View from the Moon Pyramid to the Road of the Dead in the ancient Teotihuacán Pyramids in Mexico.Tais Policanti
This story was originally published in Spanish by HuffPost Mexico. A version of it has been adapted and republished here in English with permission from HuffPost Mexico.
Millions of tourists visit the ruins of Teotihuacán every year. They climb the pyramids, walk the Avenue of the Dead, and learn about the spectacular artifacts recovered from the ancient Mesoamerican city. Looking across the vast and remarkably well-preserved stone complex, built by hand by a pre-Aztec civilization, many likely assume that only a powerful despotic king—directing hordes of slave or serf laborers—could have orchestrated the construction of such a carefully planned city. Indeed, this is what archaeologists once believed. If tourists make the effort to visit some of the excavated residential compounds outside the main archaeological zone, however, they may start to understand why such assumptions about Teotihuacán society are changing. For these structures lie at the heart of our shifting perspective of the ancient city: namely, that it was far more egalitarian than we had previously imagined possible.
I began my archaeological career in the 1970s as an undergraduate examining artifacts at Teotihuacán. That first trip to Mexico cemented my love not only for the archaeology, but also for Mexican life and culture. In the decades since, I moved on to excavating Aztec-period sites in the provinces of that civilization’s empire. In 2015, when I was appointed director of Arizona State University’s archaeological lab in San Juan Teotihuacán, I got to return to my first love among Mexican sites, armed with new ideas about ancient cities and urban life. But after just a few years of work, I began to see Teotihuacán in a very different light.
Compared with the Aztec sites I have studied, Teotihuacán seems very strange, and not just because of its huge size (100,000 people, living in an area of close to 20 square kilometers). For one, it’s the only pre-modern Mexican city completely planned with a grid layout. For another, its residents lived in a form of housing—apartmentlike multifamily compounds with white lime-plaster floors, ornamented roofs, and porches—remarkably spacious and luxurious for the ancient world. These complexes are key to the conclusion of many researchers, including myself, that the city’s residents lived far more economically equal lives than any other known Mesoamerican society.
These new insights into Teotihuacán have come thanks to extensive fieldwork on the site. This includes decades of study from archaeologists excavating the pyramids and apartment compounds, who have helped to more fully reconstruct the architecture of the long-abandoned city and unearthed artifacts that are giving us clues about the lives of the people who inhabited it. It also includes work from anthropologists like René Millon and George Cowgill, who mapped the entire city and took more than 5,000 collections of artifacts from the surface of the ground. These materials are now stored in the lab I direct, where they are being studied by archaeologists.
i think the emphasis on social behaviors in autism is probably way overblown.
if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.
and that’s not the only bias we should expect if our model of autism derives primarily from the observations of clinicians.
imagine you’re a therapist of some kind, and an autistic person shows up in your office. what is there to notice about them?
there’s the way they greet you. they way they talk, their vocabulary and sentence structure. the awkward feeling when they respond in unexpected ways to your non-verbal social signals, or fail to take turns in conversation. the way they move, how they rock back and forth or flap their hands or make other repetitive movements. the way they tend to repeat everything you say. the way they keep talking about horticulture session after session despite your every attempt to change the topic. the way they cover their eyes and start yelling when you turn the lights on or forget to hide your yellow jacket, but don’t react at all to the sound of their mother calling their name from the doorway. the way they melt down when you ask to meet at a different time next week.
you see the same behavior patterns over and over in this certain group of clients. so autism appears to be a condition characterized by 1) social deficits in emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and social participation in general; 2) repetitive movements and speech patterns, 3) unusual intense focus on highly restricted interests, 4) something really odd about how they react to sensory inputs from the environment, and 5) insistence on sameness or rigid adherence to ritualized behavior patterns.
i have blind-men-touching-an-elephant feels about this description of autism. or maybe even looking-for-your-keys-under-the-lamp-post,-even-though-that’s-not-where-you-dropped-them,-because-you-can-see-here,-and-over-where-you-dropped-them-it’s-all-dark feels.
