I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting.
I know this isn’t the spirit of your comment but this is one of the use cases of VR that I’m most looking forward to.
We’ve invested a LOT into immersing people into past worlds - think Jurassic park for dinosaurs, plenty of TV and movies about Roman times etc. VR would make all that seem so dated and boring.
Work up a sweat running from a T-Rex - quick shower and off to work!
Looking forward to that day too. And if I may add another wish; that it becomes routine to be able immerse oneself in the ideas and culture of that time too. I realize that it is presently both easier and appeals to a larger audience to simply project our own ideas and culture onto past settings. But who knows what the future will bring. One can hope.
You may enjoy the Transformation series by Neal Asher.
A non-significant plot detail involves organisms being fitted with neural capture devices to record full sensory stimuli, before being killed/eaten by other organisms. These neural recordings are then sold to wealthy buyers who want to experience novelty.
Actually the first time I ever used a VR headset it was a program that put you in the dinosaur era. There were some triceratopses and hadrosaurs walking around in front of me, then I heard a branch snap behind me, I turned my head and saw a Tyrannosaurus and it was legit the scariest experience of my life. The graphics weren't even that high quality, but I don't think my flight or fight response takes the time to measure a predator's polygon count.
Feels like a good place to visit, not live. My sneaking suspicion is that subsistance farming feels pretty similar no matter what century and empire you do it in, and that’s the boring stuff that doesn’t make it into the history books.
I am pretty sure if you came "to visit" aka a tourist, you likely would not have lived too long there to settle down.
Unless you brought some modern day magic, like a gun or a smartphone, to convince them you are send from the gods and not to be sacrificed just yet.
They literally murdered babies regulary. Why would one want to visit those, except for hardcore anthropologic studies?
And subsistence farming probably did differ, depending how far away the next empire was. Some lived in total slavery and dependency and some quite undisturbed pretty much on their own (there are some villages in remote greece areas for example, claiming to never have been conquered.).
We're giants, with no scars and no disfigurations. Wouldn't that be enough magic? Most of us are utterly ignorant of the most basic skills that would be universal in such times; further evidence that we must be if not Gods then the swaddled products of some form of divine grace.
They believed everything is magic and from the gods. And the priests interpreted the signs. So yeah, maybe the signs said for you to be treated as a king. And then to be sacrificed the next day. A special sacrifice.
Ah yes, the Maya did not have the tradition like the inca to bury 100 human and lamita babies alive on solstice. And I am not an expert in the various rites of human sacrifice. But what I understand is, that a sacrifice is more powerful, if the sacrifice is more valuable.
So if this was the norm:
"Some other sacrifice related practices include burning victims alive, dancing in the skin of a skinned victim, taking head trophies, cannibalism, drinking a deceased relative's bathwater, and sprinkling sacrificial blood around sanctuaries"
then the only reason for them to not sacrifice babies regulary (but I am pretty sure they did so on occasion, too) would be, if they would not deem them worthy enough. So my point kind of still stands: why would you want to visit such folks?
"I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting."
The thread was literally about people wanting to enjoy human sacrifice and I expressed my disgust with that.
I am not anti-mayan, nor anti aztec, nor anti historic-german tribes who practiced human sacrifice, too (which would be my heritage). There are many interesting things in their way of life. But I am anti to people who like those cultures today, because of the blood and gore.
So anyway, expressing interest in human sacrifice, is ok here, but not expressing discomfort with that, because this might cause flame wars? Well, good to know.
That quote doesn't say what you're describing, and of all the things to get upset about on the internet, imagining that other people enjoy human sacrifice and then getting mad about it is surely among the most avoidable.
Perhaps it would be helpful to explain how this becomes a moderation issue. It's because we can't play both indignation games and curiosity games at the same time. The former very quickly drowns out and burns up the latter. HN is supposed to be for curiosity games. Therefore when people start playing indignation games (and that is certainly not just you—the temptation is ubiquitous) we try to get them to stop and to return to the intended spirit of the site.
" in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting"
Yes, maybe I should have just asked, what exactly does he mean by "proper offering to the sun god" in the combination of "maybe a bit more violent" but "definitely more exciting".
Because that just sounds like human sacrifice in that context to me. Along with other quotes like that in that thread. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29129436"
So clear, that I did not see much point in asking. So yeah, I got a bit "agitated" with that. Still, in my perception I got the mod warning, for expressing disconcern with peoples lust with human sacrifice. And those people did not, because they expressed their desire in soft terms.
It is allright. I probably just seek more other places now again.
Pre-Columbian farming in South/Central America was substantially less labor-intense than in Europe and Asia because maize has an intrinsically higher yield in terms of calories per unit labor.
The downside is that maize isn't as nutritious as wheat or rice and needs to be more heavily supplemented with proper protein from meat or pulses - or the human being becomes malnourished.
>Easily obtained, what is more, for maize has always been a crop that demands little effort. The archaeologist Fernando Marquez Miranda has given us an excellent account of the advantages enjoyed by peasants cultivating maize: it required them to work only fifty days in the year, one day in seven or eight, according to season. They were therefore free, perhaps a little too free. The maize-growing societies on the irrigated terraces of the Andes or on the lakesides of the Mexican plateaux resulted in theocratic totalitarian systems and all the leisure of the peasants was used for gigantic public works of the Egyptian type. (It is arguable whether the cause was indeed maize, or irrigation, or the dense population of societies which became oppressive from sheer weight of numbers.)[One]
On the other hand, the physical labor of grinding the kernels into meal, done by women kneeling at large mortar and pestle like tool, was intense and visible in skeletal remains.
