By the end of the war, the Nazis had hidden over six thousand five hundred stolen masterpieces in the Altaussee salt mine in the Austrian Alps. And here is the paradox that should haunt every one of us: de Landa’s own field notes, the writings of the man who destroyed the civilization’s records, became the key that scholars finally used in 1952 to crack the Mayan script. It was also, and I’m quoting the Internet Archive here, “the largest self-created folk-art collection in the history of the world.” Thirty-eight million pages of human creativity.
Author: Jason Alan Snyder
Published at: 2026-03-23 22:39:16
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