Narratives of ecocide, when a society fails due to self‐inflicted ecologic disaster, have been broadly applied to many major archaeological sites based on the expected environmental consequences of known land‐use practices of people in the past.
The wood‐overuse hypothesis suggests that tree clearance in the uplands surrounding Cahokia led upstream erosion, causing increasingly frequent and unpredictable floods of the local creek drainages in the floodplain where Cahokia Mounds was constructed. More frequent and unpredictable flooding in the floodplain would increase the risks involved within bottomland agriculture to “a point where less productive, but more predictable, upland agricultural strategies became the optimal solution to a growing problem”.
The presence of a stable ground surface (Ab horizon) from Mississippian occupation to the mid‐1800s does not support the expectations of the wood‐overuse hypothesis. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that pre‐Colombian ecological change does not inherently cause geomorphic change, and narratives of ecocide related to geomorphic change need to be validated with the stratigraphic record.
To me narrative have fleshed out stories with unsupported bits and pieces. I’d prefer just stating what is understood at the time (which obviously can be wrong and disproven layer on but at least it’s in good faith).
In these situations, the evidence is rarely clear cut. Part of establishing the belief in the evidence is investigating whether or not it can fit into a plausible-but-ultimately-speculative narrative.
In other words, if you can't even construct a coherent story of causation that incorporates your evidence, then maybe you have misinterpreted your evidence.
That's why a narrative is an important part of the puzzle. They are not to be taken as gospel -- they're just a basic sanity check of the evidence.
Edit: I'm not dismissing your perspective! I would have said the exact same thing a couple of years ago. I'm used to evidence being either obviously true or obviously false, or at least being able to establish a Bayesian posterior belief based on incontrovertible assumptions.
What changed for me was that I read some monographs in anthropological history (or is it historical anthropology? I keep forgetting which is which.) These make for incredibly frustrating reading for someone like me. It's all anecdotes and narratives and no clear sets of underlying principles. But that's precisely why it's been so meaningful for me to read them. It's really widened my perspectives on both humanity and that type of research.
I imagine too the narrative, not despite, but because of the "holes" gives researchers new areas to focus their investigation. Then either buttress the narrative by filling in the holes or to challenge it.
A friend was reading a paperback in the 70's that suggested dinosaurs were warm-blooded. I thought it was an insane premise (because I was maybe 12 years old) but there does seem to have been a tidal shift in how dinosaurs are perceived vs. how I was taught as a child. No doubt it was someone with a theory or narrative that gave pause to some of the researchers in the field, kindled the imagination of some young researchers....
Narratives can be informed more by the time from which they arise and not by the time to which they want to describe. The authors provide the context here:
Environmental explanations for the collapse of complex societies have been popular topics since William Thomas' 1956 volume on “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” (Thomas, 1956). This seminal work established the philosophical argument that humans are inherently destructive to the environment (Middleton, 2017; Ponting, 1991; Thomas, 1956), a philosophy that is widely applied in anthropology (Oliver‐Smith & Hoffman, 1999), geology (Nianfeng et al., 1999; Wilkinson, 2005), biology (Ceballos et al., 2015; Meyer & Turner, 1992; Vitousek et al., 1997), environmental ethics (Attfield, 2008), and general public discourse today (Diamond, 2005; Goudie, 2019; Montine et al., 1990; Ponting, 1991; Ward, 2009).
Thus the need to fill holes with assumptions built on assumptions influenced by current societal trends, aka a narrative, & package the product as "Science".
Stating what's "understood" in archaeology is just as much an act of interpretation, except you'll be less able to comprehend it as a layperson because it's filled with irrelevant details like "sites 1, and 3, and 9 show tree ring dates of 1210, 1360, and 1297, while sites 1a, 2, and 6 show archaeomagnetic dates of 1500, 1678, and 1349 respectively". Imagine that for dozens of kinds of evidence across thousands of sites. It will still be subject to many of the pitfalls of interpretation in how you recognize a site, label a site, excavate it, date it, and so on, but that's basically the "base level" evidence in archeology.
Narratives are stories. In this case a story used to describe a conjecture. Unfortunately researchers found the story convincing enough that Since the publication of the wood‐overuse hypothesis, no attempts have been made to evaluate if erosion in the uplands and/or increased flooding in the floodplain did indeed occur during Cahokia's occupation.
