9 Comments
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Michael S. S. Curl's avatar

Almost got stabbed on a Mexican pyramid? Out of fashion I think :) Good on you.

Mark A Foster's avatar

So sorry to read about your harrowing experience at Monte Alban - saddened by the resonance with the topics of your post. Thank you for your careful parsing of the "nearest" sources that you could find to try to illuminate "how it might have been." Appreciate the show and tell cadence of the presentation.

matthew's avatar

Very much share the excitement! The next decade feels like the first time we'll be able to rigorously compare societies across time and place at scale. I'm working in some very early areas of this, mostly around new learning tools and public first hand sources and translations for high school and undergraduate learners, but it already seems clear this is going much farther. Exciting time, very fun time, and probably upending for a lot of fields. Great post as usual, thanks!

Shikha Bhatnagar's avatar

Wow - this was so fascinating to read. I just looked up more information about Aztec marriages and found similarities with Hindu marriages of the past and present - especially the knot tying and the birth chart compatibility.

(Also, sorry about the attack! I visited Mt Alban last year and was wandering around alone quite freely without incident, but perhaps it helps that I look Mexican.)

Stanislas Richard's avatar

Sorry to read about you're being mugged. Hope you are alright. But why did you wait until getting back to Chicago to get checked? You could have had some internal injury that needed attention.

Alice Evans's avatar

You're kind. Well, I wanted to leave Mexico promptly, and spoke to a very kind Colombian doctor over the phone who thought I seemed much better.

Fullantho's avatar

For colonial period, Maria Elena Martinez’s Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico is a good source. Publish by Stanford Press

bestbeforedate's avatar

We don't have to go very far back in western history to find societies as authoritarian and economies founded on grueling piecework. So it's not very surprising. The thing is, these are humans, there must be some humanity in how they lived so wgere is it? But smtio often were tempted to speculate beyond far beyond the evidence