Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeologists

Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by phkahler on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:38AM (#19318406)

I'm curious about how they decide this is a religious site. The artifacts have images on them, but that can't be the only indicator of why they were there can it? Why build pyramids and other things above ground but then make people crawl deep into a hole to have a small religious site? Isn't it more likely people of lower status were forced to live underground and this is their stash of valuables? - to give just one possible alternate interpretation. How do they decide what a site is?

I'm sure they take into account all the other knowledge that has been gathered over the years and put this find in context. That's largely missing from the article.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by dkersten on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:52AM (#19318486)

"Religious site" always seems like a cop-out to me, like saying "we don't know what this was used for, must have been a religious site", but since I'm not an archaeologist or historian, I have to trust that the people who actually are those things know what they're doing and know how to determine if something truly was a religious site or not.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by 8bitsrule on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @08:54PM (#19324932)

Yes. I have the same reaction when I see an old site called a 'temple'. Who -knows- what the frame of mind was of a culture thousands of years ago (particularly if nothing's written)? Often it seems like just another way of implying 'pre-scientific', 'magical', 'savage'... less-developed than us.

A more -practical- explanation seems more plausible in many cases. E.g. Gobekli looks -educational- to my eyes; I see multiple classrooms.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by clarkevans on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @08:27AM (#19318692)

Here's a quote from Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries for you: "The clustering of hundreds of monumental inscriptions mounted on huge poles along both sides of a highway was quite common. Each inscription represented a different religious sect or point of view and was placed as near as possible to heaven." (Section 1, The Motel of the Mysteries, p. 12)

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by INTPenis on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:51AM (#19318479)

You're not the first to question this. In other forums I've seen people state that archaeologists have a tendency to say ritual whenever they're not sure of something.

If it can be properly dated then it's unlikely regular people were living under a pyramid. But if it can't then it might as well be refugees taking shelter in the mayan ruins after its civilization collapsed.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by JoeAltmaier on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @08:04AM (#19318560)

Valuable objects; difficult to reach; no resources for living (dark, cold; no food or water). All point to having a very good, very impractical reason for going there. Religion fills the bill very nicely?

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by phkahler on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @02:05PM (#19321608)

Sounds like a stash of stolen goods to me. And that's actually a practical reason for going there. OTOH religion wants to be accessible to the people. They build temples and such to draw people in, not make them crawl into a deep scary hole where they have a pile of random stuff.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by Digory on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:37PM (#19324551)

Some religions are about secrets, not persuasion.

Mithraism was a popular underground (literally) religion among the Roman army. And the Hebrews weren’t about letting people traipse through the holy of holies.

I agree that religion is probably overused in these explanations, but it’s plausible.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by JoeAltmaier on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @05:42PM (#19323685)

Folks hide valuables too - for fear of their being stolen. And rituals often have special places for the initiated, excluding the public. So not a slam-dunk that's its stolen stuff.

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Re:Maya ritual cave ‘untouched’ for 1k years stuns archaeolo... by gerbilly on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @09:06AM (#19318944)

The article mentions incense too.

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