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Ed Barnhart - The Amazon Rainforest is Hiding a Lost Civilization__ _ SRS _335 · NO FILTER

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Dr. Ed Barnhart, welcome to the show.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Pleasure to have you. But yeah, I think I ran
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: across your YouTube channel a little while ago, and we've
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: been kind of wanting to dive into some ancient civilization
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: stuff and some historic type stuff. So we reached out
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: and here we are. So, you know, originally I wanted
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: to talk about kind of just the Mayans and, um,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: do a whole episode on that but it looks like
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: we got a lot more to cover so we'll see
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: how it goes but i love this kind of stuff
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: we've had a couple of um a couple of guys
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: on we've had randall carlson on we've talked with graham
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: hancock a couple of times but um have been able
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: to work it out and um yeah we've had some
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: guys on talking about ancient egypt and tim albarino has
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: been on so Here you are.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm happy to be here, and thanks for highlighting
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: the Americas. Most of the archaeology people knows about is
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: somewhere outside of our hemisphere, and there's so much here.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: I'm thrilled to get a chance to talk about it.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Perfect. Let me start you off with an introduction here. Dr.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Ed Barnhart, you're an archaeologist and explorer best known for
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: your work studying the ancient civilizations of the Americas. You
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: discovered and mapped the Maya city of Machna in Belize
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: and later led the Palenque Mapping Project in Mexico. In 2003,
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: you founded the Maya Exploration Center and have served as
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: the director ever since. You also have a YouTube channel
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: offering weekly deep dives into the ancient cultures of the
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Americas in addition to being the host of the ArcheoEd podcast.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the show.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Nice introduction. Thanks for that.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: So before we get started, everybody gets a gift. Those
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: are Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: actually up in Michigan. And it's just candy. Well, thank you.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm from Colorado. It might have had more
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: in it, but I like candy just fine. Thank you
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: very much, Sean.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: You're welcome. You're welcome. And then one other thing to
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: knock out, I actually heard you have a Patreon account
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: as well. I do. Can I walk into that conversation?
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: I do have a Patreon account. It's a fraction of
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: what yours is, but I think Patreon's great. I think that,
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: you know, Google and all those other things, those algorithms
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: are not really treating you and I well. I think
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Patreon's a great way for people that care about what
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: we do to support us directly.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: So.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: When I started out, I started this in my attic
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: and had no income.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: It was 2019?
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: When I started this?
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I started this in Christmas of 2019.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: I think we're very much the same. I started my
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: podcast like right when COVID started and I was trapped
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: at home and I could not travel and couldn't do anything.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: I just went nuts and went into my holiday closet
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: and just started talking to a microphone.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Right on. It worked out. So these guys have been
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: with me since the beginning. And, you know, they were
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: the ones that really supported me and carried me through
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: all the way to today. And so we've turned it
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: into one hell of a community. And one of the
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: things I do is they get the opportunity to ask
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: each and every guest a question. So this is from
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Mad Dog Crazy. Do you believe... Do you believe the
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Mayans interacted with aliens and to what degree? And how
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: do you interpret the Mayan calendar or its supposed predictions
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: when you compare them to what's happening in the world today?
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Let's leave out the Mayan calendar because I know we're
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: going over that later. That's a long one. That's a
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: long one. So do you believe the Mayans interacted with
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: aliens and to what degree?
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: I see no archaeological evidence that they did. every one
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: of their technologies. We see them building from rudimentary things
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: to more complex things in a very understandable human fashion.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: I'm happy for this question because I have appeared on
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: ancient aliens like 25 times now, so people could get
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: the impression that I'm pro-alien theory. At least when it
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: comes to the Maya that I've studied for my whole life,
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: I see no evidence that They were influenced or in
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: contact with aliens.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Do you believe in aliens? Do you think they're out there?
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: I do.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: I think it's a statistical impossibility that we're the only
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: people in the universe. And I'll also say that the
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: modern Maya today, big fans of the aliens things. Every
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: ruins I ever go to, I talk to the guards.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: I love to talk to the guards because they see everything.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: And they're always telling me that aliens are floating over
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: the sites at night. They say there's green and red lights.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: There's some of them say they're like spirits and some
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: of them say they're aliens, but you know, from hearsay
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: out of the mouths of the Maya, they're sure interested
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: in their ruins today. That's what they say.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: So when you say there's no archeological evidence that they
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: were interacting with any aliens, what, I mean, what, what
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: archeological evidence would you be looking for?
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's a good question. I mean, How do
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: we look for an artifact that we have never seen?
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: How do we– what would be the evidence? I would
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: think that the evidence would be some kind of like
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: startling technology leap. One day they're Stone Age, the next
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: day they're building cars, that sort of thing. But the
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: Maya were– the Maya through their entire period never even
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: got to metallurgy. So that's the sort of thing I'm
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: talking about. I would expect some sort of large leap
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: in technology, in the kind of materials they're using, maybe
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: in their medical sciences. But I don't see anything like
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: that that would be unexplained other than contact. We have
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: lots of archaeological examples of, One culture contacting another and
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: that culture immediately picking up on new technologies and changing.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Gotcha.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: That's the sort of thing. And on a, you know,
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: on a, just a terrestrial scale, we see the evidence
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: of that all the time. So if I was to
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: look for something that could be alien contact, I would
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: expect the same kind of radical technology adoption change and
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: nothing in Maya history gives me that.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: Sorry.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I actually don't believe in aliens.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, now the question of do I think
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: aliens have been here, that one kind of smacks of
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: human hubris, doesn't it? It's kind of like, why would
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: we be so important that an advanced species would even
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: come and look at us? That one's less statistically possible.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: But the universe is so vast. How would we be
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: the only sentient beings in it.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: I don't know maybe we're the only ones created but
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: how did okay so let's get into i just how
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: did you get into this how did you get it
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: what what what sparked the fascination with the ancient civilizations
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: and the americas for you.
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: Well i think that i'm one of those lucky people
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: who have always been who i've been and i just
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: had to figure out a way to channel it I
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: was always an explorer. Even as a little kid, my
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: parents had to lock the front door because I would
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: just open it and walk out and keep walking. I
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: would just explore. I explored the woods behind my house.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: I explored down the street until I was tired. I
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: could be miles away. And so, I mean, I was
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: always just thrilled to go explore new things. And when
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: I was 13 or 14, I went to the Dollar
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: Theater in Irving, Texas, and I saw Indiana Jones. And
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: I was like, that's what I want to do. That
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: looks cool to me. Of course, I've never gotten to
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: fight any Nazis or anything, but the archaeology part came true.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: But I was a very bad student. When the opening
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: lines came up, it said, like, 1936, South America. Honestly,
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: I was like, there's a South America here? I just
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: thought there was America. So I went and looked it
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: up in the library and then I became obsessed with
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: the Inca. And through high school, I read all about
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: the Inca. And at the time they were talking about
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Machu Picchu being this one citadel up in the mountains.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: But I thought there must be many more of those
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: if that's where they pray. So I told the high
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: school counselor, I said, uh, The job counselor, she said,
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: what do you want to do? I said, well, I
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: want to find a lost city. She said, that is
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: not a practical job, Ed. You should try to find
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: an actual career. But, you know, I kept with it.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: I went to school in Colorado, mostly because I wanted
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: to ski. And lo and behold, nobody knew anything about
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: South America there or the Inca. There were no professors,
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: but there was one for the Maya. And so I
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: started studying the Maya. And in my, I guess, sophomore year,
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: I signed up to do a field school in Honduras
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: that was in a beautiful city called Copan. And I
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: called my dad and said, hey, I made it in
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: this field school. And he said, you're an idiot. You've
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: never even been out of the country. You're going to
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: go to Honduras?
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: I was like, yeah. They used to be one of
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: the most dangerous countries in the world. San Pedro Sula.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: San Pedro Sula was number one for a long time. Yeah.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: I was once walking around there and going between my
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: hotel and the museum and multiple people stopped me like,
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: why are you on the street? You should get inside.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been there too. It's an interesting place.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: It's getting better. It's no longer number one. I think
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: it's like number eight or something. Really, they're on the rise.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: Right on.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: Anyway, I really fell in love with Copan, and that's
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: where I met my mentor, Linda Shealy, who's the woman
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: who broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. And I followed
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: her to the University of Texas, and there I got
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: into the archaeology side of it and signed up to
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: do the deepest of the jungle surveys they allowed their
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: students to do. And I found a city.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: You found a city in college?
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: I did. And when I was 25, I found Mashnah.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: Everybody told me that was impossible, that all the cities
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: had been found, that a student, leading students couldn't do
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: such a thing. But I used these topography maps and
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: I said, if I was a Maya in this huge area,
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: where would I find it? Where would I put my city?
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: And I knew they put their pyramids in triads. And
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: they symbolize the three hearthstones of civilization. I knew they're farmers.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: So I found this one spot. And also their pyramids
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: are called Toon Wheat Stone Mountains. So they revere the mountains.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: And I looked and I looked for the tallest peak
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: in the area, found it. And there were two little
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: peaks right next to it with three rivers running through
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: on the topography map in the 1990s. That was before
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: our phones and everything. And I just... Dumb luck, I guess.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: I said, if I was a Maya, that's where I'd go.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: And it took me two seasons to hike and cut
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: out there with student groups, but it was there.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: How many students? Anywhere from four to eight. That's it? Yeah.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: And the other trick that I did is I bucked
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: my professor's kind of demand that I just went in
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: a straight western line through the hills, because up, down, up, down.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: Season one, I started finding these old overgrown logging roads
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: that were from the British a hundred years ago. And
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: I was like, why am I doing this transect when
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: these roads are the path of least resistance through these hills,
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: the same one that the Maya would have taken. I'm
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: following these roads out there. So I liberated the roads
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: as I went out there and ended up where I
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: wanted to be and there was a city actually on
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: the first hill, not on the tallest hill.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: So hold on. So, so were you looking for anything
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: in particular? I mean, you had mentioned that the, the professor, sorry,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: I forgot her name already. Oh, Linda, the hieroglyph, the
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Mayan hieroglyphics. Is there something that you guys translated that
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: said there was like a lost city or something, or
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: were you just going, Hey, there's probably a cities out
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: there that we haven't discovered yet. You're looking at topography going, we're,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Where would I build a city?
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: Sheely was in the art history department. My professor from
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: the archaeology anthropology department was Fred Valdez. So he, they're
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: two different professors. But it's just a well-known fact that
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: there are thousands of Maya communities out there and we
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: haven't found them all. We still have not found all
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: the Maya cities at all. And so on my way
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: to Mashnah finding it, I found.
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: five.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: Maya villages and we mapped those out. They'd have like 30,
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: 40 buildings, nothing very big. And then finally, after going through,
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: I thought I was just in another village, but then
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: we ran into one that was like six meters tall
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: and square. And I thought that that's not a village building.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: And soon after that, we found one that was 18
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: meters tall and a hundred meters across. And it was
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: part of A big plaza where we found a ball
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: court and a palace and fallen stela and a big
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: reservoir eventually.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: What is a ball court? What's that?
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: The Maya had a ball game. They had a ball
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: game with a rubber ball and the courts are very obvious.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: They have sloping walls and little stands above and they
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: have an open lane in the middle. And so they're
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: easy to see, even ruined. The shape is very blatant,
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: but it was a ball court. And only big cities
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: had ball courts in their plazas.
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• 18:02
  Speaker 1: it's protection. So what, what timeframe did the Mayans exist?
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Is it Maya or Mayans?
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Uh, that's a funny debate. And you know, one of
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: the frustrating things about archeology is there's no command structure,
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: you know, in your world, you know, when the general says.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: This is the way it is, that's it. Everybody does it.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: But in the Maya world, it's a competing thing. So
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: some people like, uh, linguists want to say Mayan, but
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: Linda Shealy, who broke the code, always want to say Maya,
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: except for Mayan languages and Mayan architecture, which is also random.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: I tend to say Maya just out of homage to
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: my mentor. But it's a debate that nobody has the
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: authority to finalize. So either one's right, really. So we'll
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: just give it the potato, potato thing.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: How long ago did this civilization exist?
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: Archaeology starts calling the people down there Maya, maybe 2000
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: BCE is the earliest that we really will say those.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: People are Maya. 2000 BCE, so it was 4,000 years.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: People down there, 10,000, 14,000. But archaeology does this thing
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: where they have to behave a certain way before they're
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: that cultural group. So they start behaving like Maya. somewhere
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: around 4,000 years ago. And then they reached their peak.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: We have a.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Pre-classic, a classic, and a post-classic Maya. The classic period
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: where they made most of their pyramids and they really
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: perfected their writing system and astronomy that runs from about
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: 250 AD to 800. And then there's this weird collapse,
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: the famous disappearance of the Maya. And really they're just
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: reforming themselves and they emerge again in what we call
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: their post-classic form All the way up until the Spanish contact.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: So the pre-classic is this long period from, you know, it,
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: it ends at that like 250 AD, but it starts
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: 2018 hundred. The cool thing about my archeology is we're
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: still figuring it out. I mean, as we sit here,
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: somebody could be digging up the evidence that they were
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: actually there for 500 years earlier than we thought.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: How, how far did their. At the height, how big
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: was the empire? Where did it stretch from and to?
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Well, all of Guatemala, half of Honduras, into, in Mexico,
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: all the way up into the Yucatan, all of Belize,
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: and about halfway through Chiapas, which is the Mexican state
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: that's adjacent to Guatemala.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Okay. There.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: the line phrase. And there's a couple of weird, not
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: really Maya cities. And then we're into Zapotec and before
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: them Olmec territory.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: And on the other side, when you get into Honduras,
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: there's a, there's a site called Los Naranjos on a lake,
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: Lago Yehoah, that's half Maya and half the next culture
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: over the Lenka people. So we see the, The border
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: of the Maya world blurring to the east and west,
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: but to the north and south, it's from sea to sea.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: So a huge territory. And as a result, not all
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Maya are the same. The ones that grew up in
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: the highlands with cold and snow behave differently than the
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: ones that are down in the lowland jungles.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Okay. What kind of, what were they documenting in hieroglyphics?
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: What kind of things did you learn?
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: Almost entirely, at least of the things that we have
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: to read left, which are all on stone. They're really
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: broken records. All about the kings. The king was born
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: this day. He married this person. He fought these people.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: He was crowned this day.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: He died.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Kind of frustrating.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: The biographies of one particular person.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: Now, we get some texts out of ceramics. And ceramics
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: are much, they'll tell different topics. Like sometimes those will
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: give us little stories of mythology. There are some that
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: say this is the king's cup. He drank chocolate out
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: of it. And then we have four surviving books. And
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: those are gold. Those talk about hunting rituals. They talk
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: about astronomy. They talk about deep time.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: Deep time. What is that? Uh, well, they, they go
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: back like.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: In the codices specifically, I think the farthest they go
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: back is 33,000 years, but that's a ridiculously long period
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: of time to be talking about. There's these sections called the,
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: the serpent pages in the Dresden codex. And they have, uh, these,
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: this serpent body. That winds down the page, and there
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: are dates that go further and further back in time
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: to 33,000 years ago.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: 33,000 years ago.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: And why did they go back that way for a
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: long time?
