Impressive city structures, pyramids, temples: a documentation of archaeological research in the remains of three urban structures in Mesoamerica. The TV review.
There is so much that the experts argue about to this day. One can argue about views and opinions, not about facts. An expert dispute is always a sign that little is known, but that, firstly, the production of knowledge in the scientific community, i.e. the productive debate among experts, is intact and, secondly, that there are at least some facts that one should adhere to can.
Archaeologists, for example, have their artefacts and objects, their impressive methods of determining materials, their origin and age – and beyond that they have their theories that can be debated.
In the case of the pre-Columbian history of the Mesoamerican civilizations, the facts are not exactly few and far between. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are full of pyramids and urban remnants, often hidden in a rainforest overgrowth that had several centuries to make the area their own.
“Mayan Power Centers”: Misleading collective title
Claire Denavarre and Fabrice Buysschaert have compiled an extensive documentation of the facts that archeology has unearthed about prehistory. You have put this together somewhat misleadingly under the collective title “Mayan Power Centers”. Misleading, because the Maya were only one of numerous ethnic groups in the region and the epoch of their greatest expansion of power by no means shaped the entire early history of Mesoamerica. After all, nobody speaks of the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the era of the Florentines and Venetians.
| series | Mayan power centers |
| Channel | ZDFinfo |
| consequences | Three (Chichén Itzá, Teotihuacán, Tikal) |
The documentation focuses on three urban structures, each of which exerted its own aura in the surrounding regions over a certain period of time: the city-states of Teotihuacán, Tikal and Chichén Itzá. Once upon a time there were impressive pyramids, temples, city structures and sophisticated agricultural cultivation and irrigation systems everywhere. The latter were necessary because in Teotihuacán, for example, a quarter of a million people had to live and be fed for a while.
These imagery are threatening: the documentary series “Maya Power Centers” focuses on buildings
What were these people doing there? Well, what homo sapiens does: live, work and build buildings, rule and allow oneself to be dominated, invent religions, celebrate rituals, sacrifice and allow oneself to be sacrificed, wage wars, kill neighbors.
The archaeologists can only stick to the facts that they unearth. They let the temples and pyramids and the great visual axes and symmetry notions built into the cities speak for themselves.
Above all, they analyze the structures, what else can they do? You will find all sorts of threatening images of gods that have to do with jaguars or snakes, and from the threatening nature of these imagery they conclude that human sacrifices were constantly and almost wastefully made in Mesoamerica. In general, the ethnological research approaches discussed here are quite monotonous. You learn a little, but really only a little, about agriculture, you hear a lot about the impressive skills of the architects and builders, about building materials and the amazing durability of the structures and occasionally about extensive and sophisticated water retention and filter systems.
Mayan power centers
ZDFinfo, June 13th, from 8pm to 3pm and in the ZDF media library.
“Maya Power Centers” on ZDFinfo: Hollow spaces of ignorance
If you ask yourself what all this was for, there are a few vague hints about powerful autocrats, self-sacrificing priests, neighborly campaigns and time and again human sacrifices. Didn’t people then have anything else to do but slaughter each other? Yes, some traded after all if they had previously conquered an important port.
On the one hand it is really amazing what the early cultures of Mesoamerica were able to build. But it is just as astonishing how much the huge cavities of ignorance are used as projection spaces for contemporary thinking. (Hans-Jürgen Linke)
