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Fear & Loathing at the SAAs with Dr. Marijke Stoll! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've grown quite where I.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: This hasn't been easy, I know.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: That lesson will stand you in good stead all your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's so, why that's so why that's so why that's.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet a very special bonus mini-episode of Tales from Oslantis.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: I am your co-host, as always, Curly Plapoyawa.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: And uh this episode is going to be coming to you from the 89th annual meeting of the SAAs, which went down in New Orleans.
• 0:56
  unknown: Uh uh.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: And the FAA stands for Society for American Archaeology, of which I am a proud member.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I gave a couple of talks at this last FAAs, and it was a lot of fun.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: I got to see some old friends, meet some new friends, and take in the site in New Orleans.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: And uh this was coming off the tail end of a I don't like to call it a debate.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: It was a discussion that happened uh on the Joe Rogan experience, the Joe Rogan podcast, uh between my friend Flint Dibble, Dr.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: Flint Dibble, professor of uh zoarchaeology at uh Cardiff and a not so archaeologist.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, some would call him a pseudo archaeologist by the name of Graham Hancock, and uh by some may call him that.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: I would include myself in that.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_03: I consider him a pseudo-archaeologist and not by any means a legitimate or accurate uh portrayer of the archaeological record.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: And what happened was uh Joe Rogan welcomed Flint Dibble onto the show where he had this discussion with Graham Hancock to talk about some of the pseudo-archaeological claims that Graham Hancock likes to put out there in the world.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm uh proud to say that I was able to help out in this endeavor if you listen to the show in its entirety, and I think it's something like four and a half hours long.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's a rather long discussion, but it's well worth the listen if you have the time uh or desire to check it out.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: I strongly and highly recommend that you do so.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: But I made a uh little cameo appearance uh during uh the discussion.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Flint asked if I would record a uh make a previously recorded video that he could air on the Joe Rogan show when it came to the topic of expertise and why context matters.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: And uh also featured uh on the discussion was a friend of mine and colleague and Oaxaca archaeologist, Micah Stahl.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I ran into Maraika at the SAA's, and we uh she was kind enough to take some time to talk to me for the podcast.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I decided to make it a little uh bonus mini episode.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's not very long, but I think you'll enjoy the content.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: So without further ado, fear and loathing at the SAA's.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: Alright, so we are here at the SAAs in beautiful New Orleans, and I'm standing here with the one and only Moraika Stahl.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_04: How are you doing today?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing pretty good.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had a great uh symposium yesterday on Oaxacan archaeology, and we're bringing together Mexican, American, and Canadian archaeologists, and basically trying to build bridges between the two different research communities, and every year it gets bigger and better.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_04: Awesome.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_04: So the conference is going well for you.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it is, and um, in fact, I'm now on the Committee of the Americas, and yesterday I pushed for more equity uh for archaeologists that live outside the United States.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_04: So that's because you live in Oaxaca, right?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I live in Miu Atlanta Porfirio Díaz in Oaxaca, Mexico.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very much uh surrounded by and involved with uh indigenous culture there.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And uh living there, you just kind of um the whole idea that objects are animated or places are animated, um, is not a surprising thing to me because that's the way the people treat it and that's what they teach you.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so I'm here to fight the fight, fight the good fight for them.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: Sweet.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_04: Speaking of fighting the good fight, you made a cool little cameo appearance on the recent conversation.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not gonna call it a debate because it wasn't a debate.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um, because we don't debate science.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um you you publish.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_04: But we you were part of that great conversation on Joe Rogan with Flint Dibble and uh that other guy.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_04: And um, so have you gotten any response from that?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_04: Has have you gotten any feedback?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I've gotten uh feedback from Flint, who absolutely loved it, and he said that both your video, Curly, and mine came really in handy, um, especially when um He Who Shall Not Be Named uh was trying to push his nonsense.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And um I have gotten responses about it.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: The archaeology community has been talking a lot about that conversation, and I'm really glad that I had that opportunity because one of the things that has always bothered me about what he who shall not be named, what his what his ag what he pushes as his agenda is he says that archaeologists do not engage with indigenous myth, right?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um but he cherry-picks what he wants, right?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so the story he picks happens to be um uh a myth or a story that was written down a hundred years after the conquest, right, by Hispanicized indigenous scribes who had been instructed and taught by Spanish priests.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so this story carries a lot of Christian overtones.