MajoraZ MajoraZ 14 hours ago (edited) I work on content on Mesoamerica with other history and archeology youtube channels, so I wanna give some extra info, even though Lindy already did a pretty solid job!. The biggest thing I wanna address is the “Stone age” label, but I wanna focus on Tikal itself first. Lindy said that most of the city today is covered by jungle, but it needs to be stressed just how true that is. When you look at Tikal or other Mesoamerican sites today, you’re usually seeing just a few standing, exposed structures in the site’s central urban core (which had temples, palaces, plazas, ball courts, laid out around plazas to facilitate communal flow viewing and ritualistic alignments). But this is highly misleading. Firstly, as erosion has removed the rich paint, frescos, reliefs, and other accents on buildings, but also because a significant amount of the structures in the core are often still buried or destroyed. If you compare simplified or tourist maps of Tikal’s core to detailed archeological ones, you can see hows dozens, if not hundreds of other structures in the latter.

But we’re still just talking about the urban core Around the fancy stone temples and palaces, you had landscaped suburbs radiating out with commoner residences along agricultural land. With large Maya cities in particular, huge amounts of what’s now jungle around sites like Tikal used to be massive suburban sprawls, with hundreds to thousands of residences covering dozens to even hundreds of square kilometers, amongst cleared land or managed forest groves. As found via LIDAR scans in the past few years, Tikal’s suburbs are so expansive (12,000 structures within a 76 square kilometer area, which as I’m explaining arguably isn’t even the full expanse; and contained a significant amount of infrastructure, from additional reservoirs, canals and water management systems, palisades, mini-cores with additional temples and palaces, etc) that they literally filled the space between it and other nearby cities like Zotz and Uaxactun, forming megalopoli/megacities. El Mirador and it’s surrounding cities, which Lindy mentioned, was similar, though much further away.

As you can imagine, this can make determining where a given Mesoamerican city ends, or a adjacent one or surrounding towns/villages (Lindy states there were around 60 Maya city-states, but there are over 4000 maya sites known, even with the issue I am describing. Lindy must be excluding towns and villages and specific time periods, not to mention the rest of Mesoamerica with other civilizations) begins sort of difficult. But the combined Tikal Megalopolis certainly had a population in the hundreds of thousands, at least (I’ll refrain from giving specific estimates due to even the recent LIDAR studies and reporting having some discrepancies).

Also, I was quite pleased that Lindy brought up the city’s water management systems. Complex waterworks was actually pretty common for large Mesoamerican cities. In Tikal’s case, there were a series of massive reservoirs in the urban core. Lindy mentions how the main "Palace reservoir " could hold water for ten thousand people for multiple years alone, but it was hooked up to other large reservoirs nearby, with dams and channels which allowed them to flow into one another if needed to prevent flooding, and as noted in the video, structures and plazas in the surrounding infrastructure having drains to similarly redirect rainwater or water from floods into the reservoir network. Some of these reservoirs even had advanced filtration systems, and some of the connections between them even had switching stations to choose how the water flowed. Some households also had personal rainwater reservoirs or wells. As I noted, even the sprawl around the city center had strategically reservoir and canals placed across huge expanses the surrounding suburbs, and. Grids of channel systems along Tikal’s (and I presume the suburb’s) farming fields located in nearby wetlands re-directed water flow to move it from frequently flooded areas into less wet areas, as well as hooked up to an overall drainage system in case of floods, as well.

On one last note about urban design and infrastructure, at 26:05 or so, lindy talks about the North Acropolis and the emphasis on sets of 3, but I think it’s a rather good example of Maya complex construction stages. While Mesoamerican civilizations in general would build certain structures in stages (Lindy also mentions later in the video that the “Lost World” pyramid was built in stages over 1000 years, one on top of another in layers: That’s pretty typical for Mesoamerican pyramids), the Maya in particular often built temple or palace compounds or other acropoli almost like fractals: You’d start out with a relatively simple shrine on a small platform, but then that platform would be widened and more shrine structures would be built upon it. Then they’d raise those 3 structures to have elevated pyramid steps, while adding on more platforms to the side. Then those existing structures would continue to not just get taller or get additional layers, but more platforms, terraces, and “wings” or halls to the structure would be added too, over time making entire hill sized complexes of multiple floors, buildings, temples, etc on terraced platforms. The La Danta complex at El Mirador is an extreme example of this, the overall structure including all the platforms was over 70 meters tall, and covering 42 acres of horizontal area!

I take some issue with the way Lindy talked about the “Classic Maya Collapse”: Yes, many of the giant Maya cities in the Central and Southern Yucatan Peninsula declined between roughly 800 and 900AD, including Tikal, but many of the smaller villages or medium sized towns and cities survived in those places, while the Maya cities in say the Nothern and some other parts of the Peninsula were unaffected or even grew in power and size in the early Postclassic period. By the time the Spanish arrived, there was still very much “Maya civilization”, especially in the North and West (to say nothing about the rest of Mesoamerica), and as Lindy notes, there are still millions of Maya people today. The Maya city-state of Nojpeten was actually the very last Mesoamerican state to fall to Europeans, only being defeated in 1697. We actually also DO know quite about Maya commoners in their lives, the Maya are some of the most archeologically studies cultures in the world and we have ethnological records on the Postclassic maya written by the Spanish

With all that said, now let’s address the elephant in the room: “Stone age” is not the right term to be using here. Lindy clearly understands that these were not primitives, unsophisticated societies (and there’s also something to be said with assuming that a lack of complexity is inherently lesser, too), but beyond even just the baggage of that term, it’s inappropriate here for other reasons. Firstly, it merely originated as a way for museums in early modern history to date and group artefacts from Europe and the Near east together back before we had more accurate dating methods. It was never intended to be nor does it accurately function as a series of steps or stages societies progress through: It’s rather arbitrary to focus on the material of choice for tools instead of say population density or bureaucratic administrative tiers or any other number of metrics; and there are some cultures in Africa who developed steel metallurgy without ever inventing bronze and still living in small villages.

And the Mesoamericans DID actually smelt metals! Gold, Silver, and Copper shows up around 600AD and bronze shows up around 1300AD, a few centuries before contact with Europeans, though it wasn’t widely used in tools or weapons or armor still. (in Eurasia, metallurgy developed ALONGSIDE complex societies, with utilitarian metallurgy also being driven by the need for metal banding around wheels among other factors. in Mesoamerica, they already had massive cities with hundreds of thousands of denizens like Teotihuacan before any metallurgy showed up, no draft animals to drive carts to need to make wheels with, and the climate was also inhospitable to metal armor: Even conquistadors often abandoned theirs in favor of what was essentially local types of Mesoamerican gambeson)

Lastly, on the note of Teotihuacan, 150,000 denizens is a bit of an older estimate, but it’s still around the general ballpark, and the city is not Aztec, it predates them by around 1000 years, though the Aztec did take a lot of archecture and urban inspiration from the city, even refurnishing some of it’s shrines, doing excavations there and bringing back artefacts to use in their own cities, and working it into their mythology. But that’s another video (One i’d be happy to help out with, if Lindy is interested)