> The Maya Civilization, from Central America, was one of the most advanced ancient civilizations
The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.
(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)
The Maya are still around, but the Maya civilization's institutions were all destroyed. And the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books [1] they could find and burning them. So a lot of knowledge was lost.
For this reason, one of the most fascinating historical relics to me are the Incan Quipu [0]. Not only because their logic appears to be 'proto-computational' (at the very least a very complex system of encoding numeric and narrative information through sequences of knots that were also used directly for calculations), but since, neither in the form of a valuable material like gold nor obviously a book to be destroyed, a large enough number survived to this day. There are few traces of the past we know exist that might contain everything from astronomical calculations to old social-institutional histories.
They're comparable in that sense to the Heculaneum manuscripts, which researchers have lately made great progress on with deep learning [1]. I hope an equivalent initiative someday starts on the Quipu.
> narrative information through sequences of knots
It's unlikely any complex narratives could be encoded there, though.
Possibly a bit like the e.g. the Mycenaean Linear B script. Which is fully decoded and well understood. But despite having a full fledged writing system they mainly used it for accounting and such. They can tell us about how many goats, sheep and various good they had they had but don't tell as much about the society or history as such.
Heculaneum manuscripts are kind of the opposite from the Quipu in the sense that we have zero issues understanding the actual text/symbols just extracting them from the destroyed scrolls is rather complicated.
Minoan tablets are maybe a bit closer and little progress has been made there (then again we are fully capable of reading the script just have no clue about the language it was written in).
My immediate observation when I first learned of the Quipu and its use: nodes and edges.
Potentially a graph to be completed by the owner via verbal communication/interpretation as a supplement to the material instrument; a single source of information that could be interpreted differently depending on the societal role and vocation of the owner.
They hunted down all of the libraries, collected all of the books inside, and burned them in massive bonfires, accidentally saving a total of like 3 books which had already been shipped back to Europe as trophies. I think there are also some remaining fragments of a few others. One Spaniard wrote about it:
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
The colonization of the new world was largely an immunological accident.
When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.
The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
Just answer the question instead of resorting to whataboutism. Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?
> Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?
"The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).
Mao is bad because he delayed the growth that China was capable of achieving and did achieve after Deng Xiaoping. 40 years after the communist revolution in 1990, China was still as poor as India per capita. In the 35 years since then, China became five times richer per capita than India. If the Chinese republicans had maintained power continuously since 1912, there's a good chance that China would be as developed as South Korea or Japan today.
It's valid to ask a similar question about the Americas. What would life be like for people today? It's probable that the Aztecs or their descendants would have taken over the Americans, since they were by far the most technologically superior. Would they have evolved into a prosperous industrialized society today?
Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement ....
After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.
European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?
Now imagine that happening once per generation for 3 or 4 generations in a row, followed by / contemporary with getting invaded by an alien army with significantly superior weapons and ships whose goal was total domination and enslavement / elimination.
So the general theory is that if you kill half of the population the descendants will be better off? What's the mechanism, and what happens if you follow that to its conclusion?
The Meso-American civilizations routinely engaged in human sacrifice. Tens of thousands of people per year were murdered. These weren't peaceful monks quietly engaging in scholarly pursuits. Even if you don't personally drag victims to the top of the pyramid and cut their heads off or hearts out, if you stand around and watch, you're part of the problem. I'd be interested in how you compare the details of what pre and post colonization looks like and why you weigh post colonization as evil.
Because it might not have been the “Spanish”, but certain people who ruined history. So it’s not fair to blame a whole country for the actions of a few.
It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
The initial conquests and the immediate atrocities that followed them (arguably the worst period) were mainly quasi private enterprises. The state even tried to reign them in to some extent due to significant social/religious pressure at home. Of course that was largely superficial and hardly enforced after boatloads of silver and gold started arriving.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated. The local church was dominated by the notorious Inquisition.
We're not talking here about some random peasants living somewhere in the Iberian peninsula, nor about the Spanish people of 2025, but about the genocidal organization in control in the 16th century.
