MesoAmerica Links | MesoAmericas & Beyond

Mayan Civilization ‘Grossly Underestimated’

Posted on February 8, 2018February 8, 2018 by admin

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Repost from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.

“The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research.

The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.

The survey has yielded surprising insights into settlement patterns, inter-urban connectivity, and militarization in the Maya Lowlands. At its peak in the Maya classic period (approximately A.D. 250–900), the civilization covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, but it was far more densely populated.

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multi-disciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there—including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Laser scans revealed more than 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures that were part of a vast network of cities, fortifications, farms, and highways.
COURTESY WILD BLUE MEDIA/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Giant Maya Carvings in Guatemala

Posted on August 10, 2013September 10, 2013 by admin

Recently found in the Maya city of Holmul in the northeastern Petén Basin region in Guatemala, near the modern-day border with Belize, is an enormous frieze—which measures 26 feet by nearly 7 feet (8 meters by 2 meters)—depicts human figures in a mythological setting, was discovered in July 2013 in the buried foundations of a rectangular pyramid in Holmul.

The frieze is very well preserved and even though most of the paint is faded away now, traces of red, blue, green, and yellow paint are still visible on the frieze.

The section of the temple at Holmul where the frieze was found dates back to about A.D. 590, which corresponds to the Maya classical era, a period defined by the power struggles between two major Maya dynasties: Tikal and Kaanul.

See National Geographic

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Posted on June 19, 2013November 26, 2013 by admin

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. The book argues that a combination of recent findings in different fields of research suggests that human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.

There is much more to read in this book than the above summary and many surprising aspects to the North & South American and Mesoamerican cultures before Columbus. Well worth the read.

New York Times Review

Wikipedia Summary

Amazon Page

7th-century Maya hieroglyphs found at La Corona, Guatemala

Posted on October 17, 2012October 23, 2012 by admin

Mayan December 21, 2012 End Date Wrong?

Posted on October 21, 2010 by admin

Reprint from ABCNews.

The Mayan Inscriptions' Palace at the Palenque archaeological site, in Chiapas state. (Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images)

Professor Gerardo Aldana, an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, said that the date could be inaccurate by 50 to 100 years or even more.

Aldana says that scholars have used the fixed numerical value called GMT constant to figure out the correlation between the Mayan and Gregorian dates. He says that the method has never been proven conclusively.

He added that his findings might challenge the accepted Gregorian dates, which are published in the new book “Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World.”

In his research, he attempted to reconstruct the astronomical practices of the ancient Maya people.

“One of the principal complications is that there are really so few scholars who know the astronomy, the epigraphy, and the archeology,” Aldana said in a release.

“Because there are so few people who are working on that, you get people who don’t see the full scope of the problem. And because they don’t see the full scope, they buy into things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a fun problem.”

Researcher Questions Accuracy of Mayan Calendar’s 2012 Prophecy and Other Dates

The GMT constant, named for early Mayan scholars Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez and J. Eric S. Thompson, is partly based on astronomical events. Those early Mayanists relied heavily on dates found in colonial documents written in Mayan languages and recorded in the Latin alphabet, the release said.

A later scholar, American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, further supported the GMT constant.

But, through his research reconstructing Mayan astronomical practices and reviewing data in the archeological record, the release said Aldana found weaknesses in Lounsbury’s work that cause the argument behind the GMT constant to fall “like a stack of cards.”

“This may not seem to be much, but what it does is destabilize the entire argument,” he said.

“A few scholars have stood up and said, ‘No, the GMT is wrong,'” Aldana said. “But in my opinion, what they’ve done is try to provide alternatives without looking at why the GMT is wrong in the first place.”

Multi-Layered Mesoamerican Universe?

Posted on June 4, 2010 by admin

Tamoanchan Tree — Four trees at the Cardinal Directions

The multi-layered universe of the Mesoamerian culture has been taught and appears in books as if it has been proven. Jesper Nielsen’s article Dante’s heritage: questioning the multi-layered model of the Mesoamerican universe questions this notion.

It appears the pre-conquest model of the universe was of the cardinal directions, the center, the upper world and Underworld thus making for a three tiered universe. The different levels were divided into different regions and on each of the levels these different regions correspond to the four cardinal directions.

The number nine is prominent. It is represented by a god in the center and two gods at each of the four cardinal directions. These added up equal nine.

After the conquest, it appears there was a mixture of the cosmological ideas from Dante’s The Divine Comedy brought by the Franciscan friars with the ideas of the native Indian’s resulting in a skewed view of their universe which is how it is taught now and not seriously questioned.

The full article can be viewed at the following link.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3284/is_320_83/ai_n42366465/

Early Mayan Writing

Posted on February 26, 2010 by admin

This vertical column of ancient Mayan glyphs was painted on stone found in a Guatemalan pyramid complex dating back to between 200 B.C. and 300 B.C. and show the Maya were writing at a complex level 150 years earlier than previously thought, though simple glyphs are dated to as early as 600 B.C.

They were found on preserved painted walls and plaster fragments in the pyramidal structure known as Las Pinturas, in San Bartolo, Guatemala.

The writing is completely different than the Zapotec writing and indicates they are not simple derivatives of each other.

Though a lot is now known of Mayan writings it is not known what these glyphs say.

Full article is here is printed on MSNBC.

Were the Toltecs a Historic Nationality?

Posted on January 29, 2010January 29, 2010 by admin

MesoAmerias.com has published Daniel Brinton’s argument that Tula was merely one of the towns built and occupied by that tribe of the Nahuas known as Azteca or Mexica and its inhabitants were called Toltecs, but there was never any such distinct tribe or nationality; they were merely the ancestors of this branch of the Azteca and the Toltec “empire” is a baseless fable.

The paper is published in MesoAmericas Book Collection.

People of Mesoamerica

Posted on August 20, 2008September 25, 2008 by admin

The section of the main site MesoAmericas.com for the people of the ancient cultures has been started. Here is the first paragraph:

Olmec Mother Culture

The earliest known civilization in Mesoamerica is the Olmec. It appears they are the genesis of most of the aspects of the Mesoamerican cultures. The form of their government, pyramid-temple building, writing, astronomy, art, mathematics, economics and religion became the template for succeeding cultures. The questions of where the Olmec received their inspiration and knowledge, not to mention the required force, to create the Mesoamerican culture is rarely examined deeply.

More to come…

Ancient Mesoamerica

Posted on May 4, 2008May 4, 2008 by admin

Mayan Glyph, Palenque

What mystery was evoked,
Seeing hieroglyphs for the first time,
With no comprehension of the mind,
To resurface at a later time,
What does this riddle represent to me?
Maybe unraveling it, unravels something in me.