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Lord0fHats t1_j18wsim wrote

To clear a few things up: (copied from another thread)

This isn't in Yucatan. Hansen's work primarily deals in the Peten and the most famous city in his area of interest today is the Maya city of El Mirador.

This also isn't really 'new.' Hansen has been arguing the need for increased archeology in this region for nearly 20 years. The crux of his interest is that the cities of the Mirador Basin are older than the Classical Maya, but display remarkable sophistication. He's never come right out and just said it exactly, but he's been angling for a long time that greater study of the largely unexplored and surveyed sites could lead to a general rewriting of early Maya history, when their culture first emerged and how sophisticated it was before the Classical Maya.

Mayanists have an ongoing, low key, debate about where Maya civilization began; in the Highlands, or as Hansen wants to argue, in the Peten. (EDIT: I got my geography wrong)

He's not wrong that there's interesting sites there that could force a reconsideration of things. He's not wrong that it's underexplored either.

This article is wrong in acting like this is new. Lidar has been getting used in this region for a decade. 1491 even has a chapter mostly dedicated to the myth of 'sparse human settlement' that uses the earliest studies to discuss how littered in human alterations the American landscape was when Europeans arrived.

There's a 12 kilometer highway for example that connects El Mirador to another Maya settlement in the region; Nakbe, where most of El Mirador's stone was quarried.

This is more a case of Hansen trying to drum up interest and support than a truly new discovery, but then again I'll bet lots of people reading were unaware of all this before so *shrug* Dude's doing what he's gotta do.

EDIT: I also now feel obligated to link to this information another redditor shared with me, which I didn't know and I find so disappointing.

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AshFraxinusEps t1_j19llj2 wrote

>Hansen has been arguing the need for increased archeology in this region for nearly 20 years

Let's be honest we should do that for more of the world in general. But yep, the South American civilisations haven't nearly been chronicled enough

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serpentjaguar t1_j1a5x6b wrote

Central American or Mezo-American. The South American cultures are/were very different and unrelated culturally.

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AshFraxinusEps t1_j1a9xil wrote

True, but they are grouped together in the pre-colombian era, like the Med is for all 0AD info outside of China/East, or like Medieval tends to mean Europe not Africa or Asia

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serpentjaguar t1_j1gvq0g wrote

Scarcely. This may be true in the most childlike pedestrian sense, but it holds zero water in terms of even the most basic understanding of New World archaeology and anthropology. There simply is no schemata in which we view the mesoamerican civilizations as having anything whatsoever to do with your South American cultures.

They are totally and completely unrelated and while I think they probably did have a notion of one another, it would have been very dim and mitigated through a long and unreliable trading chain of goods that rarely reached one or the other, and for which we have nearly zero archaeological evidence.

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averytolar t1_j19rsi6 wrote

I’m going to go with Peten being the cradle of maya civilization..Tikal is just a fingernail scratch of what’s out there.

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Lord0fHats t1_j1a2b47 wrote

It's worth investigating. I think the main reason he hasn't just said it is because it's a highly speculative thing with his current data set. El Mirador is where most of his work is but El Mirador is not as old as Highland sites like Kaminaljuyu.

It would be a bit frowned on for him to make that speculative a claim without more data. Issue is collecting data in this field is very time consuming and very expensive.

EDIT: He also apparently did say it and has been frowned on outside my knowledge.

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AshFraxinusEps t1_j1a7ak1 wrote

*Whispers. I'm tapping out. My knowledge isn't enough

But I did hear that maybe Satellite X-Ray scanning has shown an even more ancient civilisation/Stonehenge-like religious place along the Amazon, which makes more sense as long river like the Nile. Might have been more a seasonal giant religious/trade gathering though

BUT, I'll trust you. Maybe Guatemala would have been the Silk Road/Constantinople analogue between North and South America, like Constantinople/Istanbul/Byzantium was for the other giant continent

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averytolar t1_j1abttp wrote

It’s amazing walking around out there. When you walk up the tallest pyramid and look out among the jungle, gives you a vibe that your standing over a lot more than a bunch of howler monkeys.