> While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil
Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
At that time the Spanish crown and church weren't doing "human sacrifice" (as defined by themselves).... they were just torturing people to death and doing ritualistic public executions (e.g. by burning alive) of those considered to be non-believers, heretics, or enemies of the state.
On the other side of the coin, it's not like the "average person living in Maya kingdoms" (i.e. some peasant farmer just trying to make a living in a feudal society) was responsible for their own political elites' ritual execution of captured enemies.
> had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain,
Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.
Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.
In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".
Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.
e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.
> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
Why do people always ignore what happened before a few hundred years before? The Moors invaded Spain and were advancing into Europe and moved into what is modern day France. It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves in what is now modern day Spain.
Well... I was talking about about what was happening a few centuries ago.
Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
> It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves
> Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
The Reconquista led to the Inquisition. The Reconquista started 711 and ended in 1492. How could it not be relevant?
> The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated.
That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1]
So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.
For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.
I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything.
I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants.
the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.
I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
I understand it's a joke and it is partially true but also there are still direct descendants of Central and South America original peoples, and also many Spanish families that exploited the conquered lands came back to the "mother land" and kept their families there.
The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount of conflict and intrigue between the two groups.
Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes.
That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find.
The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
I would say because it highlights that even back then there was the same kind of tension as today between those who believe they are doing right, those who also believe they are doing right, and right never ending up being done in the end. It’s like ideological, metaphysical, and psychological border disputes and skirmishes, i.e., human nature.
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.
I'm guessing that his 1st person description of the human sacrifices carried out by the Mayan and establishing a connection between those and the need to erase the culture that enabled them and that he - wrongly or not, we can't know anymore - saw as enabled by those books had some weight there...
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
It's complicated in the sense that there were both people trying to burn and destroy anything and those trying to preserve the books and the language doing their own stuff in parallel.
I guess that is implied since these things always happen this way, its not like book burners are just having a nice campfire and the books they dislike just happen to be close by.
I was surprised to find out that there are still many indigenous groups with populations in the millions. My California public education made it seem like they were all pretty much wiped out save for those who survived to the various reservation systems.
My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.
Even in the US, the Indian Wars weren't finished until the 1890s. In fact, most of the big wars against the Native Americans took place after the American Civil War. One of the big faults I have with US history in the education system is that it tends to front-load the depiction of Native Americans in the Precolonial portion of history, with an echo in the Trail of Tears and forced migration in the 1830s, and largely edits them out of the history of the settling of the west, despite this process requiring a very violent dispossession of the existing inhabitants.
> most of the big wars against the Native Americans
As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.
It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."
Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."
[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."
> It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."
This is a wild jump to make. I'm not sure I can take your comment in good faith as being serious.
I had the benefit of being able to write that comment after seeing the other replies you wrote to sibling comments, and those comments reinforce the impression that you believe in the inaccurate stereotype of Indians as "noble savages."
Look up the american bison. The US government's official policy was to eliminate bison to eliminate Indians/First Peoples. Mountains of skulls. In under a decade, the bison population was pushed down from 30-60M to approximately 500 individuals.
Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....
Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.
If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.
you seem used to issuing commands. best of luck with that approach.
your cherry picked data points may be correct, but they are also misleading absent broader historical context. these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period), so your subsequent points about x/y/z impact although valid don't carry weight. imo data driven arguments trump emotional appeals. Trail of tears and similar are powerful and empathy inducing for sure, but don't change the facts around which my comment was based.
your presentation skews things to a false dichotomy of one group against another which is inaccurate and unproductive.
current politicians (left or right) in the US don't change history (and no I didn't bother reading your nytimes link...).
> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.
sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.
> these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period
this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better
Prior to western colonization of course the native people had conflicts, just not at the scale the colonizers could achieve. During the genocide of the natives some tribes used it as an excuse to kill their enemies, sometimes to curry favor with a technologically superior force, and sometimes just to kill their enemies. Some fought back against the invaders, with varying degrees of success. Most people just died.
None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.
> None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans
No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.
It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.
Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe.
I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.
