Astral Codex Ten

Mayans

7 min read

Mayans

Article

Mayans is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 21, 2021 and June 17, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Eastern Orthodoxy among the Mayans of Guatemala”; “For the Mayans, the strategy that brought them down was investing in a red queen race of population growth and agricultural intensification”; “Mayan sculpture regularly depicts military themes”. It most often appears alongside United States, Mediterranean, Africa.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 21, 2021
  • Last seen: June 17, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
April 21, 2021 · Original source
This story of a religious leader converting, followed by his flock, reminds me of the story of Eastern Orthodoxy among the Mayans of Guatemala. On two separate occasions, important Catholic religious figures in Guatemala converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and their followers followed - there are now about 400,000 Mayans in the Constantinopolitan subgroup and an undetermined number more in the Antiochan subgroup.
Inline links: Eastern Orthodoxy among the Mayans of Guatemala
Your Book Review: The Collapse Of Complex Societies
June 03, 2021 · Original source
For the Mayans, the strategy that brought them down was investing in a red queen race of population growth and agricultural intensification. There were several major power centers in competition, and they might have prioritized population growth as a matter of policy – when food started becoming scarce, male height started going down while female height didn’t, which some people think indicates that Mayans prioritized keeping women healthy for population growth reasons. (Tainter doesn’t say, but I assume they ruled out the hypothesis that the women were never that well fed to begin with, since it’s easy to check for – male:female height distributions under equal nutrition are well known.)
Inline links: red queen race
Mayans practiced similar kinds of agriculture, and hard times hit everyone at the same time. This was a major cause of population clustering around the power centers / states:
The people in these power centers spent a lot of effort erecting monuments. One reason to do so was to signal legitimacy of reign – apparently a ruler succeeding more impressive kings would go into a frenzy of building at the start of their reign. And the bigger and more ornately carved with vicious depictions of what the creator society would do to prisoners of war the better. For whatever reason, Mayans didn’t have standing armies, so their main way of signaling “this is how many people we have (and this is how badly we’ll screw you over if you attack us)” was by building monuments:
Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
Yellow River Basin The Han Dynasty never made it very far south towards the Yangtze. Political and military obstacles were relatively unimportant, and the climate and land meant longer and more productive growing seasons for agriculture. The Yangtze also has more predictable and manageable flood plains. Yangtze Valley is prettier too. Why not extend civilization southward? In McNeill’s words “for in moving southward and into better farming regions, Chinese pioneers were also climbing a rather steep disease gradient!” The climatic gradient is steep, like New England to Florida, in a shorter geographic distance. For a Chinese peasant, the mutually tolerable accommodation with the state and with the microparasites of the Yellow River Valley was maintainable. But more microparasitic intensity made the balance unmaintainable. The Han Dynasty and Confucianism really only worked at a certain latitude. By the way, guess which major Chinese city is on the Yangtze? (You can look back at the map.) In contrast to the Ganges Valley in India, with a civilization and farming starting around 600 BC but remained unstable and never consolidated. The Ganges Valley is hugely productive agriculturally but also warmer and wetter than China’s southern Yangtze Valley. “Classical Indian civilization thus took form under climatic and (presumed) disease conditions that the early Chinese found too much to bear.” It took a long time for China to populate the Yangtze River basin- biological accommodation to a microparasitic climate will take a long time. By that time, around 1200 AD, there is also evidence the Sung Dynasty was a less powerful and less demanding macroparasite. “To achieve such a mass population [100 million by A.D.1200] two things were needed: a suitable microparasistic accommodation to the ecological conditions of the Yangtze Valley and regions farther south, and a regulated macroparasitism that left enough of their product with the Chinese peasants so that they could sustain a substantial rate of natural increase over several generations.” Epistemic Status: A convincing narrative with zero evidence McNeill explicitly and regularly reminds the reader that this overarching thesis has little to no evidence. But it does have lots of examples. It’s the same problem that most overarching histories of humanity face: lack of documentation. Except this time it’s lack of documentation 10,000 years ago of something we discovered existed 300 years ago and is invisible without a microscope. In some way, though, this complete lack of documentation makes his case stronger- the invisible forces are stronger than the visible ones. We all kind of knew the narrative that the Spanish decimated the Aztecs and Mayans with help of smallpox. I just never extended that logic towards humanity’s escape from Africa, the march of civilizations into the countryside, and what type of social structures worked best at certain ‘disease gradient’ latitudes. The documentation of the conquistadors was almost adequate to infer disease as a massive influence. But earlier medical records and writings lack such detail. When McNeill contrasts this force of microparasitism balancing with and against the adequately vague force of macroparasitism, it’s hard not to nod your head and agree. McNeill provides as much detail and admits lack of detail as possible. The book is about on fifth footnotes. But the most convincing arguments for his narrative is the sum of parts that make up the narrative. I’m going to just list a few more examples that fit his framework because they are all interesting and also paint a more convincing picture of the importance microparasitism played in human history. The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets has been a key driver in ancient civilization expansion. The moment the city folk come in contact with tribes, smaller towns, anyone in the countryside they also bring the city folk diseases. This makes civilization expansion fundamentally easier.
Inline links: Yangtze Valley is prettier too