Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America

00:00:00.000 | for the vast majority of human existence we've been nomadic and we've done these kind of wider

00:00:06.720 | or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region but they'd move so once humans

00:00:14.000 | figured out how to stay in a place that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization

00:00:20.560 | i think you said beauty and blood went hand in hand for the aztec what i meant by that is they

00:00:26.240 | were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and you know ripping people's hearts out this they

00:00:32.560 | had this this just you know grotesque violent bent but in the same way they also absolutely loved flower

00:00:42.400 | gardens and poetry and music and dance the same aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand

00:00:53.520 | people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry but they were

00:01:00.800 | really just surgical about it they'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs

00:01:07.200 | right along the sternum and then push the sternum down pull up and just while the person was alive

00:01:12.880 | yep while the person was alive the following is a conversation with ed barnhart an archaeologist

00:01:22.000 | specializing in ancient civilizations of south america mesoamerica and north america this is a

00:01:29.600 | lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends

00:01:36.160 | here's ed barnhart do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth

00:01:44.480 | which we don't know anything about yes i do and in fact you know we we have found some civilizations

00:01:53.120 | that we had no idea about just in my lifetime i mean we've got gobekli tepi and we've got the stuff

00:02:00.480 | that's going on in the amazon and there's some other less startling things that we had no id existed and

00:02:08.080 | push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations we had no idea about so

00:02:13.840 | yeah it's happened and i think it'll happen again do you think there's a lost civilization

00:02:19.920 | in the amazon that uh the amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of yes i do and i uh

00:02:29.680 | we're beginning to find it there are these huge what we call geoglyphs these mound groups that are

00:02:36.640 | in geometric patterns i think that the average joe when they hear the word civilization they think of

00:02:43.520 | something that looks like rome and i don't think we're ever going to find anything that looks like

00:02:48.880 | rome in the amazon i think a lot of things there i mean wherever you are on the planet you use your

00:02:55.200 | natural resources and in the amazon there's not a whole lot of stone what stone is there is deep deep

00:03:01.280 | deep so a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles but is it possible

00:03:11.600 | that all that land that's not covered by trees is actually hiding stone for example some architecture

00:03:18.320 | some things that's just very difficult to find for archaeologists i think at the base of the andes

00:03:24.960 | where the amazon connects to the andes there's a lot of potential there because that's where the stone

00:03:31.520 | actually starts poking up when you get down into the basin stone is meters and meters under the ground

00:03:37.520 | except for a a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep and even then only in the dry season

00:03:45.440 | because that river rises like over a hundred feet every year well that's one of the things having

00:03:53.680 | visited that area uh just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water i was uh humbled by the power of

00:04:01.600 | water to shape landscapes and probably a race history in the context that we're talking about of

00:04:07.760 | civilizations as water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia

00:04:14.240 | and so if there's something existed a very long time ago thousands of years ago it is very possible it

00:04:21.200 | was just eaten up by nature absolutely in fact in my opinion that's almost a certainty in a lot of places

00:04:28.640 | uh you know the grand canyon was dug by water there's this wimpy little river in it right now

00:04:34.880 | and you can't possibly imagine that it dug that but it did the power of nature and

00:04:40.320 | geology is really kind of magical and when it comes to you know ancient civilizations that could be from

00:04:47.200 | a long time ago there's probably a lot that are just under the ocean and just the wave action have destroyed them and what they haven't destroyed buried deep

00:04:56.960 | under the ocean so you think atlantis ever existed

00:05:01.280 | i don't think that atlantis existed i do think it was one of plato's many parables talking about you know

00:05:11.200 | putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school if one did exist or a shadow of it

00:05:19.600 | my money would be on akrotiri akrotiri is what's left of a big city that was on the island of santorini

00:05:27.760 | and when their volcano blew up it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so fast that 70 miles away

00:05:37.840 | in crete there are chunks of santorini in their cliff so it blasted what was ever there but what's

00:05:45.680 | left on the side of the crater akrotiri is strangely advanced for its age

00:05:52.160 | and so if there's anything that's a model for atlantis as plato explained it

00:05:58.160 | it's akrotiri akrotiri the ancient greek city so it says the settlement was destroyed in the

00:06:05.280 | theron eruption sometime in the 16th century bce and buried in volcanic ash which preserved the remains

00:06:12.720 | of the frescoes and many objects and artworks so we don't know how advanced that civilization was

00:06:19.360 | no but we can walk around the ruins and see that it's got streets it's got plumbing it's got little

00:06:25.680 | sconces for uh for torches at night it was a vibrant city with uh with a lot of especially in terms of

