Well, maybe. But people still speak Mayan today and they've retained the legends and stories which are depicted on the iconography and actually written in the script, that's how we were able to decipher and read it.
I don't mean to sound like a cultural darwinist, but Athens and the library of Alexandria were razed to the ground and yet we still have Plato today because everybody who got their hands on his writings decided to read, translate, and disseminate it--there was no reason for the Romans to preserve his philosophy, no reason for the Arabian and Persian peoples either, and yet here we are today with complete versions of these texts translated into myriad languages over thousands of years, whereas other cultural properties, perhaps even from civilizations far larger, have simply disappeared, like the Egyptian materials for over a thousand years.
I don't think its wise to be too excited about these potential discoveries, because the reason why these cities can even be recognized and named as such by peoples (namely, us) living and analyzing them hundreds or thousands of years later is because of certain shared psychological and therefore social contexts. They may manifest in different forms, but the parallel developments of civilization across time, in different places, in completely separate contexts, is only on account of the shared, basic psychology of all humans, and in the end there will never be a remarkable difference between the kinds of texts produced by a predominantly agrarian society in the Ancient near-east, like the Egyptians, and a predominantly agrarian society in Mesoamerica.
In any kind of scientific endeavour it is never a good idea to be over-confident, nevertheless I think I have to claim that at this point in time anthropologists have developed a pretty good map of how human civilizations develop, from the totemic cults of tribal cultures to the cosmopolitan sprawls of modern urban centers: no matter where you look or what you examine, material cultures appear to progress in a basically similar manner. And, as I said above, there is no sense in trying to "recover" a lost culture, Mayan or otherwise; those cultures are still alive and well today--cultures never die, they just change, all we can do is create a map of those changes, we can never actually go back and fully understand how a people lived and experienced the world and how they expressed that experience in literature and philosophy, since our interpretation of that data will always be tainted by modern experience. But the map, and the contact with the Other, in the form of a "lost" culture, can show us that our modern experience is not the end all be all of the world, there will always be something in these cultures that escapes modern understanding, and I think that in that encounter something fruitful can be born, and therein lies the value of these sorts of investigations.
> perhaps even from civilizations far larger, have simply disappeared, like the Egyptian materials for over a thousand years.
What you're missing is a history of conquest. Greece and Rome had a very intertwined cultural exchange. It wasn't just alexander that conquered land all over (all the way to india) and I am sure you know of how rome invaded it's way to the point they needed two emperors.
Civilizationd in america invaded each other but not the rest if the world. Same with Africa (outside of Egypt and few minor regionally invading countries). Even in asia, chinese never invaded india. Now Genghis obviously did more invading than alexander so I'd be interested in how much culture and history he spread but I think Rome is what made a difference in the western part of the old world. They built roads and encouraged people from different parts of the empire to travel and trade. Genghis had a habit of killing everyone that resisted but the romans kept them alive as slaves.
American culture and literature for example, I am sure will last many centtiries in other cultures.
>American culture and literature for example, I am sure will last many centuries in other cultures.
Who can say?
You're right that Greece and Rome had very intertwined cultural exchange, but that was only after Greece had been conquered; again, that doesn't explain why Platonic philosophy was so influential outside of Greece and Rome.
And yes, the American civilizations didn't invade people from other parts of the world, but to them they did, because their immediate area was the world, and I'm sure if the Mayan civilization never collapsed they would be a colonizing force not unlike the Europeans. Appropriating land and labor for use in capital exploitation is not a distinctly European phenomenon.
> I'm sure if the Mayan civilization never collapsed they would be a colonizing force not unlike the Europeans. Appropriating land and labor for use in capital exploitation is not a distinctly European phenomenon.
I fully agree with that and even commented as much recently. My point was not "invading bad" but the types of invasions that happened in Europe historically and subsequent developments and technology sharing laid the ground work for an efficient cultural exchange. There was a well functioning regional economy in mediterrenean rim countries for many centuries. It would be even more shocking if greek and roman authors were unknown to the rest of the regions they traded with.
A good comparison is east asia. Chinese cultural influence and literature from antiquity and before can still be seen in korea, japan, vietnam,etc... before the 20th century the works of pluto or aristotle I'm sure were mostly unknown in asia (even in colonies)and africa. Even in the americas, it is either colonizers who brought that cultural literature or natives that had to be exposed to the material against their will.
The prevalnce of cultural artifacts like literature is caused by military victory and conquest.
In modern timed for example, certain tv shows or movies from the US are universally (almost) known.
Didn't the Maya civilization suffer from systematic erasure? Monks collected their books and had bonfires, called them devil-worshippers and threatened them to abandon their scripts and legends.
The few surviving ones are amazing though. I always hope that someday a hidden cache of preserved codices that somehow escaped destruction will be discovered, but it seems unlikely.
> The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. [...] Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified. From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, [...]
What's your source or authority for claiming it was definitively the conquistadores?
If the dating estimates in the article are right, I think this might even have been caused by the prior Preclassic Collapse a few centuries before that. Remember, the dates given are a full two millenia before colonialism and a lot can happen to cause societies to change and history and knowledge to be lost over that timescale; our historical knowledge of much of Europe during this time period isn't exactly great either.
I know it is not an excuse but the European conquerors did the same other cultures have been doing to them for centuries. The "barbaric way of doing things" was common and was pretty extended for much part of the history.
European nations had been plagued by poverty, wars, killing, totalitarianism, witch hunting... For centuries, so when they reach the New World they continue to behave the same way they have been behaving until that point.
The only good part is that some countries were conquered and dominated by cultures that did not exterminated them. There was some mixing between peoples and the culture was enriched by that exchange.
I don't mean to sound like a cultural darwinist, but Athens and the library of Alexandria were razed to the ground and yet we still have Plato today because everybody who got their hands on his writings decided to read, translate, and disseminate it--there was no reason for the Romans to preserve his philosophy, no reason for the Arabian and Persian peoples either, and yet here we are today with complete versions of these texts translated into myriad languages over thousands of years, whereas other cultural properties, perhaps even from civilizations far larger, have simply disappeared, like the Egyptian materials for over a thousand years.
I don't think its wise to be too excited about these potential discoveries, because the reason why these cities can even be recognized and named as such by peoples (namely, us) living and analyzing them hundreds or thousands of years later is because of certain shared psychological and therefore social contexts. They may manifest in different forms, but the parallel developments of civilization across time, in different places, in completely separate contexts, is only on account of the shared, basic psychology of all humans, and in the end there will never be a remarkable difference between the kinds of texts produced by a predominantly agrarian society in the Ancient near-east, like the Egyptians, and a predominantly agrarian society in Mesoamerica.
In any kind of scientific endeavour it is never a good idea to be over-confident, nevertheless I think I have to claim that at this point in time anthropologists have developed a pretty good map of how human civilizations develop, from the totemic cults of tribal cultures to the cosmopolitan sprawls of modern urban centers: no matter where you look or what you examine, material cultures appear to progress in a basically similar manner. And, as I said above, there is no sense in trying to "recover" a lost culture, Mayan or otherwise; those cultures are still alive and well today--cultures never die, they just change, all we can do is create a map of those changes, we can never actually go back and fully understand how a people lived and experienced the world and how they expressed that experience in literature and philosophy, since our interpretation of that data will always be tainted by modern experience. But the map, and the contact with the Other, in the form of a "lost" culture, can show us that our modern experience is not the end all be all of the world, there will always be something in these cultures that escapes modern understanding, and I think that in that encounter something fruitful can be born, and therein lies the value of these sorts of investigations.