|
correspond to; be based on; at one's peak; fall into ruin; lead to ;deal with |
The Mayan Indians lived in Mexico for thousands of years. The Maya were so bright that they achieved a lot. They had farms, temples and cities with many buildings. They knew much about nature and the world around them. This knowledge helped them to live a better life than most people of that time.
In ancient Mexico there were many small clearings in the forest. In each clearing was a village with fields of crops around it. The Maya planted seeds after they cleared the land. A farmer was able to grow crops that produced for several people. But not every Maya had to be a farmer. Some were builders or priests (祭司) .
The Maya believed in many gods. They built large temples to honor them. Skillful workers built cities around these temples. It was difficult because they had to carry all of the building materials themselves. Today, many of these ancient Mayan cities and temples are still standing.
Although the Maya worked hard to build the beautiful cities, very few of them lived in them. Usually, only the priests lived in the cities. The other people lived in small villages in the forests. Their houses were much simpler. Most Maya lived a simple life close to nature.
Around the year 800, the Maya left their villages and beautiful cities, never to return. No one knows why this happened. They may have died from a deadly disease. They may have left because the soil could no longer grow crops. The lost secrets of the Maya are still beyond the reach of modern people. They are still one of our greatest mysteries.
The ruins of a Maya city have been discovered in Guatemala with the help of the remote sensing technique LiDAR. This lost city envelops sites like Tikal, Holmul, and Witzna, but shows that these famous areas are a small part of this lost urban network.
Hidden under the jungles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve site, more than 60, 000 human-made features—homes, canals, highways, and more — have been identified in aerial images collected by some international researchers headed by the PAGUNAM Foundation, a Maya cultural and natural heritage organization. Those have experts rethinking the outlines and complexity of the Maya Empire.
These ancient peoples obviously created these imaginative cultures based on their known relics (遗迹), but the new research has suggested that the size of this lost society is far beyond what experts imagined. The findings will be explored in a one-hour documentary called Lost Treasures of the Maya Snake Kings, to be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel.
This breakthrough was possible thanks to LiDAR sensors, which can survey lands in 3D by bouncing pulses off the ground from unmanned air vehicles and others. LiDAR is exceptionally useful for detecting archeological (考古的) sites, as it gets through jungles and other features that hold up exploration on the ground. The technique has made many discoveries become a reality in recent years. For instance, major finds at Angkor, Cambodia and Caracol, Belize can explain what it did. The final goal is to survey Guatemala's lowlands with it.
"There are entire cities we didn't know about now showing up in the survey data, " Francisco Estrada-Belli, one of the lead archeologists on the project, said in Nat Geo's coming documentary. "There are 20, 000 square kilometres more to be explored and there are going to be hundreds of cities about the mysterious people who built this urban network there that we don't know about, and we will push back the frontiers with the technology," he added.
Different Cultures
The cultures of the East and the West really distinguish themselves from each other a lot. .
The origin of the Eastern culture is mainly from two countries: China and India. Both of the two cultures are developed by rivers — the Yellow River in China and the Indus River in India.
When the two mother rivers gave birth to the Eastern culture, another famous culture was brought up on the Mesopotamian plain (美索不达米亚平原) —the Mesopotamian Civilization. This civilization later on developed into the cultures of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greek. Like the Chinese culture, the European culture also crossed waters. When the British settled down in America, their culture went with them over the Atlantic Ocean. So the American culture doesn't distinguish itself from the European culture a lot.
Take the language system for example. In the East, most languages belong to the pictographic language while the Western languages are mostly based on the Latin system. Other causes like human race differences count as well. But what's more, due to the far distance and the steep areas between the East and the West, the two cultures seldom communicate until recent centuries. So they grew up totally in their own ways with almost no interference (干预) from the other.
The differences are everywhere. But different cultures make the world in the 21st century more varied. The cultural gap should not be the obstacle to the civilization of human beings. It ought to be the motivation for our going farther.
A. Let us work together to keep a variety of cultures.
B. One important thing is to learn about the other's culture.
C. And these two are well-known as the base of the European culture.
D. This is because the culture systems are two separate systems on the whole.
E. They helped the two cultures develop for centuries and form their own styles.
F. They are obvious and affect people's ways of thinking and their views of the world.
G. At the same time, some other differences add to the cultural differences.
Nine 1700-year-old brick tombs have been discovered in northwest China's Xinjiang. Experts say that they can1valuable clues for the research of exchanges (交换；交流) between the central Chinese government at that time and2Western Regions.
It is the3time ancient tombs with typical characteristics of China's main Han nationality have been found in the Uygur ethnic region.
4from Beijing, Shanxi and Xinjiang concluded that the tombs were5between the middle and late third century and fourth century.
The tombs were unearthed during the6of a road earlier this year in Kuqa county, 740 km from Xinjiang's capital Urumqi and part of the7Qiuci State. Qiuci State, which8between the second century BC and 860 AD, was one of the 36 states in the Western Regions.
The tombs would help archaeologists with research into the political, economic and cultural9between the Central Plains government and states in the west, and on the cultural10of the Central Plains on the Western Regions.
Archaeologists from the Xinjiang institute have dug nine tombs since August 22, 11bodies of more than 30 people, some ancient12and more than 60 pottery (陶器) jars. It is thought there are another three tombs to be13.
The people buried in the tombs were14either people from the western regions deeply influenced by the Han culture or the Han residents (居民) in the 15.
