What’s down there
To move to a less distasteful subject than rapey theocrats and constitution-trampling crooks, there’s this exciting story that’s been in the headlines for a couple of days of finding huge previously unknown Maya sites buried in Guatemala.
By raining down laser pulses on some 770 square miles of dense forest in northern Guatemala, archaeologists have discovered 60,000 Maya structures that make up full sprawling cities.
And the new technology provides them with an unprecedented view into how the ancient civilization worked, revealing almost industrial agricultural infrastructure and new insights into Maya warfare.
“This is a game changer,” says Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College who is one of the leaders of the project. It changes “the base level at which we do Maya archaeology.”
The data reveals that the area was three or four times more densely populated than originally thought. “I mean, we’re talking about millions of people, conservatively,” says Garrison. “Probably more than 10 million people.”
The technology makes it possible to strip away vegetation visually and see what it’s hiding. Garrison spent eight years with a team mapping less than a square mile at a site called El Zotz without LiDAR, while LiDar took data for 67 square miles in a few hours.
The most important Maya city, Tikal, was found to be three or four times larger than the scientists had thought, with a previously undiscovered pyramid in its center. And Garrison adds that they’re not totally sure they’ve surveyed the entire extent of that city.
Suddenly having a broad view allows archaeologists to ask many new questions, he says. And there’s plenty of forest to still explore — the study area is a fraction of the total area where the Maya lived.
I call that exciting.
It used to be archaeological dogma that there were only about ten million people in the *whole of the Americas*, and only recently has been speculated that there might have been around 100 million people. If this evidence bears out, that figure might well itself be an order of magnitude too low.
Which only makes the scope of the genocide all the more breathtaking
Exciting indeed!
If the Maya were even more populous than previously thought, their “crash” might have been even bigger, too. My understanding of the currently prevailing theory of the demise of the Classical Maya civilization is that it was a combination of warfare and environmental degradation. Pushing the limits of carrying capacity is dangerous enough in good times; throw in a drought or two and you’re in real trouble. These new findings might change a lot of that, but we too are a civilization pushing the limits of carrying capacity, with rough times looming on a rapidly approaching horizon.
I think one of great disasters of human history is the collision between the indigenous societies of the Americas and the invaders from Europe. The rapaciousness and ruthlessness of the European powers was bad enough all on its own. But even if the Europeans had been completely peaceful and benevolent, introduced diseases would have nonetheless decimated the cultures they came into contact with. With limited understanding of disease mechanisms, they wouldn’t have had the knowledge or sense to limit their contacts with vulnerable populations until it was too late. Indigenous refugees fleeing disease unwittingly took it with them, spreading them well in advance of the invaders themselves The Europeans knew enough to be able to eventually use diseases as weapons, but the initial spread of many was likely to have been accidental. Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire was greatly aided by diseases that preceded his force’s arrival. A recent civil war helped a lot, too.
YNnB? My memory is a bit sketchy here, but I recall reading that that one of the great empires was defeated far more easily than it should have been because the arrival of the conquistadors appeared to fulfil a prophesy about a vanquishing god coming from the East, and so the empire’s king pretty much lost the will to resist as the outcome was thought to be pre-ordained. Basically, an empire was lost to a far inferior number of men by a combination of advanced weapon technology, the Spanish use of horses (a previously unseen beast in the Americas allowing the Spanish to travel with alarming speed), hitherto unencountered diseases (which actually worked both ways, with the Spanish falling foul of indigenous diseases, though to a lesser extent), and superstition.
I’ll be damned if I can find a reference to it at the moment!
Acolyte of Satan I believe you’re thinking of Cortes’s landing and movement into Tenochtitlan and the conquest of what we know as Mexico City. A Mexican friend of mine used to refer to “Cortes and his band of 40 syphilitics.” There was a prophesy of a white personage’s arrival. Although we do not know, of course, what Moctezuma’s exact thinking and feeling was, we do know that his state was reviled by enough of the tribes Cortes encountered on his march inland that the Spanish were able to enlist quite a lot of help from the tribes that Moctezuma had conquered and taxed and stole from (he didn’t mine all that gold on his own).
Thank you, Claire, it was indeed Cortes and his ’40 syphilitics’ (brilliant description!) I was thinking of.
Cortez benefited from a smallpox outbreak that he brought along on his second landing in Mexico. AND the fact that he found powerful allies among the conquered people of the Aztec empire. Especially the Tlaxcalans, who had retained more autonomy under Aztec rule.
Recent, slightly lurid, book about a LiDAR scan discovery in Honduras. Several substantial urban areas, only one of which that particular project was able to visit at ground level. A large city complex abandoned at just about the time of Spanish arrival. No Europeans had ever seen the place, apparently the epidemic wave killed off so many that the survivors ‘killed’ their religious and civic totems and abandoned the place.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30145126-the-lost-city-of-the-monkey-god
Claire Ramsey, @4
Yes, the Tlaxcalans were crucial to the defeat of the Mexica without them the Spanish probably would have been defeated and sacriificed. As to the story of the prophecy of the ‘Bearded White God’, some historians think that it’s a later development.
Recent estimates put the reduction of the indigenous population in Mexico due to plague introduced by the Spanish at in excess of 80%.