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.
The downside is that maize isn't as nutritious as wheat or rice and needs to be more heavily supplemented with proper protein from meat or pulses - or the human being becomes malnourished.
>Easily obtained, what is more, for maize has always been a crop that demands little effort. The archaeologist Fernando Marquez Miranda has given us an excellent account of the advantages enjoyed by peasants cultivating maize: it required them to work only fifty days in the year, one day in seven or eight, according to season. They were therefore free, perhaps a little too free. The maize-growing societies on the irrigated terraces of the Andes or on the lakesides of the Mexican plateaux resulted in theocratic totalitarian systems and all the leisure of the peasants was used for gigantic public works of the Egyptian type. (It is arguable whether the cause was indeed maize, or irrigation, or the dense population of societies which became oppressive from sheer weight of numbers.)[One]
[One]https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAndCap... p161
...it was most definitely worse than others.
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.).
"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.
Perhaps it would be helpful to explain how this becomes a moderation issue. It's because we can't play both indignation games and curiosity games at the same time. The former very quickly drowns out and burns up the latter. HN is supposed to be for curiosity games. Therefore when people start playing indignation games (and that is certainly not just you—the temptation is ubiquitous) we try to get them to stop and to return to the intended spirit of the site.
Yes, maybe I should have just asked, what exactly does he mean by "proper offering to the sun god" in the combination of "maybe a bit more violent" but "definitely more exciting".
Because that just sounds like human sacrifice in that context to me. Along with other quotes like that in that thread. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29129436" So clear, that I did not see much point in asking. So yeah, I got a bit "agitated" with that. Still, in my perception I got the mod warning, for expressing disconcern with peoples lust with human sacrifice. And those people did not, because they expressed their desire in soft terms.
It is allright. I probably just seek more other places now again.