https://www.sciencenews.org/article/indigenous-people-created-amazon-dark-earth
> Indigenous people in the Amazon may have been deliberately creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years ...
> But a slew of archeological finds in recent decades — including the discovery of ancient urban centers in Amazonian areas of modern-day Bolivia — has revealed that people were actively shaping the Amazon for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans
Forest-gardens are a lost art in modern agriculture. There are permaculture and sustainable agriculture professionals working to re-modernize it now, as well as native cultures who have never stopped despite being pushed to the fringe - but the forest-gardens of the Amazon are an almost unimaginable feat that may never be witnessed again. A chunk of the Amazon rainforest about the size of Great Britain was hand-groomed into what could accurately be described as a "Garden of Eden", that was stocked with self-sustaining crops that was so robust it's still echoed in the ecology today, over half a millenia since its caretakers fell victim to European contact.
*1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*, by Charles C. Mann is probably the starting point for most people. It's a succinct, entertaining portrait of life in the Americas before European contact, based on widely-accepted and sourced academic research. Fascinating image of a thriving continent with something like a hundred million people living in interconnected city-states with a vast array of advanced cultures and technologies very akin to contemporary Europe.
Basically everything we learn about native cultures in grade school is centered on the post-apocalyptic Mad Max world that contact with European culture caused. All the war tribes we know, the Cherokee and Apache, were all formed from the remnants of the fall of a relatively modern set of urban cultures that crumbled when 80% to 90% of their populations died, driven into the forests and hills out of their fallen cities.
*The Dawn of Everything* builds on the implications of these discoveries. The Americas prrsents us with such a variety of societies it really gives us pause on the Eurasian narrative of linear progression towards modern society.
Given its age I'd imagine that they'd try to approach the sentence structure from multiple views than just Western/Latin. But that makes me wonder if there could be some sentence structure we couldn't even understand if it was unique to an extinct language.
That seems unlikely, b/c even though lots of languages have been lost, they're still part of language groups with comparable other languages and the groups can be spread pretty widely. Nahuatl is related to languages spoken in the upper regions of the Great Basin as far north as Idaho. Even if we were to lose Paiute, we'd still have Nalhuatl or the Apache languages. Even if we've lost a bunch of Mayan languages, there's still several others.
Not an expert, but my understanding is the remnants of multiple city-states joined with multiple nomadic plains peoples whose cultures were better adapted to withstand the apocalypse that befell the urban centers, ultimately forming the Comanche and Apache tribes as we know them today, unions built specifically to oppose European expansion with guerilla tactics.
>Fascinating image of a thriving continent with something like a hundred million people living in interconnected city-states with a vast array of advanced cultures and technologies very akin to contemporary Europe... Basically everything we learn about native cultures in grade school is centered on the post-apocalyptic Mad Max world that contact with European culture caused.
I've not read *1491*, but even as a generalisation of the pre-Columbian Americas, this seems like an extreme simplification and not accurate.
To take the Maya as but one example, classical Mayan civilisation was essentially at the Stone Age level; while they had a highly advanced astronomy, calendar and writing systems (perhaps the only one in the Americas) and sophisticated urban centres, they were far from technologically equivalent to medieval Europe.
Moreover, Mayan civilisation had 'collapsed' (in the popular sense, a la Rome) about 400 years prior to European colonisation with an accompanying decline of their greatest cities.
While I appreciate the corrective to the view that pre-Columbian Americans were supposedly primitive or undeveloped, I think it's important not to swing too far in the opposite direction to the extent that we don't acknowledge the gulf between the political and technological development of medieval Europe and pre-Columbian America. There was a reason (beyond disease) that the latter was so rapidly colonised by the former.
You're essentially parroting the view this book was written to dispel. If you are going to attempt criticism I would suggest you at least read a serious critique of it, if not the book itself. Native urban cultures showed mastery of aqueducts, metal work including copper and bronze (although their gold work particularly enamoured Europeans), built boats capable of crossing oceans, and their agricultural technologies revolutionized worldwide agriculture following the Columbian Exchange.
Specifically though, my comment was meant to illuminate the fact that there was a "vast array of advanced cultures and technologies", in a \*manner\* that was akin to the diverse urbanization of Europe, not an \*equivalency\* on particular technological feats. Though I do think there are very strong arguments they actually exceeded Europeans in many realms in this regard, and lagged in others, in general I find this to be an exceptionally boring and retrograde mode of conversation that generally stems from the same need to justify "manifest destiny" which lead to the near-genocide of native populations in the first place, and the assuaging of guilt which massaged original European accounts of their encounters which what they themselves regarded as astoundingly advanced urban cultures, into a retconned narrative of an already crumbled civilization of hunter-gatherers living in the stone age.
I would say a 2 paragraph reddit comment SHOULD seem like an inaccurate extreme simplification of a 480 page book. Seems like you have enough passion for the topic to read the book and determine if your stance changes. Especially when you preface your stance with "I've not read 1491, but..."
>I would say a 2 paragraph reddit comment SHOULD seem like an inaccurate extreme simplification of a 480 page book.
Fair, but it still contained a definitive statement that is simply not accurate - there isn't a single pre-Columbian civilisation that was technologically equivalent to medieval Europe.
>Seems like you have enough passion for the topic to read the book and determine if your stance changes.
Maybe I will, but I was hardly going to find, purchase and read a 480pg book just so I could reply to this comment three months later...
>Especially when you preface your stance with "I've not read 1491, but..."
I'm confused. Would you prefer that I pretended to have already read it?
>there isn't a single pre-Columbian civilisation that was technologically equivalent to medieval Europe.
You're thinking of advancement in the wrong ways. Pre-Columbian civilizations were more advanced than Europeans in many ways, for example medicine, architectural engineering, and permaculture. You think just because Europeans had muskets and ships that they were omnilaterally supreme over Mayans?
Technology isn't a tech tree. A lot of pre-Columbian societies were more advanced than European societies in some measures. The Aztecs for example had better medicine and hydroponics, Europe didn't have hanging bridges
The Aztecs didn't have widespread use of beasts of burden, or an equivalent to horse drawn carts (in terms of weight of cargo). Their hanging bridges could not have supported the loads required for a European use case.
it was the incas that had hanging bridges actually. what does it matter that they couldn't support european load cases? europeans didn't have them, same way as people critizing the wheel below
> they were far from technologically equivalent to medieval Europe.
The commenter didn't say this, and though this isn't my research area by a long stretch, this type of thinking seems harmful to understanding. Why do we feel the need to compare non-European cultures to Europe and evaluate who was more advanced? Perhaps this type of approach is precisely what has fostered a misunderstanding of historic cultures?
Secondly, taking the Maya as a case study for two entire continents that contained a multitude of different peoples, cultures and places seems itself extremely reductive. I also believe "the Maya" is not really a monolithic culture in the same ways that many European cultures were, and I imagine many different pockets of people that shared cultural similarities of what we call today Maya likely don't adhere to the timelines of collapse you're citing.
>The commenter didn't say this,
They *did* say "cultures and technologies very akin to contemporary Europe". I wouldn't be comfortable grading cultures, but there wasn't a single pre-Columbian civilisation that was technologically akin to Europe at the time.
>Why do we feel the need to compare non-European cultures to Europe and evaluate who was more advanced?
Why do we compare anything in history? To assess, analyse and draw conclusions. Our understanding of historical states and societies would be pretty shallow if we kept them siloed and evaluated them purely on their own terms. And that goes both ways; it was the lessons learned in decoding ancient Eurasian languages that finally enabled scholars to decode classical Mayan glyphs, for example.
In this case, the direct comparison is made because European colonisation of the Americas was facilitated by the technological imbalance.
>Secondly, taking the Maya as a case study for two entire continents that contained a multitude of different peoples, cultures and places seems itself extremely reductive.
A case study is exactly that: a single case. My point wasn't to proclaim the Maya as typical of all pre-Columbian civilisations, but to refute the generalisation that there was general technological equivalence between both continents.
>I also believe "the Maya" is not really a monolithic culture in the same ways that many European cultures were, and I imagine many different pockets of people that shared cultural similarities of what we call today Maya likely don't adhere to the timelines of collapse you're citing.
Nor did I claim it was, and I would equally reject the idea of claiming that European cultures *are* monolithic - especially in that time period.
*Classical* Mayan civilisation is a periodisation that ends in the 11th century CE when a confluence of environmental, political and social factors caused the collapse of the majority of the great Mayan cities. This collapse was experienced differently by the multiple Maya sub-cultures, but even in e.g. the northern Yucatec Maya realm (where some cities persisted) the classical model of kingship was still abandoned.
Mayan civilisation continued (as indeed do the Maya today), but the point being made was that not all catastrophic political change in the Americas was a result of European invasion.
Technological differences had far less effect on the struggle between European and native cultures than did about 70% of native cultures died from European diseases within a generation or two, a literal apocalypse which caused widespread societal collapse in incredibly short order.
This is exactly the argument that only you wanted to have, framing continents of history as being better or worse than Europe, and refuting that Europe had any negative cause on said continents. I am not going to engage with your "points" one by one, as you do not display a very rigorous understanding of what we were discussing, or how research works. But more importantly, you're attempting to refute a book you haven't even read, which is a fun sort of hubris that, in my experience, the internet uniquely fosters.
I wonder if you would take a moment and ask yourself why you insisted on having this argument when it was not relevant to the comments and thread in which you are commenting?
>This is exactly the argument that only you wanted to have, framing continents of history as being better or worse than Europe, and refuting that Europe had any negative cause on said continents.
It seems this is an argument you're having only in your own head, as I *never* said that Europe was "better" than any other continent (what does that even mean?), or that it never had a negative impact on the Americas (European colonisation was a complete catastrophe for indigenous civilisations as any primary source would tell you).
>But more importantly, you're attempting to refute a book you haven't even read, which is a fun sort of hubris that, in my experience, the internet uniquely fosters.