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Cerebral-Parsley t1_j1avmlq wrote

Yeah I read an article that the Amazon could have had a huge civilization but their buildings were mostly wood. Huge platforms and walkways through the jungle.

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waiver t1_j1edloe wrote

Not sure how South American civilizations would be related to North America (and or Central America) Mayas.

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pf30146788e t1_j19usvi wrote

Correct much of this isn’t really new to people who have even been in these areas for a while. The locals will even tell you there are ruins here or there, and that nobody is doing anything with them. But if he wants to get the funding for professional archaeology, he needs to bring it to the masses as a “discovery,” but in reality none of this is new.

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OlasNah t1_j1c8wcx wrote

There’s places like that even in the US. But they are on land that people don’t want seized or whatever by the govt so they don’t tell anyone about it.

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Zeegisdik t1_j1dg1ty wrote

For those of you who didn't do the 5-day hike through what is basically a swamp: there are hundreds of pyramids and other structures still covered with earth. Hansen is right to ask for more help, they spent years digging at the massive Temple of the Jaguar and have uncovered only parts. Those causeways can still be seen but it doesn't help that it's so remote, that five day hike starts at the edge of civilization.

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[deleted] t1_j19srht wrote

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[deleted] t1_j1a2bya wrote

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marketrent OP t1_j1b01d7 wrote

>Lord0fHats

>This article is wrong in acting like this is new. Lidar has been getting used in this region for a decade.

The article is describing the discovery of settlements and the scope of its LiDAR survey. Where does it state that LiDAR is new?

What is stated, in the article:

>Scientists led by Richard Hansen, an archaeologist at Idaho State University and the director of the Mirador Basin Project, offer “an introduction to one of the largest, contiguous, regional LiDAR studies published to date in the Maya Lowlands,” a region that covers parts of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, according to the study.

ETA:

>Lord0fHats

>You picked the title of the thread.

>Also the article uses the words 'lost' and 'discovered.'

Are your comments intended to create off-topic discussion based on select words, instead of discussing the linked article itself?

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Lord0fHats t1_j1b3s64 wrote

You picked the title of the thread.

Also the article uses the words 'lost' and 'discovered.' Hansen's been working that region for 20 years. He already knew they were there.

I first heard about them in a Great Courses lecture series from 2014 which has an entire chapter dedicated to El Mirador and the region around it (edit: plugging because it's really great, Barnhart honestly makes learning fun). This technology has even been used the exact same way in the exact same region before. In 2020. In 2019. In 2018. Barnhart's lecture on El Mirado talks about it (again, 2014). The book 1491 (published 2005) talks about these discoveries.

It's not an accusation. It's common for articles, and the academics who want them published, to engage in some bluster about what they've 'found.' People get more excited about 'new discoveries' than they do about 'we knew this was here 100 years ago but we never shot radar at it!'

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Snacks75 t1_j191uul wrote

I spent some time in the Yucatan (north of Guatemala) when I was younger. I ran into a guy who was working on the toll road between Merida and Cancun. They were constantly digging up artifacts etc...

This place was covered with people.

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serpentjaguar t1_j1a5bfl wrote

The Yucatan is a completely different region though, just FYI. They're talking here about the Peten which has a pretty different topology and climate.

