the change in modern public record of the Maya during the lifetime of Arlen and Diane Chase is hard to overemphasize. "Blood of Kings" (book) is a search term.
Unless they finished the road in the past two years: it's a pain to get to.
We went a few years ago and were really surprised it wasn't more famous and had more tourists. I feel like there were about a dozen tourists visiting the day we went.
When I went (15 yrs ago?), there was also the problem of armed locals. I can't remember if they were some guerrilla group or just opportunistic bandits, but we had to caravan to get there with a military escort. So that can't help with the tourism, if it's still going on.
That used to be the case, but the security situation is much better now and escorts are no longer needed.
However, it is only 5.3km from the Guatemalan border and there is quite a lot of illegal encroachment so there is a contingent of armed military guards at Caracol.
One unfortunate reality is that looters will get to these places long before archeologists. I think they try to keep things secret, but there are limits to what you can do.
I think this is where a few humble billionaires can make a real difference, in case they're reading this :)
Correct, most archeology digs take decades because A) its hard work and you have to do it very precisely (and also we're always inventing new tech and wondering how to keep stuff in the ground) and B) There's very little money funding it - active digs might be a few weeks a year in the best of cases, and the rest of the time just trying to get money to pay the grad students basically nothing to help.
When I've gone down the Wikipedia article of ancient sites, it's amazing how many have basically been visited for 2-3 summers by a professor and some grad students, with years or even decades between visits due to funding issues or whatever
To say archaeology has shoestring budgets would be insulting to shoestrings. When I was working as a field archaeologist, I would do expeditions on less than what I make in a month working in tech. There were times when I had to seriously consider the financial trade-off between the food budget and sample dating.
Bouncing off your point - I was at the Great Wall and someone told us that after the need for the wall disappeared, villagers were looting bricks from the wall to build the things they needed until the government stepped in to stop it
Even more wild is the fact that when we're talking villagers looting the smooth-sided pyramids for stone, we're talking about the Roman Republic era and around the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty under Cleopatra.
Most of them survived well into the middle ages. There was an earthquake in the 14th century that loosened the casing stones and knocked quite a few loose. After that is when looting the stones really took off.
Funny enough, I was just reading about Percy Fawcett’s doomed expedition to find the lost city of Z in the Amazon and turns out he has been fully vindicated. He went against the general scientific consensus of the time that complex civilization was impossible and the area he is thought to have disappeared in the Xingu Park has since been found to hold a civilization of 20+ settlements and a peak populations of up to 50,000 inhabitants.
They truly are - and like you mention - modern tech is turning up more and more.
Traveling in Belize, we happened upon multiple un-excavated pyramids and other buildings. The landowner or residents knew about them and pointed them out to us, but yeah, no one has the budget to investigate even a small percentage of what's out there.
After watching >9000 hours of time team the impression I get is that they tend to take what they believe is a representative sample of a site, and leave the rest for future teams.
Time Team would often go "This site has been dug before BUT we get to put our pits down in this untouched area" or "OMG Totally new site but we dont want to wreck it for the next guys"
Modern archaeology intentionally leaves some significant pristine area to preserve the site for the future, perhaps future methods, perhaps just to leave some stones unturned forever. It's a pretty easy conclusion to arrive at given glaring mistakes of archaeology past.
Man, there's so much left to discover! South America, Turkiye, who knows, but so much.
One fascinating site not getting much attention is Zernaki Tepe, near the Van region. Some of it, if I've not confused it with something nearby, is buried under 40ft of sediment and its accessible parts exhibit some of the finest masonry work yet seen, with interlocking blocks, etc.
Estimated at 14k years, and probably older than Gobekli Tepe
Zernaki Tepe is obviously not from 14k BP. It's a grid plan urban center with aramaic inscriptions and thrown potsherds that use slip. I also can't find any papers actually arguing that it might be anywhere near that old, only some vastly more reasonable iron age dates.
I'll have to bow a bit in shame. I was introduced to that site through rogue archeologists that differ with official consensus. Additionally, the surrounding sites nearby convolute my ignorance.
That said, while I can't readily disgorge quality references on this area, I suspect we'll soon have some compelling arguments that unsettle current consensus.
I apologize for introducing an otherwise fascinating archeological discovery with feeble or possibly garbage data. And I hope it does not discourage anyone from remaining up to date on this area or actively pursuing it.
There is a lot to cover and almost all of it is well hidden. Biggest culprits being the Ocean and dense unreachable forests.. Also there is the constant of change/time which has erased the vast majority of the past.
