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Archaeologists discover tomb of first king of Caracol
- sho_hn 1y agoShout-out again to Charles C. Mann's excellent book 1491. One of my most eye-opening reads after 2000, in terms of information that I didn't possess yet, exceedingly well presented.
- acdha 1y agoI went to a book talk of his (I believe part of the release for the follow-up 1493) and liked that he was humble and not afraid to acknowledge lack of data or the possibility of being wrong. Nice change from the classic “my theory explains everything” pitfall.
- sorenKaram 1y agoCurrently reading 1491, and I saw this. Mind-blowing to me that archeologists thought that Ancient Americans were so primitive, and that it had to be such a battle to demonstrate that no these were complex peoples just like everywhere else. One of my favorite facts is that 3/5 of the worlds produce was domesticated in Meso-America. Wild. These civs were pros at developing foods.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoNo wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice… But great architecture and urban planning… plus writing and math. It’s wild.
- Qem 1y ago> No wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice… Regarding child sacrifice, we are not faring much better today: "UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell told ambassadors that an average of 28 children are killed in Gaza every day – “the equivalent of an entire classroom.” - https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165415 https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165415
- AlotOfReading 1y agoMesoamerica had both wheels and bronze. They just weren't as widely used because the technologies weren't nearly as useful in the Mesoamerican social context. Human sacrifice occurred and had important religious connotations (in terms of very literally keeping the universe alive), but it's wildly over-stated as an everyday fact of life by chroniclers.
- spauldo 1y agoThe current theory on why they didn't use the wheel much is that they had no animals to pull a cart. Llamas aren't suited to it and never spread out from the Andes in any case. My only problem with that theory is that wheelbarrows are damn useful things.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThey had animals to pull carts: Dogs and humans. Plains groups had large breeds for travois pulling before horses were introduced. Dogs weren't used for physical labor in Mesoamerica, but they had large breeds like the loberro that were large and strong enough. Andean cultures had their own large breeds I'm less familiar with. The plains example is particularly illustrative here though, because horses and knowledge of wheeled transports were introduced at roughly the same time, yet only horses were immediately adopted by nomadic plains groups and used to pull larger versions of the travois they had been pulling with dogs for centuries. The wheel just wasn't that useful because there was no road infrastructure to make it viable. And so it was with virtually all of the Americas. Eurasian style road construction largely did not exist. The few places it did exist were enormously mountainous regions where a long distance journey was not reasonable by wheeled vehicle, and in those areas wheels remained relatively impractical for transportation purposes until the industrial invention of motors. Just to give some historical examples, the conditions in northern mexico were so rough that the most common kind of wagon often needed new axles daily. Spanish colonial authorities could afford nicer wagons and built them with all sorts of durability improvements like iron-banded wheels maintained on the journey by specialist carpenters, yet still regularly lost significant percentages of caravans to the conditions even on well-maintained trails like the camino real. Is it any wonder that people largely preferred to use mules or horses? As an aside, wheelbarrows are much less useful without shovels. The primary digging implement in the Americas was a digging stick, the most basic versions of which are exactly what they sound like. Mesoamericans would occasionally have small wood or metal paddles at the end of theirs for various reasons. Descendants survive in modern tools like the coa used by jimadors to trim agave for tequila. For a large earthmoving project laborers would have used their digging sticks to loosen soil and hands or various small implements to scoop it into baskets or hides for transport by hand.
- monero-xmr 1y agoHis book is excellent for dispelling myths of the noble savage. These were not angelic tribes of peaceful hunter-gatherers, living off the land in harmony with nature, but human beings with complex motivations and driven by the same things that drive all of us.
- jonah 1y agoWe visited Caracol this spring. What an amazing site.
- timmg 1y agoUnless they finished the road in the past two years: it's a pain to get to. We went a few years ago and were really surprised it wasn't more famous and had more tourists. I feel like there were about a dozen tourists visiting the day we went.
- jonah 1y agoIt was amazingly quiet though we did arrive in the afternoon. The massive road project is making good progress, but still has a ways to go. (That being said, I wouldn't hesitate going in any regular car.) (I'm glad we were able to visit before the road was finished - we had the place almost entirely to ourselves.)
- kornork 1y agoWhen I went (15 yrs ago?), there was also the problem of armed locals. I can't remember if they were some guerrilla group or just opportunistic bandits, but we had to caravan to get there with a military escort. So that can't help with the tourism, if it's still going on.
- jonah 1y agoThat used to be the case, but the security situation is much better now and escorts are no longer needed. However, it is only 5.3km from the Guatemalan border and there is quite a lot of illegal encroachment so there is a contingent of armed military guards at Caracol.
- art_vandalay 1y ago[dead]
- aosaigh 1y agoI’m always (naively) surprised that these sites continue to contain new finds like this. I always assume they've been fully mapped and searched.
- eth0up 1y agoMan, there's so much left to discover! South America, Turkiye, who knows, but so much. One fascinating site not getting much attention is Zernaki Tepe, near the Van region. Some of it, if I've not confused it with something nearby, is buried under 40ft of sediment and its accessible parts exhibit some of the finest masonry work yet seen, with interlocking blocks, etc. Estimated at 14k years, and probably older than Gobekli Tepe
- AlotOfReading 1y agoZernaki Tepe is obviously not from 14k BP. It's a grid plan urban center with aramaic inscriptions and thrown potsherds that use slip. I also can't find any papers actually arguing that it might be anywhere near that old, only some vastly more reasonable iron age dates. What are you looking at that indicates otherwise?
- eth0up 1y agoI'll have to bow a bit in shame. I was introduced to that site through rogue archeologists that differ with official consensus. Additionally, the surrounding sites nearby convolute my ignorance. That said, while I can't readily disgorge quality references on this area, I suspect we'll soon have some compelling arguments that unsettle current consensus. I apologize for introducing an otherwise fascinating archeological discovery with feeble or possibly garbage data. And I hope it does not discourage anyone from remaining up to date on this area or actively pursuing it.
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- bsoles 1y agoIt is funny; "karakol" in Turkish means a police office/building. I wonder is there is a link in the etymology?
- mistrial9 1y agothe change in modern public record of the Maya during the lifetime of Arlen and Diane Chase is hard to overemphasize. "Blood of Kings" (book) is a search term.