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: We don't know.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: The first guys that started really understanding that, J. Eric
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: Thompson was the big man in like the 1930s. He
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: called the Maya esoteric time worshipers because we had nailed
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: the calendar stuff and we could read things like that.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: They're going back 33,000 years. There's a Stela in Tikal
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: that goes back 5 million years.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: 5 million years.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: 5 million years. At least when we do the math,
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: which is right there, it goes back 5 million years.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: Thompson thought that was them saying that's the origin of
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: the earth or the universe.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: But he generally said they're esoteric time worshipers. He also
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: said that these hieroglyphs mean nothing. They're just about their
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: esoteric time worship. That's why they're going so far back
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: in time. Now, recently, one of my friends and colleagues,
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: Michael Groff, has really nailed an argument that they're going
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: so far back in time to exhibit their understanding of
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: the procession of the equinoxes. Which is that tiny wobble
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: that the stars do from our perspective. Every 25,000, 26,000 years,
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: the stars will completely reset. Every 72 years, they're moving
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: one degree. That's something, that's kind of the holy grail
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: of ancient astronomy. If a culture understood the procession of
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: the equinoxes, that meant that they were really crack astronomers.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: How would they figure that out?
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: You know, you can do it. It just, one of
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: the things that the Maya had that their surrounding groups
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: did not is writing. So they could have a astronomer
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: who would spend his entire lifetime recording the movements of
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: the heavens, hand that book to his apprentice who would
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: continue it and continue it. You can do it. I mean,
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: we could do it today with no tools if we
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: had enough time. Every 72 years, the stars move one degree.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: So if you are pegged on a star that's going
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: to rise on the horizon at a certain time of year,
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: 72 years later, it will rise one day later. And
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: if you collect a couple of generations of information, you
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: can see that and you can prove that.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: What would they use as a landmark? We have GPS
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: and all this other shit today. How would they use,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, they can't use a tree, maybe a mountain peak.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: You could use a mountain peak. And what would they
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: measure that at? You could also use a flat constructed space.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: A lot of the Maya astronomy we believe was done
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: with one person in a stable viewer location with a stick.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: Another person with another stick tied to a rope. They
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: pull it out so it's always the same distance. And
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: they mark, okay, like if you're going to look at
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: the simple one, the sun or the moon. Let's see
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: where it rises today. It's right here. Okay. Tomorrow it's
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: right there.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: Next day. It's right there. Next day. It's right there.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, wait, look, it's hovering over here and it's coming back.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: And day after day, you'd market in an angular fashion.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: And then you could orient a building to that. Same
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: concept can be used for stars, but it just takes
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: a lot longer to collect enough data to realize they too, that, that,
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: seemingly static backdrop that the moon and the sun go
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: through is actually moving itself.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: And so that 33,000 years is talking about that the
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: sun was in this constellation this year and 33,000 years ago,
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: it was also in that position on this date.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: It's the sidereal versus the synodic period of planets.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: But they were great astronomers. We're jumping the gun here.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: We were actually talking about my beginnings, and now I've
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: got you smack dab in the middle.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: Of the Maya.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: But that's okay, wherever the conversation flows.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: So let's go back to you. You're studying topography. I mean,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: talking about civilization, you're documenting time 5 million years ago, 33,000
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: years ago, beginning of, it seems like, existence, I think
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: it was 4,000 years ago. I mean, his topography, I mean,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: how much has topography changed in 4,000 years? How do
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: you know what you're looking at was the same?
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: 4,000, not much. 33,000, yeah, a lot. But, I mean,
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: the mechanisms, I think, are not... We are in such
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: a world of technology, it feels like. I don't know
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: how the hell I ever survived without my cell phone,
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: but I did. And so did my granddad. In some ways,
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: the less you have, the more ingenuitive you become. You
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: probably understand that, being a guy that's been in the
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: field with not everything you need. I am totally convinced
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: that the average ancient person was a hell of a
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: lot more resourceful than I am. And so, you know,
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: the methods of astronomy could be as simple as, as
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: you say, you know, a hill from a certain position.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: I think we, you know, we under-credit farmers for a
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: lot of their really smart stuff. The Maya were farmers,
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: and I don't think... Sometimes there's a narrative that's painted
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: that these Erudite Maya priests told an ignorant group of farmers...
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: when to plant and when to harvest based on the
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: astronomical cycles. And I think it's exactly the opposite. I
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: think every farmer knows some sort of trick like that.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: When the sun comes over that hill, it's about time
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: to plant. When it rises in that little valley, it's
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: time to harvest. I think that we have an opposite.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: I think that the Maya priests were actually honoring the
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: the knowledge that every Maya farmer knew and was so
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: foundational to their survival as a society.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: But how do you know that it didn't change much?
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: I'm just, I mean, I used to live out in
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: the woods and I had a Creek and I spent
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: a lot of time down there and I could, I
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: could see just, I've only been, I've only been here
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: for eight years and the Creek has changed drastically. I mean,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: to me, I mean, I'm down there every day, but
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: it's changed quite a bit.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: That's a point well taken. Topography does change, especially the
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: coastal areas can change radically. One hurricane can move the
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: entire coastline. I think it began with things not as
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: ephemeral as those. I think it's mountaintops. A lot of
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: our earliest of the Maya cities that we recognize there's
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: some astronomy in there. the astronomy has to do with
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: those mountains.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: And it's from, you know, from this valley, the valley,
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: the farther it is away, the more solid it is too.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: If it's a, if it's a pyramid, a hundred feet
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: from you, you know, three people will see the right alignment. Everybody,
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: the right and left sees off. But if it's a
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: mountain 20 miles away, an entire group of people in
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: a plaza would see the exact same alignment. So it
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: began with, with at least Maya astronomy began with things
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: like that, that were alignments from a distance. I've wondered whether,
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: you know, the Maya hieroglyphically say that their pyramids are
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: called Toon Wheat Stone Mountains. And I wonder whether the
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: Maya origins in the highlands, when they went down into
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: the lowland jungles with no mountains, I wonder whether they thought, well, crap,
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: we can't do this without mountains.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: We should build some. So how did you, I mean,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: on your excursion, I mean, they didn't, did you, you didn't,
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: I would have meant, I mean, now we see in
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: documentaries and everybody uses LIDAR and things like that. Did
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: you have that back then? I would assume.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: Nope, I did not. I ordered, I ordered topography maps
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: from Belize that took two months to get to my
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: house in Texas. GPS was just starting, but it was crappy.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: It would not see through the trees. So I had one,
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: but I could only mark my position when there was
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: a tree fall and I could stand in an open
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: patch and go, aha, we got one. We got one point, guys.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: Now LiDAR will take, you know, millions a second.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: I'd be like, we have a point.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: But it actually also got me in a tough situation in.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Belize where.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: And I let an assistant who was pretty new to
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: the area, we had cut trails everywhere, but their trails
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: were all over the place, so you could get lost.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: Let him have the GPS to teach the students, and
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: they got, six of them got left behind and lost us.
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: And by the time we got to the site, I
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: counted everybody like, oh crap, we're missing six people. And
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: me and my other assistant chased them through the jungle
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: the whole day, and it was all about them. from
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: us because they were trying to use the GPS. It
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: was much different back then. So, no, I had nothing but,
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: you know, old-school survey methods and thoughts. And I guess luck.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, I will give it that. It was not
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: some brilliant Sherlock Holmes discovery of mine. I had some
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: logical thinking and probably a lot of luck.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, jungle down there is pretty thick. I mean,
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: I've pumped through Panama, Costa Rica, Columbia.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: I was wondering if you've been in the jungle too.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: I love hanging out in the, I mean, it's dangerous.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of shit in there that will kill you.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: But it's beautiful, isn't it?
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: It's amazing. And you, and yeah, and you can survive
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: off nothing. Yeah.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of resources in there.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: But so, I mean, how would you, I mean, some
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: of these things are so thick that, I mean, you,
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Be lucky to go a kilometer a day.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: There were times, there were some times, especially before I
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: found the city, I was actually kind of the laughingstock
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: of the camp that my students had just come back
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: full of nettles and they'd be like, what'd.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: You do today? Just uselessly hack the jungle and get
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: stung by it? Like, yeah, I did.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: There's this, there's this vines that are called Bayowl. that
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: are like a rubber band ball just glued together. And
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: if you hack one part with the machete, the rest
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: of it could come unwound and just whack everybody in
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: the whole group with these tiny black needles that would
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: dig so deep into your skin. And they're so thin,
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: you'd try to pull it out and just snap. And then, okay,
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: I guess that's got to fester for a couple of
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: days before it comes out.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: We had a guy, you know, insects will lay their
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: larva in that. Yeah. And so we had a guy, yeah,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: that you're supposed to wear gloves when you're in there.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: We had a guy grab one, got infected. We were
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: out there. We couldn't get back. You know, we were
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: doing some sniper stuff or something, and he cut it open,
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: and the larva started coming out of his hand. And
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: we were like, oh, shit, this is nasty. There was
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: a girl in our camp.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: Who got, 16 bot flies in her scalp. And those things, they,
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: they fester in there and then they eventually fly out
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: as flies, but they're worms with like a tail that,
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: that latches into you. So you can't pull them out.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, there's one that'll, you can't piss in the
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: river down there because that thing will swim up your
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: P string, P stream. And then these little, it like, yeah, these, these, these,
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: these spikes come out of it. Now you've got real issues.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: More than once somebody's come like, come swim in the
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: Amazon with me. No hard pass.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: I'm staying on the boat. None of that stuff. Did
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: you have any interesting encounters with wildlife or indigenous peoples
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: down there?
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: Oh, a number. A number of them. I have never
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: seen a jaguar out there, but they've seen me. There
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: was a time back there in Belize where There was
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: a rainstorm, and then we came out the next day
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: and followed our path up. But that day before when
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: it rained, our feet had gone deep in the mud,
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: so we made deep footprints. Following those footprints back out,
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: there were Jaguar prints in our footprints. And I was
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: just like, oh, shit, how long did that go on?
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: How close was it to us? Was it like right
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: behind us and we didn't see it? Or did it
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: just smell our trail later? So that was a wake
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: up call, like be careful. The same when we lost
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: those students and we went running for them, me and
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: my assistant were yelling their names. And then there was
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: something crashing in the woods just to the right of
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: us and we stopped and it stopped. And then we
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: ran again and we heard it and it stopped again.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that's big, Jim.
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: So you picked up some sticks and we were like,
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: hey guys. We started just whispering, but we were both like,
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: if that's a jaguar, we're dead. I've got another three
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: stories like that where I'm just absolutely sure it was
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: right there in the woods. Because it happened to other people.
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: There was someone in Belize who got chased all the
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: way back to our camp. But jaguars are cool.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: Jaguars.
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: don't attack humans all that often. They're curious and they're playful. Now,
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: the one that you've got to look out for, especially
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: in Belize and Guatemala, is the mountain lion version down there. Cougar,
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: they've got a number of different names for these things,
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: but they're big and long and those have no sense
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: of humor. Maya have told me again and again, jaguars,
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: you might live. It could be a good story. If
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: you see a puma out there, you're dead. If they
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: see you, it's over.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: Man, crocodiles, killer bees. Big crocodiles. Oh, the bees, boy. Bullets.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: I had this one moment where I heard the bees
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: coming again, and I just told my students, like, find
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: a bush and lay down under it.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Lay on the ground under a bush. And they were like, why? Why?
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: Just shut up. Don't talk about it. Do it. Those
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: things will kill you.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: They go like right over us. But it's funny, out
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: in the jungle, there's these low, the low-lying bushes, they
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: never go under there. So I learned if you just
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: lay totally flat on the ground, they will pass you. Man.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: Now then, there's also the pigs who run in like 40,
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: 50 groups. So in those cases, I'd be like, find
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: a tree without thorns and climb it right now.
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: Like, why?
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: Do you smell that? They are so stinky. You can
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: smell them before you can hear them. Even before you
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: hear their hooves, the waft comes through if the, if
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: the breeze is right. And you know, it's the pigs coming.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: The first time it happened, I was totally flat foot.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: They just ran up on me. I was like, what's
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: that smell? And one came right at me and turned.
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: And then another 30 just turned right after him. And
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: I just stood there flat footed like an idiot. Like,
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: why aren't I dead? That was just blind luck. But
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: from then on, I knew smell, climb.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: So let's get back to traversing the jungle here. So you,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: so what do you got a machete and a GPS
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: and a map?
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: Uh, Really just the machete. The GPS did nothing for
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: me back in the 90s. And the map, I mean,
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: I had the map. Sometimes I'd look at it and
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: go like, wow, we could be here, we could be there.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: And I'd sometimes, like season three, we had the GPS.
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: So I'd put a couple GPS marks on there. But
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: mostly I just had a compass and a machete and said,
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: my mantra was, we're going west. We're going west. We
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: know we entered the forest here at mile marker 11.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: And I can see some of these dashed lines that
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: were where the old British logging roads would be. Sometimes
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: they were actually roads there. Sometimes there weren't. But we
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: just kind of pieced it together and followed that. those
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: roads through the path of least resistance, which brought us
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: into a number of valleys where little villages were. And
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: eventually we made it out to those three peaks.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: Any active villages? No, nobody out there. So, I mean,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: what is it? How long ago did these villages exist?
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: Um, People have been doing, you know, this was 1995.
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: So people have done archaeology out there since. This is Mashnaz,
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: a terminal classic city. So it lasted till about 900
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: or 1000 AD.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: And then nobody, nobody's out there at all. Where I
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: lived was a place called Program for Belize, which was
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: a big chunk of territory that, that was originally owned
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola wanted to chop the whole thing down
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: and plant oranges for their orange drink, whatever it is,
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: Crush or, yeah, I think that's it. And then Belize
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: got up in arms about it. So Coca-Cola didn't want
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: the bad press and sold it to them for pennies
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: on the dollar. And it became a big preserve all
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: the way out to the Guatemalan border.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, how are you able to pick this up?
