Epic win

.

http://www.bicycling.com/racing/pro-cycling/injured-rider-crushes-pro-road-race-on-fans-old-stumpjumper

Much epic, many win

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-36259047

ha, amazing!

Read the footnote..

At first impressions, I'd say this is total bollocks (Erich von Däniken-style)--e.g., traces of thirty buildings in a city would certainly not place it among the top five largest Maya cities--but let's see what the experts say.

It's very easy to produce some plausible-sounding conjecture about something as complex as Mesoamerican civilisations, about which, in spite of a wealth of archaeological research, we still know so little.

Regardless of the outcome, a 15 year old liaising with world leading experts on their level is a fucking win despite the outcome.

Why be a fun sponge on this one?

It's a 15 year old kid who found some Mayan buildings / city / town / caravan park using his smarts & the internet, instead of sitting around watching TV.

Lovely idea, but now people have caught up with the scientists and they're calling bullshit:

http://gizmodo.com/teen-discovers-lost-maya-city-using-ancient-star-maps-1775735999

Not an Epic Win but something I find interesting that's related is how modern deforestation in the Amazon has revealed bigger and more complex cities than people ever knew about.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27945-myth-of-pristine-amazon-rainforest-busted-as-old-cities-reappear/

I've read that before and it is interesting. Though I don't like the last sentence, it takes away Lancashire's / Manchester's claims to historical world domination and being the centre of the universe.

Big up MCR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeGDjvCCkfk

Why be a fun sponge on this one?

Because it is most likely not a genuine finding. An updated version of the comments under the story to which kl linked:

http://gizmodo.com/experts-doubt-that-a-teen-found-a-lost-maya-city-1775985640

Far from wanting to scotch any fun, I find Maya archaeology totally fascinating, and I think it's more worth anyone's time to do some more reading into it than reading some superficial, sensationalist, and ultimately false news story about it.

It's a 15 year old kid who found some Mayan buildings / city / town / caravan park using his smarts & the internet, instead of sitting around watching TV.

As the Mayanists say, it remains to be explored on the ground, but he neither seems to have found any Maya buildings, nor is his theory of a match with star constellations likely to hold any water. I find it most preposterous how he then gives his 'site' some made-up pseudo-name like the first explorers of Mayan ruins sometimes did (or, as in the case of Teoberto Maler, even scratched their name into walls).

There is no doubt that a lot of sites remain to be found. The way I understand Maya archaeology, there were countless sites because Mesoamerica was very densely inhabited, and it isn't actually very difficult to accidentally stumble on an unexplored site. The cities that we have found so far are probably only a small fraction of those that existed, and I think many of them have been found mainly because they were not destroyed in wars but abandoned as they stood.

There may have been many more cities, such as several apparently significant ones of which we know as losers in wars from Mayan writings. These places may have been destroyed and not been re-inhabited after those wars, and will likely continue to elude us for some time. There are thousands and thousands of hills covered by jungle that may really be mounds of remains, and they most likely wouldn't show up on an aerial image as geometric structures, because they will have been covered completely by the jungle. Even most of the iconic Maya remains of major sites such as Chichén Itza had to be excavated before they could become tourist magnets.

Some of the sites, like Tikal, easily rival the largest European remains of ancient cities, and there is always the factor to be considered that the largest number of buildings then were probably found in wooden shanty towns of which few remains would have survived until today, and which are difficult to document archaeologically.

Anyway, I wish he was right, as I enjoy it when new discoveries are made, but I'm afraid the days of dilettantes like Heinrich Schliemann are long in the past.

Tldr

You wouldn't want to live next door to it, though.

Absolutely right. Having done a bit of remote sensing, I was a bit sceptical from the start. Also, I've read previous articles where people have tried to match constellations to ancient settlements and it just strikes me as implausibly fantastical. Still, I hope the kid has learned a lot, that his enthusiasm remains undiminished, and that he keeps on exploring...

Oliver, I asked this question in the books thread without success, but since you seem to have an interest in Mayan stuff I figured I'd repost here just in case you had any thoughts...

Does anyone have any recommendations for books about pre-Columbian American history, or more specifically the Inca empire?

I'm travelling to Peru/Cusco in a couple of months and would like to read up a bit on local history. I've come across Charles Mann's 1491 but heard mixed reviews.

Not after anything too deep or heavy, and availability as an audio book would be great but not vital.

Cheers.

Oliver, I asked this question in the books thread without success, but since you seem to have an interest in Mayan stuff I figured I'd repost here just in case you had any thoughts ...

I can't remember the titles of books I read way back when I first became interested in this. They were all in German and came from the library. More recently I've only looked at web-sites. I really like this one, which someone recommended in the Lost Cities thread not too long ago:

http://uncoveredhistory.com/

It features nice summaries of the archaeological puzzles encountered and brief histories of interpreting finds.

This is an old site but with nice pictures:

http://mayaruins.com/yucmap.html

I'm sure there are plenty of others.

I haven't done very much reading about the Aztecs and Incas other than Wikipedia articles, and you never know how good those are. We know far less about those than about the Maya. (What interests me the most about the Maya is that they were not a peaking civilisation at the time the Spanish arrived, and as a result there was no deliberate attempt to erase their history. (The Spanish destroyed most of the writings and records of the Mexican and Andean peoples.))

SNES game that invented grime in 1994

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9K23uzHjus

Fantastic.

The programmers from that era were originators par excellence.

It's like the memes thread in here...

Fun sponge, nice... Up there with mood hoover... #theverybanned

Lol

how work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ9gs-5lRKc

It's unfortunate that someone with such talent (and presumably patience) didn't attempt to use the skills of anyone who knew how to make a half decent video.

Amaze