I spent some time in the Yucatan (north of Guatemala) when I was younger. I ran into a guy who was working on the toll road between Merida and Cancun. They were constantly digging up artifacts etc...

This place was covered with people.

No, trains replaced steam boats and barges on the river. That's part of the reason they built the bridge.

Not the story people want to hear. I was taught something much different and I live in Texas near the border. I just recently heard about how populated the Americas were. I had to seek out the info. It’s not something you hear much about. Maybe kids learn about this now but in Texas, I doubt it.

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To clear a few things up: (copied from another thread)

This isn't in Yucatan. Hansen's work primarily deals in the Peten and the most famous city in his area of interest today is the Maya city of El Mirador.

This also isn't really 'new.' Hansen has been arguing the need for increased archeology in this region for nearly 20 years. The crux of his interest is that the cities of the Mirador Basin are older than the Classical Maya, but display remarkable sophistication. He's never come right out and just said it exactly, but he's been angling for a long time that greater study of the largely unexplored and surveyed sites could lead to a general rewriting of early Maya history, when their culture first emerged and how sophisticated it was before the Classical Maya.

Mayanists have an ongoing, low key, debate about where Maya civilization began; in the Highlands, or as Hansen wants to argue, in the Peten. (EDIT: I got my geography wrong)

He's not wrong that there's interesting sites there that could force a reconsideration of things. He's not wrong that it's underexplored either.

This article is wrong in acting like this is new. Lidar has been getting used in this region for a decade. 1491 even has a chapter mostly dedicated to the myth of 'sparse human settlement' that uses the earliest studies to discuss how littered in human alterations the American landscape was when Europeans arrived.

There's a 12 kilometer highway for example that connects El Mirador to another Maya settlement in the region; Nakbe, where most of El Mirador's stone was quarried.

This is more a case of Hansen trying to drum up interest and support than a truly new discovery, but then again I'll bet lots of people reading were unaware of all this before so *shrug* Dude's doing what he's gotta do.

EDIT: I also now feel obligated to link to this information another redditor shared with me, which I didn't know and I find so disappointing.

Don't forget how much education and experts raised on debunked theories lag behind. You can assume many readers only ever heard the "old notion" and haven't updated their info with the newer understanding that many tens of millions of people lived in the so-called Americas before colonization and genocide.

If you want a good example just look at The Aeneid.

What are your favourite books by Philip Matyszak or Donald P. Ryan?

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"Discovery disproves old theory" gets more clicks than "Discovery supports modern scientific consensus".

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What are you going to burn? You would find abandoned villages, which is why Anglo-Normans were forced to construct a series of fortifications in order to hold into their conquest.

i would just burn ireland down, checkmate.

> “challenges the old notion of sparse early human occupation”

What? you mean the pre modern assumption?

I'm still aghast at that decision. Fully loaded with the suppressor, that's an 11.24 lb rifle. That's actually the heaviest infantry rifle ever adopted by the US military.

And the cartridge is another matter. The practice rounds are still zippy enough to be used in combat, and I'm willing to bet that cost considerations are going to ensure that the reduced version gets used in combat. Which is still nothing to sneeze at: It's essentially a 7mm-08.

I mean, I'm one of those weirdos who likes the concept of a battle rifle, but they shouldn't be significantly heavier than an M-1 Garand or an M-14.

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Becky Ferreira, 22 December 2022, Motherboard (Vice)

Excerpt:

>Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a vast ancient Maya civilization that flourished more than 2,000 years ago in northern Guatemala, reports a new study.

>This long-lost urban web encompassed nearly 1,000 settlements across 650 square miles, linked by an immense causeway system, which was mapped out with airborne laser instruments, known as LiDAR.

>The results of the LiDAR survey “unveiled a remarkable density of Maya sites” in Guatemala’s Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin (MCKB) that “challenges the old notion of sparse early human occupation” in this area during the “Preclassical” period spanning 1,000 BC to 150 AD, according to a study published this month in Cambridge Core.

>The discovery sheds light on the people who lived in the bustling cities of this forested basin for more than 1,000 years.

Ancient Mesoamerica, 2022. DOI 10.1017/S0956536122000244

Apropos nothing, it is interesting from a general historical standpoint to look at the consequences of "regime change" to the success of any nation's prosecution of a war. Certainly in the U.S., regime change has almost invariably culminated in a death knell for any war effort (FDR doesn't really count, as his VP succeeded to the POTUS, and the US army was within 50 miles of Berlin when FDR suffered his fatal stroke). But, e.g., Johnson to Nixon, and then Bush to Obama, produced a nightmarish drag on war efforts.

Indeed, McClellan had at least implied, if not openly asserted, that were he elected POTUS in 1864, he would pursue an armistice with the CSA (thus recognizing their legitimacy, and the separation of the CSA from the USA!). Lincoln certainly took this seriously, which would explain his encouragement of Sherman's destruction of Georgia. Lincoln felt he needed a rapid improvement in the prosecution of the war, with at least the appearance of inevitable CSA capitulation.

The "possibly exaggerated" is more of a certainty than anything else about a lot of the Warring States period, is all I'd say. I mean there are accounts that claim hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side but estimates say that those are unfeasible even for the total number of men in the field.

Mostly raids against the civilian population (the English called these chevauchees in the Hundred Years War). The aim was both to damage the other side's resources and pressure the local nobility into defecting to your side. Each noble or town that came over expanded your zone of control and diminished that of the enemy. This involved lots of minor skirmishes, perhaps some attacks on fortified positions if these looked vulnerable, and possibly a siege against some key position. In western Europe 1100-1300 it involved lots of negotiation, intercession by third parties (the Pope, maybe the Emperor in the German lands, or the French King before 1200), assertions of right and so on.

Stinky unwashed people, fresh from bashing, cutting and slicing people apart, hand to hand.

Imagine WW1 trenches, wet, cold, disease ridden... Now add some unknown thing called ptsd from physically downing swaths of people, animals, things best left unseen... Now add Uber religion and superstition...a total lack of medical care....

Total hell on earth..

And I think you have the beginnings of an understanding.

Not according to the records of both the allied and axis soldiers who were there.

A lot of this is going to depend on where exactly you are, mind:

1. The Teutonic Knights, for example, spent most of their time fighting low-level skirmishes with pagans, often in winter, and the rest of their time sieging down forts whenever they had Crusaders come to help.

2. The Byzantines, by contrast, preferred to build bases of supply for their armies, and gradually moved them when planning an attack to reduce the logistical strain, and usually relied mostly on locals to defend territory.

3. The Hungarians (Pre-Mongol) were usually an exception, preferring to seek pitched battle against invading nomads, with little in the way of stone fortifications outside their western border. Against the Mongols, this proved a disaster.

4. While on topic, the Mongols preferred attacking the exposed population instead of sieging western stone forts (built tall to be difficult to storm, though this also made them far more vulnerable to later cannon than the earth-packed Chinese walls,) and the lack of wealth they got attacking Hungary this way was a big factor in why they didn't bother going further west.

5. The English preferred raiding the French over sieges, but this meant that anything lost to France was that much more difficult to take back. In many ways, the English had no choice but to do this, as gathering enough ships to move troops was very difficult without a royal navy.

Oh I know about the MK14 Torpedo. That shit was just rage inducing. I cannot imagine being one of the sub commanders at that time.