I wonder if this is related to Ophir. It's mentioned as a thing, not a place, in Paleo-Hebrew, but clearly began as a place where gold was found, and then became a term for any trading port where gold was sold.

During a 1954 excavation of an 8th-century Viking settlement in Sweden archaeologists found a Buddha statuette from India

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helg%C3%B6

Am I thinking of the location for the Trojan War being still in dispute?

they found tin from uzbekistan mined during the bronze age in a ship wreck off the coast of turkey

The Vandals ruled successfully for 100 years, in which period renovation and economic growth took place, the archaeological evidence bares this out, though the written evidence is contrary. There may be something of a conflict of interest in relying on ecclesiastical and Roman accounts with an uncritical eye as regards the Vandal occupation of AP, especially given that still then a great mass of Donatists which inhabited the region were already being actively suppressed by the very same, and found kinship in the anti Niceanism of one another. Funny also you should mention Hippo, where Donatism still flourished to a good extent. The Roman governors and administration in AP were corrupt, Bonifatius and others were disliked by the inhabitants, their ability to govern and protect the region was minimal and they were constantly getting by on the skin of their teeth. One may forget that not the whole mass of inhabitants of AP were Nicene Christians. For your perusal, I have another document I'd like to share but I'll have to wait until I'm on desktop and then we can take it further from there. You may have to wait until tomorrow for me to actually sit down, find them, translate etc, but remind me and I will get around to it.

https://www.academia.edu/27135277/The_Vandal_impact_on_North_Africa

It's a geographic phenomenon. Central America forms a physical bottle neck and as the region filled up with it's first group of linguistic arrivals there wasn't any room for new comers. They had to settle to the west and north where Mexico opens up. That's one theory!

This post just sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Somehow I never knew that the location of Troy had been conclusively discovered (and for a very long time now).

About a century and a half ago

When did we nail down the location of Troy?

You ain't floating when you're wearing your king bling.

Idk if it was that hard. Humans can swim and float.

One part of it is that the north and west probably saw more influxes of migrants that increased the diversity of cultures. That would result in more difference than Mayans slowly diverging from a common source.

Ones an island, so the walk might be perilous. Pretty big trek from Anatolia to Iraq as well.

Yeah no, this was definitely not the case with the Vandals. They crossed over the straights of Gibraltar after their confederation in Iberia was destroyed and plundered their way all the way to Carthage. Their naval tradition may have started in Spain but after capturing the major maritime port of Carthage (along with a sizable quantity of ships), they became the defacto power.

The romans in North Africa were definitely not happy with vandal rule opposed to Roman. Just read some of the ecclesiastical accounts of the vandal migration. St. Augustine was literally dying in Hippo while the vandals were en route. There were also letters sent from rome detailing the amounts of dead, and various members of the church who were killed (and nuns SA’d) by the vandals. They were of a heretical denomination of Christianity (Arians) and didn’t take kindly to those who were nicean.

There were more accepting circumstances in the migration period but not in regards to the Vandals in Africa

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Yeah, that jumped out at me too. It’s not like these places are super far apart. I’m not sure how long a walk that is, but I can’t imagine it would be more than a season, if that.

I mean, merchants and travelers tend to end up moving way farther than we think

> So, how did this happen? What were the Mayans doing that kept their culture so homogenous over such a long period, that clearly wasn't being done by Teotihuacan or the Toltecs in the west whose empires seem to have faded and left almost no mark on the cultures that follow?

In short, it didn't.

There's a couple key pieces of information to keep in mind here:

Maya is an exonym for most people under its umbrella, not an endonym. This means it is a foreign name, not a local name. It is debatably an endonym for part of the northern Yucatan Peninsula that later expanded during the Caste War in the late 1840s - late 1910s, but this was a long and complicated process. Either way, it was still only primarily used by people from the northern and western Yucatan until significantly recently.

• If you want to read more on this, I would recommend looking into the chapter Maya Ethnogenesis and Group Identity in Yucatán, 1500–1900 in the book The Only True People. If you need help finding this let me know, but it's fairly accessible online.

What prompted the greater expansion of the "Maya" label as a deliberately used label by the people themselves (and still only in a partial form) is essentially the Guatemalan Genocide. The Silent Holocaust, Maya Genocide, there's a couple names and you may or may not have heard of it prior.

The broad and short of it was a three and a half decade long insurgency war in Guatemala, wherein the military government very actively and disproportionately targeted indigenous citizens, for a number of reasons I'm not going to go into here, sorry.

Regardless, in the realm of 30,000 - 150,000 civilians were massacred very brutally by the Guatemalan military government, and in the aftermath the indigenous groups of northern Guatemala sought international solidarity both for aid purposes, and also as a defense mechanism to prevent a second genocide. It is not, particularly, a symbol of cultural unity.

• This is, by the way, a pretty brief explanation because the Guatemalan Genocide is mostly outside my area of focus, sorry!

Now, to be clear, much of the peoples considered "Maya" do have common cultural traits - but many of those are regional, and they also partially apply to, for example, the Xinca, or the Lenca, and so on. What's considered the Maya region has always been very culturally diverse, politically disunited, and similarities are more in the sense of broad regional cultural trends rather than supreme unity.

• As a note, Yucatec and Q'eqchi' are basically not mutually intelligible at all - they're part of totally separate branches of the same family, and the family is about as internally diverse as the European branch of the Indo-European language family. Q'eqchi' is more mutually intelligible with the Quichean subbranch of the southern Mayan languages, but not very.

There is an illusion of "Maya Unity" that sometimes get projected backwards - but it is an illusion, and primarily due to a lack of detail. In the Classic period (300 - 950 AD), this is partially because of the style of records not being particularly conducive to it. In the Postclassic period, it is due to the enduring bias of both the general public and many academics, of viewing the Postclassic Maya as some "degenerated" or "lesser" version of a past culture, and thus equally unworthy of greater attention. But over the last four decades, there's been a significant reevaluation, and we've come to understand the diversity, change, and accomplishments of these people to a much greater degree than before.

• If you want to read more on this, I would recommend It Depends on How We Look at Things: New Perspectives on the Postclassic Period in the Northern Maya Lowlands. It is pretty much exclusively focused on the Northern Yucatan, but is a solid overview. Once again, ask me if you need help finding it!

What are the chances it was a placer deposit?

You should ask this on r/askhistorians to get a proper answer

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Fair. I know this is a common tactic for newer empires that take over older ones. Rather than constructing entirely new schemes of tax collection, economics, soldiering etc, most conquerors just change who is at the top while leaving the system more or less intact.

Almost everyone that conquered Persia, be they Greek, Arab, Parthian etc., all of them basically maintained the old social order.

That's not speculation, it's basically what they did. The roman administration was still fully functioning there and they made use of it.

The naval strength was already there; the Vandals just came in and ousted the Roman governor and said "hey north African navy, you work for us now!"

By this point in history the empire did not have very good cohesion, so there wasn't really a unified and effective "imperial navy" that could coordinate a retaliation; any force which might have done so was busy elsewhere. The empire was being attacked from all sides by different groups of barbarians and the Muslims. For those sailors and marines who were in North Africa when the Vandals came, the easiest and safest thing to do was to continue going about their business as if nothing had changed. "I, for one, welcome our new Germanic overlords!" If you don't piss off the new boss, you get to keep your job.