Beyond Apocalyptco

[stan]

Without having seen the film, I pretty much agree with the above quotes posted by Starflower.
Kenneth Turan on NPR said, in light of Mel's attempt at comment on
our current civilization, that Mel is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Another thing to note is that in US pop culture, a major motion picture is often how certain social issues are brought into the conversational currency of everyday life. It shows how easily the public is manipulated
by wealthy pop stars. All the issues brought up by the film have been
known about by thoughtful people for years...but they haven't been
on network tv or in a Gibson movie, so they have not entered the awareness of ordinary folks here.
Now we have "Blood Diamonds," too. So regular people will be talking about that for a couple of weeks.
Remember Passion of the Christ? Churches were buying blocks of hundreds of tickets and renting buses to take the flocks to the movie.
How stupid.

[Beagle]

http://www.archaeology.org/online/revie ... ypto2.html

gore-fest of the first order, Apocalypto is, ironically, a morality play warning that civilizations, no matter how mighty (read ours), are doomed if they lack moral bearings and their leaders indulge in material excess (like building ridiculously large pyramids). Theorists of the collapse of archaic states take note: it's not the economy stupid, it's the Seven Deadly Sins. The film is a lengthy parable filtered through the lens of ancient Maya civilization, which did crash from glorious heights, on more than one occasion in fact, although these collapses, in the Late Preclassic and Classic periods, were regionally focused--proving by Gibson's law of civilization and its discontents that the Maya weren't all equally depraved. Given that the film is not a documentary but a vehicle to entertain the masses in a tried and true visual language--freakish people ripping each other apart--and as an added bonus sneak in a lesson about the fall of civilizations, we must cut the filmmaker some slack and not expect every aspect of the film to be in synch with what is known historically and archaeologically. When has a period film ever aspired to purity?

From todays news section.

[stan]

Tonight on NOVA Science there was a bit about the archaeologist (Satturno) whodiscovered the oldest maya paintings and heiroglyphs at San Bartolo in
Guatemala (dating to about 100 BC).

BUt the point of the story is that after this discovery, he was looking at some NASA infrared maps of the area and noticed that the vegetation in the San Bartolo area was
bright yellow, as opposed to the surrounding area. He saw other nearby
yellow areas, and using a GPS device and the NASA photo, he was able to hike to the other yellow spots and found unknown pyramids and temples in each one.
Even more than Ozmanegic discovered!
The theory is that the limestone in the monuments leached into the soil and
fertilized the trees, making them photosynthesize more, thus releasing more heat and being visible to infrared.
Then the NASA archaeologist (yes, they have one...named Sever) began looking more closely at the aerial maps and began to notice ancient roadways and canals linking these sites.
Great stuff.