Mayan Plumbing Found In Ancient City

DarkKnightRadick writes "An archaeologist and a hydrologist have published evidence that the ancient Mayans had pressurized plumbing as early as sometime between the year 100 (when the city of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, was first founded) and 800 (when it was abandoned). While the Egyptians had plumbing way earlier (around 2500 BC), this is the first instance of plumbing in the New World prior to European exploration and conquest."

Comments

Better than ours?

[SilverHatHacker]

Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?

Re:Better than ours?

[thoughtspace]

Wonder if their shower temperatures went loopy when they flushed their toilets too?

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

Re:Better than ours?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It turns out that that only happens when you aren't tossing enough severed heads down the steps of your blood-soaked skull-pyramids, and was thus an unheard of problem.

The "shoddy contractors" theory of water temperature problems is actually just a lie promulgated as part of the post-colonization suppression of native mythology.

Re:Better than ours?

[pipedwho]

However, even today we see some cultures who shit in the water that they drink. India is one such culture, and it's prevalent in Africa, too.

I thought it was people shitting in the water upstream from where 'somebody else' drinks.

Re:Better than ours?

[Inner_Child]

I thought we just called that "government".

Re:Better than ours?

[Cryacin]

Actually, until Typhoid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid) struck in the late 19th century, even king's used to defecate in their bedrooms. The stench of feces used to be quite common amongst the civilised.

It usually takes a large amount of death/discomfort/destruction for things to change unfortunately. Especially with such a large public works project such as sanitation and clean water.

All though the Thames still stinks, I'm sure that it used to be much, much, much worse than even India at the time.

Re:Better than ours?

[amRadioHed]

Even more important to improving sanitation than death, discomfort, and destruction was the concept of germs which was only just gaining traction in the late 19th century.

Re:Better than ours?

[rolfwind]

So any /.ers want to volunteer to jump into the volcano?

Re:Better than ours?

[rubycodez]

you mean it was re-gaining traction. Funny how it took western civilization over 1500 years to get back to where medicine was at the peak of the Roman Empire. Marcus Varro, 36 B.C. "and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases". Other Roman doctors know to use antiseptics and antibiotics, and knew of germs/viruses by indirect means. Of course, 600 years before that, Indian civilization knew and wrote of living infectious agents they couldn't see , and had drugs and procedure to kill them and to inoculate.

But in the mid 19th century U.S. physicians were putting leaches on Abraham Lincoln, the primitive morons.

Re:Better than ours?

[ceoyoyo]

Whew. Good thing we're more civilized in North America.

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/6-12-5/48967.html

Re:Better than ours?

[corbettw]

Getting rid of ugly virgins? What kind of sacrifice is that?

Re:Better than ours?

[EdIII]

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

Don't say that on Slashdot!

Some people might get nervous around here....

Re:Better than ours?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess? Without a microscope, the idea of "miasma" ("bad air") as an explanation for infectious disease, which was popular up through the 19th c., actually makes just about as much sense as germ theory. So I'd be interested to know the process by which the ancients arrived at their conclusion -- unless they devised some very clever experiments, they didn't really know what they were dealing with.

Re:Better than ours?

[sayfawa]

I wouldn't say a lucky guess. You don't have to see something to infer it's existence. The spread of a disease, the way it's spread, and the ways to stop it from spreading could all have led them to the conclusion that the disease was caused by some air-bound, invisible (to them) agent. Those Romans and ancient Indians seemed like smart guys. Presumably, they could imagine that some things were too small to be seen. They did both come up with the idea of the atom, after all.

Re:Better than ours?

[pclminion]

The question is, did those ancient Roman and Indian physicians actually know about germs, or were they just making a lucky guess?

But you can apply such an argument to anybody who doesn't have all the facts. Did Robert Boyle know, for certain, that gases were composed of minute particles, the kinetics of which could be used to derive his "Boyle's Law?" He did not. In the same sense as you are now implying, he made a "lucky guess." A guess which turned out to be correct, and his name has survived in history even though, in modern terms, he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.

