The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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EDIT: After a six month hiatus while I was out of country for work, I am back to working on Teo. I've been working on the Citadel in the south. I've made some changes including changing the cut stone blocks to quartz to give it the white plaster look the city originally was. Here is an aerial render. I will provide in-game screenshots of areas that people request.
So since June, I think, I've slowly been working on a friend's server making the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan. I have managed to create half of the Street of the Dead as well as the Pyramid of the Moon and the Moon Plaza. I had started it in a swamp because it was relatively flat, but I failed to scout the area early on to notice that directly north after the swamp was an area of extreme mountains and jungle. Since I had a quarter of the road done when I got to this point I decided to soldier on and blasted and cut my way through the mountains and jungle to finally complete the other quarter of the road. I also realized that the area south of the road is a winter environment. On the whole, I kinda failed to scout out a decent area. That has not stopped me. But with school taking up more of my time and the huge amount of work clearing the rest of the jungle and mountain, progress beyond the Plaza and Pyramid of the Moon has been slow.
I would like to ask for help, but I'm very specific in how I want it to look. And that specificity translates to heavy research in the city and measurements of the buildings to get them to scale. My two main resources thus far have been Rene Millon's The Teotihuacan Map (1973) and Suburo Sugiyama's chapter in The Archaeology of Measurement, Teotihuacan City Layout As A Cosmogram (2010). I even went so far as emailing Dr. Sugiyama himself asking him for accurate height measurements to which he had replied that he has been working on them for some time. I am in the process of trying to get a mod installed on the server to make clearing land easier. If this happens it would make things a whole lot easier. If you would like to help and have access to Millon's Teotihuacan Map and don't mind working with someone who wants to make an accurate to scale representation of the city, let me know. Otherwise, here are some images.
Also, any suggestions for texture packs to make this look better would be awesome.
EDIT: So due to server issues and a change is style, I've started to remake Teo in Single player afresh and to go 500m grid by 500m grid from the Teotihuacan Map instead of building one long road and building off of that. Down below are the old images and new images.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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Thank you, but it is less of an accomplishment than you think. I am on creative mode rather than survival. I had began making the plaza of Tenochtitlan on survival mode previously. I made the Templo Mayor and the Temple to Quetzalcoatl before calling it quits. I hadn't planned that area all that well, either. I'm just doing my best to make the whole place to scale and use my knowledge and experience in Mesoamerican archaeology to make the city look like how it would have been to the best that I can in Minecraft.
Tikal is an awesome place. There was a mapping project conducted before Millon's which mapped a good chunk of Tikal. Millon based his methods of survey on theirs. I'm not sure who conducted it, but it should not be hard to find if you want to use it as a reference. If you want to see some truly awesome survey work check out the stuff done by Arlene and Diane Chase at Caracol. They made use of LiDAR, a sort of laser scanner, and mapped a huge swath of jungle in Belize and uncovered numerous roads, settlements, and more terraces than they thought existed in the area (something like 90% of all hills were terraced).
Bravo for working on such a nice project! Your name means obsidian-edged wooden club by the way, I know my way around Meso-American architecture and culture a little bit.
Also! Do you plan to include housing for all of the 90,000 some residents of Teotihuacan? If so, my bow is off to you, and good luck. :s
But also.... it has been pointed out that all of the pyramids were shown to have, at one point, a layer of painted plaster over them in bright colors (mostly green and red) as well as the lovely white plaster itself. So, don't forget that!
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The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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My plan is to include housing and apartment complexes at least a hundred meters from the Street's edge at the very least. From there I will either extent the Street the other 2 kilometers and build off of that, or continue to build outward in the northern half. The hard part about building in the south is that it sits near an alluvial plain and a number of structures are buried under silt. Also, that area has been built up in recent times. We'll just have to see.
