Painted altar in Maya city of Tikal reveals aftermath of ancient coup
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
Perhaps someone can do a little ultrasonic "radar" investigation of the altar and figure out if there might be something of interest in there, or maybe find it's just filled with dirt.
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I have been very interested in the Maya civilization for many years and have visited many of their ancient cities. Tikal is one of the most spectacular. Our guide spoke of their trading relationship with Teotihuacan, but nothing about this alter. Of course the Teotihuacan city near Mexico City is impressive as well. Thanks for the interesting article.
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Really excellent storytelling. Easy to follow and understand why this is such a big find.
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I was just going to mention sonar or penetrating radar to see if there's anything inside. If I were 18 again I think I would have pivoted towards learning and pioneering efforts for remote sensing archeology that doesn't disturb artifacts too fragile to move.
A team has done remarkable work recently on building a current 3d model of the Titanic, for example, not to mention the efforts to unroll ultra fragile manuscripts without touching them.
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This was such an interesting read! Raises so many questions; how did the coup take place, what happened to the residents, why the abrupt switch - was it a case of fitting in or fitting out? - why the infill...loved this article.
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After the puppets were ousted, the locals didn't smash everything left behind? That's impressive.
Also impressive is they had an entire reservoir of madeira.
Also impressive is they had an entire reservoir of madeira.
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Tikal was my wife and I's first real archaeological vacation. We had gone to central Belize (Cayo) and then spent 2 days at a resort on Lake Flores in Guatemala. Entering Tikal was one of those "wow" moments you sometimes get when traveling. I had read up on the Maya quite a bit. The books that were the best were authored by Linda Schele with David Freidel or Peter Mathews. The Teotihuacano influence in the region was newly discovered at the time (early 1990's). The archaeology might be a bit dated but the writing style is accessible. According to those books prior to the Teotihuacano influence the polities would have ritualized battles to capture prisoners for sacrifice but the invasion and usurpation of neighbor territories was not practiced.
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FTA: “The Maya regularly buried buildings and rebuilt on top of them,”
The original and an actual pyramid scheme.
The original and an actual pyramid scheme.
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It’s crazy how much was lost about the American civilizations. In Europe you visit sites and they know just about everything, there’s ancient texts and what not. You go to Central America and it’s like “well we think such and such”, or “we assume this or that”. The new world explorers did their worst to get rid of all the history.
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I'm confused as to why the rendering has the altar with sloped sides while the picture shows it to have vertical sides. Why misrepresent the shape?
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This is the case at many of the late Puebloan sites in the Southwest, too. Their descendants are incredibly hard-bitten and generally don't tell white archaeologists shit, but I know a few archaeologists who have friends and contacts among the Pueblos. And there are certain sites where they've been told, yeah, we don't go there, you shouldn't either, too much bad shit. No context given, but there are some sites they treat like exclusion zones. Some of them have indications of atrocities, like burned kivas filled with bones, others seem to be more of a....spiritual hazard?
This is a cool article. Teotehuacanos got around; they would easily have traveled to the Yucatan, the Southwest, deep into what is now Texas and the South. The Darien Gap prevented them from getting into South America, but the Americas were as culturally vital and connected as Europe or China. There were robust trade networks and cultural exchange from Mesoamerica all the way up to what is now Utah and Colorado - macaw remains, beads, shells, and other cultural materials that originated in southern Mexico and the Yucatan are everywhere in the Southwest. Hopi runners ranged as far as the Sea of Cortez. There are mythological and archaeological indications that the Chaco Canyon phenomenon was fueled by the rise of a religious movement that may have been inspired by Tlaloc and related Mesoamerican water deities.
It is insufficiently appreciated that the Americas weren't just a bunch of tribes in a state of nature. I feel like my early history education was basically like "a bunch of tribes who ate buffalo and occasionally scratched things on rocks here, Aztecs here, Maya here, Inka there, where did they go you ask, well, it's a mystery, anyway, Plymouth Rock!" and it really did a disservice to the fact that pre-contact America had a hell of a lot of people, and their cultures were as rich and alive as any in Europe.
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Generally speaking, across most civilizations, a coup d'etat means a new elite, but things may not change as much for the proles.
Even after the Spanish conquest, plenty of local communities continued speaking nahuatl and other indigenous languages, and native religious traditions existed alongside and eventually syncretized with Catholicism.
Rural Russia over the centuries was a similar phenomenon, where generations of French, English, and Scandinavian aristocrats did little to change the rustic villages where people continued speaking Russian and leaving out bread for the domovoi even as the Czar spoke French and was baptized.
For that matter, consider Appalachia here in the USA and tell me that the people there are likely to change their behavior based on literally anything some lowland lordling tells them.
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Historical European literacy rates were...it was kinda the rural hinterland of Eurasia up until the Renaissance, is what I'm trying to say.
I would actually assume that there is a lot of European history that has been lost over the ages. Especially given how much of Europe's "Renaissance" was primarily introduced from the Arab world.
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Also there aren't surviving written records for central/South America from 500+ BCE? Not everything is the fault of wipepo.
I mean plenty of atrocity is, but sometimes the evidence is just scant and archeological in the first place.
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Things like this are a reason that we know so little. Spanish priests purposely destroyed contemporary texts.
