There were more Maya than previously thought
This is pretty astounding news. A new technology called Lidar:
…unveils archaeological finds almost invisible to the naked eye, especially in the tropics.
It is a sophisticated remote sensing technology that uses laser light to densely sample the surface of the earth…
In Guatemala, the technology has revealed that the Maya civilization was far more widespread than archeologists had previously believed:
Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million.
“With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there,” said Mr Estrada-Belli, “including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”
Most of the 60,000 newly identified structures are thought to be stone platforms that would have supported the average pole-and-thatch Maya home.
The archaeologists were struck by the “incredible defensive features”, which included walls, fortresses and moats…
One of the hidden finds is a seven-storey pyramid so covered in vegetation that it practically melts into the jungle.
Another discovery that surprised archaeologists was the complex network of causeways linking all the Maya cities in the area. The raised highways, allowing easy passage even during rainy seasons, were wide enough to suggest they were heavily trafficked and used for trade.
There’s a lot of surprise in archeology. In this case, the evidence was hidden in plain sight:
As soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish,” said Canuto said of the LiDAR images, “because these were things that we had been walking over all the time.”
The images revealed intensive cultivation of fields for agriculture, as well. As for what brought the Maya civilization down, scientists don’t know and so far Lidar hasn’t told them. There are some speculations about drought, but it’s more likely that it was war.
The articles I just linked is a review of a book on Latin American indigenous warfare written by two authors. Apparently this topic is a bone of contention in academia, an area in which revisionists try to claim that reports of warfare were just a white European plot to tarnish the Maya:
[The authors] seek to counter the increasing influence of “revisionist” groups who contend that references to Amerindian warfare and ritual violence in early colonial sources are a European fabrication intended to discredit indigenous peoples and justify their conquest. As the editors assert, scholars have tended to ignore revisionist “denial movements” on the grounds that they base their arguments on ideological considerations rather than on actual facts.
This lack of debate has benefited the revisionist movement, leading to the rapid diffusion and acceptance of denial perspectives in college campuses throughout the Americas and Europe. Through the publication of these two volumes, Chacon and Mendoza seek to redress this imbalance. Based on the latest archeological, linguistic, iconographic, ethnographic, and historical evidence, the eleven chapters that comprise the Latin American volume””the object of this review””provide a broad view of indigenous warfare in different times and geographical regions. In them, the notion that warfare and ritual violence, while not universal, was a central feature of Amerindian cultural traditions, receives significant support.
Does this sound familiar? It should—and speaking of war, it’s part of that Gramscian war that’s been so successful and borne particularly fertile fruit within the last twenty years or so. Few areas have been left untouched.
[NOTE: A related post can be found here.]
LIDAR was developed in the 1960s so it’s been around for a half century. Not all that new.
I too found that news of the Maya of interest. The archeologists speak of the extensive defensive fortifications, the Maya must have had good reason to have expended such effort on them. Revisionists simply are in denial of the incessant tribal warfare in the Americas prior to the arrival of the Europeans. It contradicts the narrative that only whites engaged in brutality. A useful lie in the left’s assertion that only the West’s civilizational suicide can act as absolution for its ancestral sins.
Scientists literally couldn’t see the forest (artifacts) for the trees. LIDAR isn’t new, though I’m sure the hardware and the details of its usage is.
A few years ago I had read about town squares being bounded by enormous stacks of human skulls during the rein of the Aztecs. A year ago or so I read that some of these stacks had actually been unearthed. So much for the fabrication theory.
I think this controversy has been brewing for a long time. I remember a lot of pushback from the peaceful indian/noble savage/warlike white faction around the time that Apocalypto came out. They didn’t like it at all, preferring to preserve a racist fiction that opportunistically suits their political ideology.
Another interesting example of how LIDAR is revolutionizing archeology is told in “The Lost City of the Monkey God” by Douglas Preston (an excellent read by the way; use our gracious hostess’s Amazon portal and pick up a copy). The expeditions that Preston describes took place in 2012 in eastern Honduras. The lost city that LIDAR revealed has proven to be a Mesoamerican culture previously unknown. Not Mayan though, IIRC, contemporary with the Mayan culture.
Of course, I am old enough to remember how in popular histories the Maya used to be described as a peaceful people living in harmony with nature under the wise guidance of their astronomer priests. Nowadays we know that the Maya were highly warlike and regularly engaged in ritual torture, mutilation, human sacrifice and general slaughter on a grand scale. Funny how our ideas about ancient cultures change when we decipher their scripts and are able to read what they actually wrote about themselves.
Probably many more Native Americans of all types. See Charles Mann’s book, 1491.
Fifteen years ago before revisionism like this became commonplace I remember being astounded by the movement among anthropologists to claim that neanderthals were more advanced than homo sapiens sapiens. They would find a stick mixed in with the bones of a neanderthal child and say this was a religious artifact at a burial. They would claim that marks on a rock were writing. The Gramscian march through our culture has been so successful that idiocies like these seem quaint and conservative now.