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um for example, uh it's supposed to be a fight, right, in Tula between Quetzalcoat, some like who's a poet and a man of peace, versus Tiscat Lapoca, whose um him and his followers like wanted to promote human sacrifice.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's obviously a real problem with that story from the beginning, and I where I would put the problem is is that the enemy is someone who practices human sacrifice, because that's not how sacrifice human, animal, of objects, of buildings, or whatever was understood within the indigenous ontology in Mesoamerica, or I'll just I'll cross the Americas in general.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um what I've argued before uh in an article in ancient Mesoamerica um about the ball games, right, is that within the indigenous framework there's a sense of uh reciprocal obligations.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if I do something for you, at some point you're gonna do something for me.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Si me das, te doy.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Te amo, me amas, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh what I learned from my ethnography with ball players is that there's a sort of you know a give and take relationship.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't participate in it, you do lose your what they call the calidad moral or your moral quality.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you if a one town issues an invitation to a team, for example, and that team accepts, but then they don't show up, well then that team that doesn't show up can expect that they won't be invited elsewhere, or if they invite other people, other people won't show up.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's why it's just like reciprocal obligations, because while, you know, there there's no like law forcing you to do this, there's social obligations.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: You could be shunned if you do not participate in the system.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: But in that way, it explains the the sort of the relationships between not only the individual and the community, but also between the community and the cosmos.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea is that the gods or the deities, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: They invented the world, they gave porn to the people, and it's sort of an obligation on the people then to reciprocate that.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so human sacrifice a lot of times was seen as paying that debt or feeding the gods.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: They feed us, we feed them, as opposed to the idea of human sacrifice in the in the Abrahamic tradition, where sacrifice is a form of punishment.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the idea that the enemy in this story, or the bad guy, would be someone who practiced human sacrifice, but the good guy would be some like peaceful Jesus-like figure, is completely wrong.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And if he who shall not be named was an actual expert in these things, he would know that.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, instead he picks the myth that posits Ketzalcoat as some sort of white god savior, yeah, which is really highly problematic.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: So in my video, um I cited a myth that uh comes from I think the Codex Mesomericanus, which was created in the 16th century, but prior to the arrival of the Spanish, um, because Zondir hide with native paints, and uh it tells the story of the creation of the world at Apollola.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in that story, the gods gather, one of them goes down into the underworld and comes back with mushrooms, they take a mushroom ceremony, and Lord Nine Wind, as he's known in the Mishtec mythology, uh they all they all consume it, but then he starts uh playing music by scraping a stone around a human skull, and he cries as a result of the mushrooms, and then they create the known world at Apoola, not Chalulas, he who shall not be named claims.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, um this is a very different picture of Ketzel Coat than that heavily Christianized myth.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that was kind of what I tried to point out was that again, he cherry picks data, and he claims that we do not engage with these myths, but we don't engage with the myths that we know come from a post-conquest period.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: We engage with myths that are actually indigenous.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and then there's the what they like to call the the hermenetics of suspicion, right?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_04: Like when you do engage with the post-colonial stuff, it's done in a certain you're using it a certain lens to analyze these.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: As as one of my professors said, you read with the text and you read against the text, right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're doing a meta-textual analysis, right, you're kind of looking at what are the author's intentions?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: What are they trying to do?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in some respects, a lot of these indigenous scribes, um, they're the sons of the people who are or grandsons of the people who originally conquered.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been educated by Spanish priests.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's still a lot of trauma going on.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: They're trying to understand what happened, and so they're looking back and trying to find reasons for it, which is why I think, you know, there's all those stories about Moctezuma and him ignoring signs.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: But when you actually look at what happened, it's like Moctezuma is so strong.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was like interested in these visitors, he didn't know what to do with them, and then um the Spanish one day decided to up and murder him.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: They committed regicide, which is why uh Cortes had to write all these letters and had to justify what he did and why originally they wanted to take him back in chains.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because he had violated a law, he had killed a a king.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's why they got chased out.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, yeah, a hundred years later, people are trying to like figure out what happened.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So they come up with all these myths, and then Montezuma comes out looking oh like a weak cool, and that's not what happened.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, he seems um the guy on Joe Rogan, he seems to always pick the uh the stories or the myths that most closely align with the narrative that he's specifically trying to push, and he ignores so he likes to accuse us of ignoring things, but he's very selective about the way he presents his information.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what he chooses, and I think, you know, if I were going to analyze it from an armchair, and again, I don't know him personally, so this is like simply what I've observed.