The authors have a potential solution in that conjectures that cross academic divisions should include support from related academic fields or from new interdisciplinary ones like geoarchaeology.
Moving forward, we propose that to move past these older narratives of ecocide, there needs to be increased engagement with obtaining both archaeological and environmental data to address these older theories, a need for researchers who are trained in interdisciplinary research, as well as increased support for long‐term, interdisciplinary collaborations. The interdisciplinary field of geoarchaeology is especially equipped to help us move forward, as long as the members of the field remain engaged with developing anthropological theory.
You see a huge city that appears to have vanished pretty fast, so you come up with some ideas about how/why that happened, like, say, ecological collapse (hypothesis). Once you find some plausible evidence that for that, you flesh out what that would look like more broadly. Now you have a theory (narrative) which should have some explanatory power. Then, as you encounter other evidence, you expect it to fit with and support that theory (narrative). If it doesn't, it may turn out your theory (narrative) was wrong, or at least incomplete, just as in the rest of science.
Just like theories in other fields, these narratives can be kind of sticky and survive longer than the evidence suggests they should.
It's not a perfect mapping, but that's basically what's going on.
That's nowhere near the widest, just the widest F5 that comes to mind. 11 days later the widest tornado on record struck on the other side of the OKC metro, and would've been an F5 in a populated area:
Officially, the widest tornado on record is the El Reno, Oklahoma tornado of May 31, 2013 with a width of 2.6 miles (4.2 km) at its peak. This is the width found by the National Weather Service based on preliminary data from University of Oklahoma RaXPol mobile radar that also sampled winds of 296 mph (476 km/h) which was used to upgrade the tornado to EF5
A tornado with a particular placement could be a precursor to all of these things. Missouri has had some of the deadliest tornado's on record. Supporting thousands of people requires a lot of food, and if a sizeable portion of your crop is destroyed by a major weather event, people have to leave town.
I live in Missouri and have spent some time at Cahokia. They have an awesome Visitors Center with a huge display of artifacts there. My wife and I have also visited several sites in the Yucatan including the museum in Merida where they have a huge number of artifacts.
When we mentioned to an employee at the Visitors Center at Cahokia that the art and artifacts were very similar to those we saw in the Yucatan and it seems plausible that those cultures were known to each other they responded with a statement that was a scripted response that denied any connection to any other culture and insisted there is none at all. It sounded exactly like something a lawyer would craft and they ignored everything we brought up that implied their could be any connection.
From what I could gather the reason for that is if any connection to a living tribe of indigenous peoples could be proved the privately owned lands surrounding the Cahokia site where there are mounds, and there are a lot of them, could be claimed as sacred sites to those tribes and would have to be returned to them.
So my take away is the State of Illinois is actively dissuading research that could provide more insight to who lived there and what actually became of them and anyone who tries to prove otherwise is booted out of the conversation.
I'm not sure if random conversations at visitors centers are really the way this kind of research proceeds. Illinois mints quite a few archeologists every year, at a series of rather large universities, none of which give even a fraction of a shit about real estate interests around Cahokia.
I didn't say archeologists were dismissing the connection. I said the Chokia Park employees were, and they did so in a very scripted manner and refused to even discuss it.
Go there and test it out. It was a very strange thing to observe.
You would like me to go test out what happens when a random person attempts to advance archeological theories by confronting park employees about them?
I've seen more than a few cases when "a random person attempts to advance" human knowledge and was completely dismissed by the "experts" and arrogant jackasses who later found out that random person was right.
A great example is where the Monarch Butterflies gather in winter. The guy who came back from Mexico back around the 1980-90s and told others he'd seen them in the mountains in Mexico was called a fool and a liar by all the experts until he showed them the next year. Of course, the Mexicans who lived near the site had known they come there for many generations but no experts had thought to ask them, or they dismissed them if they were told about it.
All told I'd estimate I've spent around 30-40 days exploring Mayan sites and the Cahokia Mounds. How much time have you spent on that?
I did not "confront" them. I mentioned that some of their artifacts (art) looked very similar to those I'd seen at Mayan sites and they recited a scripted response. When I rephrased my question they recited the script again.
I am not saying those Park Rangers are conspiring to hide the truth. I am saying they are not allowed to acknowledge or even discuss the possibility of a connection to any living descendants anywhere.
