New Mayan Discoveries

Lets have an actual Mayan thread then,
I don't know much about them, how does this discovery relate to the suspected mass depopulation their mayor urban centers suffered?

>how does this discovery relate to the suspected mass depopulation their mayor urban centers suffered?

It shows the Mayan kingdoms were much larger then assumed and reinforces the theory that climatic conditions and over-population killed them.

Don't know much about Central American history, were they bronze age?

>It shows the Mayan kingdoms were much larger then assumed
Can't wait till they use Lidar on the Yucatan peninsula
I understand porfirian era archeologists used fucking TNT while "researching" and plenty of urban tracing was thought to have been lost

they had some bronze, but it was rare, they used it for currency

LIDAR in Amazonas when??

This. They should use it in Marajo and Kuhikugu.

You know, you don't have to wait for someone to post something you're interested in

LIDAR is fucking magic. Most amazing breakthrough for archaeology in a century.

honestly, I think now is the best time to be alive if you're interested in archaeology

I'd first heard about LIDAR when they used it to uncover the full scope of the Angkor ruins in Cambodia, was stunned by what it uncovered. Now look what they've found in central America. God imagine them pointing this at the Amazon, or in parts of the American PNW that's too densely forested to properly canvas.

youtube.com/watch?v=o6Kq4XF1zKU

Also

youtube.com/watch?v=SwihfJgRRvs

Heck yes dude, this is very exciting

If only we knew the true extent and capabilities of the Mayans.

I would pay good money to get a 10 minute video of LIDAR at its peak, bustling with carts, common folk, merchants, religious ceremonies and who knows what else they had going on.

I didn't mean to say LIDAR, but a Mayan city such as this one.

I'm a little pissed a ctrl+F didn't get me a hit for "Atlantis"
Glacial Maximum ending plus overcultivation, my dudes

Seriously, this shit is incredible. They've uncovered stuff in just a couple years that has gone undiscovered after decades of investigation.

What an amazing old civilization. It's such a tragedy that Christianity came and destroyed any return to past glory.

>Christians
>destroying the Mayans

What really amazes me is how the indigenous american people aigned their temples with stars, plantes and constelations. But then again, it seems multiple civilizations across the globe did that as well.

thehiddenrecords.com/

bumpin' 4 visibility,this thred is naise

>ywn live in a tripolar world balanced between indo-europeans, asians and native americans

>ywn
what does it mean?

Lurk more faggot

lulz, the funny part is where I've lurked enough to know that lurking moar makes you a pathetic piece of shit with no life, so yeah, fuck you with your lurk moar, the less time I use this site the better, that's why I'm asking, I can't be sitting on my ass here and picking up on every new trend you autists start

>ywn be this new

> spoonfeed me reee
Back to facebook tough guy

What the fuck?
Stop posting, get the fuck off Veeky Forums, turn off your smartphone and pay attention in class. Middle school will be over before you know it, cherish these days.

rly guys, I've been here since 2010 or so

Bullshit, have my last (You) and lurk more faggot

kek m8

...

>it suggested that Central America supported an advanced civilization that, at its peak, was comparable more to the advanced cultures of ancient Greece or China rather than to the disparate city states that ground-based research had long suggested.
I didn't know there was a doubt about that. All these cities shared the same architecture, religion, culture etc so obviously they were part of the same civilization, no?

They did bring the civilization to ruin. One autist bishop alone burned over a thousand codices.

You know what they meant stop playing dumb.

>60,000 structures

That's a very developed area. I wonder what they are counting as "structures". Semantics aside, this is a very interesting discovery.

...

They have extensive contact with their neighbors, so this "discovery" of them being a major civilization is not surprising to me. The scale of it is, however

A neat time-lapse of the rise and fall of Maya city-states

>tfw never be able to watch MFC with your Xiib after a long day of sun tracking on the pyramid

Tikal did nothing wrong

can you give me the run down. I always confuse incas, aztecs and mayans.

Maya are the older of the Central American civilizations, with the younger being the Aztecs. It lasted from ~2000 B.C to ~900 A.D when overpopulation and a changing climate caused their agricultural system to collapse. Cities warred with each other on and off, and they never really recovered. They pioneered the domestication of corn, beans, squash, and peppers in the region; had a hieroglyphic alphabet; were ruled by a divine king; and had artisans who skillfully worked with stone, copper, jade, silver, gold, obsidian, ceramics, and paints. The city-states were eventually conquered by Spain, and then abandoned completely when old world diseases destroyed the native population.

Basically Aztecs were of the many Nahua ethnicities and prior to the 1200s were nomads of the north. They settled in the valley of Mexico, a mountain-valley area filled with lakes. So it was more temperate climate. The Maya were their south-east, and they had long been in the area since at least the Formative period (2000 BC). Their region varied between rainforest jungle in northern Guatemala and Yucatan peninsula; savannas and marshes in Guatemala's south; swamp and marshes in the Gulf coast region, and mountain-valley areas with lakes like the Aztec area in Guatamalas highland region. So it ranged between tropical and temperate. Both areas had rain and dry seasons.