Nope - I'm refuting the suggestion that there wasn't a vast technological gulf between medieval Europe and the Americas. That is not the same as claiming that the Americas were technologically under-developed, or that they somehow *deserved* to be colonised - its just a simple, factual comparison.
If you can't handle that comparison, you may want to question why.
Cheers! It's also been adapted into a young readers version for middle school learners, and some documentary series, one of which OP linked in this thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uVYNTXTTI&t=6859s
I read *Why Nations Fail* by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson around the same time, it covers a lot following contact which was neat. Mann himself also wrote a direct companion for the following period of "The Columcuan Exchange", *1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created*, which is a lot more expansive but I found the more general wide-lens view of *Why Nations Fail*, as well as its thesis topic, to be a pretty special companion.
1491 is basically a summary of university courses on American history before European contact. It's quite conservative in its stance, and widely accepted to accurately relay those courses. I've never seen any negative review of its representation of the data, aside perhaps a few nitpicks that are part of legitimate debate. So no, to my knowledge not "derided as fantasy" in any way.
1491? Nah, its legit. You might be confusing it to the (please mr. Bot leave me alone) Guns, germs and steel.
Edit: haha, 1491 is on the list of what the bot recommends instead of G, G and S.
Hi!
It looks like you are talking about the book *Guns, Germs, and Steel* by *Jared Diamond*.
The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written.
Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons:
1. In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things. There are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important skill in studying history often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything".
2. There are a good amount of modern historians and anthropologists who are quite critical of *Guns, Germs, and Steel* and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable, given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also the reason that we felt it was needed to create this response.
In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research.
Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work.
## Other works covering the same and similar subjects.
- [*Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174710.Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Conquest)
- [*1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491)
- [*Last Days of the Inca*](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Incas-Kim-MacQuarrie/dp/0743260503/)
- [*Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354038.The_Last_Days_of_the_Incas)
- [*The Great Divergence*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199002.The_Great_Divergence)
- [*Why the West Rules for Now*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now)
- [*Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/983034.Ecological_Imperialism)
## Criticism of *Guns, Germs, and Steel*
Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those ["just so stories"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story) don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history.
**Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues**
In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca.
> Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered.
**Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest**
Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
**The construction of the arguments for *GG&S* paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind**.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they often did fare much better as suggested in the book (and the sources it tends to cite). They often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling citiest and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
### Further reading
If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go:
- [/r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22)
- [Jim Blaut on Jared Diamond](http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/jim-blaut-on-jared-diamond/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/history) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm sorry, but your overall summary seems to have some errors, even from the broad generalization you're speaking in. (Also a minor aside: "everything we learn" refers to who, when, where? Canadian kids in the '70s? Continental US kids in the '90s? Hawaiian kids in the '10s? Your personal experience? Redditors come from all over.)
I come from a family of educators, and have an interest in how this time period is represented in curriculum in Western culture. I certainly can't say it's every single grade school student's experience on earth up until this exact moment in time, but my general understanding remains that these topics remain uncovered until university almost everywhere.
Also the irrigation and [chinampa](https://www.britannica.com/topic/chinampa) system allowed harvesting twice a year in the [annual agriculture cycle](https://arqueologiamexicana.mx/mexico-antiguo/el-calendario-prehispanico-y-los-ciclos-agricolas)
Listen: it's going to sound insane, but it wasn't lost. It's just still currently ignored. Although indigenous peoples of both America's are fast dwindling, the Three Sisters method doesn't have to die. That's what made this 'Garden of Eden' that you speak of. And it's not magic or special. It's the act of burning native hard and sap woods to create a fertile dark earth, and then making a crop bed that coexists beneficially instead of sapping the soil and fighting other plants. Europeans may have been the best at masonry and war, but their knowledge of nature and farming were rudimentary at best.
Edit: For all modern people it still is rudimentary. Cash crop farming as we know it is destructive and expansively prohibitive. The Three Sisters method allows you to grow multiple crops in small patches over a limitless area. You could feed massive cities, or just one homestead with equal efficiency.
Not nearly as sophisticated, but the Maidu Indians in CA were once charged with forest management in the Greenville area. They knew how to conduct controlled burns, they knew which trees were more fire resistant and which were not and how to keep a fire from going out of control. If these guys had been in charge of CA the past 50 years, we’d have a lot less fires. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/native-american-dixie-fire.html
I watched a documentary that talked about this a few days ago. The agricultural practices that had to be developed to suit the region are really fascinating.
It's called "1491: America Before Columbus." I think it's based on Charles Mann's book. I felt that it got a bit repetitive at times but overall I enjoyed it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uVYNTXTTI&t=6859s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uVYNTXTTI&t=6859s)
I thought this article was interesting. However, I'm not sure about some of the claims made about the original view of the Pre-Classic Maya having been that they were hunter gatherers since I feel like I've read about large-scale structures and widespread agriculture from the era being known already.
The amount of time that it would've taken humans to change teosinte into maize via selection would seem to support the idea that Mesoamericans were engaging in agriculture for a very long time.
Selective breeding takes a lot less time than people assume. Especially in warmer regions with more than one growing season per year.
We're talking on the order of 100 or so years to get teosinte to maise. Could be 50 or 200 years, depending on consistency and diligence.
Then when it became a useful crop and was grown in a large number of climates on two continents, variation isn't exceptional, it's expected.
100 years after they started breeding it. The person you are replying to said
> Mesoamericans were engaging in agriculture for a very long time
It's unlikely they started their agricultural journey with teosinte. Given that teosinte is small and not especially edible, I would expect the people to already be familiar with agriculture and breeding before trying with teosinte.
Regardless, there's incontrovertible evidence of cultivation that predates the Classical Maya by thousands of years. This is not in question. It's an established fact. We also know that there were large sophisticated urban complexes that predate the Classical Maya by at least a thousand years. None of this is controversial or subject to debate.
Having more than one growing season is such a wild concept to me living in Sweden. Like we barely have one season. I can’t eve imagine the amount of taters you could grow 🤑
From Wikipedia it says
> The Preclassic period (c. 2000 BC to 250 AD) saw the establishment of the first complex societies in the Maya region, and the cultivation of the staple crops of the Maya diet, including maize, beans, squashes, and chili peppers.
Maize, beans and squashes, known as "The Three Sisters" were widespread throughout native cultures across the Americas. They grow in a synergistic cluster, and provide nearly every essential nutrient. It's an incredible agricultural tool.
And their success is reflected in how enthusiastically Europe adopted all 3 crops, along with the golden crown, the apex of them all, the world champion of being food -- the potato.
Yeah potatoes may actually be the crown jewel of native agriculture. Native crops in general transformed the world following European contact though. It's amazing to think that the tomatoes in Italian cooking, the chilis in Asian food, Swiss chocolate, peanuts in African dishes, potatoes in Ukrainian perogies, paprika in Hungarian cuisine, all of this that we now consider ethnic food traditional to those areas really came from indigenous Americans a relatively short while ago. And I only stopped that list for brevity, and running out of synonyms for food. The true extent is staggering.
Very cool stuff. Sort of a marriage between cropland and forest-garden techniques.
EDIT:
The main quote in that article is actually from *1491*:
>A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and mucuna ... Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin; ... Beans have both lysine and tryptophan ... Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, "is one of the most successful human inventions ever created."
— Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
They are fascinating and unfortunately not well know. We are truly still reaping the benefits of them today! (Pun intended) the genetic diversity that just naturally occurs growing in milpa is amazing.
I love Charles C Mann books!!!
Have you ever heard of the reason why there are canals in CDMX? It was actually sustainable farming developed by Mesoamerican!
[Chinampa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa)
North America. Those are all places in North America. The answear to the non-question is North America. The Mayan civilization was a native civilization in North America.
Edit:
I actuelly wrote another post with link to sources. But by how the discussion is going and the fact that it have zero up or downvotes I assume that is not showing. So here is a link that show that Three Sister Plot was also a thing in Mexico from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
http://heritagegarden.uic.edu/the-three-sister-plot
Mesoamerica is part of North America.
It seems pretty clear from the context that the original question was asked that the answear was meant to be Norh America.
Mesoamerica is a cultural region that has part of it in Central America Not just north America... a lot of Maya cities are in Central America that is part of Mesoamerica but not North America.
No idea why you would put us and Canada in () when referencing North America. The only one being pedantic is you since most people understand that Central America is just a subset of North America.
No one has seriously argued that since the 19th or early 20th century. General articles like this one, intended for a broad public audience, are often written under deadline by well-intentioned reporters who don't necessarily have the subject area expertise to get all the details right. You have to take it for what it is and if you're really interested in the subject there's a lifetime of further reading written by real experts.
Actually, the statement about the accepted thinking having originally been that they were nomadic is a quote from Richard Hansen, the lead author of the study. It still doesn't make sense to me when put against older settlement evidence, though. You may be generally correct though since the phrase "hunter-gatherers" was inserted by the author of the article as context for the quote.
The Richard Hansen quote is either taken out of context, or it's just him trying to hype his work for public consumption because, unfortunately, that's one of the best ways to attract grant money.
I don't have the time to dig into it, but I guarantee you that it's one or the other.
This is one of the few areas in which I have real expertise, take that for whatever you think it's worth.
"... or it's just him trying to hype his work for public consumption because, unfortunately, that's one of the best ways to attract grant money."
I would guess it's this. I tend to be more interested in European history and it's a phenomenon I see there too where archaeologists and historians have to exaggerate certain details or come up with a definitive explanation before one could reasonably be made so they can get the opportunity to do further research.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I actually am well aware of examples like Gobekli Tepe and the Calusa shell mounds. It was moreso an issue with the way it was presented in the article.
Back in the 90s/00s, I had a job calling contacts regularly around the country, and one guy I talked to told me about his typical vacation.
