Mayan migration to Louisiana

What if one Mayan city or 2 in the late classic age decided to flee away from the Mayan world. They fles so far away that they reach Louisiana.
 
I mean, relocation is not the hard part, and the Maya certainly had boats, the question is "why that way, why Louisiana, and why not someplace closer".
 
Yah I just thought this would be a interesting scenario i new to the forum and Thai is my first post I just thought I put it out there and see what people think
 
Yah I just thought this would be a interesting scenario i new to the forum and Thai is my first post I just thought I put it out there and see what people think

Welcome to the forum than!

A little advise from someone with a little more experience: in general, people prefer discussing scenarios with both an understandable logic behind them (IE. Why would this decision be made?) and some degree of likelihood. While crazy scenarios can be interesting, they can be difficult to discuss in detail if they don't have that grounding.
 
Louisiana (at least a site like New Orleans, at the best port on the Mississippi, which shifts every few centuries) is certainly a good place to have a city, but the Mayans weren't seafaring. They'd be pretty alien compared to the locals of the region, who would fight them at every step.

The best case scenario is a seafaring Mississippian culture (or seafaring Mesoamerican culture, which may or may not be Mayan), like a wanked version of the Woodland-era cultures in Louisiana. They'd be a great middleman between the emerging centers in the American Bottoms (one of which would become Cahokia) and Mesoamerica. Perhaps they'd import obsidian, gems, and alcohol from Mesoamerica (among others--it was very wealthy compared to even a place like Cahokia), but they'd no doubt have nice niches in exports, and I think yaupon tea (found only in Chiapas in Mesoamerica) could be a great export from the lower Mississippi in pre-Columbian times.

Said Lower Mississippian state could end up seriously powerful and influential, like a regional version of Cahokia, if not larger.
 
I hope no one minds me quoting a previous comment of mine, but to be fair we did have a similar topic just this week:

Making ships that could navigate high seas (not hug a coast) is pretty difficult, and requires a well-developed maritime culture, which itself requires a well-developed maritime interest. The Mediterranean encouraged naval technology because useful goods were spread between disparate societies; the Nile is straightforwardly better for growing wheat than the Greek highlands are, while if you want quality copper you can't beat Cyprus. Moreover, some parts of the Mediterranean (Egypt and the Levant, ancient North Africa, then later Italy and southern France) have a high population carrying capacity, with no practical limit.

The Maya just didn't really have this. Pretty much all goods they really needed were produced in abundance in one part of the Maya sphere or another, so not much essential stuff ever passed through non-Maya hands. The elite stuff like jade did need a longer trade network, sure, but never one that's so debilitating you'd need to conquer anywhere else. And even then, that's all to the south! If Maya oarmen had somehow reached the Caribbean islands or the north shore of the Gulf, they'd have found a bunch of people who have basically nothing of use. There was no economic motive to develop or build ships that could do more than hug the coast.

But let's assume they did so. What would incentivise them to build a new city there? Classic Maya society was an extremely conservative aristocracy, where priests and nobles ruled over their own city-state and its thousands of commoners who themselves had neither the means or the motive to go anywhere else. The city wasn't just an important economic unit, it was the focal point of the entire religious and cultural system. There weren't any aristocrats on the Mayflower, and unlike 17th-century England the Maya aristocrats had no intention of allowing their subjects to leave - at least, they certainly wouldn't have financed the undertaking.

But let's assume they do for some reason. What are the native peoples who already live there going to think? The Maya would probably think of them as uncivilized, sure, but there wasn't exactly a massive disparity in technology, nor would they introduce any devastating diseases. Absolutely nothing about Maya material culture would have any use in the bayous or on the coastal plains. Our poor Maya "colonists" would find themselves astonished that their intimate knowledge of water conservation and building with stone don't do much for them in a swamp, and instead they'd have to learn how to build levees and mix their crops really quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I suspect we'd stop calling them "Maya" and instead call them "Mississippians" within two or three generations. Considering both of the above points, it's not like they'd have had a particularly close connection to their original homeland anyway.

People on this board take too much from the 17th and 18th centuries (as well as just plain hindsight) in thinking that "populous colonies = good". Even the European colonisation of the Americas started as trade enterprises, and some colonies like New France barely ever got beyond that level. Even Rome, the sine qua non of premodern colonisation, didn't really send out colonial expeditions - they preferred to conquer the land first, and then dole it out to Roman families later if they had to, or else just assimilate the natives. It should be a basic rule of thumb that settler colonisation just didn't really happen before the 18th century, and unfortunately I can't see the Maya becoming an exception.
 
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