The Aztecs were an aristocracy ruled by a Speaker (Tlatoani), who was chosen among the nobility of four Tlatoques, but also by a Cihuacoatl (Snake Woman) who governed internal matters in the city. Both of these charges were composed of men despite the name which comes from a Goddess. Their empire conquered altepetls (cities) and incorporated these cities into their rule. The rule was very soft however, as they let the conquered people be, elect their own rulers, worship their own religion etc. The only thing they demanded was annual tribute and sending armies to aid them in other conquests.

The Maya were composed of dozens of different ethnicities and given their long time in the region varied much more. In the Classical period (200-900) they had Kings (Ahau) rule and sometimes Queens (Ix Ahau), who claimed direct descendancy from their Gods. Some even took on the title of Holy Lord (K'uhul Ahau). Unlike the Aztecs they were not a single city, but multiple city-states competing with each other. After the collapse, the Maya entered the Postclassic period (1000). To the north, in the Yucatan you had places influenced or conquered by the Toltecs or their Maya mercenaries such as in Chichen Itza, Uxmal etc. In these places you saw two rulers, or even four. They seemed to be experimenting.

In the west, in the Gulf Coast, the Putun Maya became renown merchants (called Mesoamerican Pheonicians by some), and mercenaries of the Toltecs. These militarist bands conquered other Maya areas, among them the Guatemala highlands. Which gave rise to new kingdoms there with a mix of Mexican and Maya flavor. The K'iche, Tzutujil, Cakchiquel and other emerged. This happened while they were dealing with waves of Nahua migrants as well, from the Toltecs, and later peoples. These Nahuas became different from the Mexican ones like the Tlaxcaltecs and Aztecs. They call them Pipil. By now it is the late Postclassic period so the Aztecs would be appearing. As these kingdoms grew in the Guatemalan highlands back up north in the Yucatan peninsula many cities consolidated power in the League of Mayapan. In the 1440s this League broke apart from internal revolts led by a rival dynasty. The dynasty survived by the Merhcant princes and this rivalry would reemerge when these families went to their own cities. By this time the Yucatan peninsula was fractured into many city-states but you also see a semblence of the Classical culture returning with the erection of stelea, artistic traditions being more unique from the trendy Mexican style. It was in this warring state that the Spaniards arrived.

t-this

The Mayans were already long gone by the time the Christians came, you’re bitching they descecrated the remain? Well don’t act like they didn’t end themselves with an unsusstainable agricultural method. I hate the victim complex historical lense where people go back and try to blame inherently weak positions on whichever culture found the corpse first.

The big cultural centers were abandoned but the maya culture was very much alive and some tribes persist until today.
The spaniards mindlessly destroyed what they could when they arrived, which many consider a big loss if they are not disease ridden dogmatic barbarians.

>many
most people don't really give a fuck user deal with it

If they weren’t so inherently weak and divided them they wouldn’t have so easily been conquered. Nobody is saying the Spanish were justified, as anyone interested in history would be offended by the destruction of old structures in any context, but what you have to remember is that this is how the world works, the Spanish were not unique in destroying the cultural foundations of the conquered, its conquest 101. No sense in leaving infrastructure in place for a future revolt, ultimately they were weak and woe comes to the weak, if not the Spanish then somebody else would have done the same, it’s not like anyone outside of Christians would have conquered them, the Chinese didn’t have the cultural inclination towards colonization and would have never had the logistical capacity to maintain an overseas empire in the Middle Ages. So ultimately to either the Spanish or some other european, no matter what the weak get purged so the Mayans were doomed the moment their civilization stopped being a unified threat. My point is that these civilizations were doomed before the vultures came, and vultures were going to come eventually.

The civilizations were doomed when diseases came*

And the destruction of cultural heritage and knowledge has the same concept as destroying scientific knowledge nowadays.

Destroying centuries of development and culture is as "normal" as muslims destroying thousands of statues and archeological evidence of the earliest civilizations in the middle east.

MILLIONS
>what corn did they growe?

That is not a significant distinction. Disease was going to come, what scenario do you envision where nobody ever finds the remnants of Mayan society and brings disease? It’s not a matter of “if” but “when.” You blame the first vulture that comes, wisdom tells us this is folly. Vacuums will always be filled, only brainlets can’t see this.

>The Mayans were already long gone by the time the Christians came
Factually wrong on all accounts. The Late Postclassic Maya were very much still around. And they still lived in cities. Pic related are Mayas of that period.

>you’re bitching they descecrated the remain?
Yes, because we could have known more about them. We do know more now but there's still a lot of holes and theories. We are talking about a culture which has no basis in Eurasia where we could make connections and comparisons to perhaps fill in the holes.

> Well don’t act like they didn’t end themselves with an unsusstainable agricultural method.
You're talking about the Classical period. Like I said above the culture was very much still alive. It was just different. It's like talking about the Byzantines in the 1200s and the Roman Empire in the first century. They were different but there was still some continuity.

> I hate the victim complex historical lense where people go back and try to blame inherently weak positions on whichever culture found the corpse first.
Again they weren't a corpse.

They weren't easily conquered actually. It took almost 200 years. And even after that there were rebellions in the colonial period and when Mexico became independent (see Caste War). Hell even today in Chiapas you still have the EZLN.