Can you imagine the feeling of watching a human sacrifice in a crowd of 10,000 people? Or watching the king pierce his own penis with a stingray spine? The blood! And still-beating hearts! The collective empathy induced by these powerful experiences, specifically the affective resonance, would be a powerful binding force. Especially when combined with the pounding music and (occasionally) psychedelics [1].
Wikipedia has a nice article on Mayan human sacrifice [2]. It all sounds so brutal, but then again, so is Squid Game.
I'll offer that was probably not any more common in Mayan life than ours now and those glyphs and stories are a sort of example used to keep folks in check or aggrandize the rulers of the day and in regards to those not much has changed.
I hate to sprinkle blow on your parade, but coca was a different civilization 3000 miles and a few centuries away from both the Maya and the Aztecs. The only thing they have in common is they or their descendents eventually had their history erased by Spanish colonizers in the name of "civilization".
I find it ironic that the Spanish get a bad rap for “colonizing” the Mayans, but all the evidence suggests the Mayan civilization was committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Modern day countries participating in human sacrifice and mass murder would similarly be invaded and the history of their actions would be altered. See: Germany in WW2.
When in Rome...
I doubt commiting genocide or ethnic cleansing was new to anyone back then, so you claim Spain 'liberated' these people? Sounds like a nice nitpick written by the victora. So easy to lap it up when the world is black n white. Please stop watching MCU/Star Wars
There are many places where mass murder happens right now yet nobody is even contemplating their invasion. It happens only when there is something to take, something precious.
Well two countries were invaded by USA after 11-S. At that moment both invasions were sold to the public as justified, because “security” and “for the people living there”.
I firmly believe that one day we will find out the ancient world has a much bigger and overarching story than is currently known. And it will blow your mind. The Korean-Tamil hypothesis comes to mind.
Go down the Robert sepehr (has a channel on youtube) rabbit hole my friend. He's an anthropologist who has connected the dots in an interesting way if true.
Or read “A Story Waiting to Pierce You” by classical scholar Peter Kingsley.
He gives evidence for shamanic influences at the origin of western civilization, namely through the friendship of Abaris and Pythagoras. Abaris was from the Steppes—and potentially from as far as Mongolia. He then speculates further about the shared cultural lineage between the Americas, which was populated by the steppe people circa up to 10k BCE, and the emergence of complex society around the Black Sea. A lot of speculation but all grounded in well-cited evidence. A short but fun read.
You would definitely enjoy the Robert sepehr rabbit hole. He hits on what you described and a whole lot more. Watching him, I'm like how is this information not more widely known. But I never have the time to do independent digging, to confirm or deny his research. But super entertaining.
The thing that many modern people believe (incorrectly), is that primitive folks are not as smart as more developed people.
They are every bit as smart (some might say, “smarter”); they just don’t have the social, physical, and logical infrastructure, or access to resources, that more developed societies have.
I think that was the premise of Guns, Germs and Steel.
Sure, I don't think the comment you are responding to is advocating for pure collectivism though, just speaking to those who completely reject any aspects of it.
Intelligence is a quality describing psychological and cognitive ability. It doesn't sit on some hidden one-dimensional quantitative scale as given in the half-assed pseudostatistic known as IQ. That you're asserting as fact an open ended extrapolation of IQ tests onto people living in entirely different circumstances centuries ago is pretty ironic.
The Flynn effect is examined over decades not centuries. People today test better than people 40 years ago did on the same test. This can be measured in real time when the average person in an african country goes from malnourished to nourished - the average intelligence increases.
IQ is not the only thing that improves. Different types of memory have improved over the same time periods.
Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades.
> Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades.
I assume you never had to "complete manual farm labor [your] entire life". In truth, a dumb farmer is a dead farmer. If you're a farmer and you're dumb your crop fails and you can't eat, and if you can't eat you die.
I know you said (paraphrasing) "not as intelligent" rather than "dumb", but farmers today rely on science and technology developed by others to grow their crops and not lose their harvests. People in ancient times didn't have access to the same science and technology and they had to figure a lot out themselves. Staying alive, feeding your family and your community (or having your crops stolen by warlords and bandits, as it were) year after year, was a much harder test of intelligence than an IQ test, and with much higher stakes to boot.
But I think modern city-dwellers understimate the amount of intelligence it took, for example, to develop all the crops and farm animals we take for granted today. Since we're talking about Pre-Columbian Americas, think for a moment of all the staples of our diet that were developed by those ancient civilisations that didn't even have writing: potatoes, corn, tomatoes, eggplants, beans, pumpkins (from which courgettes are derived), bell peppers, sweet potatoes, and then cocoa, tobacco and coffee. And that's just the staples, by my own definition of foods I couldn't cook without.
And everywhere else you look in the world you find plants and animals that were developed by people who had no knowledge of genetics. They did it empirically, painstakingly, over generations. But they did it because they were just as intelligent as anyone trained as a scientist in modern times. If all those ancient farmers were not at least as intelligent as modern scientists, we wouldn't have the mad variety of food we have today.
