Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 90: Decoding Teotihuacan w/ Magnus Pharao Hansen

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Episode 90: Decoding Teotihuacan w/ Magnus Pharao Hansen · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: You must excuse me.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't easy enough.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: A lesson of honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Honesty to yourself, honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: That lesson will stand you in good step on your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: 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_05: Now I'm catching on to why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantes, where we explore the fascinating worlds of Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, while also challenging the myths and misinformation that surround them.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_05: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa, and sadly, Dr.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_05: Ruben Ariano Tlacatecat could not make it for this episode.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_05: He is knee deep in finals week at the university, so he has uh some other concerns to deal with, but fear not, dear listeners, because I am joined by a very special guest and friend of mine, Dr.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_05: Magnus Farrow Hansen.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_05: Dr.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_05: Magnus Farohansen is an anthropologist and linguist who works as an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and author of the book Nahuat Nation: Language Revitalization and Semiotic Sovereignty in Indigenous Mexico.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_05: So and he's also a good friend of mine.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_05: And full disclosure, we have co-published in the past.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_05: So that's how that's how I know him.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_05: Welcome to the show, man.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_05: It's good to have you back.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_05: It's been a long time.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_05: Thanks.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_05: I'm I'm happy to be back.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_05: I'm very happy to be on the show again.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell And you are uh currently broadcasting from uh the motherland of uh Mexico in Nayarit, if I'm not mistaken.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_05: So what takes you there?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_05: What are you what are you getting up to in Nayarit?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Well I'm I'm working on a large project where we aim to make um dictionaries of of two languages, uh Huirarica and Nayari, or as they're previously called, uh Huichol and Cora.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we're working with communities here in Nayarit to to um to build some some dictionaries of those languages.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: So how big is the team that you're there with?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um we have uh we're working with an NGO uh that's based in in Tepeque called Sensontle.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: And they're basically the team that uh is working with me.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: And there's um five or six uh integrants in in this NGO, most of whom are are speakers of the language.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_05: That's excellent.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_05: And how long have you been working on that?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's been a year and a half now, a year and a half.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_05: Oh wow.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_05: So you've been putting in some work.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_05: And uh if you could just briefly talk about what is your your uh your research area in general, in in case we have any uh audience members that are not familiar with your work.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um most of my career I've been working with uh Nahuatl, and I've been documenting uh dialectal variation in náhuatl and trying to make sense of how the different varieties of náhuatl uh changed and uh how they got to the places where they are.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been working on um also náhuatl language politics, the way that náhuatl has been used by the Mexican state uh in different periods of Mexican history.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I've been working on the way that Nahuatl languages, Nawan languages um express things uh related to space, spatial relations.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then recently I've been more and more trying to get further back in the history of Nawan languages, which uh requires one to do comparative historical linguistics, comparing Nawan languages and the Proto-Nawa language with uh its closest relatives in the Utrostecan language family.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: And um in my work I came to the uh conclusion that um the there's several theories of which Udrasteken languages might be closest to Nawa.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I came to the conclusion that the theory that has it that the Korachol languages, which is Wirrarika and Nayri, are the closest relatives of the Nawan languages.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: So that is also why I'm putting particular focus on documenting those languages to make comparing with Proto-Nawa more uh easier and and more efficient and and better.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: So particularly Wirradica is not a very well documented language in terms of lexicon or or uh grammar.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um recently it's only sort of in the early phases of getting good documentation compared to to Nawa.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Nayari has some documentation though, also uh it's it's not like it's not huge uh the the amount of documentation that's there, but at least there's a a good dictionary.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh for one variety.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_05: Coming to this from a place where you you you are a linguist, um a Nawa linguist.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_05: Do you find that you can understand those languages?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_05: Are you developing like a better fluency of those languages at all?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_05: Not yet.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_05: Or is it all just like on the written word?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're super different from Nawa.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um they're really very different.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are many words that you can see.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: There that like the roots are the same, but the grammar of both those languages is quite different from Nawan languages.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: So even if I can understand some words and I in a conversation I can pick up words, I still don't have the grammatical uh understanding to be able to put together an understanding of of spoken uh Wirrarica.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm focusing mostly myself on on learning Wirarica, and I'm still very much in the beginning phase of it.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: I do hope to be able to maybe become conversational, but I'm not uh I'm not sure because it's a very it's a really very different and very hard language to to uh to get into.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_05: Well when you see it written out, um with Nahuatl I can understand.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_05: You know, when I see it, I have a pretty good idea of how to pronounce the word.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_05: But with Rirarika, it it a lot of times I'm like, I have no idea how that word is pronounced.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um actually that's the that's the least of it.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: It has a like Nahuatl, a relatively simple sound system.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: It does have some sounds that are weird or different from a Nawa uh perspective, but yet just the grammar is very, very different.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's um the way that words fit together, the way that sentences are built, it's it's uh it's a completely different uh system.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um and also very, very interesting in and especially to understand how they could have in uh developed from from the same, from a language that was originally the same language at some point in the past, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's what I really find interesting to see.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: What are the processes of language change that creates such different languages from something that was originally the same?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: And nobody is nobody has any doubts that those three languages come from the same source language, but the question is how, right?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: And and how they developed to be what they are, and uh what sequences of changes would have happened, and so on.
