Posted on 10/27/2020 10:53:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
The great Maya city of Tikal transported zeolites for water filtration thousands of years before other cultures learned or adopted the idea, archaeologists have found. The filtration was probably much better than anything known to the Europeans who conquered the area 1,500 years later.
The Corriental reservoir was one of Tikal’s sources of drinking water. Dr Kenneth Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati found crystalline quartz and zeolite when digging at the reservoir. Neither are local to the area and would have had to be brought a long way by the standards of a people who had no beasts of burden.
No one would carry these materials so far without a good reason.
Tankersley observed the quartz/zeolite combination would have removed multiple pathogens from the water supply, including heavy metals, nitrogen-rich compounds, and bacteria. The last raises the tantalizing possibility the Maya had a germ theory of disease two millennia before Pasteur, but bacterial removal was more likely a beneficial side effect of efforts to remove other impurities. “This system would still be effective today and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago," Tankersley said in a statement.
The porous limestone on which Tikal sat, in what is now northern Guatemala, does not lend itself to wells for storing water during the dry season, so access to clean water would have been particularly essential.
In Scientific Reports, Tankersley proposes a source for the minerals and even explains how people might have come to recognize their value. A decade ago co-author Professor Nicholas Dunning reported volcanic rock known as tuff, rich in quartz and zeolite, in a scarp. “It was bleeding water at a good rate,” he said. “Workers refilled their water bottles with it. It was locally famous for how clean and sweet the water was."
The tuff deposit probably produced just as good water thousands of years ago, and some long-lost Maya scientists identified the ingredients that made it filter so effectively.
The minerals at Dunning’s site match those at Corriental, but nothing similar was found at other Tikal sites, including two other reservoirs the team excavated, indicating it was mined and transported the 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the city. That may seem a short distance today but was back then a long trek.
The minerals first appear at the reservoir around 2,200 years ago, and were replenished after flash floods until the city was abandoned more than 1,000 years later. Even older water filtration systems have been found in Egypt, South Asia and Greece, but Tikal’s version was probably superior. Zeolite is used to purify water today because its pores are well sized to filter out microbes such as cyanobacteria, and its ions bind to heavy metals.
The Aztecs and Incas transported water to their cities from clean springs, but the landscape in which many Maya lived made this unviable. Instead, the Maya built thousands of reservoirs – Tikal alone had five – only a few of which have been excavated. Consequently, we do not know how widespread zeolite use was.
The volcanoes of the region gave the Maya these minerals, but they also left high concentrations of mercury in the area. Human and natural activity washed this into water supplies, where it polluted Tikal’s other reservoirs and may have contributed to the city's collapse, the team previously showed, while the zeolites gave Corriental protection.
PinGGG!.....................
“Light-Years” - groan.
Ancient aliens transferred technology to the Mayans. I’m a believer in the ancient alien explanation for the technical wonders built by primitive civilizations.
Light years, I always regarded that as, you know, kind of a distance in space. These clever reporters know there’s a thing, spacetime. I’m sure that’s what was meant.
Anyway, I bet Mayans knew cuz they were so smart!
I was in Cancun at Chicheniza on 12/21/2012 at 11:11 and — NOTHING! I wanted to be at Ground Zero when the End came.
I wanted my money back but who is there to ask?
(Actually, it was crowded but pretty funny. A bunch of overaged hippies were playing “ring around the rosie” around the Great Pyramid, then would all fall down, then start again.)
Right!
I like how the Nat Geo and others make Maya out to be SO advanced and superior to our culture.
I mean these guys were doing human, and blood sacrifice along with some other REAL WEIRD and brutal things, all WHILE purifying their f’n drinking water! It was all being done centuries AFTER the birth of Christ... so.... how ‘advanced’ were they?
Thanks Red Badger.
Montezuma’s revenge.
should have been inventing gun powder. too busy ripping peoples hearts out I guess.
And all these years later they are still bottling Topo Chicio
They weren’t doing anything weirder or more brutal than Europeans. Europeans burned an associate of Martin Luther at the stake merely for a difference of opinion on a theological matter.
Administering a flogging so serious the victim could die from the wounds was common in colonial America.
Then there is keelhauling... for those in the Navy.
Humanity is pretty rotten throughout the world; no one has a monopoly on evil, no one can really brag about being above it.
The West purified our water by making beer out of it. Breakfast beer a very low ABV and the ABV rose during the day.
So they essentially had Britta water and we had beer. Who exactly got the better end of that deal?
They filtered it through human skulls.
(They were in another galaxy at that time)
Advanced astronomy and water filtration. Very impressive.
Yep nowhere in the Americas was a wheel to be found.
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