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thinking about the history of the Americas, Hansen said. The lidar findings have unveiled “a whole volume of human history that we’ve never known” because of the scarcity of artifacts from that period, which were probably buried by later construction by the Maya and then covered by jungle.

When scientists digitally removed ceiba and sapodilla trees that cloak the area, the lidar images revealed ancient dams, reservoirs, pyramids and ball courts. El Mirador has long been considered the “cradle of the Maya civilization,” but the proof of a complex society already being in place circa 1,000 B.C. suggests “a whole volume of human history that we’ve never known before,”

Excavations around Balamnal in 2009 “failed to recognize the incredible sophistication and size of the city, all of which was immediately evident with lidar technology,” Hansen says. Lidar showed the site to be among the largest in El Mirador, with causeways “radiating to other smaller sites suggest[ing] its administrative, economic and political importance in the Preclassic periods.”

He says that once the area is fully revealed, it could be potentially as significant a marker in human history as the pyramids in Egypt, the oldest of which dates circa 2,700 B.C

the research “sheds light on how the ancient Maya significantly modified their local environment, and it enhances our understanding of how social complexity arose.”

Among the multistory temples, buildings and roads, images of Balamnal, one of the Preclassic civilization’s crucial hubs, were revealed for the first time. It dates back to 1,000 or possibly 2,000 years before the most famous, and well-excavated, Maya site of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which was constructed in the early A.D. 400s.

Before the lidar study, archaeologists, biologists and historians had identified about 50 sites of importance in a decade. “Now there are more than 900 [settlements]. … We [couldn’t] see that before. It was impossible.”

The lidar images raise questions about how “one society living in a tropical jungle in Central America became one of the greatest ancient civilizations in the world [while] another society living in Borneo is still hunting and gathering in the exact same environment,”

About 40 miles south of Petén is Tikal, ruins of the largest city of the Maya civilization’s later “Classic” period (A.D. 200 to 900). Now a national park, Tikal was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979. It could serve as a possible blueprint for El Mirador.

“It could be something great,” Hernández says of El Mirador’s potential transformation into a significant tourist site. “But only if the government, archaeological organizations and locals work together. Then a decision can be taken as to whether it should become a national monument, an area of returned, modern-day Mayans and other Indigenous Guatemalans (who make up about 40 percent of the population in the country) or a tourist hub.

“I don’t want my kids to say, ‘oh, I remember the Mirador, it was a nice place, jaguars were living there’ — like a legend,” Hernández says. “We can save it now. This is the right moment to do it.”

The Maya culture was known for its sophisticated approach to agriculture, arts and astronomy. The peak era for the civilization, which some archaeologists refer to as the Classic Period, is generally considered to have lasted from around A.D. 250 to 900.

The total population at that time was once estimated to be a few million, said Diane Davies, an archaeologist and Maya specialist based in the United Kingdom. But in light of the new lidar data, she said it could now be closer to 10 million.

“To have such a large number of people living at such a high level for such a long period of time, it really proves the fact that these people were highly developed, and also quite environmentally conscientious,” she said.

The administration has also canceled bidding rounds for clean-energy projects in solar and wind power, while boosting natural-gas pipelines and refineries, which experts say will complicate Mexico’s goals under the Paris Climate Accords

“It’s become clear that this guy does not care about the environment at all,” said Gustavo Alanis-Ortega, director of the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights, or Cemda, a prominent nonprofit. Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Mexico Climate Initiative, said he feels “totally betrayed.”

This week, the government said that it is beginning work on the Maya Train without having published an environmental impact report, as required by law.

“You’ve got massive kingdoms in the central lowlands, like Tikal and Calakmul — the United States and Soviet Union of their time,” said Dr. Scherer. “Our team deals with much smaller realms involved in their own sort of political alliances that break down and turn into conflicts at a really tiny, localized scale.”

before the location of Sak Tz’i’ was pinned down, “archaeologists knew that its rulers engaged in high-stakes diplomacy, sometimes resulting in warfare with powerful neighbors.” The maps by Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer, he added, “bring a concreteness and poignancy to this narrative, showing that the site was smaller than most of its competitors and in a sense punched above its weight.”