If somebody posits that minute organisms are the ultimate cause of disease, then I give that person props. I really don't give a shit that he cannot prove whether he's right. That fact is, he IS right. You attitude smacks of the bitterness of a person who has perpetually sought success but never achieved it. Whatever.

Re:Better than ours?

[Anonymous Coward]

" Funny how it took western civilization over 1500 years to get back to where medicine was at the peak of the Roman Empire. Marcus Varro, 36 B.C."

Blame Christianity.

Re:Better than ours?

[electrosoccertux]

No , they sacrificed virgins to prevent that.

Don't say that on Slashdot!

Some people might get nervous around here....

sacrificing a slashdot nerd would most certainly not be my first choice for appeasing the gods. Think of the stench wafting up from that pasty white unwashed skin and oily hair.

Re:Better than ours?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Boyle's laws can be confirmed by experiment without knowledge of the kinetics; he wasn't just guessing, he was formulating a model based on his observations. With regards to infectious disease, this is roughly equivalent to sanitary practices, which can be shown to work without an underlying knowledge of germ theory. But if you're going to propose a mechanism -- the behavior of gas molecules in the first case, that of infectious microorganisms in the second -- then unless you have some kind of evidence, then yes, it's a lucky guess. There is a reason why "model" and "theory" are two different words. Note that I'm not claiming models aren't useful; of course they are. But they do not lead to understanding of the underlying mechanisms in and of themselves.

Re:Better than ours?

[KiloByte]

They used male virgins, who are dime a dozen, both now and then.

Re:Better than ours?

[sourcerror]

Last time I checked the Bible, the old testament has passages about to bury your feces, not to make love with a menstruating woman, and some other common sense stuff. Heck, do you have any idea why Jews and Muslims don't eat pork?

Re:Better than ours?

[vegiVamp]

Well, the gods are the ones going on about how it's the inside of a person that matters most. Plenty of insides in a fat virgin.

Re:Better than ours?

[et764]

I and most Christians I know do not have a problem with condoms, and we probably wouldn't even recommend prayer as the most effective way to prevent HIV. What we'd probably recommend instead is to only have sex with the person you're married to. Sure, this doesn't work too well against rape and blood transfusions, but then again, condoms don't really work there either.

No big surprise,,,

[Overzeetop]

If the aliens gave pluming to the Egyptians, why not the Mayans?

pattern?

[ascari]

There was Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in the Indus valley, then the Egyptians, then the Mayans. Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing? If so, are we doomed?

Re:pattern?

[M. Baranczak]

Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing?

Cultures go under all the time, with or without plumbing.

are we doomed?

Most certainly.

Re:pattern?

[OnePumpChump]

If you don't have to go outside to shit, you grow complacent and weak.

Re:pattern?

[Cryacin]

More like you let someone else deal with your shit. That permeates to all aspects and corners of life. Another example that springs to mind is outsourcing.

Re:pattern?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I doubt that it's the plumbing per se; but a rise in interlocking technical and social complexity really helps if you want to "go under" in a way dramatic enough for history to notice.

Barring fairly rare events(like the sudden appearance of really nasty plagues, or an advanced culture showing up and gunning you down, or both), low-complexity cultures don't really "collapse" in any useful sense. They wax and wane a bit, some years good some years bad, and they may undergo various sorts of linguistic and genetic shifts due to warfare and migration; but they aren't specialized enough for things to really go to hell.

If you have interlocking specialization, though, you have entire institutions, and populations, that are basically dependent on large numbers of other structures and people for their continued existence. This makes it fairly easy for the right push to, instead of "reducing the hunter-gatherer population by ~10%" do something more along the lines of "catastrophic mass starvation, entire cities abandoned to the flames, the capital investments of 200 years annihilated within months".

Re:pattern?

[hhedeshian]

What'll be different, I think, is that a lot less information will be lost in the demise of a "modern" culture simply due to the global (that's the key word here) communications network and data archival abilities we now possess. If the US went into oblivion, the world wouldn't have to re-invent the Ford Model-T or "Freedom Fries"; That data will be quite difficult to get rid of due to geographic redundancy.

Also, spoken langauges don't die off in short periods of time. Given the available compute power and potential advances in translation software, it should be relively easy to bring texts up to the new language. You won't need a giant rock and guys like Daniel Jackson spouting some Goa'uld nonsense.