…except like it’s not even an elephant but instead some kind of enormous dinosaur with parts that are way too high up to reach. if people try to figure out what it is by touching its feet, one person says “it’s a thing with claws”, and another person says “no, it’s a thing with feathers”, and a third person who’s very clever responds, “the underlying truth is that it’s a thing with both claws and feathers”. eventually everyone agrees that whatever the thing is, it has claws and/or feathers of various types and to varying degrees. (which just clears everything right up, yeah?)
when you can only touch its feet, there’s no way to draw a picture of anything like the real animal, because nearly all of it is out of reach. your drawing will be all feathers and claws, and no torso or tail or head or teeth. you’re not *wrong* that dinosaurs tend to have feathers and claws, but you’re missing the true shape of things anyway.
importantly, a dinosaur would have a hellofa time recognizing itself in your drawing. especially an unusually tall dinosaur, or a dinosaur with few feathers, or one who’s been filing their claws way down since age five.
autism is a cognitive/perceptual style that *impacts* socialization, movement, speech patterns, conversation topics, reactions to sensory inputs, and preferences about order and sameness. but *none* of those factors carves reality at its joints.
(you wanna know what i think autism *really* is now, right? well i’ll tell you this much: i don’t know. but i think i “weak central coherence” is a shockingly powerful working model for predicting my own experiences, even if i’m still confused.)
I agree with this post, which is why I am really sympathetic to Lynn Waterhouse’s theory that autism is actually many different underlying neurodivergences which happen to all look the same to therapists. (Analogy: fever. Fever is clearly a discrete thing, and many treatments help all kinds of fever, but sometimes you have a fever because you have a flu and sometimes you have a fever as a drug reaction and sometimes you have a fever because you have a tumor, and these are meaningfully and importantly different.)
Anyway, “weak central coherence” feels really inaccurate to describe my autism, but I resonate with Temple Grandin’s description of the verbal/logic autistic thinking style.
if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.
I looked up
“weak central coherence”… doesn’t fit me at all. If anything I see the big picture more than the little details. I’m guessing it really is like
cptsdcarlosdevil said, an outward effect of multiple different underlying issues.
There does seem to be quite the variety of experiences getting pushed under one umbrella, based on some surface similarities as (often very oddly) described and interpreted from the outside. Important to keep in mind, and not assume that the map necessarily even has much to do with the territory.
i think the emphasis on social behaviors in autism is probably way overblown.
if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.
and that’s not the only bias we should expect if our model of autism derives primarily from the observations of clinicians.
imagine you’re a therapist of some kind, and an autistic person shows up in your office. what is there to notice about them?
there’s the way they greet you. they way they talk, their vocabulary and sentence structure. the awkward feeling when they respond in unexpected ways to your non-verbal social signals, or fail to take turns in conversation. the way they move, how they rock back and forth or flap their hands or make other repetitive movements. the way they tend to repeat everything you say. the way they keep talking about horticulture session after session despite your every attempt to change the topic. the way they cover their eyes and start yelling when you turn the lights on or forget to hide your yellow jacket, but don’t react at all to the sound of their mother calling their name from the doorway. the way they melt down when you ask to meet at a different time next week.
you see the same behavior patterns over and over in this certain group of clients. so autism appears to be a condition characterized by 1) social deficits in emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and social participation in general; 2) repetitive movements and speech patterns, 3) unusual intense focus on highly restricted interests, 4) something really odd about how they react to sensory inputs from the environment, and 5) insistence on sameness or rigid adherence to ritualized behavior patterns.
i have blind-men-touching-an-elephant feels about this description of autism. or maybe even looking-for-your-keys-under-the-lamp-post,-even-though-that’s-not-where-you-dropped-them,-because-you-can-see-here,-and-over-where-you-dropped-them-it’s-all-dark feels.
…except like it’s not even an elephant but instead some kind of enormous dinosaur with parts that are way too high up to reach. if people try to figure out what it is by touching its feet, one person says “it’s a thing with claws”, and another person says “no, it’s a thing with feathers”, and a third person who’s very clever responds, “the underlying truth is that it’s a thing with both claws and feathers”. eventually everyone agrees that whatever the thing is, it has claws and/or feathers of various types and to varying degrees. (which just clears everything right up, yeah?)
when you can only touch its feet, there’s no way to draw a picture of anything like the real animal, because nearly all of it is out of reach. your drawing will be all feathers and claws, and no torso or tail or head or teeth. you’re not *wrong* that dinosaurs tend to have feathers and claws, but you’re missing the true shape of things anyway.
importantly, a dinosaur would have a hellofa time recognizing itself in your drawing. especially an unusually tall dinosaur, or a dinosaur with few feathers, or one who’s been filing their claws way down since age five.
autism is a cognitive/perceptual style that *impacts* socialization, movement, speech patterns, conversation topics, reactions to sensory inputs, and preferences about order and sameness. but *none* of those factors carves reality at its joints.
