The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.
(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)
My favorite group is the Mapuche who managed to hold out against the Spaniards until they were conquered by Chile and Argentina in the late 19th century. They managed to thwart the conquistadors for centuries! It wasn’t until the modern era where military logistics got good enough to unseat them and overcome the advantages they had.
While all the other American conflicts with tons of Indian involvement (both sides, esp civil war) had it downplayed.
One of my first realizations of slant put on history.
As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.
Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....
Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.
If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.
> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.
sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.
this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better
For example I've been studying the Mississippi river cultures [1] which left behind lots of mound villages formed into chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms. Those cultures suffered a decline around the mid-15th century likely due to environmental changes which we can see in the distribution of villages and mounds changing. We can also see how warfare evolved based on defenses and the distribution of arable land to houses (i.e. are they clustered villages for defense or spread around their fields for efficiency?) Historians then compare them to the accounts of the Narvaez and de Soto expeditions which provides a baseline for post-contact (mid 16th), where we can also see a large decline and social restructuring before the English and French came in to finish the job (the Spaniards more or less gave up on that area as economically uninteresting except for the occasional slave raid).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_shatter_zone
You can come up with all the juvenile “fun facts” you want but what’s the point if you’re not actually going to say anything to add to the conversation?
is this a serious question? what defines history as a subject is precisely that it is not the present.
None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.
No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.
It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.
Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe. I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.
Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory. What else do you call that?
In this case, people A are responsible for most of the demise of people B, surely. I don't deny that history education should be improved on these matters, instead of choosing a villain and a victim, but your view is not much better.
The various tribes also engaged in near constant warfare with each other, defeating them, taking their territory, and making the rest slaves. Cortez was only able to defeat the Aztecs because he was able to enlist the aid of the non-Aztec tribes, who hated the Aztecs because of the depredations of Aztecs against them.
The Inca empire was only recently formed before the Spanish arrived.
In North America, the Commanche carved out an empire in the south at the expense of the tribes that had been living there. See "Empire of the Summer Moon":
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."
[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."
This is a wild jump to make. I'm not sure I can take your comment in good faith as being serious.
So they couldn't murder/expel (unlike the British/American colonists) most of the native population (especially considering that North America was much less densely inhabited to begin with) if they wanted someone to work in the mines and plantation (again relatively not that many slaves were imported to the mainland colonies as well).
France was similar (except they struggled even more with getting enough people to move to the colonies).
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
Strange times, those, eh?
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
They're comparable in that sense to the Heculaneum manuscripts, which researchers have lately made great progress on with deep learning [1]. I hope an equivalent initiative someday starts on the Quipu.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu [1] https://www2.cs.uky.edu/dri/herculaneum-papyrus-scrolls/
It's unlikely any complex narratives could be encoded there, though.
Possibly a bit like the e.g. the Mycenaean Linear B script. Which is fully decoded and well understood. But despite having a full fledged writing system they mainly used it for accounting and such. They can tell us about how many goats, sheep and various good they had they had but don't tell as much about the society or history as such.
Heculaneum manuscripts are kind of the opposite from the Quipu in the sense that we have zero issues understanding the actual text/symbols just extracting them from the destroyed scrolls is rather complicated.
Minoan tablets are maybe a bit closer and little progress has been made there (then again we are fully capable of reading the script just have no clue about the language it was written in).
For a long time, it was thought that they indeed contained only the latter, but my certainly non-specialist grasp on the matter is that we now know they were used to encode much more than that. In addition to being used directly to verify calculations [0], they contained "histories, laws and ceremonies, and economic accounts" or, as the Spanish testified at the time: "[W]hatever books can tell of histories and laws and ceremonies and accounts of business is all supplied by the quipus so accurately that the result is astonishing"[1]. My---again crude---understanding is this was through embedding categories, names and relational data in addition to numbers, signaled not least through texture and color [2].
I likely come across as if I'm trying to over-inflate the Incan knots, but really it's just to say they appear to be a rather fascinating in-between of legal-administrative inscriptions, whose discovery transformed understanding of Roman institutions over the last century or so, and the straight-forward manuscripts of the Herculaneum.
[0] My elementary and probably out-of-date recollection: an emissary would come to towns with Quipus containing work orders, which would be validated with the community on the spot.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/27087183
[2] https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-abstract/65..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/483319
Potentially a graph to be completed by the owner via verbal communication/interpretation as a supplement to the material instrument; a single source of information that could be interpreted differently depending on the societal role and vocation of the owner.
I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.
That was the Aztec, an entirely different culture from the Mayans. The Mayan Kingdoms lasted until 1697.
Wheels are great if you have something stronger than a human to pull it, or you only have to move it a short distance, or if you have a hard paved road. But pulling carts or wagons or wheelbarrows through rough terrain or muddy roads with just human power is absolute trash and not worth the effort, and moving things over small short distances alone isn't worth the specialized labor and cost of making decent wheel and axle systems without machine tools.
If you are still unsure, ask yourself why hikers and campers don't pull a cart or push a wheelbarrow everywhere they go instead of using a backpack even though they can have ultra light aluminum construction with pneumatic tires and ball bearing axles. All the effort you would save by using a wheelbarrow on smooth parts of your path would be undone by just a handful of random sticks or rocks you run into with it along the way.
Is the weather in the tropics so similar that year-on-year mismatch stops mattering?
1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)
2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.
3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.
It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.
(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)
Any reason number 13, of all numbers, has been so significant in different parts of the world, sometimes associated with completely opposite meanings (e.g., between Jews and Persians/Europeans)?
1/7 in base 20 takes surprisingly short form of 0.(1h) (h is 17), unlike 1/9 or 1/11 - so I wonder if there's Mayan prejudice on those instead
That's the explanation?
The Mayans did not want to give up their lifestyles even in the face of crippling population growth and surrounding natural resource depletion... which led to their downfall.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.
(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)
I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.
That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.
If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.
For comparison, estimates of the deaths from the Black Plague in Europe are 30% to 60%. It's a huge error bar, despite having a lot of written records that survived.
The end of the Incan empire is a really striking example of this dynamic. The Spanish landed on the South American mainland in ~1524, European diseases started spreading, and in 1527 the Incan emperor died from one of the diseases without an heir. This triggered a really brutal civil war of succession that weakened the empire. The Spanish started the conquest proper of the Incan empire in ~1532 and were successful in part because how weak the empire was after the civil war.
So essentially, by arriving early and (inadvertently) initiating the disease epidemics, the Spanish put in place conditions that made the conquest possible a few years later.
pavinjoseph•3mo ago