Posted on 01/31/2017 8:22:41 AM PST by BenLurkin
Used by the Maya for travel and transporting goods, the causeways were identified in the Mirador Basin, which lies in the far northern Petén region of Guatemala, within the largest tract of virgin tropical forest remaining in Central America.
Also known as the Kan Kingdom, El Mirador is considered the cradle of Mayan civilization. Prior to its abandonment in 150 A.D., it was the largest city-state in the world both in size — 833 square miles — and population. It boasted the largest known pyramid in Central America, and was home to at least one million people.
Researchers have known about the presence of these roads since 1967, when British Mayanist Ian Graham published a map of Mirador showing causeways crossing the swamp regions. Now laser-based remote sensing has been used to map the area, providing new insights into the massive system of superhighways.
The Light Detection and Ranging tool, known as LiDAR, is capable of penetrating the thick jungle vegetation at a rate of 560,000 dots per second, producing detailed images that mimic a 3-D view of the scanned areas.
...
"These causeways are 130 feet wide, up to 20 feet high and in some cases they extend as far as 25 miles," Hansen said.
The first building of the causeway between Mirador and Tindall and Mirador and Nakbe dates to 600 and 400 B.C., while other causeways date from 300 BC to 100 A.D.
(Excerpt) Read more at seeker.com ...
Ouchy
Lurkin is a good guy not sure why he’s on the culture relativist train
Sunken always was too but he ran away over Trump o think to Gopbreifingroom
Nobody argued the significance of western civilization when I was a boy
Look at any old world book or britannica
We were proud of the culture and judeochristian traditions
Now it’s all about destroying those notions as evil meanwhile pumping the achieving of groups like Mayans who actually were the devils handiwork if you read up on them
Anyone can go to Europe or the Med periphery and see the civiliazations Caucasians created and then go to Tikal or Cuzco or various other sites
I’ve been all over from mounds in Brazil and the Yucatán to Tikal to Peru to Colombian Sierra Nevada tribal ruins to Mississippian culture where I grew up ....mounds to .....now this is where it gets interesting and around the same time as the Mayans
Puebloan people’s culture in New Mexico....now they had some building talent...and still lived in
But even they lagged too God bless em....hiding out from Apache and Comanches.
I’m tired of this crap
Be proud of whAr we are first so we can fight back
For folks who didn't have the wheel, or AFAIK pack animals? Why 130 feet wide?
That doesn't square with Roe v. Wade...Baal worship writ large.
It’s quite a contrast. The third-worldness of Latin American society today compared to the US, when the Mayan/Aztec empires flourished in the same company while North American Indians never got past hunter-gathering, wheel-less savagery. Climate doesn’t seem to be very much of a factor. Oh, and is religious cannibalism, which is what it was, really that far removed for eating one’s god?
The Spanish arriving there was analogous to the Allied armies arriving at the Nazi death camps. Thank God that civilization was wiped out.
The Maya were engaged in mass murder on a Nazi like scale when the Spanish arrived. The conquistadors were absolute heroes.
Northern Europe never approached Mayan levels of pagan barbarity. That’s a specious comparison.
That doesn’t square with Roe v. Wade...Baal worship writ large.
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Well ok you got that right.
Annihilating a millennium of their accumulated historical, medical, and astronomical records worked well in the cause of enslaving the evil little people.
North American indians did have at one time, large agricultural societies. The did not build stone pyramids, but did build large mounds and sizable communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders
Cultural diffusion from Central America, most likely.
This time last year I flew down to port canaveral for a cruise to the western caribbean. Across the bay is cape canaveral. A few days before we set sail. Elon Musk’s SpaceX took off
and landed on a barge in the atlantic. That was something that no aerospace company had been able to do in 50 years. It promises to slash the cost of space travel dramatically—because most of the
cost of going into space consists of the cost of getting the first 200 miles of the planet’s surface.
From port canaveral we sailed across the caribbean to cancun. I took a tour of an old mayan city called tulum. Tulum had its astronomers too. This city was a walled enclosure
with an entrance so tiny that
we were forced walked through single file. Inside were two square towers aligned east west. each tower had a square hole in the middle that sunlight would come
through perfectly at the summer and winter soltice. this marked the time for planting. The central americans are so deeply attached to the
rising sun that their graves to this day all face due east.