00:06:35.040 | hydraulic engineering it's it's very advanced for being 3500 years old so if you check out here's an

00:06:43.440 | image of the uh excavation what a project it's an amazing place and you can tell that it's just part

00:06:51.920 | of it because it it's pretty close to where the crater begins so the city itself was probably much

00:06:57.760 | larger so in this case there's a lot of evidence but like we said there could be there could be

00:07:02.720 | civilizations that there is no there's very little evidence of because of the natural environment that

00:07:08.160 | destroys all the evidence right and i think akrotiri is actually a great example of that because here

00:07:13.200 | we have the side that did preserve that looks amazing but we know there was more of the city

00:07:19.280 | that was completely obliterated it was shot chunks of that city are probably in the walls of crete 70

00:07:26.160 | miles away and uh you know plato says that it it sunk it was on an island and it sunk well that's

00:07:32.960 | exactly what happened to akrotiri i think this is what plato was referring to if it does exist at least

00:07:39.920 | the model of it i think this is probably what he was talking about and there could be other

00:07:44.800 | civilizations of which plato has never written right that we have no record of and uh it's humbling to

00:07:51.920 | think that entire civilizations with all the dreams the hope the technological innovation the the wars the

00:07:58.480 | conflicts the the political tensions all of that uh the social interactions the hierarchies all of that

00:08:05.040 | the art can be just destroyed like that and forgotten completely lost to ancient history

00:08:12.480 | i reflect upon that often as an archaeologist i think about the this great country that i live in and

00:08:19.200 | love and all the things we've achieved but you know we're we're a baby historically speaking we've been

00:08:25.600 | around 200 years heck a lot of the cities i study in uh central and south america they had a run of you

00:08:33.600 | know 800 a thousand years and now they're ruins but we're we're barely getting started in terms of

00:08:40.320 | historical civilizations so humans homo sapiens evolved uh but they didn't start civilizations right away

00:08:49.760 | there's a long period of time there's a long period of time when they did not form these complex societies

00:08:55.120 | so how did we let's say 300 000 years ago in africa actually go from there to creating civilizations

00:09:04.000 | i think that a lot of human uh evolution had to do with uh the the pressures that their environment put upon them

00:09:14.480 | and you know a lot of things start changing right around 12 000 years ago and that's when you know our last

00:09:22.640 | ice age really ended i think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them

00:09:29.600 | into especially finding new ways of subsistence here in the americas a huge thing that happened

00:09:36.480 | was all the megafauna went away when the climate changed enough the the mammoths died out and the bison

00:09:44.240 | died out and there was just uh they had to come up with different ways of doing things we were hunters

00:09:51.520 | and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting and we got things we got from gathering and in the americas

00:09:58.080 | when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits

00:10:04.000 | there you know the the gathering started to be a much more important thing and i think that led to

00:10:11.760 | figuring out hey we could actually grow certain things and gardens turned into crops turned into

00:10:17.920 | intensive crops and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area

00:10:24.320 | they didn't have to roam around anymore and that's where we get the first sedentary communities which

00:10:30.960 | means they they stayed in the same place all year long for the vast majority of human existence

00:10:37.760 | we've been nomadic and we've done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the

00:10:44.800 | geographic region where they'd know okay you know in the mountains we'll in the we'll be in the summer in the mountains

00:10:51.280 | because there's berries and things and then in the winter we'll be down here and we'll hunt

00:10:55.120 | but they'd move so once humans figured out how to stay in a place i think there that's the initial

00:11:03.600 | trigger to what would become civilization what do you think is uh there's a lot of questions i want to ask

00:11:09.680 | here what do you think is the motivation for societies is it the the carrot or the stick so you said like

00:11:15.680 | is it like when resources run out when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody then you have

00:11:20.720 | to figure stuff out or is it more the carrot of like there's always this kind of human spirit that

00:11:27.200 | wants to explore that wants to uh maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this

00:11:33.680 | with uh the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas sort of

00:11:39.520 | technological innovation let's call it well you know i i have an explorer's heart so i'm kind of uh you

00:11:46.720 | know by i'm biased right you know i i do think that that we have an innate desire to see what's on the

00:11:54.320 | horizon yeah and to impress other people with our achievements things like that i we're we're social

00:12:01.040 | beings um that's that that's really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together so i i

00:12:08.400 | think that it's much more the carrot than the stick when things get ugly the stick comes out but usually

00:12:14.240 | the carrot does the job the really interesting story is how the first people came to the americas

00:12:20.560 | i mean to me that's pretty gangster to go from asia all the way potentially during the ice

00:12:29.760 | age or maybe at the end of the ice age or during that whole period not knowing what the world looks