I'm going to stick with just the plain stone. I have never heard of the pyramids being covered in plaster and being painted green or red. I know Mayan pyramids would be painted red, but that is an entirely different area. Any painting that I know of in the city were for murals on the insides of the buildings which would have protected them from the elements. Also, it is particularly difficult to have things look like white plaster with the available blocks.
Mexica valley structures were indeed covered in plaster so they could be painted with red or green paints, this is a more recent discovery seemingly (despite it being recorded in conquistadore findings).
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Looks like a great start. Unfortunately I know nothing about this type of architecture. However, I can appreciate the amount of work that this is, and will be. You have a long road ahead of you. Good luck, and I will follow this thread because I am interested in its completion.
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It would be difficult to make the Pyramid red since there are no red wool steps to keep the 45 degree angle. The angle is actually less, but what can you do? And like I sad previously, Minecraft only has so many blocks available to build with. The closest thing I could think of for plaster would be clay blocks. And I'm not trying to argue with you about tiny facets of the place. Like I said, I never really came across anything in the literature to suggest that residential structures were painted on the outside. I was trained as a Mayanist who's now looking into West Mexico. Central Mexico has always been a side endeavor in my studies.
Well, you can't really be adequately trained in one without the other, if you are going so far to claim being an expert (I am not by any means), since after all, the Teotihuacanos influence on the Maya (in all their forms just about) left an indelible mark that can still be seen today in the modern Maya style of art. Teotihuacan was known by its contemporaries as the 'place where the gods met man' (or something along those lines) for a reason. It is even debated whether or not Spearthrower Owl was a ruler in absentia of Tikal, (Spearthrower Owl having been one of the rulers of Teotihuacan I believe). In any case, you are right about the difficulty of applying 'painted stucco' but it could be done with a modified texture pack and using wool as your medium. None of all that has been said between us detracts from how great your work is and I really hope to see you finish it.
Keep going!
~Jillian
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The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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You would be surprised in what you don't cover when studying one area. While Mayanists have know that Teo had an influence in the Yucatan, there has been debate as to how that power was applied. Teo seems to be an economic power rather than territorial power. It's still a mystery as to who Spearthrower Owl really was, but he probably was from Central Mexico. He may have been a rebel who entered the area of his own free will or some kind of trader. Teo was know as 'place of the reeds' or Pu in Mayan. But like I said, you would be surprised who you don't cover. We never covered Zapotecs either for your example. Instead we learned what was known about the Mayan from early Pre-Classic up until the contact in the Post Classic. But I am no expert in the Maya and won't be. Like I said, I started as a Mayanist, undergrad, and now I'm looking into West Mexico, grad school. If you have questions about Me so America in general I will do my best to answer them.
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I realized that WorldEdit can be installed on the server I'm working on. So this weekend the admin is going to install the plugin so I can get back to work and complete this. WorldEdit will make things infinitely easier
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I will try and post updates of the cleared land this weekend when I get the WorldEdit plugin installed. But as of right now even if I wanted to do it the old fashioned way of dynamite and pickaxe, I cannot. The server seems to be down.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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I was able to have WorldEdit installed today. I ended up clearing the entire northern part of the road from the Plaza to the swampy area. Now to determine where the Sun Pyramid will be going and to clear a large enough area to begin building that.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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So I started working on the Pyramid of the Sun. My friend/admin of the server was helping out. He noted that the place lacked a bit of color. I used the replacement feature in WorldEdit to turn the cobblestone steps into Netherrack steps in an attempt to make it look red while still giving it an angle. Thoughts? Also if you know of any Bukkit friendly plugins to add materials or a texture pack that would be suitable, please let me know.
This is the Moon Pyramid. I couldn't find the code to replace the cracked stone blocks which explains the grey parts.
I undid both replacements after I took the screenshot so no damage was done if this looks like poop.
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Also, do I restore the Sun Pyramid to what it looked like at its height or make it look like how it is now? This is in regards to the top two tiers of the Pyramid. Currently the top two tiers are from an earlier version of the Pyramid that had crumbled away. During early restoration the rubble was carried away and that rubble was the later part of the Pyramid which had crumbled over time.