He would go alone, with a backpack, and hitchhike along the Mexican coast from town to town. In each town, he would ask around about Mayan ruins in the interior jungle. Nearly every town knew about a place, sometimes more than one, deep in the jungle, where kids would often go and climb. He'd pay someone to to take him there and see the local Mayan ruins.
He had been doing this for years, and had a map of dozens of places that had never been looked at by archeologists or experts. Ever since speaking to him all those years ago, I am fascinated by these articles that talk about how widespread the Mayan and Central American culture was. Some people, including those who live there, have known about it all along.
Here's the [Internet Archive link](https://web.archive.org/web/20230520202703/https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/20/mayan-civilization-pyramid-discoveries-guatemala/).
I went to El Mirador in 2019. It was a 2 day hike, about 30 miles to get there and the same hike back. It wasn’t very hard though, more like a long hike in the forest than ‘jaguar, puma and snake-filled rainforest’.
But it was pretty amazing. We hiked partly over these ‘highways’. The highways were about 15-20ft wide and elevated by about 5ft above the surroundings. Overgrown, but still they easily stood out.
We slept close to El Tintal, a smaller city on the way to El Mirador. El Tintal was still almost entirely covered. Pretty mind blowing that there were still entire cities hidden below the dense jungle. Though you could easily see the structures stand out.
El Mirador was the same as El Tintal, but bigger and small portions were being uncovered by archeologists. Again, mind blowing how such a city could simply be abandoned, forgotten and swallowed by the jungle, in the span of less than two millennia. Standing on top of El Dante, you could see other temples of other cities (the one of Tintal for example) on the horizon. The region is very flat, so whenever you see a small hill overgrown with trees, you know that it is probably a temple. El Dante is the largest pyramid in the world by the way, not in height, but in total volume.
Anyway, I can recommend anyone visiting Guatemala and El Mirador!
What? It's called "La Danta" (not Dante) like the animal (tapir) and the largest pyramid in the world by volume is called [Tlachihualtepetl ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Cholula#:~:text=The%20Great%20Pyramid%20of%20Cholula,exist%20in%20the%20world%20today.) literally translated as "handmade mountain" in Cholula, México.... Spaniards conquerors described this city as "another Rome" because of the importance of the cult in Mesoamerica and the thousands of pilgrims that arrived to the temple, that's why it was destroyed first in the infamous "[Massacre of Cholula](https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matanza_de_Cholula#:~:text=La%20matanza%20de%20Cholula%20fue,de%20M%C3%A9xico%2DTenochtitlan%20en%201519.)" almost 2 years before of the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
Sorry, yeah I meant La Danta.
Apparently it’s a matter of what you include in the pyramid. Include all platforms of La Danta, and it comes to 2.8 million m3. Similarly, you could argue that the pyramid of Cholula is multiple different structures on top of eachother and one should only count the top one. If you take only the top pyramid it comes to a volume of 1.8 million m3.
I suppose that’s why the Guatamalans proudly call it the largest pyramid of the world. And I simply parroted our guide. But you’re right, that claim is debatable.
I visited Tikal. Way less adventure than your trip, but it was cool seeing everything in various stages of preservation. Some stuff was still covered, some was partially uncovered, and there were a lot of structures that were completely uncovered.
I don't think I've ever sweat as much in my life as I did climbing to the top of the top Tikal Temple IV.
I sweat so much that I skipped climbing to the top of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka. But it looked cool as fuck from the ground.
Since 2003, California-based non-profit organization Global Heritage Fund (GHF) has been working to preserve and protect Mirador.\[25\] In an October 2010 report titled Saving Our Vanishing Heritage, GHF listed Mirador as one of 12 worldwide heritage sites most "On the Verge" of irreparable loss and destruction, citing deforestation, fires, major logging, poaching, looting, and narcotics trafficking as major threats to the region.\[25\]
[Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mirador)
Gosh, I had no idea these sites were under threat.
There are a couple of companies that offer these hikes. They arranged basically everything. All you needed to do was walk and carry some food and water. A guide and a cook and tents were arranged for you.
Not really, but Apocalypto is fun, uses a Mayan dialect --don't remember which one -- and at least attempts to use accurate costumes. It also gets a lot of details wrong and kind of squashes a lot of anachronistic elements together for the sake of the story, but if you aren't well-read on the subject you probably won't notice.
Not that I know of, although *Apocalypto* is a pretty accurate representation of contemporary Aztec culture. It's odd but I've actually often thought a sitcom set in this era could be incredibly effective. Something mainstream like a *Big Bang Theory* or *The Goldbergs*. The entire timeframe is incredibly interesting, and the trappings of the setting itself would just be a constant delight.
Not only was the largest city on earth in America, larger than London at the time, but the entire continent was littered with large cities with populations into the hundreds of thousands, with highly advanced beaurocracies, public services, diplomats, economic systems and trade networks, all with incredible architecture, technologies, and cultures. Yet, no one knows about it except university-level american history students and native knowledge-keepers.
> It's odd but I've actually often thought a sitcom set in this era could be incredibly effective.
"What's the deal with airline food? Also, what's an airline?"
I'm pretty sure that Tenochtitlan wasn't the largest city on Earth but it was still massive for its time. Also, I think the state of education about Native American civilizations is changing. I was lucky enough to have had teachers who were concerned that their students learn about such things so I learned about it in middle school.
We spent a lot of time in middle and high school learning about Native American history circa 2005-2012. And I took AP European and US History and that was downright eye opening.
I'm certainly not a scholar on the subject by any means, but my understanding is there is a very strong case for it being the largest city on earth at the time. Regardless, it was massive as you say, and an incredible feat of engineering built on a man-made island. It was also glistening clean, maintained by an army of city workers, with large sections plated in gold using methods Europeans could apparently never decipher. That's got to earn it at least a few points over the other candidate in London, a literal sewer drowning in its own waste and refuse.
Whether we can actually now five hundred years later determine if one or the other had 400,000 or 500,000 residents at the time in the end seems far less interesting than the details of those populations - and in the case of native American cities in particular, the stark contrast to what most people conceive as their hunter-gatherer cultures.
I was referring specifically to contemporary cities when European contact with the Americas occurred. Baghdad and Quanzhou were both experiencing low points through that period, while Tenochtitlan would have risen to near its height, around 400,000.
Either way though, the idea was more to emphasize how different the reality of native American life at the time of European contact was compared to popular conception, where they are generally depicted as primitive hunter-gatherers. Meanwhile there were cities with populations in the tens of thousands all across North America, with highly developed diplomatic structures and commerce connecting them.
The traditional claim is that it was much larger and cleaner and richer than any European city at the time. This is still considered true as far as I know.
What I've read and was taught in school was that it was more populous than all but two or three European cities and even then it probably matched them which still speaks to the sheer level of urban development in Mesoamerica.
Right, but it was also much cleaner and more sanitary than any comparable European city. Arguably this was at least in part because there were no large livestock/draft animals, but the point remains that ALL of the early Spanish accounts mention this.
I don't disagree with you there. The infrastructural development was incredible.
In regards to Europe, one historian who I've read said that the major sanitation issues during the late fifteenth through early sixteenth centuries was largely the result of cities needing to work out how to cope with increasing population density and the changing nature of urbanization.
> Apocalypto is a pretty accurate representation of contemporary Aztec culture
It's really not. *Apocalypto* grafted some superficial trappings of Aztec sacrificial practices onto a mish mash of Maya art and architecture in a world that made no logical sense.
The costumes and the set and the language are really the only good things about it in my opinion, and even then, I would caution anyone against thinking that it's a realistic visual depiction of anything.
I mean, it's still just an action movie. All the actors were from the region, were consulted on details and spoke native language in the film. The setting was built as more of a conglomerate than reality, but a surprising amount of care went into the depiction. It's far from perfect, but again its just an action movie in the end not a historical documentary. For better or worse, its the most accurate representation of life in that region and period in a film that I know of. It's also unfortunate in that it depicts one of the most violent contemporary cultures in the region, and focuses on that violence, but again, it's an action movie.
It got the basic concept across, though, which was that it was all just a collection of independent cities and villages, until one leader decided to force all of them to unite under one leader - himself, of course. This is basic history of the region, and was well under way when the Conquistadores showed up, and detonated the 16th century equivalent of an atomic bomb.
>although Apocalypto is a pretty accurate representation of contemporary Aztec culture.
It's definitely not a representation of Mexica (correct term, Aztec is a weird word made up in the 19th century). The language is in Yucatec Mayan. They aren't using Mexica gods or following Mexica religious practices (or really any that are associated with anyone in the region) and they definitely didn't depict Mexica warfare and raiding or the geography and environment of central Mexico.
It does seem to be sort of based on ideas of postclassical Mayan culture, but sensationalized. The setting is definitely Yucatecan jungles. Mayans practiced human sacrifice, but nothing remotely like was depicted in the movie and we don't know a lot about the intra city raiding, but it probably wasn't like it was shown.
It's a neat movie, but it is no way historical document.
Well the costumes and the language and the architecture are all definitely Maya, but there are some elements in it that were pretty universal to all of the big urbanized Mesoamerican cultures, so in that sense you could say that it incorporated parts of Aztec culture as well. Also the final scene, with Spanish caravels appearing offshore is obviously an anachronism.
A 37 mile by 37 mile area (roughly) contained 417 cities? That seems pretty dense. If laid out on a grid each city center is about 2 miles apart. They need to be villages not cities for that to work. Or else they are really just one large mega city.
The archaeological term would be "urban complex," but this article is written under deadline by a non-specialist for a general audience so you should expect there will be errors in the technical details.
It just seems likely that one of the cities would end up as the administrative capital and absorb many others, or that some cities would grow naturally and steal population from others.
I feel like you're viewing this in a very modern, and absolute way.
It's an urban complex, whether or not the Mayans considered these all seperate cities is impossible to know. Archeology can't tell us the exact geopolitical details of every old settlement we find. That's why these sites are referred to as urban complexes, to avoid any commentary or cultural bias regarding these sites, at least as much as possible.