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, just, I don't know what these structures are
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: made of, but I mean, you, You abandon a house
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: here in the Mid-South, the Midwest, probably anywhere, you know, 10,
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: 20 years, it's got a tree growing through the windowsill.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: You know, you're talking about things that are 1,000 years old. Yeah,
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: and they are very destroyed. In the jungle.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: They are very destroyed, but they are made of stone. And,
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: you know, some of the little villages, they'd have stone
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: platforms that were probably like, you know, Some of them
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: are the size of the platform we're sitting on right
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: now and not much higher. But you could still see
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: the stone edges of it, see the little bit of
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: stone walls, see, you know, irregular topography is one of
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: the ways that I identify it. It is a trick.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: It's a skill to understand what's a hill and what's
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: a ruined pyramid. When it's 18 meters tall and 100
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: meters across, well, it's easier to To understand. And those.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's not any clearings down there, right?
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: You'd say bits of stone wall, bits of terraces, and
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: up on the very top where things tend to, you know,
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: spire from the top to the bottom. The bottoms are full,
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: kind of fan out with all the wreckage. Trees grow
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: up and knock whole sections of it out. Trees, big trees,
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: over the last thousand years, grow up and fall out
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: and take huge amounts of the building with them with
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: their roots. But up on top often, like the first
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: building we found at Mashnah, when we got up on
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: top of it, there were holes in the roof, the
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: corbel roof, so we could jump down inside and see
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: there were walls around us and things. So we could
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: definitely know that one was one. But when I was
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: mapping Palenque, there were places where I'd say, there's a hole,
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: there 10 meters away is a huge pile of of rocks.
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: A tree grew up into this house, and when it fell,
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: its roots catapulted all of the bricks over there in
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: the jungle. This building's gone, but there's the evidence that
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: it was once here.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: It's a trick, though.
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: I really, more than once, I've brought people out to
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: the jungle and go, see all these buildings? And they're like,
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: what the hell are you talking about, Ed? There's nothing
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: but dirt and trees here.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: So if you drop in through a roof, what's in there?
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: Drop into a place where there's been nobody for a
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: thousand years plus.
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: There'd be stone walls, the corbel roof above you. You know,
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: I've never gotten lucky enough to find anything that had
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: like murals or art inside of it.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: No human remains, pottery.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Mostly those ones would be, you know, there's stone.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: There's dirt.
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: There's bat guano, which is actually uncool. You can get
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: histoplasmosis really easily from bat guano hanging out in tunnels.
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: I did that. I have like a calcified scar in
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: my lung that's the size of a quarter. I just
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: had some new tests and nobody had mentioned that to
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: me in 25 years. Like, do you know you have
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: a big calcified scar in your lung? Like, oh yeah,
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: I do have that, don't I? That was from histoplasmosis
• 45:38
  Speaker 2: from screwing around in Maya buildings. But there'd be the
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: collapse where the roof fell in that would let us
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: get the hole. So you kind of can climb down
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: the talus of that onto the floor, which would be
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: grown up with moss. But you could see the stone walls,
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: sometimes some of the old stucco coming off, sometimes not.
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: But yeah, I've done that a bunch. Sometimes there are
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: big platforms that have, lower kind of basement buildings inside.
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: And those are fun. You just find a little hole
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden you pop down and you're
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: in the middle of a labyrinth. I love things like that,
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: but it's the jungle. So you're also kind of butt
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: puckered going, if there's a snake in this tiny little space,
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: I really can't run, can I?
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: So what's the name of the city? The big one
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: that you found?
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: Mashna. I got to name it. It's called Monkey House.
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: Monkey House. What is the estimated population? Oh, gosh, I
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: don't think we've even gotten that far yet. I think
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: I mapped 400 buildings.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: 400 buildings?
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: But I know there were more. Every Friday, I'd say,
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: we're doing Adventure Day, and we'd go somewhere without mapping
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: and just see how many buildings we could find.
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: And there were.
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: Whole neighborhoods that I never got to map when I left.
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: Wow. And the villages, what would a village be?
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: The villages would have like 20 to 30 buildings. So,
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: you know, if we very ploddingly estimate five people per building,
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: there'd be, you know, 150 people or something.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: So how far away would these villages be from the hub,
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: from the city?
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: In that limited context, they were about, I'll say, a
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: kilometer apart from each other. I found seven of them,
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: and from the road to the actual city was five
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: and a half kilometers.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: So do we know how their civilization was actually broken up?
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, what would take part? What would be happening
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: in the city versus the villages? Would they commute? It
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: was industry.
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: Not terribly different than how we live today. You know,
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: we're outside of Nashville. That's a big city. And then
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: there are some midsize cities like Franklin. And then there's
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: some people who prefer to live in the countryside. And,
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: you know, on big events, everybody goes into the big city.
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: On the average day, you hang out in your own place.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: They'd have market days where, you know, the city would
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: have the huge market and A lot of people from
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: the surrounding area would go in there to peddle their goods.
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: That still happens in the Maya world today, but it
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: was very much a, uh, it was an independent city
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: state model, like the Greeks, where there was not a
• 48:36
  Speaker 2: capital of the Maya world. There were capitals run by,
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: at least in the classic period, a ruling dynastic set
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: of elite people who would be the families of each
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: one of those cities. And because of hieroglyphs, we know
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: what their names are. We know the dynasties of these kings.
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: And then they'd have sub-cities that would have sub-lords called Sahals.
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: The guy at the main city is the Ahau. The
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: ones that are little cities, they're Sahals. And then those
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: Sahals would have farmland around them. So... Not terribly unlike
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: how we live today.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: So how would you become a leader or a king
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: or a lord? Is that how do you.
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: It was a dynastic thing. You were, it was a
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: blood right that you had the magical power because it
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: wasn't just a political position. It was also a warlord position,
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: but it was also a religious position. The right, the,
• 49:43
  Speaker 2: what's the word I'm looking for? Your validation of your
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: rulership was about your sacred blood. The Maya have a
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: religion that has a pantheon of gods up there, but
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: nobody interacts with the gods on earth. They are aloof
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: from us. But when the royal people's family died, they
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: go up into the heavens and And living ancestors of
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: those people can talk to the gods. They can act
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: as a liaison up there. They're dead ancestors that went
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: up to heaven or up to the upper world instead
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: of the lower world where everybody else's souls go. That
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: was their right to rulership, or at least their story
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: that they told everybody.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: So they believed that the lords and the kings went
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: to an upper world and all of the peasants, per
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: se- went to a lower world.
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: That's what the hieroglyphs are telling us, yes. They would
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: all start in the lower world, the underworld, but then
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: the spirits of the royal family's bloodline would ascend up
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: into the heavens where the gods were.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: The nice gods. There were less nice gods in the underworld. Really? Yeah.
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: What did they do?
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: They were the lords of death, and they'd have ugly
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: names like Pestilence and Starvation and Uh, pus. At least
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: that's what... The Maya have the equivalent of the Christian Bible.
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: They have their own creation story called the Popol Vuh,
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: a very different story.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: What is that story?
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: It says there were four creations, that we are members
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: of the fourth creation that are made of the blood
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: of the gods and corn. We're kind of more perfect
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: than the other creations that were made of mud or wood.
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: The story itself centers around the moments of the end
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: of the third creation, where a set of hero twins
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: fight the lords of death in a Maya ball game,
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: defeat them, and through that protect the world for us humans.
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: And they resurrect their father, who was killed by the
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: lords of death, send him up into the sky. He
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: becomes the maze god, the corn god. Corn is created.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: We are made of corn and drops of the blood
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: of the gods. And that's how the world started. But
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: a lot of the story is this really fun story
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: of the hero twins and their fights against the lords
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: of death in their early days. Their grandmother raises them
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: and she tries to tell them they're not ballplayers and
• 52:32
  Speaker 2: hide that because that's how their fathers died. And then
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: the story goes on where they eventually beat these terrible
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: lords of death. But we're quite clear in that underworld
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: Shibalba where the dead reside. The dead are doing fine
• 52:47
  Speaker 2: down there. In a Maya sense, our grandparents, everybody lived
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: down in the underworld in a village that looks just
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: like the village that they grew up in. And they're
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: down there farming and they're having a nice life and
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: they're living in a house.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: They're just dead.
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: And when the sun sets on us, it rises on them.
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: And when it sets on them, it rises on us.
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: But then there's another set of gods that live above
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: the sky. And those guys are the ones that pull
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: the strings on us puppets. And the Maya kings, to
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: bring it back, have this special kind of blood. When
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: they bleed their own blood and burn it on paper
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: in a bowl, that smoke goes up into the sky
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: and it becomes a conduit Through which one Maya king
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: on earth can speak to his ancestors up in the
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: sky and say, hey, would you talk to Chak for
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: me and make sure we have a good rain for
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: the harvest this year? Or, you know, will you ask
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: the gods to bless us in the battle we're about
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: to do against this other city?
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: So that's how it worked.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: To us, it's.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: Hocus pocus, but to millions of Maya people, it was
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: how things really worked. And perhaps that sort of story
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: that was no longer believed or supported is part of
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: why the Maya civilization collapsed. When things started getting rough,
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: the kings could no longer say, well, I'll just let
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: my blood and I'll ask for their favor and we'll
• 54:29
  Speaker 2: all be fine. When things weren't fine, they were like, well,
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: either that's not working or you're a liar. Either way,
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: I'm leaving the city.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: What really got my fascination with this was Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: I believe that was about the Mayans, correct? It was.
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: What do you think about that movie?
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: You know, I thought it was a great action movie.
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: The bad guys were bad. The good guys were good.
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: I was cheering for it. I don't think it was
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: a Maya documentary. I don't think it made a very
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: complimentary or true picture of who the Maya were. And,
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: you know, my colleagues, there's a mountain of bile been
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: spit about that movie. I don't take it that hard.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: I don't think that, you know, Mel Gibson is not
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: a Maya academic, nor did he pretend to be. I
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: think it's Mel Gibson's story put into another cultural context.
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: It was the, you know, The passion of the Braveheart Patriot.
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: It was the same story. The good family man is
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: threatened by the machine of society and fights it to
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: save his family.
• 55:51
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• 55:55
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• 56:02
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• 56:07
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• 57:26
  Speaker 1: So how did they live that? What was daily life
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: for your typical Mayan family?
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: I think it was pretty laid back really until like
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: the 600s when kings were sending armies to war against
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: each other and disrupted things. But the average Maya city,
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: I think they were pretty prosperous and happy. They would,
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: you know, they'd tend their little farm. They'd go to
• 57:51
  Speaker 2: the market. They'd chat with their friends. They'd go back
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: to their little house. I think that they felt protected
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: within the kingdom of a king with a standing army
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: and the influence of the gods. I think that life
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: was pretty nice, really. As we said earlier, the jungle's inhospitable,
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: but it's also abundant. I mean, food's fallen from the
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: sky there. And if you manage it right, I don't
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: think people were going hungry. I think people were feeling
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: just fine. And I think that how all too often
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: in humanity, when things are too good, we ruin them
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: by gang piling them. So part of the problem with
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: Maya classic society, it was such a successful model that
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: all of the cities swelled in population until they actually
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: managed to crest their carrying capacity.
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: How did they, did they have currency?
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: No, more of a barter system.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: Now, it's kind of, you know, we're still piecing together
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: classic Maya times. The Maya were still here when the
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: Spanish got here, so we've got those answers. But is
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: that how... Maya behaved 500 years earlier? That's hard to
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: say with certainty. By the time we get to the Aztecs,
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: there's still barter system, but even in a barter system,
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: you need some sort of practical, you know, what's this
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: versus this worth? And for them, it was chocolate. It
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: was chocolate beans.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: And so the cacao beans were not exactly currency. Nobody
• 59:37
  Speaker 2: walked into the market with 30 beans in their pocket
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: and walked out. But you could say, how much is
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: that corn worth? Three cacao beans.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: Gotcha.
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: So much so that actually there were counterfeit beans. One
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: of the things Cortez's men... saw in the Aztec market
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: before the real siege happened was that there were police
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: in the Aztec market that was 60,000 people a day,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: they said. They said it was the biggest one in
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: the world they had ever seen. But there were police
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: running around busting people with counterfeit cacao beans. They'd make
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 2: them out of ceramic. And they try to peddle them
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: off in the market and they get caught by the
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: Aztec police for counterfeit chocolate.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about, I mean, it's human sacrifice. Was that
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: a big part of the Mayan religious culture?
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: At the end, in the post-classic period, it was. In
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: the classic period, not as much. They sacrificed people that
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: were warriors that they'd capture in battles near the end
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: of the Classic Period. But in the Classic Period, the
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 2: most common and austere kind of sacrifice was the auto-sacrifice
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: that the king and his family did. They would cut
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: themselves and bleed the blood and then burn it to
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: contact their ancestors through the smoke. The smoke would become
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 2: this snake-like called the Boots Chan, the smoke serpent. And
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: it would go up into heaven and become a conduit
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: for their ancestors to come back down and talk to them.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: There's actual images of that happening. At a site called Yashilan,
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: there's this great thing with a queen pulling a rope
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: with thorns on it through her tongue. And the blood
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: is dripping down her chin onto a bowl with paper.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: And the paper's burning and the smoke starts, but then
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: it turns into this snake that has a head that
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 2: comes down over her and it opens up its mouth
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: and it burps out the dynastic founder of the Yashilan
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: lineage who's coming out with a shield and a spear.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: And the hieroglyphs tell us she's asking him to protect
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: her husband in the battle he's about to go to.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating, but that's how they did it. So that
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: was the sacrifice. It was auto-sacrifice in the classic period.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: Central Mexico was much more violent.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: They had a.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: Much bigger penchant for sacrifice, especially the Aztecs. And in
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: the post-classic period of the Maya, they start getting really,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: they're interacting with and emulating the people from Central Mexico.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: That's when we see Like at Chichen Itza. Have you
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: ever been to Yucatan? You ever seen the Chichen Itza?
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: I haven't.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: It's beautiful tourist place, easy to get to. But right
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: next to its ball court is a skull rack. And
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: the whole thing, the base of it is full of
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: images of skulls on spikes. And it's almost undeniable that
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: on top of that platform was an actual skull rack
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: that had the skulls of thousands of sacrificed people.
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: How would they sacrifice them?
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 2: Generally, heart extraction. Cutting the head off or heart extraction.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: The Maya loved heart... They loved the head thing. They
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: loved to chop somebody's head off on the top of
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 2: a pyramid and then have it dramatically roll down the
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: stairs like a ball. They show that in imagery in
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: multiple places. But heart extraction's the other way, where you'd
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: lean them over a rock. That's the Central Mexican way.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: where their chest was kind of poked out, and then
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 2: they take an obsidian knife and whack, break a couple
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: of the ribs, and then push down on one section,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 2: pull up on another, and just pull the heart out,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: still beating.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: Holy shit.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: Pretty brutal.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: What would the point of that be?
