Video from 2018. The theory that Maya civilization collapsed due to drought-related causes is widespread, but if this new research is correct the collapse may not have occurred for that reason after all.
"A new study casts doubt on drought as the driver of ancient Mayan civilization collapse. There is no dispute that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated. Believing the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholars assume the droughts resulted in starvation." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant. The results of this analysis have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"'Even in the most extreme drought situation — and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred — 59 species of edible plants would still have persisted,' Santiago said."
"Palenque ... anciently known in the Itza Language as Lakamha (literally: 'Flat-Place-River'), was a Maya city state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins date from ca. 226 BC to ca. 799 AD.After its decline, it was overgrown by the jungle of cedar, mahogany, and sapodilla trees, but has since been excavated and restored." (Wikipedia)
"A prime example of a Mayan sanctuary of the classical period, Palenque was at its height between AD 500 and 700, when its influence extended throughout the basin of the Usumacinta River. The elegance and craftsmanship of the buildings, as well as the lightness of the sculpted reliefs with their Mayan mythological themes, attest to the creative genius of this civilization." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
"The first published account of this lost city was in 1567, from a Spaniard, Father Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada," according to National Geographic.
"Exploring near the Usumacinta River, located in the modern Mexican state of Chiapas, Lorenzo came upon its stone temples and plazas, originally decorated with blue- and red-painted stucco but by then long abandoned by the Maya who built it. Lorenzo gave the grand structure the name Palenque, a Spanish word meaning 'fortification.'
"500 years later, Palenque — one of the most visited archaeological sites in Mexico — is a modern wellspring from which researchers have drawn some of the most detailed information about Maya culture."
"For a long time, it was commonly held by Mayanist [sic] experts that the 'pacific' Maya of Central America and southern Mexico did not practice human sacrifice (1). However, as more images and glyphs have come to light and been translated, it appears that the Maya frequently practiced human sacrifice in religious and political contexts." Source: Thought Company.
"Sacrifices played a vital part in Maya ritualism. Animals such as iguanas, crocodiles, turtles, dogs, peccaries, jaguars, and turkeys were occasionally sacrificed, and ... these offerings involved either whole animals -- alive, freshly killed, or cooked -- or in some cases only their hearts. But the supreme sacrifice was human life itself, and all too frequently humans were consigned to be slaughtered in the course of elaborate rituals." -- Maya, the Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization, Charles Gallenkamp, Third Revised Edition, 1985, p. 109.
(1) "The prevalent theory on the ancient Maya at the beginning of the 20th century held on to the notion that they had a predominantly peaceful society, idealizing the indigenous culture much like a noble savage. This view [was based on] poorly documented analysis of iconography and the content of Maya script." Source: Wikipedia.
Comment: The myth of the Noble Savage living a peaceful life in harmony with nature and his neighbors has the distinction of being wrong in every case that I'm aware of. It may not be the worst idea ever conceived, but it's definitely one of the most inaccurate.
Salt flats and brine water, Yucatan. Video from 2011.
"Maya archaeologists have excavated salt kitchens where brine was boiled in clay pots over fires in pole and thatch buildings preserved in oxygen-free sediment below the sea floor in Belize. But where these salt workers lived has been elusive, leaving possible interpretations of daily or seasonal workers from the coast or even inland." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "The sources of salt are mainly along the coast, including salt flats on the Yucatan coast and brine-boiling along the coast of Belize, where it rains a lot." These workers apparently were part of an (seasonal?) industry which distributed salt to communities along the coast and perhaps into the interior, but archaeologists are still working to discover more about how the network operated.
I'm not sure how salt is harvested from a salt flat, but I suppose it's just a matter of separating the salt from all the other sediments. The next video shows how to make salt by boiling brine water using primitive tools.
During the years 250-900 AD, a chaotic period that saw the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe, an advanced civilization completely unknown to the Romans entered its golden age in the rain forests of MesoAmerica on the other side of the world, only to collapse mysteriously by the end of the millennium.
This was the classical civilization of the Maya. Their secrets would remain hidden in the jungles until Spanish conquistadors subjugated the Yucatan Peninsula in the 16th Century. Since then, the Mayan ruins have been explored and their hieroglyphs translated, revealing an enigmatic, bloody and sophisticated culture that may have been the most technologically advanced society on the planet at the time.
