An interpreter of Maya culture [ Harri Kettunen ]

the quarterly of the University of Helsinki ^ | summer 2006 | Jani Saxell

[SunkenCiv]

"The Maya are the only pre-Columbian culture whose texts have been preserved up to our time in the thousands. They reveal the Maya to have been a people like all others. In the 7th and 8th centuries AD, the area was the most populous in the world and the city-states waged wars against each other," says Kettunen.

Kettunen explains that there are quite human reasons why the idealised image of the Maya arose. An early authority on Maya studies, the British archaeologist Eric Thompson had experienced two world wars. "He wanted to believe that the world had had at least one peaceful civilisation."

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

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[Question_Assumptions]

"He wanted to believe that the world had had at least one peaceful civilisation."

Read Lawrence Keeley's book War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage to see just how much wishful thinking like that has warped archaeological interpretation.