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.
> 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.
I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.
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)?
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.
pavinjoseph•6h ago