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The one problem I'm encountering if I do go with the Netherrack is the lack of Netherrack slabs for the corners so there isn't such a large gap when the corners meet
http://www.minecraft.../64/-176/-4/0/0
So since June, I think, I've slowly been working on a friend's server making the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan. I have managed to create half of the Street of the Dead as well as the Pyramid of the Moon and the Moon Plaza. I had started it in a swamp because it was relatively flat, but I failed to scout the area early on to notice that directly north after the swamp was an area of extreme mountains and jungle. Since I had a quarter of the road done when I got to this point I decided to soldier on and blasted and cut my way through the mountains and jungle to finally complete the other quarter of the road. I also realized that the area south of the road is a winter environment. On the whole, I kinda failed to scout out a decent area. That has not stopped me. But with school taking up more of my time and the huge amount of work clearing the rest of the jungle and mountain, progress beyond the Plaza and Pyramid of the Moon has been slow.
I would like to ask for help, but I'm very specific in how I want it to look. And that specificity translates to heavy research in the city and measurements of the buildings to get them to scale. My two main resources thus far have been Rene Millon's The Teotihuacan Map (1973) and Suburo Sugiyama's chapter in The Archaeology of Measurement, Teotihuacan City Layout As A Cosmogram (2010). I even went so far as emailing Dr. Sugiyama himself asking him for accurate height measurements to which he had replied that he has been working on them for some time. I am in the process of trying to get a mod installed on the server to make clearing land easier. If this happens it would make things a whole lot easier. If you would like to help and have access to Millon's Teotihuacan Map and don't mind working with someone who wants to make an accurate to scale representation of the city, let me know. Otherwise, here are some images.
Also, any suggestions for texture packs to make this look better would be awesome.
EDIT: So due to server issues and a change is style, I've started to remake Teo in Single player afresh and to go 500m grid by 500m grid from the Teotihuacan Map instead of building one long road and building off of that. Down below are the old images and new images.
Old images:
New Images
Tikal is an awesome place. There was a mapping project conducted before Millon's which mapped a good chunk of Tikal. Millon based his methods of survey on theirs. I'm not sure who conducted it, but it should not be hard to find if you want to use it as a reference. If you want to see some truly awesome survey work check out the stuff done by Arlene and Diane Chase at Caracol. They made use of LiDAR, a sort of laser scanner, and mapped a huge swath of jungle in Belize and uncovered numerous roads, settlements, and more terraces than they thought existed in the area (something like 90% of all hills were terraced).
Also! Do you plan to include housing for all of the 90,000 some residents of Teotihuacan? If so, my bow is off to you, and good luck. :s
But also.... it has been pointed out that all of the pyramids were shown to have, at one point, a layer of painted plaster over them in bright colors (mostly green and red) as well as the lovely white plaster itself. So, don't forget that!
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I'm going to stick with just the plain stone. I have never heard of the pyramids being covered in plaster and being painted green or red. I know Mayan pyramids would be painted red, but that is an entirely different area. Any painting that I know of in the city were for murals on the insides of the buildings which would have protected them from the elements. Also, it is particularly difficult to have things look like white plaster with the available blocks.
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http://www.phs.potea...t, Stokstad.pdf
Page 4, if you don't mind.
And it was covered in Stucco, a type of plaster. I wasn't by any means referring to the more commonly known Plaster-of-Paris.
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Keep going!
~Jillian
The bestest~ server website: caelteria.enjin.com
I am Co-Founder there, if you like serious roleplay, join us!
The bestest~ server website: caelteria.enjin.com
I am Co-Founder there, if you like serious roleplay, join us!
This is the Moon Pyramid. I couldn't find the code to replace the cracked stone blocks which explains the grey parts.
I undid both replacements after I took the screenshot so no damage was done if this looks like poop.