching him, I'm like how is this information not more widely known. But I never have the time to do independent digging, to confirm or deny his research. But super entertaining.
amar-laksh 5y ago
Try the dawn of everything by david graeber. It does show the vibrant nature of the historic and pre-historic world. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
cto_of_antifa 5y ago
[dead]
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
The thing that many modern people believe (incorrectly), is that primitive folks are not as smart as more developed people. They are every bit as smart (some might say, “smarter”); they just don’t have the social, physical, and logical infrastructure, or access to resources, that more developed societies have. I think that was the premise of Guns, Germs and Steel.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  There's also a different integration of skills. Knowing how to craft a reliable spear, how to operate it efficiently and how to lockdown prey to aim at is a serious set of skills. It's just not categorized as such in our era but its a blend of primitive mechanochemistry (glueing and tying sharp rocks to staff with ropelike fibers) merged with advanced survival Olympics and 24/7 without much of a safety net. All of these require more depth of focus than what most of us do on a daily basis.
- pixl97 5y ago
  You are only as capable as the society around you. Maybe that is something the rugged individualists among us should take to note.
  - trinsic2 5y ago
    We wouldn't have a civilization with out the pioneering work of individuals. Individualism and collectivism are tightly woven together. Both are needed, its a mistake to think that you can have one without the other. And actually many of the pioneering individuals had to transcend the boundaries of collectivism to actual make the world better. Tesla comes to mind.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Sure, I don't think the comment you are responding to is advocating for pure collectivism though, just speaking to those who completely reject any aspects of it.
  - oliv__ 5y ago
jjtheblunt 5y ago
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=graham+hancock https://www.amazon.com/s?k=graham+hancock is Graham Hancock, who has written several famous books about the questions of what the loss of the library at Alexandria, to fire, did to the current ideas of history.
- zokula 5y ago
  Lol Graham Hancock is one of the biggest frauds and a liars.
  - Artistry121 5y ago
    Evidence?
ink_13 5y ago
> The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to mind This one doesn't seem to have a lot behind it. There are a handful of nice coincidences, but that's all.
dmitriid 5y ago
Any museum will show you that the ancient world was very big and very interconnected. And Mayans are positively modern by the ancient timelines (e.g. Egypt is more ancient).
IAmGraydon 5y ago
The Dravido-Koreanic hypothesis is probably a bad example as it’s considered to be complete quackery by pretty much everyone who studies language. It was first suggested in 1905 and was based off the Turanian language hypothesis, which was found to be completely incorrect long ago.
peter303 5y ago
Thats a part of the Greaber hypothesis in his new book The Dawn of Everything. He says anthropologists have had a too simplistic view of prehistory and people were more sophisticated than pop history gives them credit for.

WalterGR 5y ago

Lidar reveals hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial centers (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundreds-of-long-lost-maya-and-olmec-ceremonial-centers/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundre...) 104 points|samizdis|7 days ago|12 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048229

drawqrtz 5y ago

I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting.

ashtonkem 5y ago
Feels like a good place to visit, not live. My sneaking suspicion is that subsistance farming feels pretty similar no matter what century and empire you do it in, and that’s the boring stuff that doesn’t make it into the history books.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Feels like a good place to visit, not live. " I am pretty sure if you came "to visit" aka a tourist, you likely would not have lived too long there to settle down. Unless you brought some modern day magic, like a gun or a smartphone, to convince them you are send from the gods and not to be sacrificed just yet. They literally murdered babies regulary. Why would one want to visit those, except for hardcore anthropologic studies? And subsistence farming probably did differ, depending how far away the next empire was. Some lived in total slavery and dependency and some quite undisturbed pretty much on their own (there are some villages in remote greece areas for example, claiming to never have been conquered.).
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We don't need anti-Mayan flamewars any more than anti-any-other-$thing flamewars. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Seriously? "I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting." The thread was literally about people wanting to enjoy human sacrifice and I expressed my disgust with that. I am not anti-mayan, nor anti aztec, nor anti historic-german tribes who practiced human sacrifice, too (which would be my heritage). There are many interesting things in their way of life. But I am anti to people who like those cultures today, because of the blood and gore. So anyway, expressing interest in human sacrifice, is ok here, but not expressing discomfort with that, because this might cause flame wars? Well, good to know.