• 8:19
  unknown: Yeah.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we're trying to unravel a little bit.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_05: Super fascinating.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_05: So these so Cora and uh Uirarica, are they considered Uto Aztecan languages?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they are both Utoastecan languages.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: So they're they're members of the everyone would agree, I think, that they're members of the southern branch of the Utoastecan family.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: And some classifications has have uh classified uh the Korachol languages with the languages spoken more in Sonora and Chihuahua.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: So like with Yaki Mayo Raramuri and uh uh Warihio and uh and those languages, uh and other classifications have classified them as more similar to Nawan languages.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I am on that latter team.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think that they're much closer related to Nawan.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um that they must have split from the other languages spoken in Sonora and and Chihuahua at some relatively early point in time and moved south as a single language that then split into a corachol and a Nahua blank branch at some point.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um that I think is uh relatively early.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_05: That's that's awesome.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_05: So what what I'm hoping to get across to the listener is just because a language is yorastecan, part of that family doesn't mean that they are mutually intelligible.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_05: Like you can understand from one language to another, right?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_05: Because you hear that a lot in pseudo-lingistics where you know people will say, well, Hopi is yorastekan, so therefore a Nahuatl speaker can talk to a Hopi speaker, um, no problem.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_05: And that's this is the kind of stuff that just gets repeated and shared all over the internet without any pushback.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: So Yeah, that's a little bit let's uh saying that like, well, English and Greek are both Indo-European languages, so English speakers would be able to understand Greek.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, everyone knows that that's not the case.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like we have a saying, it's all Greek to me for a right.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: So in in you just can uh from a Nawa point of view, you would say, Oh, that's all hopi to me.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm excited because of your new research, and it's not really new research, right?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_05: Your current research, because I remember you had shown me some of it back when we went on that road trip uh to uh the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley when we were heading to San Diego, uh which was amazing, by the way.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_05: That was such a fun uh road trip.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_05: But you had shown me some of this research, and then the New York Times picked up on it.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_05: So you've published at this point.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_05: Um the headline of the New York Times was New Crack at an ancient puzzle reignites debate for archaeologists.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_05: And if you can you know, tell us tell us what this research is about.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_05: Like why did why did the New York Times glom onto this to write something about it?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_05: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's so as you say, it's it's uh an article that's been a long time in the making.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I wrote it about three years ago with my good colleague Christoph Hilmke, who is um an epigrapher who has been working first uh a lot with Mayan uh writing and and Mayan epigraphy, and uh also for the last more than 15 years he's been working on uh Teotihuacan writing.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh about four or five years ago, we were in a project together where we were trying to figure out um a little bit more about what possibly could be the language that Teotihuacan writing was written in.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Because uh Christophe and another colleague of ours, uh Jespa Nielsen, who's also at the University of Copenhagen, they have been working on the Teotihuacan writing system for a while, uh and coming to the conclusion that this has to be a real writing system in the way that the writing systems of Western Mesoamerica work, that works similar to like the the Aztec writing system, the Sapotec writing system, and several of the other undeciphered writing systems of Western Mesoamerica, which seem to work a little bit or quite a bit different from the way that Mayan writing is working, but still essentially to be a writing system that writes words in their uh like giving a full description of the sounds of of words.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so which that would be what we would call uh technically a glottographic writing system, so that it writes the language sounds, right?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: It has um it writes the phonetics of sounds in the same way that English does, in the same way that that uh uh Japanese does, right?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: So rather than like a rebus or uh No, it is a Rebus is exactly a way of writing words, the sounds of words, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the opposite of a glottographic writing system would be one that doesn't represent uh sounds uh of language directly, but could it, for example, uh represent ideas, like the meaning without being connected to a language, a specific language.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: So if you have a langu a writing system that is based only on logograms, then theoretically you could have uh a writing system that doesn't uh work for any specific language, but that could be read in any language, right?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you see a picture of a dog, you can write that, read that in English as a dog, or you can read it in Nahuatl as Chichi, or you can read it in uh Virarica as uh Zukui, or in French as chant, and it doesn't matter because you can see what it is and everyone can read it, right?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: So the writing could be separate from the language, it could represent meaning more or less directly.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_05: So I had a rebus and a logogram mixed up.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Important note is exactly when you use a logogram not for its meaning, but for its sound.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: So um if you want to write uh if you have like what what for example, uh you could have um if you if you have a s a word, like what what is it like?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: A good example of English Rebus.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always struggling.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: I should have one uh ready whenever people ask.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_05: Um that's uh just have a little business card printed out in a rebus.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_05: You could just pull it out and be like like this.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Then when I make so when I figure something out, it's it's inappropriate, right?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was just hearing I was just hearing the cockrow, and that would be an an excellent example of a rebus, but it wouldn't look good, right?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um Yeah, let's think of uh of something else.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like like let's say you want to write uh that's a good word for Mesoamerican language, you want to write cattail read.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: As a s as a specific kind of read, right?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: You would write you would uh draw a cat and a tail and a reed.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh you would know that that actually spells not those three words.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: You're not talking about a cat and a tail and read, you're talking about cattail reads.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: So you spell the a a full word with three different logograms that are read for their sound.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, a cattail reel read, you couldn't that would be tied specifically to English because in Nahuatl that's called something else, it's called toli.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Or in Nahuatl or in uh in in in Nahuatl or in Danish it would be called uh dunhama, which is so you couldn't write those with those three logograms.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: That only works in English where though that kind of read is called a cattail.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Cattail read.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_05: And speaking to the strength of like logograms where you don't where they could have meaning across languages, um, this kind of relates to the international style, right, of Mesoamerican writing.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_05: That um and I'm I'm curious because the uh the symbols, the glyphs, are what what are you referring to these as in in Teotihuacan?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, most of them are the vast majority are logograms.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: So they are are signs that represent a single word, like a root word.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: And then what we are suggesting in this paper is that if you read them using the values, the sound values of the Proto-Korachol Nawa language, which is the language that inv evolved um according to me into uh Nawan languages and into the Korachol languages.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: If you use those sound values, you can actually see some of those logograms being used for their sound value instead of their uh meaning value.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that uh I think, and we think, uh uh Christoph Helmck and I, that that is a rather strong argument to think that that is a good candidate language for the language used uh in Teotihuacan for writing.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um so of course the big question, and that's what the uh New York Times article headline goes on, is this this big ancient question is what language would they have spoken in Teotihuacan?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And um it's a it's a it's a question that really has been hard to get at um for various reasons.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um one of them has been because there's been a very big reluctance to even accept that they did use writing in in Teotihuacan.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh some archaeologists have argued that uh Teotihuacan is this um exceptional city uh where they had a very big complex uh civic organization system without having any type of writing system to uh transfer data and information, which is not very common in the world.