There were plenty of regional wars among the native Americans. None of them resulted in widespread genocide and construction of concentration camps and reservations. In the initial Spanish 'not western colonization' nearly 8 million people died. By the 1900s there was nearly an 80% reduction in population and western populations were in possession of their resources.
Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory. What else do you call that?
> Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory.
The various tribes also engaged in near constant warfare with each other, defeating them, taking their territory, and making the rest slaves. Cortez was only able to defeat the Aztecs because he was able to enlist the aid of the non-Aztec tribes, who hated the Aztecs because of the depredations of Aztecs against them.
The Inca empire was only recently formed before the Spanish arrived.
In North America, the Commanche carved out an empire in the south at the expense of the tribes that had been living there. See "Empire of the Summer Moon":
None of what you said refutes my first point.
All your points are valid, just missing broader context. 'Native American' history didn't begin when Europeans arrived.
Seems to all boil down to, people A did X bad things to people B thus people A are responsible for demise of people B, while ignoring everything else that occurred with people A - who by the way are only viewed as A by people B.
This is also a difference in outcomes between traditional colonialism (where indigenous people were viewed as a source of labor) and settler colonialism (where indigenous people are viewed simply as "in the way"). That's not to say that traditional colonialism is in any way acceptable, however.
Relatively (adjusted by area and duration) not that many people from Spain moved to the Americas between 1500 and ~1800, especially compared to the British colonies in North America.
So they couldn't murder/expel (unlike the British/American colonists) most of the native population (especially considering that North America was much less densely inhabited to begin with) if they wanted someone to work in the mines and plantation (again relatively not that many slaves were imported to the mainland colonies as well).
France was similar (except they struggled even more with getting enough people to move to the colonies).
They also mainly continued to be loyal to the Spanish crown after Argentina and Chile went through their independence, and carried out the final pacification of the Mapuche territories in the 19th century. By then only a very small part of the population had not mingled with Europeans.
Was always weird to me how "the French and Indian War" had Indian involvement almost over emphasized to pretend like it wasn't the extension of a European war...
While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.
One of my first realizations of slant put on history.
My comment wasn't intended as a "correction", just adding that historians seem to refer to this war by a different name these days. At least in the textbooks I learned from, it was discussed in the context of the Seven Years War.
The French and Indian war began 2 years before the war in Europe. So in a way it was the other way around (of course there were much more important factors than what was effectively an ongoing proxy war in faraway colonies)
That is not that simple. They never invented the wheel, the Maya calendar cycled over 5128, which is not really convenient, numeric system was also rather uncomfortable, strange numerals working in 19-base system (but they have invented zero). In addition to that they've invented sadistic religion with human sacrifices and their culture was very aggressive, what finally put Maya civilization to an end, as everyone around happily joined European conquerors to get rid of Mayans ASAP.
> In addition to that they've invented sadistic religion with human sacrifices and their culture was very aggressive, what finally put Maya civilization to an end, as everyone around happily joined European conquerors to get rid of Mayans ASAP
That was the Aztec, an entirely different culture from the Mayans. The Mayan Kingdoms lasted until 1697.
The origins of the 260 day ritual year are not known for certain, but there are a couple of hypotheses:
1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)
2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.
3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.
It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.
(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)
This reminds me a bit of how the Islamic calendar year is 355 days and doesn't have intercalation for religious reasons (many calendars insert extra months now and then to realign with the year, but the Islamic calendar does not). This is why Ramadan always seems to be at different times of year when you hear about it.
> And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos.
Any reason number 13, of all numbers, has been so significant in different parts of the world, sometimes associated with completely opposite meanings (e.g., between Jews and Persians/Europeans)?
generally, 7 and 13 get a lot of attention because a)they are prime b)1/7 and 1/13 have long period when written as decimal fraction - so you keep stumbling in your calculations every time you encounter them
1/7 in base 20 takes surprisingly short form of 0.(1h) (h is 17), unlike 1/9 or 1/11 - so I wonder if there's Mayan prejudice on those instead
The sad thing is that for all their advanced ways of the time, they succumbed to the same thing we are experiencing now... being too comfortable to fix what's broken.