(you wanna know what i think autism *really* is now, right? well i’ll tell you this much: i don’t know. but i think i “weak central coherence” is a shockingly powerful working model for predicting my own experiences, even if i’m still confused.)
I agree with this post, which is why I am really sympathetic to Lynn Waterhouse’s theory that autism is actually many different underlying neurodivergences which happen to all look the same to therapists. (Analogy: fever. Fever is clearly a discrete thing, and many treatments help all kinds of fever, but sometimes you have a fever because you have a flu and sometimes you have a fever as a drug reaction and sometimes you have a fever because you have a tumor, and these are meaningfully and importantly different.)
Anyway, “weak central coherence” feels really inaccurate to describe my autism, but I resonate with Temple Grandin’s description of the verbal/logic autistic thinking style.
if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.
Reminded by my tag commentary about it seeming safer not to make assumptions based on surface stuff without other info, especially seeing how different any intended signaling can be? Yeah, whatever “gaydar” I might have developed before is still pretty much totally broken, after moving into a sufficiently different cultural setting. Even years later, I really find it safer not to assume much dealing with other people.
(With a lot of social stuff, tbqh, not just that. And yes, the whole autism thing seems to help complicate the situation. It’s also much easier to get read as Unacceptably Weird here IME, which frankly kinda encourages less engagement to learn from.)
That also reminded me of one instance of misinterpreted cues and “maybe better not to pile up the assumptions” from a few years back.
My partner (who is also not from here) was on his way back from some evening out with friends one night, and decided to stop by a club that was open right near the station for a another drink or two before getting a cab home.
Let’s just say he’s not necessarily the best either at picking up some cues normally. Already being half sloshed probably didn’t help then. Anyway, he apparently didn’t register that this one younger guy in there was not just being friendly but hitting on him, until the guy suddenly groped him.
“But…the beard!” Turned out Mr. Gropey interpreted him coming in on his own with the usual Geeky Viking look as obviously a daddy bear type looking for company. A beard like that must mean gay gay gay!
(Or possibly Sikh, I suppose, though a less likely possibility in that case. “I’m a Unix admin, it’s traditional!”* was much more to the point here.)
With much surprise ensuing all around. Apparently the first time that had happened to Mr. C, and the situation felt way less threatening than absurd. Not the first time someone here had interpreted the beard as Fellow Gay Signaling, apparently. First time he’d ever gotten groped like that, though.
Mr. Gropey did calm down pretty quickly after it became obvious he wasn’t about to get a stomping, enough to explain.
I am at least not aware of that club having a particularly gay clientele, btw. But I’m really not up on that scene locally, at all. It sounded like he might have had better luck with that approach in past, though.
Why the dude concluded that grabbing other people’s junk unsolicited might be the right thing to do is another matter entirely, of course. Whether or not they really were as gay as he thought. Not going off on that right now.
But yeah, probably safer for everybody not to make a bunch of assumptions. Especially when dealing with people from sufficiently different backgrounds.
(And jfc don’t be That Twink 😱 Should go without saying, but maybe not.)
* As he was joking after this one place he interviewed a while back asked him if he would be willing to lose the beard. For an IT position with no customer contact. 🤔 Good indication you probably wouldn’t want to work there no matter what kind of salary they were offering, yeah.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often find it difficult
to look others in the eyes. This avoidance has typically been
interpreted as a sign of social and personal indifference, but reports
from people with autism suggests otherwise. Many say that looking others
in the eye is uncomfortable or stressful for them – some will even say
that “it burns” – all of which points to a neurological cause. Now, a
team of investigators based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
at Massachusetts General Hospital has shed light on the brain
mechanisms involved in this behavior. They reported their findings in a Nature Scientific Reports paper.
“The
findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the
apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not
due to a lack of concern,” says Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, director
of neurolimbic research in the Martinos Center and corresponding author
of the new study. “Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way
to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation
in a particular part of the brain.”
The key to this research
lies in the brain’s subcortical system, which is responsible for the
natural orientation toward faces seen in newborns and is important later
for emotion perception. The subcortical system can be specifically
activated by eye contact, and previous work by Hadjikhani and colleagues
revealed that, among those with autism, it was oversensitive to effects
elicited by direct gaze and emotional expression. In the present study,
she took that observation further, asking what happens when those with
autism are compelled to look in the eyes of faces conveying different
emotions.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
Hadjikhani and colleagues measured differences in activation within the
face-processing components of the subcortical system in people with
autism and in control participants as they viewed faces either freely or
when constrained to viewing the eye-region. While activation of these
structures was similar for both groups exhibited during free viewing,
overactivation was observed in participants with autism when
concentrating on the eye-region. This was especially true with fearful
faces, though similar effects were observed when viewing happy, angry
and neutral faces.
