Posted on 11/20/2007 7:20:23 AM PST by 3AngelaD
Maya rulers' growing demand for animals of symbolic value may have caused a decline in big game, like jaguars, in ancient Latin America, a new study suggests. Faced with environmental problems and doubts about their ability to provide for their followers, the Maya elite may have ordered more hunting of large mammals whose meat, skins, and teeth provided proof of power and status, the study says.
Kitty Emery, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has studied 80,000 animal bones found in 25 Maya trash mounds to map the effects of ancient hunting on animal populations over 4,000 years. The research, which experts said could be the most exhaustive of its kind, tracked the proportions of bones found from large, status-marking animals like jaguars and white-tailed deer to those of small game like armadillos, rodents, and rabbits. The results showed that large-animal remains were most plentiful from around A.D. 600 to 900, when the Maya population was at its largest and the proportion of elites was its highest.
However, in the later years of the Maya empire, from about A.D. 900 to 1500, evidence of big game dwindles, and bones of smaller animals become more frequent, particularly at the largest and most politically active Maya sites.
This suggests "a depression in large-game availability caused by the demands of too many people and too many elites," Emery writes in the new study.
The change in hunting habits was likely prompted by deforestation and a drier climate, which shook faith in Maya rulers' ability to provide "agricultural abundance," Emery continues. In response to this uncertainty, rulers ordered that more large animals be killed for food, as religious offerings, and as evidence of their power and status.
"I hypothesize that as the Maya elite class grew in number, and as they became more politically active, they began for the first time to demand more animals than were available," Emery said in an email.
The Maya and Conservation: Notably, the changes in hunting practices ran counter to the largely sustainable Maya conservation practices throughout their long history, Emery said.
"Even as the ancient Maya lived in large cities over thousands of years, they never exploited game animals to extinction or even local decimation," she said. "The large elite class probably did not act conservatively by recognizing the need to reduce demand for large game."
"Instead they demanded more and more in an attempt to prove their status regardless of the worsening conditions. But this scenario is speculative."...
ping!
Just where do archaeologists come up with these fairy tales?
This attributing motives is sheer speculation, not science.
Maybe there was more big game killed because they kill people and nobody wanted man eating carnivores in their backyards.
Gotta love how the author is channeling the thoughts of the Mayas.
So, elites are not people. I always knew that..............
Well, she does say it is a hypothesis, which means it is her theory of an explanation, not a statement of fact. Significant difference.
There might be other source material factored on but not mentioned. (I don’t think the Mayans kept a written history, but encounters with other peoples might have been preserved in those peoples’ historical tradition.) Or this might be an anthropologist way out in left field.
They have to write soething in that space that says "reason for huge government grant of taxpayers money".
Trust the idiots to come up with 'over hunting" as a reason. Personally, I would say that the mayans went through a period of political change in which animal rights groups. Vegans forced laws on the people banning red meat. That's probably why they died off, or in combination with the mayans all turning gay, destroying the family structure, and just dying out because of the lack of breeding.
The Mayans kept written records, but the Spanish destroyed most of them. However, their stelae, which are carved stone monuments placed in ceremonial centers, do record some of their historical events and their rulers’ achievements, military triumphs, and their descent. See also the paintings in the temple at Bonampak.
Actually, they did. But the missionaries destroyed all but a few as "works of the devil", and nobody has managed to translate the few that remain.
“The change in hunting habits was likely prompted by deforestation and a drier climate, which shook faith in Maya rulers’ ability to provide “agricultural abundance,” Emery continues. In response to this uncertainty, rulers ordered that more large animals be killed for food, as religious offerings, and as evidence of their power and status.”
“The Maya and Conservation: Notably, the changes in hunting practices ran counter to the largely sustainable Maya conservation practices throughout their long history, Emery said.”
Drawing parallels between ancient man-made climate change, failure to maintain sustainable practices, resorting to myth-based rituals to the gods for deliverance, wiping out the trees and causing damage to their whole ecosphere.
Warnings written in bone.
Repent now, before it is too late.
Would it have been okay for woman to have eaten a carrot?
They are being translated. David Stuart at Harvard, who started when he was a child, Yuri V. Knorosov, Linda Schele from UT, Tatiana Proskouriakoff and numerous others have made huge strides in deciphering Maya hieroglyphs, which can now be read coherently.
marked to read later
Good to hear that. It's been a few years since I last "read up" on the Maya.
I wonder if they have considered the obvious. If the Maya were willing to keep and care for people they would sacrifice, why wouldn’t they do that with animals?
They were skilled enough engineers to build enormous flat slabs of ground limestone concrete to build their temples on, and large artificial lakes lined with that same concrete. So how hard would it be to build pens or cages to raise sacred animals?
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Thanks 3AngelaD. Could have sworn we'd posted this somewhere, but this is the first! |
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Approximately the same time as Forest Law in England.
As the climate changed and their empire declined, I’d bet Their rituals called for even bigger declines in the “long pig” via sacrifice.
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