The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?
I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.
(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)
I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.
That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.
If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.
Estimates vary wildly on what percentage of the natives died from european diseases. There's just too little information on pre-Columbian populations.
For comparison, estimates of the deaths from the Black Plague in Europe are 30% to 60%. It's a huge error bar, despite having a lot of written records that survived.
Sounds like the opposite no? Since we are going through population collapse in a time of abundance.
Does make me wonder what the political dynamics were at the time, whether some could see problems but weren't in power to change things. Or maybe they couldn't understand or figure out solutions to the problems.
What I'd give to be a multilingual fly on the wall throughout history.
> The Maya Civilization, from Central America, was one of the most advanced ancient civilizations
The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.
(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)
The Maya are still around, but the Maya civilization's institutions were all destroyed. And the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books [1] they could find and burning them. So a lot of knowledge was lost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
For this reason, one of the most fascinating historical relics to me are the Incan Quipu [0]. Not only because their logic appears to be 'proto-computational' (at the very least a very complex system of encoding numeric and narrative information through sequences of knots that were also used directly for calculations), but since, neither in the form of a valuable material like gold nor obviously a book to be destroyed, a large enough number survived to this day. There are few traces of the past we know exist that might contain everything from astronomical calculations to old social-institutional histories.
They're comparable in that sense to the Heculaneum manuscripts, which researchers have lately made great progress on with deep learning [1]. I hope an equivalent initiative someday starts on the Quipu.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu [1] https://www2.cs.uky.edu/dri/herculaneum-papyrus-scrolls/
> narrative information through sequences of knots
It's unlikely any complex narratives could be encoded there, though.
Possibly a bit like the e.g. the Mycenaean Linear B script. Which is fully decoded and well understood. But despite having a full fledged writing system they mainly used it for accounting and such. They can tell us about how many goats, sheep and various good they had they had but don't tell as much about the society or history as such.
Heculaneum manuscripts are kind of the opposite from the Quipu in the sense that we have zero issues understanding the actual text/symbols just extracting them from the destroyed scrolls is rather complicated.
Minoan tablets are maybe a bit closer and little progress has been made there (then again we are fully capable of reading the script just have no clue about the language it was written in).
My immediate observation when I first learned of the Quipu and its use: nodes and edges.
Potentially a graph to be completed by the owner via verbal communication/interpretation as a supplement to the material instrument; a single source of information that could be interpreted differently depending on the societal role and vocation of the owner.
The link doesn't mention "seeking out" those books, in fact it mentions catholic priests both burning and lamenting the burn.
They hunted down all of the libraries, collected all of the books inside, and burned them in massive bonfires, accidentally saving a total of like 3 books which had already been shipped back to Europe as trophies. I think there are also some remaining fragments of a few others. One Spaniard wrote about it:
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
It is worth noting that the friar who organized this book burning was recalled to Spain to stand trial on account of his actions.
It is also worth noting that he was absolved of all crimes and eventually consecrated as a bishop.
Why is that worth noting?
Because it's not what most people expect.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
Was Spanish colonization “evil?” What would Latin America have been like today in the counterfactual scenario?
> Was Spanish colonization “evil?”
It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
The colonization of the new world was largely an immunological accident.
When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.
The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
How so? What would Latin America look like today in the counterfactual scenario where the Spanish didn’t colonize it?
Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
Just answer the question instead of resorting to whataboutism. Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?
> Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?
"The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).
Mao is bad because he delayed the growth that China was capable of achieving and did achieve after Deng Xiaoping. 40 years after the communist revolution in 1990, China was still as poor as India per capita. In the 35 years since then, China became five times richer per capita than India. If the Chinese republicans had maintained power continuously since 1912, there's a good chance that China would be as developed as South Korea or Japan today.
It's valid to ask a similar question about the Americas. What would life be like for people today? It's probable that the Aztecs or their descendants would have taken over the Americans, since they were by far the most technologically superior. Would they have evolved into a prosperous industrialized society today?
No, they are not better off.
I have provided as many facts for my argument as you have for yours.