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: I don't know. But certainly the end result would be fear. Like,
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: I don't want to be that guy. The Aztecs used
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 2: it brilliantly.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: They would bring.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: you know, the mayor of a new town that they
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: were trying to just get into the empire through just coercion.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: They'd bring him to Tenochtitlan and show him one of
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: these heart extraction things and be like, would you like
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: your people to do that? Or would you like to
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: send us 3,000 rubber patties a month? I'll pick the
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: rubber patties. Please don't do that to me. But, you know,
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: the Aztecs are a different people than the Maya.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: So this wasn't necessarily a religious sacrifice to the gods.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: This was more of an intimidation factor to people that
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: they want to conquer. I think it was both.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: And in the case of the Aztecs, which is the
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 2: example I was just giving you, they had a different
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 2: religion than the Maya. They were associated. There were sometimes,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: you know, crossovers between the gods that they recognized. But
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: the Aztec story, the Mexica people... They believed that they
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: were first and foremost following the god of war, Huitzilopochtli.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: And their priests said that their creation story said that
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: the sun only rose and set because the gods had
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: had the bravery to sacrifice themselves. And that going forward
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: into humanity, only sacrifices would make the sun keep coming up.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 2: And especially this war god, we see Leposhli, said, I
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: need sacrifices in order to help the sun keep coming up.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: And so the Aztecs, more than everybody else around them,
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: started sacrificing people like crazy.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Wow. Well, before we get into it, let's stick with
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: the Mayans right now. Yeah. And so, and the other
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: sacrifice would be behead people on top of a pyramid.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: and let the head roll down like a ball.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 2: So that's what we see mostly with the Maya, though
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: they did the heart extraction in the post-classic too. And
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: they didn't do, in the classic period, they didn't do
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: it too much. And it was mostly, it wasn't like everybody.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: It wasn't like women and children. It was warriors and
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: elite folks that had been captured in battle.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: So would they do this by the tens, by the? hundreds,
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: by the thousands?
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: You know, by the art and by the archaeology, you know,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: you can find piles of bodies when people are killing people.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: Archaeology can find huge piles of bodies and see the
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 2: pathology of them. We do see that in the post-classic
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: and especially the Aztec area. We don't see it so
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: much in the Maya area. So I don't think it
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: was a huge volume. But their art shows it happening
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: again and again. One of the neat things, you know,
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: you're a soldier and you know, our Western society is
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: a lot about killing the enemy and acquiring their land.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: That's not what the Maya were doing. When we see
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: like a mural of Maya battles, it's so interesting when
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: you look at it, nobody's taking a kill shot. If
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: you were to make a mural of a battle, you'd
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: have a lot of people getting killed. But that's not
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: what they do. Every time, like there's a really famous one.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: The most famous one is from Bonampak. Big, huge room
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 2: full of just a battle all around you. But all
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 2: the spears are pointed down. They're stabbing each other in
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: the legs or in the back. They want to immobilize
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: them so they can haul them back to their city
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: and sacrifice them. And you can see it in the mural. Nobody,
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 2: like there's this, Bonampak has maybe, maybe 60 people in
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: this big pitched battle, not a single person is dead
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: or getting a kill shot in that mural. They're all
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: getting stabbed in the legs.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: So they're actually going to combat to capture humans to
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: sacrifice to their gods. But we don't know what they
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: were sacrificing them for.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: I think it was to honor the gods. in that
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 2: limited context in, in the Maya, in the classic Maya period,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: it was brave warriors meeting each other, winning or losing.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: And then their ceremony of taking their life back in
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: their city, in their ceremonial context, instead of killing them
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: on the battlefield. I think that the interesting thing to me,
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: and you know, Let me not overstate that. I know
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: what the hell these people were thinking. I'm guessing too.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: I just have been guessing for 30 years and, and, uh,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: I have insight that other folks do, but I would
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: not pretend I really know the Maya mindset. I think
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 2: that with that caveat, I'll continue, that... bringing them back
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: to this ceremonial place where they are sacrificed with the
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 2: proper words and ceremony was the goal. But it's interesting, like,
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: when they attacked each other, it was not about acquiring
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: resources or killing people. It was about the favor of
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: the gods. I think the Maya were always very cognizant
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: that they're just kind of puppets on strings, that everything
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: we're doing is to gain the favor of the gods
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: and to protect our relationship to them through the kings
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: and their bloodletting. It's so Maya battles get fought and
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 2: cities win and lose, but they don't just take over
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: that city and put their flag up. What they want
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: is that king to to use his bloodletting ability to
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: gain the favor of the gods. So they, these battles
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: are on a practical level about acquiring that city's ability
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: to influence the gods, not their crops, not their buildings.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: They still allow them to fly their same flag. What
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: they want them to do is use their magical influence
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: through their blood for the team that just defeated them.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: That's why they take the, the, the elite crowd. Right.
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: Oftentimes wiping out the bloodline is a way to totally
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 2: defeat that, that city's real power, which is their access
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 2: to the gods or you either kill them or you
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: coerce them to use it for you. Interesting.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: So, so they, so then, So the conquered cities, they
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: would wipe out the bloodlines, sacrifice that to the gods
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: to get the power or whatever you want to call it.
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: Sounds like the Highlander when you talk about it like that.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: Who would rule the city that has been conquered?
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: Sometimes they'd put their own person in. Sometimes they'd install
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: their own person from their bloodline. Or sometimes that city
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: would just die out. Or they'd take like the princesses
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: from that city and and marry their bloodline into them,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: and then they were both. A huge Maya strategy was intermarriage.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: There's this whole huge Maya civil war that we learned
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 2: about maybe 20 years ago, and now we're really just
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: putting together this magnificent picture of the two sides of
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: this war. We know the two big players. They're Tikal
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 2: and Kalakmul. But the entire Maya world was either Team
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: Tikal or Team Calakmul. And for a long time, Calakmul.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: Had the better of them.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: Tikal was the big one in Guatemala, and it had
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: all sorts of allies all around it. And it intermarried
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: its daughters into their lineages. They were all very intermarried.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: There's a new book out by a great colleague of mine,
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: David Stewart, who shows more and more how the Maya
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: team elites were intermarrying nonstop, kind of like Europe. You
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: know how Europe became so crazy incestuous near the end
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: of their dynastic periods where everybody, you know, England's royalty
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: is actually a bunch of Germans, is actually a bunch
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: of Austrians. And that intermarriage, that same thing happened with
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: the Maya. So the Tikal thought they had everything worked out.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: They were like the Rome of the Maya world. They
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: would oversee all the other cities, dynastic changes.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: They were the rulers.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: But unbeknownst to them, Calakmul to the north of them
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: was intermarrying their daughters into all these cities. And then
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: all of a sudden, attack from every angle. And Tikal
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: was defeated, but not totally taken out. They still had kings.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: Those kings just had to work for Calakmul. And they
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: sat there for 80 years without any attempt to break
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: Calakmul's yoke. But then Calakmul does something unforgivable. They convince
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: the brother of the Tikal king, like 80 years into this,
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: into establishing a new city with the same Tikal emblem glyph,
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: but we call it Dos Pilas. And that brother of
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: the same bloodline starts contacting the gods. with the same
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: power that Tikal does. Tikal can't take it. That king
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 2: immediately attacks the brother and they fight back and forth.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 2: Tikal's king puts him on the run and eventually Calakmul
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: helps that brother to get back and kills the Tikal king.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: The next Tikal king actually breaks the yoke. But I
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 2: always think to myself, how was that the moment that
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: broke Tikal. Why was that the moment that broke Tikal?
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: It was his brother betraying him and using his same
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 2: power to contact the gods. That's what snapped him.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: Interesting. So, I mean, at the beginning, you said that
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: the Mayans are, it's not really a nation with one
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: capital or several capitals. And so I would think there
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: would be, you know, I would, that to me sounds
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: like they're not communicating with each other. It's not, it's
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: not one, one nation per se. So, I would imagine
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: there was a lot of civil war.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: It got crazy. And this kind of precipitates the end
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: of the classic period. Just like in Europe, just because
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: France and Germany were fighting each other, that doesn't mean
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: there weren't undercurrents of communication between families and spies and things.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: So there wasn't totally no communication, but there was definitely
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: a you're on my side or you're not kind of thing.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: So all these people capitals per se within the mayan
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: what the mayan.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 2: Race civilization region yeah sure.
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: They would all be competing for the grace of the
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: gods correct.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: Right and there'd be tears of them there'd be you
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 2: know some uh and and allies and enemies that we
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: have this fantastic chart that's been made of all the
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: allies and the enemies, you know, in red and green.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: And then there's lots of intrigue and backstabbing. There's a
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: city called Naranjo that flip-flops back and forth from Team
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: Tikal to Team Kalakmul again and again. In fact, a
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: daughter of the brother who betrays Tikal and goes to
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: Dos Pilas, Tikal totally wipes out Naranjo's bloodline. No more
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 2: kings that can conjure the gods. But then behind their back,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: with Calakmul's backing, they take a princess, a young woman
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 2: from Dos Pilas, marry her into Naranjo's line, and her
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: son becomes the next great king there. But while he's
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: a boy, she's a female warrior, and she's shown on
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 2: Steela after Steela using her power to contact the gods
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 2: as their queen and fighting. We see her with weapons.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 2: She's like the Joan of Arc of the Maya world.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 2: She takes over, I think it's six different cities, all
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 2: while he's growing up. And as soon as he's 12,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: he becomes the king and she steps in a consort position.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: But it's fascinating, all the things we know. I mean,
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: isn't it shocking that I can talk about Maya history
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: like it's European history? That's the power of these hieroglyphs
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 2: and this art. This is really the first American side
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 2: of the world culture that we can talk about like this.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: Wow. If you've been listening to the show for a while,
• 1:17:31
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• 1:17:50
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• 1:18:01
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• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: give it a try. Join the mission to fight for
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: the family farm, because you know what? They fight for us.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: Go to moinkbox.com and get free chicken wings in every
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: box for a year, as long as you're a paying customer.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: That's moinkbox.com. You had mentioned hunting rituals. What were they hunting?
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: Do we know?
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they were hunting all sorts of stuff. In those
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: particular ones, the Madrid Codex, the one that's in Madrid now,
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 2: it shows it's got like 10 pages full of deer hunting.
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: They were hunting a lot of deer. They were domesticating turkeys,
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: and they're in the same kind of pages, too, about
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: when to best slaughter turkeys, I think. But the deer
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 2: ones talk about its connection to the calendar. They're all
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: about the timing of the calendar. And so those pages
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 2: are not so much about, like, how to kill a deer.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 2: They're more about, this is the appropriate time to go hunting,
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: and this is the appropriate time to eat deer, and
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: these are inappropriate times to do that. There's a god
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: of hunting called Echua. He's a weird black striped-faced guy,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 2: but he's the guy who says, you'll have good luck hunting,
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: you'll have bad luck hunting.
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: How would they know if he's saying good luck or
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: bad luck? Do they... Just whatever the king says?
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: No, I mean, in this context, I'm talking about hieroglyphs
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: that actually say, it's good, it's bad, these are the
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: dates that you're supposed to be.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: Doing this on. Okay. Okay.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: Not in a, like, annual hunting season kind of way,
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 2: because it's.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess what I'm asking is, who would get
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: the dates? I mean, you're talking... I guess it would
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: be the king who's doing the blood sacrifice, right? With
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: the smoke.
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: And his priestly class.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: And so how would that message get to him and
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: get deciphered to everybody else's?
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, I get you now. Not every message came from
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: the beyond. That's what the calendar's about. The calendar is
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: about these cycles. Okay. And probably they believed that their
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: original inspiration for the calendar was the gods and their statements.
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: But Maya priests would use this calendar to kind of
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: in a horoscope kind of way, tell you when a
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 2: good day or a bad day was for things. The
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: first 23 pages of the Dresden Codex, which was my,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: translating it was my master's degree, is nothing. We call
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: them the prognostication pages. And they use the Maya calendar,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: the simplest Maya calendar, the 260-day calendar, to say, these
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: are good days to get married. These are bad days
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 2: to get married. These are good days to beekeep. These
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: are bad days to beekeep. This is a good day
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: to build a house. Each one of the almanacs are
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: telling us something different about it's a good day or
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: it's a bad day. And there are little glyph blocks,
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: four to six glyph blocks that are saying, this guy
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 2: is beekeeping.
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: It is bad.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 2: Or they use a euphemism like, and it was tortillas.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: And the other one, a bad one, there were five
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: or six different little euphemisms they'd use for good or bad.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 2: Like it was burial. Or it was famine. That would
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 2: be the bad things. Or it was an abundance of tortillas.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: Or it was happy.
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 2: Things like that. But they use those prognostications. So the
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: deer hunting pages that I was talking about have much
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 2: the same system. Where it's saying on days like... I'm
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 2: just making this up.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: On....
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 2: On a how, dog, and rabbit days, those are good
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: hunting days. Don't ever hunt on a flint day. That's
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: a bad day to hunt.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: Okay. How did the calendar get developed? I mean, a
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: lot of people, was it 2012 the calendar ended? Well,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: we're still here, so no. A lot of people thought
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: that the world was going to end?
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 2: A whole bunch of people did. 2012 was very, very
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 2: good to me. No, I did not. I got to
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: do a whole lecture circuit about exactly why I thought
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 2: that was bullshit. That was great. No, I think that
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: was a misunderstanding of our understanding of the calendar and
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 2: its cyclical nature. We Westerners, if I asked the average
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: Westerner to draw me a picture of time, they would
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 2: probably draw a dot. In the present, they would have
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 2: a line going into the future. They would have a
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 2: line going into the past. That question asked of a
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 2: Maya would be a circle and not a clock with
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: hands going that way. That could be, somebody might draw
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 2: that one for me too, but very cyclical in nature.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: So the Maya feel like everything that's happened will happen
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: again in one fashion or another. There's a cyclical nature
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 2: of time. They would never predict an end. That's just
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: not how their conception of time works. When they created
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 2: the calendar, gosh, you know, the earliest, the very first
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: calendar glyph we have is tied to about 600 BC.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: And it's not Maya.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 2: It's Zapotec. It's in the Valley of Oaxaca. All of
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 2: those cultures were kind of coming up with these ideas
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: and bantering them back and forth about calendars and time
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 2: and just simply how to express math around that last
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 2: centuries of the BC period.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: But it's tricky to.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 2: Say when they did it because I've always said, you know,
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: by the time somebody carves it in stone, they've been
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 2: thinking about it for a while. By the time we
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 2: archaeologists find it carved in stone, gosh, they must have
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: perfected this system a long time earlier.
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: That's interesting. So they thought time was a circle. A cycle.
