Sounds like a "guess" rather than a "solution". They have noticed a numerical coincidence and formed a hypothesis. Without additional evidence tying the 819-day count to astronomical observations its not particularly convincing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization#Writing_and_...
>We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
The same individual of whom it's been said
>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.
So yeah, scholarship of the Maya civilization is extraordinarily challenging.
I think the word you were looking for is “narrow-minded”. But even then, Landa thought he had gone through enough to see that there was nothing of value in the Maya books. Even tried to learn the language a little. He just didn’t have the mental and cultural framework to care about other perspectives.
All thanks to the East India Company being a soulless megacorp devoted to profits instead of religious zeal like the other colonists.
From Alexander the Great to various Khan's, then Mughals, then Portuguese etc. Some important Indian texts were burned/destoryed in these attacks, For eg., the Nalanda University
Still, a lot of texts remained both in written format and in Oral format.
I feel like the role of Nalanda in Indian history has been greatly exaggerated.
The education system was very decentralized, and that's really why most things have survived.
There is not much evidence of concrete knowledge/resources being lost at Nalanda.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220120055253/https://www.patna... [2] https://www.myindiamyglory.com/2017/09/11/nalanda-9-million-...
Also, think about it in this way: if some of the manuscripts there was the only copy available, were those really impactful?
You are right about the diseases being endemic in the population.
Whether it's good science is beside the point.
> Science doesn't have some super clear, strict, reductive definition like the "scientific method" you may have been taught in school.
This is peak anti-intellectualism, this is the exact kind of school bashing that Isaac Asimov warned us about.
There is no definition of it "in my mind", this is not about opinion vs opinion here, friend.
I ask, because usually, when I hear people say "hurr durr scientific method", the defition that comes out of their mouth excludes almost all of science except 2 or 3 fields. And I'm not interested in having a discussion with a silly disagreement in terminology at the core.
I'm not sure where you're getting all your veiled insults from. I'm not an anti-intellectual, and I'm not bashing school. But yes, kids get taught straight up incorrect things in school all the time. That doesn't mean I think school is bad, in fact I encourage it. It's just a fundamental consequence of the fact that information is never perfect, and neither are the teachers or authors communicating it.
Try to examine your own biases and figure out why you're placing me in some kinda crackpot category just because I think anthropology is a valid field of science.
(But linguistics definitely is.)
We also have things like computer "science", library "science" and military "science".
Just because it's a "science" in common parlance doesn't mean it actually is.
Where do you think definitions reside?
My understanding of alchemy is that its practitioners tried to transmute matter from one kind to another, e.g. lead to gold, because they didn't know enough about how matter worked to know they'd always fail.