>So my take away is the State of Illinois is actively dissuading research that could provide more insight to who lived there and what actually became of them and anyone who tries to prove otherwise is booted out of the conversation.
That's literally what they do, though. They employ a shit-load of experts there to figure out who lived there, what they did, and why they left/what happened to them. STL NPR just ran an interview with the scientist identified in this article about this literal thing.
I guess, what I'm saying is that if they're trying to engage in a cover-up, they're doing a terrible job.
Also, if a random tourist can put together the pieces, what are the chances that scientists haven't evaluated it? Maybe, if they say no, it is just because there was no substantive connection? Why does everything have to be a conspiracy?
They did. There was a period of about a hundred years where "archaeologists" basically ascribed any particularly large sites in North America to the toltecs or other mesoamerican elites. Such a confused person is how Toltec mounds got its name. These days such a suggestion would be considered along the same lines as a racist version of geocentrism, which is probably why they felt brushed off.
Have you been to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City? Its name made me wary of how it would present native cultures, but they actually are a comprehensive (and massive) museum with large permanent and traveling exhibits on native cultures. I saw their exhibit on Spiro and the mound builder cultures, and they did not pull punches regarding treatment of historical tribal structures and artifacts. https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/
I'm not an archaeologist, but I can already see some reasons to suspect that a lay person's first guess "there must be a connection" would be quickly dismissed.
First off, which phase of Yucatan Maya civilization do the artifacts you're referring to come from? Are you looking at Itza phase or Mayapan phase? (I'm assuming in the first place that it's Postclassic Yucatan, given that the shift of Mayan civilization from the highlands to the Yucatan happens during the transition from Classic to Postclassic). One of those is contemporaneous with Cahokia, the other is not.
Another question to ask is what are you considering as diagnostic of the art and artifacts? Are these features common enough to indicate influences in local style, or are you misdiagnosing occasional trade goods showing up?
I said I've visited several sites in the Yucatan including the museum in Merida where they have a huge number of artifacts. So, it's safe to assume most all of what I saw there was Mayan.
It's very possible that some of what I saw at Cahokia is Mayan trade goods and that is why I asked if those cultures could have been in touch with each other.
To be clear, I did not say "archeologists deny there is a connection". I said the Park Rangers there denied it with a scripted response and refused to even discuss the possibility Mayans had been there.
I'm an archaeologist with relevant experience. Long distance, sustained contact between these regions didn't exist. Mayan trade networks are pretty heavily studied and from what we know they didn't extend north much past central Mexico.
It's very common for people to see similarities in regions that weren't connected by contact though. People find it very hard to identify cross-cultural relationships in art/design unless they're intimately familiar with the cultural background and language of the designs. As someone who presumably isn't a time traveling precolumbian native, you're doubly alien to their cultural background. It's the same sort of phenomenon as the other-race effect. With enough exposure and practice, you get better at seeing the nuances and differences that weren't immediately apparent.
Even archaeologists are affected by this and it only gets better with experience and study. There can also be false similarities in some objects and styles due to convergent evolution. Houses in certain parts of Nepal look remarkably like ancestral puebloan structures. There was no contact, but they converged on broadly similar styles because of similarities in the resources provided by the local environments and the constraints of building good houses.
For the record, there's a long history of "theories" that posit mesoamericans came up into what's now the US and built all of the native structures that are there today. These ideas are pretty soundly rejected by the archaeological community and they're also a bit racist. You undoubtedly didn't intend to suggest this, but that's likely how it came across to the ranger. Rangers aren't perfect and sometimes they have bad days. They're generally majority correct though and worth listening to when they shut down discussions.
The key words for me in all you wrote are "from what we know".
What I know is that the Mayans who still live there say our archaeologists here tend to ignore them. Two Mayan Park Rangers told me that while I was standing on top of a pyramid enjoying the refreshing breeze up there on a vicious hot and humid day.
One of the things I noticed in all those places (Cahokia, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico) is that refreshing breeze and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park Rangers because it occurred to me after visiting many sites there that maybe those structures were built to provide a place to cool down from working in the fields below and they were both astonished. They instantly changed their attitude and started talking to me. They confirmed that is why they were built and went on to say that the archaeologists who come there are completely dismissive and arrogant and don't ever talk to them to try and learn from them. That's what they told me. You can do what you will with it.
