

Ancient Maya cities found in jungle - jdmitch
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/three-ancient-maya-cities-found-in-jungle-140815.htm

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nathancahill
The title and article are a little sensationalized. I grew up in Guatemala,
and the entire Yucatan peninsula, along with Guatemala, Belize and Honduras,
are covered in "undiscovered" cities. I'd regularly dig up pottery and carved
stones in fields and garden beds.

The Calakmul area is especially dense in ruins. Most xateros (rubber tappers)
know them all and can guide you to them for a couple bucks. Very few of them
are surveyed or even mentioned in literature.

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hemancuso
This hit front page on reddit today, much more interesting comments. Mostly
noting that there are lots and lots of "undiscovered" cities because it's
extremely expensive to unearth and preserve them. The yucatan largely is flat,
not unlike Florida. Most hills in the jungle are sites. "Undiscovered" sites.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2e2il8/maya_citie...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2e2il8/maya_cities_found_in_yucatan2_massive_cities/)

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smackfu
That's got to suck finding an undiscovered Mayan city, and then it turns out
to actually be a discovered-but-lost Mayan city.

Sure makes you appreciate GPS though.

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brianbreslin
I grew up reading stories of lost cities of gold and all that, so when
satellite maps became more common in the 2000s I thought for sure we would
find tons of lost cities. Unfortunately you can't get much off of even
infrared scans of these areas as the buildings are rock and wouldn't have heat
signatures any different from their surroundings.

One day I bet we will see more emerge from faster scanning tech.

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vpb
Back when I was remote sensing, I remember some talk of people using SAR
images (Synthetic Aperture Radar??) to search for Maya roads. I imagine
something was found since then but I didn't kept up with the literature on the
subject.

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josephyu0305
This is great and very historical, I am very interesting with this article. I
love historic place.

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josealicarte
If you check this one, kinda interesting to read which is one of the cities
featured an extraordinary facade with an entrance representing the open jaws
of an earth monster.

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funkyy
This bring memories:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq5Y_ogiyi0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq5Y_ogiyi0)

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nevster
When I saw the title, the first thing to come in to my mind was: Dun da duh
daaaa, dun da daaaaaaa....

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jacobolus
By the way, the “Maya” in the article’s original title is correct. There’s no
reason to change it to the incorrect “Mayan”.

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dang
Thanks. We missed that one.

(If anyone is wondering, as I was, the convention is to use "Mayan" for the
language and "Maya" for the people.)

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ar-jan
Yes - but note that there are about 30 Mayan languages, not just one.

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thaumasiotes
How is this measured? For calibration, how many English languages are there
now?

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XaspR8d
Well there isn't a nice and easy test, but in linguistics it tends to come
down to some measure of mutual intelligibility. How much meaning can a speaker
of Variety A garner from a speaker of Variety B? And vice versa. For tricky
distinctions, throw in some historical and social analysis to taste.

I don't know much about Mesoamerica but I believe the "30 languages" claim
refers to the count of current languages descended from a single ancestor, not
the languages of Classic Maya. (EDITED to avoid implying "Proto" and "Classic"
Maya were one in the same--they were separated by millenia!)

English is a particularly tricky issue because there are so many "standard"
Englishes understood by many but natively spoken by none, and because lingua
francas tend to become such a smooth continuum between their different lects.
However for the purposes of the mutual intelligibility tests, the vast
majority of world Englishes would still fall under one "language". Many that
don't are already labelled distinctly, either as creoles/pidgins, or from
historical divergence (e.g Scots, Frisian). English' divergence is little
compared to that of, say, Arabic, and I suspect any two random English
speakers in the world would understand each other much much more easily than
any two Mayan speakers.

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mchaver
I believe you are correct about the 30 (not 100% sure on the number) Mayan
languages being ancestor of Proto-Maya. Classical Maya belongs to the Ch'ol
branch and is mostly likely a written form of the parent language of Ch'olti'
(extinct) and Ch'orti'.

Here are some random facts about the Mayan languages and Maya people:

Yucatec is the most spoken of the Mayan languages, located in the Yucatan
peninsula. Interesting story about Korean immigration to Mexico (Spanish only,
some early immigrants ended up in Yucatan and one lady mentions that many
learned Yucateco before Spanish because the worked with they Mayas):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmDTrvddD_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmDTrvddD_8)

Popul Wuj is written in K'iche'. Trippy videos about the Popul Wuj:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeOYNsBHvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeOYNsBHvM)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDt9rQrGp1I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDt9rQrGp1I)

Lacondon people managed to escape Spanish control:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nSb36zgGzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nSb36zgGzo)

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slivvy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb4n8Cl3leg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb4n8Cl3leg)