00:12:34.320 | like going into the unknown can you talk to that process how did the first people come to the americas

00:12:39.360 | well first off i agree with you that was pretty gangster i mean that's that's that's a hard place

00:12:45.280 | to live i i listened to some of your podcasts is that guy uh jordan jonas yeah the mustard but i i

00:12:51.040 | wouldn't have made a crossing there yeah well there you go like the fact that those guys exist

00:12:56.560 | that somebody like jordan jonas exists people that uh survive and thrive in these harsh conditions that

00:13:03.680 | that's an indication that it's possible but yeah so when when do you think and how did the first people

00:13:09.600 | come the traditional theories are still somewhat valid or at least you know on the table that when that

00:13:18.480 | land bridge occurred that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the

00:13:25.280 | game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across the thing that has

00:13:30.880 | changed is how early that happened dna has been a total game changer for archaeology you know we we get

00:13:39.520 | all these uh evolutionary tracks that we could never see before when i was a young archaeologist i had i

00:13:46.720 | would have never dreamed we'd have the information we have now and that information a lot of it's coming

00:13:52.720 | out of texas a and m we see the traditional like 12 500 years ago that there was a migration but now

00:14:02.880 | we're seeing one that's almost certainly happening closer to 30 000 years ago and now the thing that

00:14:10.640 | seems like madness but might be true is that it could have been as early as 60. a lot of the dna things are

00:14:17.440 | suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. and when i was a younger

00:14:25.520 | archaeologist it was heresy to go beyond this 12 500 you're a wacko if you said that but now it's really

00:14:34.880 | very clear that they came over at least by 30 000 and the bridge opened and closed and opened and closed

00:14:41.120 | that's during the ice age right

00:14:45.840 | i mean that's crazy right that's that is crazy yeah i mean you know they didn't roll in and

00:14:51.120 | immediately make new york but there were people and there were definitely not people here before

00:14:56.240 | that which is fascinating the uh the when the when the bridge closed dna mutated and so we have specific

00:15:05.680 | kinds of haplogroups that are here in the americas that don't exist otherwise and that same haplogroup game has

00:15:14.160 | been showing us more and more that people came across siberia it's not africa it's not western europe

00:15:22.480 | those are still you know they've become kind of fringe theories but they're not totally eradicated

00:15:27.760 | i have dna is uh developing science as well and i think we all need to keep that in mind that it's not

00:15:37.440 | like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers and sometimes like in any science

00:15:44.080 | a breakthrough puts a stew two steps backwards not forwards so i think you know we don't need to have

00:15:50.880 | too much faith in the models that are now being created through dna but they are pointing in the direction

00:15:58.160 | of everybody came across from siberia that all native american people are of asiatic descent

00:16:05.680 | do you think it was a gradual process if it's like 30 to 60 000 years ago was it just gradual movement

00:16:15.440 | of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals or was it like one explorer that pushed the the tribe to

00:16:25.600 | just go go go go and go across maybe across a hundred years travel all the way uh across maybe into north

00:16:35.840 | america into north north america where canada is now and then sort of like big leaps in movement versus

00:16:42.080 | gradual movement i think it was big leaps and now this is just you know uh mostly guess i'll i'll admit

00:16:50.080 | but i think that it much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium

00:16:58.560 | that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more uh slow and steady pattern and

00:17:06.480 | then something big will happen again i do think that uh the early people went as far as they could go

00:17:14.000 | and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years one of the fascinating

00:17:20.800 | things that dna is showing us which actually blood types were showing us way before that is that the

00:17:28.000 | oldest people in the americas are in south america the ones that are uh that got separated early and didn't

00:17:37.600 | mix their dna like the people in the amazon most of those guys have uh o blood type and their haplogroup d

00:17:47.520 | which is the oldest one that entered the the us and what are they doing down there if i do believe they

00:17:54.960 | came across the bering strait i don't think it's very we have no real evidence to say they they came in mass

00:18:01.600 | across uh oceania so they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to south america so there's

00:18:11.600 | some kind of some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore so if you had to bet all your money

00:18:18.080 | it happened like tens of thousands of years ago but at a very rapid pace there's these explorers that went

00:18:26.400 | all the way to south america and there established their kind of more stable existence and from there

00:18:35.440 | south america mesoamerica north america was kind of gradually expanded into that area like the next

00:18:41.680 | waves came down and did north america and central america and the very first wave made it all the

00:18:48.560 | way down to south america and got isolated isolated and then mixed in with the next groups that came

00:18:54.480 | that's fascinating kind of like there's a there's an interesting correlate in uh

00:19:00.000 | in europe where today everybody feels like uh celtic people are from ireland but actually celtic people