Finally, what those Park Rangers at Cahokia said was boilerplate legalese. It was not a conversation I had with them. They refused to converse because they are instructed to not even discuss it.
I'm not a mesoamericanist. The relationship between indigenous mayans and archeologists is indeed complicated and highly political, but not particularly relevant to our discussion here.
Since you seem to be fishing for someone to point out the issues in your pet theories, I find it useful to start from the assumption that historical peoples weren't stupid about how to achieve their goals. Let's look at the cooling platform hypothesis in that light:
1) It takes a lot less labor to build a tower (like they did at palenque) than to build a pyramid.
2) It kind of defeats the purpose of a breeze driven cooling platform to have a big temple and narrow doors taking up most of the usable area. Triadic pyramids might fit the bill except for all the obvious reasons they don't.
3) The stairs are uncomfortably steep even for modern people.
4) The pyramids are pretty far from where they would have grown crops. Instead they're on elevated rocky ground that could support them.
5) Big fields of crops weren't really the classical mayan style of agriculture. Mayans tended to live in reasonable proximity to their fields and it's baffling why they'd walk a fair distance to the pyramid when they could retire to their much closer, presumably comfortable houses.
6) Cooling platforms would have kept being useful, but mayans stopped building, maintaining, or even using these structures in the postclassic.
People will tell you a lot of things, particularly in tourist traps. Many will also agree with whatever crazy ideas you come up with in the interests of appearing friendly and/or for money. You don't necessarily need to take everything at face value (a lesson I've been trying to teach my father for years).
You have no good idea about where and how Mayans grew their crops and the notion that those structures were built far away from where they grew and harvested food nothing more than a notion.
The Mayans that live there confirmed my assumption. Go tell them they're wrong
I'll tell you what gets their feathers ruffled are guys like you who don't even ask them what they know and think.
And the park I'm talking about where that conversation took is not a "tourist trap". Almost every visitor there was Mayan and very few tourists go near there. It was Xunantunich. Go look around with Google Maps and tell us again there's no where to grow crops there.
You're all so fast to dismiss me when none of you know more about this than me and I don't care where you sat in a classroom to get your degree. And the giant leaps to take what I've said so completely out of context here is stunning. You all didn't read what I said at all, you all projected your own made up interpretations onto me so you had something to bitch about.
Alright.. I'll address those points head on by adding detail to the reasoning behind my hypothesis.
1) Everyone of the sites I've been to with a grand structure had many lessor structures around the main pyramid. I think it's probably accurate to say that on most all cases those large pyramids were built in stages and transformed into being used mainly for ceremonial purposes during and/or after lessor structures were built all around it to catch that cool breeze on those hot and humid days.
As communities grew courtyards and markets and sports fields were built, and around them were elevated areas, not so much different than our own sports arenas now, for people to gather and watch and sit in a cool breeze on hot days.
Take a wider look at Palenque. That tiny tower is surrounded by structures there that are terraced with perfect amount of room to sit and eat and relax in a cool breeze. Very few have any or much indoor space because they were not created to provide that.
2) Again, all of those large pyramids were built in stages and all of them have smaller structures underneath the big one. Some of them evolved into what we might call a "temple" but around all of those are many lessor buildings with elevated spaces to sit and relax and catch a cool breeze. Go look at photos of any of them.
3) Not on all of those structures. Uxmal is a prime example of where that's true but it's surrounded by buildings and structures that provide easy to climb stairs to elevated places to cool off, and again that giant structure was built in stages and ended up being used for ceremonial purposes. It evolved into the temple it became.
4-5) I did not say "Big fields of crops" in regards to where they were working, but again, that's just not accurate. There is ample evidence of deforestation and agriculture on a lot of those hillsides and valleys surrounding those sites and not all of the locations where those sites exist are mountainous. And there is no way to sustain a large city without a thriving agriculture surrounding it. It makes no sense to build a city where it cannot sustain itself.
Some sites are on pretty flat lands. Tolum is an example of that. And consistent to where it's located there are no huge pyramids there because there's a breeze on the cliff face on the ocean front. But just just a city block inward of that it can be stifling hot and humid. Better yet, go to google maps and check out "Zona Arqueológica Xcambó". This is yet another site I visited and noticed how refreshing the breeze was on those buildings there. Unlike Tolum, that site is just slightly above sea level and most all the structures there are built with easy to climb stairs and have large decks to sit on and prepare and eat a meal.