Prove that without any colonization they would be worse off.
Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement ....
After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.
European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?
The Black Death killed approximately 30–60% of Europe's population between 1347 and 1353.
Now imagine that happening once per generation for 3 or 4 generations in a row, followed by / contemporary with getting invaded by an alien army with significantly superior weapons and ships whose goal was total domination and enslavement / elimination.
Exactly. Your average European alive today likely is better off because half their ancestors died of the plague.
So the general theory is that if you kill half of the population the descendants will be better off? What's the mechanism, and what happens if you follow that to its conclusion?
no, they're not, this whole line of thought is explicitly white supremacist. shame on you
> How so?
Just speaking personally I have a pretty dim view of genocide and slavery.
The Meso-American civilizations routinely engaged in human sacrifice. Tens of thousands of people per year were murdered. These weren't peaceful monks quietly engaging in scholarly pursuits. Even if you don't personally drag victims to the top of the pyramid and cut their heads off or hearts out, if you stand around and watch, you're part of the problem. I'd be interested in how you compare the details of what pre and post colonization looks like and why you weigh post colonization as evil.
Witch hunts in Europe and, to lesser extent, in colonized parts of America weren't that different.
Nobody can know, but it is hard to believe it could be any worse than it already is, and so most scenarios they would probably be better off.
I suppose it depends on whether or not you view genocide and forced religious conversion as evil.
We truly have no clue, nor could we pretend to infer an answer to this. Anyone who pretends otherwise needs to get off their high horse.
Because it might not have been the “Spanish”, but certain people who ruined history. So it’s not fair to blame a whole country for the actions of a few.
Duh. But not all Romans!
It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
The initial conquests and the immediate atrocities that followed them (arguably the worst period) were mainly quasi private enterprises. The state even tried to reign them in to some extent due to significant social/religious pressure at home. Of course that was largely superficial and hardly enforced after boatloads of silver and gold started arriving.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
It's really not sane to do so, today.
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated. The local church was dominated by the notorious Inquisition.
We're not talking here about some random peasants living somewhere in the Iberian peninsula, nor about the Spanish people of 2025, but about the genocidal organization in control in the 16th century.
> While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil
Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
At that time the Spanish crown and church weren't doing "human sacrifice" (as defined by themselves).... they were just torturing people to death and doing ritualistic public executions (e.g. by burning alive) of those considered to be non-believers, heretics, or enemies of the state.
On the other side of the coin, it's not like the "average person living in Maya kingdoms" (i.e. some peasant farmer just trying to make a living in a feudal society) was responsible for their own political elites' ritual execution of captured enemies.
> had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain,
Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.
Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.
In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".
Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.
e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.
> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
Why do people always ignore what happened before a few hundred years before? The Moors invaded Spain and were advancing into Europe and moved into what is modern day France. It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves in what is now modern day Spain.
Well... I was talking about about what was happening a few centuries ago.
Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
> It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves
Seems tangential?
> Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
The Reconquista led to the Inquisition. The Reconquista started 711 and ended in 1492. How could it not be relevant?
> The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated.
That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1]
So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.
For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...
I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything. I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants.
the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.
I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
You guys remind me of the old joke:
A Mexican goes to Spain, accosts the first Spaniard he sees, and lays into him: “I demand an apology, sir - your ancestors pillaged my country!”
The Spaniard blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”
I understand it's a joke and it is partially true but also there are still direct descendants of Central and South America original peoples, and also many Spanish families that exploited the conquered lands came back to the "mother land" and kept their families there.
The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount of conflict and intrigue between the two groups.
Mmmmmm, Black Sails…
Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes.
That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find.
The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
I would say because it highlights that even back then there was the same kind of tension as today between those who believe they are doing right, those who also believe they are doing right, and right never ending up being done in the end. It’s like ideological, metaphysical, and psychological border disputes and skirmishes, i.e., human nature.
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.
If that is the case, why did the trial absolve him of all crimes and why did get consecrated as a bishop by the king of Spain?
