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Ancient Maya city discovered in Mexican jungle
- sho_hn 3y agoTraditional shout-out to reading Charles C. Mann's excellent "1491".
- elpakal 3y ago+1. Shout out to its follow up 1493 too.
- AndrewOMartin 3y agoRead this book if the following sounds interesting to you. The Amazon, before European settlement was not a huge virgin rainforest with scattered tribes living in harmony with nature. Instead it was a completely human agriculture dominated landscape with huge cities boasting populations larger than Paris but without the famine and shit in the streets. The forest we see now is not the state they lived in but is more like a post-apocalyptic landscape where the trees have taken over again and scattered pockets of survivors eke out an existence.
- ghaff 3y agoAnother major archaeological site on the Yucatan peninsula, Coba, was discovered in the 19th century but was sufficiently remote that it wasn't excavated in earnest until the 1970s when a road was put in.
- twelve40 3y agoCoba is really cool. I found it more interesting than Chichen Itza (probably because of lack of annoying street vendors who grab you by the sleeve, and fewer people in general). The only bummer was that they still don't let you climb the pyramid, according to the guide, "because covid" (wtf??? in 2023???) Otherwise, super-fun and the bike guides (local Maya who speak the language) are a great company.
- ghaff 3y agoCoba had just started to be excavated when I was first there. I don't remember if things were at the point where you could climb a pyramid or not. Tulum was relatively undeveloped at the time as well. I think I was first at the latter before the road from Cancun was open. (As I recall, Tulum had (has?) a small airport you could fly into--not that Cancun was anything like it is today (not that I've been down there in years).
- UberFly 3y agoI often reflect on the massive amount of stuff that is constantly falling out of the trees on my property, and then wonder just how deep places like this must be buried with a jungle growing on top of them for 1000 years.
- el_nahual 3y agoNot as much as you'd think! In many places in the yucatan peninsula topsoil is only a few inches deep; it's not rare to see no topsoil at all! The limestone bedrock is exposed to air. Most mayan ruins have vast sections that are un-execavated, and you can just see the shape of walls/buildings/roads under the plants and foliage. In the words of Fray Diego de Landa, a spanish bishop (and monster) that was in charge of the church in Yucatan in the 16th century: Yucatán es una tierra la de menos tierra que yo he visto ("Yucatán is a land with the least amount of land I've ever seen", where in spanish "tierra" means both "land" and "dirt/soil")
- bedobi 3y ago> Yucatán es una tierra la de menos tierra que yo he visto complete side note but is that what he would have said verbatim or a rendition in modern Spanish? super curious
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- evtothedev 3y agoIf you like this sort of news, I strongly recommend the Ancient Beat Substack[1]. It's worth paying for, and it's something I genuinely look forward to every Friday. [1] https://ancientbeat.substack.com/ https://ancientbeat.substack.com/
- earthboundkid 3y agoNow that we can read Mayan inscriptions, this could lead to some interesting new material for scholars.
- irrational 3y agoNow? Haven’t we been able to read Mayan for quite a long time?
- acheron 3y agoThe major decipherments started in the 1970s, so depends on your definition of “a long time” I suppose. I don’t think it’s fully deciphered yet, but iirc something like 80-90% of inscriptions can be figured out now.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIn fact the breakthroughs in decipherment, as well as all significant anthropological findings, have been thanks to the work of His Excellency, Fray Diego de Landa, OFM, who has been unjustly accused as a "monster", but despite his burning of all their codices, 'his work in documenting and researching the Maya was indispensable in achieving the current understanding of their culture, to the degree that one scholar asserted that, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told."' (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa
- earthboundkid 3y agoThat’s pretty bullshit. If the Spanish hadn’t destroyed Mayan culture, we wouldn’t need to “decipher” the hieroglyphics. We could just ask educated Mayans to read them to us. You don’t get points for stabbing a man and then giving him last rites.
- hoten 3y ago