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.
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.Yeah, and the Hindus "discovered" the cleansing properties of the most oxygenated of the world's major rivers, the Ganges, and built its anti-bacterial properties into an entire religion.
not to mention large-scale slavery.
Although there are several hundred volcanoes in China/Mongolia/Tibet, Europeans wouldn’t know much about volcanic rock for filtering because they were exposed to so few volcanos. Same for the eastern seaboard of the USA. OTOH, California, home to 20 volcanos, New Mexico with 12, Arizona with 6 are included in the about 170 volcanoes in 12 American states active in the past 12,000 years. Guatamala with 35 volcanoes, 15 in Costa Rica, 21 in Nicaragua, 20 in El Salvador, and 45 or so in Mexico gave those living on the western seaboard much more exposure to and experience with volcanic tuff.
Did the Mayans get the specifics of the minerals or did they just notice that water that flowed from or over the rock-sponge tuff was clear of algae and tasted better? The tuff would have to be constantly dredged out and replenished tho, for the same reasons our home water filters need replacing - the pores clog over time. And if the clogged material remained in place, what clogged it would just leach out, now in a concentrated form. So what did they do with the dredged material?
https://www.tripsavvy.com/list-of-central-america-volcanoes-1491002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_China
There are still Maya there today. The Spanish never did fully conquer them.
Where the Maya live today, even Mexicans are not welcome and sometimes ‘disappear’..................
..... a lot like DC..................
“...Nobody says the ancient Romans weren’t a great civilization because they commonly murdered babies...”
Also true.
But my further point is that Christianity was a sea change in western culture.
The Old Testament was about justice... everyone got that... even the Romans....
But the New Testament was about ‘mercy’ and brought the idea of compassion into the forefront of theology and western belief systems.... it DID change the world. From that point forward, it viewed ritual death and sacrifice as, not only brutal (as they always had been) and the conduct of very backward barbarians.... but also sinful.
‘Romans’ for example... understood brutality for what it was and used it constantly to subdue and coerce people. So, though they understood their brutality and torture were beastly practices and efficient ‘tools’... they didn’t regard brutality as a sin. ‘Sin’ for Pre Christian people was more like bad form than actual moral failure.
Christianity made murder and brutality an individual and societal failure to be seen as the lowest and worst of human conduct. With Christianity, murder and brutality were never again seen in the same way...in western culture.
Maybe, but just for the record, when Europeans arrived to colonize North America... they were horrified at the way native Americans treated prisoners they captured in their tribal conflicts.
The noble savage was not totally ‘noble’.
Go Maya!
Necessity is the mother of invention to coin a phrase
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.