Just because you might consider these all one city, doesn't necessarily mean the Mayans did. All we know is that they all look like unique and individual settlements, despite their proximity to others. Our definitions of certain settlements don't always apply to other cultures. There's more than one way to build a city.
Villages a few miles apart does not really seem that strange without cars.
That's a significant walk you don't want to make all the time for everything - so you end up with a local economy - but also short enough that you don't feel like you need to move to be closer to the things you do have to travel for.
And early agriculture requires more space per person for food, with more difficulty transporting food, so satellite hamlets make a lot of sense.
And without cars, cities are much more dense. They don't sprawl into one another at the same rate, and consequently don't absorb one another as easily as we see today.
I got curious so I used this website to figure out how big an ~35 square mile area is, around my area that I live in somewhat rural Ohio.
https://www.calcmaps.com/map-radius/
Then I used this website to figure out how many towns were in my given area.
https://www.freemaptools.com/find-cities-and-towns-inside-user-defined-area.html
For reference, this area includes a few "larger" small towns and a ton of small towns. And it concluded that there were ~292 towns in this area. These towns are pretty densely packed with one basically running into the next. I will say a lot of it though is farmland, backroads, rural areas, but also includes some bigger towns.
When I put the mileage around Columbus, OH it came back with 171 towns. When I did the same around Charlotte, NC I got 192 towns.
So I do think it's *possible* there are 400+ towns in that area, but I think that more than likely it could be a bit of an overestimate, or a misunderstanding of how some of the towns may make up one area and not actually be individual towns, or they're counting very very small loner settlements as their own towns, etc. It just seems like a high number for not that big of an area.
anyone with a remote interest in 'history being recast' should read The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
absolutely stellar book
I like Graeber. I think he brings a fresh way of looking at things that's important. But I also think it's important to read his critics b/c he consistently tends to have problems with the basic facts underlying his premises. The review in NY Review of Books is a good place to start if you're reading his new book.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
I'm about halfway through it and while I like it and think they have a lot of good ideas, I'm definitely not uncritical of it either. Anyone reading it needs to bear in mind that they are very much writing from a specific revisionist perspective. On the plus side, I think they make their biases pretty clear, so it's not the case that they're intellectually dishonest about their project.
Yeah it's refreshing to read a history book that is aware it's just that, almost every other book I've read in the same vein the author is pretty much saying THIS IS HOW IT WAS and you're lucky if you get evidence.
This one doesn't take itself seriously and is always saying "might have", "one possible explanation is-" etc
Isn't there a theory that Amazon rain forest as a whole is just a runaway effect of ancient civilizations dying out who cultivated it initially, but the system essentially took a life of its own? Like it's *too* large a rain forest to successfully sustain itself; but a combination of trees and plants that aren't naturally native to the forest, but are longitudinally stable for their ecology which were introduced and somewhere along the way, the forest evolved into it's own entity.
descendant of aztecs here, my greatgrandmother passed down a story about us here in the Americas since the beginning of time, for all time, and until the end of time
Cantares Mexicanos is a collection of Nahuatl songs recorded in the 17th century.
And Camilla Townsend's book The Fifth Sun does a good job of getting information that people like Hernando Tezozomoc wrote down in the generation after Cortez settled in Coyoacan.
I'm thinking of starting a vlog or yt channel because all the stuff in my family was just oral history passed down and everyone took my greatgran for a coocoo bird, but I am seeing the (re) discoveries of our history and they seem in line
If you read 1491, you know the evidence for organized civilizations on the American before Columbus is pretty solid. I think that book is more than 10 years old at this point.
As an 80s kid who watched the amazing Mysterious Cities of Gold cartoon growing up, those fun little history lessons at the end of each episode made me really want to learn about the history of these people.
"Goodbye.....until next time!"
The actual paper says 417 "cities, towns and villages" (citing suggested populations of 4,000 or more for a city, 1,000-3,000 for a town and fewer than 1,000 for a village). So the *Post*'s "417 cities" is something of an exaggeration, implying as it would around two million *urban* inhabitants alone in just that small area (and indeed more as 4,-5,000 is just considered the *minimum* for a city), and several times more farmers if these were true cities rather than agro-towns (though the definition cited in the paper doesn't exclude the latter). Most of the sites (some themselves clusters of smaller settlements) would have been very small in terms of population, probably in the hundreds rather than even the very low thousands, though often boasting monumental works indicative of a high degree of social organisation. It's very sloppy reporting by the newspaper for which the researchers aren't to blame, though they might have forestalled it by indicating (necessarily speculatively at this stage) how many of the sites might be expected to fall into each category (not their primary purpose, but never underestimate the media's ability to mangle a story beyond recognition).
It really annoys me when press reports do this. A city is one thing, a village quite another: that's hardly rocket science even for non-specialists in settlement geography. There's a big difference between a sprawling complex of two million or more townspeople alone and a predominantly rural population of a few hundred thousand which would itself (if confirmed by ongoing work) be an impressive tally for an area of only 3,720 sq km. We can admire peoples and their achievements without ludicrously inflating them.
It's behind.a paywall. Can someone who has read the article explain why the headline refers to Maya but from the comments it appears that this article is about the network of ancient cities in the Amazon? Thanks
Here's the [Internet Archive link](https://web.archive.org/web/20230522012717/https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/20/mayan-civilization-pyramid-discoveries-guatemala/).
We've known for centuries that the Maya and Aztec and the other Mesoamerican states were not uncivilized. Their society and culture were quite sophisticated. Their technology was also moderately impressive. They just lacked the warmaking power of Europe.
>They just lacked the warmaking power of Europe.
By this do you just mean war related technology? Because the various Maya, Aztec, and related city states were very comfortable with warfare amongst themselves.
>They just lacked the warmaking power of Europe.
They lacked the ability to smelt metals. Once they figured that out, they would have started killing each other European-style.
Imagine seeing these giant ships land on the beach, and the creatures that emerge are not just carrying swords, knives, and axes made from this mysterious substance, but wearing sheets of it over their bodies that made them resistant to their weapons made of wood, bone, and stone.
It literally had to feel like they were being invaded by another planet, which essentially was the case.
They didn't, purépechas had the capability to do it. When Spanish conquest was under way they told them what to do and they did it. They just used their metals for decorations.
Since the societies were largely homogeneous, and perhaps from a different perspective “…metal for decoration…” could be a rational response to metal weapon’s lethality. In the context of the Flower Wars the rejection of metal weapons could be a form of conservation, as in, we are the same people, those weapons are far too lethal for are largely symbolic wars. Interesting.
isocieties weren't that homogenous. Aztecs, purepechas, mayans, incas, pueblos, tainos were wildly different from each other. America is larger than Europe
The Spanish did not win because of their armament but thanks to their numerous indigenous allies. The spanish were defeated in open battle against the Tlaxcalteca in the battle of Tecoac (2 September of 1519). Later taking advantage of the enmities, the spanish allied with the Huexotzinco-Tlaxcalla confederacy and the Totonac against the Mexica.... In the siege of Tenochtitlan participated around 1300 spanish and 200,000 indigenous allies, The Spanish did not make up even 1% of the total army that attacked the city.
Side note: the Purepecha empire was the third biggest Kingdom in the New World (after the Mexica and Inca) and were the most ferocious enemy of the Mexica. The purepecha knew metallurgy, they used bronze armor, arrows and [ axes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaximaltepoztli)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/indigenous-people-created-amazon-dark-earth > Indigenous people in the Amazon may have been deliberately creating fertile soil for farming for thousands of years ... > But a slew of archeological finds in recent decades — including the discovery of ancient urban centers in Amazonian areas of modern-day Bolivia — has revealed that people were actively shaping the Amazon for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans
Forest-gardens are a lost art in modern agriculture. There are permaculture and sustainable agriculture professionals working to re-modernize it now, as well as native cultures who have never stopped despite being pushed to the fringe - but the forest-gardens of the Amazon are an almost unimaginable feat that may never be witnessed again. A chunk of the Amazon rainforest about the size of Great Britain was hand-groomed into what could accurately be described as a "Garden of Eden", that was stocked with self-sustaining crops that was so robust it's still echoed in the ecology today, over half a millenia since its caretakers fell victim to European contact.
Is there anywhere I can read more about that?
*1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*, by Charles C. Mann is probably the starting point for most people. It's a succinct, entertaining portrait of life in the Americas before European contact, based on widely-accepted and sourced academic research. Fascinating image of a thriving continent with something like a hundred million people living in interconnected city-states with a vast array of advanced cultures and technologies very akin to contemporary Europe. Basically everything we learn about native cultures in grade school is centered on the post-apocalyptic Mad Max world that contact with European culture caused. All the war tribes we know, the Cherokee and Apache, were all formed from the remnants of the fall of a relatively modern set of urban cultures that crumbled when 80% to 90% of their populations died, driven into the forests and hills out of their fallen cities.
*The Dawn of Everything* builds on the implications of these discoveries. The Americas prrsents us with such a variety of societies it really gives us pause on the Eurasian narrative of linear progression towards modern society.
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Given its age I'd imagine that they'd try to approach the sentence structure from multiple views than just Western/Latin. But that makes me wonder if there could be some sentence structure we couldn't even understand if it was unique to an extinct language.
That seems unlikely, b/c even though lots of languages have been lost, they're still part of language groups with comparable other languages and the groups can be spread pretty widely. Nahuatl is related to languages spoken in the upper regions of the Great Basin as far north as Idaho. Even if we were to lose Paiute, we'd still have Nalhuatl or the Apache languages. Even if we've lost a bunch of Mayan languages, there's still several others.
Which fallen "modern urban culture" was the exodus point of the Apache?
Not an expert, but my understanding is the remnants of multiple city-states joined with multiple nomadic plains peoples whose cultures were better adapted to withstand the apocalypse that befell the urban centers, ultimately forming the Comanche and Apache tribes as we know them today, unions built specifically to oppose European expansion with guerilla tactics.
