Posted on 12/09/2010 8:01:31 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Using new techniques and extensive excavations, researchers have found that the Maya coped with tough environmental conditions by developing ingenious methods to grow crops in wetland areas. "The work shows that this intensive agriculture is more complicated and on a par with these other areas of intellectual development," says Timothy Beach, a physical geographer at Georgetown University in Washington DC, who presented his findings on Wednesday at the Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting in Denver, Colorado.
The Maya civilization, considered one of the most advanced ancient societies, lived in sprawling and densely populated pockets from the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico to Honduras in Central America. The civilization arose before 1000 BC and reached its height from about 400 BC to 900 AD...
It has long been suspected that the Maya relied heavily on agriculture. In the 1970s, researchers began characterizing the remains of elaborate irrigation canals found in wetland areas. But it has not been clear how widespread these canals were or whether the use of wetlands for farming was an important part of the Maya agricultural system...
One of the reasons some scholars dismissed the idea that wetlands were fundamentally important to the Maya is that they are often far from famous sites such as Tikal and Chichen Itza. But there must have been dense populations living in rural areas near wetlands, far from the glitzy urban centres, says Beach.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
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Had they been in the United States and tried doing that, they would have been fined millions of dollars under the Clean Water Act.
"Those Bastards!"
---Eric Cartman
LOL!
No noble savages these were, they raped and pillaged a vital eco-system and they must now pay.
Ain’t it the truth?!? BWAAAHA HA HA!!!
When Mayan barbarians drain swamps for productive use, they’re “an advanced civilation. When Americans do the same thing, we’re planet-raping imperialists.
How far does the liberal yardstick bend?
The researcher practically had an orgasm, from the sound of his constant string of praise for a group of people who were probably fighting a drought and in the process making the “ecosystem” around them suffer even more. :’)
And the environmentalists are converting farmland into wetland, actually wasteland. The hell with food, they believe that they will be able to import theirs. It is the sheep who will starve. The sheep? They are shouting Whee,Whee all the way home[ to the camps].
http://media.smh.com.au/drive/car-news/the-worlds-fastest-road-car-2087420.html
I want a ride.
*********************************
The world's fastest road car (05:04)
Zero to 100kmh in two and a half seconds. Drive climbs into the cockpit of the 736kW Bugatti Veyron for a spin around Sandown Raceway. 09/12/10
It’s part of the long range planning of our enemies — we won’t have any way to produce anything, not even the electronics — and the food supply will be crucial.
Well, yeah, somebody had to be growing a whole lotta food to support those cities.
Yeah, I could go for that. I’d have to deal with the brain-dead idea of putting speed bumps in many of Grand Rapids’ public streets, while A) letting the potholes go and B) pushing for a tax increase to avoid reductions of police coverage we already voted a tax increase to support and are clearly not getting (else why the speed bumps).
The rafts on which food was grown in the boggy lake around Tenochtitlan were perhaps more impressive — they managed three crops a year, and in a two-season tropical area like the Mayans had, they should have been able to do at least that well. But yeah, a lot of labor was needed for those pyramid projects, and the next one started on top of the previous (at times), making it a decades- or century-long process.
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