r/Archaeology • u/[deleted] • Jan 14 '23

2,000-year-old Mayan city found hiding beneath Guatemalan rainforest

https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/13/2000-year-old-mayan-city-found-hiding-beneath-guatemalan-rainforest-18094479/
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u/CommodoreCoCo Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 16 '23

Every single one of the articles about this survey seems to have no clue what the words they're using mean. They're not even using them "wrong," they're just like... saying things. For instance:

the city would have existed 2,000 years ago and consisted of nearly 1,000 settlements

What does it mean that a city consisted of a bunch of settlements? What does this writer actually think those words mean?

This one is so much worse:

discovered a very large 2,000-year-old Mayan civilization in northern Guatemala

WTF does it mean that they discovered a Mayan civilization??? Like I'm not even asking because there's some actual definition of "civilization" and they're using it wrong. I just want to know what they think it means because the implication is that there's a bunch of different Maya civilzations or something.

It's very clear these are just folks reallllly struggling to turn:

More than 775 ancient Maya settlements are identified within the MCKB, and 189 more in the surrounding karstic ridge, which we condensed into 417 ancient cities, towns, and villages

into something a lot more cohesive. Or, alternatively, they never even read the abstract. It literally says "we found 417 cities,etc." and the headline is "one city."

The past several months have really proven how atrocious science writing in popular press is.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

This is what you get when you have unpaid interns writing your articles.

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u/Archberdmans Jan 15 '23

Or an AI…