All these were not developed by people who lacked intelligence, but I think you are right to suggest that an IQ test would find those people to be less intelligent than "someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades". But that is a bug, not a feature.
You ever read Guns, Germs and Steel? It's a somewhat controversial book, but it has some fascinating discussions.
The intro says it all. Jared Diamond is a damn smart cookie. I don't know if he still works there, but he used to be a Harvard professor, so he hung out with a lot of smart cookies.
He wrote the book, because he was hanging out with New Guinea hunter-gatherers (I believe they hunted and gathered heads).
He realized that a lot of these folks were every bit as smart as his peers, and wanted to find out why they didn't come out of the scrum as a more advanced society.
There's also a different integration of skills. Knowing how to craft a reliable spear, how to operate it efficiently and how to lockdown prey to aim at is a serious set of skills. It's just not categorized as such in our era but its a blend of primitive mechanochemistry (glueing and tying sharp rocks to staff with ropelike fibers) merged with advanced survival Olympics and 24/7 without much of a safety net. All of these require more depth of focus than what most of us do on a daily basis.
is Graham Hancock, who has written several famous books about the questions of what the loss of the library at Alexandria, to fire, did to the current ideas of history.
The Dravido-Koreanic hypothesis is probably a bad example as it’s considered to be complete quackery by pretty much everyone who studies language. It was first suggested in 1905 and was based off the Turanian language hypothesis, which was found to be completely incorrect long ago.
Thats a part of the Greaber hypothesis in his new book The Dawn of Everything. He says anthropologists have had a too simplistic view of prehistory and people were more sophisticated than pop history gives them credit for.
"estimated to date from around 1,050–400 BCE, and are thought to have been used as ritual spaces, where people gathered to meet, and to watch processions"
In this sentence there are 0 facts and 4 brazen speculations.
Edit. Although I agree with at least one speculation:
"they were representing cosmological ideas through these ceremonial spaces"
That is the state of archeology. When thinking about how hard it is to make anthropology and sociology “proper” sciences even today with social media as datasets - just consider how hard solving the same problem, inversely, based on whatever scraps survived today is.
Agreed. Every culture has invented A central plaza surrounded by buildings…the only cosmological idea it embodies is that “tall tightly packed buildings block the wind.”
Ours is the civilization in history to build urban wind canyons, buildings with wide open roads between them. We also have less people occupying those spaces than even moderately sized European towns.
The parallel between similarities of modern day stadiums and arenas in many major cities, and structures bearing similar size and shape
to one another shared among major population centers in this part of the ancient world, is striking.
Indeed, on seeing the pictures in the article I got the feeling that these might as well be structures used for playing a kind of sport, requiring a standardized shape and size like today's football pitch etc. People today like to play or watch sports, why wouldn't the ancient people like that too?
The distinction between sport and ritual human sacrifice isn't quite clear when it comes to this part of the world.
But who are we kidding, the Romans also built massive structures where they could watch people kill one another and/or get eaten by lions. The shape of those structures can definitely still be seen in the design of modern football stadiums.
They do! I visited "El Mirador" in the forest of Guatemala.
And at one of the smaller cities on our way there, our guide pointed out that one of the small squares in, what was our entrance to, the town was probably used for playing a game similar to basketball but with a hard rock. There were also elevated places around it where people (albeit smaller in size) could have comfortably sit down and watched.
For those interested in these sort of things I highly recommend the incredibly well done Fall of Civilisations podcast: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/, there is an episode on the Maya civilisations.
> Some of the sites are oriented to align to the sunrise on certain dates in Mesoamerican calendars, suggesting the ritual processes involved cosmological concepts tied to the movements of the seasons
I always wonder how justified these inferences are. If future archeologists discover the ruins of, say, MIT's Infinite Corridor, will they conclude that it was a ceremonial site for the winter solstice? Obviously archeologists have additional historic context to feed these inferences, but you do have to wonder about the degree to which highly-visible and naturally enduring-- but possibly superficial and culturally unimportant-- features of these sites lead to skewed conclusions.
An historian friend once told me that whenever you see "ritualistic" or "religious reasons" mentioned in archeology publications it basically means "we have no fucking clue why they did that".
Well, many ancient structures align with sunrise on Equinox: the day where the earth is perfectly aligned with the sun and not tilted (that is: neither hemisphere is closer to the sun than the other). This is the exact middle day between the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year.
Others have a similar alignment on summer Solstice or winter solstice (the longest and shortest day of the year respectively)
It _may_ be a coincidence, but I don't think any modern building has a window on both sides of the building where the sun rises on summer solstice and shines straight through both windows. If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design.
OTOH, there's some ruins where it aligns with sunrise on _some_ random day, and that just feels like a coincidence. Like dropping a pencil on the floor and claiming the direction in which it points has some special meaning -- if you look hard enough, you'll find a meaning to give to it.
I'm not saying it isn't by design; I'm saying it may not be an essential feature of the building, just one that's easy to see for modern archeologists.
> If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design.
Right, so imagine you found a contemporary building with this feature. Would you conclude that the building's purpose likely involved cosmological rituals, or that the architect thought the alignment was neat?
It's possible for something to be a custom but still be superficial. The sun can be very important to the Mayan people and cause them to design their buildings around its schedule, without the building being specifically meant for sun-related rituals.