00:19:10.800 | started in eastern europe and it was the entire area and when rome kind of swept everything and and rome

00:19:18.800 | was now the the ruler of the day it was only that far edge of the celtic world ireland that they were

00:19:27.120 | like ah we're we're not gonna mess with those guys on that island we'll leave them be so now it looks like

00:19:32.480 | that's the heart of celtic tradition but actually it's the fringe so if it is 60 000 years ago these are

00:19:41.840 | really early humans yeah and there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about

00:19:48.640 | uh very old carbon 14 dates in the amazon and in the andes area that everybody just dismissed this no

00:19:57.360 | he didn't get a date of 40 000 years but i think we're going to come back around to start readdressing

00:20:03.920 | some of these based on new evidence at hand and that's the interesting thing is you know the early

00:20:10.400 | humans spread throughout the world and then like you said perhaps they've gotten isolated and then

00:20:16.640 | civilizations sprung from there and they all have similar elements even though they were isolated

00:20:22.000 | that's really interesting that's really interesting that there's multiple cradles of civilization

00:20:27.840 | not just one like one good idea that those ideas naturally come up those structures naturally come up

00:20:38.000 | and i i wonder whether you know the similarities that all those cradles have it could be uh you know a

00:20:46.800 | shared much deeper past that they all have or it could be a more kind of star trek thing where uh you

00:20:55.600 | know captain kirk was always talking about the uh the theory of parallel human development that humans across

00:21:02.720 | the universe go through certain stages of development and that that could be the answer to it

00:21:08.000 | which which one do you lean on which which one do you lean towards i think it's a case-by-case

00:21:13.920 | thing i think if we look globally i lean much more towards the human parallel development but if i look

00:21:20.800 | just to the americas and we have a shorter time period where you know the the things that become major

00:21:26.880 | civilizations now now now i'll say you know up to 30 000 years ago which is still a blip in the time of

00:21:34.800 | of humans um i think that there were shared things that those people came over with from asia and that

00:21:45.280 | as they got separated that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and uh cultural

00:21:53.440 | customs that we can see i i'm a big proponent that there are uh commonalities in all the cultures of

00:22:00.960 | the americas that lead back to and point to a a single distant origin you've spoken about the lost cradle

00:22:09.440 | civilization south america so uh south america is not often talked about as one of the cradles

00:22:16.560 | of civilization south america mesoamerica can you explain well we have very early stuff in south

00:22:23.360 | america you're right i mean you know especially as uh uh as an american our country's so big and you know

00:22:31.120 | the we are so far removed from these places we don't even think about it but more and more we're seeing

00:22:37.520 | things that that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about like egypt and mesopotamia

00:22:44.800 | um there are things it's all on the peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization someday

00:22:53.840 | we might start talking about the amazon more and more but right now what we've got are things that date

00:23:00.000 | back into the 3000s bce along the coast of peru and there are big stone built pyramids and temples

00:23:12.160 | and they're they they're amazingly isolated even now that we've found them uh some of them like corral

00:23:19.520 | is one of the most famous ones just north of lima we've known about it for a couple decades now how old

00:23:25.360 | it is but every time i visit there it's like i've visited the moon there's absolutely nobody there not

00:23:32.560 | for miles i it's uh amazing how such an a such a discovery was made and yet still nobody goes to see

00:23:41.360 | it it's not easy to get to so you think there's a bunch of locations like that some may not have been

00:23:46.400 | discovered in the peru area oh there are so many peru has tons that desert gets really ugly quick and it

00:23:53.920 | buries things completely there are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched

00:24:00.240 | you know when people hear the name pyramids they think of egypt immediately but egypt has got about

00:24:07.600 | 140 pyramids and we have pretty much found them all peru has thousands thousands of pyramids and now

00:24:15.680 | they weren't built of uh a lot not all of them were built of stone some of them were adobe bricks which

00:24:22.240 | have weathered terribly so now they don't look they're they're not exciting places to visit today

00:24:27.200 | you know what's funny too you you know we started off talking about you know whether i think there's

00:24:32.640 | a lost civilization out there uh there are definitely things that are still to be discovered but there

00:24:40.560 | are some things that were discovered a hundred years ago and archaeologists or back then they they

00:24:46.080 | call themselves antiquarians just kind of passed over coral was one of these sites because the the coast of

00:24:53.120 | peru has some of those pyramids that were made by the moche are full of of gold and beautiful ceramics

00:25:02.720 | and you know things that you can sell for big money but coral was found a long time ago but the archaeologist

00:25:11.040 | was like god no gold no ceramics forget about it this place is no good we can't sell anything here

00:25:17.760 | and then about the 1970s or 80s somebody said hey no ceramics is that older than the invention of ceramics