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 2: Actually, we in the Western world are aberrant. If we
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: look at most of the cultures of the world, they
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: are much more cyclically oriented than we are. Our timeline
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: thing is the aberration, not the cycle.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: What would they think about eclipses? Is there any documentation
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: on that? What would they think, want to know?
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 2: Generally speaking, they were freaked out by them. They did
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 2: not like them. They still don't like them. I've been
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 2: in Maya villages where eclipses are answered by getting outside
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: of your house and banging pots and pans and the
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 2: dogs bark and they want to chase it off, especially
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 2: like when the moon goes away. They were capable of
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 2: predicting them.
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 2: Not perfectly. Really? Kind of a shotgun approach. But there's
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 2: a page, again, out of the golden. If we only
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 2: had 100 Maya books, God, we'd know so much. From
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 2: the four we have, we see so much insight. I wish,
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 2: you know, where's the recipe book? Where's the history book?
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: We got an astronomy book. We got a hunting book.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: But in the Dresden Codex, again, there are a couple
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: of pages that talk about eclipses. And they figured out
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: that it was every five or six lunations of the moon.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 2: They figured out the concept of nodes. They did not
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 2: know that it was the sun and the moon and
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: the earth lining up. But they did realize that every
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: five or six moon cycles was the only time.
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: It could happen.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: So there are charts that show... They say 148 days,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 2: 148 days, 148 days, 148 days. And then every once
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 2: in a while they'll go 177 days, 148, 148. And
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 2: that's five or six lunations of the moon. So we
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: can tell they're making these shotgun approaches to try to
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 2: figure out when an eclipse would happen. And pictures right
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 2: next to it show like a sky band with the
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 2: With the moon goddess hanging dead off of it and
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 2: another symbol that has the sun half black, half sun.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: Even without the numbers, it's pretty blatant that they were
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: talking about eclipses. But the numbers themselves show us that
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 2: they weren't quite as good as the Greeks.
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: Got at it.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 2: But they did have the concept down. They understood that
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: there were certain nodes that it could happen on. They
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 2: couldn't say like, this time it won't, this time it will.
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 2: But they knew the cycle.
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: Gotcha. How advanced were their mathematics? Pretty advanced. darn advanced, really.
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, they could do anything with their math system
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 2: that we can do, which I think just alone on
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 2: a base level, that's impressive. It was their number system.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: We have a a system that's better than what the
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 2: Romans and the Greeks were using. The Romans and the Greeks, like,
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 2: you know, Roman numerals, it's one, two, three, but then
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 2: the next one is IV and then it's V and
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 2: then it's VI and then you get to 10 and
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: it's X. And then it's, you know, you know what
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about? That, that is not a positional system
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: of numeration. That's why, you know, did you ever get a,
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: like a, movie in the 1980s, and they put the name,
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: the year in Roman numerals instead, and it was like
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 2: 20 Roman numerals. Like, God, what a terrible system. Just
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 2: to say 1983, all this mess. We have a positional
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 2: system of numeration. We go 1 through 9, and then
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 2: the next one is 10. And what we do is
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 2: we put a 0 in the 1s column and a
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: 1 in the 10s column. Then when we get to 99...
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 2: we have another position that comes up. We have a
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: zero in the ones, a zero in the tens and
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: a one in the hundreds, right? That's how our system works.
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 2: That's positional. Look, that's the same thing. My students do like,
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: are you.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: Talking about math again? Please go away.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 2: But you asked, uh, the Maya have a base 20 system.
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: So they work just like we do. We're base 10,
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 2: but theirs goes up one through 19. When you hit 20,
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: You have a zero in the ones and a one
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: in the twenties.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 2: And then you go to 400 and then you go
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: to 6,000, 8,000. Uh, but they can do the same thing.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 2: They can, they can express any number approaching infinity with
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 2: their number system. But the cool thing is our system,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 2: we have a one through a nine and then a
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 2: zero that's 10 symbols, right? With it, we can express
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: any number. The Maya have a bar, uh, They have
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: a dot for one, they have a bar for five,
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 2: and then they have a shell or a flower for zero.
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 2: They can also express every number, but they did it
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 2: with just three symbols. In that regard, their mathematical system
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 2: is more elegant than ours. They pulled it off with
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 2: just three symbols. We have to use 10. Wow. Yeah,
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 2: and they did. They used, you know, like I told
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 2: you earlier, There's one calculation. We can see they said
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: 5 million years. The frustrating thing about the Maya math
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 2: is that they're always talking about time. They're very rarely
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: talking about big numbers of things. And I wish I
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: would see more. You know, why doesn't somebody tell me
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 2: there's 10,000 people? I want to read that number. The
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 2: reason I want to read it is because part of
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 2: the Maya calendar is this really weird cycle called the
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 2: long count. That's their kind of most linear count of days.
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: But within the long count, there's days, months, years, 20-year periods,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: 400-year periods. But the years... It's only 360 days. It's
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: double weird because one, a year is 365 days. Why
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 2: would they be five days off and just keep doing
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 2: it and never correct it, which is what happened. The
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 2: long count is weird like that. But the other one
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: is mathematically, if you're in a base 20 system of,
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 2: a decimal system of numeration, you should go one, 20, 400, 8,160,000,
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 2: but the Maya long count goes one 20, 360, 7,600
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: and on up. So they augment that third position to 360,
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 2: not 400. So a straight counting of things, Are they
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 2: using their system properly or are they augmenting it like
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 2: they do the count of days in the long count?
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 2: We have thousands of examples of them using this log
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: count augmented system, but nothing. Oh, God dang it. Can
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: somebody tell me there's 400 captives so I can read
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: how you do your math system with things instead of days?
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: It hasn't happened yet, but it's one of these confusions.
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: I am.
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 2: I'm a Maya math nerd. I've been studying this thing
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 2: for my whole life, and I've been dying to see
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 2: some Maya count something that's not days to see if
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 2: they actually adhere to a 20-base system.
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: Or do they not? I mean, they have to, but
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: I don't have the proof. What would they do with
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: their debt? They'd bury them under their houses. They would
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: bury them under their houses. Yep.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 2: Which I think is... is wonderful in a way. I
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 2: guess I've been infected by the Maya. But to our society,
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 2: that's kind of macabre. You put them in the cemetery
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 2: where you're supposed to put them. But they felt this connection. Like,
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 2: we have these ghost stories. The Maya have no ghost stories.
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 2: They are absolutely convinced that the spirits of their ancestors
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 2: are here, and they mean to help us. And so
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 2: having Grandma under your bed.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: As you sleep is nice to them. It would be
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: weird to us.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 2: And we have all sorts of, you know, European baggage
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: about ghosts and remnants, vampires, zombies, and all this crap.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 2: The Maya have none of that. And I think it's
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: a deep connection to their belief that their ancestors never
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 2: really leave them. And their ancestors want to come home.
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: So they just keep them there.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: Right on. What was the, I mean, what kind of
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: ended the Mayan Empire?
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 2: Infectious disease, honestly, was the number one killer of the
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 2: Mayan Empire. In the 1500s, the Spanish came in, of course,
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 2: you know, conquest and the sword didn't help either. But really,
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 2: it was infectious disease that ruined everyone. I mean, and
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 2: it's proof that there was not that much contact before.
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: Because once contact really happened, 90% of people were dead
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 2: in the first 50 years.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 2: Our debate is how many people were here. And today,
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 2: you know, I think that I am now saying a
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 2: conservative number when I say 100 million people died in
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: the first 50 years.
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: Holy shit.
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 2: Across the Americas, that's North America to South America. But
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 2: there were millions of people that got hit with 13
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 2: infectious pandemic diseases. Europe had gained herd immunity. You know
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 2: how we talk about, you know, COVID's not gone. We
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 2: just got to, you know, herd immunity. And of course
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 2: we have vaccines too, but Europe didn't have these vaccines,
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: but they did get a herd immunity after the Black
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 2: Plague and all of that. But it was still dormant
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 2: in their populations. So when the population hit the Americas
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 2: who had never been exposed to this stuff, the diseases
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 2: just rolled in. And then sadly, you know, one of
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 2: the real ironies of that is they did come to
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 2: conquest and they did enslave the Indians and the Indians
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 2: died off to such a great extent that they stole
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 2: Africans and hauled them over to be slaves. But Africa
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: brought its own infectious diseases that they had had herd
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 2: immunity in. That's when, like, yellow fever and malaria showed up.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 2: But from the moment the first Europeans stepped on the continent,
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 2: they were dead. You know, there were ones that died
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 2: by the sword. But if not for the infectious diseases,
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 2: we'd be living in a different world right now.
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: Okay. Good. And who documented those infectious diseases? Was that
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: the Europeans?
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, the Europeans. God, the most tragic cases are
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 2: the first contact in the Caribbean, just how fast it happened.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: They landed in Hispaniola and Jamaica area, Cuba, and what's
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: now half Dominican Republic, half Haiti. And those people, like
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 2: almost everybody was dead in the first 10 years. And
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: they started importing slaves first there. But that was this
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 2: terrible crucible where nobody could get away. They were isolated
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 2: on islands and just wiped out like there was no
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 2: one left to enslave. One of the things, you know,
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: during COVID, everybody had their own different way of soothing themselves.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: I intensively studied the history of pandemics for the entire
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 2: time and One of the fascinating things I saw reading
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 2: all of the documents of the Caribbean is that about
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 2: 10 years into it, the Spanish started suffering these diseases too.
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 2: They started dying out on the islands there too. And
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 2: I wondered to myself, is this the undocumented mutation.
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: Of these diseases?
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: It swept through the Caribbean people, the Taino, to the
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 2: point where it mutated enough to boomerang back onto the Spanish?
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 2: I think in that limited context, it did. But once
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 2: it hit the mainland.
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: It was like a wildfire.
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 2: And the poor Maya and people of Mesoamerica, nobody, the
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 2: Europeans either, did not know what an infectious disease was.
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 2: Europe was still believing we're made of the four humors.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 2: We're made of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm.
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 2: That was, you know, they were putting leeches on people.
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 2: That's where they were at. The Maya were a much
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 2: cleaner people, but they... They believed that all of diseases
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 2: were a spiritual attack, a disfavor of the gods or
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 2: an attack by spirits. So they would bathe themselves together
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 2: to try to, oh, maybe it's, you know, but they
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 2: would get the disease like that. And the priests would
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 2: come in and try to baptize everybody because they thought
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 2: God was punishing them because they were pagans. But they'd
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: take the same bowl of holy water, line them up
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 2: and just splash disease everywhere. everybody's face. So they were
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 2: accelerating it in that way. By the time Pizarro got
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 2: to South America and no Europeans had been there yet,
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 2: the king himself of the Inca had died of smallpox.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 2: And the empire was in disarray because two brothers were
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 2: fighting for the kingship because their father had died of smallpox.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: It hit It hit the king in the Andes, running
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 2: like a wildfire ahead of the Spanish. Wow.
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: Did the Mayans, I mean, did they have any medicine?
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: They did have medicines. They had good medicines, but their
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 2: mentality was that it was all spirits. It's interesting how
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: they got to the same conclusions that we do. In
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: some ways, they have, you know, medicines we're still trying
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: to get from them because they're so effective. Things like
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 2: they can make kidney stones turn to mud with these
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 2: interesting things.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I got that stuff.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 2: From some Maya guys for a friend of mine who
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 2: had kidney stones. But I had to, like, talk to
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 2: a group of shamans, and they were like, what are
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 2: you here for?
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: Who are you? Archaeologist, huh?
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 2: You sure you're not a medicine? You sure you're not
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 2: from the pharmacology world? You're going to sell this shit?
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: Why do you want it? Like, I just want it
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 2: because my friend's suffering, like, They were like, all right,
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: you can have it. You, little boy, go out in
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 2: the woods with him and get him some. And some
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: little kid brought me out into the woods and got
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: me this stuff. But that side example here. They did
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: have medicine, but they felt like it was all spiritual. Like,
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: I've got a spiritual attack happening. I need a spiritual solution.
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 2: What kind of plant spirits can help me? And they
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: divide them into... Hot plants and cold plants. And most
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: of them, they would put in a brew. They would
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 2: like to, they'd boil them, and there'd be things that
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: were hot spirits that you'd drink hot, or cold spirits
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 2: that you'd drink cold. Some of them, they'd be plants
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: that you'd just ingest mostly, but they liked to make brews,
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 2: but their mentality was that sickness was a spiritual attack,
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 2: not a physical, like, germs thing. No, nobody on the
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 2: planet understood what a germ was in the 1500s.
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: But that was also their damning because they felt like
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: everybody getting sick was proof positive that their gods had
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 2: abandoned them. And the perfect timing of the conquistadors showing
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: up with a bunch of priests who said, you know
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 2: why you're all sick? because you're pagans. And if you
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 2: just follow God instead, you'll be okay. And they were like,
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 2: that makes a lot of sense. Okay, your God's more
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 2: powerful than our God. We're sick because your God is
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 2: more powerful than our God. And if we just pray
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 2: to your God, we'll be okay. That really accelerated the
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 2: conversion into Christianity. Every Maya person today is a Christian.
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: No kidding. So that is what created Christianity in Central
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: South America.
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 2: It certainly helped sell it. It helped sell it. That whole, like,
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 2: Jesus got sacrificed thing, too. They were like, yeah, I
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 2: get that, too. That's good stuff. Okay, I understand where
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: you're coming from.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: So ironically, you know, okay, I will become a Christian.
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 2: What do I got to do? Well, I'm just going
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 2: to take this bowl of water and I'm going to
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 2: splash it on your face like I did the last
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 2: hundred guys in the line. accidentally giving them the disease.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 2: There was a priest in the Amazon in Brazil who
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 2: wrote this heartbreaking chronicle where he said, I've done everything
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 2: God's asked. I've made these utopian communities, and I am
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 2: baptizing people, thousands of people a day, and yet God
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 2: still takes them. What am I doing wrong? Please send
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 2: me a sign. No idea that probably the bowl of
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 2: holy water was what was accelerating it. That's no dispersion
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 2: on Christianity. I'm just saying what a terrible coincidence clash
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 2: of events that accelerated. His goal was to stop it.
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 2: but his actions were accelerating it.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: Very interesting. Let's take a quick break.
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 2: Sounds good.
• 1:45:11
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• 1:45:14
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• 1:45:16
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• 1:45:23
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• 1:45:25
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• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: the break. I got a hot question for you. Sweet.
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: You ready? Ed, we're still discovering entire human landscapes underneath
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: the Amazon. A new nature study estimates there could be
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: 24 to 30,000 ancient earthworks in just one region and
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: potentially millions of people living there at its peak. From
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: an archaeologist's perspective, How badly have we underestimated what the
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: Amazon looked like before Europeans arrived? And what do you
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: think is still hidden underneath that canopy? Love that question.