Imagine being an archeologist in the year 2650 and discovering all those decorative lions on large buildings built in the 1900s. What lion-oriented purpose did these buildings serve?
It's less likely such an alignment happens by chance. If you do observe it, it's reasonable to look for explainations. A ritual use is of course not the only reason, there could be other features in the site (geological or otherwise natural e.g rivers, pre-existing man made artifacts like roads etc) which may have imprinted a direction on the building
well it kind of make sense due to the fact that people used to look up much more. i suggest you travel outside of light pollution and at night you will see what ancient people saw.
Knowing little about this, I wonder would it change how we thought about these if we didn't call everything ceremonial and ritual? It's like it's to put some kind of figleaf over these people other people who were probably a lot like us.
I suppose my reaction is that popular archeological articles seem to effectively defy economics as a force in their explanations, and seem to prefer treating the cultures as being under an impaired superstition about the world.
It seems like uncovering a stadium, airport, or the Washington Mall from our world today and saying it was for rituals and ceremonies, which sure, abstractly it is, but it seems a bit filtered through a lens of studying them as primitive pagans. Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic.
If you start with the loop of necessity that nothing is ever more than it needs to be, we can bootstrap the question of for what was this necessary? It's even more plausible to say pyramids were the product of a policy of Ancient Keynesianism, than to treat megalithic builders as primitive. Maybe I'm just as curious as archeologists are, but if we applied how mystified some modern academics can seem about trade and economics today and then apply that back to studying ancient cultures, I'd wonder if there were some opportunities to reduce some blind spots.
While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse? "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were very real and important.
If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.
Maybe that's the point. Unlike with today's people, you can't know for sure the intentions behind archeological finds. Calling something "ritualistic" in archeology seems more likely to be correct, as not all social rituals are religious in nature.
I'm partially trained in anthropology and would love to provide some insight. While terms like 'ritual' and 'ceremonial' certainly indicate religious undertones, they are delineated in an anthropological context.
For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual' would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps just a fun activity within the society.
I say all of this but understand that this article isn't necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents
Sure, we tend to forget that things like Independence Day fireworks are also modern rituals. I don't see how that's super relevant to my original point, though? Religion is not the only ritual system, but it does seem to be the one with the most consistent track record of inciting huge non-economically-motivated resource expenditures (at least superficially; the economic impact of social cohesion is one of small-change-in-the-exponent things that's easy to underestimate). Anyway, I really just wanted to push back on the idea that "ritual purposes" is an implausible explanation for these kinds of things.
It's not a putdown at all, other than perhaps to a modern intelligentsia who would see, say, the NFL as a ritual instead of a complex economic organization, of which what we perceive externally as ritual is the least meaningful explanation for a vast economic machine.
Cathedrals are another example, where the Catholic church was mainly a vast economic and political colonial machine driven by economics and power, and churches established territory, merely under the convenience of state religion.
When you design any structure, form follows function, and function follows economy, which in turn has necessary conditions, like shortest distances, water, waste, an average 1500 kcal/person/day, security for families and offspring, what kind of costs to impose on invaders, a contract and accounting system for future delivery of goods and promises, credit for crops, tools for leverage, architecture that is the expression of all of it.
When we say ritual now, it implies sympathetic magic. The scientific method is not a ritual, nor is proving theorems, or using geometry to engineer things. These were human civilizations and my point is we might learn more about them faster if we didn't start with the premise they were superstitious and lacked political and economic agency. Sure, if one thinks all religions are equally nonsensical and its role is at best a noble lie, then an ancient one might also be that, but if it's a way to encode and transmit knowledge robustly and sustainably in a culture, I'd argue they were probably more like us than we think when we say they're doing rituals.
Maybe we're mostly in agreement? I certainly agree that ancient people were very similar to us, and that religion can have value by transmitting knowledge. But religions, almost any social meme complex, tend to have a lot of nonsense closely entwined with the beneficial payload. So when people act it out as a whole, it can have some really goofy side effects, like cathedrals (the details of what's inside, if not the brute fact of its location). You can't treat the ritual separate from its practical implications, because in the minds of people they derive from the same logical source, and if you try to take just the parts you like you'll actually be acting inconsistently with your supposed beliefs. Separating the good from the bogus at scale apparently takes centuries at best.
I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away.
As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.
We appear to be mostly in agreement, and specifially on the point that in practice archeologists probably necessarily do the exact economic analysis I'm advocating.
I suspect the friction point may be about whether the idea or meaning of a ritual is an encompassing abstraction for general social shared experience vs. a specific sub-category of experiences that I am saying requires sympathetic magic. My view ignores whether there are rituals that are not sympathetic magic, and I'd posit there aren't, and that ones that don't have it are are just habits. However, the exceptions others point out should show the limits to that heuristic as well.
Very much agree some science has been ritualized, which imo de-sciences it, and to me this discussion of our relationship to meaning is a really important idea at the root of this question. It's related to what we deal with as hackers, which is whether our abstractions are meaningful and powerful tools for illuminating complexity, or just a layer of obfuscating jargon.
A criticism I think we might agree on is crappy social science and theory papers are like a "Chinese Room," where the authors have taken opinions, transliterated them into something that gets published using some stats and p-hacking and formal methods, but it's as though they have never had "real" understanding of the subject or material, and the crossover is that this chinese room meets sympathetic magic pattern resembles the category of ritual I was describing.