akomtu 5y ago

"estimated to date from around 1,050–400 BCE, and are thought to have been used as ritual spaces, where people gathered to meet, and to watch processions" In this sentence there are 0 facts and 4 brazen speculations. Edit. Although I agree with at least one speculation: "they were representing cosmological ideas through these ceremonial spaces"

lokimedes 5y ago
That is the state of archeology. When thinking about how hard it is to make anthropology and sociology “proper” sciences even today with social media as datasets - just consider how hard solving the same problem, inversely, based on whatever scraps survived today is.
hasmanean 5y ago
Agreed. Every culture has invented A central plaza surrounded by buildings…the only cosmological idea it embodies is that “tall tightly packed buildings block the wind.” Ours is the civilization in history to build urban wind canyons, buildings with wide open roads between them. We also have less people occupying those spaces than even moderately sized European towns.
acjohnson55 5y ago
Did you read the underlying research? That might explain why they think this.

andrew_ 5y ago

The parallel between similarities of modern day stadiums and arenas in many major cities, and structures bearing similar size and shape to one another shared among major population centers in this part of the ancient world, is striking.

photon-torpedo 5y ago
Indeed, on seeing the pictures in the article I got the feeling that these might as well be structures used for playing a kind of sport, requiring a standardized shape and size like today's football pitch etc. People today like to play or watch sports, why wouldn't the ancient people like that too?
- kijin 5y ago
  The distinction between sport and ritual human sacrifice isn't quite clear when it comes to this part of the world. But who are we kidding, the Romans also built massive structures where they could watch people kill one another and/or get eaten by lions. The shape of those structures can definitely still be seen in the design of modern football stadiums.
- stardenburden 5y ago
  They do! I visited "El Mirador" in the forest of Guatemala. And at one of the smaller cities on our way there, our guide pointed out that one of the small squares in, what was our entrance to, the town was probably used for playing a game similar to basketball but with a hard rock. There were also elevated places around it where people (albeit smaller in size) could have comfortably sit down and watched. Edit: autocorrect is messing me up

wlll 5y ago

For those interested in these sort of things I highly recommend the incredibly well done Fall of Civilisations podcast: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/, there is an episode on the Maya civilisations.

novaRom 5y ago
Probably the best book on this topic is The Great Divide: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426005-the-great-divide https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426005-the-great-divid...

fsiefken 5y ago

does this rectangular shape have a special mathematical property like the golden ratio or 1:4:9?

zaik 5y ago
If you look hard enough there is always a 'special' mathematical property to everything

icambron 5y ago

> Some of the sites are oriented to align to the sunrise on certain dates in Mesoamerican calendars, suggesting the ritual processes involved cosmological concepts tied to the movements of the seasons I always wonder how justified these inferences are. If future archeologists discover the ruins of, say, MIT's Infinite Corridor, will they conclude that it was a ceremonial site for the winter solstice? Obviously archeologists have additional historic context to feed these inferences, but you do have to wonder about the degree to which highly-visible and naturally enduring-- but possibly superficial and culturally unimportant-- features of these sites lead to skewed conclusions.