I'm guessing that his 1st person description of the human sacrifices carried out by the Mayan and establishing a connection between those and the need to erase the culture that enabled them and that he - wrongly or not, we can't know anymore - saw as enabled by those books had some weight there...
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
Strange times, those, eh?
It's complicated in the sense that there were both people trying to burn and destroy anything and those trying to preserve the books and the language doing their own stuff in parallel.
I guess that is implied since these things always happen this way, its not like book burners are just having a nice campfire and the books they dislike just happen to be close by.
I was surprised to find out that there are still many indigenous groups with populations in the millions. My California public education made it seem like they were all pretty much wiped out save for those who survived to the various reservation systems.
My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.
Even in the US, the Indian Wars weren't finished until the 1890s. In fact, most of the big wars against the Native Americans took place after the American Civil War. One of the big faults I have with US history in the education system is that it tends to front-load the depiction of Native Americans in the Precolonial portion of history, with an echo in the Trail of Tears and forced migration in the 1830s, and largely edits them out of the history of the settling of the west, despite this process requiring a very violent dispossession of the existing inhabitants.
> most of the big wars against the Native Americans
As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.
It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."
Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."
[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."
> It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."
This is a wild jump to make. I'm not sure I can take your comment in good faith as being serious.
I had the benefit of being able to write that comment after seeing the other replies you wrote to sibling comments, and those comments reinforce the impression that you believe in the inaccurate stereotype of Indians as "noble savages."
Look up the american bison. The US government's official policy was to eliminate bison to eliminate Indians/First Peoples. Mountains of skulls. In under a decade, the bison population was pushed down from 30-60M to approximately 500 individuals.
Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....
Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.
If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.
you seem used to issuing commands. best of luck with that approach. your cherry picked data points may be correct, but they are also misleading absent broader historical context. these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period), so your subsequent points about x/y/z impact although valid don't carry weight. imo data driven arguments trump emotional appeals. Trail of tears and similar are powerful and empathy inducing for sure, but don't change the facts around which my comment was based. your presentation skews things to a false dichotomy of one group against another which is inaccurate and unproductive. current politicians (left or right) in the US don't change history (and no I didn't bother reading your nytimes link...).
> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.
sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.
> these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period
this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better
Genocide is bad even if the victims are imperfect human beings
Prior to western colonization of course the native people had conflicts, just not at the scale the colonizers could achieve. During the genocide of the natives some tribes used it as an excuse to kill their enemies, sometimes to curry favor with a technologically superior force, and sometimes just to kill their enemies. Some fought back against the invaders, with varying degrees of success. Most people just died.
None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.
> None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans
No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.
It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.
Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe. I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.
There were plenty of regional wars among the native Americans. None of them resulted in widespread genocide and construction of concentration camps and reservations. In the initial Spanish 'not western colonization' nearly 8 million people died. By the 1900s there was nearly an 80% reduction in population and western populations were in possession of their resources.
Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory. What else do you call that?
> Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory.
The various tribes also engaged in near constant warfare with each other, defeating them, taking their territory, and making the rest slaves. Cortez was only able to defeat the Aztecs because he was able to enlist the aid of the non-Aztec tribes, who hated the Aztecs because of the depredations of Aztecs against them.
The Inca empire was only recently formed before the Spanish arrived.
In North America, the Commanche carved out an empire in the south at the expense of the tribes that had been living there. See "Empire of the Summer Moon":
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
None of what you said refutes my first point. All your points are valid, just missing broader context. 'Native American' history didn't begin when Europeans arrived. Seems to all boil down to, people A did X bad things to people B thus people A are responsible for demise of people B, while ignoring everything else that occurred with people A - who by the way are only viewed as A by people B.
This is also a difference in outcomes between traditional colonialism (where indigenous people were viewed as a source of labor) and settler colonialism (where indigenous people are viewed simply as "in the way"). That's not to say that traditional colonialism is in any way acceptable, however.
Relatively (adjusted by area and duration) not that many people from Spain moved to the Americas between 1500 and ~1800, especially compared to the British colonies in North America.
