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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.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 09 2015, @04:26PM
More free than serfs under the feudal system often were. Your lord would determine what crops you planted, for example.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 09 2015, @06:55PM
> Your lord would determine what crops you planted, for example.
Right now, the markets do, as drunk oracles that the farmers try to interpret to maximize their individual return...
So we end up with too much milk one year and not enough the next, too much corn one year and too much wheat the next. It's a good things our yields are the best ever, because otherwise we'd be changing diets every year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @08:02PM
Surely you have heard of storage. We store grain in silos, preserve milk as cheese or milk powder, etc. We aren't living hand to mouth each year.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 09 2015, @08:05PM
That would be the Marxist interpretation of the agriculture market, yes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @10:45PM
and lets not forget how much the government subsidizes the production of so many things that ends up being thrown away.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday November 10 2015, @02:09AM
The problem TFA has though is that the freedom aspect is completely made up. There's no evidence presented that shows that they could make those decisions.
We know about the conditions European serfs lived under because we can read the writing left behind. There's nothing like that here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @03:09AM
Far more likely they just set certain targets (with minimums)-how much wheat, how many sheep, how many pigs and by when. They didn't care how you achieved them, where you planted stuff (within the boundaries of what you were assigned), how you planted stuff. Why would they micromanage?
Only today you have places where every minute and every word is monitored and could be reviewed later with all the hard statistics.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:39AM
> Far more likely they just set certain targets (with minimums)-how much wheat, how many sheep, how many pigs and by when. They didn't care how you achieved them, where you planted stuff (within the boundaries of what you were
> assigned), how you planted stuff.
I'm sure many lords worked like this, but I bet not all of them did.
> Why would they micromanage?
Because those stupid peasants are stupid and dirty and I'm better than them because I'm a lord and I know everything and everything I do is right and when it goes wrong it's obviously someone else's fault for not doing what I told them to.
You think bad managers were invented especially for the Dilbert era?