Ancient Maya city discovered in Mexican jungle | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Maya city discovered in Mexican jungle

reuters.com

172 pointsbenbreen51 comments

Another 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.

Coba 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.

Coba 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).

I 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.

Not 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")

> 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

Doesn't sound like modern Spanish

Definitely modern Spanish…

Not a modern Spanish sentence structure.

Can you expand?

Yes. The sentence in question is "Yucatán es una tierra la de menos tierra que yo he visto".

The section "la de menos tierra" sounds fine in isolation, as do the preceding and following sections.

But together they give off a very archaic feeling. Understandable since it was written almost 500 years ago.

A modern version, might be:

Yucatán es la tierra de/con menos tierra que (yo) he visto.

If you know Spanish and you read that sentence and the following ones here: https://www.wayeb.org/download/resources/landa.pdf (cmd+f or go to page 101) you'll notice that every single sentence is rendered differently as it would be in modern Spanish.

An example:

Yucatán es una tierra la de menos tierra que yo he visto, porque toda ella es una viva laja, y tiene a maravilla poca tierra, tanto que habrá pocas partes donde se pueda cavar un estado sin dar en grandes bancos de lajas muy grandes. La piedra no es muy buena para labores delicadas, porque es dura y tosca; empero, tal cual es, ha sido para que de ella hayan hecho la muchedumbre de edificios que en aquella tierra hay; es muy buena para cal, de que hay mucha, y es cosa maravillosa que sea tanta la fertilidad de esta tierra sobre las piedras y entre ellas.

And a quickly made conversion into modern Spanish, trying to preserve certain things while excising others haphazardly:

Yucatán es la tierra con menos tierra que yo he visto, porque toda ella es piedra viva, y tiene maravillosamente poca tierra, a tal grado que habrá pocas partes donde se pueda cavar (4-5 metros cuadrados) sin dar con grandes bancos de lajas muy grandes. La piedra no es muy buena para labores delicadas, porque es dura y tosca; pero, tal cual es, ha sido usada para construir los numerosos edificios que en aquella tierra hay; es muy buena para cal, de la cual hay mucha, y es cosa maravillosa que esta tierra sea tan fértil, sobre las piedras y entre ellas.

EDIT: so everything is understandable really, but some things, like the phrasal adverb (?) (locuciónes adverbial) "a maravilla" has become less used than using -mente to convert an adjective into an adverb. And some articles are used strangely, and some words aren't used anymore (estado as a unit of area), empero instead of pero, etc.

Thanks, that helps. I think I have some trouble distinguishing formal from archaic. I do find it much easier to parse the modern versions you made.

I'm glad I could help. And yes, I can see how it can be difficult to distinguish them, especially since there really wasn't any word that truly has become obsolete in those sentences, except the specific meaning of estado, it was just a matter of how everything works together, both words and phrases.

Also note that even in the modern version I made, some sentences sound formal, or perhaps literary, such as "que en aquella tierra hay" rather than the super informal "que hay allá" or the middle ground "que hay en aquella/esa tierra".

Also note that I completely botched the spelling of lucuciones adverbiales by adding an accent and eliding the plural, oops.

This is an excellent comment. Kudos to you for taking the time to write it out.

Thanks! I had fun writing it.

Not a native speaker, but it sounds almost spoken/informal in my mind. "Yucatan is a land (place/territory) - it's the one with the least land that I have seen."

Doesn't seem that weird to me, but I hear a pause before "la"- curious what makes you think it is.

For the interested, relative pronouns: https://studyspanish.com/grammar/lessons/relproelque

It is verbatim, Spanish from the 16th century. It doesn't sound right to a modern Spanish speaker.

It seems fairly close to modern Spanish at least. Totally intelligible.

"Intelligible" and "sounds right" are very different things.

Can you expand about why it doesn't sound right? Are you a native speaker?

No - you'll have to ask the commenter a few notches above about that. I was referring the general distinction between the terms. In general - just because a phrase is easily understood doesn't mean it is idiomatically correct or natural-sounding to a native speaker.

As to the phrase itself: from my limited knowledge of the language, it does sound to be very close to correct -- so I'd be curious also as to what the sticking point is.

Sounds fine to me. Maybe depends on your kind of Spanish

Verbatim, from his diaries.

Great info. Thanks! I wonder if that contributed to their susceptibility to drought.

The topography is also extremely level so if you see anything mound-ish, there's likely something man-made in there.

Yeah, this surprised me a lot when I was in Mexico, it was so much more flat than I thought it would be. Dense, thick, flat carpet of jungle as far as the eye can see.

Does that mean it has clearly been cultivated to be that flat?

No. It's undeformed limestone karst, meaning old uplifted seabed that was not crunched up.

It’s because that’s where the asteroid hit right? The one that killed the dinosaurs

That was the guy that collected all the manuscripts from Mesoamerican civilizations and burned them all.

This event is comparable to the destruction of the Great library of Alexandria, or the destruction of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

I remember flying over some parts of Chiapas as a young boy thinking for sure that every mound or hill was an undiscovered temple of some kind, waiting for someone to stumble on. There’s a lot of uncovered magic there, a lot like all of the wild dinosaur bones being accidentally found in the construction debris of booming humanity.

one of my many majors in college (mid 1990s) was archaeology, specializing in central/south america.

i recall one of my profs telling us that if you see a hill in the yucatan, it's a buried ruin.

Tropical trees are rarely deciduous and jungles like the Amazon often experience significant monsoon seasons which wash away a lot of topsoil. In fact a surprisingly significant part of the Amazon's minerals come from the Saharan dust storms that make it across the ocean

So Sahara is good for something after all

It's a one of the biggest sources of trace micronutrients in the world. The 800 million metric tons of mineral dust a year that it produces feeds a ton of ecosystems:

    Amazon rainforest: phosphorus feeds plants
    Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico: iron feeds plankton
    Atlantic ocean: iron feeds plankton
    Southern Europe: phosphorus feeds plants
    Mediterranean: iron feeds plankton
    Sahel: phosphorus and iron feed plants
    Florida everglades: phosphorus feeds plants
    Andean cloud forest: phosphorus feeds plants

Worth noting also that roughly half of oxygen in the atmosphere comes from the ocean, the large majority of which comes from plankton. The same type of plankton that bloom from iron.

Scientists have been investigating whether manually spreading iron dust over the ocean can be an effective way to undo the damage that our rapidly rising ocean acidity is doing to our oxygen supply

Traditional shout-out to reading Charles C. Mann's excellent "1491".

+1. Shout out to its follow up 1493 too.

Read 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.

If 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/

Now that we can read Mayan inscriptions, this could lead to some interesting new material for scholars.

Now? Haven’t we been able to read Mayan for quite a long time?

The 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.

In 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

That’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.

Are you saying he did not burn the original works? If he did, the accusations seem just to me.

It's quite unjust to call anyone a "monster". Human beings have dignity and deserve respect, even if they are found to have done wrong. I would not call any human person a "monster", no dictator, no mass murderer, particularly no bishop or clergyman. The word "monster" is dehumanizing and unjust in itself. It is emotional rather than descriptive or accurate. It is verbal cruelty, and I believe that no matter how cruel someone is, they never deserve human cruelty in return, but rather respect and dignity.

> It's quite unjust to call anyone a "monster".

The so called "journalists" have no problems using this word.

Well, sometimes it's also unjust to call someone a "journalist", isn't it.

I choose to presume you're trolling. The alternative is that you're a monster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com