More old mounds

More mounds turned up in Wengrow & Graeber (reference 1) this afternoon, mounds which I tracked down to reference 2, mounds which rival those of reference 3. It seems that around three thousand years ago there was a lot of mound building in North and Central America. Maybe South America too, but I don’t know anything about that.

On this occasion, it is in the far south eastern corner of Mexico, near the border with Guatemala, a place called Aguada Fénix, on the San Pedro River, in the Maya Lowlands. According to reference 2: ‘… Our airborne lidar of Aguada Fénix, a previously unknown site located in Tabasco, Mexico, revealed a human-made plateau, which measures 1,400m in length and 10 to 15m in height … We dated this construction to [around] 1,000 BC…’. Where a lidar is contraption involving a laser with which one can model the ground from the air in great detail, vegetable cover notwithstanding. Where we are talking large platforms rather than mounds – snapped above – and it seems that there are lots of them in and around the Maya Lowlands. And I think I can see the attraction, in a stretch of undulating jungle, of first carving out then building a plateau of this sort. An assertion of the force of mind over the forces of nature, over the force of the encroaching jungle.

The authors estimate that this one took more than 10 million man days to build, spread over 200 years, apparently quite a short time for a structure of this sort. Organised in a dozen or more layers over the years, with some of the layers exhibiting chequerboard patterns involving two or more colours. 

10 million man days sounds a lot, but if we allow two hundred working days a year, I make that 250 ground workers. Which does not sound like a huge workforce to me, by the standards of the Old World of the time - although this is not a point which I have checked.

They also say that, so far at least, there is no evidence of the sort of social stratification expected at sites of this size and age; no signs of kings, priests or warriors. With the only bit of sculpture turned up so far being of a peccary, a sculpture getting on for a metre long, so roughly life sized. All grist to the Wengrow & Graeber mill, as they dispute the long established archaeological truism that large scale engineering works needs kings. That a disorganised bunch of hunter gatherers, transitioning to farming, doesn’t cut it.

On which more in due course.

References

Reference 1: The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity – David Wengrow, David Graeber – 2021.

Reference 2: Monumental architecture at Aguada Fénix and the rise of Maya civilization - Takeshi Inomata and others – 2020. Available from the University of Arizona Libraries.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/new-world-earthworks.html. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aguada_F%C3%A9nix. Wikipedia is on the case.