Teaching a unit on Maya now, this is a well-timed find!

I love when discoveries like this are made.

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So they gunned the indigenous people down?

As you do. Can't have savages running around YOUR new island that you just discovered

I don't think Guatemala is an island?

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They would be musket balls right? Bullets hadn't been invented yet.

Not yet, my friend… not yet…

muahahahah

A musket ball is a type of bullet. Bullet is derived from boulette - French for "small ball".

I have two bullets then

How can you put the bullets before the bayonet ‽‽

>The Maya civilization reached its height between 250 and 900 AD

So was it still really Mayan when it was conquered by the spanish?

Fall of Civilisations has an incredible podcast on the rise and fall of the Mayans, and many other civilisations. Highly recommend a listen

The people were, I do believe. That time period represented the height of the civilization, not the alpha and the omega.

'Civilization" and "height" were bad choices of words by the article IMO. Maya is more of an ethnicity than a social structure.

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Yes advanced government and architecture as well as a history spanning possibly thousands of years what dirty dumb savages

Yes, and Mayan people still exist in that region today.

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How the hell did you get the frank above the beans????

Well yes, that's a pretty big part of this whole "war" thing: people getting shot.

The last stronghold of the Maya in Guatemala was an island in a lake. Check out the article for pictures!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nojpet%C3%A9n

Advanced how?

Such a great podcast, Paul Cooper is a God!

Rome is still Rome today, filled with Romans, even though it’s “height of civilization” was two thousand years ago. Of course it was still Mayan, Greeks are still Greeks even after Ottoman conquest for centuries. They are still Mayan even after some fights with their old neighbours and new.

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Modern ammunition is composed of a cartridge which contains gunpowder and a bullet.

Technically, a bullet was and still is just the solid projectile. The proper way to refer to modern ammunition is "cartridge".

thank you for the recommendation! i'm excited to give it a listen later today!

They had city states and archived architecture that's lasted almost millennia. Not very different at all from many European states before and during the dark ages

Beans above the frank.

Thank you. It was an extremely early morning post.

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It’s a great podcast! The fall of Roman Britain is a good episode to get a feel for how the podcast operates and it’s a relatively short episode (may be the first one too, I don’t remember)

There’s a difference between a war and a genocide. Just because the genocided people are fighting back doesn’t make it okay for them to be gunned down.

I'll start there then!

Thanks :)

Only the ones not killed by European diseases or enslaved.

The Aztec had better sanitation than the Europeans.

In fact, they had better access to potable water than London had until mid-19th century.

I don't think that is a question.

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That's what's called a siege, it was a stronghold after all

It’s still a genocide.

Not really. Diseases did most of the job. The Spaniards where not really interested in killing millions of people that could be useful. Sometimes the Europeans didn't even need to arrive at a place to exterminate a population, like the people of the Mississippi valley, an advanced civilization with big towns and agriculture, diseases arrived and collapsed that society, by the time the Spanish people arrived only empty towns remained, by the time the French and British arrived nothing was left.

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I don’t think anyone is defending it but Genicide is a relatively recent term, war usually implied genocide up until WWII.

Everything is part of an island.

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Access to potable water < has guns and the ability to cross oceans

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That’s just like, not true…

While the word “genocide” has only existed for about a century, the concept has existed for longer as have localized translations for it.

And saying most wars pre WW2 had the express purpose of genocide is…. not correct. The American or Russian Civil Wars? The Napoleonic Wars? WWI? The innumerable wars of Medieval Europe or Japan? Very rarely are “wars” fought for the sole purpose of genocide. Wars are fought for a variety of reason, however the “wars” fought against indigenous Americans were almost all about either exterminating them or pushing them off their land. Just because the word didn’t exist at the time doesn’t change the fact that these are not wars, they’re genocides.

The Maya still exist, mainly in central america. The area is to this day mayan, yes.

Post Classic maya “Itzá” they still speak Itzá around the lake and In the rest of peten. They used to be called “los brujos del agua” by the Spaniards.

The term genocide may be new but war def is not and was not mutually exclusive with genocide before WW2

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Ability to kill =/= civilized.

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Never said it wasn’t.

But diseases killed the vast majority of the natives.

The only reason the Spanish won is because the natives were too sick to fight back.

The survivors endured centuries of slavery.

And who brought the diseases? And who weaponised the diseases once they realised that the natives have no kind of immunity against it?

It was a with multiple extermination methods.

Yeah but that doesn't mean anything if your civilisation is gone

The ability to kill does not make a society advanced.

The Aztecs where an an advanced society, but their areas of advancement were not all military.

But apparently the people on Reddit feel that that only thing that defines civilization is the ability to kill.

By that definition, Rome was less civilized than the Germanic tribes that overthrew them.