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/burning-the-maya-books-the-1562-tragedy-at-mani/
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Albino_Boo
Ars Praefectus
Not true at all. There's only secure dating and written records for the South East corner of Europe for around 2500 years. There's only limted knowledge of the what happened outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire in Europe and that's because what the Romans wrote about their neighbours. Even well documented period like the Roman empire has huge blanks. The entire Roman 9th legion disappeared from the records around 120. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west written records end and only shadowy existence of entire kingdoms are known. The fact the kingdom of Lindsey existed is the only thing is known. The when the veil was lifted on Anglo-Saxon England the documentation is very sparse and partisan. The Viking Kings of East Anglia are only known by the their names on coins. There's no written records that have survived from Lithuania from before the 1400s.
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There's still a lot we don't know about ancient Europe. Dodecahedrons, for example.
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much like current times, the merchants were very active carrying things for a thousand miles. Humans have always been walkers and migrants.
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It's important to appreciate how thin the thread of memory and history truly are. History isn't written by the victors, but by the people who write things down. If it's never recorded, it slips from memory shockingly fast (oral histories count as "recorded" in my book).
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The altar is tapered. That one photo just doesn’t show it, for whatever trick of perspective. There are direct photos of each side in the paper that show the tapering.
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It doesn't seem distorted, but it's a possibility. Looking at the article, it's not even easy to tell as their images are overly cropped in a sloped manner. It's actually funny how this isn't obvious one way or the other.
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It is obvious. The altar is tapered. All the diagrams and photos show a taper except for one photo that could easily be a trick of perspective or lens distortion. For it to not be tapered, one would have to imagine that one photo is the only one that shows the actual geometry, while photos taken directly of each side are somehow distorted and a bunch of archaeologists can’t measure a right angle in person.
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Well, there were plenty of codices and written records, they just got destroyed. By the wypipo. In general, in this arena of history, you don’t have to worry too hard about heaping an unfair level of blame on the Europeans.
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Ph
Photographer would have been well advised to use a perspective correcting lens, or software.It is obvious. The altar is tapered. All the diagrams and photos show a taper except for one photo that could easily be a trick of perspective or lens distortion. For it to not be tapered, one would have to imagine that one photo is the only one that shows the actual geometry, while photos taken directly of each side are somehow distorted and a bunch of archaeologists can’t measure a right angle in person.
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I'd guess the photograph is from the photogrammetry survey, already ortho‑corrected...
From the paper:
… application of photogrammetry, and processing of the high-resolution orthomosaic images ...
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Antiquity, 2017? Shouldn't that be 2025 since this article was just recently published?
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Although it's worth pointing out that even European history has a lot of gaps or distortions. In addition to what other posters already pointed out, we must keep in mind that a lot of knowledge - or rather how it was passed on - was at a time almost monopolized by the Church, as many if not most of those ancient texts were transcribed by monks.
This has tremendous potential for introducing biases when an event didn't conform to the preferred narrative/beliefs at the time.
On the other hand, I guess that's just a flaw mankind's preservation of history had been saddled with for eons. At least the evolution of research methods and better awareness of our biases let us shine ever better lights on our past ("wait, you're saying these bones actually belonged to a woman?"), and every now and then we even keep discovering new texts that contain interesting new details.
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I looked at their orthomosaic images. Every one of them was overly cropped as if they only cared about the art in the center.
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Fantastic post, Snark218! I feel like you've highlighted something that's been bugging me for ages about popular understanding of pre-Columbian America.
The trade networks you mentioned were absolutely fascinating. We tend to think of ancient peoples as being somewhat isolated or limited in their travel range, but the archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. These weren't just occasional chance encounters - we're talking about systematic, established exchange networks that facilitated the spread of both goods and ideas across thousands of miles.
Your comments about education are spot-on. My history textbooks basically portrayed pre-contact America as a mostly empty wilderness with a few scattered villages. The reality - that the Americas were home to advanced civilizations with monumental architecture, complex religious systems, sophisticated agricultural techniques, and extensive trade networks - got maybe a paragraph or two.
It's also worth noting how Eurocentric perspectives shaped archaeology itself. For a long time, archaeologists refused to believe that indigenous Americans could have built the impressive structures they encountered. There were all sorts of bizarre theories about lost civilizations, ancient Egyptians, or extraterrestrials having built these sites because surely the "primitive natives" couldn't have managed it. It's taken decades to undo some of that damage.
Have you read Charles Mann's "1491"? It does a pretty good job of synthesizing the more recent archaeological understanding of pre-Columbian America. The population estimates he discusses are mind-blowing - some regions may have been more densely populated before contact than they were centuries after European arrival.
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I have indeed read 1491, and that was in a lot of ways the start of a dive down a rabbit hole - archaeology has long been a personal interest of mine, but then it became a professional one too, and a mentor of mine has done a ton of work at Clovis and pre-Clovis sites.
And yes, once you're down that rabbit hole, it's astounding what you come across. The "empty wilderness with a few tribes scattered about, using everything from the bison" model is, I believe, something we cling to because the reality of European contact induces a lot of cognitive dissonance. It is easier to believe we just sort of stepped in to a largely unpopulated and underutilized area and maybe did a few regrettable things than to square up to the fact that, through active and passive means, Europeans caused a staggering genocide and the collapse of largely coequal and advanced cultures with a valid and original claim to the Americas.
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Wasn't basically the whole of South American coast connected in one very long trade network for quite a time? With roads and the empire's food stashes (logistics! Clausewitz! drink a shot!) all along it for a few hundred years or more? Basically the logistics equivalent of the Roman empire.
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