East10 🌑utpost (Cody)

finding a mayan site with ai is cool and all but... the number of known mayan structures that are unexcavated is estimated to be in the millions. the entire yucatan was a mayan urban sprawl like their new york city. i love research and researchers like this but to put the actual find in context its the equivalent of a future researcher finding a previosuly unknown building in manhattan. cool, but now that means there are 20,048,049 +1 mayan structures known that are unexcavated. i say this not to minimize the find in any way but to give it proper context of the tremendous scale of the maya. it is almost incomprehensible. we will never and can never excavate all the mayan sites unless elon decides to send a billion humanoid bots to excavate en mass. but even then there is a more disturbing reality of industrial scale looting. in el mirador for example there are over 10,000 looting pits. every unexcavated structure seems to already have one. the looters move one million times faster than the archaeologists. in el mirador specifically the looters were the first ones to show the archaeologists the important sites they had found. heres one example of a looting pit we came across in el mirador but again pretty much every structure has one. the story of looting in Peten is actually really interesting. it was the chicleros, or chewing gum people who first went into the jungle with commercial intent to make and sell chewing gum from the sapodilla tree. while in the jungle they realized there were ancient mayan structures literally everywhere and started looting them. they then became extremely wealthy and all over the region the "chicleros" were seen as wealthy elite. 🧐 my question is, was the wealth from the chewing gum, the looting, or both. and where are all these looted artifacts? are there some billionaire museums us commoners will never see?! show us!!

El mirador is not for the faint of heart. @East10Outpost and I took this photo right before setting out from Carmelita. First, it is a 45 (forty-five) mile hike through mud and muck and swarms of mosquitos that cover your body the second you stop to rest. It’s hot. It’s humid. But in between the blisters on your feet and the clothing completely drenched in sweat something happens. You realize you are further away from human civilization than you’ve been in a long time. You realize you haven’t looked at anything on the internet in days. Your “feed” is the sound of howler monkeys, the sighting of jaguar tracks, a tapir barely visible through the trees. Stories of love and loss and life and death with those you share the trail with. I signed up for this journey because I wanted to see the largest Mayan city, and I owed Cody one. But what I got was something else entirely, what I got was a chance to live a little bit more like the way humans lived a long time ago, out in the jungle, around a fire, at camp, around a hearth, depending on each other for survival. What I got was the chance to step outside of modern life entirely, if only for a few days, and remember what the wild earth is like. And what I discovered was that I like it better. I don’t know how, but I would like to reorient my life around a fire, around a trail, around the wilderness, around a group of people who’ve all found themselves there for different reasons. El mirador awakened something in me, but it honestly has nothing to do with the maya or ancient civilization but has everything to do with people, and the wild. The trek to el mirador is magical. I feel it has a profound capacity to transform an individual.