Word: mayans
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Today, the skull measuring has stopped, and the museum is now a nice quiet place filled with replicas of Mayan stone reliefs and ceremonial objects from the different natives of Oceania. And if you venture up to the fifth floor you can watch one of the miracles of the academic world: how a concentration dies...
...campaign promise four years ago to clean up Guatemala's politics, notoriously corrupt since the country's 36-year civil war ended a decade ago. During that war, which claimed nearly a quarter-million lives, the Guatemalan military launched a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerillas, massacring entire Mayan villages accused of supporting the rebels. Many wartime figures were never prosecuted for their offenses, and human rights groups and the U.N. have warned that former state security forces - laid off after the peace accords mandated a downsizing of the military - could be involved in the drug smuggling rings...
...Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima, will not even be nominated in that category, since the Academy's foreign-language finalists are selected from a list of films submitted by their home countries. A non-English-language film from the U.S., like Iwo Jima and Mel Gibson's Mayan massacre movie Apocalypto (also a Globe nominee), is eligible only for Best Picture. The other Globe runners-up - The Lives of Others from Germany, Pan's Labyrinth from Mexico and Volver from Spain - would all be honorable choices for the foreign Oscar...
...answer, of course, is that the cross's iconography was a lot simpler than Mexican history. I called Charles C. Mann, author of the highly respected history 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Mann first noted a couple of anachronisms in the film. The Mayan capital, including any great temple of the sort in the film, had mysteriously disappeared 700 years before the Spanish arrived. Moreover, although the Mayans probably engaged in some human sacrifice, there is no evidence that they practiced it on the industrial scale depicted in the movie For that, as the Guggenheim exhibit suggested...
...Most interesting, however, was Mann's observation that if the boat Jaguar Paw sees is indeed the 1519 landing party of Cortes (who pushed quickly through what remained of Mayan territory on his way to the bloody battle of Tenochtitlan), the man holding up the cross was no particular friend to the indians. It was not until 1537, Mann said, that, after considerable debate both ways, Pope Paul III got around to proclaiming that "Indians themselves indeed are true men" and should not be "deprived of their liberty." In the intervening 18 years roughly a third of Mexico...