"Ritual" in an anthropological context, the way I believe OP is using it, is a pretty broad term with no particular magic connotation (though I'd say "general social shared experience" is going too far). It seems to encompass e.g. burial practices, and our common celebrations of Christmas and Halloween would qualify as well. The definition in this cousin comment meshes with my understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29131502
I found a bunch of churches were built on ground that has been shown to contain soil bacteria with anti-biofilm properties. This means the 'holy ground' was literally able to heal wounds. Likewise, a lot of 'holy water' has similar healing properties because it often contained gold and silver nanoparticles.
The ritual use of these sites usually occurred afterwards once economic situation and custom solidified it as an area of rulership. Often cargo-cult'ing what would have been a genuine healing process.
FWIW, a lot of our structures are basically for rituals.
Large stadiums are for spectators to observe the best football players as part of yearly ceremonial games.
Certain parks are for ceremonial gatherings on certain time of years, where we put traditional ritual ornaments (e.g.: christmas decoration).
It's just the OUR rituals have names and we don't think of them as rituals, but we have plenty of things that are ritualistic and ceremonial: the olypmics, new year, halloween, easter, friday drinks at the office, birthday parties, etc.
It's a very short text given to Anthro 1101 classes recounting objective observations about the titular 'daily rituals of the Nacirema', who by their descriptions must be a distant and alien people.
At risk of spoiling, Nacirema backwards is 'American'.
I think your associations with the word ritual are too limited. It isn’t just paganism, but all ceremonial behaviors that serve symbolic cultural functions. Stadiums included.
On this point: What they've uncovered here looks to me kinda like a jousting field [0]. The raised line in the center separates the running area of the two opponents' horses, though some of them are too far off-center and the hump next to the line would be a bit of a mystery.
>Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic.
Sez who?
Maybe just you.
;)
Egyptian pyramids, for example.
Ellora Caves, for another, at least for the "hundreds of tons of rock" part.
I can mention more.
And anyway, in ancient India, religion, astrology, rituals, sculpture, temple-building a.k.a. religious architecture, dance, music, song, even cooking / food, medicine and healing, were all interlinked and blended into one harmonious whole. Linked by a sort of analogue of the holy grail of physics, the grand unified theory of everything. I don't know if there is a specific single name for that or not, but I can mention many traditional terms that give clear pointers, if anyone is interested.
“Pagan” as a word is used to mean “non-Christian”, which in modern times, doesn’t really carry any weight in terms of what you’re saying about their practices. Christians are more than happy to insist they have some sort of religion that is “more advanced” while simultaneously being /historically recorded/ as having acted violent, cruel, callous, and superstitious to anything outside of what their parents and community told them was “religion”, and this only carries over to the printing press being used as the means by which to disseminate their poison. Your ideas of religion are backward and given to you by the sellers of poison for the soul.
I've been to a few dozen sites there over the 3 trips I've taken to the Yucatan area.
I climbed a pyramid in Guatemala a few years ago on a trip there and chatted with the park rangers there. At first they were kinda of standoffish, which is common, but I learned that when I took out my little "Spanish for Dummies" handbook and cracked a joke about me needing it they'd laughed and warm up to me. Being humble made an amazing difference.
It can get pretty hot there during our winter months here in the US when I went there and I finally realized just a few days before at a different site on that trip that on all of my trips the one thing in common when you climb those is a wonderfully refreshing and cooling breeze, whereas in the forest below them it was hot and muggy, and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park rangers.
They instantly became excited to talk to me about that. They told me that is exactly why they were built and what they were used for, and emphatically pointed out they were not built for "chopping off their enemies heads" like the archeologists that come from the US and Europe like to opine and imagine they were used for.
I was kind of shocked by that, and their disdain for those foreign archeologists that keep saying they were, which they made very clear to me.
I got fairly well torched the last time I mentioned this here but I think it's important to share because it's so easy to overlook. I overlooked it for quite a long time myself.
Just a few years ago my wife and visited the Chokia site near St. Louis, MO on a vicious hot and humid summer day and it's there too. So you don't have to go to the Yucatan to experience that wonderful cooling breeze on a pyramid because climbing that big mound offers the same cool breezy relief, and it's undeniably there while just below it is not.
Now... to put this into proper prospective you have to spend some time below those pyramids working a bit. Working up a sweat for a few hours in the sun like real labor does for you. Then go climb that mound. It's the equivalent to modern A/C.
The Mayans will tell you that's why they were built. It's fair to say some were modified over the years to be more ceremonial, like Uxmal for example, but all around even that one are many lesser structures with perfect places to sit and refresh in the cool breeze to be found on them.
If you go to Tulum you'll notice that in the parking lot it's hot and humid and the air is dead still and there are no tall structures anywhere. But if you walk to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean you'll find the cooling breeze. They didn't need a tall structure there. That was where they took their work breaks.
We need to update our take on those because that is too common and too easy to prove and it's what the Mayans themselves say is the reason those structures were built.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] thread104 points|samizdis|7 days ago|12 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048229
We’ve invested a LOT into immersing people into past worlds - think Jurassic park for dinosaurs, plenty of TV and movies about Roman times etc. VR would make all that seem so dated and boring.
