February 10, 2024 Dr. David S. Anderson: “Secrets from the Jungle: How the Ancient Maya Because Mysterious.”
In the public imagination, the jungles of Central America are veritably teeming with lost cities, mysterious pyramids, and inscrutable inscriptions all left behind by a vanished populace known as the Ancient Maya. Yet with more than 100 years of scholarly study, and recent revelations made possible through Lidar scans of vast cityscapes, we have truly never known more about the preconquest inhabitants of the Yucatan peninsula. This talk seeked to explore this contradiction and asked how the public came to think of the Ancient Maya as Mysterious in the first place. And, perhaps most importantly of all, how they came to host a rebellion against the evil galactic empire!
David S. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University in 2010 with a focus on the archaeology of the ancient Maya. His fieldwork has focused on studying the development of Maya sociopolitical complexity and cultural institutions during the Preclassic period. Over the past ten years, Anderson has becoming increasingly involved in the examining how the academic community should engage with pseudoarchaeological claims such as the existence of Atlantis or ancient alien contact. His work has sought to move past simply debunking such claims and instead has turned to looking for the roots that allow these ideas to thrive and shape the public perception of archaeology.