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 2: Yep, we did not see that coming at all. I
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 2: will brag and say I saw that coming. I saw
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 2: the beginnings of that on my great courses about South
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 2: America that I did before 2012. I think I did
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 2: that in 2009. I said, this stuff is beginning in
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 2: the Amazon and get back to me in a decade.
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 2: Cause what we're going to find is going to freak
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 2: us out. And it has, there are thousands of these
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 2: geoglyphs and that we call them geoglyphs, but they're actually
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 2: enclosures around big communities and, uh, different places at different
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 2: ways that they handled that, that wetland environment. Some of
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 2: them built big mounds up and causeways in between In Bolivia,
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 2: there are these magnificent, huge communities that have big mounds
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 2: with raised causeways going out to littler mounds and littler
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 2: people's houses. And they basically built raised roads over the
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 2: wetlands and then figured out how to farm those wetlands
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 2: and just turned it into an agricultural paradise. And it's not,
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 2: it was still there when the Spanish arrived. There's a
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 2: hundred years after the Spanish arrived, some priests went down
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 2: there and tried to civilize them. And in those journals,
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 2: one of the priests said, expressed his frustration. He said,
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 2: they've built this magnificent system of causeways and all they
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 2: use them for is to go from party to party.
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 2: These people are always having celebrations. They're not using these
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 2: for commerce or education or anything. They just use them
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 2: to party, which I thought was hilarious. Like these people
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 2: were having a grand old time. And there's so much
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 2: down there in the Amazon that, yeah, I'm no longer surprised.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: It's just a question of time before we see just
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 2: how much is there. And I'm beginning to wonder like,
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 2: Where are the bald patches? Where are the countryside patches?
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: Really? There's that much? Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 2: I think in the heart of the Amazon is probably
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 2: where the bald patch is, where the Amazon, you've been
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 2: down there, you know, in an average year, the water
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 2: level around like Manaus raises 100 feet. And the trees
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: all have adapted to that and the wildlife has. They
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 2: all just go up into the trees and half the
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: year they see the water or see the ground. In
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 2: those environments, probably, you know, a raised causeway was not enough.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 2: But it's really, at the moment, the evidence kind of
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 2: rings the heart of the Amazon. And maybe that's just how...
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 2: Deeply archaeologists have been able to go from the known
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 2: to the unknown. Or maybe the heart of the Amazon
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 2: is so deep that even their adaptations wouldn't work there.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: That's yet to be seen. You see a lot of people.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: How many times have you been down there?
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 2: To the Amazon?
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 2: Just once.
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: Just once?
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I spent a week down there going from Manaus.
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 2: I picked the Black River instead of the Amazon to
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 2: go up, but I spent on a boat going up there.
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 2: And mostly my mission that time was to talk to
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 2: modern Native groups and ask them why they picked where
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 2: they picked to put their village.
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: What do they say?
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 2: The answer was the same every time, that there's this
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 2: black soil here. that's very agriculturally productive. They call it
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 2: a terra preta. And that, in archaeology, we've begun talking
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 2: about that as an anthropogenic landscape. And it's the evidence
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: that thousands, well, at least hundreds of years ago, maybe
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 2: thousands of years ago, humans had churned up the land
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 2: there so much to farm that.
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: It's this rich soil.
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 2: The people that live there now, the natives, they don't,
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 2: necessarily know that that's where our ancestors were thousands of
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 2: years ago. They just practically pick the places that are
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 2: full of this black soil that archaeology has now realized
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 2: is man-made. And it's huge areas. We call it an
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: anthropogenic landscape. The Amazon destroys everything. There's the evidence of
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 2: earth and mounds and things just get churned up there
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 2: so much that it's hard to detect human past, uh, habitation.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 2: So this anthropogenic landscape is a relatively new concept where
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 2: we're analyzing the soils to see, did that happen naturally
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 2: or did humans do that?
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: Wow. Have you, have you ever seen anybody living off
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: grid out there? Well, those native guys, yeah.
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: But even those guys know what Manaus is. You mean
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 2: like actual native folks living off the grid?
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: It doesn't even have to be native. I was surfing
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: around YouTube the other day. I just actually sent this
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: channel to, I think it's called Yes Theory. Is it
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: Yes Theory? I found this channel called Yes Theory. I
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: don't know much about it because I just found it,
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: but they found this guy who's been living off grid,
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: Up the Amazon River, I think somewhere in Brazil for
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: like 39 years or something.
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 2: It's not the crazy guy that's accused of killing tourists,
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 2: is it?
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: No, no, I don't think so. Well, these guys are
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: still living. He lives out there, but you.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 2: Don't want to find him.
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: One dude out in the middle of nowhere, he's got
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: a river house on the side of the Amazon somewhere,
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: and he's been out there for 39 years.
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 2: Well, my hat's off to that guy because he should
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 2: be dead by now.
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: It's fascinating. Try to reach out and get these guys on.
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 2: My work is mostly in the rainforests of Guatemala and
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 2: Mexico and those areas. And those are inhospitable forests. But
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 2: I got to say, the Amazon's next level. The Amazon had, like,
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 2: way more snakes, way more deadly plants, way more environmental
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 2: changes that could kill you.
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 2: About day three going up the, uh, the black river,
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: we stopped in a ruined city that had like European
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 2: brick built houses and things, but they had trees coming
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 2: out of them. And there were, we walked down the
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 2: street and the, the riverboat captain said, yeah, this, this
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 2: was gonna be Manaus. And this was where the rubber
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 2: industry started. but then the jungle just swallowed this place
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 2: and they decided to move down river to Manaus. And
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 2: I was like, what, what ended it? And he said
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 2: something strange about like, they say it was ants, like ants,
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. Ants took over a city. That's, that's what
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 2: he said to me. And I, the ants there are huge.
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: And the army ants just swarm. I mean, that environment is,
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 2: Scared me, and I like the jungle.
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, here's a follow-up. If somebody gave you unlimited
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: LIDAR tomorrow and said you can scan one unexplored region
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: anywhere in the Americas, where are you going? Oh, wow.
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: That's a good one.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's funny. It's a race right now. People
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 2: are LIDAR-ing the crap out of things. If I went to...
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 2: My gut reaction is to say the Amazon. But stand
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 2: in line, Ed. There's, you know, 50 guys out there
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 2: LIDAR-ing the Amazon. Where would I go that everybody doesn't
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 2: think they should look? I would probably do what my
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 2: friend and colleague Luke Caverns, Luke Reagan, is doing. I
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 2: would scan... Up and down all the rivers of North America,
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 2: of the United States, because the Mississippi and all the
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 2: way out to the East Coast, there are pyramids here.
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 2: But they're trapped in the woods there. They're on private properties.
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 2: And you could find so much. People are doing it.
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: I'm still, I would be behind the curve there because
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 2: Luke has found almost 80 pyramid sites along rivers.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: 80 pyramids. Yep.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 2: And there's another one I've just become obsessed with somebody's
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: Facebook page. It's LIDAR America. This guy every day is
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 2: pumping out another LIDAR image of a pyramid sitting on
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 2: somebody's ranch. And he shows just the aerial shot of
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: just the woods. Nothing.
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: LIDAR.
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 2: Holy crap. There's three pyramids in those woods. It's just
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: the pace of discovery. Right here in the U.S.? Right
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 2: here in the U.S.
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: And it's not underground.
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: LIDAR can't punch underground.
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, we have, you know, half a dozen major
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 2: sites that are archaeological parks you can visit. But LIDAR
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 2: is showing– a year ago, I said, ah, LIDAR's not
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 2: finding anything new.
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: That's not true anymore.
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 2: LIDAR has, especially here, right in North America, been finding–
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 2: dozens and dozens of big earthen pyramids that are all,
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 2: they peg on the big rivers. Mississippian civilization starts about
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 2: 900 when they really get corn from Mesoamerica. Once they
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 2: figure out how to grow big crops of corn, they
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 2: start making huge communities along our major rivers. And a
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 2: lot of that area is in national parks, or it's
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 2: just wilderness, or it's somebody's mega ranch of 3,000 acres,
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 2: and it's out there. But we've never seen it before.
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 2: This LIDAR has been showing us just how much. I'm
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 2: so happy to see it because I knew it was there,
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 2: and I know how many pyramids were destroyed from like
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: the 1700s 1700s and 1800s as we moved out into
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 2: the cropland i was worried they were all gone but
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 2: lidar's been showing me nope there's still probably hundreds of them.
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: Wow i would love to stumble across one of those.
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 2: You know Is this, this, this, uh, property is like
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 2: 30 acres. I would bet you my bottom dollar. You
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 2: have Mississippi and civilization right here on this property.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: That would be cool. How will we find that out?
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 2: You know, uh, survey out and out, out in these woods,
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 2: you could go to Nashville. There are, uh, contract archeology
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 2: firms for not very much. They would survey your entire
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 2: land phase one and, and tell you where the archeology is.
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 2: And I guarantee you there's a lot of stuff here, Sean.
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do that. Do it. Tell me how
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: it goes. All right. Here's the bonus because we're getting
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: into this anyways. Graham Hancock believes there have been any,
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: excuse me. Graham Hancock believes there may have been an
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: advanced lost civilization that influenced later cultures. You know his work,
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: but you disagree with that conclusion. Where exactly do you
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: think he gets it wrong?
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 2: I think that Graham has oversimplified the situation. His, you know,
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: like any person who studies something for their lifetime, his
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 2: ideas have evolved over the years. But he still sticks
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 2: with this idea that there was a single reason advanced civilization.
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 2: And that's a buzzword advanced that was epically destroyed by
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: some kind of cataclysm about 12,000 years ago, but that
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: it provided the seeds for every other major civilization around
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 2: the planet where I, and I think the majority of
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 2: my colleagues believe that civilizations began in independently of one another,
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 2: grew up and then met, where he believes they started
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 2: at a single place, spread out, grew up, met again,
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 2: never remembering their common origin. That's an overly simplistic thing.
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 2: I can't prove it. He can't prove it right. I
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: can't prove it wrong. There's not enough evidence to say,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 2: but it doesn't make... I think I can, make a
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 2: better argument than him that civilizations developed independent of each other.
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 2: Human civilizations, a kind of, you know, human commonality, finding
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: things like math and science that are the same in
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: every culture, or at least the products of them are.
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 2: Two plus two is four, whether we're here or on
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 2: the moon.
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: And do you think they interacted with each other?
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 2: I think they eventually interacted with each other, but I
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 2: think they grew up independently. Like, for example, you know,
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 2: Egypt and China, you know, they developed on their own
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 2: track and they ended up making, you know, sedentary life, crops, houses,
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 2: you know, then eventually cities. The same thing happened in Peru.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 2: But there's no way there's the times and space are
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 2: wrong for China to have taught Peru how to do
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 2: this or, you know, in. In Hancock's vision, it's somewhere
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: around the Mediterranean. In the old days, he used to
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 2: try to say it was something akin or actually Atlantis.
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 2: He no longer says that. But he's still going with, yeah,
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 2: he's no longer saying it's Atlantis, but he is saying
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 2: it's some sort of ancient civilization. He loves, and I love,
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 2: Gobekli Tepe. That turned everything on its head. That was
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 2: a perfect example. Where I do agree with him is
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: that there are ancient civilizations that we know nothing about
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 2: that we are still, we could still discover, or at
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 2: least I share that optimism.
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, I can't remember where I, I mean, let's
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: go back to the Mayans, for example. I should have
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: asked this. I mean, what, how big were their structures?
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: Were they, I mean, did they, are they comparable to
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 1: Egyptian architecture?
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 2: Well, nothing compares to the pyramid in Giza in terms
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 2: of height. It's 150 meters tall. The tallest Maya building
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 2: is 70 meters tall. So half the height. But volume-wise,
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 2: Giza's not the biggest. The biggest is actually in Mexico.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: Mexico.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 2: It's the Cholula pyramid. It's not as tall, but its
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 2: area is much, much wider. Like the pyramid in the
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 2: Giza is pretty steep, but the one in, in Cholula
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 2: is very wide. So volumetrically it's bigger. And the third
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 2: one is the temple of the sun at Teotihuacan, just
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 2: North of Mexico city. So two of the three largest
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: pyramids in the world are in Mexico. Neither one of
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 2: those are Maya. But, like, number five, I think, is
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 2: the complex in El Mirador, which is a B.C. period
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 2: Maya site. So that's exciting.
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: So, I mean, how would they have built it? Do
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: we know?
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 2: Manual labor, brick by brick. One of the things that.
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: They weren't huge blocks like....
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 2: In some cases, like... Mirador, the early days, they used
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 2: some bigger blocks. But generally speaking, most of the Maya,
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 2: most of the Mesoamerican pyramids are made of blocks that
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 2: a single block could be carried by a person, by
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 2: a single person.
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: So that's different. Okay.
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: In the case of Egypt, they're massive blocks. There's not
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 2: a stone source anywhere near they built them. So they
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 2: had to bring them down a river and then they
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 2: had to drag them across a desert and then they
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 2: had to drag them up there. The scale of Egypt,
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 2: you know, in my opinion, as an archaeologist, it is
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 2: unfair to compare any other civilizations architecture to.
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: To Egypt. Okay.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 2: Egypt blows them out of the water. Even, you know,
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 2: the second one that I would say is in second
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: place is not the Maya or any of these things
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 2: in America. It's the Khmer in Cambodia. The Angkor and
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: the Khmer civilization, the scale of their architecture is also mind-blowing.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: I've never even heard of this.
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: I'm going to have to go look it up. You
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: haven't heard of Angkor Wat?
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: I don't think so.
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 2: Holy moly, you're in for a ride if you like archaeology.
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: The scale of things there. The city's called Angkor. I've
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 2: done a lot of work over there. I love the
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 2: astronomy there. I've got some cool stuff going. And they're
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 2: all such nice Buddhists there. I mean, everybody's so freaking kind.
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 2: I have to, like when I bring groups of tourists there,
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 2: I have to tell them, don't get mad because you're
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 2: just going to freak some people out. These people don't
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 2: work like that. If your meal comes late, please don't
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 2: be angry. You'll make somebody cry. It'll freak them out.
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 2: But anyway, Angkor is in the middle of Cambodia and
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 2: there's a single compound there called Angkor Thom that the
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 2: entire city of Tikal would fit inside. And it's just,
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 2: it's just one section. The, uh, at let's say at
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 2: like 1200 AD Angkor had a population of just shy
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 2: of a million people.
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 1: It's crazy.
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 2: So, but, but Egypt is still on a tier above them.
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: So, you know, I have, I can't remember if I
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: saw this from Graham Hancock's work or is it true?