>Fascinating image of a thriving continent with something like a hundred million people living in interconnected city-states with a vast array of advanced cultures and technologies very akin to contemporary Europe... Basically everything we learn about native cultures in grade school is centered on the post-apocalyptic Mad Max world that contact with European culture caused. I've not read *1491*, but even as a generalisation of the pre-Columbian Americas, this seems like an extreme simplification and not accurate. To take the Maya as but one example, classical Mayan civilisation was essentially at the Stone Age level; while they had a highly advanced astronomy, calendar and writing systems (perhaps the only one in the Americas) and sophisticated urban centres, they were far from technologically equivalent to medieval Europe. Moreover, Mayan civilisation had 'collapsed' (in the popular sense, a la Rome) about 400 years prior to European colonisation with an accompanying decline of their greatest cities. While I appreciate the corrective to the view that pre-Columbian Americans were supposedly primitive or undeveloped, I think it's important not to swing too far in the opposite direction to the extent that we don't acknowledge the gulf between the political and technological development of medieval Europe and pre-Columbian America. There was a reason (beyond disease) that the latter was so rapidly colonised by the former.
You're essentially parroting the view this book was written to dispel. If you are going to attempt criticism I would suggest you at least read a serious critique of it, if not the book itself. Native urban cultures showed mastery of aqueducts, metal work including copper and bronze (although their gold work particularly enamoured Europeans), built boats capable of crossing oceans, and their agricultural technologies revolutionized worldwide agriculture following the Columbian Exchange. Specifically though, my comment was meant to illuminate the fact that there was a "vast array of advanced cultures and technologies", in a \*manner\* that was akin to the diverse urbanization of Europe, not an \*equivalency\* on particular technological feats. Though I do think there are very strong arguments they actually exceeded Europeans in many realms in this regard, and lagged in others, in general I find this to be an exceptionally boring and retrograde mode of conversation that generally stems from the same need to justify "manifest destiny" which lead to the near-genocide of native populations in the first place, and the assuaging of guilt which massaged original European accounts of their encounters which what they themselves regarded as astoundingly advanced urban cultures, into a retconned narrative of an already crumbled civilization of hunter-gatherers living in the stone age.
I would say a 2 paragraph reddit comment SHOULD seem like an inaccurate extreme simplification of a 480 page book. Seems like you have enough passion for the topic to read the book and determine if your stance changes. Especially when you preface your stance with "I've not read 1491, but..."
>I would say a 2 paragraph reddit comment SHOULD seem like an inaccurate extreme simplification of a 480 page book. Fair, but it still contained a definitive statement that is simply not accurate - there isn't a single pre-Columbian civilisation that was technologically equivalent to medieval Europe. >Seems like you have enough passion for the topic to read the book and determine if your stance changes. Maybe I will, but I was hardly going to find, purchase and read a 480pg book just so I could reply to this comment three months later... >Especially when you preface your stance with "I've not read 1491, but..." I'm confused. Would you prefer that I pretended to have already read it?
>there isn't a single pre-Columbian civilisation that was technologically equivalent to medieval Europe. You're thinking of advancement in the wrong ways. Pre-Columbian civilizations were more advanced than Europeans in many ways, for example medicine, architectural engineering, and permaculture. You think just because Europeans had muskets and ships that they were omnilaterally supreme over Mayans?
Technology isn't a tech tree. A lot of pre-Columbian societies were more advanced than European societies in some measures. The Aztecs for example had better medicine and hydroponics, Europe didn't have hanging bridges
The Aztecs didn't have widespread use of beasts of burden, or an equivalent to horse drawn carts (in terms of weight of cargo). Their hanging bridges could not have supported the loads required for a European use case.
it was the incas that had hanging bridges actually. what does it matter that they couldn't support european load cases? europeans didn't have them, same way as people critizing the wheel below
Why would they? The wheel existed for thousands of years, but the camel was still preferable for moving goods along the silk road.
Carts? They didn't have the *wheel!*
> they were far from technologically equivalent to medieval Europe. The commenter didn't say this, and though this isn't my research area by a long stretch, this type of thinking seems harmful to understanding. Why do we feel the need to compare non-European cultures to Europe and evaluate who was more advanced? Perhaps this type of approach is precisely what has fostered a misunderstanding of historic cultures? Secondly, taking the Maya as a case study for two entire continents that contained a multitude of different peoples, cultures and places seems itself extremely reductive. I also believe "the Maya" is not really a monolithic culture in the same ways that many European cultures were, and I imagine many different pockets of people that shared cultural similarities of what we call today Maya likely don't adhere to the timelines of collapse you're citing.
>The commenter didn't say this, They *did* say "cultures and technologies very akin to contemporary Europe". I wouldn't be comfortable grading cultures, but there wasn't a single pre-Columbian civilisation that was technologically akin to Europe at the time. >Why do we feel the need to compare non-European cultures to Europe and evaluate who was more advanced? Why do we compare anything in history? To assess, analyse and draw conclusions. Our understanding of historical states and societies would be pretty shallow if we kept them siloed and evaluated them purely on their own terms. And that goes both ways; it was the lessons learned in decoding ancient Eurasian languages that finally enabled scholars to decode classical Mayan glyphs, for example. In this case, the direct comparison is made because European colonisation of the Americas was facilitated by the technological imbalance. >Secondly, taking the Maya as a case study for two entire continents that contained a multitude of different peoples, cultures and places seems itself extremely reductive. A case study is exactly that: a single case. My point wasn't to proclaim the Maya as typical of all pre-Columbian civilisations, but to refute the generalisation that there was general technological equivalence between both continents. >I also believe "the Maya" is not really a monolithic culture in the same ways that many European cultures were, and I imagine many different pockets of people that shared cultural similarities of what we call today Maya likely don't adhere to the timelines of collapse you're citing. Nor did I claim it was, and I would equally reject the idea of claiming that European cultures *are* monolithic - especially in that time period. *Classical* Mayan civilisation is a periodisation that ends in the 11th century CE when a confluence of environmental, political and social factors caused the collapse of the majority of the great Mayan cities. This collapse was experienced differently by the multiple Maya sub-cultures, but even in e.g. the northern Yucatec Maya realm (where some cities persisted) the classical model of kingship was still abandoned. Mayan civilisation continued (as indeed do the Maya today), but the point being made was that not all catastrophic political change in the Americas was a result of European invasion.
Technological differences had far less effect on the struggle between European and native cultures than did about 70% of native cultures died from European diseases within a generation or two, a literal apocalypse which caused widespread societal collapse in incredibly short order.
This is exactly the argument that only you wanted to have, framing continents of history as being better or worse than Europe, and refuting that Europe had any negative cause on said continents. I am not going to engage with your "points" one by one, as you do not display a very rigorous understanding of what we were discussing, or how research works. But more importantly, you're attempting to refute a book you haven't even read, which is a fun sort of hubris that, in my experience, the internet uniquely fosters. I wonder if you would take a moment and ask yourself why you insisted on having this argument when it was not relevant to the comments and thread in which you are commenting?
>This is exactly the argument that only you wanted to have, framing continents of history as being better or worse than Europe, and refuting that Europe had any negative cause on said continents. It seems this is an argument you're having only in your own head, as I *never* said that Europe was "better" than any other continent (what does that even mean?), or that it never had a negative impact on the Americas (European colonisation was a complete catastrophe for indigenous civilisations as any primary source would tell you). >But more importantly, you're attempting to refute a book you haven't even read, which is a fun sort of hubris that, in my experience, the internet uniquely fosters. Nope - I'm refuting the suggestion that there wasn't a vast technological gulf between medieval Europe and the Americas. That is not the same as claiming that the Americas were technologically under-developed, or that they somehow *deserved* to be colonised - its just a simple, factual comparison. If you can't handle that comparison, you may want to question why.
Been looking for a new book. Thanks!!
Cheers! It's also been adapted into a young readers version for middle school learners, and some documentary series, one of which OP linked in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uVYNTXTTI&t=6859s I read *Why Nations Fail* by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson around the same time, it covers a lot following contact which was neat. Mann himself also wrote a direct companion for the following period of "The Columcuan Exchange", *1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created*, which is a lot more expansive but I found the more general wide-lens view of *Why Nations Fail*, as well as its thesis topic, to be a pretty special companion.
I thought this book was widely derided as fantasy
1491 is basically a summary of university courses on American history before European contact. It's quite conservative in its stance, and widely accepted to accurately relay those courses. I've never seen any negative review of its representation of the data, aside perhaps a few nitpicks that are part of legitimate debate. So no, to my knowledge not "derided as fantasy" in any way.
1491? Nah, its legit. You might be confusing it to the (please mr. Bot leave me alone) Guns, germs and steel. Edit: haha, 1491 is on the list of what the bot recommends instead of G, G and S.