6) What you're talking about there has nothing to do with why they were used when they were used. In some cases it could be their exodus from those metro areas had to do with drought and famine, and something similar probably happened at Cahokia.
And we really don't know much about their use during and after the European invasion. Their historical records were destroyed for the most part and most of them were captured and enslaved or chased far into the mountains and forest and jungles and either murdered or enslaved as the invasions expanded. There's no good reason to assume sites like Tolum and Xcambó were uninhabited when the Spaniards arrived. There is clear evidence they were all rounded up and either enslaved or murdered.
And now, via lidar, we know there are all kinds of structures around and on the top of those hills that have been grown over. So we know they didn't have to "walk a fair distance to the pyramid". It really doesn't make a lot of sense to build so many of these otherwise. And they served a dual purpose. They cleared rock from areas to grow crops and they had to pile the rock somewhere. Why not make a platform to gather, cook, eat, catch a cool breeze, and rest and socialize...
I think the Yucatan art we be more where they came from. As where they went though its pretty well known they went east, due to mound building etc. Then they went back west on the trail of tears.
Seems like ecocide only gets pulled out as a theory for mysterious culture collapse when the next best alternative is "I have absolutely no idea."
Are we really scraping the bottom of the barrel here and dreaming up something that probably didn't happen, or are there genuine, on the record, circumstances of well known and understood communities accidentally committing some sort of (minor to catastrophic?) ecocide on themselves that they had to deal with?
The toy examples of Polynesian islands get a lot of play here, although if you rule out the extremely marginal and isolated places like Henderson, Pitcairn and Easter islands, there's not much to go on.
They've never taken out a settlement the size of a city but there have been a couple of tailings dam collapses in recent years that have led to the deaths of (in one case) 270 people and (in the other) displacements of hundreds of people, along with widespread downstream pollution:
Then of course there's the drying up of the Aral Sea starting in the second half of the 20th century, due primarily to the diversion of the rivers that feed it for the purpose of irrigation, which has had a devastating effect on the surrounding communities that used to depend on it:
This reminds me of the theory that the Rapa Nui on Easter Island also suffered from self-inflicted "ecocide", cutting down all their trees to build their legendary Moai statues and ending up with no birds, unstable soil, erosion… all that comes with it.
This narrative resonates with a lot of people given our current climate crisis and can seem like an ominous warning, but it is also disputed.
45 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadThe wood‐overuse hypothesis suggests that tree clearance in the uplands surrounding Cahokia led upstream erosion, causing increasingly frequent and unpredictable floods of the local creek drainages in the floodplain where Cahokia Mounds was constructed. More frequent and unpredictable flooding in the floodplain would increase the risks involved within bottomland agriculture to “a point where less productive, but more predictable, upland agricultural strategies became the optimal solution to a growing problem”.
The presence of a stable ground surface (Ab horizon) from Mississippian occupation to the mid‐1800s does not support the expectations of the wood‐overuse hypothesis. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that pre‐Colombian ecological change does not inherently cause geomorphic change, and narratives of ecocide related to geomorphic change need to be validated with the stratigraphic record.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gea.21848
Why are there “narratives” when it comes to archeology?
I realize there are favorite or predominant hypotheses, but they should not become “narrative”. I really dislike when everything becomes narrative.
In other words, if you can't even construct a coherent story of causation that incorporates your evidence, then maybe you have misinterpreted your evidence.
That's why a narrative is an important part of the puzzle. They are not to be taken as gospel -- they're just a basic sanity check of the evidence.
Edit: I'm not dismissing your perspective! I would have said the exact same thing a couple of years ago. I'm used to evidence being either obviously true or obviously false, or at least being able to establish a Bayesian posterior belief based on incontrovertible assumptions.
What changed for me was that I read some monographs in anthropological history (or is it historical anthropology? I keep forgetting which is which.) These make for incredibly frustrating reading for someone like me. It's all anecdotes and narratives and no clear sets of underlying principles. But that's precisely why it's been so meaningful for me to read them. It's really widened my perspectives on both humanity and that type of research.