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 1: Is it true that a lot of these ancient wonders
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: like Giza, I think Stonehenge, Easter Island, were these all
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: built on top of major fault lines? No, it's not true.
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 2: No, that's not true. I, Uh, I mean, I said
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 2: that very flippantly. I mean, I could take a moment
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 2: to think about that, but I mean, fault lines mean earthquakes.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: Cause if I remember right, I don't think that the
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: plains of Salisbury are very, uh, earthquake prone.
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 2: Okay. Nor is, nor is Egypt really, uh, uh, Peru's
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 2: got a ton of fair earthquakes, but I'm not sure
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 2: that Easter Island has ever had an earthquake.
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: I could be off. I could be off, you know, the, the, One.
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 2: Weird thing that I've seen, and this is.
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: Machu Picchu, I think, they were saying.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 2: Peru's got a ton of earthquakes, that's for sure. But England,
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 2: not that many. One thing I did see that this is...
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 2: Now I'm bridging on crackpot here.
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: But....
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 2: It's interesting to me how the cradles of civilization hover along.
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 2: In the world where magnetic interference is zero. You know how, like,
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 2: when you use your compass, it always points magnetic north,
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 2: but that's not really true north. It could be off
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 2: to a certain time, like the Boy Scouts are all about.
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 2: They post this map of the world every year where
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: the magnetic declination is. So like up in New England,
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 2: you have to set your compass to like 15 degrees
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: off to be true north. The magnetic and true north
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 2: are pretty off there. But there's a sine wave that
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 2: goes through the earth that where it's zero. And it
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 2: fluctuates a little by year by year. It doesn't go
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 2: way off, but it's a yearly thing that it moves.
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 2: But I was tracking that one time, just using my
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 2: compass and things back, and I noticed that in the
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 2: top of Yucatan, it's zero. In Egypt, it's zero. Where Harappa,
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: it's zero. In Southeast Asia, it's zero. The line, like,
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: tags the cradles of civilization. And that's That's totally crackpot
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 2: of me to say, because there's no evidence that magnetic
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 2: declination means anything to the ancient people. I just, it's
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: an interesting observation that in all the places where the
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 2: cradle of civilization has, we're not suffering any magnetic disturbance.
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 2: And we know we're electromagnetic people. Is there something about,
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 2: you know, having no magnetic input? interference that does something
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 2: different to the human mind. There are certainly big businesses
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 2: that have fallen and risen about rubbing magnets on your
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 2: body to have special healing powers. I just, you know,
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 2: I probably shouldn't have even said that, but it's an
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 2: observation I've made that it's weird that it's zero in
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: all the cradles of civilization.
• 2:09:41
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  Speaker 1: tell them our show sent you. How would you even
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: begin to look into that? Well, how would I prove
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: it is the thing.
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: There's a thousand great ideas about archaeology, but how would
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 2: I archaeologically prove that? I mean, the truth of the
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 2: magnetic zero... It's just there on the Boy Scout map.
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 2: You can just see it there. You can Google right
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 2: now magnetic declination of the Earth, and it'll show you
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 2: where it's zero and where it goes off of zero
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 2: up to like 25 degrees off. But how I would
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 2: prove that it had any effect on the birth of civilization, well,
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: I can't. And that's what makes it a crummy archaeological
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: theory and something that probably shouldn't have come out of
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 2: my mouth in this interview.
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. What were you saying about, we were talking about,
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: I think we were talking about the cataclysm, potentially, of
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: advanced civilizations. And you said something had, oh, we were
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 1: talking about Atlantis, I think. And you said there was
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: something that turned it on its head.
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, I know you had Randall Carlson on
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 2: a couple years ago. And I saw that one. And
• 2:12:22
  Speaker 2: you guys talked a lot about the Younger Dryas theory
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: and how the ideas that maybe a comet hit the Earth.
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 2: And turned everything on its head. That's the time period.
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 2: Graham is very excited about this whole Younger Dryas thing
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: because it seems to be in lines with what he's
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 2: been saying for years but didn't have the language to
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 2: talk about why did everything come apart. This theory of
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 2: the comet and the Younger Dryas does help his argument. And,
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 2: you know, I'd like to say, too, that Graham and
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 2: I are friends. I worked with him on his ancient
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: apocalypse thing, and we spent three days in Palenque together.
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: I love that series.
• 2:13:07
  Speaker 2: Thanks. That was fun. That was fun to be a part.
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 2: But I really got to know him, and I've met
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 2: a lot of people that are in the pseudo-archaeology sphere.
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 2: Some of them are charlatans, and I don't like those guys.
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: I would imagine.
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: Graham's not a charlatan. He's just wrong. And I've said
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 2: it to him, and he's said it to me. I've
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 2: seen him actually publicly say, Ed and I are friends.
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 2: He doesn't believe what I have to say, and that's okay.
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 2: Which I think is nice. We should all be like that.
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 2: Graham has brought millions of people to get excited about archaeology,
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 2: and I don't think my colleagues should be spitting on him.
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 2: If he's wrong, the truth is immutable. The truth always
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 2: comes out. People spout bullshit every day.
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 2: But you don't have to get upset about it. If you,
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 2: if the, the truth will come out regardless of what
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 2: anybody says. So why spend time fighting about it when
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 2: this guy has actually garnered the audience that we've always wanted?
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: Do you, what do you think about, uh, Atlantis? You
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 1: think that's a possibility?
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 2: Uh, you know, personally, I think that it was a
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 2: parable that Plato told to talk about the, uh, potential
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 2: downfall of society and how things happen. I do not
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 2: think there's an Atlantis out there. I'm sad to say.
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 2: I wish there was. I think there may be a
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 2: story that he used as the foundation to talk about Atlantis.
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 2: And if in that scenario, the best candidate, if I
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 2: do say, you know, is there something even like Atlantis?
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 2: I think it would be Akrotiri. On the island of,
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 2: what's that island that everybody loves to go to in
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 2: the Mediterranean outside of Greece? I'm blanking on its name,
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 2: but everybody goes to it. It's got the volcano in
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 2: the middle. I don't know why I'm blanking on it.
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 2: It's like the most famous with the white places, with
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 2: the blue roofs. Anyway, that's an island out there in
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 2: the Aegean that a huge volcano blew up. and blew
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 2: the whole island to pieces. So much so that 70
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 2: miles away in Crete, there are chunks of Santorini. Santorini
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 2: is the island. But there's a section of a city
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 2: that's still there called Akrotiri. It's only a section of
• 2:15:42
  Speaker 2: it because the crater blew up most of the city.
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 2: But it's from like, I think, I want to say
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 2: 1200 B.C.? And it's very advanced. It has, like, streets
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 2: and street lamps and all sorts of things that were
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 2: very advanced. But the volcano blew up, destroyed Akrotiri, put
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 2: chunks of it into Crete's cliffs. From the description of
• 2:16:12
  Speaker 2: a city that was out in the water and then
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 2: exploded and sunk.
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 2: Santorini and Akrotiri. If there's anything that does match the
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 2: description of Atlantis, it's that. But that's just my opinion.
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 2: And when it comes to Atlantis, boy, there are a
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 2: lot of opinions out there.
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 1: Do you think that it's an impossibility that there potentially
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 1: was a super technologically advanced civilization You're talking about the
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 1: Mayan calendar that goes back 15 million years. A lot
• 2:16:55
  Speaker 1: could happen in 15 million years.
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 2: Well, just because we talk about 15 million years doesn't
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 2: mean there was somebody back there. We talk about the dinosaurs.
• 2:17:05
  Speaker 2: Most of us don't believe we were there with them.
• 2:17:08
  Speaker 2: But I'd like to say, I'd start out with one
• 2:17:11
  Speaker 2: of my mantras is, we don't know what we don't know.
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 2: We can be very sure about what we know. but
• 2:17:19
  Speaker 2: we don't know what we don't know. So part of
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 2: me hopes that we're totally wrong. But when it comes to,
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 2: you know, super advanced type civilizations or even just a
• 2:17:31
  Speaker 2: major civilization, let's not even give it, you know, all
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 2: the bluster of some advanced technology, I really feel like
• 2:17:39
  Speaker 2: archaeology would see at least the evidence of it. We're
• 2:17:42
  Speaker 2: not great at interpreting things, but damn, we're good at
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 2: finding things. I mean, we find fish scales.
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 1: I just.
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 2: feel it's very improbable that there was a civilization massive
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 2: enough to have trade relations with the rest of the
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 2: planet that we don't even have a brick from it anymore. Now,
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 2: part of what Graham says, which is legit, is that
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 2: back at 12,000 years ago, the sea levels were different.
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 2: The sea has risen 300 feet. That might be more,
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 2: 600 feet. And so a ton of archaeology must be
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 2: under the ocean right now. And it could have been
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 2: just buried, churned up by the ocean waves. It could
• 2:18:31
  Speaker 2: be miles out under the water. So I agree with
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 2: him on that point. There is probably... all sorts of
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 2: archeological evidence under the ocean that our current technology isn't
• 2:18:43
  Speaker 2: allowing us to see. Maybe LIDAR had changed that. I've
• 2:18:46
  Speaker 2: been hearing that people are developing LIDAR, not to just
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 2: go through the air, but go through the water. If
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 2: we can map out with LIDAR, the whole ocean floor,
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 2: maybe we'll find some of that stuff, but it could
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 2: get buried very deep. You know, one hurricane puts, you know,
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 2: a whole beach onto the land. What's it doing to
• 2:19:05
  Speaker 2: the bottom of the ocean? So I totally agree that
• 2:19:09
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff under the ocean.
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: There has to be.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 2: But how do we get to it? Until we find it,
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 2: it doesn't exist. It's what we don't know.
• 2:19:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, how do you explain, or maybe you don't,
• 2:19:21
  Speaker 1: but I mean, you've got to be stumped on it.
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, things like Stonehenge or the pyramids or the,
• 2:19:30
  Speaker 1: I think there's those caves in Turkey that are like
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: entire cities that are underground. Oh, yeah. Or Cappadocia. Where
• 2:19:38
  Speaker 1: was it? I can't remember where I saw this. It
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 1: was probably one of Graham's things. But there's a cave.
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: I think it's in India or something. But they were
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 1: saying that the cave walls inside are flatter than a
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: glass top table. They brought this instrument in.
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 2: Huh.
• 2:19:56
  Speaker 1: And....
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 2: I don't know about those ones.
• 2:20:01
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 2:20:03
  Speaker 1: And they're saying these caves are ancient and that it
• 2:20:07
  Speaker 1: would have been, you know, to light it up down there,
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 1: it would have been fire. And the people would have
• 2:20:12
  Speaker 1: died because of smoke because it's just a little hole
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: that goes into this cave. And it would have been,
• 2:20:17
  Speaker 1: you know, hammered.
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 2: Are they certain humans made it? Or they just suspect
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 2: they are?
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 1: No, I don't think they are.
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 2: That's another one. Like, you know, some of Graham's research
• 2:20:26
  Speaker 2: or evidence is actually geology.
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 1: Hmm.
• 2:20:33
  Speaker 2: And it's not human and it very much looks human.
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 2: And if you're not, you know, somebody who intensively studied geology,
• 2:20:41
  Speaker 2: totally understandable that you'd look at something like that huge
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 2: wall in Montana and say like, there's no way humans
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 2: didn't make that. But you know what, what I lamely
• 2:20:52
  Speaker 2: say is, you know, what's magical is geology, which is
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 2: a total nerd ass thing to say.
• 2:20:59
  Speaker 1: But it's true.
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, geology makes some amazing stuff. There, you know,
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 2: like I was one time on the salt flats of
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 2: Uyuni in Bolivia. And it's just as far as you
• 2:21:11
  Speaker 2: can see this, these flats with perfect hexagons connected to hexagons,
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 2: connected to hexagons, 70 miles of them. And it's just like,
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 2: it's so perfectly geometrical. Be like, how did nature make this?
• 2:21:28
  Speaker 1: Hmm.
• 2:21:29
  Speaker 2: How did this not, how is this not drawn? And yet,
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 2: it did. There's amazing things that geology makes that look
• 2:21:38
  Speaker 2: so amazing, you know, to the layman. It just feels
• 2:21:45
  Speaker 2: like there's no explanation other than man.
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 1: But there is. So what are you working on today?
• 2:21:54
  Speaker 2: Well, lately I've been trying to be a talking head
• 2:21:57
  Speaker 2: on the internet. But, you know, I'm kind of in
• 2:22:07
  Speaker 2: the sunset of my career. I'm 57 now. I still
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 2: feel good.
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 1: My kids are raised.
• 2:22:11
  Speaker 2: I might go out and have another adventure, but I
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 2: do soberly realize that I could break a hip on
• 2:22:17
  Speaker 2: a pyramid any day, and I better have another income source.
• 2:22:21
  Speaker 2: So a lot of the things that I'm wrapping up
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 2: are kind of passion projects. I've got I guess really
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 2: three that I'm passionate about. One is the archaeoastronomy in
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 2: Southeast Asia. I found some, you know, the French have
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 2: mostly done all the work in Cambodia, but they haven't
• 2:22:41
  Speaker 2: focused on their astronomy at all. And I have found
• 2:22:44
  Speaker 2: some really cool stuff there, stuff that's like Indiana Jones,
• 2:22:49
  Speaker 2: tricks of light and shadow, you know, like when the
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 2: beam of light comes in and he knows where the
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 2: Ark of the Covenant is. Like that kind of stuff. Wow.
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 2: In Cambodia.
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:23:01
  Speaker 2: I could spend an hour telling you about that, but
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 2: I'm thrilled about that stuff because I'm really doing something
• 2:23:08
  Speaker 2: for the people of Cambodia in that too.
• 2:23:10
  Speaker 1: It's getting exciting.
• 2:23:11
  Speaker 2: They're starting to make events around the astronomy stuff I've
• 2:23:15
  Speaker 2: figured out.
• 2:23:16
  Speaker 1: Man, that sounds fascinating.
• 2:23:18
  Speaker 2: I love it. I wish it wasn't so freaking far away.
• 2:23:21
  Speaker 2: It's like actually the other side of the planet.
• 2:23:23
  Speaker 1: Let me hear one thing that you're over there.
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 2: Most of my stuff is about a phenomena called Zenith passage,
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 2: something that only happens in the tropics. The day that
• 2:23:33
  Speaker 2: the sun goes directly over our head here in the
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 2: United States, it will never go directly over our head.
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 2: That only happens in the tropics. That's why the tropics
• 2:23:43
  Speaker 2: are defined as they are. The Zenith passage is within them.
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 2: And it changes from latitude to latitude day to day.
• 2:23:50
  Speaker 2: It's not like we all see summer solstice on June 21st.
