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ArsTechnica has a story about a painted altar in the mesoAmerican city of Tikal, revealing clues about the Aztec takeover of Tikal a couple of thousand years ago.
LIDAR scans effectively strip away the jungle revealing the ruins of ancient buildings and this has triggered a whole mass of new information. The original article is in Antiquity magazine for those who want more detail [link below]:
Here is a quick summary:
"A family altar in the Maya city of Tikal offers a glimpse into events in an enclave of the city's foreign overlords in the wake of a local coup.
Archaeologists recently unearthed the altar in a quarter of the Maya city of Tikal that had lain buried under dirt and rubble for about the last 1,500 years. The altar—and the wealthy household behind the courtyard it once adorned—stands just a few blocks from the center of Tikal, one of the most powerful cities of Maya civilization. But the altar and the courtyard around it aren't even remotely Maya-looking; their architecture and decoration look like they belong 1,000 kilometers to the west in the city of Teotihuacan, in central Mexico.
The altar reveals the presence of powerful rulers from Teotihuacan who were there at a time when a coup ousted Tikal's Maya rulers and replaced them with a Teotihuacan puppet government. It also reveals how hard those foreign rulers fell from favor when Teotihuacan's power finally waned centuries later."
Journal: DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.3
(Score: 4, Informative) by Mykl on Monday April 14, @11:37PM (3 children)
The Aztec civilization rose after the fall of Teotihuacan, so this was not "Aztec vs Mayan".
According to Wikipedia, the current thinking is that it was the Totonac people who founded and largely inhabited early Teotihuacan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan [wikipedia.org]
And now for something completely different. For those who like their board games, Tikal features as one of the locations on the board in the (excellent) board game Tzolk'in (The Mayan Calendar). The same author of that game went on to create another board game called Teotihuacan. While also good, it doesn't quite reach the heights of Tzolk'in in my opinion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aliks on Tuesday April 15, @03:48AM
Thanks for the correction - I should have checked the details!
To err is human, to comment divine
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @07:56PM (1 child)
I have played Teotihuacan fairly often. The gear mechanism of Tzolk'in for progressing the game sounds interesting, but rather complex?
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday April 15, @11:29PM
The gear mechanism itself for Tzolk'in is pretty straightforward in principle, but the game rules do force players to think several moves in advance.
Each turn, players can either:
- Place one or more of their 'workers' on available spaces across the 5 gears, using the lowest available spaces. More workers = higher cost
- Remove one or more of their workers from their position on gears and gather the reward for that space. Spaces higher up on the gears are generally worth more
After each player's turn, a central gear is moved one space, resulting in all of the playing space gears moving up one space too. A worker placed at position 1 on a gear is now on position 2 for that gear, etc.
It is NOT possible to place a worker and remove a worker on the same turn, and it is NOT possible to 'do nothing'. Therefore, in order to achieve the reward higher up on some of the gears, it's necessary to have a strategy of placement and removal that allows the right workers to stay on the right gears for the right amount of time. Executing that well can be quite challenging (and hugely satisfying!), particularly when other players with their own agendas could be getting in your way.
There are (unsurprisingly) some parallels with the board game Teotihuacan - needing to plan worker movement to maximise the ability to collect resources on the resource tiles and maximise the ability to use them on the reward tiles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, @07:20AM (1 child)
I'm waiting for the DVD. The sequel "Maya+Aztec vs. Predator" will be truly great.
(Score: 3, Touché) by higuita on Tuesday April 15, @04:59PM
+alien+terminator