Re:pattern?

[c0y]

Some people believe that toilets don't allow for complete elimination and are the source of a lot of colon cancer.

For my part, I've realized that after a lot of years camping and having to squat over a hole I dig, that at some point my knees simply won't let me do that any more. I've come to believe that maybe people die younger in parts of the world that lack sit down toilets and remember this quote by Charles Bukowski:

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.
- Charles Bukowski

Re:pattern?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Insensitive clod. I'm reduced to posting messages to slashdot written in my own blood, by the light of a burning hobo, over a half-duplex rfc1149 link.

Re:pattern?

[M. Baranczak]

Oh, for those innocent years when we thought we could solve the world's problems by breakdancing.

Six easy steps to avert collapse of civilization

[jamshid]

Okay, not really related to ancient Mayan plumbing, but that article did make me think about this great talk by neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman:
http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02010/apr/01/six-easy-steps-avert-collapse-civilization/

Pretty Neat

[Tremegorn]

The guy who has the photo credit in the article (Kirk French) was my Archaeology TA during my freshman year. (I'm currently attending PSU for an EE degree). He's a really cool guy, glad to see he's doing well.

That aside, this is actually a pretty big discovery; very few ancient civilizations actually managed complex engineering achievements like running water. If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Re:Pretty Neat

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I've heard the theory suggested that engineering knowledge(and accompanying social and technical organization) is exactly what allows a civilization to suddenly die out.

Technology(speaking in the broad sense, including things like complex social structures, bureaucracies, and so forth) is extremely powerful; but also makes it fairly easy to get locked-in to brittle trajectories where(even if alternatives are theoretically possible), your only real approach to any problem becomes "do whatever it is we already do; but more, and harder". This often goes poorly. Worse, you have usually managed to build a population that depends on your complex social structures, which makes for a fun die-off if they should come loose.

When the Roman legions stopped being a net gain, through plunder and Romanization, and started to become a liability(since they couldn't expand the borders any further, and spent most of their time fighting civil wars to install one emperor after another), Roman civilization as a whole never really came up with an alternative. They pretty much just raised more, tried harder, passed a few more laws to try to preserve the status quo. Long-view, they were following a doomed path, proximately, though, they didn't really have a whole lot of options. Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.

I don't know how the Mayans went down; but complexity quite possibly helped them along.

Re:Pretty Neat

[gstoddart]

That aside, this is actually a pretty big discovery; very few ancient civilizations actually managed complex engineering achievements like running water.

Actually, the more I hear about ancient civilizations, the more I believe that in at least some regards, they had knowledge that was lost to the West until sometime after the Renaissance. They didn't know everything, but they sure as shit knew a lot. Certainly a lot more than has been attributed to them during most of my lifetime.

If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

One could ask the same question of Western Society -- a tremendous amount of stuff which was apparently fairly well-known in antiquity didn't get found out again until the last several hundred years.

How is is that "our" civilizations suddenly died out? There's probably a good 1000 years in which we managed to root around in the muck whereas before we had better ways of doing it. WTF happened there?

Re:Pretty Neat

[lawpoop]

Any emperor who adopted a "fewer legions" policy would find himself replaced with extreme prejudice by somebody willing to do the opposite.

For some reason, I'm having mental images of Roman legions marching through Iraq and Afghanistan, with predator drones buzzing overhead.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Cylix]

The History channel's Modern Marvels nearly always provides a reference to the ancient rome.

So much so that a running joke amongst my friends is that when Modern Marvel's eventually covers the "data center" they will likely mention it was first invented by the Romans.

Re:Pretty Neat

[Anonymous Coward]

One wonders how something that happened in 1492 could cause the Classic Maya collapse, which happened around 800. Did they discover time travel in 1492?

Re:Pretty Neat

[esmrg]

why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Are you actually serious with that question???