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: He is the son of British missionaries who grew up during the waiting days of British Empire, and so was very much formed by this idea of the white man's burden, and that other people come from other places to bring knowledge, to bring railroads, to bring knowledge of the Christian God.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's not surprising to me that he would take ayahuasca and then suddenly, like, instead of seeing the connections between human beings about how we're all the same species, and we we like you know have similar experiences, but we also kind of interpret them in particular ways depending on our particular context, social, cultural, and environmental context, instead of understanding that, instead, like his brain reached back to his childhood where he was a child of missionaries bringing knowledge to the to the to the naive brown people who are unaware of the Christian God, and that carries over to what he argues for now.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I see no difference between um what his dad was doing as a missionary and what he argues for now.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I know he doesn't like the accused of this label, but in a way, like what the the what he is pushing is a form of white supremacism and racism.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_04: Well, yeah, he would have to be very disingenuous or just flat out obtuse not to be able to look at these stories and see how they're connected to racism because he likes to deflect that.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_04: Like, well, I'm not I'm not racist, you know, and then he'll be like, my wife's black or whatever stupid excuse he would have.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And as someone with um, I love I love my father, but as someone with uh a conservative father who does sometimes use his brown wife and and and children as a defense against his own racism, um, I think I highly resent that.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And um I know I have said some kind of mean things on Twitter about it, but at the same time, as a reaction, perhaps from my own trauma, but you know, but that's a reaction against it because he will bring up the fact that his wife is um a person of color, and that's just deflection.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, but it's still at the same time, he's still arguing that these round people were too stupid to stack stones on top of each other and put seeds in the ground, and that they had to be shown by uh some advanced civilization coming from elsewhere.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And what's really funny is if you watch episode two of uh the first season of Ancient Apocalypse, when he's talking about the intellectual giants that brought this knowledge to them.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, they look very kind of Middle Eastern Israeli with their beards and their long hair, which is funny.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: But also, um, in that cartoon, they show this Ketzakalat guy, right?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: This figure, but he's standing in the middle of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, because they show the double temple with Witsalapochli and Klaloc.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I always laugh when I see that because okay, that doesn't that doesn't prove your point.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because by then, Tenochtitlan, I mean, they'd had farming and they were building temples for a thousand, two thousand years at that point.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: At least you could have picked, like, I don't know, La Consentida in the coast of Oaxaca, which we know is uh early formative site that's like at least uh at this point 4,000 years old, and it's like some of the first evidence of public monuments, probably built by semi-nomadic groups.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's on the Oaxacan coast.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you uh do your cartoon drawing with Tenochtitlan, which comes at the very end of this sequence?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And they and like the Aztecs were doing or the Mexica, the the Tenochtitka Mexica were had the chinampas, the raised beds around the lake.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they had very sophisticated agricultural technology, and yet that's what you show in your show, and we're supposed to take you seriously.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Please.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh manches.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I just want to thank you for your work and um for doing that video for the for the uh you know so unquote debate that happened on Joe Rogan.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um I thought Flint did great.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I doubt he did too.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_04: It was just an absolute ass-kicking.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_04: It was I didn't think that uh Homeboy was prepared or that he thought that he was gonna get hit with so much uh data and research.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because what he's used to is being able to just speak off the cuff and have people believe him because he has a British accent.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess when uh Americans hear someone saying, It's upset, upset, yeah, they like, oh my god, this person must be so intelligent, they have a British accent.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: So um, but no, Flynn did a very good job, and I was also saying I was uh delighted by Joe Rogan.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, interestingly enough, that took me by surprise.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: It took me by surprise too.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember when I when I when I saw a couple episodes of him years ago when he would have actual academics on, including a paleontologist.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was really before.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: I remember that episode.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he was actually very interested.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So when you can like break through to him, he will he will like you know ask good questions and uh be reasonable.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was, you know, I also wanted to say good job, Joe Rogan, too.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you were you were they were all that both Flint and Joe were good in the debate.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: He who shall not be named was a slustered.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_04: Awesome.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: That proves what he is.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you for taking the time to speak to me.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, thank you so much, Curly, for inviting me to speak to you with you.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, of course.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_04: And uh yeah, we're here at the SAA's 2014.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_04: Are there any fourteen?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_04: God damn, that's how drunk I am.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, well, you know, uh as an explanation for the audience, we've been here for three days, and sometimes in order to avoid the you have to keep going.