Largest Known Maya Structure Found
insidescience.org
insidescience.org
Instead, people used parchments/vellum (animal skins) as writing material. You cannot have vast libraries with books made from animal skins.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I highly recommend these places out! Their churches which mix Catholicism with their own believes are very far out.
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.
1: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.3690036,-111.9644457,3a,15.4...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
(They did have a knotted string message system, but it couldn't contain full language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu .)
The Maya did have writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script
If you don't know, and don't want to spend a few seconds searching, asserting things doesn't contribute to the conversation.
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.
There's a recent movie about the challenges affecting modern Mayans called Ixcanul, watch it if you can.
Are the Maya communities in Mexico still speaking Maya languages?
Very interesting article though!
Indeed it’s very impressive how much they accomplished by themselves without the wheel, without big domesticated animals and without contact with other civilizations.
Related, I very much recommend the book "Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs".
They aren't super-great in hilly terrain, though.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Marshes_Wheel
Wheel & axle made of wood, for a two wheel push cart.
Spend some time using an ordinary dolly to move heavy boxes around, then try carrying them. There's just no comparison.
Besides, it's one thing to say that wheel technology is gated by metals technology, quite another to say it is gated by the existence of pack animals.
The axle is also very clearly a turned part, probably made on a lathe.
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.
I've been to Chichen-Inza. It's flat.
The Egyptian chariots had wooden wheels and axles, and were light.
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/course...
A rail road even. Dogs and goats are useful for pulling sleds over a rail. Or a trail.
I agree that the size of the animal doesn't makes wheels less worthwhile.
... by then. They could have had horses, camels, and various others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...
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.
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.
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.
Were they really walking around the tropical jungles of Mexico?
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.
Notable exceptions from the PIE family are semitic languages, and Hungarian, Basque, and Finnish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_Fifth
Not a great read, but I was certainly feeling nostalgic when I finished it.
http://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-g...
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’.
Free to access images (the maps at the beginning and the artifacts at the end are the most interesting to a layman like me): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2343-4#Sec15
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4
Placement within Mexico for context: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Tabasco_...