A friend was reading a paperback in the 70's that suggested dinosaurs were warm-blooded. I thought it was an insane premise (because I was maybe 12 years old) but there does seem to have been a tidal shift in how dinosaurs are perceived vs. how I was taught as a child. No doubt it was someone with a theory or narrative that gave pause to some of the researchers in the field, kindled the imagination of some young researchers....
Environmental explanations for the collapse of complex societies have been popular topics since William Thomas' 1956 volume on “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” (Thomas, 1956). This seminal work established the philosophical argument that humans are inherently destructive to the environment (Middleton, 2017; Ponting, 1991; Thomas, 1956), a philosophy that is widely applied in anthropology (Oliver‐Smith & Hoffman, 1999), geology (Nianfeng et al., 1999; Wilkinson, 2005), biology (Ceballos et al., 2015; Meyer & Turner, 1992; Vitousek et al., 1997), environmental ethics (Attfield, 2008), and general public discourse today (Diamond, 2005; Goudie, 2019; Montine et al., 1990; Ponting, 1991; Ward, 2009).
The authors have a potential solution in that conjectures that cross academic divisions should include support from related academic fields or from new interdisciplinary ones like geoarchaeology.
Moving forward, we propose that to move past these older narratives of ecocide, there needs to be increased engagement with obtaining both archaeological and environmental data to address these older theories, a need for researchers who are trained in interdisciplinary research, as well as increased support for long‐term, interdisciplinary collaborations. The interdisciplinary field of geoarchaeology is especially equipped to help us move forward, as long as the members of the field remain engaged with developing anthropological theory.
You see a huge city that appears to have vanished pretty fast, so you come up with some ideas about how/why that happened, like, say, ecological collapse (hypothesis). Once you find some plausible evidence that for that, you flesh out what that would look like more broadly. Now you have a theory (narrative) which should have some explanatory power. Then, as you encounter other evidence, you expect it to fit with and support that theory (narrative). If it doesn't, it may turn out your theory (narrative) was wrong, or at least incomplete, just as in the rest of science.
Just like theories in other fields, these narratives can be kind of sticky and survive longer than the evidence suggests they should.
It's not a perfect mapping, but that's basically what's going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Moore_tornado
That's nowhere near the widest, just the widest F5 that comes to mind. 11 days later the widest tornado on record struck on the other side of the OKC metro, and would've been an F5 in a populated area:
Officially, the widest tornado on record is the El Reno, Oklahoma tornado of May 31, 2013 with a width of 2.6 miles (4.2 km) at its peak. This is the width found by the National Weather Service based on preliminary data from University of Oklahoma RaXPol mobile radar that also sampled winds of 296 mph (476 km/h) which was used to upgrade the tornado to EF5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_records
When we mentioned to an employee at the Visitors Center at Cahokia that the art and artifacts were very similar to those we saw in the Yucatan and it seems plausible that those cultures were known to each other they responded with a statement that was a scripted response that denied any connection to any other culture and insisted there is none at all. It sounded exactly like something a lawyer would craft and they ignored everything we brought up that implied their could be any connection.
From what I could gather the reason for that is if any connection to a living tribe of indigenous peoples could be proved the privately owned lands surrounding the Cahokia site where there are mounds, and there are a lot of them, could be claimed as sacred sites to those tribes and would have to be returned to them.
So my take away is the State of Illinois is actively dissuading research that could provide more insight to who lived there and what actually became of them and anyone who tries to prove otherwise is booted out of the conversation.
Go there and test it out. It was a very strange thing to observe.
A great example is where the Monarch Butterflies gather in winter. The guy who came back from Mexico back around the 1980-90s and told others he'd seen them in the mountains in Mexico was called a fool and a liar by all the experts until he showed them the next year. Of course, the Mexicans who lived near the site had known they come there for many generations but no experts had thought to ask them, or they dismissed them if they were told about it.
All told I'd estimate I've spent around 30-40 days exploring Mayan sites and the Cahokia Mounds. How much time have you spent on that?
I am not saying those Park Rangers are conspiring to hide the truth. I am saying they are not allowed to acknowledge or even discuss the possibility of a connection to any living descendants anywhere.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man
That's literally what they do, though. They employ a shit-load of experts there to figure out who lived there, what they did, and why they left/what happened to them. STL NPR just ran an interview with the scientist identified in this article about this literal thing.