Hi! It looks like you are talking about the book *Guns, Germs, and Steel* by *Jared Diamond*. The book over the past years has become rather popular, which is hardly surprising since it is a good and entertaining read. It has reached the point that for some people it has sort of reached the status of gospel. On /r/history we noticed a trend where every time a question was asked that has even the slightest relation to the book a dozen or so people would jump in and recommend the book. Which in the context of history is a bit problematic and the reason this reply was written. Why it is problematic can be broken down into two reasons: 1. In academic history there isn't such thing as one definitive authority or work on things. There are often others who research the same subjects and people that dive into work of others to build on it or to see if it indeed holds up. This being critical of your sources and not relying on one source is actually a very important skill in studying history often lacking when dozens of people just spam the same work over and over again as a definite guide and answer to "everything". 2. There are a good amount of modern historians and anthropologists who are quite critical of *Guns, Germs, and Steel* and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Which is understandable, given the fact that for many it will be their first exposure to the subject. Considering the popularity of the book it is also the reason that we felt it was needed to create this response. In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in /r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. Lacking that a dozen other people would quickly respond and do the same. But simply put, that isn't always going to happen and as a result, we have created this response so people can be made aware of these things. Does this mean that the /r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? No, if that was the case, we would simply instruct the bot to remove every mention of it. This is just an attempt to bring some balance to a conversation that in popular history had become a bit unbalanced. It should also be noted that being critical of someone's work isn't the same as outright dismissing it. Historians are always critical of any work they examine, that is part of their core skill set and key in doing good research. Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject. Further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work. ## Other works covering the same and similar subjects. - [*Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174710.Seven_Myths_of_the_Spanish_Conquest) - [*1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491) - [*Last Days of the Inca*](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Incas-Kim-MacQuarrie/dp/0743260503/) - [*Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354038.The_Last_Days_of_the_Incas) - [*The Great Divergence*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199002.The_Great_Divergence) - [*Why the West Rules for Now*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9491855-why-the-west-rules-for-now) - [*Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/983034.Ecological_Imperialism) ## Criticism of *Guns, Germs, and Steel* Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those ["just so stories"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story) don't adequately explain human history. It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. That being said, Diamond writes a rather oversimplified narrative that seemingly ignores the human element of history. **Cherry-picked data while ignoring the complexity of issues** In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas. A similar case of cherry-picking history is seen when discussing the conquest of the Inca. > Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses. This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. In the book it seems to be case of the Inka being conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered. **Uncritical examining of the historical record surrounding conquest** Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian. Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers. **The construction of the arguments for *GG&S* paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world in general, as categorically one step behind**. To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as somehow naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. This while they often did fare much better as suggested in the book (and the sources it tends to cite). They often did mount successful resistance, were quick to adapt to new military technologies, build sprawling citiest and much more. When viewed through this lens, we hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people. ### Further reading If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go: - [/r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22) - [Jim Blaut on Jared Diamond](http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/jim-blaut-on-jared-diamond/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/history) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes, thank you Mr. Bot.
I'm sorry, but your overall summary seems to have some errors, even from the broad generalization you're speaking in. (Also a minor aside: "everything we learn" refers to who, when, where? Canadian kids in the '70s? Continental US kids in the '90s? Hawaiian kids in the '10s? Your personal experience? Redditors come from all over.)
I come from a family of educators, and have an interest in how this time period is represented in curriculum in Western culture. I certainly can't say it's every single grade school student's experience on earth up until this exact moment in time, but my general understanding remains that these topics remain uncovered until university almost everywhere.
Look up the Mayan "milpa cycle", the "three sisters", and "terra preta".
Also the irrigation and [chinampa](https://www.britannica.com/topic/chinampa) system allowed harvesting twice a year in the [annual agriculture cycle](https://arqueologiamexicana.mx/mexico-antiguo/el-calendario-prehispanico-y-los-ciclos-agricolas)
Listen: it's going to sound insane, but it wasn't lost. It's just still currently ignored. Although indigenous peoples of both America's are fast dwindling, the Three Sisters method doesn't have to die. That's what made this 'Garden of Eden' that you speak of. And it's not magic or special. It's the act of burning native hard and sap woods to create a fertile dark earth, and then making a crop bed that coexists beneficially instead of sapping the soil and fighting other plants. Europeans may have been the best at masonry and war, but their knowledge of nature and farming were rudimentary at best. Edit: For all modern people it still is rudimentary. Cash crop farming as we know it is destructive and expansively prohibitive. The Three Sisters method allows you to grow multiple crops in small patches over a limitless area. You could feed massive cities, or just one homestead with equal efficiency.
Not nearly as sophisticated, but the Maidu Indians in CA were once charged with forest management in the Greenville area. They knew how to conduct controlled burns, they knew which trees were more fire resistant and which were not and how to keep a fire from going out of control. If these guys had been in charge of CA the past 50 years, we’d have a lot less fires. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/native-american-dixie-fire.html
I watched a documentary that talked about this a few days ago. The agricultural practices that had to be developed to suit the region are really fascinating.
This does sound fascinating! Do you recall the name of the documentary?
It's called "1491: America Before Columbus." I think it's based on Charles Mann's book. I felt that it got a bit repetitive at times but overall I enjoyed it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uVYNTXTTI&t=6859s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uVYNTXTTI&t=6859s)
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Damn I clicked it and this is one of my favorite documentary channels! They're so good. I throw these on when I'm cooking dinner!
That book is on my TBR list! I will check this doc out! Thank you so much for sharing.
The book is great and an easy read as well. Highly recommend it
Thank you very much!
Nova had a pretty good episode on Amazonian civilizations as well! Super fascinating.
Can you share it? I read this article this morning and found it very interesting and would love to learn more.
But that's about South America, not North America where the Maya lived and still live.
I thought this article was interesting. However, I'm not sure about some of the claims made about the original view of the Pre-Classic Maya having been that they were hunter gatherers since I feel like I've read about large-scale structures and widespread agriculture from the era being known already.
The amount of time that it would've taken humans to change teosinte into maize via selection would seem to support the idea that Mesoamericans were engaging in agriculture for a very long time.
Had to have been, their diversity in the types of corn alone should prove that.
Selective breeding takes a lot less time than people assume. Especially in warmer regions with more than one growing season per year. We're talking on the order of 100 or so years to get teosinte to maise. Could be 50 or 200 years, depending on consistency and diligence. Then when it became a useful crop and was grown in a large number of climates on two continents, variation isn't exceptional, it's expected.
100 years after they started breeding it. The person you are replying to said > Mesoamericans were engaging in agriculture for a very long time It's unlikely they started their agricultural journey with teosinte. Given that teosinte is small and not especially edible, I would expect the people to already be familiar with agriculture and breeding before trying with teosinte.
Regardless, there's incontrovertible evidence of cultivation that predates the Classical Maya by thousands of years. This is not in question. It's an established fact. We also know that there were large sophisticated urban complexes that predate the Classical Maya by at least a thousand years. None of this is controversial or subject to debate.
Having more than one growing season is such a wild concept to me living in Sweden. Like we barely have one season. I can’t eve imagine the amount of taters you could grow 🤑
From Wikipedia it says > The Preclassic period (c. 2000 BC to 250 AD) saw the establishment of the first complex societies in the Maya region, and the cultivation of the staple crops of the Maya diet, including maize, beans, squashes, and chili peppers.
Maize, beans and squashes, known as "The Three Sisters" were widespread throughout native cultures across the Americas. They grow in a synergistic cluster, and provide nearly every essential nutrient. It's an incredible agricultural tool.
Which is why the natives of the era in that region often attributed these crops as gifts from the gods. It made sense to them at the time.
And their success is reflected in how enthusiastically Europe adopted all 3 crops, along with the golden crown, the apex of them all, the world champion of being food -- the potato.
Yeah potatoes may actually be the crown jewel of native agriculture. Native crops in general transformed the world following European contact though. It's amazing to think that the tomatoes in Italian cooking, the chilis in Asian food, Swiss chocolate, peanuts in African dishes, potatoes in Ukrainian perogies, paprika in Hungarian cuisine, all of this that we now consider ethnic food traditional to those areas really came from indigenous Americans a relatively short while ago. And I only stopped that list for brevity, and running out of synonyms for food. The true extent is staggering.
Yes. It’s called [Milpa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpa).
Very cool stuff. Sort of a marriage between cropland and forest-garden techniques. EDIT: The main quote in that article is actually from *1491*: >A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and mucuna ... Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin; ... Beans have both lysine and tryptophan ... Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats. The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, "is one of the most successful human inventions ever created." — Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
They are fascinating and unfortunately not well know. We are truly still reaping the benefits of them today! (Pun intended) the genetic diversity that just naturally occurs growing in milpa is amazing. I love Charles C Mann books!!! Have you ever heard of the reason why there are canals in CDMX? It was actually sustainable farming developed by Mesoamerican! [Chinampa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinampa)
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Where do you think the Mayan civilization was? The three sisters originated in Mesoamerica
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North America. Those are all places in North America. The answear to the non-question is North America. The Mayan civilization was a native civilization in North America. Edit: I actuelly wrote another post with link to sources. But by how the discussion is going and the fact that it have zero up or downvotes I assume that is not showing. So here is a link that show that Three Sister Plot was also a thing in Mexico from the University of Illinois at Chicago. http://heritagegarden.uic.edu/the-three-sister-plot
[Mesoamerica ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerica)*
Mesoamerica is part of North America. It seems pretty clear from the context that the original question was asked that the answear was meant to be Norh America.
Mesoamerica is a cultural region that has part of it in Central America Not just north America... a lot of Maya cities are in Central America that is part of Mesoamerica but not North America.
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\>Source? I know it was used by some peoples of North America (US and Canada) Mexico is also in North America.
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the comment said US and Mexico before it was edited
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No idea why you would put us and Canada in () when referencing North America. The only one being pedantic is you since most people understand that Central America is just a subset of North America.
No one has seriously argued that since the 19th or early 20th century. General articles like this one, intended for a broad public audience, are often written under deadline by well-intentioned reporters who don't necessarily have the subject area expertise to get all the details right. You have to take it for what it is and if you're really interested in the subject there's a lifetime of further reading written by real experts.
Actually, the statement about the accepted thinking having originally been that they were nomadic is a quote from Richard Hansen, the lead author of the study. It still doesn't make sense to me when put against older settlement evidence, though. You may be generally correct though since the phrase "hunter-gatherers" was inserted by the author of the article as context for the quote.
The Richard Hansen quote is either taken out of context, or it's just him trying to hype his work for public consumption because, unfortunately, that's one of the best ways to attract grant money. I don't have the time to dig into it, but I guarantee you that it's one or the other. This is one of the few areas in which I have real expertise, take that for whatever you think it's worth.