“Another interesting example of how LIDAR is revolutionizing archeology is told in “The Lost City of the Monkey God” by Douglas Preston (an excellent read by the way; use our gracious hostess’s Amazon portal and pick up a copy)”
Seemed interesting but before I bought a copy I looked in my local library. I am an ebook person and refuse to read dead tree books. Due to collusion (real in this case) by the big 5 publishers they are hard to find in library. Anyway they had the ebook and I was able to check out the cloudReader version without a 6 month hold. The kindle version had a 6 person queue.
Anyway sorry Neo but my cheapness knows no bounds.
There’s a good chance that the non-Mayan Mesoamerican city discovered in Honduras were the people that the Mayan defensive fortifications were constructed to defend against. As violent cultures typically view neighbors as rivals, rather than as allies.
Yeah, this is something I’ve been deconstructing for myself for a while.
When I was a child I found a vintage “Tales of the Old West” book, which included horrific accounts of Native Americans spearing white babies as a game in front of the mothers. Hard to justify, no matter how much white guilt one brings to history. You don’t see that stuff anymore.
Here’s the book which finished the job:
“War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” by Lawrence Keely.
https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126
The myth of the peace-loving “noble savage” is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild.
Lawrence Keeley’s groundbreaking “War Before Civilization” offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as “the pacification of the past”).
Geoffrey Britain:
Aztec human sacrifice is rather difficult to revise out of the picture.
Here’s another off-topic science topic. Over the last 20 years or so, approx. 3,700 exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, have been discovered and categorized. A small percentage of those are habitable in the sense that they could harbor some form of life.
Now there is research that claims evidence of planets outside our galaxy! Researchers at U of Oklahoma, using the Chandra X-ray satellite observatory, were using a distant galaxy with a super massive black hole at its center (RXJ1131−1231) as a lens to focus the light from an even more distant galaxy. Laughably, the middle galaxy is referred to as a “microlens.”
So Einstein’s theory of general relativity, with its concept that gravity can bend rays of light, is now a routine tool in the astronomer’s tool belt.
While these astronomers were observing the more distant galaxy they noticed optical aberrations as though the lens had “nicks” in it. It turns out those nicks were probably rogue planets that were unbound by any solar system and are flying around loose inside the “lens” galaxy. These conclusions rely on supercomputer models of the lens galaxy.
I think we are truly living in a golden age of astronomy.
Aztec human sacrifice is rather difficult to revise out of the picture.
Gringo: Yes!
Current historical thinking acknowledges Cortes’s edge in defeating the Aztecs wasn’t just Spanish technology or the Aztec belief the Spaniards might be the return of Quetzalcoatl, but the other Mesoamerican tribes who hated the Aztec’s cruel subjugation and thus aided the Spanish with troops and knowledge.
THE SCENE: Against a backdrop of the prairies, two Indians watch a herd of buffalo passing by.
INDIAN: Well, I think it’s about time – the way the corn’s been growing for the last two or three generations.
SECOND INDIAN: Look at that herd of buffalo! They’re ready!
INDIAN: Everything’s living The Great Spirit’s Way – in Harmony.
SECOND INDIAN: He’ll be here soon.
INDIAN: The True White Brother is coming home. Remember what the Great Spirit said? If we did what we were supposed to do, and lived according to the Plan, White Brother would finish his work in the East and come back to us.
SECOND INDIAN: It’ll be nice to have the family together again.
A Conquistador, a Padre and several Spanish soldiers enter to a trumpet fanfare and flamenco music. The buffalo scatter.
CONQUISTADOR: Buenos dias, amigos!
INDIAN: Hello! You must be The True White Brother!
CONQUISTADOR: Sure! You must be The Indians!
INDIAN: Yes!
SECOND INDIAN: Welcome Home!
All the Spanish soldiers cheer.
CONQUISTADOR: Welcome to New Spain! This is your new Father – Father Corona.
FATHER CORONA: Pox venucci ixum! Down on your knees, now! D’ye recognize what I’m holidn’ over your head, lads?
INDIAN: It’s a Cross. The Symbol of the Quartering of the Universe into Active and Passive Principles.
FATHER CORONA: God have mercy on their heathen souls!
–Firesign Theater, “Temporarily Humboldt County
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjNqlhPFc4Y
Huxley:
“Hamburgers all over the road in Mystic Connecticut.” or so I recall.
Scientific consensus said that the ancients had primitive tech compared to us.
Good thing scientific consensus is ALWAYS wrong sooner or later.
Go look for crystal pyramids under the water and various Google Earth sonar pictures of terraced farms and pyramids underwater. An entire civilization died in the Divine Flood. There was an interesting reason for the War in Heaven and why a bunch of humans got wiped out too.
Some of the knowledge of the ancients is hidden, the rest covered up because it would violate some pimped up academic’s pet theory on archaeology. Look up Smithsonian and American giant bones for a case example of what humans do when they need to disappear the evidence of the ancients.