00:25:28.240 | shit we better go take another look at that place so what's the dating on coral coral i think starts at

00:25:34.320 | about 3200 bce and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it uh until about

00:25:44.640 | 1800 bce so what's the story behind like looking at some of these images what's the story about

00:25:51.920 | constructions like that what was the idea that thing isn't that amazing yeah oh that gosh i mean

00:25:58.560 | it should be some sort of you know i'll be a flaky archaeologist like you know this is uh this is a

00:26:04.400 | place where where rituals took place that's so many things we say are so just painfully vague and

00:26:11.520 | that's about you know what we got and a place like this i know the one we're looking at here i've been

00:26:16.480 | here a couple of times in the pyramid behind it the rubble's built in a way where the building won't

00:26:23.440 | rock apart this is a very uh earthquake prone place but the buildings haven't fallen because

00:26:29.520 | they make these uh net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wiggle around and don't allow the

00:26:38.560 | building to fall down and inside these we've also found a couple of things that were uh babies that were

00:26:46.880 | human babies that were buried in there and i don't think there's a lot of people that see that and go oh

00:26:52.480 | look at that they were sacrificing babies these monsters i think a lot of the things that are

00:26:58.080 | interpreted as baby sacrifices corrals evidence being one of them i think it's more about the the tragic

00:27:06.480 | nature of infant mortality in the past it was a lot more common there were cultures that didn't even

00:27:13.680 | really properly name their kid until they got to five because chances were they were going to die and so i

00:27:20.320 | think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as

00:27:25.920 | sacrifices i think they're putting them in special places because they they mourn the death of their

00:27:31.840 | kids and it just happened a lot more frequently then one of the things you said that really surprised me is

00:27:38.640 | that pyramids that pyramids were built in peru possibly hundreds of years before they were built in egypt

00:27:45.120 | that true absolutely absolutely in fact that's crazy there's one that's now pushing uh 6 000 bce

00:27:55.600 | like that's thousands of years before the stuff in egypt and that one's called waka prieta and it was not a

00:28:05.120 | a it was not an egyptian pyramid it was but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before

00:28:11.840 | what do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid the fact that it can withstand the elements

00:28:19.920 | uh structurally that kind of thing is it uh yeah why why do humans build pyramids and why do they build it

00:28:28.640 | in all kinds of different locations in the world well you know my my root answer is is is pretty boring

00:28:35.760 | really a lot of people ask me why are there pyramids all over the planet how is that is that a coincidence

00:28:42.000 | i mean who yeah i think that uh when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement you end up

00:28:52.400 | building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top and that turns into a pyramid uh you know

00:28:59.360 | any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down and

00:29:04.640 | if he wants one that's going to stay and be tall he ends up making something with a fat base and a

00:29:09.200 | and a tiny top and i think that uh you know building something big and tall together is one of those

00:29:17.360 | those human things like we built that that will be here after we're gone people remember who we were

00:29:24.160 | we are all if there's any human commonality it's it's fear of our own deaths and that we were nothing

00:29:31.120 | and no one will ever remember us i think that the first big monuments like that were probably

00:29:37.040 | uh a group of people saying we're going to do something that people will remember forever

00:29:42.800 | now that being said you remember we were just talking about waka prieta and this one that's almost

00:29:47.280 | 6000 bc now is the first one that one's a funny case we just talked about all these lofty goals but

00:29:55.840 | actually i'm pretty sure that waka prieta's first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash

00:30:05.600 | i think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town

00:30:10.160 | and it stunk it's it's on the coast it stunk like fish and somebody said if we just bury this thing

00:30:16.400 | with dirt it won't smell anymore and then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to

00:30:21.920 | everybody and then said well it's squishy you know if we if we cap it with clay then it will really not

00:30:28.320 | smell i really think that the very first pyramids in peru were about trash management

00:30:36.560 | talk about plating huh yeah but then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the

00:30:42.240 | sort of the enormity of the construction and they're like oh we should maybe the next guy thought maybe

00:30:47.200 | we should keep building these kinds of things yeah yeah in uh not not to jump ahead but in north america

00:30:54.160 | you know where they also made pyramids there's this interesting evolution where there were these piles of

00:31:01.280 | shells along rivers and along the coastlines people ate a lot of shells that was an easy thing to collect

00:31:07.760 | and eat so these piles of shells would be near communities and they probably became landmarks but

00:31:14.480 | eventually they started burying their dead inside those two probably again you know about stink and about

00:31:22.240 | you know well we don't want the dogs to eat them maybe put them in the middle of the shell pile but then