"More than 1,000 years before Europeans landed on the shores of the Americas, the Maya developed a science-based civilization in the almost total isolation of the tropical lands of the Yucatan Peninsula," according to James A. O'Kon, author of The Lost Secrets Of Maya Technology (New Page Books, 2012). "The mystery of the Maya and the origins of their advanced science and technology have always intrigued me and initiated my quest for answers to their riddles."
O'Kon is an interesting character, a professional engineer who "synergistically applied field exploration, research, forensic engineering and 3D virtual reconstruction of Maya projects to discover lost Maya technological achievements." He argues persuasively that the engineering and scientific feats of the Maya rivaled any of the accomplishments of the more well-known civilizations in the Mediterranean world.
The Maya developed a written language, mathematics (including the number zero), an elaborate astronomical system, huge cities that included some of the highest buildings ever constructed at the time, the blast furnace, water systems, underground reservoirs and an extensive network of paved roads, among other things, all without the benefit of metal tools.
This lack of metal tools means that the Maya are generally considered to be a Neolithic culture, but O'Kon disputes the current "three-age system" (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) popular with mainstream archaeology, precisely because the Maya clearly meet all of the criteria for an advanced civilization. He suggests calling them "technolithic," meaning "a technologically advanced culture that did not have metal tools," (p. 88) presenting evidence that the Maya compensated for their lack of metals by designing tools made of jadeite and obsidian.
The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology discusses subjects like the rise and fall of the classical Mayan civilization and their mathematics and astronomy, but its main focus is on their technology. O'Kon goes into considerable detail about the techniques they used in the manufacture of cement, multistory buildings, arches, vaults, water collection and storage systems, water filtration, roads, long-span bridges and things like Maya boat construction and the "man-powered tumpline," a "load-carrying mechanism that powered the Maya economy." (p. 274)
O'Kon sees the collapse of the Classical Period as a result of the breakdown of Maya technology in the face of radical environmental changes. He surveys the evidence that climatic conditions, especially prolonged drought and the effects of tropical volcanic eruptions, led to the abandonment of Maya cities which could no longer support their populations.
This is a fascinating and unique book, well-written and accessible to the general reader. I'd recommend it highly for anyone interested in one of the most exotic and spectacular civilizations in the ancient world.
The ancient Greek in this video sounds very sophisticated. The Viking language sounds almost as hard-ass as classical Latin, while ancient Egyptian is incredibly sinister. It reminds me of the voice Eleanor hears through the wall in The Haunting -- the classic 1963 film, not the execrable 1999 remake.
"From hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti to alcohol-infused enemas and psychoactive dried toad skins, the array of consciousness-altering substances that people in the early Americas used was wider than thought, a new report suggests." Source: Live Science.(2014)
Note: "At least 54 hallucinogenic mushrooms in the genus Psilocybe were used by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, and those mushroom species can still be found today in Mexico, according to the report. Psilocybin is the hallucinogenic compound in these mushrooms that produces mind-altering effects."
I've had some limited experience with magic mushrooms, but I always thought that the stuff about psychedelic toad skins was just a myth. It's for real, however, and the practice of licking toad skins (or taking the active ingredient in powdered form) to get high -- extremely high it sounds like -- has apparently become a fad in the United States:
"Comparable to the likes of ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and mescaline, a new mind-altering drug is hitting the US psychedelic scene – toad venom. The drug comes from a rare species of toad native to the Sonoran Desert, Bufo Alvarius, which produces a venom known as 5-MeO-DMT: an extremely potent natural psychedelic. 5-MeO-DMT is about four to six times more powerful [!] than its better-known cousin DMT (dimethyltryptamine)." Source: Addiction Center (2019). Don't ask me why the Addiction Center has articles on non-addictive psychedelics.
Hoyo Negro. Underwater cave. Yucatan. Video from 2016.
