And Also Bc It Is Just Really Interesting - Tumblr Posts

Really makes you think about how we perceive history and historical places especially. Because in truth a LOT of places like this that are centuries or even thousands of years old have had restorations sometime in the last 200 years or so. But in a way yeah that is just another layer of history to learn about (and from).

Even if u leave the places alone completely they’ll still decay and rust. They will never look exactly like they did in their time and that’s part of their charm! Like the history of the building or site itself is well… history of course.

American archaeologists, in cooperation with the Mexican government, reconstructed Chichen Itza according to the standards of the 1920s, which were not as painstaking as today's standards. Perhaps the biggest excavation job was the Temple of the Warrior, which was an overgrown mound when the archaeologists began. Here it is mid-excavation in 1925:

Over the next few years, masons worked to rebuild the temple as the archaeologists thought it should look:

By 1928, it looked like this:

Two sides of the famous "El Castillo" were similarly rebuilt.

The other half of it was left mostly unrestored:

Some observers think that Chichen Itza is a sham, a pseudo-historical confection constructed more to wow the tourists than to honor history (this website sums up the “it’s a fake!” argument pretty well).

But, like every site, Chichen Itza probably doesn’t have a “pure” or “authentic” state. It changed repeatedly over the years when it was one of the most important cities in Mesoamerica. It’s still changing today. The reconstruction in the 1920s certainly didn’t follow modern standards of archaeological precision. But now the changes of the 1920s are just another layer of history, laid on top of centuries more.

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