I believe the OP was making the common mistake of personifying the system instead of the people. That is common these days. However, the classic maya vanished before that, around 800 C.E. While the people didn't actually 'vanish', their way of life did. While it is possible that the maya became victims of their own overgrowth like the romans, subject to the law of diminishing returns, it seems more plausible they just abandoned it when it no longer served them. Perhaps the city was more a project or experiment than an exercise in domination and superiority like it was with the romans. The experiment served its purpose and then the people dispersed back into the jungle. It's unfortunate that most of what they learned and recorded during this time was destroyed by those invading peoples you mentioned.

Re:Pretty Neat

[jd]

Is it really that different from the Vikings, given the Nordic experiments in international trade? The British Empire also ran out of places to invade and ran out of ways to pay for a gigantic military infrastructure. If you look at the Hittite Empire, we still don't know much about the collapse other than their expansion started to decline and they plunged into a bunch of civil wars soon after.

I'm going to offer the following conjecture: that ANY militaristic power above a certain size, in order to survive, MUST grow OR collapse, that the cost of maintaining the military will exceed the disposable resources in the event of any unusual domestic expenditure, and that as the militaristic power grows, the size of event required to throw the system out-of-kilter grows smaller. Expansion (the confiscation of other people's disposable resources) is the only way to keep the power from disintegrating under the strain.

I'll offer a much more controversial conjecture as well: that ANY power of ANY kind, above a certain size, in which some specific domain provides a significant net drain on resources, will be equally unstable and MUST expand within that domain for the same reason as above. Thus, an intellectual society MUST expand knowledge fast enough to be able to cover the costs of that focus by borrowing from what the society is learning. An engineering society must further its skill in that domain continuously or implode.

To a lesser degree, this must also be true of any differences in abilities between any two fields, no matter what they are. The greater the gap, the greater the odds that society will run into a situation where one needs to borrow from the other to avert decay or collapse, but can't. It must also be true whether the gap is caused by excessive expansion in one area, OR excessive decline in another. You end up with a gap either way.

Thus, if this is correct, all other collapses of all other societies MUST eventually be traceable to distorted progress in some way, no matter what the primary cause is, what technology available is, or what kind of society it is. (If there exists even one collapse of any society anywhere at any time that cannot be shown to fit this pattern, then the generalization is invalid.)

From the above, and assuming nobody can think of a counter-example, I will propose one of the laws of Asimov's concept of Psychohistory: No matter what the details, the stability of a culture is inversely proportional to the RMS of the standard deviation of ability across all fields of endeavor with respect to all other fields of endeavor.

History of the World Part I

[rattaroaz]

This reminds me of my favorite scene from History of the World, Part I

"Pump the shit, right out of your house!"

Well, what happened to Roman civilization?

[IANAAC]

If anything this just adds to the mystery, if they had engineering knowledge of similar level to the Romans, why did their civilization suddenly die out?

Probably much like Roman civilization, the main power structure lost control. That seems to be recurring throughout all history and cultures.

Obviously that's a huge simplification, but it no doubt contributed to the "collapse" of their civilization. I put "collapse" in parentheses, because Mayan civilization still exists to a certain degree.

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[Anonymous Coward]

Get them out before we have to endure more imcompetence. Is it any wonder the middle east is 3rd world? Those towelheads are to stipud to make a bumb even!

Careful, there. I have posted all sorts of horrible depraved "nigger" jokes, "Jew" jokes, and the like, and not one thing happened. Then I posted a joke about Muslims and Mohammad and *bam*, suddenly my IP address was blocked from Slashdot for several days. Slashdot even has a nice little webpage telling you that you've been blocked. Apparently the PC crowd has a lot of rampant favoritism, especially when one particular group gets its panties in a wad and bitches up a storm about everything a hell of a lot more than the others. Isn't it funny how it's considered cool to bash Christians and Judaeo-Christian beliefs in the media and Christians are expected to be adult enough to accept it and deal with it, but you make one negative remark about Islam and it suddenly doesn't work that way? AND no one sees this as a hypocritical double standard that needs to go?

Re:SOLUTION? DEPORT ALL MUSLIMIICS

[PitaBred]

It's hypocritical to an extent, but then again, the Jews and Christians typically don't threaten to kill you or follow through on their threats. I blame the moderate Muslims who say almost nothing against their extremist brethren. Other Christians put George Tiller in jail. Why is Osama still free?