The findings of the study support the
hypothesis of an imbalance between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory
signaling networks in autism – excitatory refers to neurotransmitters
that stimulate the brain, while inhibitory refers to those that calm it
and provide equilibrium. Such an imbalance, likely the result of diverse
genetic and environmental causes, can strengthen excitatory signaling
in the subcortical circuitry involved in face perception. This in turn
can result in an abnormal reaction to eye contact, an aversion to direct
gaze and consequently abnormal development of the social brain.
In
revealing the underlying reasons for eye-avoidance, the study also
suggests more effective ways of engaging individuals with autism. “The
findings indicate that forcing children with autism to look into
someone’s eyes in behavioral therapy may create a lot of anxiety for
them,” says Hadjikhani, an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard
Medical School. “An approach involving slow habituation to eye contact
may help them overcome this overreaction and be able to handle eye
contact in the long run, thereby avoiding the cascading effects that
this eye-avoidance has on the development of the social brain.”
The
researchers are already planning to follow up the research. Hadjikhani
is now seeking funding for a study that will use magnetoencephalography
(MEG) together with eye-tracking and other behavioral tests to probe
more deeply the relationship between the subcortical system and eye
contact avoidance in autism.
“So now that neurotypical scientists have said so, can we stop forcing Autistic people to – For fuck’s sake.”
Aren’t there entire major cultures that don’t do eye contact? How do they explain the “development of the social brain” there?
Reminded yet again of how much I love the too-common conflation of a GF diet and what some of the food faddists keep doing with that.
“I will base my diet around often low-nutrition commercial analogues of foods which usually contain certain grains” is not at all the same as “I will choose from literally anything that’s not made with these few specific grains originating around the Mediterranean”.
It’s even weirder when the latter describes most of the cuisines across the world, before wheat/barley/rye got introduced. Not everyone had those particular grains at all. It’s like saying you’re bound to get sick if you don’t eat any rice or corn, but way more Eurocentric in its assumptions. (But, what else would someone possibly eat as a major part of their diet?! 😩)
It’s also kinda like framing lactose intolerance as the unusual/pathological state, when adult lactase persistence is the oddity across the world. That’s only going to turn into any kind of problem if fresh dairy is a common part of your food traditions. Again, more unusual than not around the world until relatively recently. People found plenty to eat that didn’t involve fresh dairy before that. And groups that have been exposed to gluten-containing grains for less time also (surprise!) seem to have higher rates of celiac, from what research has been done.
That’s beyond the casting of actual medical reasons to avoid gluten as rare enough to hardly consider. Which is kinda how a lot of us didn’t get the problem recognized until we were well into adulthood and very very “inexplicably” sick from it. (See also: Celiac disease goes undiagnosed in 90% of cases, Canadian researchers find.) I was trying to find something older, estimating that there are about the same number of people in the US who don’t know they have celiac alone as the ones who are eating GF without needing to. But, I couldn’t find the source I was thinking of right now.
The number of people going around with unrecognized dangerous autoimmune reactions would seem to be a much bigger concern than Western food faddists possibly hurting themselves by not showing much sense. If it weren’t that, it would be something else for that demographic anyway. It always is.
It’s also not liable to be great for anybody to rely heavily on, say, bread made largely out of pure potato starch, instead of getting a better variety of nutrients. Many of the explicitly GF products largely aimed at food faddists are even worse for actual celiacs to use as staples, if anything, since we are by definition starting out with multiple deficiencies from not being able to absorb our food properly. So our bodies really need the vitamins and minerals you’re just not going to find in a lot of the commercial explicitly GF starchy foods.
I’ve probably gone on about all of this before, but I just get so tired.
Now let me explain. We are just like everyone else because we are HUMAN!!! WOW WHAT A SHOCKER! OMG!
I had a guest shocked because the deaf lady that checked in before him was a complete bitch. He said and I quote “I thought those ppl were suppose to be nice.” Like what the fuck dude. She’s deaf she’s not a fucking fairy tale angle for fucks sake.
Disabled people are people get that threw your thick ass skulls.
Hell I’m the first to tell you I’m an evil bitch and I was like this way before I became disabled.
Disabled ppl can be rude.
Disabled ppl can be sexy.
Disabled ppl can be smart.
Disabled ppl can be anything because we are still just a fucking human being.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.