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I was just gonna say that's not a common like you don't have these massive metropoles.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, so this is a city with sophisticated systems of government.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it that would m be an exceptional thing.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is that it would also be an exceptional thing if their writing system was only based on on logograms and could be re-read in any language without having a sort of uh a particular tie to a specific language.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, it is possible to have a writing system that people will of speaking different languages will adopt that writing system and read it in their own way.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, we know that happens with Chinese, that early Chinese uh uh was written, of course, in Chinese, in early Chinese, but very quickly it was adopted in Korea, in Japan, in Vietnam, and they would use Chinese logograms but read them in their own languages.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's how we get like kanji uh writing in in Japanese, which comes from like they're Chinese logograms, but they're read in Japanese most of the time.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they're actually still read in Chinese, I guess.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: But um uh that's possible.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: But it would be an exception if you had a writing system that was never tied to a specific language in the beginning, in in its beginning, before eventually maybe being extended to other languages.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: All writing systems that we know of have started in one language and has adapted to the to the the sound system of that language before then being extended to other languages.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: So on the face of it, that would be it would be very weird if not uh if uh Teotihuacan didn't have a writing system and if that writing system wasn't tied to a specific language.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um but that has been an argument from some archaeologists.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh other archaeologists and and epigraphists have said, no, we we can see that this looks like a writing system, and very probably it would have been tied to some language, and then the question becomes which language?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: And there's also a number of different theories.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's important to start by saying that that Teotihuacan was a huge city, and you don't get huge cities where only a single language is spoken.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's also the case for for Teotihuacan.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: We know that there were entire uh uh neighborhoods, barrios, where they were speaking Maya.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: We found mm uh areas with Maya writing, we found areas with uh only Sapotec, uh pottery and sapotec writing, and very probably there were also.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: So other barrios where they would speak other languages.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing is that those are identifiable because you can see that the things in those barrios come from those areas, and you can see that they use the writing systems of the areas of origin.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: But then there's like the main part of the city, and that doesn't look like anything anywhere else.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like when you see those types of writing, when you see those types of artifacts somewhere else in Mesoamerica, you assume this is from Teotihuacan.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: People from Teotihuacan must have come here.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: So this is characteristic of Teotihuacan itself.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And what language would the people who were like the majority culture in Teotihuacan then have spoken?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: And um that is the the the the question that makes us archaeologists, right?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_05: So that people have a good understanding of the time frame that we're talking about here.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_05: Like what when Teotihuacan existed, like about what time did it I don't want to say collapse, but like what time did it stop functioning as this majority.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: We see a huge decline in the population of Teotihuacan.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: And we see some of the main centers being uh actively destroyed.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's CE or BCE?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's CE.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, that's uh you could say it's almost sort of around the same time as the Roman Empire is uh in its uh terminal decline in in in Europe.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and also uh the time when when Teotihuacan sort of starts growing is around uh the century before uh our our um our um our timekeeping system.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh about 200 uh CE we have a very large city with very large monumental architecture.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: So there's about 350 years or so where this uh this city dominates uh not just western Mesamerica, um west of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, but also apparently uh has a very strong presence in the Maya area, uh where we have depictions of people who look like they might have come from Teotihuacan bringing weird uh weaponry, weird uh ceramic styles, and also weird uh words into the Maya area.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's all mostly in the period between 200 and and uh 500 and something.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um where Teotihuacan has its its heyday as uh as a as a very, very significant power in this part.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_05: Is that around the uh the same time frame as when uh the spear thrower owl was uh seen as like the heyday?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that is the main piece of evidence for Teotihuacan uh uh presence in the Maya area is uh on uh stila.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: I always mix up if it's 21 or 31, I think it's 31, isn't it?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um in Tikal uh that mentions the arrival of um Siachkach.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: And uh who is a representative in some way of someone else, uh whose name is written as uh an owl with a spear thrower.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: And the spear thrower is an as a is a weapon that is completely uh emblematic of Western Mesoamerica, particularly Tewakan, right?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: So they were the spear thrower people, and the Maya were probably more like uh um blow gun people, right?
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_05: And that name is so cool.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_05: Siah kak.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_05: Is it uh Born in Fire?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Born in Fire, yeah, that's a that's that's a radical name.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's a great name.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_05: And spear thrower owl, like goddamn, we we need to start naming our kids cooler names, people, because Bob and Bill just ain't got it anymore.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_05: What I love about that stale that that you're talking about, and I don't remember which one it is, is that it says very specifically, um, you know, on this date, Siakak arrived, and then it lists their leaders like he entered the water, which was like the euphemism for our leader died.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: So a bunch of guys like they just randomly entered the water on the day that he.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, when this guy shows up, people are entering the entering the water.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_05: Um so there's a quote here from the the New York Times article that I want to read because I have a question.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_05: Uh it says the scientists acknowledged, though, that they faced the same daunting limitation that has frustrated researchers for decades.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_05: There are only about 300 known texts from Teotihuacan, a tiny figure compared with the thousands of documented Aztec or Maya texts that helped scholars learn those writing systems.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_05: So 300 is not a lot, but I want to ask you what qualifies as a text?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because 300 sounds like it's a lot, it potentially, at least like it's sizable.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: But many of these texts consist uh consist of a single sign or as or a combination of signs, right?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um so anything in in those 300 um texts, you get anything where you have um uh signs that we consider to be likely to stand for words, right?
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: And and that in itself is is not always easy to see.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that's another part of the thing with Teotihuacan writing, and as it also has been with Aztec writing, that it it because it's figurative, all of the logograms are written in were ways that actually look like the things that that the logogram means.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: So they're pictures, right?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: So now it's uh uh writing was long said, no, that's pictographic writing, that's not really language.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it looks like images, and it's not always clear when you see something is writing.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and most of these texts are like there's the uh um Christoph, who who is who is the authority uh of the two of us on the way that Teotihuacan writing is is used, he usually says that the majority of those texts are on ceramics.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you find uh a piece of ceramic, and then there's maybe one glyph somewhere that may be a combination of two or three glyphs, but uh writing something, right?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: And since there's no broader context, there's not, it's not like now uh Maya writing where you have like rows of glyphs like neatly ordered, and you can see this is definitely text, right?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um so here you have every time you you uh see Teotihuacan writing, you also have to start by making the argument this is actually writing, this is not just a picture.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Or these elements in this picture are writing, because that's the other thing, that it's all often combined um with uh iconography that's representative, and then uh glyphs that are writing, right?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, in the same way that you could say that if you watch uh um comic, like you see Superman and you'll see an S on his chest, and you'll see, okay, that's actually writing, but it it's embedded in a picture, right?