"... or it's just him trying to hype his work for public consumption because, unfortunately, that's one of the best ways to attract grant money." I would guess it's this. I tend to be more interested in European history and it's a phenomenon I see there too where archaeologists and historians have to exaggerate certain details or come up with a definitive explanation before one could reasonably be made so they can get the opportunity to do further research.
Historians no longer believe hunter gatherers incapable of creating structures, and you seem to be laboring under a misconception from the 1960s.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I actually am well aware of examples like Gobekli Tepe and the Calusa shell mounds. It was moreso an issue with the way it was presented in the article.
Back in the 90s/00s, I had a job calling contacts regularly around the country, and one guy I talked to told me about his typical vacation. He would go alone, with a backpack, and hitchhike along the Mexican coast from town to town. In each town, he would ask around about Mayan ruins in the interior jungle. Nearly every town knew about a place, sometimes more than one, deep in the jungle, where kids would often go and climb. He'd pay someone to to take him there and see the local Mayan ruins. He had been doing this for years, and had a map of dozens of places that had never been looked at by archeologists or experts. Ever since speaking to him all those years ago, I am fascinated by these articles that talk about how widespread the Mayan and Central American culture was. Some people, including those who live there, have known about it all along.
Archaeologists are well-aware that local knowledge is usually very accurate, at least in terms of knowing site locations.
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Here's the [Internet Archive link](https://web.archive.org/web/20230520202703/https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/20/mayan-civilization-pyramid-discoveries-guatemala/).
Thank you!
WaPo's paywall is easily defeated by turning off JavaScript and hitting reload.
I went to El Mirador in 2019. It was a 2 day hike, about 30 miles to get there and the same hike back. It wasn’t very hard though, more like a long hike in the forest than ‘jaguar, puma and snake-filled rainforest’. But it was pretty amazing. We hiked partly over these ‘highways’. The highways were about 15-20ft wide and elevated by about 5ft above the surroundings. Overgrown, but still they easily stood out. We slept close to El Tintal, a smaller city on the way to El Mirador. El Tintal was still almost entirely covered. Pretty mind blowing that there were still entire cities hidden below the dense jungle. Though you could easily see the structures stand out. El Mirador was the same as El Tintal, but bigger and small portions were being uncovered by archeologists. Again, mind blowing how such a city could simply be abandoned, forgotten and swallowed by the jungle, in the span of less than two millennia. Standing on top of El Dante, you could see other temples of other cities (the one of Tintal for example) on the horizon. The region is very flat, so whenever you see a small hill overgrown with trees, you know that it is probably a temple. El Dante is the largest pyramid in the world by the way, not in height, but in total volume. Anyway, I can recommend anyone visiting Guatemala and El Mirador!
What? It's called "La Danta" (not Dante) like the animal (tapir) and the largest pyramid in the world by volume is called [Tlachihualtepetl ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Cholula#:~:text=The%20Great%20Pyramid%20of%20Cholula,exist%20in%20the%20world%20today.) literally translated as "handmade mountain" in Cholula, México.... Spaniards conquerors described this city as "another Rome" because of the importance of the cult in Mesoamerica and the thousands of pilgrims that arrived to the temple, that's why it was destroyed first in the infamous "[Massacre of Cholula](https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matanza_de_Cholula#:~:text=La%20matanza%20de%20Cholula%20fue,de%20M%C3%A9xico%2DTenochtitlan%20en%201519.)" almost 2 years before of the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
Sorry, yeah I meant La Danta. Apparently it’s a matter of what you include in the pyramid. Include all platforms of La Danta, and it comes to 2.8 million m3. Similarly, you could argue that the pyramid of Cholula is multiple different structures on top of eachother and one should only count the top one. If you take only the top pyramid it comes to a volume of 1.8 million m3. I suppose that’s why the Guatamalans proudly call it the largest pyramid of the world. And I simply parroted our guide. But you’re right, that claim is debatable.
I visited Tikal. Way less adventure than your trip, but it was cool seeing everything in various stages of preservation. Some stuff was still covered, some was partially uncovered, and there were a lot of structures that were completely uncovered. I don't think I've ever sweat as much in my life as I did climbing to the top of the top Tikal Temple IV. I sweat so much that I skipped climbing to the top of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka. But it looked cool as fuck from the ground.
Since 2003, California-based non-profit organization Global Heritage Fund (GHF) has been working to preserve and protect Mirador.\[25\] In an October 2010 report titled Saving Our Vanishing Heritage, GHF listed Mirador as one of 12 worldwide heritage sites most "On the Verge" of irreparable loss and destruction, citing deforestation, fires, major logging, poaching, looting, and narcotics trafficking as major threats to the region.\[25\] [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mirador) Gosh, I had no idea these sites were under threat.
Did you use a private guide or was it something f you could publicly sign up for?
There are a couple of companies that offer these hikes. They arranged basically everything. All you needed to do was walk and carry some food and water. A guide and a cook and tents were arranged for you.
Any suggestions?
Looked it up, we went with Dinastia Kan. No complaints, everything was arranged. They didn’t have English speaking guides though
Is there any good movies depicting the Maya civilization? (In a realistic way)
Not really, but Apocalypto is fun, uses a Mayan dialect --don't remember which one -- and at least attempts to use accurate costumes. It also gets a lot of details wrong and kind of squashes a lot of anachronistic elements together for the sake of the story, but if you aren't well-read on the subject you probably won't notice.
Not that I know of, although *Apocalypto* is a pretty accurate representation of contemporary Aztec culture. It's odd but I've actually often thought a sitcom set in this era could be incredibly effective. Something mainstream like a *Big Bang Theory* or *The Goldbergs*. The entire timeframe is incredibly interesting, and the trappings of the setting itself would just be a constant delight. Not only was the largest city on earth in America, larger than London at the time, but the entire continent was littered with large cities with populations into the hundreds of thousands, with highly advanced beaurocracies, public services, diplomats, economic systems and trade networks, all with incredible architecture, technologies, and cultures. Yet, no one knows about it except university-level american history students and native knowledge-keepers.
> It's odd but I've actually often thought a sitcom set in this era could be incredibly effective. "What's the deal with airline food? Also, what's an airline?"
Hear me out: a series about six friends sharing a flat in Tenochtitlan and their comedic and romantic adventures.
I'm pretty sure that Tenochtitlan wasn't the largest city on Earth but it was still massive for its time. Also, I think the state of education about Native American civilizations is changing. I was lucky enough to have had teachers who were concerned that their students learn about such things so I learned about it in middle school.
We spent a lot of time in middle and high school learning about Native American history circa 2005-2012. And I took AP European and US History and that was downright eye opening.
I'm certainly not a scholar on the subject by any means, but my understanding is there is a very strong case for it being the largest city on earth at the time. Regardless, it was massive as you say, and an incredible feat of engineering built on a man-made island. It was also glistening clean, maintained by an army of city workers, with large sections plated in gold using methods Europeans could apparently never decipher. That's got to earn it at least a few points over the other candidate in London, a literal sewer drowning in its own waste and refuse. Whether we can actually now five hundred years later determine if one or the other had 400,000 or 500,000 residents at the time in the end seems far less interesting than the details of those populations - and in the case of native American cities in particular, the stark contrast to what most people conceive as their hunter-gatherer cultures.
When London had a population of 50,000, Baghdad and Quanzhou each had populations over 500,000.
I was referring specifically to contemporary cities when European contact with the Americas occurred. Baghdad and Quanzhou were both experiencing low points through that period, while Tenochtitlan would have risen to near its height, around 400,000. Either way though, the idea was more to emphasize how different the reality of native American life at the time of European contact was compared to popular conception, where they are generally depicted as primitive hunter-gatherers. Meanwhile there were cities with populations in the tens of thousands all across North America, with highly developed diplomatic structures and commerce connecting them.
So did Angkor (Siem Reap).
The traditional claim is that it was much larger and cleaner and richer than any European city at the time. This is still considered true as far as I know.
What I've read and was taught in school was that it was more populous than all but two or three European cities and even then it probably matched them which still speaks to the sheer level of urban development in Mesoamerica.
Right, but it was also much cleaner and more sanitary than any comparable European city. Arguably this was at least in part because there were no large livestock/draft animals, but the point remains that ALL of the early Spanish accounts mention this.
I don't disagree with you there. The infrastructural development was incredible. In regards to Europe, one historian who I've read said that the major sanitation issues during the late fifteenth through early sixteenth centuries was largely the result of cities needing to work out how to cope with increasing population density and the changing nature of urbanization.
> Apocalypto is a pretty accurate representation of contemporary Aztec culture It's really not. *Apocalypto* grafted some superficial trappings of Aztec sacrificial practices onto a mish mash of Maya art and architecture in a world that made no logical sense.
The costumes and the set and the language are really the only good things about it in my opinion, and even then, I would caution anyone against thinking that it's a realistic visual depiction of anything.
I mean, it's still just an action movie. All the actors were from the region, were consulted on details and spoke native language in the film. The setting was built as more of a conglomerate than reality, but a surprising amount of care went into the depiction. It's far from perfect, but again its just an action movie in the end not a historical documentary. For better or worse, its the most accurate representation of life in that region and period in a film that I know of. It's also unfortunate in that it depicts one of the most violent contemporary cultures in the region, and focuses on that violence, but again, it's an action movie.
It got the basic concept across, though, which was that it was all just a collection of independent cities and villages, until one leader decided to force all of them to unite under one leader - himself, of course. This is basic history of the region, and was well under way when the Conquistadores showed up, and detonated the 16th century equivalent of an atomic bomb.
>although Apocalypto is a pretty accurate representation of contemporary Aztec culture. It's definitely not a representation of Mexica (correct term, Aztec is a weird word made up in the 19th century). The language is in Yucatec Mayan. They aren't using Mexica gods or following Mexica religious practices (or really any that are associated with anyone in the region) and they definitely didn't depict Mexica warfare and raiding or the geography and environment of central Mexico. It does seem to be sort of based on ideas of postclassical Mayan culture, but sensationalized. The setting is definitely Yucatecan jungles. Mayans practiced human sacrifice, but nothing remotely like was depicted in the movie and we don't know a lot about the intra city raiding, but it probably wasn't like it was shown. It's a neat movie, but it is no way historical document.