Work up a sweat running from a T-Rex - quick shower and off to work!
A non-significant plot detail involves organisms being fitted with neural capture devices to record full sensory stimuli, before being killed/eaten by other organisms. These neural recordings are then sold to wealthy buyers who want to experience novelty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEMbLt4B4iA
I am pretty sure if you came "to visit" aka a tourist, you likely would not have lived too long there to settle down.
Unless you brought some modern day magic, like a gun or a smartphone, to convince them you are send from the gods and not to be sacrificed just yet.
They literally murdered babies regulary. Why would one want to visit those, except for hardcore anthropologic studies?
And subsistence farming probably did differ, depending how far away the next empire was. Some lived in total slavery and dependency and some quite undisturbed pretty much on their own (there are some villages in remote greece areas for example, claiming to never have been conquered.).
We’re going to collectively suppress discussion about this statement.
People are arguing that my baby sacrifice point might be exaggerated and they might be right, so?
So if this was the norm:
"Some other sacrifice related practices include burning victims alive, dancing in the skin of a skinned victim, taking head trophies, cannibalism, drinking a deceased relative's bathwater, and sprinkling sacrificial blood around sanctuaries"
then the only reason for them to not sacrifice babies regulary (but I am pretty sure they did so on occasion, too) would be, if they would not deem them worthy enough. So my point kind of still stands: why would you want to visit such folks?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"I would have loved to live in ancient Maya or Aztec times. Playing ōllamalitzli with the boys, cracking open some cocoa, in the evening watch a proper offering to the sun god. Maybe a bit more violent and shorter than modern life but definitely more exciting."
The thread was literally about people wanting to enjoy human sacrifice and I expressed my disgust with that.
I am not anti-mayan, nor anti aztec, nor anti historic-german tribes who practiced human sacrifice, too (which would be my heritage). There are many interesting things in their way of life. But I am anti to people who like those cultures today, because of the blood and gore.
So anyway, expressing interest in human sacrifice, is ok here, but not expressing discomfort with that, because this might cause flame wars? Well, good to know.
Perhaps it would be helpful to explain how this becomes a moderation issue. It's because we can't play both indignation games and curiosity games at the same time. The former very quickly drowns out and burns up the latter. HN is supposed to be for curiosity games. Therefore when people start playing indignation games (and that is certainly not just you—the temptation is ubiquitous) we try to get them to stop and to return to the intended spirit of the site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, maybe I should have just asked, what exactly does he mean by "proper offering to the sun god" in the combination of "maybe a bit more violent" but "definitely more exciting".
Because that just sounds like human sacrifice in that context to me. Along with other quotes like that in that thread. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29129436" So clear, that I did not see much point in asking. So yeah, I got a bit "agitated" with that. Still, in my perception I got the mod warning, for expressing disconcern with peoples lust with human sacrifice. And those people did not, because they expressed their desire in soft terms.
It is allright. I probably just seek more other places now again.
The downside is that maize isn't as nutritious as wheat or rice and needs to be more heavily supplemented with proper protein from meat or pulses - or the human being becomes malnourished.
>Easily obtained, what is more, for maize has always been a crop that demands little effort. The archaeologist Fernando Marquez Miranda has given us an excellent account of the advantages enjoyed by peasants cultivating maize: it required them to work only fifty days in the year, one day in seven or eight, according to season. They were therefore free, perhaps a little too free. The maize-growing societies on the irrigated terraces of the Andes or on the lakesides of the Mexican plateaux resulted in theocratic totalitarian systems and all the leisure of the peasants was used for gigantic public works of the Egyptian type. (It is arguable whether the cause was indeed maize, or irrigation, or the dense population of societies which became oppressive from sheer weight of numbers.)[One]
[One]https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAndCap... p161
...it was most definitely worse than others.
Wikipedia has a nice article on Mayan human sacrifice [2]. It all sounds so brutal, but then again, so is Squid Game.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenics_and_the_Maya
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Maya_cultur...
I'll offer that was probably not any more common in Mayan life than ours now and those glyphs and stories are a sort of example used to keep folks in check or aggrandize the rulers of the day and in regards to those not much has changed.
Modern day countries participating in human sacrifice and mass murder would similarly be invaded and the history of their actions would be altered. See: Germany in WW2.
He gives evidence for shamanic influences at the origin of western civilization, namely through the friendship of Abaris and Pythagoras. Abaris was from the Steppes—and potentially from as far as Mongolia. He then speculates further about the shared cultural lineage between the Americas, which was populated by the steppe people circa up to 10k BCE, and the emergence of complex society around the Black Sea. A lot of speculation but all grounded in well-cited evidence. A short but fun read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
They are every bit as smart (some might say, “smarter”); they just don’t have the social, physical, and logical infrastructure, or access to resources, that more developed societies have.
I think that was the premise of Guns, Germs and Steel.
Individualism and collectivism are tightly woven together. Both are needed, its a mistake to think that you can have one without the other.
And actually many of the pioneering individuals had to transcend the boundaries of collectivism to actual make the world better. Tesla comes to mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
IQ is not the only thing that improves. Different types of memory have improved over the same time periods.
Even from a theoretical perspective it doesn’t make sense that people who complete manual farm labor their entire life would be as intelligent as someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades.