Shout-out again to Charles C. Mann's excellent book 1491. One of my most eye-opening reads after 2000, in terms of information that I didn't possess yet, exceedingly well presented.
Currently reading 1491, and I saw this. Mind-blowing to me that archeologists thought that Ancient Americans were so primitive, and that it had to be such a battle to demonstrate that no these were complex peoples just like everywhere else.
One of my favorite facts is that 3/5 of the worlds produce was domesticated in Meso-America. Wild. These civs were pros at developing foods.
Mesoamerica had both wheels and bronze. They just weren't as widely used because the technologies weren't nearly as useful in the Mesoamerican social context.
Human sacrifice occurred and had important religious connotations (in terms of very literally keeping the universe alive), but it's wildly over-stated as an everyday fact of life by chroniclers.
The current theory on why they didn't use the wheel much is that they had no animals to pull a cart. Llamas aren't suited to it and never spread out from the Andes in any case.
My only problem with that theory is that wheelbarrows are damn useful things.
They had animals to pull carts: Dogs and humans. Plains groups had large breeds for travois pulling before horses were introduced. Dogs weren't used for physical labor in Mesoamerica, but they had large breeds like the loberro that were large and strong enough. Andean cultures had their own large breeds I'm less familiar with.
The plains example is particularly illustrative here though, because horses and knowledge of wheeled transports were introduced at roughly the same time, yet only horses were immediately adopted by nomadic plains groups and used to pull larger versions of the travois they had been pulling with dogs for centuries. The wheel just wasn't that useful because there was no road infrastructure to make it viable.
And so it was with virtually all of the Americas. Eurasian style road construction largely did not exist. The few places it did exist were enormously mountainous regions where a long distance journey was not reasonable by wheeled vehicle, and in those areas wheels remained relatively impractical for transportation purposes until the industrial invention of motors. Just to give some historical examples, the conditions in northern mexico were so rough that the most common kind of wagon often needed new axles daily. Spanish colonial authorities could afford nicer wagons and built them with all sorts of durability improvements like iron-banded wheels maintained on the journey by specialist carpenters, yet still regularly lost significant percentages of caravans to the conditions even on well-maintained trails like the camino real. Is it any wonder that people largely preferred to use mules or horses?
As an aside, wheelbarrows are much less useful without shovels. The primary digging implement in the Americas was a digging stick, the most basic versions of which are exactly what they sound like. Mesoamericans would occasionally have small wood or metal paddles at the end of theirs for various reasons. Descendants survive in modern tools like the coa used by jimadors to trim agave for tequila. For a large earthmoving project laborers would have used their digging sticks to loosen soil and hands or various small implements to scoop it into baskets or hides for transport by hand.
> No wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice…
Regarding child sacrifice, we are not faring much better today:
"UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell told ambassadors that an average of 28 children are killed in Gaza every day – “the equivalent of an entire classroom.” - https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165415
I went to a book talk of his (I believe part of the release for the follow-up 1493) and liked that he was humble and not afraid to acknowledge lack of data or the possibility of being wrong. Nice change from the classic “my theory explains everything” pitfall.
His book is excellent for dispelling myths of the noble savage. These were not angelic tribes of peaceful hunter-gatherers, living off the land in harmony with nature, but human beings with complex motivations and driven by the same things that drive all of us.
the change in modern public record of the Maya during the lifetime of Arlen and Diane Chase is hard to overemphasize. "Blood of Kings" (book) is a search term.
all i can find is the medieval fantasy novels?
1986 Kimbell Art Museum; Schele & Miller; 86-80193 LoC
We visited Caracol this spring. What an amazing site.
Unless they finished the road in the past two years: it's a pain to get to.
We went a few years ago and were really surprised it wasn't more famous and had more tourists. I feel like there were about a dozen tourists visiting the day we went.
It was amazingly quiet though we did arrive in the afternoon.
The massive road project is making good progress, but still has a ways to go. (That being said, I wouldn't hesitate going in any regular car.)
(I'm glad we were able to visit before the road was finished - we had the place almost entirely to ourselves.)
When I went (15 yrs ago?), there was also the problem of armed locals. I can't remember if they were some guerrilla group or just opportunistic bandits, but we had to caravan to get there with a military escort. So that can't help with the tourism, if it's still going on.
That used to be the case, but the security situation is much better now and escorts are no longer needed.
