I find this story about a discovery of a new Mayan City utterly fascinating.
I’m actually reading a book on Indigenous history now called Native Nations: A Millenium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (currently only $1.99 on Amazon), while it concentrates on North America, it does touch on how lidar is discovering so much about the history of people here. The technology is able to search underneath a lot of growth, erosion over time, and underground in order to detect ruins.
We’re learning so much more about indigenous people and how a lot of their civilizations had tried out cities and eventually moved away from them as they either found it didn’t work for their society or they moved beyond them.
From the summary of the book on Amazon it states:
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated.
A lot of people (including me in my ignorance in the past) don’t think about how the indigenous people’s achievements stopped after colonists arrived on the scene, but they continue on and reach new heights even today after all they have been through. The more we learn, the more as a society we can grow and become better people, imagine what it would have been like if colonists could have worked together with the people who’s land we took. Imagine the future we may have now, one with new forms of society that could live with the land, one that would perhaps be beyond a lot of the concerns that we live with today…the lives that could have been saved1. While we can’t change history, understanding should always be something we work towards.
1If you are interested in what could have been I recommend Stephen Graham Jones, Davide Gianfelice, and Joana Lafuente’s excellent Earthdivers comic series.
The year is 2112, and it’s the apocalypse exactly as expected: rivers receding, oceans rising, civilization crumbling. Humanity has given up hope, except for a group of Indigenous outcasts who have discovered a time travel portal in a cave in the desert and figured out where everything took a turn for the worst: America. Convinced that the only way to save the world is to rewrite its past, they send one of their own—a reluctant linguist named Tad—on a bloody, one-way mission to 1492 to kill Christopher Columbus before he reaches the so-called New World.
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