I assume you never had to "complete manual farm labor [your] entire life". In truth, a dumb farmer is a dead farmer. If you're a farmer and you're dumb your crop fails and you can't eat, and if you can't eat you die.
I know you said (paraphrasing) "not as intelligent" rather than "dumb", but farmers today rely on science and technology developed by others to grow their crops and not lose their harvests. People in ancient times didn't have access to the same science and technology and they had to figure a lot out themselves. Staying alive, feeding your family and your community (or having your crops stolen by warlords and bandits, as it were) year after year, was a much harder test of intelligence than an IQ test, and with much higher stakes to boot.
But I think modern city-dwellers understimate the amount of intelligence it took, for example, to develop all the crops and farm animals we take for granted today. Since we're talking about Pre-Columbian Americas, think for a moment of all the staples of our diet that were developed by those ancient civilisations that didn't even have writing: potatoes, corn, tomatoes, eggplants, beans, pumpkins (from which courgettes are derived), bell peppers, sweet potatoes, and then cocoa, tobacco and coffee. And that's just the staples, by my own definition of foods I couldn't cook without.
And everywhere else you look in the world you find plants and animals that were developed by people who had no knowledge of genetics. They did it empirically, painstakingly, over generations. But they did it because they were just as intelligent as anyone trained as a scientist in modern times. If all those ancient farmers were not at least as intelligent as modern scientists, we wouldn't have the mad variety of food we have today.
All these were not developed by people who lacked intelligence, but I think you are right to suggest that an IQ test would find those people to be less intelligent than "someone today who is educated for almost 2 decades". But that is a bug, not a feature.
The intro says it all. Jared Diamond is a damn smart cookie. I don't know if he still works there, but he used to be a Harvard professor, so he hung out with a lot of smart cookies.
He wrote the book, because he was hanging out with New Guinea hunter-gatherers (I believe they hunted and gathered heads).
He realized that a lot of these folks were every bit as smart as his peers, and wanted to find out why they didn't come out of the scrum as a more advanced society.
is Graham Hancock, who has written several famous books about the questions of what the loss of the library at Alexandria, to fire, did to the current ideas of history.
This one doesn't seem to have a lot behind it. There are a handful of nice coincidences, but that's all.
And Mayans are positively modern by the ancient timelines (e.g. Egypt is more ancient).
In this sentence there are 0 facts and 4 brazen speculations.
Edit. Although I agree with at least one speculation:
"they were representing cosmological ideas through these ceremonial spaces"
Ours is the civilization in history to build urban wind canyons, buildings with wide open roads between them. We also have less people occupying those spaces than even moderately sized European towns.
But who are we kidding, the Romans also built massive structures where they could watch people kill one another and/or get eaten by lions. The shape of those structures can definitely still be seen in the design of modern football stadiums.
Edit: autocorrect is messing me up
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426005-the-great-divid...
I always wonder how justified these inferences are. If future archeologists discover the ruins of, say, MIT's Infinite Corridor, will they conclude that it was a ceremonial site for the winter solstice? Obviously archeologists have additional historic context to feed these inferences, but you do have to wonder about the degree to which highly-visible and naturally enduring-- but possibly superficial and culturally unimportant-- features of these sites lead to skewed conclusions.
Others have a similar alignment on summer Solstice or winter solstice (the longest and shortest day of the year respectively)
It _may_ be a coincidence, but I don't think any modern building has a window on both sides of the building where the sun rises on summer solstice and shines straight through both windows. If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design.
OTOH, there's some ruins where it aligns with sunrise on _some_ random day, and that just feels like a coincidence. Like dropping a pencil on the floor and claiming the direction in which it points has some special meaning -- if you look hard enough, you'll find a meaning to give to it.
> If we do have any such buildings, I'm fairly certain it's by design.
Right, so imagine you found a contemporary building with this feature. Would you conclude that the building's purpose likely involved cosmological rituals, or that the architect thought the alignment was neat?
It's possible for something to be a custom but still be superficial. The sun can be very important to the Mayan people and cause them to design their buildings around its schedule, without the building being specifically meant for sun-related rituals.
Imagine being an archeologist in the year 2650 and discovering all those decorative lions on large buildings built in the 1900s. What lion-oriented purpose did these buildings serve?
I suppose my reaction is that popular archeological articles seem to effectively defy economics as a force in their explanations, and seem to prefer treating the cultures as being under an impaired superstition about the world.
It seems like uncovering a stadium, airport, or the Washington Mall from our world today and saying it was for rituals and ceremonies, which sure, abstractly it is, but it seems a bit filtered through a lens of studying them as primitive pagans. Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic.
If you start with the loop of necessity that nothing is ever more than it needs to be, we can bootstrap the question of for what was this necessary? It's even more plausible to say pyramids were the product of a policy of Ancient Keynesianism, than to treat megalithic builders as primitive. Maybe I'm just as curious as archeologists are, but if we applied how mystified some modern academics can seem about trade and economics today and then apply that back to studying ancient cultures, I'd wonder if there were some opportunities to reduce some blind spots.
If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.
“Rituals” does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion don’t you think?
For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual' would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps just a fun activity within the society.
I say all of this but understand that this article isn't necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents
ancient temples. Modern temples look more like shopping malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of old.