However, it is only 5.3km from the Guatemalan border and there is quite a lot of illegal encroachment so there is a contingent of armed military guards at Caracol.
I’m always (naively) surprised that these sites continue to contain new finds like this. I always assume they've been fully mapped and searched.
My impression is that archeologists are drowning in way more ancient sites than they can possibly investigate.
For example, these thousands of unexpected ancient sites they've found in the Amazon using Lidar recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/06/a...
One unfortunate reality is that looters will get to these places long before archeologists. I think they try to keep things secret, but there are limits to what you can do.
I think this is where a few humble billionaires can make a real difference, in case they're reading this :)
Correct, most archeology digs take decades because A) its hard work and you have to do it very precisely (and also we're always inventing new tech and wondering how to keep stuff in the ground) and B) There's very little money funding it - active digs might be a few weeks a year in the best of cases, and the rest of the time just trying to get money to pay the grad students basically nothing to help.
When I've gone down the Wikipedia article of ancient sites, it's amazing how many have basically been visited for 2-3 summers by a professor and some grad students, with years or even decades between visits due to funding issues or whatever
To say archaeology has shoestring budgets would be insulting to shoestrings. When I was working as a field archaeologist, I would do expeditions on less than what I make in a month working in tech. There were times when I had to seriously consider the financial trade-off between the food budget and sample dating.
The financial situation is even worse today.
Bouncing off your point - I was at the Great Wall and someone told us that after the need for the wall disappeared, villagers were looting bricks from the wall to build the things they needed until the government stepped in to stop it
To my understanding that was pretty standard throughout history.[0]
Why go chisel out new rocks to build your mill when there's an unused pile of them _right there_?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia
That's basically what happened to the pyramids in Egypt. They were smooth-sided for over 3000 years.
Even more wild is the fact that when we're talking villagers looting the smooth-sided pyramids for stone, we're talking about the Roman Republic era and around the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty under Cleopatra.
Most of them survived well into the middle ages. There was an earthquake in the 14th century that loosened the casing stones and knocked quite a few loose. After that is when looting the stones really took off.
Funny enough, I was just reading about Percy Fawcett’s doomed expedition to find the lost city of Z in the Amazon and turns out he has been fully vindicated. He went against the general scientific consensus of the time that complex civilization was impossible and the area he is thought to have disappeared in the Xingu Park has since been found to hold a civilization of 20+ settlements and a peak populations of up to 50,000 inhabitants.
Wild stuff.
They truly are - and like you mention - modern tech is turning up more and more.
Traveling in Belize, we happened upon multiple un-excavated pyramids and other buildings. The landowner or residents knew about them and pointed them out to us, but yeah, no one has the budget to investigate even a small percentage of what's out there.
After watching >9000 hours of time team the impression I get is that they tend to take what they believe is a representative sample of a site, and leave the rest for future teams.
Time Team would often go "This site has been dug before BUT we get to put our pits down in this untouched area" or "OMG Totally new site but we dont want to wreck it for the next guys"
Etc etc/
Modern archaeology intentionally leaves some significant pristine area to preserve the site for the future, perhaps future methods, perhaps just to leave some stones unturned forever. It's a pretty easy conclusion to arrive at given glaring mistakes of archaeology past.
That’s a wonderfully responsible approach to archaeology. I hope we continue practicing those lessons learned from past mistakes.
These are major breakthroughs.
Looks to me like this couple is making progress over the long term that few individuals would be able to match.
And now getting it right after 40 years by concentrating on things that you just can't expect to be within reach after only 30 years or so.
Some of the most admirable type of research that most people are ever going to see.
Man, there's so much left to discover! South America, Turkiye, who knows, but so much.
One fascinating site not getting much attention is Zernaki Tepe, near the Van region. Some of it, if I've not confused it with something nearby, is buried under 40ft of sediment and its accessible parts exhibit some of the finest masonry work yet seen, with interlocking blocks, etc.
Estimated at 14k years, and probably older than Gobekli Tepe
Zernaki Tepe is obviously not from 14k BP. It's a grid plan urban center with aramaic inscriptions and thrown potsherds that use slip. I also can't find any papers actually arguing that it might be anywhere near that old, only some vastly more reasonable iron age dates.
What are you looking at that indicates otherwise?
I'll have to bow a bit in shame. I was introduced to that site through rogue archeologists that differ with official consensus. Additionally, the surrounding sites nearby convolute my ignorance.
