That rascal is going to have a bunch of books, several of them brand new, going up. She’s been working on covers for the books, so she doesn’t have the text fixed yet, and in her copious spare time she’s been proofing Rusalka, but she is going to have a really big slice of the upcoming catalog, which I’m starting to work on.
We’re going to need to revise the size of the cover images I’ve got: they’re too slow loading for the catalog. But that’s minor. We’re needing to establish a file size and then I’ll get it all prettified.
I’ve been catching this Nostradamus Effect program stripped on the History Channel, and I have never seen such a collection of nonsense. John the Baptist’s hair is all whirlpools symbolizing Leonardo Da Vinci’s belief in a great Flood. They’re talking science, but it’s all mismash. A magnetic polar reversal is going to wipe out life on Earth (not). There’s going to be a Great Flood. Yeah, well, even rising sea level is not going to make it too much deeper by 2012, and the planet has pretty well all the water it has had for the last several million years, so it’s not as if it’s going to rain a lot everywhere. And what else? There are all these atmospheric effects that are going to spontaneously happen. They have a bunch of strange people analyzing Leonardo’s art, and talking about whirlpools, and any artist can tell you—if you’ve got a good technique for making hair, you make hair that way. Period. It’s pretty. It works. Why mess with success? The Mona Lisa is backed by a threatening landscape foretelling doom. Hey, I’m sure it was a place Leonardo liked, and you couldn’t sell a landscape. Looks like the Apennine mountains to me. And the Mayans couldn’t even figure out not to trust the Conquistadores, so they weren’t too good at predicting the future, were they?
Conquistadores & Aztecs, I believe. Weren’t the Mayans overthrown by the Aztecs?
You’re probably right. The Americas are not my forte. ;)But they still shoulda seen it coming!
1441 There is a rebellion within Mayapán and the city is abandoned by 1461. After this, political union is lost in Yucatán. Sixteen rival groups compete among themselves to rule over the others.
1517 The Spanish first arrive on the shores of Yucatán under Hernández de Córdoba, who later dies of wounds received in battle against the Maya. The arrival of the Spanish ushers in Old World diseases unknown among the Maya, including smallpox, influenza and measles. Within a century, 90 per cent of Mesoamérica’s native populations will be killed off.
1519 Hernán Cortés begins exploring Yucatán.
1524 Cortés meets the Itzá people, the last of the Maya to remain unconquered by the Spanish.
1528 The Spanish under Francisco de Montejo begin their conquest of the northern Maya. The Maya fight back with surprising vigour, keeping the Spanish at bay for several years.
1541 The Spanish are finally able to subdue the Maya and put an end to Maya resistance. Revolt continues, however, to plague the Spaniards off and on for the rest of the century.
1542 The Spanish establish a capital city at Mérida in Yucatán.
(The Aztecs did have influence on southern Mayan cities, but never the whole of the Yucatan.)
http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/map16-az.html
I can always rely on my readers to keep me honest! My knowledge is spotty at best. I know a lot about the Chachapoya, but I get Aztecs and Maya mixed up, silly me.
You know what gets me? There is apparently a big mystery about why the Maya civilization collapsed. Was it war, famine, drought? They have apparently found some new ruins that look like people just walked away from them and never came back. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2009-09-19-mayan-collapse_N.htm But the thing that gets me is that the Maya are not a dead tribe. Hasn’t anyone bothered asking their descendants why great-great-great….grandpa decided to head to the Yucatan?
I agree. Not enough archaelogists have real respect for the accuracy of oral history. Of course, your next problem is getting the descendants of the people your ancestors dislodged to talk to you straightforwardly.
One of the classics—the south-central European villagers who were challenged about their memory of events, and their ability to compose verse on the fly…they did it in pretty good verse extemp and produced images of WWII style warfare told in epic style. Dactylic hexameter is sort of like rap. You just have to have a feeling for it. But once lodged in verse, things can be passed with better accuracy than you’d think.
Oh definitely. One of the best examples I can think of are the Brehon Codes in Ireland. These law tracts got written down in the 500s by the monasteries and were used into the Norman period, but the language format is very archaic and some folk think it could date back to the Bronze Age. They were entirely oral and covered an extensive array of laws, including 10 different types of legal marraige and the rights slaves had, as well the types of redress allowed for wrongs, damages etc. depending on occupation or social standing or the degree of injury. These things are amazingly complex and comprehensive. Homer’s works were all oral. It’s why the storyteller was so critial — it wasn’t simply entertainment — these poeple contained the history, mores, the very placement of a people in the land and with their gods. Stories were scared and among the Celts at least, if you were learned, you were pretty close to being sacrosanct.