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you can still sort of tease out that there's some writing element here, and there's some some iconographic elements in there, but um you have to make the argument every time.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it's only once you see that there's certain shapes that are just repeated uh in many different contexts and which are recognizable as shapes, like as glyphs, uh that you see, okay, this has this actually has to be a a writing symbol because otherwise it doesn't make sense that this glyph appears in so many different contexts.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just decoration, it's not just a pattern uh uh that they liked or whatever, right?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: And this is combined with other similar patterns or similar glyphs uh in different contexts.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: So so uh that that's that's a very important thing to say.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: 300 uh texts, that's uh uh that's given argumentation that these are texts.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not a lot.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a lot at all.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_05: Um how many of these uh ceramics are are fragments and how many of them come from whole pots?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I don't know.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I I um I I know that some of the most important collections of uh Teotihuacan ceramic with m lots of fragments has disappeared.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like the biggest uh the biggest collection uh which came from uh an a scholar called Hasse von Vinick.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh when he died, it was sold uh in pieces.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: The entire collection of ceramics uh was sold.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: And nobody knows where those things ended up.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: And those were probably mostly the like a lot of that was fragments.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we only know of those in his work, like the drawings that he he left, because he was one of the first ones to write on on uh Teotihuacan uh writing and uh and to actually include uh a lot of drawings and to argue that this was writing.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_05: And so apart from the ceramics, um you have the murals, right?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of murals, they're much more much more well known, right?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and they're stunning and they're uh beautiful, and they're also mostly destroyed.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um so many of the murals we only because of the they're painted on plaster and walls, and the upper parts of the walls are often damaged so that the plaster uh falls down, so you only have like a band near the near the ground, uh which is usually a freeze of some sort.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: So we can't always many of the places we can see there was a huge mural here, but we can't see it anymore.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Many of them were drawn when they were in better shape, but now they're not looking so good anymore.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um so some of the murals are also quite hard to read.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: But the one thing that I keep coming back to, like, there's so much of Tetuacan that has not been excavated yet.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's Yeah.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_05: Like 5% of the whole site's been excavated.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: 5% of the site that's that's really excavated.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: And even some of many of the places that are excavated, we have very good reasons to think that there are murals underneath the part that has been excavated.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, when you walk up the Alley of the Dead, uh as it's called uh in Teotihuacan, uh there's one place where they've uh removed like the the stones that have been the surface, and behind those stones, there's a mural of a Jaguar, right?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: And when you see that, and then you see all those buildings up that very, very long avenue having those stones in front, and you can think, holy shit, there's probably murals behind all of this.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, you can't just like take all that down to see the murals that are like uh but but there's there's more there.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like so that that's what we're hoping for, of course, that that more evidence will come up that will confirm or reject this this proposal.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, because that's part of the process, right?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_04: You have to actively try to disprove your hypothesis.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: What you want, of course, is a high hypothesis that can actually be falsified.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because if it can't, then then you're not really doing any work that you're just talking shit.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_05: Then you're just a religion.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we get with we have that too, right?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: But we're trying to to uh to to do it the other way.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: So so hopefully what we say is something where people can say, no, this new piece of evidence definitely shows that these guys were wrong.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're hoping that other evidence comes as well, or more of uh of that that says, okay, this actually looks like they were right.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: But that's a that's for the future to to show.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_05: And it's exciting.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_05: Um and just so we're clear, you know, we have ceramics, we have murals, but there are no like deerskin or or paper uh documents that exist.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: No, no.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that the the the time period for that is a little bit too deep for those things to have been likely to to survive.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like I guess it's not impossible that something could turn up, uh but it hasn't so far.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: There are images in Teotihuacan uh iconography of people with books.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we know they must have had uh writing in in in other formats that would have been perishable.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um but we haven't found any of that yet because it perished.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell That's awesome.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't know that.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't know that there was representation of of books.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_05: That's badass.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_05: And so I guess the uh million-dollar question would be what language do you think is the uh have you put a name to it?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Well, the way that we refer to it in abbreviation is PCN, which stands for Proto Proto-Korachol Nawan, which is the language that would develop into Korachol, Proto-Korachol, the language that then would develop into Kora and Wichol, or uh Nayari and Wiharika, and then Nawa, uh which would devel pre-Nawa, which would be sort of the earliest branch that would develop into proto-nawat, which would develop into all of the Nawan languages that exist today and that have existed.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that most likely what would have been spoken and written at Totiwakan would have been uh the eastern dialect of this proto-coratural Nawan language, which is what became Nahuatl.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that's simply because uh it fits uh given the the geographics of the of the Nawan languages, that the area where Teotihuacan is is also where that has been an important center for the the spread of Nahuatl.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: And there's not really any good reason to think that speakers of Corachol languages would have been there that early.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: So probably we were talking about a dialect continuum that spread from from western Mexico, sort of uh Nayarit, uh Jalisco, and all the way down the Bajío to uh Hidalgo and uh the the basin of Mexico, and where they would have been able to understand each other, but the westernmost ones would have sounded more like uh Nayaris, and the eastern ones would have sounded more like nahuas, and they would gradually then have diverged uh and and become these two language groups.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_05: It's amazing.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_05: How long does it take, realistically, for something like that to happen?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: It can happen relatively quick.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um but in this case um it would appear that they would have had um something like at least at least more than half a century to drift apart, right?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um if we think about it is what happened in Europe at the same time where that we know about, like if we start at at around 200, which is when we also see that that Teotihuacan was already a large uh city, um that's when we would have only Latin at that point, right?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: And in the entire Roman Empire.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then around 800 to 1000, that's so that's about six, eight hundred years after that, is when we start seeing signs of what is early French, early Spanish, um and so on, right?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um so the divergence from Latin to to the Roman Romans languages would have been about six to eight hundred years.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um you could of course say it might have started a little later because it only started at the uh at the fall of the Roman Empire, obviously, but but that that's the type of type time period what the Jews expect uh a language to develop into some relatively different new languages.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um and this looks like it could be basically the same time frame where we see a change from the Proto-Coracholnawan language, uh which would have been spoken then between 200 to 50 or 600, and then at the end of Teotihuacan, those speakers who would have been there, who would have been like the easternmost uh Koracholnawans, they spread out uh from uh Teotihuacan as this site uh declined, and they would become the the speakers then of the early Nawan uh languages, which would first be like an eastern and a western Nawan language.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_05: So what kind of uh pushback are you getting on this?