I guess, what I'm saying is that if they're trying to engage in a cover-up, they're doing a terrible job.
Also, if a random tourist can put together the pieces, what are the chances that scientists haven't evaluated it? Maybe, if they say no, it is just because there was no substantive connection? Why does everything have to be a conspiracy?
First off, which phase of Yucatan Maya civilization do the artifacts you're referring to come from? Are you looking at Itza phase or Mayapan phase? (I'm assuming in the first place that it's Postclassic Yucatan, given that the shift of Mayan civilization from the highlands to the Yucatan happens during the transition from Classic to Postclassic). One of those is contemporaneous with Cahokia, the other is not.
Another question to ask is what are you considering as diagnostic of the art and artifacts? Are these features common enough to indicate influences in local style, or are you misdiagnosing occasional trade goods showing up?
It's very possible that some of what I saw at Cahokia is Mayan trade goods and that is why I asked if those cultures could have been in touch with each other.
To be clear, I did not say "archeologists deny there is a connection". I said the Park Rangers there denied it with a scripted response and refused to even discuss the possibility Mayans had been there.
It's very common for people to see similarities in regions that weren't connected by contact though. People find it very hard to identify cross-cultural relationships in art/design unless they're intimately familiar with the cultural background and language of the designs. As someone who presumably isn't a time traveling precolumbian native, you're doubly alien to their cultural background. It's the same sort of phenomenon as the other-race effect. With enough exposure and practice, you get better at seeing the nuances and differences that weren't immediately apparent.
Even archaeologists are affected by this and it only gets better with experience and study. There can also be false similarities in some objects and styles due to convergent evolution. Houses in certain parts of Nepal look remarkably like ancestral puebloan structures. There was no contact, but they converged on broadly similar styles because of similarities in the resources provided by the local environments and the constraints of building good houses.
For the record, there's a long history of "theories" that posit mesoamericans came up into what's now the US and built all of the native structures that are there today. These ideas are pretty soundly rejected by the archaeological community and they're also a bit racist. You undoubtedly didn't intend to suggest this, but that's likely how it came across to the ranger. Rangers aren't perfect and sometimes they have bad days. They're generally majority correct though and worth listening to when they shut down discussions.
What I know is that the Mayans who still live there say our archaeologists here tend to ignore them. Two Mayan Park Rangers told me that while I was standing on top of a pyramid enjoying the refreshing breeze up there on a vicious hot and humid day.
One of the things I noticed in all those places (Cahokia, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico) is that refreshing breeze and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park Rangers because it occurred to me after visiting many sites there that maybe those structures were built to provide a place to cool down from working in the fields below and they were both astonished. They instantly changed their attitude and started talking to me. They confirmed that is why they were built and went on to say that the archaeologists who come there are completely dismissive and arrogant and don't ever talk to them to try and learn from them. That's what they told me. You can do what you will with it.
Finally, what those Park Rangers at Cahokia said was boilerplate legalese. It was not a conversation I had with them. They refused to converse because they are instructed to not even discuss it.
Go there and test it yourself.
Since you seem to be fishing for someone to point out the issues in your pet theories, I find it useful to start from the assumption that historical peoples weren't stupid about how to achieve their goals. Let's look at the cooling platform hypothesis in that light:
1) It takes a lot less labor to build a tower (like they did at palenque) than to build a pyramid.
2) It kind of defeats the purpose of a breeze driven cooling platform to have a big temple and narrow doors taking up most of the usable area. Triadic pyramids might fit the bill except for all the obvious reasons they don't.
3) The stairs are uncomfortably steep even for modern people.
4) The pyramids are pretty far from where they would have grown crops. Instead they're on elevated rocky ground that could support them.
5) Big fields of crops weren't really the classical mayan style of agriculture. Mayans tended to live in reasonable proximity to their fields and it's baffling why they'd walk a fair distance to the pyramid when they could retire to their much closer, presumably comfortable houses.
6) Cooling platforms would have kept being useful, but mayans stopped building, maintaining, or even using these structures in the postclassic.
People will tell you a lot of things, particularly in tourist traps. Many will also agree with whatever crazy ideas you come up with in the interests of appearing friendly and/or for money. You don't necessarily need to take everything at face value (a lesson I've been trying to teach my father for years).
