The Western Hemisphere. General term for the Americas following their discovery by Europeans, thus setting them in contradistinction to the Old World of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - There was more than the obvious reason to feel blue for people offered in human sacrifice rituals by the ancient Maya to their rain god -- they were painted blue before being heaved into a watery sinkhole.
And it wasn't just any blue. It was Maya blue -- a vivid, somewhat turquoise-colored pigment used for about a millennium by Mesoamerican peoples to decorate pottery, figurines and murals that has long mystified scientists.
kbs2244 wrote:I don’t remember on the Caribbean side, but I remember the Spaniards were impressed with the size and seaworthiness of what they called “rafts” on the Pacific side.
They probably would have been pretty impressed with the Caribbean side too, it seems:
The Taino possessed canoes of various sizes and proportions for different activities. Small canoes may have been individually owned, but some larger, special-purpose canoes could have been shared by a community and had restricted access. Because of this, the most important factor in choosing a settlement was access to the open ocean. They needed launching and beaching places for their large canoes.
The dugout canoes (canoa) constructed by the Taino were made from the trunk of a single large tree (maca), although the sides may have been built up with planks to allow for construction of very large vessels. The chroniclers of the contact period described immense canoes for the Taino. Las Casas said the canoes in Cuba were 20 m long, and Columbus reported seeing very large canoes under sheds on the coast of Cuba. Oviedo wrote that the boats had cotton sails, but this is generally not believed to be a pre-Columbian trait.
...and this from wikipedia's entry on the Taino:
Their dugout canoes (Kanoa) were made in various sizes, which could hold from 2 to 150 people. An average sized Kanoa would hold about 15 - 20 people.
...The hull sizes this suggests to me would be close to the size-range for first-millennium Norse vessels. Though I'm no expert, it all suggests a capable maritime culture to me
To know the limits of what's possible, try the impossible.
I wonder why a people would want a canoe with that sort of capacity?
If the number of people it could carry was simply a way of describing size, that's fair enough, but if they were actually built to carry such a human cargoe there seems to be but two uses, ferrying or war!
Both. I'm sure it could carry people and cargo depending on the need. Somehow I doubt that our ancestors would have been committed to single-use products.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
It is, of course, completely accidental that paddle design of the Caribbean Taino and the NW American Indian Coastal tribes are almost identical.
Must be that the Taino are some of those Siberians who WALKED the Beringian Corridor and SWAM to the Caribbean archipelagos.
Or some such truck.
john
"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."
"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."
.....as to a similarity of paddle design, decoration is one thing.
But as to form... the human desire to create/design the better mousetrap in the light of ergonomics need not be seen as a recent science but more as a natural desire for comfort ie. "ugh, this paddle makes me less tired than the last one....or if this paddle was only...I wouldn't be so tired"... may be enough to explain re-occuring forms in different locations.
More than a hundred reasons have been proposed for the downfall of the Maya, among them hurricanes, overpopulation, disease, warfare, and peasant revolt. (Read "Maya Rise and Fall" in National Geographic magazine (August 2007).
But Sever, NASA's only archaeologist, adds to evidence for another explanation.
"Our recent research shows that another factor may have been climate change," he said during a meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month.
One conventional theory has it that the Maya relied on slash-and-burn agriculture. But Sever and his colleagues say such methods couldn't have sustained a population that reached 60,000 at its peak.
The researchers think the Maya also exploited seasonal wetlands called bajos, which make up more than 40 percent of the Petén landscape that the ancient empire called home.
Another theory on the demise of the Mayan civilization. Climate change, self induced or not, seems a likely reason to me.
Climate change that leads to famine would quickly lead to war and disease. We see this constantly in our own time. Rarely do we have a famine which is not being made worse by some group trying to kill another group.
These things are all interrelated and it suggests to me that humans, for all our technological wizardry, haven't gotten a hell of a lot smarter.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
woodrabbit wrote:.....as to a similarity of paddle design, decoration is one thing.
But as to form... the human desire to create/design the better mousetrap in the light of ergonomics need not be seen as a recent science but more as a natural desire for comfort ie. "ugh, this paddle makes me less tired than the last one....or if this paddle was only...I wouldn't be so tired"... may be enough to explain re-occuring forms in different locations.
Agreed.
With regard to the Maya collapse, it seems to have occured roughly contemporaneous with various other similar occurences across Mesoamerica (notably the fall of Teotihuacan and the Anasazi thing too) So I'm guessing some large scale environmental upheaval might have figured in there somewhere, with various knock on effects of people migrating from one area to another. I thought slash and burn was actually high yeild in terms of agriculture, the downside being that it eventually destroyed the soil and so could not be sustained indefinitely. Though I'm not sure how that squares with the figures quoted by Beagle.
Fabric fragments excavated from the tomb of an ancient Maya queen rival modern textiles in their complexity and quality, scientists say.
The tomb was discovered in the Maya city of Copán in Honduras by a team led by archaeologist Robert Sharer of the University of Pennsylvania.
Researchers believe the queen, whose name is not known, was buried in the fifth century A.D.
Some of the fabrics found within her tomb have thread counts of over 80 weft yarns per inch, said Margaret Ordonez, a textile expert at the University of Rhode Island who studied the cloth.
"This is in the range of the clothing that we wear," she said. "This is a higher thread count than your jeans."
Religion is about "self" control. Something that seems greatly lacking in today's world. I doubt, for example, that many of the survivors and families of the Virginia Tech rampage will be thinking of control and fear of invisible dieties as they turn toward their churches and religious leaders for comfort and hope.
Depends on one's point of view, doesn't it? I have no doubt that the power structure spouts that particular line of nonsense for the followers. In the meantime, the power structure only cares about maintaining/expanding that power and the money in the collection plate. I have no use for organized religion at all, Monk. Throughout history it has been a curse on mankind. Disorganized religion is not at all harmful.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
In pre-Inca times, only one-third of skull surgery patients survived the procedure, as indicated by short- or long-term healing around cranial openings. Survival rates rose to between 80 and 90 percent during the Inca era, from A.D. 1400 to 1532. Few skulls showed signs of infection near surgical holes.
Odd that in this very same time period "civilized" Europe struggled to find a way to deal with the Black Death by marching around praying and whipping themselves....and then killing Jews.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
I would be pretty certain that the surgeons were also priests.
Maybe Wararrow can answer this:
How separated were the royalty and priest class at this time?
Was the priest class hereditary, or could the priests cull some “bright boys” from the general population if they saw promise in them?