Searching for the lost settlement, Dr. Golden said, had been like assembling a map of medieval Europe from historical documents and not knowing where Burgundy should go. “Essentially, we’ve located Burgundy,” he said. “It’s that critical a piece of the puzzle.”

Neolithic Chinese ink had different cultural requirements from medieval manuscript ink; printing ink is most certainly different from that found in modern fountain pens

Recently, Maya Blue has been a key piece of evidence in evaluating the authenticity of one of only four Maya codices to survive into the 21st century, the Grolier Codex.

In 2007, however, a detailed chemical analysis of the pigments found in the Grolier matched elements to the Maya Blue found in other codices and artifacts. Although the Grolier contains very little visible blue, these findings, along with other pre-Hispanic materials found in its inks, authenticated the codex.

In traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting, the inkstick – along with the inkstone for grinding, a brush and paper – were the classic tools of the trade.

From the Middle Ages to the 19th century, iron gall ink was one of the most frequently made and used inks in Europe – so much so that it was often referred to as ‘common ink’.

The neat biblical verses were penned in iron gall ink, with the distinctive rusty hue as a clear indication of the ink used

While historically pervasive, iron gall ink is also inherently corrosive. Once put to paper, parchment or vellum it bites into and eats away at the surfaces

When Johannes Gutenberg introduced mass printing to Europe in the 1440s, the technological breakthrough was more than just a metal, moveable type press. A new kind of ink had to be developed

In the centuries prior to Gutenberg’s press, books and codices written out in longhand used water-based inks.

In 1968, the Japanese company Epson built the first electronic printer; 16 years later, Hewlett Packard released the first laser jet. By the late 1990s, inkjet printing was inexpensive enough to be ubiquitous in personal computing.

Indelible voting ink was invented in 1962 by scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi, just before the third election in a newly independent India to help combat voter fraud.

voters’ ink-stained fingers have become a cultural shorthand and symbol of fraud-free, democratic elections.

In the 1940s an emerging class of urban professionals and merchants sought to modernize Guatemala and break the dependency on coffee exports

heir goal was not socialism, but modernization and industrialization within a national framework. The working-class movement in Guatemala, including the Communist Party, identified and worked with this movement. Jacobo Arbenz, the candidate of this movement, came to power in 1954.

The overthrow of Arbenz led to a deepening of the agro-export economic model, including further expropriation of Indian land. One of the consequences of this was that "de-ruralization" took place without any sort of parallel urbanization and proletarian process. The dispossessed Indian was never absorbed into a capitalist economy, because manufacturing jobs were not being produced. Instead, the big plantations were becoming more and more mechanized and fewer and fewer jobs became available. The Indian could only find work on a seasonal basis and those who could not find work often found their way into the informal economy as street peddlers or subproletarians.

The root causes of the class conflict are in Guatemala's economic system, which simply provide for nothing except the luxury of the big bourgeoisie and the upward mobility of a slender percentage of the urban middle- class.

The wealthiest 20 percent of the population received 47% of national income in 1970. This grew to 57% in 1984. The wealthiest 10 percent increased its share from 41% in 1980 to 44% in 1987. Meanwhile, the poorest 50% fell from a 24% share in 1970 to 18% in 1984. In the countryside during the 1980s, the top 2% of the rural population received 40% of income, while 83% received only 35%

The largest 2 percent of Guatemala's farms cover 67% of usable land, while 80% of farms account for 10% of the land. In another indicator of the growing inequality, over 50% of peasant income came from land cultivation in 1976. By 1988, this percentage had decreased to 25%.

And yet Guatemala remains the one country in Central America that has not passed any significant land redistribution law.

But this is the peace of the graveyard. Will there be struggle in the future? It is safe to say that the misery that caused the last outburst will sooner or later cause a new upsurge in the future. Whether it will take the same form as the guerrilla warfare of the 1980s can not be guaranteed. The old mole revolution adopts many guises.

