A Central-American Athens: How an archeological discovery in Guatemala further discredits racism and white supremacy.

This morning on the BBC News website, I read that a team of archaeologists had made a discovery whose reverberations will be felt well beyond the world of archeology and anthropology.

Using the latest laser mapping technology, a team of archaeologists has shown that the Ancient Mayan capital city of Tikal in modern-day Guatemala was three or four times larger than previously thought. This would mean that the city’s population would have to have been many millions of times larger than previous estimate (To give some context to the magnitude of this discovery, as recently as just 20 years ago it was believed that Tikal was at least twice as large as Ancient Rome.)

Now using a technology known as Lidar (light detection and ranging), 60,000 new ruins have been located beneath the dense forest canopy, including houses, palaces, temples, highways and fortifications.

Researchers have concluded that the Mayan people achieved a level of cultural and social sophistication that was every bit as advanced as that of Ancient Greece or China.

In the words of one member of the team: “Everything is turned on its head”.

Discoveries like this are paradigm-shifting for their own field, but like a galaxy, they often spiral out and touch other fields of study as well, including politics.

What does this discovery have to do with politics? A great deal as it turns out. Because it is yet another blow in the battle against racism and white supremacy.

One of the central claims of mainstream white supremacists such as Richard Spencer and Ann Coulter is that it was white European immigration that was the great engine for the civilisation and industrialisation of North America. They argue that only European civilisation was capable of the rapid change achieved in the US and other parts of the New World that were successfully colonised by white settlers, such as South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. People who believe in this narrative, some of whom are close to the ear of the US President, contend that by allowing immigration from the global south and people of colour, America is at risk of diluting the White-European gene pool that allowed it to achieve its period of true greatness in the 1950s (a time when America’s race laws were on par only with those of the officially white supremacist regime of South Africa).

This is where the Mayan people come in. According to the mainstream view, America (for the sake of this article, I am referring to the entire continent of America, from Canada to Argentina) was a backwards, sparsely populated wasteland, populated by bloodthirsty savages whose only contributions to society were the tomahawk and human sacrifice.

The reality could not be more different. At its height, around 1,300 years ago, the Mayan civilisation was one of the most sophisticated on Earth. They were innovative farmers. They mapped the stars and the movement of the sun and planets with such accuracy that conspiracy theories propose that must have had help from aliens. They were great sculptors, painters, craftsmen, and mathematicians, creating complex calendars to regulate their religious festivals. They devised a writing system that at its time was the most advanced in all of Mesoamerica. And as for industry, the Maya constructed an elaborate system of aqueducts and canals, and the structures and temples built by the Maya were the tallest buildings in the New World, and were only surpassed at the beginning of the 20th Century when skyscrapers were put up in New York.

The Maya were also slave-owners and warriors, and practiced human sacrifice to appease their gods. But to argue that this somehow relegates them to a lower cultural level than Medieval Europe requires some pretty astonishing historical and intellectual gymnastics. After all, it would be to ignore Europe’s religious superstition and backwardness, the wars of aggression and imperialism waged in the name of “civilising” Christianity, as well as methods of torture and public execution whose brutality would have pleased Saddam Hussein.

The work in the field of genetics has exploded every biological claim of the racial superiority of White people, to the extent that people like Richard Spencer now self-identify as “identitarians”, claiming that it is the mentality, culture and society of White people that shows them to be not just different but superior to the cultures of people of colour.

Now the field of archeology has dealt yet another blow to this absurd fantasy. We can see that well before the first European set foot on the American continent, a culture as vibrant and rich as 5th Century Athens was already thriving.

I have no idea how the White supremacist movement will react to this latest discovery (I doubt many of them will read about it) which proves just how ridiculous their theories are.

But in the mean time, it’s fun to watch them try.

(NB: Unlike many indigenous peoples in America, the fall of the Maya was not the result of European colonialism. Astute recorders of their history, we know that some time after AD 800, some kind of catastrophe befell Tikal, the capital. It is believed that the city was a victim of overpopulation; a rapid rise in the number of people meant that more and more parts of the jungle had to be felled to create fields for agriculture, and the farmers simply could not keep pace with the increasing number of mouths to feed. Eventually the soil and its fertility was exhausted, and starvation forced the people to abandon the city).