One of the biggest problem we’ve had is that many of the Tribes we deal with are not the least bit interested in telling us their oral histories. There’s a great deal of distrust even now among the Tribes with how archaeologists will use that knowledge — and some of that is well founded. The other problem is that much of that knowledge is considered sacred, and there are concerns regarding proteccting the information; add to this the fact that if Tribal members aren’t supposed to have that knowledge unless they’ve gone through certain ceremonial levels, why are they going to tell the unworthy white folk anything? We get very frustrated alot.
Oh… and the other thing: how little most Americans know about the native tribes. Ask people about pyramids in the New World, and everyone thinks Aztec, and some think Maya, but almost no one talks about the Mississippians. Heck, I probably wouldn’t know that much about them except that I lived within an easy drive of Cahokia, and liked to go out and see Monk’s Mound. It’s impressive to see what can be done by nothing more than people carrying baskets of dirt.
Humans are pattern-seeking beasties. Usually it works to our benefit (hey, those shadows over there look like a sabertooth tiger — ZOMGRUNHIDE!), but sometimes we invent patterns where there aren’t any, like the constellations. Occasionally it comes back to bite us in the bum.
# 1487 Dedication of enlarged great temple
Teloloapan, SW of Tenochtitlan, does not send representatives so all its inhabitants are immediately destroyed. The same happens in Oztoma and Alahuiztla. Oztoma, on the edge of Tarascan territory is heavily fortified in fear of a future assault.
# 1488 Destruction of the town and population of Oaxaca
# 1491-1495 Conquest of the Pacific coast from Zacatula to Acapulco
# 1492 Columbus lands in the Bahamas thinking he is in Asia
# 1498 Conquest of Tehuantepec at the south end of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Meanwhile, first European colonists arrive in Haiti
# 1500 Conquest of Xoconoxco (modern Soconusco) on the coast due south of the Yucatan peninsula
Meanwhile, Amerigo Vespucci discovers that America is not part of Asia
# 1503-1520 Reign of tlahtoani #9 Moteuczoma Xocoyotl (or Xocoyotzin) (“Montezuma II”), son of tlahtoani #6 Axayacatl
# 1503 Flooding of Tenochtitlan
# 1519 Tenochtitlan has grown to 150,000-200,000 people, Valley of Mexico to 1,000,000 to 1,600,000 people
(Cf.: Paris 300,000, London 50,000, Seville 65,000)
# 1519 Landing of Hernán Cortés near Veracruz
He allies himself himself with Huastec and Totonac populations in that region, and eventually with the Nahuatl-speaking but non-Mexica city of Tlaxcala, the beleaguered but never conquered enemy of the Tenochtitlan régime. These alliances rapidly multiply into a general rebellion against Mexica hegemony. (Western accounts tend to portray events as the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. Native accounts tend to represent the Spanish as convenient tools suddenly available to help overthrow oppressive enemies.)
# 1516-1519 Reign of Cacama at Texcoco
# 1520 Noche Triste: Spanish temporarily defeated at Tenochtitlan
# 1520-1520 Four-month reign of tlahtoani #10 Cuitlahuac, who dies of smallpox
# 1520-1522 Reign of tlahtoani #11 Cuauhtemoc
He lives till 1425, so some sources end his reign then.
# 1521 Tenochtitlan falls to Spain
Notice the difference in the Maya and Aztec names. The Maya were past their political prime and the Aztecs were on the ascendancy. Note also the arrival of smallpox with the Spanish and the arrival from Cuba by one Hernán Cortés in 1519 first to the Yucatan and then into central Mexico.
This one is Aztec history (or Mexica as they called themselves) The previous post is Maya history. Both end with the arrival of Hernán Cortés and smallpox.
1492 Columbus lands in the Bahamas thinking he is in Asia
You know, I’ve never seen any evidence for this. At all. Who knew what about South America is a complex, touchy, and usually hidden topic that causes historians a lot of grief because there’s so little _proof_ – while at the same time if you say ‘it was unknown’ you need to ignore a large body of secondary evidence.
And, sigh, until very recently I didn’t have the slightest clue that someone, somewhere in Peru had large, sea-going cargo rafts long (?) before Europeans arrived.
you never read the book? (Kon-tiki)
where my place in Spain is, Extremadura, is where these conquistadors came from (Trujillo). one of the 3 nearby towns is Mérida!
You have more patience than I have, I was only able to last about twenty minutes into that episode they did on Leonardo, then I switched over to a rerun of NCIS.
The thing that they never explained, or at least they didn’t in the part I watched, was why he felt it necessary to encode secret messages in his paintings. Personally I think he just put in what he thought would make the painting look good.