The Vatican, whenever they build a church, it is almost always on a power spot, an ancient temple or pagan site, to claim it and prevent archaeologists from digging into it.
Their LUCIFER telescope in the US is sitting on Mt Gramm (SP), which is a holy mountain of the native reds.
As for ancient tech, look up megalithic construction using mortarless methodology and the various holes that have been drilled into stone blocks that would destroy diamond drills of our “superior tech” civ.
It is possible to use counter rotation to move these blocks, but cutting them by hand… good luck with that.
So Einstein’s theory of general relativity, with its concept that gravity can bend rays of light, is now a routine tool in the astronomer’s tool belt.
Except his theory is wrong. Speed if light isn’t a cosntant via atomic clocks.
The Theory of Gravity, although not Newton’s laws of reaction and force, has certain fundamental flaws in it.
It is widely accepted as true because it explains a lot of the verse mathematically.
However, it has not been unified with the other forces under quantum and particle physics. In fact, I would state that it is impossible to unify it because the same effects of gravity can be explained using the hyperdimensional toroid model of electromagnetic repulsion and attraction.
Basically, Nichola Tesla’s model of the verse vs Einstein and Kepler’s.
The problem with the theory of gravity has to do with cosmology and water on earth. The water is staying level on this earth, while the Earth is flying, rotating in space, and traveling with our galaxy or against the spiral arms at some X YZ stupendous big number in scientific notation velocity. So how is water staying on the globe level when it is encountering gravitational rotational forces?
In fact, how does the sun, moon, earth system remain stable when there is no mathematical calculus genius or formula for a predictable THREE BODY solution?
It is called the three body problem and one of those things they give out prizes if anyone can solve it. Specific variable solutions have been presented, 13 new ones I heard, but those are specific and thus limited, not general solutions. Newton could predict 2 bodies acting on each other, via theory of gravitation, but not 3 or more.
And the solar system has more than 3…
Yet it repeats, over and over again, as we see in the Heavens. We have not and cannot crack the “math”, so the math doesn’t even work.
It’s too high level for most people to even know about, but Newton faced it and knew it. Lesser and greater minds have compensated for it, to little avail.
Aztec human sacrifice is rather difficult to revise out of the picture.
They can suppress entire archaeological digs and disappear artifacts submitted to the custody of Museums in Latin America and North America. There’s nothing the DS will fail at doing, due to their roots and power base.
Why do they suppress it, a Mensa level human might ask? Because it contradicts certain acceptable theories of evolution, and like Global Warming, evolution makes money. And when humans get in the way of making money… they tend to get zapped like cows by the Powers That Be.
Geoffrey Britain Says:
February 5th, 2018 at 8:03 pm
There’s a good chance that the non-Mayan Mesoamerican city discovered in Honduras were the people that the Mayan defensive fortifications were constructed to defend against. As violent cultures typically view neighbors as rivals, rather than as allies.
Sources have called these civilizations the Adena as well as the post cessor Hopewell in NA, and Jaredite->Nephite by the LDS.
The Adena culture had colonies in Latin America, with its main base around the Great Lakes. Time wise, this would trace back to a few centuries before Plato mentioned Atlantis, the great trading empire.
Archaeologists also call it by a different name in the Levantine proto period of comparable parallel time section: the sea people.
I’m rather good at connecting the dots, which is why the True Nature of the Leftist alliance became rather apparent to me after 2006. Apparently, nobody else who saw the same data as me formed the same conclusions and analysis. Or nobody in the mainstream.
Before Snowden was data mining and copying the NSA archives, Special Forces had already been open source datamining. I merely utilized the same methods that Facebook used to get “profiles” of VIPs and HVTs( HIgh value targets).
The time scale researchers portray the Incan, Mayan, and Olmecs in a time progression. The Olmecs were the colony of the Adena, and one of the home bases of the Sea People. The destruction of what Plato called Atlantis (although that might just be the post Divine Flood version of Atlantis, not the true tech of the ancients) caused severe trade problems with the Middle East and Levantine.
The scientific status quo is stuck on the landbridge theory of how reds came into America, so they ignore dating evidence pointing to a farther past. They also ignore the story of red tribes that say they came into the Americas via the river to the Great Lakes on turtleshell ships. Certainly the words of “primitives” carry no worth to you white USA people, but Plato the Greek philosopher’s words should at least fill in the credibility gap. Especially with the number of Greek altars and gods and idols USA has in DC…
As for Cortez, he was running his own guerilla war, the same thing the Northern Alliance did in Afghanistan and Mao did.
There was no way a bunch of white conquistadors, who burned their ships and thus are now cut off logistically completely from their base sources of trade and resources, was going to take over an entire empire of natives, even if those natives had 99% of them wiped out by disease.
Buzzer goes off, and lights flash “you win”.
It is considered a “Revisionist Western” because Native Americans receive a sympathetic treatment that was uncommon for Western films in previous decades.