So they couldn't murder/expel (unlike the British/American colonists) most of the native population (especially considering that North America was much less densely inhabited to begin with) if they wanted someone to work in the mines and plantation (again relatively not that many slaves were imported to the mainland colonies as well).
France was similar (except they struggled even more with getting enough people to move to the colonies).
The Mapuche even expanded their territorial control, in large part to their acquisition and mastery of Spanish horses.
They also mainly continued to be loyal to the Spanish crown after Argentina and Chile went through their independence, and carried out the final pacification of the Mapuche territories in the 19th century. By then only a very small part of the population had not mingled with Europeans.
The Commanche also held out until after the Civil War.
Was always weird to me how "the French and Indian War" had Indian involvement almost over emphasized to pretend like it wasn't the extension of a European war...
While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.
One of my first realizations of slant put on history.
It's more properly a campaign of the Seven Years War, which was almost a world war of its time.
>like it wasn't the extension of a European war...
My comment wasn't intended as a "correction", just adding that historians seem to refer to this war by a different name these days. At least in the textbooks I learned from, it was discussed in the context of the Seven Years War.
The French and Indian war began 2 years before the war in Europe. So in a way it was the other way around (of course there were much more important factors than what was effectively an ongoing proxy war in faraway colonies)
I've been in towns in Mexico where the kids ONLY speak a Mayan language. No Spanish or English.
I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.
That is not that simple. They never invented the wheel, the Maya calendar cycled over 5128, which is not really convenient, numeric system was also rather uncomfortable, strange numerals working in 19-base system (but they have invented zero). In addition to that they've invented sadistic religion with human sacrifices and their culture was very aggressive, what finally put Maya civilization to an end, as everyone around happily joined European conquerors to get rid of Mayans ASAP.
> In addition to that they've invented sadistic religion with human sacrifices and their culture was very aggressive, what finally put Maya civilization to an end, as everyone around happily joined European conquerors to get rid of Mayans ASAP
That was the Aztec, an entirely different culture from the Mayans. The Mayan Kingdoms lasted until 1697.
They used past historical data to make predictions without having the need for a helio-centric model?
How does one even come up with 260 day year?
Is the weather in the tropics so similar that year-on-year mismatch stops mattering?
The origins of the 260 day ritual year are not known for certain, but there are a couple of hypotheses:
1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)
2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.
3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.
It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.
(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)
This reminds me a bit of how the Islamic calendar year is 355 days and doesn't have intercalation for religious reasons (many calendars insert extra months now and then to realign with the year, but the Islamic calendar does not). This is why Ramadan always seems to be at different times of year when you hear about it.
> And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos.
Any reason number 13, of all numbers, has been so significant in different parts of the world, sometimes associated with completely opposite meanings (e.g., between Jews and Persians/Europeans)?
generally, 7 and 13 get a lot of attention because a)they are prime b)1/7 and 1/13 have long period when written as decimal fraction - so you keep stumbling in your calculations every time you encounter them
1/7 in base 20 takes surprisingly short form of 0.(1h) (h is 17), unlike 1/9 or 1/11 - so I wonder if there's Mayan prejudice on those instead
> And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos.
That's the explanation?
The sad thing is that for all their advanced ways of the time, they succumbed to the same thing we are experiencing now... being too comfortable to fix what's broken.
The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.
This should be upvoted. A lot. The downvotes are ill-informed.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?
I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.
(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)
I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.
That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.
If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.
The collapse of classical Maya civilization predated the arrival of the Spanish by around six centuries.
Estimates vary wildly on what percentage of the natives died from european diseases. There's just too little information on pre-Columbian populations.
For comparison, estimates of the deaths from the Black Plague in Europe are 30% to 60%. It's a huge error bar, despite having a lot of written records that survived.
*cenotes
Sounds like the opposite no? Since we are going through population collapse in a time of abundance. Does make me wonder what the political dynamics were at the time, whether some could see problems but weren't in power to change things. Or maybe they couldn't understand or figure out solutions to the problems. What I'd give to be a multilingual fly on the wall throughout history.
The original RDB!
Whenever I see these backwards-applied math models I think of the “wet streets cause rain” expression.