I know there are mesoamerica autists on this board. sperg out about it for me, I'm interested.

favourite nation? favourite rulers? coolest cities? most /fa/ civilisation? cool wars? I wanna hear the stuff you don't get to talk about much

>>17763458 (OP)
>favourite nation?
Not a nation but my favorite culture(s) are the postclassic Maya, because they're very misunderstood by most people and I'm a massive cunt who likes to 'ummm akshually' the ones who think they were non-existent or cavemen or a declining post-apocalyptic civilization. And also because their mercantile culture and the close religious, political, cultural and artistic ties they developed with the rest of Mesoamerica are fascinating, as is the fact that a couple of their states survived until nearly 200 years after Spanish contact.
>favorite rulers
Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, Mixtec king and warlord from the 11th century, is very interesting to me since he's a thoroughly pre-columbian figure that didn't even get much attention from Spanish chroniclers, and yet we know quite a lot about his simply because he's talked about extensively in many of the surviving mixtec genealogical books.
>coolest cities
Aside from all the big famous ones everybody knows about like Tenochtitlan and Teotihuacan and the classic maya cities, I'm a big fan of small to medium sites like el meco or Tulum, and also cities that went against the stereotype and never really collapsed, like Lamanai, a Maya city that was not only still inhabited at the contact period despite being ancient, but even had (and has) the same name it did since the classic period.
>most /fa/ civilization
For the most part they all kind of dressed the same basic away aside from the purepecha and some cultures that liked being naked sometimes so all of them i guess.

>>17763458 (OP)
Going to have to agree with the Maya, they are the only Mesoamericans to have preserved their culture and even today make up to 50% of the population of their former territories. Also the Classic Maya civilization was absolutely huge and left a thousands of buildings and inscriptions that are still being discovered. I've been to both Peten and Yucatan and basically every couple square miles has at least one ruin or minor archeological site like a shell midden or pottery shards
I might say that the highland maya are underrated but I'm biased because my great grandma was K'iche.

i just think they're neat

Incafag, I still miss you :(

please tell me more about the illegitimate rule of the gay butt babies

>>17765227

>>17765227
It was just a weird way of calling the Itza Maya gay and degenerate pieces of actual shit, because politics, and because everything in maya texts like the chilam balam is covered in a layer of esoteric magic metaphor. The Itza thenselves were a Maya bloodline from the south that migrated into the northern yucatan peninsula in the early postclassic, clashed with the locals, and inevitably took over some cities, most notoriously the famous site of Chichen Itza, which bears their name to this day. They would eventually migrate back south to the Peten Basin, where they would once again play an important role in Maya history, as their kingdom there in the Peten, centered around the city of Nojpeten/Tayasal, would be the very last Maya and Mesoamerican state to ever fall to the spanish, all the way in the year 1697.

Also, Wikipedia is a particularly shitty source for pre-columbian Americas-related stuff from what I've seen, so i wouldn't take most things you see there at face value.

>>17763458 (OP)
>favourite nation?
Purepechan empire.
> favourite rulers?
It was some Zapotec whose name I forgot. In lieu of him, Xicohtencatl.
> coolest cities?
Monte Alban.
> cool wars?
Mayapan league wars.

>>17765147
Love these gardens so much

>>17765138
>I've been to both Peten and Yucatan and basically every couple square miles has at least one ruin or minor archeological site
I remember I took a small plane over Peten when I went to Tikal, you could see square and pyramidal shapes formed in the canopy of the jungle for kilometers, you could clearly see the entire jungle used to be interconnected cities, then my suspicion was confirmed like 12 years laters with the LIDAR discovery, it was mindblowing

I still don't think I fully get the 'flower wars' the aztecs/mexica headed. They were real conflicts but also ritualized?

>>17766009
Flower wars were ritual conflicts to obtain captives and such. However, the Mexican empire was also about to launch another wave of 'real' wars of conquest and subjugation aga8nst its neighbors ( I forget the actual name). You may be confusing the two.

>>17765147
Up to seven (7) harvests a year, depending on what and when. Pretty sick. I'm not clear if they began with filling these up or just built the frame first and let the debris gather on the bottom while the initial platform was just a wattle or reed mat with earth on top.