That said, while I can't readily disgorge quality references on this area, I suspect we'll soon have some compelling arguments that unsettle current consensus.
I apologize for introducing an otherwise fascinating archeological discovery with feeble or possibly garbage data. And I hope it does not discourage anyone from remaining up to date on this area or actively pursuing it.
It is funny; "karakol" in Turkish means a police office/building. I wonder is there is a link in the etymology?
Same - it’s like when I was kid and thought we had visited every planet but meanwhile we’ve only been to the moon a few times.
tip of the iceberg..
There is a lot to cover and almost all of it is well hidden. Biggest culprits being the Ocean and dense unreachable forests.. Also there is the constant of change/time which has erased the vast majority of the past.
Shout-out again to Charles C. Mann's excellent book 1491. One of my most eye-opening reads after 2000, in terms of information that I didn't possess yet, exceedingly well presented.
Currently reading 1491, and I saw this. Mind-blowing to me that archeologists thought that Ancient Americans were so primitive, and that it had to be such a battle to demonstrate that no these were complex peoples just like everywhere else.
One of my favorite facts is that 3/5 of the worlds produce was domesticated in Meso-America. Wild. These civs were pros at developing foods.
No wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice…
But great architecture and urban planning… plus writing and math. It’s wild.
Mesoamerica had both wheels and bronze. They just weren't as widely used because the technologies weren't nearly as useful in the Mesoamerican social context.
Human sacrifice occurred and had important religious connotations (in terms of very literally keeping the universe alive), but it's wildly over-stated as an everyday fact of life by chroniclers.
The current theory on why they didn't use the wheel much is that they had no animals to pull a cart. Llamas aren't suited to it and never spread out from the Andes in any case.
My only problem with that theory is that wheelbarrows are damn useful things.
They had animals to pull carts: Dogs and humans. Plains groups had large breeds for travois pulling before horses were introduced. Dogs weren't used for physical labor in Mesoamerica, but they had large breeds like the loberro that were large and strong enough. Andean cultures had their own large breeds I'm less familiar with.
The plains example is particularly illustrative here though, because horses and knowledge of wheeled transports were introduced at roughly the same time, yet only horses were immediately adopted by nomadic plains groups and used to pull larger versions of the travois they had been pulling with dogs for centuries. The wheel just wasn't that useful because there was no road infrastructure to make it viable.
And so it was with virtually all of the Americas. Eurasian style road construction largely did not exist. The few places it did exist were enormously mountainous regions where a long distance journey was not reasonable by wheeled vehicle, and in those areas wheels remained relatively impractical for transportation purposes until the industrial invention of motors. Just to give some historical examples, the conditions in northern mexico were so rough that the most common kind of wagon often needed new axles daily. Spanish colonial authorities could afford nicer wagons and built them with all sorts of durability improvements like iron-banded wheels maintained on the journey by specialist carpenters, yet still regularly lost significant percentages of caravans to the conditions even on well-maintained trails like the camino real. Is it any wonder that people largely preferred to use mules or horses?
As an aside, wheelbarrows are much less useful without shovels. The primary digging implement in the Americas was a digging stick, the most basic versions of which are exactly what they sound like. Mesoamericans would occasionally have small wood or metal paddles at the end of theirs for various reasons. Descendants survive in modern tools like the coa used by jimadors to trim agave for tequila. For a large earthmoving project laborers would have used their digging sticks to loosen soil and hands or various small implements to scoop it into baskets or hides for transport by hand.
> The wheel just wasn't that useful because there was no road infrastructure to make it viable.
The wheel was invented and used widely in Eurasia millennia before the invention of road infrastructure.
American horses were even the ancestors of Eurasian horses; they were likely wiped out with other American megafauna by the Native Americans.
We don't know why Amerindians weren't traveling around in wheeled vehicles pulled by animals in 1491, but "it wasn't practical" is not the answer.
> No wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice…
Regarding child sacrifice, we are not faring much better today:
"UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell told ambassadors that an average of 28 children are killed in Gaza every day – “the equivalent of an entire classroom.” - https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165415
I went to a book talk of his (I believe part of the release for the follow-up 1493) and liked that he was humble and not afraid to acknowledge lack of data or the possibility of being wrong. Nice change from the classic “my theory explains everything” pitfall.
His book is excellent for dispelling myths of the noble savage. These were not angelic tribes of peaceful hunter-gatherers, living off the land in harmony with nature, but human beings with complex motivations and driven by the same things that drive all of us.
[dead]