00:31:27.280 | that all of a sudden became this like that's where my grandfather's body is that's where great

00:31:33.120 | grandfather's body is and all of a sudden people started being attached to place not just for the

00:31:38.560 | resources but for the shared memories of their ancestors so when the very first pyramid was built in

00:31:45.440 | uh ohio area by the adina people it was built out of dirt but it's full of bodies and i think it's an

00:31:54.480 | echo of a old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds so where and who were the

00:32:04.000 | first civilizations in south america as in america well you know i think we're still piecing that together

00:32:12.480 | coming back to the first things we talked about i think we're still missing a lot of stuff especially in

00:32:18.320 | south america it just keeps getting older and older part of the reason it's hard to answer that question

00:32:24.080 | is you know at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture we have in the americas

00:32:32.240 | this long period of time that we call the the paleo indian time where they were hunting mega fauna and then

00:32:41.840 | when those went away we get into this even longer period of time called the archaic where they're

00:32:47.200 | just hunters and gatherers sometimes somebody's coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead

00:32:52.400 | they go back and forth with different hunting tools but really nothing changes for thousands of years

00:32:58.240 | and then finally they start developing into these larger groups which for the most part has to do with

00:33:07.040 | agriculture it used to be archaeology that was just the end all be all civilization starts with the

00:33:13.520 | invention of agriculture and we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm but that's

00:33:20.640 | been discounted peru was a big part of that that area of coral it's connected to another city on the coast

00:33:28.240 | called aspero and aspero starts about the same time but they're all about fishing they have no farming

00:33:37.360 | and coral who's up river from them is farming but funny enough they're not really farming food

00:33:42.400 | they're farming cotton and they're making nets and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast

00:33:48.880 | for the fish so it's not as simple as it's just agriculture anymore but it is i think still rooted in

00:33:57.440 | how can we feed more people than just our family how can we together create a food abundance

00:34:04.240 | so we're no longer scared about running out of food so is it possible which is something you've argued

00:34:11.760 | that civilization started in the amazon in the jungle i do think so i think religion in south america began

00:34:23.040 | in the amazon i think there were people there very old there's actually uh the earliest pottery in all

00:34:30.880 | of the americas all these places that we have civilizations that grew up you know where the oldest pottery is

00:34:37.520 | the middle of the amazon so there's interesting cultures developing in the amazon so religion

00:34:44.720 | you would say preceded civilization in south america the uh the corral and aspero that i was just talking

00:34:52.400 | about it's weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have we have those pyramids

00:34:59.600 | and things that we call temples but we don't really know what went on in there and there's no hints

00:35:05.440 | of uh religious iconography uh ceremonies nothing like that the first stuff that we get is right when

00:35:14.320 | that culture ends about 1800 bce this culture called uh shavin starts up and they their main temple is up in

00:35:24.720 | the andes in this place of uh least path of re least resistance between the amazon and the coast it's about

00:35:33.600 | three days walk either way from this this place where this temple is that's where we start seeing the very

00:35:40.400 | first religious iconography and it's all over the temples there are things that are definitely from the

00:35:46.960 | coast but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles and those don't come from the coast

00:35:56.000 | all of those things are coming out of the amazon i mean religion is a really powerful idea religions

00:36:02.160 | are one of the most powerful ideas they're the strongest myths that tie people together and to you

00:36:07.760 | it's possible that this powerful uh idea in south america started in the amazon i do i do think it did um

00:36:18.640 | and you're right ideas are more powerful than weapons but archaeology can't see them at all we can see

00:36:28.000 | sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they they create and lead to but there's an

00:36:36.000 | interpretation problem are we right about what idea created this that those are things that archaeology

00:36:42.000 | just can't get at that's one of the challenges of archaeology and looking into ancient histories

00:36:47.760 | you're trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of architecture but understand what

00:36:53.600 | was going on inside their mind that's really what what i'm in it for trying to understand these people

00:37:00.160 | and it's real detective work and we know we're dealing with uh a totally flawed record we only

00:37:06.800 | have what could preserve the test of time you know if we look around this room here if uh if 2000 years

00:37:14.560 | of weathering happened in this room what would be left and what would we think happened here

00:37:21.280 | right right right right but there's not in this room but if you look at thousands of rooms like it maybe

00:37:30.000 | you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled the world uh the

00:37:37.040 | religions the different ideas uh tell me about this feng deity one of your more controversial ideas is that

00:37:44.240 | you believe that the rule the religions there's a thread that connects the different civilizations the

00:37:51.920 | societies of the andean region and the religion that practice is more monotheistic than is currently

00:38:01.440 | believed in the mainstream that is exactly what i think and it's i think it's all about this fang deity who