>>17765657
Love the overdressed skimpness thing that a lot of elite cultures without steel needles had going on.

What are some books to get Meso-pilled?

was rudy right about the aridity of the Yucatan? It's savanna forest, which is means 30+ inches of rain a year, which is Seattle*-tier. Doesn't sound arid to me. Sounds like Thailand.

*Olympic rain shadow notwithstanding. Whoever was about to point this out, picrel.

>>17765229
>I ask for answers
>I get sprayed in the face
many such cases
>>17765657
thank you for giving me a serious answer anon. I figured it was a bit biased one way or another, I can never seem to find reliable information on sexual attitudes and practices in mesoamerica. on one hand you have spaniards claiming they were all sodomites and prostitutes and on the other you have aztec kings disemboweling their cousins for being too gay.

>>17765217
Passing through, this is an Meso thread thou

>>17766624
From what i've read, it was somewhere in-between: homosexuality was most certainly not fully accepted, it was looked down upon and as a man you were still expected to y'know, be manly, and not take it up the ass, and if people found out you did they would make fun of you and treat you differently than they would a normal man, yet at the same time, the state did not waste waste time actively persecuting homosexuals, and if you were a powerful nobleman you could easily get away with it.
The famous account claiming that Nezahualcoyotl brutally punished homosexuals with death was probably one more example of his family retroactively assigning christian aspects to him to glorify their own family in the eyes of the colonial Spanish authorities. They also claimed he was a pre-columbian christian who opposed human sacrifice, for instance.

>>17766615
monsoon forest, if you want a specific name. it's a type of rainforest, but seasonal.

>>17766615
See, I live not too far from there and the thing about that is that the 30 cm it gets are concentrated in a period of four months. Or so. So it rains a shitton for a few months then never again until the next season. Climate change also doesn't helpm
>>17766845
I feel like the real Nezhualcoyotl would debate the friars on human sacrifice until he died. He seemed like a pious guy.

>>17765147
What was the yield of the typical chinampa anyway? Didn't the Aztecs still need to import most of their food from communities outside Lake Texcoco?

>>17766009
Who knows. It could be that Europeans were not the first foreigners in america. Or at least that they were known to be foreigners.

For example, If mexico magically became an empire and tried to genocide all non natives. Then china would come to the rescue and save white people. But then china decides to genocide everyone anyway. lol

Bump. I am haplogroup Q-Z776, who can I LARP as?

>>17766009
Anyone trying to tell you exactly what the flower wars are is operating on some assumptions. The flower wars are simply not fully understood, and there are few contemporary sources about it. The first mention comes as an excuse from the Aztecs for why they haven't conquered Tlaxcala (instead of admitting they could not defeat them, they say they use them for practice/captives).

The concept of mutually agreed upon yearly battles originating from a year of famine comes from one particular priest who doesn't use the term "flower war".

It's very unclear what flower wars actually entailed and if they were even a particularly common occurrence, or whether they even happened outside of between the Aztecs and Tlaxcalans.

Quick! someone post Tenochtitlan from 1900

pretty kino combination of colors to base your material culture around i must say

>>17763458 (OP)
>nation
Maya city states from Classical Period on the Petén Basin
>rulers
Nezahuacoyotl. Dude's life sounded like an anime (if the stories are to be believed).
Yuknoon, the Great too. He made Calakmul into a regional hegemon.
>cities
El Mirador, Teotihuacan, El Tajin and Angamuco are some of my faves.
>most /fa/
Teotihuacanos with their feather heavy aesthetics. Zapotec headdresses are pure drip as well.
>cool wars
The century old "star wars" (yeah, that's the name) between Calakmul and Tikal.
Unironically, the conquest of Tenochtitlan by the spaniards too.

>>17769717
Tlacaelel was goated.

Can you give me a good reading list to get into Mesoamerican history/culture?

>>17763458 (OP)
any good sources on Mesoamerican political/social structures? Heard something about the Olmecs being ruled over by Artisans/Merchants and was wondering if there was any truth to that, and why later civilizations were dominated more by warrior and priest-kings.