• 2:23:56
  Speaker 2: It's not that way with Zenith. It changes from latitude
• 2:23:59
  Speaker 2: to latitude. So they can be discussing this astronomical phenomena
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 2: like it happened for us on August 17th. When did
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 2: it happen for you to the south? Oh, it didn't
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 2: happen for us until September 5th. How strange. So it's
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 2: already very foreign to us as far as sun phenomena.
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 2: But all of those, you know those B-shaped in Hindu temples,
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 2: like beehive shaped? They have a hole in the roof
• 2:24:30
  Speaker 2: and an altar on the bottom and the hole goes
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 2: all the way through the roof. And only on the
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 2: day of Zenith passage, this really bright beam of light
• 2:24:40
  Speaker 2: comes down and lights up the whole temple on the inside.
• 2:24:44
  Speaker 2: And that's why their temples are designed like that. And
• 2:24:48
  Speaker 2: they have this great cap, like roof cap, that has
• 2:24:54
  Speaker 2: a hole going right through it that's only about like
• 2:24:57
  Speaker 2: that wide. So it focuses the light into what looks
• 2:25:02
  Speaker 2: like a laser. I mean, later on, when I can
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 2: pull my phone out, I'll show you tons of photos
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 2: of this phenomena. But it's incredible. And all the temples
• 2:25:11
  Speaker 2: do it. So I've been trying to prove that that
• 2:25:15
  Speaker 2: happens on purpose. And I finally found one of their
• 2:25:19
  Speaker 2: capitals that was set away that's actually oriented to see
• 2:25:23
  Speaker 2: the sunrise on Zenith Passage. The whole city's oriented to
• 2:25:30
  Speaker 2: the day that the sun will rise at that latitude
• 2:25:33
  Speaker 2: at Zenith. And then when it comes up, it shoots
• 2:25:36
  Speaker 2: beams of light through all their temples. And it's so cool.
• 2:25:41
  Speaker 2: And I just kind of stumbled into it. I had
• 2:25:43
  Speaker 2: been studying archaeoastronomy in the Maya world for so long.
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 2: And we had really documented that the Maya are paying
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 2: attention to Zenith Passage and talking to each other about it.
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 2: And we ran out of ways to figure it out.
• 2:25:57
  Speaker 2: So I was like, well, Cambodia is in the tropics too.
• 2:26:00
  Speaker 2: Why don't we go over there and see what they're doing?
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 2: And I found more than I could possibly imagine.
• 2:26:07
  Speaker 1: That sounds fascinating.
• 2:26:08
  Speaker 2: It was great. I love it. And I love the
• 2:26:10
  Speaker 2: people there. I love the environment, the jungle.
• 2:26:13
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful.
• 2:26:14
  Speaker 2: So that's one of my things. Another one is I
• 2:26:19
  Speaker 2: have made one third of a map of Easter Island
• 2:26:22
  Speaker 2: for the people of Rapa Nui. And I would like
• 2:26:25
  Speaker 2: to continue, but I did it just before COVID. And
• 2:26:29
  Speaker 2: then the entire island went into lockdown for three years.
• 2:26:32
  Speaker 2: And now the administration's different and, Chile doesn't really want
• 2:26:36
  Speaker 2: me doing it because I'll make a better map than
• 2:26:39
  Speaker 2: they've ever made and give it to the Rapa Nui,
• 2:26:42
  Speaker 2: who will then have control of their own patrimony. And
• 2:26:45
  Speaker 2: that's inconvenient. I probably shouldn't be saying all this shit,
• 2:26:48
  Speaker 2: but that's inconvenient for the government and universities of Chile.
• 2:26:53
  Speaker 2: I've got good friends on the island. What I want
• 2:26:55
  Speaker 2: to do, I went in there with my heart on
• 2:26:57
  Speaker 2: my sleeve and said, you guys have now finally gotten
• 2:27:00
  Speaker 2: control of your patrimony.
• 2:27:02
  Speaker 1: But you don't know where any of.
• 2:27:02
  Speaker 2: Your stuff is. Every archeologist has just come in, mapped
• 2:27:06
  Speaker 2: the Moai, asked you if aliens did it and left.
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 2: I will map all of your villages. I will figure
• 2:27:12
  Speaker 2: out where all your crops are, where all your houses are,
• 2:27:16
  Speaker 2: where all your chicken coops are. And I will put
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 2: back together where hopefully where your clan, there are 13
• 2:27:24
  Speaker 2: clans there, but they don't know where their land is anymore.
• 2:27:27
  Speaker 2: And I said, as you move out, you don't want
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 2: to destroy your ancestor stuff. I'll make you the first
• 2:27:32
  Speaker 2: map of your actual settlement map. And I made one
• 2:27:36
  Speaker 2: third of it, and then the world blew apart. And
• 2:27:39
  Speaker 2: I've been trying to get back ever since. I was
• 2:27:41
  Speaker 2: almost there. I bought the head of Mauhanua a dinner
• 2:27:46
  Speaker 2: when I was out there the last time.
• 2:27:48
  Speaker 1: And we were agreed.
• 2:27:50
  Speaker 2: Something weird has happened. I think that archaeologists that don't
• 2:27:55
  Speaker 2: want me there are thwarting me. But I'm very stubborn.
• 2:27:59
  Speaker 2: I will get there. I'm flying back there again. I'm
• 2:28:01
  Speaker 2: going to buy him dinner again. And I will finish
• 2:28:04
  Speaker 2: a map of Rapa Nui that I will give to them.
• 2:28:07
  Speaker 2: That's part of the thing. They're like, they think I'm weird. Like,
• 2:28:11
  Speaker 2: you don't want any money.
• 2:28:12
  Speaker 1: You don't. You're just going to give it to us?
• 2:28:15
  Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, I'm just going to give.
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 2: It to you.
• 2:28:18
  Speaker 1: Man, I would love to go there. I actually love
• 2:28:20
  Speaker 1: to go on there. It's beautiful.
• 2:28:23
  Speaker 2: You know, it's so easy, too. Sean, you don't need
• 2:28:25
  Speaker 2: a guy like me to go there. You know, you
• 2:28:27
  Speaker 2: fly from Santiago five hours out to Rapa Nui, but
• 2:28:31
  Speaker 2: once you get there, the town of Rangaroa is lovely.
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 2: It's got hotels. They're foodies. The food there is wonderful.
• 2:28:38
  Speaker 2: And there's only like 6,000 Rapa Nui people left, sadly,
• 2:28:43
  Speaker 2: but they are some of the nicest people I've ever met.
• 2:28:46
  Speaker 2: And those heads, they have full bodies under the ground.
• 2:28:49
  Speaker 2: They all have full bodies. The heads were just a misunderstanding.
• 2:28:53
  Speaker 2: Those are the ones that are standing in the quarry
• 2:28:55
  Speaker 2: and the erosion has buried their bodies, but every one of,
• 2:28:59
  Speaker 2: there's not a single actual head on Easter Island. They're
• 2:29:03
  Speaker 2: all bodies. And you know how many we've recorded now
• 2:29:08
  Speaker 2: over a thousand, there's over a thousand on Easter Island.
• 2:29:13
  Speaker 2: When you see the pictures, you're like, Oh God, are
• 2:29:15
  Speaker 2: there 50 of them? That's a lot of stuff. No,
• 2:29:17
  Speaker 2: there's a thousand.
• 2:29:19
  Speaker 1: Oh man. I would love to chat with you about that.
• 2:29:21
  Speaker 1: We're going to have to bring it back on. We've
• 2:29:23
  Speaker 1: got a lot more to talk about.
• 2:29:24
  Speaker 2: Sounds good.
• 2:29:25
  Speaker 1: That's yeah.
• 2:29:25
  Speaker 2: So I, I'd love to do something for the Rapa
• 2:29:27
  Speaker 2: Nui people. I like the stuff in Southeast Asia. And
• 2:29:34
  Speaker 2: I want to prove that the Inca fused their walls
• 2:29:37
  Speaker 2: together with acid. I think they did. I think they
• 2:29:41
  Speaker 2: melted those walls together. I don't think they carved them
• 2:29:44
  Speaker 2: so neat that they fit together like perfect blocks. I
• 2:29:46
  Speaker 2: think they melted them together.
• 2:29:48
  Speaker 1: With what?
• 2:29:51
  Speaker 2: Hydrofluoric acid is my guess. They definitely had a lot
• 2:29:55
  Speaker 2: of acid. They had a lot of hydrochloric acid that
• 2:30:01
  Speaker 2: comes out of their mines. When you mine gold and silver,
• 2:30:04
  Speaker 2: one of the byproducts is hydrochloric acid and they have
• 2:30:08
  Speaker 2: a lot of fluorite. See, it's andesite. So no natural
• 2:30:13
  Speaker 2: acid alone would melt them. But there are places where
• 2:30:18
  Speaker 2: I see like wipe marks. In Cusco, there are places
• 2:30:22
  Speaker 2: where like There's something where, like somebody took a rag
• 2:30:25
  Speaker 2: and wiped a muddy part off of a piece of granite,
• 2:30:30
  Speaker 2: which is impossible. And I see places where crystals are
• 2:30:37
  Speaker 2: scissored across the seam between two rocks, two bricks.
• 2:30:44
  Speaker 1: That's impossible.
• 2:30:45
  Speaker 2: So, again, kind of a harebrained theory, but that's what
• 2:30:48
  Speaker 2: I got from my mentor, Linda Sheely, used to tell
• 2:30:51
  Speaker 2: us all. We're the lunatic fringe. We come up with
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 2: the weird ideas that are impossible, but those are the
• 2:30:58
  Speaker 2: ones that change the way we think about things. So
• 2:31:01
  Speaker 2: I'm always trying to be honoring her by being on
• 2:31:04
  Speaker 2: the lunatic fringe. This definitely classifies, but there's a ton
• 2:31:10
  Speaker 2: of fluorite in the Andes mountains. The Inca were making
• 2:31:16
  Speaker 2: jewelry out of fluorite. And if you combine hydrochloric acid
• 2:31:20
  Speaker 2: and fluorite, You get HF. That's hydrofluoric acid. Did you
• 2:31:27
  Speaker 2: watch Breaking Bad?
• 2:31:28
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 2:31:30
  Speaker 2: You know that scene where they're trying to dissolve the
• 2:31:32
  Speaker 2: body in the tub and it comes through from the
• 2:31:36
  Speaker 2: upstairs to the downstairs? What they're pouring on him is
• 2:31:39
  Speaker 2: hydrofluoric acid. And it burns right through rocks, ceramic, things,
• 2:31:45
  Speaker 2: but it won't burn through plastic. And it won't actually
• 2:31:48
  Speaker 2: burn through... certain other substances too. But if you brought
• 2:31:54
  Speaker 2: fluorite and hydrochloric acid and applied them together on site,
• 2:32:00
  Speaker 2: they would melt and a site. And I think that
• 2:32:04
  Speaker 2: they did weird little layers of just enough of this
• 2:32:08
  Speaker 2: acid and put one rock on another and melted them together.
• 2:32:11
  Speaker 2: There are lots of places in Cusco that I'm like,
• 2:32:17
  Speaker 2: this rock made a muddy footprint into the one below it.
• 2:32:21
  Speaker 2: Nobody carved that. How the hell did that happen? This
• 2:32:25
  Speaker 2: lower rock was soft when this big rock came on
• 2:32:29
  Speaker 2: top of it.
• 2:32:30
  Speaker 1: That's a fascinating theory.
• 2:32:32
  Speaker 2: Lots of people think that it was acid, and weird
• 2:32:35
  Speaker 2: people say things like, oh.
• 2:32:36
  Speaker 1: It was urine.
• 2:32:38
  Speaker 2: Or there's a weird bird in the Amazon that eats
• 2:32:42
  Speaker 2: certain plants. that are acidic and then goes to a
• 2:32:44
  Speaker 2: cliff and spits it onto the cliff and it melts
• 2:32:48
  Speaker 2: the rock and makes it soft so they can peck
• 2:32:50
  Speaker 2: a little nest into there. They think maybe it's that.
• 2:32:54
  Speaker 2: There's weird stories from Spanish conquistadors talking about people around
• 2:33:02
  Speaker 2: Lake Titicaca could make stone soft and turn it into statues.
• 2:33:12
  Speaker 2: There's a weird story about near a mine where some
• 2:33:20
  Speaker 2: Spanish were trying to make an Inca slave drink something
• 2:33:27
  Speaker 2: out of a weird jar. And he was like, no, no, no.
• 2:33:29
  Speaker 2: And then it spilled on the ground. And the Spanish
• 2:33:32
  Speaker 2: reporter in the Chronicle said, and the granite beneath it
• 2:33:38
  Speaker 2: got all soft and muddy. after it dumped out of there.
• 2:33:42
  Speaker 2: I don't know whether that's just bullshit or what, but
• 2:33:45
  Speaker 2: there's lots of little stories like that. I'm not, I'm
• 2:33:47
  Speaker 2: certainly not the first person to say it, it might've
• 2:33:51
  Speaker 2: been acids. I might be the first person to try
• 2:33:54
  Speaker 2: to suggest it's hydrofluoric acid. So I went to Cusco
• 2:33:59
  Speaker 2: with this. I wrote him a letter in Spanish and said,
• 2:34:01
  Speaker 2: you know, if I could just take some samples out
• 2:34:05
  Speaker 2: of the walls, I can have them. Oh, uh, studied
• 2:34:09
  Speaker 2: through neutron activation and I can figure out whether there's
• 2:34:13
  Speaker 2: any traces of acids in there. And they were like,
• 2:34:16
  Speaker 2: don't touch our walls. You weird ass gringo. So I'm waiting,
• 2:34:21
  Speaker 2: I'm waiting for that guy's position to change. I'll send
• 2:34:23
  Speaker 2: the next guy the letter again, see what happens.
• 2:34:26
  Speaker 1: Right on. Well, Ed, I'd love to see you again. And, and, um,
• 2:34:32
  Speaker 1: thank you for making the trip out here. This was
• 2:34:33
  Speaker 1: a fascinating interview. Thanks. I loved it.
• 2:34:37
  Speaker 2: I hope I didn't talk too long, but I'd be
• 2:34:39
  Speaker 2: happy to come back.
• 2:34:40
  Speaker 1: Perfect.
• 2:34:41
  Speaker 2: Perfect.
• 2:34:42
  Speaker 1: Well, we'll see you soon. All right. Thank you. No
• 2:34:58
  Speaker 1: matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if
• 2:35:01
  Speaker 1: you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment,
• 2:35:07
  Speaker 1: and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can.
• 2:35:14
  Speaker 1: And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts
• 2:35:18
  Speaker 1: and Spotify and leave us a review.