Re: Mutant Message (was Re: Re Look out! long hair gun loon!)

Wesley Schwein (schwein@pegasus.montclair.edu)
Sat, 20 Dec 1997 14:24:56 -0500 (EST)


On Fri, 19 Dec 1997, Michael Lorrey wrote:

> Damien Broderick wrote:
> > The first point has some merit. Sadly, be warned that the book you cite is
> > a brainless fabrication, a New Age hoax. (I gather that the publisher,
> > following its debunking, now reprints it as a `novel'.)
>
> Thanks Damien. SOunds like another case of the famous Maya fraud of the
> 30's, where socialist/communist sympathizing archaeologists from British
> and American Ivy League schools developed the preposterous and
> completely unsupported, and eventually debunked theories that the Maya
> civilization was a socialist paradise of peaceful, communistic, unarmed
> innocent heathens.

Who are some of these archaeologists? From what I understand of Mayan
studies, the field was long dominated by a pair named Sylvanus Morley and
Eric Thompson, both of whom painted the Maya as basically a bunch of High
Church Anglicans, remarkably like the scholars themselves!

Thompson held up the decipherment of the Maya script for *decades* largely
because Yuri Knosorov, the philologist who came up with a fruitful
methodolgy for deciphering, was a Soviet citizen and therefore evil,
foolish, and unscientific. As more and more Mayanists used Knosorov's
methods and the "semeisiographic wisdom" of the ruins turned out to
describe wars, king lists, and other distinctly non-mystical
preoccupations, the image of Maya civilization as a peaceful, communal
*theocracy* died out.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wesley Schwein Hopeful monsters unite!