Cathedrals are another example, where the Catholic church was mainly a vast economic and political colonial machine driven by economics and power, and churches established territory, merely under the convenience of state religion.
When you design any structure, form follows function, and function follows economy, which in turn has necessary conditions, like shortest distances, water, waste, an average 1500 kcal/person/day, security for families and offspring, what kind of costs to impose on invaders, a contract and accounting system for future delivery of goods and promises, credit for crops, tools for leverage, architecture that is the expression of all of it.
When we say ritual now, it implies sympathetic magic. The scientific method is not a ritual, nor is proving theorems, or using geometry to engineer things. These were human civilizations and my point is we might learn more about them faster if we didn't start with the premise they were superstitious and lacked political and economic agency. Sure, if one thinks all religions are equally nonsensical and its role is at best a noble lie, then an ancient one might also be that, but if it's a way to encode and transmit knowledge robustly and sustainably in a culture, I'd argue they were probably more like us than we think when we say they're doing rituals.
I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away.
As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.
I suspect the friction point may be about whether the idea or meaning of a ritual is an encompassing abstraction for general social shared experience vs. a specific sub-category of experiences that I am saying requires sympathetic magic. My view ignores whether there are rituals that are not sympathetic magic, and I'd posit there aren't, and that ones that don't have it are are just habits. However, the exceptions others point out should show the limits to that heuristic as well.
Very much agree some science has been ritualized, which imo de-sciences it, and to me this discussion of our relationship to meaning is a really important idea at the root of this question. It's related to what we deal with as hackers, which is whether our abstractions are meaningful and powerful tools for illuminating complexity, or just a layer of obfuscating jargon.
A criticism I think we might agree on is crappy social science and theory papers are like a "Chinese Room," where the authors have taken opinions, transliterated them into something that gets published using some stats and p-hacking and formal methods, but it's as though they have never had "real" understanding of the subject or material, and the crossover is that this chinese room meets sympathetic magic pattern resembles the category of ritual I was describing.
It's helpful to refine this stuff, thank you.
The ritual use of these sites usually occurred afterwards once economic situation and custom solidified it as an area of rulership. Often cargo-cult'ing what would have been a genuine healing process.
Large stadiums are for spectators to observe the best football players as part of yearly ceremonial games.
Certain parks are for ceremonial gatherings on certain time of years, where we put traditional ritual ornaments (e.g.: christmas decoration).
It's just the OUR rituals have names and we don't think of them as rituals, but we have plenty of things that are ritualistic and ceremonial: the olypmics, new year, halloween, easter, friday drinks at the office, birthday parties, etc.
https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...
At risk of spoiling, Nacirema backwards is 'American'.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting
Sez who?
Maybe just you.
;)
Egyptian pyramids, for example.
Ellora Caves, for another, at least for the "hundreds of tons of rock" part.
I can mention more.
And anyway, in ancient India, religion, astrology, rituals, sculpture, temple-building a.k.a. religious architecture, dance, music, song, even cooking / food, medicine and healing, were all interlinked and blended into one harmonious whole. Linked by a sort of analogue of the holy grail of physics, the grand unified theory of everything. I don't know if there is a specific single name for that or not, but I can mention many traditional terms that give clear pointers, if anyone is interested.
Stonehenge, too.
(Edited.)
I climbed a pyramid in Guatemala a few years ago on a trip there and chatted with the park rangers there. At first they were kinda of standoffish, which is common, but I learned that when I took out my little "Spanish for Dummies" handbook and cracked a joke about me needing it they'd laughed and warm up to me. Being humble made an amazing difference.
It can get pretty hot there during our winter months here in the US when I went there and I finally realized just a few days before at a different site on that trip that on all of my trips the one thing in common when you climb those is a wonderfully refreshing and cooling breeze, whereas in the forest below them it was hot and muggy, and I mentioned that to those Mayan Park rangers.
They instantly became excited to talk to me about that. They told me that is exactly why they were built and what they were used for, and emphatically pointed out they were not built for "chopping off their enemies heads" like the archeologists that come from the US and Europe like to opine and imagine they were used for.
I was kind of shocked by that, and their disdain for those foreign archeologists that keep saying they were, which they made very clear to me.
I got fairly well torched the last time I mentioned this here but I think it's important to share because it's so easy to overlook. I overlooked it for quite a long time myself.
Just a few years ago my wife and visited the Chokia site near St. Louis, MO on a vicious hot and humid summer day and it's there too. So you don't have to go to the Yucatan to experience that wonderful cooling breeze on a pyramid because climbing that big mound offers the same cool breezy relief, and it's undeniably there while just below it is not.
Now... to put this into proper prospective you have to spend some time below those pyramids working a bit. Working up a sweat for a few hours in the sun like real labor does for you. Then go climb that mound. It's the equivalent to modern A/C.
The Mayans will tell you that's why they were built. It's fair to say some were modified over the years to be more ceremonial, like Uxmal for example, but all around even that one are many lesser structures with perfect places to sit and refresh in the cool breeze to be found on them.
If you go to Tulum you'll notice that in the parking lot it's hot and humid and the air is dead still and there are no tall structures anywhere. But if you walk to the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean you'll find the cooling breeze. They didn't need a tall structure there. That was where they took their work breaks.
We need to update our take on those because that is too common and too easy to prove and it's what the Mayans themselves say is the reason those structures were built.