Brad
And none of the people they asked to be on the show were artists, or actual historians.
Warning: my long comment below is basically academic and bibliographic, detailing sources that folks in the comments above can or are drawing from.
The work that CJ refers to showing Serbo-Croatian poets on the fly composing epic verse (aka traditional ballads) retelling the adventures of their heros is Albert Lord’s excellent and readable 1960 work, The Singer of Tales. Lord proposed that “Homer” used similar techniques of oral formulaic composition in creating/reciting/singing the Iliad and the Odyssey. I met Lord several times at talks and events at Harvard when I was getting my doctorate in Celtic Languages and Literatures there. Greg Nagy, a superb Harvard prof from whom I took a course on oral tradition, has taken Lord’s ideas and expanded on them in regards to Greek epic. His book kicking around the bookshelves here at home is The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, but I don’t think that is where Greg deeply looked at Homer’s oral compostion techniques, though certainly it will appear throughout his analysis of thematic formulae use in epic verse to describe heros’ attributes.
These days I don’t get much of a chance to teach (and lately, read) on things Celtoid, but the dark age Brehon Laws in Old Irish are indeed fascinating, as well as their later, medieval commentary (sometimes showing that the commentator had no idea what the earlier law was talking about) which form the bulk of the legal texts we have. If you want to get a good summary and analysis of the Brehon Laws, try Fergus Kelly’s A guide to Early Irish Law. Alas, there is no provable evidence that the laws in their current form go back several thousand years to the bronze age.
I teach a course on techniques of scientific inquiry using Maya Archaeology as its focal point. For their final paper, the students create a research proposal reviewing theories of the so-called “Collapse of Maya Society” in the 800-900s AD and propose their own hypothesis with supporting evidence, plus a fantasy budget and research outline of how they would test their idea. New (i.e. post Collapse) Maya cities sprang up after the collapse, including Chichen Itza, which was later somewhat abandoned but still in use for pilgrimage when the Spanish arrived. For the most part, the Aztecs did not conquer the Maya cities and territories of their period (there never was a pan-Maya empire they could take over once and for all) but instead enlisted the Maya as trading partners. The Spanish did try to actively conquer all the Maya lands, but the Maya continuously revolted, including in the 19th Century. Many see the Zapatista rebellion of the ’90s in Chiapas as one of these on-going Maya revolts.
An excellent review and analysis of the many theories of the Classic Maya Collapse (that 800-900 AD-ish one, but also notes plenty of other times Maya cities were abandoned or otherwise degraded) is David Webster’s new The Fall of the Ancient Maya. It’s very likely there is no one cause/reason for the collapse, although environmental degradation and drought are very trendy theories now as we today grapple with the potential collapse of our own world due to environmental carelessness.
Many Maya archaeologists do pay considerable attention to the views and understandings of the many, contemporary Maya people today (as do my students, who often say in their research proposals that they will interview the Maya re. why they think cities sank into oblivion over a thousand years ago).
My absolute favorite scholarly (though not strictly archaeological) example is Dennis Tedlock, who learnt to be a contemporary Quiche Maya “day-keeper” or shaman, and consulted with other daykeepers when he translated the Popul Vuh, a 16th C. written version of the Quiche Maya creation story. Tedlock’s Popul Vuh, with its many footnote commentaries, is the version to read. And this summer, I also read Tedlock’s “Breath on the Mirror,” in which he beautifully retells or narrates traditional Quiche stories of the conquest as well as stories of him and his wife training as day keepers. Especially relevant to the Popul Vuh is his analysis of key aspects of the story to show how its events coincide with the Maya 260 calendar round (one of the many time cycles the ancient Maya tracked and still actively used today) and with movements of stars and planets in the sky. Not only is his book informative, it’s a lyrical read too.
OK, end of academic lecture. It’s rare that a blog post and the ensuing comments hit on topics I’ve worked on academically, and I’m afraid I couldn’t resist commenting and pointing out great books.
Brilliant, Raesean! Thanks so much for putting that together. A lot of people on this site are interested in everything, and a lot of people on this site know a whole lot, it’s very clear— I love these comments.
Good post, Raesean. Another Pre-Columbian Civilization that gets short shrift is that of the so called Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloans. That they could build their monumental buildings out of rocks and mud is a wonder and a half. It would have been nice if they had been literate, though. We know so little about them.
You know, I just studied Colonialism in South America this spring… and I can barely remember a thing! My brain is like a sieve sometimes, alas! Although I do remember the rebellions of Túpac Amaru I and II, having written a paper of dubious quality at best on the latter. That whole last term was a blur, I swear! Too much machine embroidery by far for a certain art class… the things I get myself into!