Hundreds of ancient Maya sites hidden under Mexico reveal a mysterious blueprint

“Rituals” does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion don’t you think?

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.

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.

https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...

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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

> 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?

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.).

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.

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.

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