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_05: Because this there's some like really, really extraordinary claims.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: It is, it is, it is um in in how I'm trying to you're illuminated.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's the sun has moved a little bit there.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um well, so maybe you uh we should start by m mentioning that that um so we're not the first people to claim that probably an ancestor of Nahuatl would have been spoken in Teotihuacan.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: Several other scholars have made have made that uh suggestion, including uh Carl Taube, who's an iconographer,'s work worked a lot on uh Teotihuacan, including um uh Sergio Gomez Chavez, who's one of the main archaeologists working at at uh Teotihuacan, together with a linguist called uh Timothy King, and recently uh Gordon Whitaker, who is uh uh one of the experts on Aztec writing, have all suggested that probably uh Teotihuacan writing could be tied uh to the Aztec writing system, both because there's some similarities in in the visual part, but also because um that's an area where Nahuatl has been spoken for a long time.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: The question, of course, is how long time uh it has been spoken there.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um and their linguists have been uh the past 40 years or so, have been thinking that Nahuatl came very late to that area and that probably before Nahuatl came to the Valley of Mexico, other languages like Otomi, Totonac um would have been spoken in that region.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so they have been favoring uh those languages, Otomi, Totonak, maybe even uh Huastec, maybe even a Mihisokian language, which is uh proposal by the late uh Terence Kaufman, uh could have been spoken in that area.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um so they've been seeing those as more likely candidates for the language of Tetiwakan.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um but in in that sense, it's it's not an outrageous proposal that we're making.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're just siding with the tradition that sees Nahuatl as uh as um likely language uh of that area.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And our main argument, uh apart from the actual readings uh for why this makes sense uh in terms of history, is that uh I don't agree that Nahuatl uh would have arrived very late in the center of Mexico.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, my own um research on the history of Nahuatl and the spread of Nahuatl suggests that precisely the central of central uh Mexico, the Valley of Mexico, would be a better candidate for the place where Nahuatl develops and start spreading out.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_02: Which would suggest that that the it could have uh been present uh longer than we think.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: The reasons that people have been reluctant to believe this uh is partly because of the Nawas themselves that have um ethnohistorical accounts that tell that they came from the north uh and that they arrived relatively late.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_02: And this these accounts, of course, are from the Mexica people, um specifically who also call themselves before they call themselves Mexica, they call themselves Azteca, and they describe this migration of the Azteca groups, which are the ones that mostly the ones that spoke Nahuatl that they uh classified as as Aztecas, um somewhere north of Mexico City.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, uh they don't give any very uh geographically clear maps of where they came from, or they don't and they don't say how long a distance they traveled.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and they don't say in what period they traveled or over how many years they would have traveled, right?
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of reasons to think that, yes, of course they would have come from the north.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: We know that the by now we know that the Yudo-Second language family came from the north, but we don't know necessarily that this is what the Aztec migration uh stories refer to.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like this could be much later migrations, because we know that those tribes uh of Nahuatl speakers would have moved around quite a lot.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and if the Mexicas, who were the last, according to their own account at least, the last ones to arrive in the in the area of Mexico, well, they could have moved simply from somewhere in Hidalgo state, close to Tula, who knows, like, or maybe a little bit further up in the Bahio.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: But all the other Nahuas could have been there still, right?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the ethnic historic accounts, I don't think that we should see them as necessarily uh contradicting an early uh Nahua presence uh or Nahua ancestral presence in the basin of Mexico.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because they those accounts pertain specifically to the Mexica, uh not necessarily to the entire group of Nahuatl speakers.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um and also it doesn't say when this happened.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_05: Um so as like Yeah, well it just says like set ekbat, right?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_05: I think the is it the Botorini one of the codices has setbat as like the year of the of the migration, but that could mean Well that happens every 52 years, right?
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_05: Every 52 years there was a set tekbat.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_05: So we don't really know which specific set tekbat that they're talking about.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: So so that the put that's part of the pushback is no, some some scholars have uh made up their minds that Nawas come are latecomers to to Central Mesoamerica, uh and they couldn't have been there.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and some scholars are saying, okay, but we just can't like we can't know.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's not enough texts.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we're like it's it's like you need at l m many more examples of the same words being written in the same way to be able to make that argument.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and that is partly right, like that would be much better.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like the the ready systems that have been truly deciphered have had many more examples, right?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that that is ideally what we would have.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: But on the other hand, we have to start with what we have.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: We can't wait uh till we don't everything's perfect.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: Everything's perfect, right?
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um especially not since we're making like proposals that can be tested.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then there's some more technical, and I think those are actually the better the better pushback is where they okay, some there's some technical things where where you're making an argument, but this looks like it could be a counter argument.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, one very good argument is that we're actually proposing that some of the words that are found in the Maya uh written record, specifically the Stelas at Tikal, um, that they can be read in this early uh Korachol Naun language.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh some experts, particularly uh Albert Navlechin, is saying, okay, but it's weird that they're writing all the consonants in those words with the Mayan letters that write glottalized consonants.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: So they don't write, for example, we have a word that we're reading uh reading as uh kosaka, which uh is is an early proposal by by uh David Stewart that that could be an hour word and mean mean necklace koskat.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it actually works.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: We can we works, we can show that the earliest form of this word in the pre-nour language would have been kosaka.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that is precisely what is written in in that text, except that apparently uh it uses the glottalized K.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh or maybe that particular one doesn't, but some of the other one uh use the glottalized case, where we're saying, okay, but for this to make sense, because there are no glottalized uh consonants in in uh in Uto Aztecan.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we have to read it as the non-glottalized version.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that is a that is potentially a problem because then you have to explain why they would write it with a glottalized letter instead of the plain K letter, right?
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: And Albert is saying, okay, so this suggests that this could be another language that has glottalized consonants, and otomi is a language that has a distinction between glottalized and non-glottalized consonants.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_02: So he's saying that actually looks more like it could be otomi.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is that you cannot read that.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_02: Kosaka doesn't mean anything in otomi, with or without a glottalized.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_05: Interesting.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_05: So how big of a difference does that glottal uh make in the pronunciation?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: What we're saying is that actually you could you could posit other explanations for why the Mayas would use glottalized uh consonants when writing, right?
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that might be simply because it sounds strange.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't sound like their usual K.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_02: So they use the more the slightly different K.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that could be, for example, because some of the the Nawa consonants could be um because in Nawa you can't have uh two uh at least not in early Nawa, um you get that later on.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: You can't have two consonants next to each other.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's also always a vowel between, and when two when a consonant is between vowels, you often get it softened.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: So so this uh early language seems to have had a difference between uh strong consonants and weak consonants.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the strong consonants uh would appear in the beginning of words and at the end uh well in certain other environments, and in the beginning of syllables that were stressed, and the weak ones would be in the beginning of syllables that were unstressed.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe this would be the Maya way to show this uh phonetic distinction between strong and weak consonants.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's at least uh uh one way that you could explain why they would choose to represent it that way.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then and other ways, like just like sometimes like if you hear people speak weirdly, you just sort of also choose like the weird letters, right?
