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posted by martyb on Monday November 09 2015, @01:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the 140-decades-of-delaying-doing-dishes dept.

A Mayan village frozen in time 1,400 years ago by a volcanic eruption reveals that commoners had power in a culture best known for the works of the elite class.

Though elites in city centers had an impressive record in developing arts, hieroglyphs and a complex calendar, rural villagers weren't under the thumb of this ruling class, excavations in El Salvador suggest. In fact, nearly all decisions appeared to be under local control, and villagers had a remarkable quality of life, said Payson Sheets, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

[...] Instead, Mayan villagers called the shots for their own community, Sheets and his colleagues report in a new paper in the September issue of the journal Latin American Antiquity. Differences in artifacts from house to house reveal that individuals could decide the basic rhythms of their days, from when they did the dishes to whether they let the kids help make a pot. Households also had a great deal of discretion in deciding how to lay out their maize fields, when to weed and when to harvest.

Egyptologists have recently begun to revise their understanding of the lives of the workers who built the pyramids from slaves to valued craftsmen, and this suggests a similar shift in understanding among Mayanists.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday November 09 2015, @03:00PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday November 09 2015, @03:00PM (#260776)

    The reason is very simple: They're the majority. If they end up angry enough, they'll revolt against the people in charge and at the very least give them a fight they don't want to have, followed by those in charge having a manpower problem.

    The way that those with power counter that is:
    1. Having an overwhelming technological advantage (e.g. armored knights on horseback with lances versus peasants with pitchforks).
    2. Convincing a portion of the common people to identify more with those in charge than the other common people (e.g. using racism to stop white indentured servants from working with black slaves to overthrow their common masters in the Virginia colony).

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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