00:38:08.000 | somewhere thousands of years ago crawled his way out of the amazon up into the andes and

00:38:13.360 | a religion took hold that could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the amazon but

00:38:20.320 | he is the one creator deity in my opinion through all of these cultures and the people in the amazon still

00:38:28.720 | talk about him there his name is viho masse in some groups but they say that his uh his emissaries on

00:38:36.800 | earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity why is the current mainstream belief is that

00:38:42.880 | a lot of the religions are not monotheistic well there are bona fide uh pantheons you know greece had

00:38:51.280 | one egypt had one mesopotamia had one lots of the early religions of the old world were

00:38:58.560 | pantheons and i think that was part of the problem the earliest archaeologists walked in there with a

00:39:05.440 | preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons and so they went to the art looking for

00:39:11.200 | them and they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun god and all these

00:39:19.280 | things but when i look at the art and i was trained by a person right here in austin texas as an art historian

00:39:27.600 | you follow certain uh diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time and when i look at

00:39:35.520 | it and use that methodology there's a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and

00:39:42.960 | feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt he's he's got really identifiable traits he also

00:39:50.640 | likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around but he's the fanged deity and he's there

00:39:56.880 | he shows up in chavin de juantar the capital of that chavin culture and he keeps showing up through

00:40:04.560 | every culture even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium right up to the inca the inca have

00:40:14.960 | a creator deity they call viracocha but viracocha is the fang deity he is when we do see him by the time

00:40:25.600 | you get to inca they do this kind of like almost uh islamic thing where they say you you can't understand

00:40:32.880 | the face of viracocha so when they do put him in a cosmogram they'll make him just a blob like he's just

00:40:41.360 | unknowable but he's at the very top i think we're misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to

00:40:47.680 | say were deities as just supernatural beings if we flip the mirror on christianity and take a look at

00:40:55.520 | it which of course christianity's monotheistic right it would be heresy to say otherwise but who are all

00:41:01.840 | these other characters who are all these angels and demons and you know jesus christ and i mean i don't

00:41:08.960 | even know who the holy spirit is but he's some sort of supernatural being but it's that monotheistic

00:41:15.280 | system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not god that's where i think the

00:41:23.920 | crux of us misunderstanding ancient andean art is so what is the process of analyzing art through time

00:41:32.880 | to try to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture you just see what

00:41:38.640 | shows up over and over and over and over well certainly without the uh advent of writing

00:41:45.200 | uh depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them and there are certain you know what we call

00:41:55.360 | diagnostic elements like we can we can pull apart the same sort of thing in uh like in the greek pantheon

00:42:04.080 | you know you know by their dress and what they're holding what the different gods are you can tell hades

00:42:09.280 | from from zeus by the different things they're holding you know lightning bolts or tridents or whatever

00:42:16.160 | it is so they all have these diagnostic elements to them so that's how art history goes about

00:42:22.000 | analyzing art over time once once we can put it in a chronological sequence then we can say

00:42:28.320 | okay here's here's a deity here in shavin culture now we move forward 500 years now we're in moche and nazca

00:42:39.200 | culture you know who are who where are the deities here and what i see is that same guy with not just

00:42:47.840 | one or two traits but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of

00:42:55.200 | years in each one of these cultures he's got circular eyes he's got a fanged mouth he's got claws on his hands

00:43:04.720 | and feet he's a he's a humanoid but he also has uh snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes

00:43:12.480 | coming off of his belt and then not so much in shavin but as it goes forward he starts carting around

00:43:20.320 | uh severed heads human severed heads so they're like in the old literature uh the moche will call

00:43:29.840 | him the decapitator deity but then they have these other like oh here's the crab deity and here's the

00:43:36.400 | fox deity but if you look at them like the crab deity is just that guy's face coming off of a crab

00:43:43.600 | and the fox deity is that guy's face coming off of a fox so i think in on that particular instance i

00:43:50.800 | explain it similar to what zeus did you know how zeus was able to like you know turn into whatever

00:43:56.240 | animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted and he showed up in all sorts of forms but he was

00:44:00.800 | always zeus i think that the uh the fang deity manifests himself through people and animals

00:44:08.800 | throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don't have anymore

00:44:15.200 | and across hundreds of years thousands of years from shavin to mocha to inca as you're saying right

00:44:22.240 | wari has them too tiwanako that's that famous place pumapunku he's all over there i wonder how

00:44:29.920 | those ideas spread and morph of this fang deity i think people walked and proselytized and places like

00:44:40.080 | shavin there's a later one in inca times called uh pachacamac that are pilgrimage places where people come in

00:44:47.920 | to be healed if they're sick but also just to pay homage to the powers that be so