"The cenotes and underwater cave systems of the Yucatan Peninsula are emerging as one of the most promising frontiers for Paleoamerican studies. Following the end of the last glacial maximum, rising sea levels flooded the region’s maze of underground passageways and preserved a diverse Late Pleistocene fossil assemblage. A female human skeleton, named 'Naia[1],' found in spatial association with the remains of now-extinct fauna in the submerged subterranean pit of Hoyo Negro presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary Paleoamerican and paleoenvironmental research in Quintana Roo, Mexico. At 13,000-12,000 years BP, the young woman’s skeleton represents the oldest nearly complete individual yet found in the Americas." Source: University of California - San Diego.
[1] "Naia (designated as HN5/48) is the name given to a 12,000–13,000 year-old human skeleton of a teenage female that was found in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. Her bones were part of a 2007 discovery of a cache of animal bones in an underwater chamber called Hoyo Negro (Spanish for 'Black Hole') in the Sistema Sac Actun. At the time of Naia's death, the cave system was mostly dry, and she likely died falling into Hoyo Negro." (Wikipedia)
Video from 2014.
The Hoyo Negro cave "is part of the underwater labyrinth known as the Sac Actun cave system," according to Live Science (2014). "The cave is more than 100 feet (30 meters) deep, and divers get only an hour of bottom time on each dive, further complicating the exploration of the site."
Note: The scale of the Sac Actun system has only recently been discovered:
"In early 2007, the underwater cave Sistema Nohoch Nah Chich was connected into and subsumed into Sac Actun making it the longest surveyed underwater cave system in the world." (Wikipedia) "In 2018, a discovery of link between the Sac Actun system (reported to be 263 km long) and the Dos Ojos system in Tulum, Quintana Roo (84 km long) has been reported [next video]. The combined system is reported to be the world's largest underwater cave system known."
A number of very ancient human remains have been discovered in these flooded cave systems:
"Humans have been living in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula since at least the Late Pleistocene (126,000-11,700 years ago). Much of what we know about these earliest settlers of Mexico comes from nine well-preserved human skeletons found in the submerged caves and sinkholes near Tulum in Quintana Roo, Mexico." Source: Science Daily (2/5/2020).
The latest discovery is a possibly female skeleton around 10,000 years old. Designated Chan Hol 3, the skeleton "was likely a woman, approximately 30 years old at her time of death, [who] lived at least 9,900 years ago." Whoever she was, she appears to have been disfigured, possibly by an STD, and seems to have come to a bad end:
"The woman's skull had three distinct injuries, indicating that something hard hit her, breaking the skull bones. Her skull was also pitted with crater-like deformations, lesions that look like those caused by a bacterial relative of syphilis..." (Live Science)
The shape of the skull shows distinct differences from the skulls of other specimens from the same general period:
"The Tulúm skeletons indicate that either more than one group of people reached the American continent first, or that there was enough time for a small group of early settlers who lived isolated on the Yucatán peninsula to develop a different skull morphology. The early settlement history of America thus seems to be more complex and, moreover, to have occurred at an earlier time than previously assumed." (Science Daily)
"The 16th-century courtier John Dee, a scientific adviser to England's Queen Elizabeth I, was also deeply involved in magic and the occult, and he tried to commune with ghosts, using a so-called spirit mirror made of polished obsidian." Source: Live Science.
"Now, a new analysis of Dee's infamous mirror has finally traced its origins — not to the spirit world, but to the Aztec Empire.
"Obsidian mirrors such as Dee's were known from Aztec culture, but there were no records on his mirror's origins. However, geochemical analysis enabled researchers to link the mirror's obsidian — a type of volcanic glass — to Pachuca, Mexico, a popular source of obsidian for Aztec people. This finding indicated that the artifact was Aztec and not a copy made from European obsidian, and Dee likely acquired the mirror after it was brought to Europe from Mexico, according to a new study."
Blurred view of the mirror starts at around 0.13s.
This mirror and other scrying equipment thought to have been owned by Dee is on display in the British Museum:
"The mirror was used as a ‘shew-stone’ – one of many polished and lustrous things used by Dee to carry out his occult research into the world of spirits. Dee worked with the medium and convicted criminal, Edward Kelley, to summon visions of angels into the mirror’s reflective surface. The two men held séances in England and on the Continent between 1583 and 1589." (British Museum)