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meatybone t1_j1c6ca6 wrote

Although this is a different region, you're right about that area. Its amazing to me that near such a populated city, there are sights that have only been discovered recently. Xcambo for example was only discovered in the 90s I believe. Discovered is a strange term to use though. There are still many Mayan people living near there that continue the languages, traditions, and skills such as maintaing the walls along the roads. The route to Motul is a great example of the stone work that continues today. The locals always knew of these sights, but it really hits you though when you venture into the jungle and realize just how truly dense it can be. There is a vast network in that area from the pink salt lakes that they still harvest today in Meya'h Ta'ab, Xcambó, Dzibilchaltún, Mayapan and so many more. Many of the more modern towns are built from the dismantled building of the Mayans. It's mind blowing to think of what it must have been like before the Spanish turn the best ones into churches and other buildings. So little is left of what was so much

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marketrent OP t1_j18byom wrote

Becky Ferreira, 22 December 2022, Motherboard (Vice)

Excerpt:

>Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a vast ancient Maya civilization that flourished more than 2,000 years ago in northern Guatemala, reports a new study.

>This long-lost urban web encompassed nearly 1,000 settlements across 650 square miles, linked by an immense causeway system, which was mapped out with airborne laser instruments, known as LiDAR.

>The results of the LiDAR survey “unveiled a remarkable density of Maya sites” in Guatemala’s Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin (MCKB) that “challenges the old notion of sparse early human occupation” in this area during the “Preclassical” period spanning 1,000 BC to 150 AD, according to a study published this month in Cambridge Core.

>The discovery sheds light on the people who lived in the bustling cities of this forested basin for more than 1,000 years.

Ancient Mesoamerica, 2022. DOI 10.1017/S0956536122000244

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dubamamorange t1_j18ju8m wrote

> “challenges the old notion of sparse early human occupation”

What? you mean the pre modern assumption?

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SomeDEGuy t1_j18pnys wrote

"Discovery disproves old theory" gets more clicks than "Discovery supports modern scientific consensus".

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I_am_BrokenCog t1_j19bdpc wrote

well, it has been the consensus among ethnologists, historians and sociologists that the America's population of North, Central and South, were "only a few millions of people" when Columbus and de Leon explored the hemisphere.

Since the 70s or 80s this has been challenged, although not without remaining doubt, that the population was actually in the hundreds of millions.

So, yes, "old notion" is perfectly correct. Sometimes truth is both sensationalist click bait and factual reporting.

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Anonynja t1_j18w5uc wrote

Don't forget how much education and experts raised on debunked theories lag behind. You can assume many readers only ever heard the "old notion" and haven't updated their info with the newer understanding that many tens of millions of people lived in the so-called Americas before colonization and genocide.

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ITDrumm3r t1_j18z7u8 wrote

Not the story people want to hear. I was taught something much different and I live in Texas near the border. I just recently heard about how populated the Americas were. I had to seek out the info. It’s not something you hear much about. Maybe kids learn about this now but in Texas, I doubt it.

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Tudhal t1_j195xxg wrote

>many tens of millions of people lived in the so-called Americas before colonization and genocide.

This article is about the region 2000 years before Columbus.

There weren’t many places on the planet in 1000 BC to 100 AD with tens of millions of people.

Even Rome was scarcely more than a village in 500 BC.

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Wundei t1_j1986ml wrote

It’s worth noting that this is just surface mapping. Who knows what is in the ground underneath these structures. If there was this much unknown development hiding, who knows how long these cultures actually lived in the area for.

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AlaskanSamsquanch t1_j197l88 wrote

I thought we knew this? Either way it’s an awesome discovery.

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Kdzoom35 t1_j19jn6u wrote

I thought it's been figured out that Mesoamerica was one of if not the most densely populated areas in the world pre Columbus/Cortez.

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pf30146788e t1_j19tyf3 wrote

I used to live down that way but on the Mexico side of the border. They are constantly finding new stuff. Some of it is even known but nobody has bothered to go about digging carefully. The Maya empire was vast and powerful.

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mrb1 t1_j1ads6w wrote

Well, another nail in the Terra Nullis coffin

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OlasNah t1_j1c9792 wrote

There’s a book ‘Lost City Of the Monkey God’ that dealt with some of these LiDAR techniques down in that region so it’s definitely not a new revelation

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vinyasmusic t1_j1cu815 wrote

Oh but the civilization began just 3000 years ago

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