Iv 5y ago
An historian friend once told me that whenever you see "ritualistic" or "religious reasons" mentioned in archeology publications it basically means "we have no fucking clue why they did that".
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
Well, many ancient structures align with sunrise on Equinox: the day where the earth is perfectly aligned with the sun and not tilted (that is: neither hemisphere is closer to the sun than the other). This is the exact middle day between the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year. Others have a similar alignment on summer Solstice or winter solstice (the longest and shortest day of the year respectively) It _may_ be a coincidence, but I don't think any modern building has a window on both sides of the building where the sun rises on summer solstice and shines straight through both windows. If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design. OTOH, there's some ruins where it aligns with sunrise on _some_ random day, and that just feels like a coincidence. Like dropping a pencil on the floor and claiming the direction in which it points has some special meaning -- if you look hard enough, you'll find a meaning to give to it.
- icambron 5y ago
  I'm not saying it isn't by design; I'm saying it may not be an essential feature of the building, just one that's easy to see for modern archeologists. > If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design. Right, so imagine you found a contemporary building with this feature. Would you conclude that the building's purpose likely involved cosmological rituals, or that the architect thought the alignment was neat? It's possible for something to be a custom but still be superficial. The sun can be very important to the Mayan people and cause them to design their buildings around its schedule, without the building being specifically meant for sun-related rituals. Imagine being an archeologist in the year 2650 and discovering all those decorative lions on large buildings built in the 1900s. What lion-oriented purpose did these buildings serve?

motohagiography 5y ago

Knowing little about this, I wonder would it change how we thought about these if we didn't call everything ceremonial and ritual? It's like it's to put some kind of figleaf over these people other people who were probably a lot like us. I suppose my reaction is that popular archeological articles seem to effectively defy economics as a force in their explanations, and seem to prefer treating the cultures as being under an impaired superstition about the world. It seems like uncovering a stadium, airport, or the Washington Mall from our world today and saying it was for rituals and ceremonies, which sure, abstractly it is, but it seems a bit filtered through a lens of studying them as primitive pagans. Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic. If you start with the loop of necessity that nothing is ever more than it needs to be, we can bootstrap the question of for what was this necessary? It's even more plausible to say pyramids were the product of a policy of Ancient Keynesianism, than to treat megalithic builders as primitive. Maybe I'm just as curious as archeologists are, but if we applied how mystified some modern academics can seem about trade and economics today and then apply that back to studying ancient cultures, I'd wonder if there were some opportunities to reduce some blind spots.

andrewflnr 5y ago
While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse? "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were very real and important. If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >Think about all the huge temples ancient temples. Modern temples look more like shopping malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of old.

oblib 5y ago

I've been to a few dozen sites there over the 3 trips I've taken to the Yucatan area. I climbed a pyramid in Guatemala a few years ago on a trip there and chatted with the park rangers there. At first they were kinda of standoffish, which is common, but I learned that when I took out my little "Spanish for Dummies" handbook and cracked a joke about me needing it they'd laughed and warm up to me. Being humble made an amazing difference. It can get pretty hot there during our winter months here in the US when I went there and I finally realized just a few days before at a different site on that trip that on all of my trips the one thing in common when you climb those is a wonderfully refreshing and cooling breeze, whereas in the forest below them it was hot and muggy, and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park rangers. They instantly became excited to talk to me about that. They told me that is exactly why they were built and what they were used for, and emphatically pointed out they were not built for "chopping off their enemies heads" like the archeologists that come from the US and Europe like to opine and imagine they were used for. I was kind of shocked by that, and their disdain for those foreign archeologists that keep saying they were, which they made very clear to me. I got fairly well torched the last time I mentioned this here but I think it's important to share because it's so easy to overlook. I overlooked it for quite a long time myself. Just a few years ago my wife and visited the Chokia site near St. Louis, MO on a vicious hot and humid summer day and it's there too. So you don't have to go to the Yucatan to experience that wonderful cooling breeze on a pyramid because climbing that big mound offers the same cool breezy relief, and it's undeniably there while just below it is not. Now... to put this into proper prospective you have to spend some time below those pyramids working a bit. Working up a sweat for a few hours in the sun like real labor does for you. Then go climb that mound. It's the equivalent to modern A/C. The Mayans will tell you that's why they were built. It's fair to say some were modified over the years to be more ceremonial, like Uxmal for example, but all around even that one are many lesser structures with perfect places to sit and refresh in the cool breeze to be found on them. If you go to Tulum you'll notice that in the parking lot it's hot and humid and the air is dead still and there are no tall structures anywhere. But if you walk to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean you'll find the cooling breeze. They didn't need a tall structure there. That was where they took their work breaks. We need to update our take on those because that is too common and too easy to prove and it's what the Mayans themselves say is the reason those structures were built.