The Mayans that live there confirmed my assumption. Go tell them they're wrong
And the park I'm talking about where that conversation took is not a "tourist trap". Almost every visitor there was Mayan and very few tourists go near there. It was Xunantunich. Go look around with Google Maps and tell us again there's no where to grow crops there.
You're all so fast to dismiss me when none of you know more about this than me and I don't care where you sat in a classroom to get your degree. And the giant leaps to take what I've said so completely out of context here is stunning. You all didn't read what I said at all, you all projected your own made up interpretations onto me so you had something to bitch about.
1) Everyone of the sites I've been to with a grand structure had many lessor structures around the main pyramid. I think it's probably accurate to say that on most all cases those large pyramids were built in stages and transformed into being used mainly for ceremonial purposes during and/or after lessor structures were built all around it to catch that cool breeze on those hot and humid days.
As communities grew courtyards and markets and sports fields were built, and around them were elevated areas, not so much different than our own sports arenas now, for people to gather and watch and sit in a cool breeze on hot days.
Take a wider look at Palenque. That tiny tower is surrounded by structures there that are terraced with perfect amount of room to sit and eat and relax in a cool breeze. Very few have any or much indoor space because they were not created to provide that.
2) Again, all of those large pyramids were built in stages and all of them have smaller structures underneath the big one. Some of them evolved into what we might call a "temple" but around all of those are many lessor buildings with elevated spaces to sit and relax and catch a cool breeze. Go look at photos of any of them.
3) Not on all of those structures. Uxmal is a prime example of where that's true but it's surrounded by buildings and structures that provide easy to climb stairs to elevated places to cool off, and again that giant structure was built in stages and ended up being used for ceremonial purposes. It evolved into the temple it became.
4-5) I did not say "Big fields of crops" in regards to where they were working, but again, that's just not accurate. There is ample evidence of deforestation and agriculture on a lot of those hillsides and valleys surrounding those sites and not all of the locations where those sites exist are mountainous. And there is no way to sustain a large city without a thriving agriculture surrounding it. It makes no sense to build a city where it cannot sustain itself.
Some sites are on pretty flat lands. Tolum is an example of that. And consistent to where it's located there are no huge pyramids there because there's a breeze on the cliff face on the ocean front. But just just a city block inward of that it can be stifling hot and humid. Better yet, go to google maps and check out "Zona Arqueológica Xcambó". This is yet another site I visited and noticed how refreshing the breeze was on those buildings there. Unlike Tolum, that site is just slightly above sea level and most all the structures there are built with easy to climb stairs and have large decks to sit on and prepare and eat a meal.
6) What you're talking about there has nothing to do with why they were used when they were used. In some cases it could be their exodus from those metro areas had to do with drought and famine, and something similar probably happened at Cahokia.
And we really don't know much about their use during and after the European invasion. Their historical records were destroyed for the most part and most of them were captured and enslaved or chased far into the mountains and forest and jungles and either murdered or enslaved as the invasions expanded. There's no good reason to assume sites like Tolum and Xcambó were uninhabited when the Spaniards arrived. There is clear evidence they were all rounded up and either enslaved or murdered.
And now, via lidar, we know there are all kinds of structures around and on the top of those hills that have been grown over. So we know they didn't have to "walk a fair distance to the pyramid". It really doesn't make a lot of sense to build so many of these otherwise. And they served a dual purpose. They cleared rock from areas to grow crops and they had to pile the rock somewhere. Why not make a platform to gather, cook, eat, catch a cool breeze, and rest and socialize...
Are we really scraping the bottom of the barrel here and dreaming up something that probably didn't happen, or are there genuine, on the record, circumstances of well known and understood communities accidentally committing some sort of (minor to catastrophic?) ecocide on themselves that they had to deal with?
Eg. Messing up their home and having to move on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_dam_disaster
Then of course there's the drying up of the Aral Sea starting in the second half of the 20th century, due primarily to the diversion of the rivers that feed it for the purpose of irrigation, which has had a devastating effect on the surrounding communities that used to depend on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
This narrative resonates with a lot of people given our current climate crisis and can seem like an ominous warning, but it is also disputed.
Here's an article supporting this theory: https://writingscience.web.unc.edu/2017/09/the-ecocide-of-ea...
An one debunking it: https://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-easter-island-a-...
The Cahokia mounds are an amazing artifact and you should go visit if you are anywhere nearby!