What lovely art!

On the Mayans:

“We now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable…” and that the sadness Stephens detected long ago was due to some very nasty customs indeed:

“Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating, sometimes years later, in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple.”

Mayaball!

Civilizations can produce wonderful things. Heck, I'm just thankful for running water. To think that your civilization could be summed up as a monument to bloodlust leaves a lot to be desired. Ok, I'll grant you that the conquest of the Americas might have destroyed some or many of the artifacts which one could regard with a certain awe, but I doubt it would help much.

Pyramids and blood. That doesn't look too good the archeaological resume.