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: So sort of the way that uh if you want to write st uh now in a way that looks cooler, you would write it with a Z instead of an S because that makes it look nicer, right?
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_02: No, some of my friends do that at least.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_05: Guilty as charged.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_05: And and the the only reason I do that is because I think the Z just looks like a stronger letter.
• 55:42
  unknown: Yeah.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_05: Like, and maybe that's exactly what the Mayas were doing.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like we wanna like this there's the sound strong or it sounds hard when they're speaking, so we're gonna use the stronger hard version of the consonant.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_02: We we don't know that much, I guess, about like how uh classical Maya people thought about the aesthetic quality of their own sound systems.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_05: But well, it was a beautiful language.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_05: You know, the way it's written, it's it's gorgeous.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_05: So I mean it stands to reason.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_05: So it's it stands to reason that they would put in some extra effort in the stylistic.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, to sort of represent the foreignness of this writing, of this language that came from somewhere else and sounded probably horrible to them.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_05: So I saw one uh some pushback online where someone said actually, you know what?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna get to this later because I there's it all stems from this one video.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_05: There's a video floating around right now online, and I'm sure some of our listeners have seen this video because it's being shared to me.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not even joking, like 10 times a day somebody sends me this video and they're like, What do you think of this?
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_05: And and I'm sure you've seen the video, you know which one I'm talking about.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's this guy who very um he's he's very confidently misrepresenting uh the substance of your research.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_05: And he's saying, you know, Magnus uh hand Magnus Farohansen and his uh co-research who who's your your co-author on this?
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_05: I can't I Christoph Helmke.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, uh I can't pronounce that.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_05: Helmke?
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_05: Helmke, yeah.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_05: Helmke, okay.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_05: He's like, yeah, these two guys, they're proposing that the Aztecs or Mexicas are the direct descendants of the people from Teotihuacan, and that the people from Theotihuacan spoke Nahuatl, and that the Mexicas came from, you know, this group, that they're the direct descendants of these people.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_05: And uh people are just sharing this all over the place.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_05: And so when people, what I'm seeing is people are disagreeing with this video, but they're disagreeing with the misinterpreted version of the video, if that makes sense.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_05: They're not countering your argument, they're countering the uh his argument.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_05: His argument that he's claiming that you made.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_05: And so they're saying, like, oh well, this is just modern day uh Nawa centrism in academia to claim that the Mexica come from uh Teotihuacan.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, that's not what the research says, though.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_05: Um can you what do you think of that video, first of all?
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_05: Like I'm sure you've seen it.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I've I thought I think it's funny, of course, like because I haven't really I haven't uh I've I I've I've really enjoyed, of course, uh to be able to publish stuff that gets people excited and that people want to read and that people like uh want to disseminate in in all kinds of different formats, right?
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: So there's TikToks and YouTube videos and all those things.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_02: And uh of course, also we were prepared that people would read that research in different ways, right?
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because you read it from where you're coming from in some way, right?
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_02: And uh of course we were expecting that that like there'd be some people who would say this is uh this is now centrism or Mexico centrism, because we're basically proposing in that sense that yes, now what has a bigger role in the cent in the history of of uh central Mexico than has been generally agreed upon.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we were we're sort of prepared out from it, but it's super fun to see like how psyched some people get and like all how they get it to fit into whatever kinds of weird ideas they uh they uh otherwise have.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_02: So like there's also Mormons saying, okay, two Danish researchers have proved the Book of Mormon true.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's I'm pretty sure that's not what I'm doing.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_05: Um I've not seen that.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a video or it's uh uh Yeah, that was that's a no, I think it was uh it was on uh it was on Facebook.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_02: Someone shared it on Facebook, like from some uh Mormon apologetics account.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_05: Um That's amazing.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_05: So they're basically saying that you've you've proven that the Lamanites all spoke Nahuatl is that what That seems to be the implication.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um But just so we're clear, you're not claiming that the Mexica are directly descended from Teotihuacan.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well in a way we are, right?
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because we're saying that all So you're just gonna cause more problems.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I'm actually making the world really.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_02: People are gonna read that.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_02: But but we're saying that all Nahua speakers descend from what would have been probably Teotihuacan, right?
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_02: And um not only them, also Wirradika speakers were also descended from people who spoke that language and who were present at Teotihuacan.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: So, what for example that means is that there's some of those words that we're proposing the the uh readings of that you can't read in Nahuatl.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: You can't read them in proto-nawatl either.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: You have to compare with uh, for example, wirarika.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: Wirarika in many cases has the older form of this of the word because Nahuatl sort of often skipped, it drops vowels, and then you get those two consonants standing together.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_02: And uh wiradika does not.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it keeps the older form of the word.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_02: And what we what it looks like to us is that the Teotuacan texts are using that something that is closer to the Wirarica writing, right?
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um but that doesn't um really mean that um that the speakers of whatever language was spoken at Teotuacan would have been closer related to to Wirrarica people either, right?
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Because they were related to the ancestors of all of those languages.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: And all speakers of Nawan and all speakers of uh Wirarika and Nayari would potentially have ancestors who spoke this language.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I say potentially because of course language and genes don't follow each other.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like you can learn a language without having uh the learning or adopting the genes of whoever teaches the language to you, right?
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_02: We people do that all the time.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_02: Most people in the world are bilingual.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_05: Uh don't say that in this country.
• 1:02:44
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  unknown: Right.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_02: Except in the US.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so languages and genes, they don't follow each other.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um so many of the people who speak Nahuatl today, they would their ancestors would have both spoken different languages, but at some point they shifted to Nahuatl.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_02: In the same way that many of the people who today speak Spanish, their ancestors spoke Nahuatl.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so all this about direct descendants, that's a little bit um that's iffy uh when you're talking about language, right?
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_02: Because the language descends from a different uh path than genes.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_02: And we can't assume it to be the same path.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_02: But linguistically what we're saying is that yes, Mexicas and Tlascaltecas and uh Nonualcas and uh the people of uh of uh El Salvador and the Nault speakers of um Honduras, of uh Durango, the Nahuatl speakers who came to uh New Mexico in the 16th century, they would all have linguistically their linguistic ancestors would have been in Teotihuacan.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that doesn't mean we can't we can't say anything about the genetics, right?
