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.
They’re not comparing the Maya to our culture, they’re comparing them to the other ancient cultures of the world. Many of the Mayan finds are new because of the use of Lidar and geophysics. It wasn’t known until recently just how extensive and ancient the Mayan civilization was.
As somebody pointed out, brutality was pretty common in the ancient world on every continent. Human sacrifice was practiced in Europe and Asia. Other forms of killing were common. Nobody says the ancient Romans weren’t a great civilization because they commonly murdered babies.
Those Native Americans were no more brutal than a lot of the rulers of Europe at the time-various methods of torturing political prisoners and criminals alike to death, burning supposed witches, having rebels hanged, drawn and quartered-doesn’t sound civilized to me-the world was a more savage place then-my ancestors left Spain for what is now Mexico starting in the 16th century, so they obviously thought it was safer to take their chances living in a wilderness around people who dispatched enemies by ripping out their hearts and practiced other forms of blood sacrifice than living in Spain where they could be imprisoned and slowly tortured to death because some noble wanted to shut them up just for the hell of it. My DNA says some of my ancestors bred with those savages, too-so...
Now I will go sharpen my obsidian knife and pick out a Karen from the nearest town-dia de los muertos is only a few days away...
nowhere in the Americas was a wheel to be found.
That is because nowhere in the Americas was a large beast of burden-like a donkey or horse-to be found to pull a wheeled cart until the Spaniards brought them on the ships in the 1500’s...
Hey, they had find a way to filter all that human blood out of the water, didn’t they?
The alcoholic drink they made from yucca and other plants required clean water, too-pre-Columbian white lightnin’...
Tequila!....................
“Then there is keelhauling... for those in the Navy.”
There are no records of anyone being keel hauled in either the Continental or the United States Navy. Now, 50 lashes with the cat was another story.
Did the Mayans have the wheel?
I remember that from Ed Sullivan. Wait, what? ;^).
How in the world did they know how to do this?
Accidental discovery, or possibly, they didn't know that it was working, they just thought the rocks were pretty.
It was Ancient Alien welfare
The Mayans weren’t conquered by anyone but themselves. Poor land management was their down fall. They were gone as a civilization befor the Spanish arrived.
Thank you! So many of the discoveries in history that are commonplace good sense appear to have been accidental-everything from sanitation to fermentation-I like your theory-put the pretty rocks in the water-then discover they make the water safe to drink = “magic” stones you add to water to make it okay to drink...
I lived with the Mayans every winter for ten years up until last year. I lived in a small village where bilingual meant Spanish and Mayan. I was the only gringo in the small village of about 500 families. It was an hours drive inland from Tulum. Once a month I had to travel to Tulum so I could speak English with others. They are the most happy people and they have nothing, they are subsistence farmers. They are completely exploited by the oligarchy as slave labor to the resorts on the Riviera Maya. I lived in the Zona Maya. I will never rfeturn, and I miss them so much.
Yes, we know archeology is never lacking for praise of the Maya as a wonderful and “high” culture, which of course was run on rewards and punishments of a religio-political system built on blood and murder of sacrificial victims.
Sounds like something that would be interesting to try as a modern application. :^)
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