thedorkages:Chichen Itza.It’s difficult to find accurate information about Chichen Itza. Not because
thedorkages:Chichen Itza.It’s difficult to find accurate information about Chichen Itza. Not because it’s hard to find, or because archaeologists don’t study it; good heavens, no, archaeologists study the crap out of it. It’s because an entire generation of spiritualists and their descendents took one look at the giant temples with serrated sides and squealed with delight. So it’s very easy to find webpages about how aliens helped the Maya build temples that channel the very power of the earth itself to create magical snake monsters; it’s less easy to find webpages that discuss how the Maya were nerds.And they were undoubtedly nerds! That’s how you do good architecture, as we’ve been discussing with Persia, India, and China — you make a lot of people very, very excited about numbers, and to be very, very excited about numbers, you also have to be the kind of person who thinks that it is sooooo coooooool that you can map a random star for three hundred or three thousand years using your calculations. Which the Maya could do. Because the Maya were nerds. I don’t want to discount the religious significance of all of this — as far as we can tell, the surviving codices are equally religious and mathematical. But that’s the case for most of the science that got done everywhere in the world until spectacularly recently. Think, like, the last fifty years. The point is not their motivation; the point is that, for some deeply mysterious reason, people have been much more willing to believe that aliens landed in Mexico than that some engineers who lived and worked in Mexico before the arrival of Columbus were really, really smart.So what Chichen Itza has: like, a million temples. It also has paved roads, a giant ballcourt, governmental buildings, optical and acoustic effects carefully designed to aid worship (particularly notable is the GIANT SHADOW SNAKE GOD). And, oh, yeah, since they rarely used metal for tools, this was all carved using quartz dust, emery, and jade.What Chichen Itza doesn’t have: alien wizards. -- source link