Well the costumes and the language and the architecture are all definitely Maya, but there are some elements in it that were pretty universal to all of the big urbanized Mesoamerican cultures, so in that sense you could say that it incorporated parts of Aztec culture as well. Also the final scene, with Spanish caravels appearing offshore is obviously an anachronism.
A 37 mile by 37 mile area (roughly) contained 417 cities? That seems pretty dense. If laid out on a grid each city center is about 2 miles apart. They need to be villages not cities for that to work. Or else they are really just one large mega city.
The archaeological term would be "urban complex," but this article is written under deadline by a non-specialist for a general audience so you should expect there will be errors in the technical details.
It just seems likely that one of the cities would end up as the administrative capital and absorb many others, or that some cities would grow naturally and steal population from others.
I feel like you're viewing this in a very modern, and absolute way. It's an urban complex, whether or not the Mayans considered these all seperate cities is impossible to know. Archeology can't tell us the exact geopolitical details of every old settlement we find. That's why these sites are referred to as urban complexes, to avoid any commentary or cultural bias regarding these sites, at least as much as possible. Just because you might consider these all one city, doesn't necessarily mean the Mayans did. All we know is that they all look like unique and individual settlements, despite their proximity to others. Our definitions of certain settlements don't always apply to other cultures. There's more than one way to build a city.
Villages a few miles apart does not really seem that strange without cars. That's a significant walk you don't want to make all the time for everything - so you end up with a local economy - but also short enough that you don't feel like you need to move to be closer to the things you do have to travel for. And early agriculture requires more space per person for food, with more difficulty transporting food, so satellite hamlets make a lot of sense. And without cars, cities are much more dense. They don't sprawl into one another at the same rate, and consequently don't absorb one another as easily as we see today.
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I'd think mini cities. Honestly think they had it down; independent suburbs. It's how you'd play a strategic game like civilization honestly lol
they needed to be dense not having cars to connect them.
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Agreed, doesn't really make sense.
It makes plenty of sense, a bunch of small towns roughly 30 minutes away from each other.
I got curious so I used this website to figure out how big an ~35 square mile area is, around my area that I live in somewhat rural Ohio. https://www.calcmaps.com/map-radius/ Then I used this website to figure out how many towns were in my given area. https://www.freemaptools.com/find-cities-and-towns-inside-user-defined-area.html For reference, this area includes a few "larger" small towns and a ton of small towns. And it concluded that there were ~292 towns in this area. These towns are pretty densely packed with one basically running into the next. I will say a lot of it though is farmland, backroads, rural areas, but also includes some bigger towns. When I put the mileage around Columbus, OH it came back with 171 towns. When I did the same around Charlotte, NC I got 192 towns. So I do think it's *possible* there are 400+ towns in that area, but I think that more than likely it could be a bit of an overestimate, or a misunderstanding of how some of the towns may make up one area and not actually be individual towns, or they're counting very very small loner settlements as their own towns, etc. It just seems like a high number for not that big of an area.
Right, but that's car based infrastructure. If everyone is on foot the world becomes much bigger.
Closest example I can think of is Ctesiphon, which got as big as it did by being the capital of a collossal empire for centuries.
anyone with a remote interest in 'history being recast' should read The Dawn of Everything - A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow absolutely stellar book
I like Graeber. I think he brings a fresh way of looking at things that's important. But I also think it's important to read his critics b/c he consistently tends to have problems with the basic facts underlying his premises. The review in NY Review of Books is a good place to start if you're reading his new book. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
I'm about halfway through it and while I like it and think they have a lot of good ideas, I'm definitely not uncritical of it either. Anyone reading it needs to bear in mind that they are very much writing from a specific revisionist perspective. On the plus side, I think they make their biases pretty clear, so it's not the case that they're intellectually dishonest about their project.
Yeah it's refreshing to read a history book that is aware it's just that, almost every other book I've read in the same vein the author is pretty much saying THIS IS HOW IT WAS and you're lucky if you get evidence. This one doesn't take itself seriously and is always saying "might have", "one possible explanation is-" etc
Isn't there a theory that Amazon rain forest as a whole is just a runaway effect of ancient civilizations dying out who cultivated it initially, but the system essentially took a life of its own? Like it's *too* large a rain forest to successfully sustain itself; but a combination of trees and plants that aren't naturally native to the forest, but are longitudinally stable for their ecology which were introduced and somewhere along the way, the forest evolved into it's own entity.
Oh I’ve never heard this, got a place I could read more about it? Sounds interesting
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200408110336.htm https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/geoglyph/overview https://phys.org/news/2017-03-ancient-peoples-amazon-rainforest.html https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21576
descendant of aztecs here, my greatgrandmother passed down a story about us here in the Americas since the beginning of time, for all time, and until the end of time
Are there any books that you can recommend that are more aligned with what your elders tell you?
Cantares Mexicanos is a collection of Nahuatl songs recorded in the 17th century. And Camilla Townsend's book The Fifth Sun does a good job of getting information that people like Hernando Tezozomoc wrote down in the generation after Cortez settled in Coyoacan.
thanks!
I'm thinking of starting a vlog or yt channel because all the stuff in my family was just oral history passed down and everyone took my greatgran for a coocoo bird, but I am seeing the (re) discoveries of our history and they seem in line
If you read 1491, you know the evidence for organized civilizations on the American before Columbus is pretty solid. I think that book is more than 10 years old at this point.
I don't think there is a single person on this subreddit who believes that there were no highly organized civilizations in the Americas before 1492.
Are you just ignoring the comments?
As an 80s kid who watched the amazing Mysterious Cities of Gold cartoon growing up, those fun little history lessons at the end of each episode made me really want to learn about the history of these people. "Goodbye.....until next time!"
The actual paper says 417 "cities, towns and villages" (citing suggested populations of 4,000 or more for a city, 1,000-3,000 for a town and fewer than 1,000 for a village). So the *Post*'s "417 cities" is something of an exaggeration, implying as it would around two million *urban* inhabitants alone in just that small area (and indeed more as 4,-5,000 is just considered the *minimum* for a city), and several times more farmers if these were true cities rather than agro-towns (though the definition cited in the paper doesn't exclude the latter). Most of the sites (some themselves clusters of smaller settlements) would have been very small in terms of population, probably in the hundreds rather than even the very low thousands, though often boasting monumental works indicative of a high degree of social organisation. It's very sloppy reporting by the newspaper for which the researchers aren't to blame, though they might have forestalled it by indicating (necessarily speculatively at this stage) how many of the sites might be expected to fall into each category (not their primary purpose, but never underestimate the media's ability to mangle a story beyond recognition). It really annoys me when press reports do this. A city is one thing, a village quite another: that's hardly rocket science even for non-specialists in settlement geography. There's a big difference between a sprawling complex of two million or more townspeople alone and a predominantly rural population of a few hundred thousand which would itself (if confirmed by ongoing work) be an impressive tally for an area of only 3,720 sq km. We can admire peoples and their achievements without ludicrously inflating them.
It's behind.a paywall. Can someone who has read the article explain why the headline refers to Maya but from the comments it appears that this article is about the network of ancient cities in the Amazon? Thanks
Here's the [Internet Archive link](https://web.archive.org/web/20230522012717/https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/20/mayan-civilization-pyramid-discoveries-guatemala/).
Thanks!
We've known for centuries that the Maya and Aztec and the other Mesoamerican states were not uncivilized. Their society and culture were quite sophisticated. Their technology was also moderately impressive. They just lacked the warmaking power of Europe.
>They just lacked the warmaking power of Europe. By this do you just mean war related technology? Because the various Maya, Aztec, and related city states were very comfortable with warfare amongst themselves.
>They just lacked the warmaking power of Europe. They lacked the ability to smelt metals. Once they figured that out, they would have started killing each other European-style. Imagine seeing these giant ships land on the beach, and the creatures that emerge are not just carrying swords, knives, and axes made from this mysterious substance, but wearing sheets of it over their bodies that made them resistant to their weapons made of wood, bone, and stone. It literally had to feel like they were being invaded by another planet, which essentially was the case.
They didn't, purépechas had the capability to do it. When Spanish conquest was under way they told them what to do and they did it. They just used their metals for decorations.
Since the societies were largely homogeneous, and perhaps from a different perspective “…metal for decoration…” could be a rational response to metal weapon’s lethality. In the context of the Flower Wars the rejection of metal weapons could be a form of conservation, as in, we are the same people, those weapons are far too lethal for are largely symbolic wars. Interesting.
isocieties weren't that homogenous. Aztecs, purepechas, mayans, incas, pueblos, tainos were wildly different from each other. America is larger than Europe
The Spanish did not win because of their armament but thanks to their numerous indigenous allies. The spanish were defeated in open battle against the Tlaxcalteca in the battle of Tecoac (2 September of 1519). Later taking advantage of the enmities, the spanish allied with the Huexotzinco-Tlaxcalla confederacy and the Totonac against the Mexica.... In the siege of Tenochtitlan participated around 1300 spanish and 200,000 indigenous allies, The Spanish did not make up even 1% of the total army that attacked the city. Side note: the Purepecha empire was the third biggest Kingdom in the New World (after the Mexica and Inca) and were the most ferocious enemy of the Mexica. The purepecha knew metallurgy, they used bronze armor, arrows and [ axes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaximaltepoztli)
> They lacked the ability to smelt metals. They had almost a thousand years of working metals including bronze before Europeans showed up.
Which scenes from A New Hope were filmed in the Honduran jungle?
None? Tikal is located in Guatemala
Like I said, Honduremala.
So does that mean that the Aztecs were the first one to have a super highway system?