3 ms·

It's a shame to think of all the ancient literature and rich history we've lost from these civilizations. I'm sure they had their Homers and Platos.

pjmlp 4y ago
The worse part of it, compared with other lost civilizations is that we Europeans were responsible for it, in the process to make them "civilized". How it could have turned much differently if there was a pacific coexistence with the conquistadores.
- wageslave99 4y ago
  I know it is not an excuse but the European conquerors did the same other cultures have been doing to them for centuries. The "barbaric way of doing things" was common and was pretty extended for much part of the history. European nations had been plagued by poverty, wars, killing, totalitarianism, witch hunting... For centuries, so when they reach the New World they continue to behave the same way they have been behaving until that point. The only good part is that some countries were conquered and dominated by cultures that did not exterminated them. There was some mixing between peoples and the culture was enriched by that exchange.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Wikipedia disagrees with you: > The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. [...] Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified. From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, [...] What's your source or authority for claiming it was definitively the conquistadores?
  - makomk 4y ago
    If the dating estimates in the article are right, I think this might even have been caused by the prior Preclassic Collapse a few centuries before that. Remember, the dates given are a full two millenia before colonialism and a lot can happen to cause societies to change and history and knowledge to be lost over that timescale; our historical knowledge of much of Europe during this time period isn't exactly great either.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
DiscourseFan 4y ago
Well, maybe. But people still speak Mayan today and they've retained the legends and stories which are depicted on the iconography and actually written in the script, that's how we were able to decipher and read it. I don't mean to sound like a cultural darwinist, but Athens and the library of Alexandria were razed to the ground and yet we still have Plato today because everybody who got their hands on his writings decided to read, translate, and disseminate it--there was no reason for the Romans to preserve his philosophy, no reason for the Arabian and Persian peoples either, and yet here we are today with complete versions of these texts translated into myriad languages over thousands of years, whereas other cultural properties, perhaps even from civilizations far larger, have simply disappeared, like the Egyptian materials for over a thousand years. I don't think its wise to be too excited about these potential discoveries, because the reason why these cities can even be recognized and named as such by peoples (namely, us) living and analyzing them hundreds or thousands of years later is because of certain shared psychological and therefore social contexts. They may manifest in different forms, but the parallel developments of civilization across time, in different places, in completely separate contexts, is only on account of the shared, basic psychology of all humans, and in the end there will never be a remarkable difference between the kinds of texts produced by a predominantly agrarian society in the Ancient near-east, like the Egyptians, and a predominantly agrarian society in Mesoamerica. In any kind of scientific endeavour it is never a good idea to be over-confident, nevertheless I think I have to claim that at this point in time anthropologists have developed a pretty good map of how human civilizations develop, from the totemic cults of tribal cultures to the cosmopolitan sprawls of modern urban centers: no matter where you look or what you examine, material cultures appear to progress in a basically similar manner. And, as I said above, there is no sense in trying to "recover" a lost culture, Mayan or otherwise; those cultures are still alive and well today--cultures never die, they just change, all we can do is create a map of those changes, we can never actually go back and fully understand how a people lived and experienced the world and how they expressed that experience in literature and philosophy, since our interpretation of that data will always be tainted by modern experience. But the map, and the contact with the Other, in the form of a "lost" culture, can show us that our modern experience is not the end all be all of the world, there will always be something in these cultures that escapes modern understanding, and I think that in that encounter something fruitful can be born, and therein lies the value of these sorts of investigations.

pjmlp 4y ago

The worse part of it, compared with other lost civilizations is that we Europeans were responsible for it, in the process to make them "civilized". How it could have turned much differently if there was a pacific coexistence with the conquistadores.

wageslave99 4y ago
I know it is not an excuse but the European conquerors did the same other cultures have been doing to them for centuries. The "barbaric way of doing things" was common and was pretty extended for much part of the history. European nations had been plagued by poverty, wars, killing, totalitarianism, witch hunting... For centuries, so when they reach the New World they continue to behave the same way they have been behaving until that point. The only good part is that some countries were conquered and dominated by cultures that did not exterminated them. There was some mixing between peoples and the culture was enriched by that exchange.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Wikipedia disagrees with you: > The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. [...] Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified. From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, [...] What's your source or authority for claiming it was definitively the conquistadores?
- makomk 4y ago
  If the dating estimates in the article are right, I think this might even have been caused by the prior Preclassic Collapse a few centuries before that. Remember, the dates given are a full two millenia before colonialism and a lot can happen to cause societies to change and history and knowledge to be lost over that timescale; our historical knowledge of much of Europe during this time period isn't exactly great either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

DiscourseFan 4y ago

Well, maybe. But people still speak Mayan today and they've retained the legends and stories which are depicted on the iconography and actually written in the script, that's how we were able to decipher and read it. I don't mean to sound like a cultural darwinist, but Athens and the library of Alexandria were razed to the ground and yet we still have Plato today because everybody who got their hands on his writings decided to read, translate, and disseminate it--there was no reason for the Romans to preserve his philosophy, no reason for the Arabian and Persian peoples either, and yet here we are today with complete versions of these texts translated into myriad languages over thousands of years, whereas other cultural properties, perhaps even from civilizations far larger, have simply disappeared, like the Egyptian materials for over a thousand years. I don't think its wise to be too excited about these potential discoveries, because the reason why these cities can even be recognized and named as such by peoples (namely, us) living and analyzing them hundreds or thousands of years later is because of certain shared psychological and therefore social contexts. They may manifest in different forms, but the parallel developments of civilization across time, in different places, in completely separate contexts, is only on account of the shared, basic psychology of all humans, and in the end there will never be a remarkable difference between the kinds of texts produced by a predominantly agrarian society in the Ancient near-east, like the Egyptians, and a predominantly agrarian society in Mesoamerica. In any kind of scientific endeavour it is never a good idea to be over-confident, nevertheless I think I have to claim that at this point in time anthropologists have developed a pretty good map of how human civilizations develop, from the totemic cults of tribal cultures to the cosmopolitan sprawls of modern urban centers: no matter where you look or what you examine, material cultures appear to progress in a basically similar manner. And, as I said above, there is no sense in trying to "recover" a lost culture, Mayan or otherwise; those cultures are still alive and well today--cultures never die, they just change, all we can do is create a map of those changes, we can never actually go back and fully understand how a people lived and experienced the world and how they expressed that experience in literature and philosophy, since our interpretation of that data will always be tainted by modern experience. But the map, and the contact with the Other, in the form of a "lost" culture, can show us that our modern experience is not the end all be all of the world, there will always be something in these cultures that escapes modern understanding, and I think that in that encounter something fruitful can be born, and therein lies the value of these sorts of investigations.