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_02: And this and so in in the sense of biological ancestry, that's a completely different question.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_02: Especially in in the scenario that we're thinking about, where uh Teutihuacan is a multi-ethnic town that has probably a language that is a little bit more important than the others, in the sense that that's the language that they're putting into writing.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean necessarily they're the most powerful group.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean may meet mean necessarily that they're the majority group, but it's their language that's being put into writing.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like so, in the same way, like uh we have a lot of uh Latin texts uh written in Denmark in the 12th century.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: That does not mean that most Danes were uh Latin speakers in that period, right?
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um So there are all diff all kinds of ways where you need to separate uh the people from the language and the writing system, right?
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_02: Because those those don't necessarily line up with each other.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_02: And our argument is specifically specifically about the language and the writing system.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think that there's a uh uh one of the the arguments in in in in the article, one of the uh people who comment on it is is Michael Smith, who's an archaeologist, and he's arguing, well, well, we also need to know more about the archaeology and the genetics of this of this scenario to know more about who the people of Teotihuacam are.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that's absolutely sure.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_02: Those that's a different way to to look look at the same scenario.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_02: And and you could um you could uh hope for different ways in which the archaeological or the genetic record might support the idea of of uh connections with northwestern Mexico.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_02: But also there are ways in which that might not be the case, and the language might still be there, right?
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in the same way that you could find Lats in in Britain or Scandinavia in the 10th century.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_05: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, I think it's um it's hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around that a place like Teotihuacan being a multi-ethnic city, this massive multi-ethnic city with different languages being spoken, there's like this disconnect because now you look at Teotihuacan and it's, you know, the um the plaster is is all gone.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, not all of it, but most of the plaster is gone.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_05: All these because all of these structures would have been plastered and then painted and had reliefs on them and just been very different than what we're used to seeing right now.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_05: And just like this alive, vibrant, very colorful, and then you're hearing all these different languages spoken.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_05: And I think it's hard for some people to wrap their heads around that.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_05: When I take people to Chaco Canyon, for example, I have to remind them like these structures would have been plastered, they would have, they would have been covered, they didn't look like this.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, if you could imagine smoke rising and fires burning at night, and like it's we're so far removed from what these places actually looked like when they were living, that I think that gets lost in it where people have a hard time conceptualizing.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_05: Like they think, well, Magnus is saying that the Mexicas came from Teotihuacan.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_05: And so in their brains, that equates to one day people were living in Teotihuacan.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_02: And then they left and they found it at the Tenochtitlan.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, like stuff like that.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_05: Like there's this weird disconnect in like how much time would have passed.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's like just looking at uh uh grasping time and grasping like uh the complexity of any actual real life uh society is is beyond most people.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's one of the things in uh is the the basis for nationalism, right?
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like is that you just want to simplify everything to the point where uh you can make it make sense in in some neat categories that you can and reality is always much cooler and much richer, and there's so many patterns that you can explore in the same at the same time.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and then sometimes you find a signal in all that noise, right?
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's what I think we we tried, we've we think we've done.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like we found a signal and we've interpreted it, uh, and we hope that future signals will will corroborate it.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but that doesn't mean no, it doesn't mean that Teotihuacan was uh now a sa city.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean that everybody there uh like our ancestors of like Moctezuma or uh uh anything like that, not at all.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's from the fall of Teotihuacan around 550 to 600 to the founding of of uh of Tenurstitlan, there's a longer span from that point to the founding of Tetan.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_02: Tenochtitlan than there is from the founding of Tenochtitlan.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_02: No, that's the same spa span basically from the founding of Tenochtitlan to today.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like so we're as far removed from the founding of Tenochtitlan as the founders of Tenochtitlan were from the fall of Tetiwakan.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's a huge time span.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_02: And they weren't just sitting around there waiting, right?
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like they were moving around, making new cities, like spreading out, the languages were diversifying, they were mixing, they were borrowing words, barring uh and lending out words, right?
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so there's a a very considerable period of time where where people were doing other things after Teotuacan uh fell and before the Mexica even began to exist, really.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: And we know for a fact when the Mexica starts uh to exist, right?
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_02: Because uh you referred to the well, not for a fact, but we know that they saw themselves as having come into being in a specific time and place when they were told by Witzilipochtli that you're not Aztecai anymore.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're mexika now.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_05: You are now mexica.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_05: So let me ask you one last question.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um so this language, the system, the writing system, how does this relate to or does it relate to at all to the international style of writing?
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_05: Like could it also be seen as like an ancestor of the sort of international style of writing where you had Mishtek, Zapotec, Nawas, all these different groups using common symbols to represent similar ideas but across a vast landscape, right?
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_05: They're all speaking different languages, but they could interpret the symbols that were painted on these ceramics to mean the same things.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not I'm not the expert on on the writing traditions of Mes America.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: Of the two of us, that's Christophe who is who knows that that stuff better.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_02: But for example, I'm pretty sure that that he would agree, and that iconographer uh uh epigraphus would agree that, for example, the the Sapotec writes system already existed and it's had its own writing tradition at this time, right?
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_02: And some of the other ones would have uh come uh subsequently, and some of those would probably be derived from the Teotihuacan uh tradition, and others from the Sapotec tradition or mixed, and some from the isthmus writing, Pialmek tradition, Maya tradition, and so on, right?
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_02: So there are several earlier writing traditions in in Mesoamerica that share some things, but that are also different, right?
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_02: So probably mm many of the logograms that are like directly pictographic, but you can see what they represent, um they would have been read in the same way, right?
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_02: But many of the other signs are sort of not that clearly representing something.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like some of them are geometric or or complex shapes, but they don't really look like anything particular.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_02: So you wouldn't really be able to have those signs work in that way as as unless that there's as a a a historical or a social reason that they would read them the same way.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um Do you see um any calendrical symbols being used in the U.S.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we have uh some calendrical symbols in Tewakan writing, but not a lot and not enough.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we don't have the names uh or the the glyphs for all of the all of the day symbols, mostly for the year bearers.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so and w which makes sense, right?