"The colonialists’ need to preserve the basic Indian economic and social organization order to facilitate the exploitation of a rural labor force, is one of the factors which explains why the Indian culture, revolving around precapitalist agriculture based on maize and the corresponding level of social organization, survive in the new colonial society; but it also explains why this culture not develop. The culture imposed by the Spanish colonialists (western, greco-latin, judeo-christian) dominated the Maya-Quicbe culture, because it expressed a mode of production superior to that of the Mesoamerican Indians.

The sense of ethnic-cultural identity--the other key to understanding the survival of the Indian culture as we know it today--finds its explanation in the relative independence of the superstructure with regard to the material base which gives rise to it at a given moment."

The dating system is based on measuring the length of chromosome segments of a particular ancestry that occur in a population. When people of two different populations intermarry, their children’s genomes carry large chunks of DNA of one parent’s ancestry interspersed with large chunks from the other’s.

Another mixing event is the injection of European-type DNA into the Kalash, a people of Pakistan, at some time between 990 and 210 B.C. This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers

Though all humans have the same set of genes, their genomes are studded with mutations, which are differences in the sequence of DNA units in the genome. These mutations occur in patterns because whole sets of mutations are passed down from parent to child and hence will be common in a particular population

The lowest amount of African admixture occurs in the Druse, a religious group of the Middle East that prohibited slavery and has been closed to converts since A.D. 1043.

from the average size of the chunks in a person’s genome, the geneticists can calculate the number of generations since the mixing event.

One of the most widespread events his group has detected is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia.

the European colonization of America is recorded in the genomes of the Maya and Pima Indians. And Cambodian genomes mark the fall of the Khmer empire in the form of ancestral DNA from the invading Tai people.

They find among Northern Italians an insertion of Middle Eastern DNA that occurred between 776 B.C. and A.D. 550, and may represent the Etruscans, a mysterious people said by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to have emigrated from Lydia in Turkey.

his method cannot yet detect genetic mixing between very similar populations, as was the case with the English and their invaders from Scandinavia and Northern Germany.

“In some sense we don’t want to talk to historians,” Dr. Falush said. “There’s a great virtue in being objective: You put the data in and get the history out. We do think this is a way of reconstructing history by just using DNA.”

It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave he was. Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann’s from Hawaii, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I re­member her saying that.” Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar — that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.

Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teach­ers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Java­nese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily,” he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikrana­gara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikrana­gara, said, “People tease about skin color all the time.” If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”

“She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indone­sia,” he wrote in his memoir. “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often character­ized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.”

Ann uprooted Barry, at age 6, and transplanted him to Jakarta. Now she was up­rooting him again, at barely 10, and sending him back, alone. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later. When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. “I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Of­fice and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid.”

he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of un­conditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface dis­turbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

According to the prosecution, in August 1982, Guatemalan soldiers responded to a Maya land-rights campaign by raiding valley communities and taking many men — including the husbands of six of the women in the courtroom — to Finca Tinajas, never to be seen again.

They said the soldiers knew their husbands had been taken and the women were defenseless. “The soldiers said, ‘No one asks about you anymore. No one cares about you. You belong to us now,” said Petrona Choch Cuc.

Since 2007, the U.S. and U.N. have funded the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, an international mission dedicated to help Guatemala’s independent prosecutor’s office, the Ministerio Publico, prosecute difficult cases of corruption and organized crime.

Rios Montt and Byron Lima Oliva, who was convicted of murdering one of the authors of a report published by the Catholic Church that laid out a detailed and fact-checked record of wartime atrocities, including mass rape.

He adds: "This isn't a fundraising gimmick — it's the transparency and honesty I have promised you since I entered this race. The truth is, for our campaign, these debates have offered our only guaranteed opportunity to share my vision with the American people. If I can't make the next debate stage, we cannot sustain a campaign that can make it to Iowa in February."

Castro actually has met the fundraising threshold to qualify for the fifth debate. However, he has failed to reach the polling threshold.

"Our campaign is facing its biggest challenge yet," campaign manager Maya Rupert said in a statement. "Secretary Castro has run a historic campaign that has changed the nature of the 2020 election and pushed the Democratic party on a number of big ideas. Unfortunately, we do not see a path to victory that doesn't include making the November debate stage—and without a significant uptick in our fundraising, we cannot make that debate."