The ability to reveal the summer and winter solstice gave the priest class and aristocracy of the old mayas so much power they were supported in everything by the farmers outside the walls.
Sometimes things did not go well. The rains didn’t come for a season or two.
In such instances the aristocracy of maya thought it an honor to give themselves up for sacrifice. Their hearts were cut out and offered to their gods to bring back the rains. The rains returned.
The system went on for about 600 years from about 200 AD to 800 AD.
Then something happened.
About 800 AD the climate changed. this is the beginning of what has come to be known as the medieval warming period. It went on for about 500 years from 800-1300.. In the north the weather
got warmer.
The viking population exploded. They outstripped the ability of their lands to produce food for themselves so they sailed south to raid, and
to establish new colonies in england ireland france and russia. They sent outposts to Iceland and what was then Greenland. Their most adventurous explorers even traced
the outlines of north america.
In central america the rain stopped. Naturally the nobility and priest classes offered themselves up for sacrifice. But the rains didn’t return as usual. So they kept on sacrificing themselves.
As the decades wore on and the rains still didn’t fall—sections of the
leadership of mayan cities all over central america were sacrificed—including their children. They were so weakened that in 880 AD the Toltecs from central mexico invaded the Yucatan.
they had a different
sacrificial procedure.
They would raid neighboring cities in order to take prisoners
from the warriors and elites and sacrifice them. (The Aztecs learned their sacrificial practices from the toltecs.) The toltec practice spread all over the mayan cities of central america.
In an orgy of wars
over the next century the mayans succeeded in killing off all the people in their cities. Leaving only farmers outside the walls to dig out a living. Still the rains didn’t come Mel gibson’s movie Apocolypto gives a good
visual of that time—except that Gibson shows a spanish ship in the end his movie. The problem was that the spanish arrived in central america about 1519 or 500 years after the Mayans
killed themselves and emptied
their cities. 200 years before the spanish arrived — the medieval warm ended in Europe, rains returned to central america and jungles grew over the old empty mayan cities.
(hat tip to sunkenciv for getting me thinking along these lines.)
How could the mayans be so dumb. How could they not know there was no amount of sacrifice would bring the rains? They were just pouring their blood away.
In 1967 a book called the Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was published. It rocked the academic world. In the 1971 roe v wade was was passed. In 1973, the Club of Rome published The Limits of Growth which postulated that technology would grow linearly whereas population would grow exponentially. That the only solution to population explosion was to curb population growth. They made the same point as Malthus did in his book published in 1798. In 1798 Malthus was ignored. In 1973, the club of rome became gospel. Unlike the Mayans who were faced with actual starvation. The west was faced with the possibility of potential starvation in the distant future. Population growth for american and europe was curbed. something like 55 million babies have been aborted in the USA since roe v wade. they have all been replaced by foreign legal and illegal immigration. Technology has continued to improve exponentially.
Israel has performed a feat of literally biblical proportions. faced with a drought since 2000 they have created a desalination system that moves water at the world’s cheapest price for desalinated water—to their cities and then cleans the water again to brown water standards—and moves the water to their farms and fields.
Israel has freed themselves from the ancient drought cycle which has gripped the middle east for thousands of years going into prehistory.
The same drought destroyed Syria’s farmers and sent them to Syria’s cities where they were tinder for the collapse of that country and the refugee migrations to Europe.
why was malthus ignored and the club of rome’s tome become gospel? Because the western civilization of malthus was christian. the western civilization of the club of rome 200 years later had turned pagan.
There are still jaguars (not many) and boa constrictors in those forests. I would be too chicken to go in there.
That’s a very valid point.
The most successful, if that’s the word for it, tribe in what is now the US were the Apaches. They were primitive, bloodthirsty savages, even relative to other tribes.
Note: this topic is from 01/31/2017. Thanks BenLurkin.
“the Apaches. They were primitive, bloodthirsty savages”
The Comanches drove them out of the plains and into the desert. They also drove the Mexicans to letting Americans settle in Texas.
Great book!
Cannibalism was a lot more widespread among the Amerind then people are willing to admit.
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