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because those are the the people would write years more than they would write single days, and in years you only get four different uh year signs.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh some of them are very similar, and some of them are different enough that we can't say exactly how they were meant to be pronounced.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_02: So for example, there's one glyph that um uh Epigraphers of of Totuacan have called the reptile eye glyph, which looks like it would be the day sign akatl.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like so the f the first uh the first day sign, right?
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh but it doesn't necessarily like you can't see from the sign that it looks like a read.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not straightforward to propose that it would have necessarily been read like a like read.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_02: And you see it in with associations to uh storm god and to certain places and so on, but we haven't been completely able to to to propose uh a reading of it yet.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_02: Though we're working on it.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um because there's some some arguments that think that could make you think that maybe it it would be be also read as a read.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_02: But there are two words for read in Nahuatl and in also in in uh Korachol Nahuatl.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um so and what are the other ones?
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_05: Uh well what's the second word?
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_05: Because I I know akat.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Tol.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Tol.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Tol.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_02: Which is also a very interesting word.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_05: And is that where you would get tolan from?
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_05: Interesting.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah man, I love this stuff.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_05: I remember when you when we sat at my kitchen table and you pulled out your uh your laptop and you're like, check this out.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_05: And like we were just geeking out over it.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's been like a s a really extremely exhilarating process where like you find things and you it looks like, wow, this suddenly makes sense in a new way.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh or that like there are these patterns, and then I then you're looking for something and then you find it.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's like that's what happens uh in the way that I use it.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so uh because I'm I've been reconstructing these historically uh ancient forms of of the words, right?
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes I'm looking for, oh, is there a cognate for this word?
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then suddenly you find it and it just fine falls into place and I can reconstruct that earlier form.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then sometimes later on, that reconstructed forms make sense of uh of a glyph in Teotihuacan, right?
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_02: But that's uh that's very, very satisfying to that experience.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_02: Where you you can confirm your own hypothesis, right?
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh which is, of course, um always a little bit easier than having other people confirm them for you.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_05: And then you second guess yourself, like, well, am I being a little too overzealous with this?
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's it, that's definitely a a risk.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like uh I'm very aware of that risk, and I'm also seeing how how it it like it's it just happens.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like even to the best scholars, like you get you fall in love with an idea, and then everything you look at points towards it, and I'm really hoping that that's not what we've done here.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's something that that future scholars will look at and say, okay, there's actually something in there that that brought that whole process forward.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_05: So is the paper itself, is that behind a paywall, or is that something that our our listeners can access?
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_02: It is unfortunately around uh behind a paywall.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_02: In the two years that we the paper was in uh in um under review, the the journal changed their policies from allowing you to pay for open access to no longer allowing that.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that meant basically the paper was accepted, we had everything, and we could like either we publish it, paywalled, or you can or we don't publish it.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so we had to accept that.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh luckily we are allowed to share it with colleagues.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I would consider anyone who who writes a request to my um institutional email a potential colleague.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_05: Sweet.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_05: So we'll uh we'll include your institutional email in the show notes.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Also, if you have research gate, you can request it and I can send it through research gate, which I would say.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, cool.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_05: That's great.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_05: So what's the next step?
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_02: What do you um Well we have a couple of other papers.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_02: So what what we have in this one, because of course it's a huge argument because we have to make first the argument this is writing, which then we have to make the argument there's a language called Protokorotol Nawa, and then we have to make the argument that we couldn't actually maybe read some signs in this language.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_02: But we weren't able to include all our evidence, all our readings of Tewakan glyphs uh in that one paper.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_02: So actually, I think we have our best arguments and our best readings yet to be published.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_02: So stay tuned for that.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the That sounds great.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_02: We have a reading of uh of what uh spear thrower owl's actual uh name would have sounded like, yeah.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_05: Very cool.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_05: And what do you what do you think uh the word uh teotihuacan?
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_05: Like how do you translate that?
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_05: Because I've heard like a million different translations of that word.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that's a that's a complicated one.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um it doesn't really follow what you would expect now grammar to do.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that's why it lends itself to uh different interpretations.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not too weird because with names, especially important names like deity names and important place names, you often get like an earlier form or an uh a non like a form that's sort of fossilized at some point in its development.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_02: But I think I agree with uh what uh my colleagues Christoph and Jesper, uh Helmke and Nielsen have proposed that it probably doesn't mean uh place where the gods came into being, but place where the sun came into being, because uh the original meaning of teot um seems to have been sun more than necessarily a deity.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_05: So a specify Well you see that that represented, right?
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_05: The glyph for Teot is uh sun.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that would make absolutely fits well with the origin myth of the sun coming into uh existence at Teotihuacan, where the gods gather Teotihuacan and then one of them becomes the sun.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so there's several reasons why that actually is a relatively good uh proposal.
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think, of course, that that is what the people who live there would have called their own town.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's the other that's the other side of this.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_05: So do you do you uh do you all have a uh hypothesis on what the name would have been?
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is there any so there's uh uh there's some hypotheses both by uh Gordon Whitaker, another one by uh uh Jesper and Christophe.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm not completely decided.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I think maybe uh a a good possibility would be that it would be related to to um reads toll.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Particularly.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_02: There's at least one place glyph that uh has the reptile eye glyph in it.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_02: And if that would be read read uh uh as a read, then I'm thinking that uh the existence of Tolan would wouldn't make sense, right?
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um as a as a early place name.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Though it could also be an an a later reading of it, I guess.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's too cool.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_02: That would be wait to read the new stuff.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Not something that we're uh c sure about yet.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because there are different glyphs that could be the name of Totiwakan.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um what is it that Gordon Whittager proposes?
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_04: I f I forget right now.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_04: We'll just uh ask him.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he has an article called The Names of Tethiwakan.
• 1:22:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's where you can uh see his proposals.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_05: Very cool, man.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_05: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_05: It's been fascinating.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_05: I love like talking about this kind of stuff.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_05: And just me too.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_05: Geeking out about it.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_05: Um so you are in Nayarit right now, then you're heading back to D Fe and then back home, back to your homeland.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_05: Then back home.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_05: How long is that flight?
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh a 12-hour flight to Europe.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_02: When I'm shifting in Amsterdam.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I hope you have a a great flight.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_05: I will.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_05: And thank you for coming on.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_05: It's been a pleasure as always.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_02: A lot for inviting me.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_02: I was uh I'm always very happy to connect with your uh listeners, some of the clever podcast listeners out there.
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_02: See, see, see, dear listeners, yeah, you get love.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_02: And remember the truth is like medicine.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.