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ol’ Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have. “I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?” “No, I’m happy,” she says.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

On the left, what gets termed “wokeness” is indissociable from self-help. How should we understand superficial, performative expressions of “anti-racism” or preening social-media politics if not as a way for self-described good-hearted liberals to make grand public displays of pruning their moral shrubbery?

We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth

This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires.

We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.

Among the right, a new kind of reactionary self-help is ascendant. Its mainstream version is legible in the manosphere misogyny of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate, while more eldritch currents lurk just beneath the surface. The Nietzscheanism of internet personalities like Bronze Age Pervert—who combines ethnonationalist chauvinism in politics and personal life with a Greco-Roman obsession with physical fitness—is only one of many examples of the trend the social critic Maya Vinokour has called “lifestyle fascism.”

Stewart’s response to the UTIs is not concern for his wife but irritation: “This guy is breaking all my toys,” he grumbles. When she gets upset that her husband keeps calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” during sex—something he professes not being able to help—Stewart does not change this habit. Instead they strike a preposterous bargain: “He will try his best not to scream cunt during sex, and I will do my best to ignore him if he does.”

What the author is trying to find in her open relationship is not sex, but self-understanding—what it means, how we get it, whether sex can provide it. And although the answers Molly arrives at are not cheaply won, they are cheap all the same.

his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.

though Molly may tell herself and her readers that she is on a journey of learning and growth, the ugly truth is that More feels like a 290-page cry for help. Molly does not come off as a woman boldly finding herself, but rather as someone who is vulnerable to psychological manipulation and does not enjoy her open marriage.

if it seems like Molly Roden Winter does not want to be in an open marriage, it is because she often lets us know that she doesn’t want to be in an open marriage.

When a couples therapist asks the pair why they’re in counseling halfway through the book—prompted by a breakdown Molly experiences that stems from their marital arrangement—she explains: “We’re here because I don’t want to be in an open marriage anymore, but Stewart does.”

There are precious few sex scenes where Molly seems to be enjoying herself. When Molly is in the middle of a squirmy threesome she’s been dreading, she literally dissociates from her body, pretending that she is a director staging a scene in which her physical person is merely an actor. Molly describes how she performs her role with “a clinician’s detachment” and leaves the apartment rapidly so as not “to be pulled back into this scene.” After one of her dates repeatedly removes his condom without her consent—an act known as “stealthing,” which is considered a sex crime in a number of countries and the state of California—she contracts a series of urinary tract infections

Near the end of the memoir, the author’s mother provides the empty epiphany toward which the text careens. “Everything that happens in life,” her mom offers, “is an opportunity to learn about yourself. Marriage. Motherhood. Relationships. Even anger and illness. Nothing that happens is good or bad in and of itself. It’s all just an opportunity to learn and grow.” With this maternal revelation, Molly’s “skin starts to tingle.” She relates that the advice “feels almost holy.”

Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.

These obstacles include, in her case, profound gender inequality relating to Molly’s life as a parent to two sons, and a troubling family history. Molly’s mother joined a cult—and indoctrinated the author into it as a child—at the urging of a male partner in her own open marriage. The book makes tacit comparisons between Molly’s mother’s initiation into a cult at the behest of an extramarital partner, and Molly’s own initiation into an open marriage at the behest of her husband.

throughout More, the dominant emotion Molly reports is not lust but rage—primarily at the deeply unequal child-care burdens that are placed upon her. “I think about all the years I’ve spent my night alone with the kids—the dinners, the bedtimes, the dishes, the loneliness of doing it all by myself—because Stew had to work,” she laments at one point. That Stewart is now spending late nights not working (if he ever was) but rather schtupping his endless reserve of mistresses pushes Molly further to the brink: “I feel my jealousy mingle with the resentment I’ve kept at bay for years,”

Molly doubles down on her quest for self-actualization through the relentless pursuit of bitter novelty: new sexual experiences that she rarely seems to enjoy, new partners who rarely treat her kindly.

The only solution Molly can imagine is to persist in an open marriage, rather than push for an equal one. Inward sexual revolution plainly feels more possible than a revolution in who does the dishes.