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Date: March 15, 2024 06:50PM
"The Book Of Mormon" has no answer for this any more than "there are those who believe that life here began out there..."
Fiction is one thing.
Reality is something else.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/maya-empire-ruins-lidar-technologyIn 2009 archaeologists Diane and Arlen Chase, currently with the University of Houston, tried something new at Caracol, an ancient city in Belize they’d been excavating since 1985. Lidar scanners, initially used for meteorology and tracking celestial bodies, were increasingly being mounted to aircraft to aid mapping and surveying.
“At the beginning of the project we’d thought Caracol was just a few pyramids and temple groups,” Arlen Chase says. “But when we lidar-surveyed the outlying areas, we discovered that it was actually a huge, elaborately planned city.” The metropolis likely supported at least 100,000 people, almost twice the present-day population of Belize City.
The Chases’ findings awakened other archaeologists to the technology’s potential. In 2021, excavations based on the Pacunam data yielded surprises even at Tikal, Guatemala’s largest archaeological site. The city was at least four times as big as previously thought, and partly surrounded by a massive ditch and defensive wall stretching for miles. Also revealed were a large pyramid and a mysterious compound with links to Teotihuacan, an ancient superpower more than 800 miles to the west.
“To find major new monuments in the heart of Tikal—one of the most extensively studied sites in the Maya area—reinforces how many doors lidar is opening,” says Román-Ramírez, who directs the South Tikal Archaeological Project. “We’re discovering features that we couldn’t perceive even when we were walking on top of them.”
Nowhere in the Maya lowlands is the environment easy on humans. What few nutrients the soil contains are regularly washed away by months of torrential rains, often followed by withering droughts. Hansen’s research suggests that the rise in population at El Mirador was enabled by hauling fertile mud from low-lying swamps and depositing it on terraces cut into the hillsides. Farmers elevated the pH by adding lime to the soil, producing abundant harvests of corn, squash, beans, peppers, and cotton.
In a region often plagued by too much or too little precipitation, the flow of water was meticulously controlled via canals, dams, reservoirs, and agricultural terraces—an immense infrastructure that is now being revealed.
“You couldn’t feed as many people as the ancient Maya did with the kind of slash-and-burn agriculture people in this part of the world use today,” says Tulane’s Canuto, who models population density. He estimates that 10 million to 15 million people lived throughout the Maya realm at its peak, including many in swampy regions that most archaeologists had thought uninhabitable.
To build El Mirador’s towering 230-foot pyramid, known as La Danta, armies of workers used hammerstones and obsidian blades to cut and drill into the limestone, then pried the rectangular blocks apart. Hansen and his research partners replicated the process, using tools found at the site’s quarries as models. Workers built wooden litters to carry blocks weighing an average of 900 pounds. “With enough men and the means to feed them,” Hansen says, “a king could complete it in his lifetime.”
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