The Maya were landscape engineers on a grand scale, even when it came to fishing.
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Ancient fish-trapping network supported the rise of Maya civilization
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I believe sedentarism = couch potatoes.
Sedentism = non-nomadic, not hunter-gatherers.
Sedentism = non-nomadic, not hunter-gatherers.
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Clever folk, the Maya. A whole host of advanced achievemments. Writing, Agronomy, Astronomy, Hydrology, Mathematics, Transportation. On the other hand, human sacrifice, pyramid schemes (literal, not capitalistic).
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The DOI at the bottom of the Zara Ars article just took me back to the self-same Ars article. Here’s the journal paper DOI, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adq1444
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You say that like human sacrifice and pyramids are unusual in human civilizations
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It made me grin, actually (the bit about the "absolute lack of any chill whatsoever when it came to re-engineering the whole landscape"). It puts a slightly irreverent, slightly tongue-in-cheek spin to the outlook of a group of people from very long ago (whom we often think of in drily historical terms).
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Not unusual, just a flawed worldview (IMHO). Unlike Egyptian or other ancient pyramid builders, the Mayan kings power was tied to building a larger pyramid over the top of the previous king's pyramid. This will require ever larger resources to support, which like a ponzi financial scheme is guaranteed to fail at some point.
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It’s articles like this that remind me — no matter how troubling today’s world can be — I can count on Ars for interesting stories to learn from and step away from today. Subscription continues to be well worth every coin.
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maya did human sacrifice too? i thought just the aztec. update: yes, maya did it too. thanks google.
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I would think that a society that practices human sacrifice at the scale of the Inca/Maya would need a large population surplus. And that human surplus was probably due to the large amount of food that this technology provided.
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It's actually a lot easier and more sustainable than building an entirely new pyramid. The problem with Mayan rulers wasn't the construction techniques, it was the feudal city-state god-king political model. Compared to say, Egyptian civilization, the rulers continually had less power than they claimed, and the shifting landscape of alliances and rivalries led to kingdoms falling and rulers being murdered faster than they could say Kʼukʼulkan. Consequently, Mayan dynasties don't seem to have been particularly long lasting.
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No one did it at the scale of the Aztecs. Their human surplus consisted of having neighboring nations nearby that they could constantly raid and attack in order to obtain prisoners for sacrifices. That contributed to their undoing when the Spaniards arrived on the scene.
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No. No it is not more sustainable. Unless you are building a larger pyramid in each generation. Which no culture did for any sugnificant number of generations. Increasing volume at scale means it clearly is not sustainable over long periods of time.
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This brings to mind World Heritage Site Budj Bim in Victoria, Australia. An eel aquaculture site of 75 square kilometres, about 6600 years old. It includes dry-stone construction, and tree hollows used to smoke the eels for preservation.
https://www.sea.museum/en/first-nations/an-australian-stonehengehttps://www.seagardens.net/eel-ponds
https://www.sea.museum/en/first-nations/an-australian-stonehengehttps://www.seagardens.net/eel-ponds
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More evidence that humans in non western cultures were also as smart, they just had different resources to take advantage of and different constraints they had to work around.
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Where could I read more about this? Did Ars write about it previously?
It's not strange at all. It's a phrase that's become popular in English; the editor would have struck it from the copy otherwise.
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As time progresses we find out more and more about how advanced native american culture was. Yes, there were sparsely populated, migratory hunter/gatherer societies on the plains, but that's not the whole story, not even close.
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Plus, domesticated a whole bunch of plants (or at least people in the same region as them did).
Mesoamerican domesticated food plants:
Maize
Certain bean species
Squash
Tomatoes
Chili peppers
Cocoa
Avocado
Amaranth
Vanilla
Sunflower
Papaya
And others. Not to mention that they grew species imported from South America, such as potatoes and cassavas.
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Where are you getting that from? Maya temples often have a smaller one underneath, but not to the extent of one for every generation of ruler.
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And even if the Spaniards hadn’t arrived, not clear how sustainable such a practice would have been. The Aztec only achieved hegemony in the Valley of Mexico less than a hundred years before Cortés arrived. Previous Nahuatl-speaking powers exercising control in the region hadn’t been as blood-thirsty, near as we can tell.
EDIT: The word “Aztec” gets used to describe different levels of groupings. The group of city states led by Tenochtitlan, that had hegemony within the valley at the time Cortés arrived, is the group that had been in power less than 100 years and was particularly blood-thirst for human-sacrifices, near as we can tell.
“Aztec” sometimes gets used to describe the broader group of Nahuatl-speaking city states, others of which had been dominant in the valley before the rise of Tenochtitlan and its allies.
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OK… so besides maize, beans squash, tomatoes… what have the Maya ever done for us?
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I've been there.
It's not much to look at, but still amazing that it exists.
ETA That's some serious deep-time shit.
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I've tried growing amaranth in our garden at home, but it escapes me how the mesoamericans could have gotten much in the way of seeds from it. They are so tiny and so much work to separate. I think quinoa would be more practical, but it doesn't grow in my climate.
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Quite like another seed crop grown in the Americas, sumpweed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iva_annua32% protein and 45% oil makes the seeds a rich source of fats and protein, but even the domesticated varieties with larger seeds were still a pain to deal with. It was largely displaced by maize agriculture when that arrived.
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The Aztecs still cultivated a lot of amaranth, long after maize arrived. My guess if anyone runs into amaranth that would be hard to get a lot of seed from would be different cultivars, since not all were bred as seed sources. The whole plant is edible and some cultivars were bred primarily for use as greens.
The original wild plant that maize was bred from also didn’t have a hella lot of seeds.
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There were also Mound Culture cities on the plains, relying on “three sisters” agriculture and riverine trade. De Soto ran into them, and then they were gone by the time Europeans arrived at the plains, again. They likely succumbed to collapse triggered by the Old World diseases tearing through the populations, as the Europeans pretty much only interacted with those cultures the one time, so purposeful genocide can’t be the explanation for their disappearance.
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The Mississippian culture was already in decline before Columbus, Cahokia having been abandoned several generations prior, and their religious and political system was fragmenting to the point that only a (relatively) few holdouts were adhering to it by the time De Soto encountered them, and those likely modified to suit regional powers rather than extensions of the centralized power that had collapsed.
A lot of tribes on the fringes had already more or less moved on, though incorporating Mississippian influence while retaining little oral tradition of that influence's origin. In many places the origin and nature of the Mississippian-era mounds was lost to even those who lived at the sites. It's almost remarkable how little knowledge of it was preserved in traditions after the transition. The farming practices largely remained, with Three Sisters system being incorporated into and then subsuming much of the existing Eastern Agricultural Complex for example.
I think the current mainstream explanation is that climate changes reduced yields, causing the religious and political credibility of Cahokia to wither away, and then the Mississippian areas that had been under its influence drifted and shifted with the times and needs of local populations, almost like the Western Empire breaking up.
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I believe the Maya inherited this system from the late Archaic Period people who engineered and built it. So as usual it's those who inherit the wealth who do the damage, i.e. human sacrifice and such.
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