The implication that science had “found” Naia, as though her existence was unknown until scientists arrived, was a form of the same erasure that had characterized the treatment of Indigenous history throughout the colonial period.

These critiques are legitimate and important.

The framing of ancient human discoveries as things that science “found” or “discovered” tends to position science as the first real knower of the past — as though the history it is recovering was genuinely unknown before it was analyzed by researchers, rather than known in different ways and through different frameworks by the communities whose history it represents.

The Maya knew their landscape’s cenotes were connected to the underground water world.