00:44:53.840 | uh shavin was a place where people from the amazon and people from the coast were all coming together in

00:45:00.640 | fact we saw it in the archaeology there there's these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with

00:45:08.320 | the fang deity all over them that have like one labyrinth they'll have all pottery the next labyrinth

00:45:14.000 | they'll have a bunch of animal bones the next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone so

00:45:18.720 | people are showing up and giving this tribute and they're learning and then they're going back to

00:45:24.960 | their community so i think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage

00:45:31.680 | spots do somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fang deity do we know much about the

00:45:38.960 | relationship they had with the fang deity and like their conception of the powers of the fang deity is

00:45:46.880 | it were they afraid of the fang deities and all-knowing god is it uh something that brings joy and harvest

00:45:58.080 | or is it something that you're supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans to to keep it keep at

00:46:04.640 | the way i think he has two sides of the coin like a lot of the the hindu gods are you know one aspect

00:46:11.520 | is terrible the other aspect is lovely um i think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see

00:46:18.160 | him as a fierce warrior taking people's heads off and he is a jaguar which in and of itself implies a

00:46:24.320 | certain power and ferocity but then there are other funny things about him like he is definitely involved

00:46:31.440 | in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with uh sex acts

00:46:37.280 | when it comes to the moche there's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with

00:46:43.680 | women or men um and some of them show their faces transforming into that fang deity like he is acting through them

00:46:54.640 | but the the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fang deity has a little puppy

00:47:02.400 | he has a puppy that's like just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on him in various scenes

00:47:08.800 | they see him again and again sometimes he's in these these healing sex scenes in fact i tracked that

00:47:15.600 | puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where the uh where a priest was having sex with somebody

00:47:22.720 | in a house and there's a fang deity and there's a puppy just scratching at the door like hey you forgot

00:47:28.480 | me and then finally one day i found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fang deity

00:47:35.920 | i was like no he really is very involved in this what is this weird puppy so he's okay yeah he likes

00:47:41.840 | to take heads off but he also has a puppy he adores this actually this is awesomely makes sense now

00:47:46.880 | because i i saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30 years ago on shamanism and motor civilization it reads

00:47:55.600 | the mocha are the major focus of this paper sex puppies and head hunting will be shown to be related

00:48:01.520 | to ancient mocha shamanism uh so now i understand i was like with the puppies puppies yeah

00:48:08.080 | all right uh and the head hunting that's the decapitator and i've added rock and roll to that list since

00:48:13.840 | actually which is rock and roll or you know music is also a big part of it they they oh interesting

00:48:19.760 | they they call spirits down there's this whole spirit world there's the ancestors

00:48:25.040 | and the the people that drink san pedro cactus juice kind of they don't talk about the fang deity

00:48:31.520 | anymore i think christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back you know it was

00:48:38.480 | unpopular to have a pagan deity so they don't talk about him much anymore though he's still around

00:48:43.920 | they're in like around trujillo they call him i iopec but um music play in the amazon they play flutes

00:48:54.400 | sometimes a chorus of women sing and that's supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony there's

00:49:01.200 | a spirit that's hurting the person that's sick and then the the priest or the shaman or the corandero

00:49:07.280 | whatever you want to call him has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out

00:49:14.320 | what's going on so when the music starts that's bringing those spirits in and people don't see them

00:49:22.000 | unless they've imbibed the san pedro cactus juice which is this hallucinogen which is in the amazon

00:49:30.000 | side it was ayahuasca on the amazon on the coast it was san pedro cactus but that's what allows you to

00:49:38.880 | actually see that other world yeah i i went to the amazon recently did ayahuasca uh very high dose of

00:49:47.040 | it bold move

00:49:48.720 | um when in rome well how far back does that go oh i i think longer than anybody can remember but i mean

00:49:59.360 | it's a natural plant that's been there forever i think that it's thousands and thousands of years that's

00:50:04.960 | another thing uh shavin de juantara was talking about where i think the things came the religion

00:50:10.560 | came from the amazon there's this wall on the back side that faces the amazon side so if you're entering

00:50:18.560 | the city from the amazon path you see this wall first and it's a bunch of faces that some of them are human

00:50:25.200 | some of them are total jaguar and some of them are trans forming in between but there's a group of them

00:50:32.080 | that are midway through transformation and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that's coming

00:50:41.120 | like down their face san pedro doesn't do that to you but ayahuasca does ayahuasca traditionally they'd

00:50:49.360 | take a blow gun and just shoot it up your nose or up your ass but it was a lot of times up your nose

00:50:56.080 | and when it shoots up your nose the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you

00:51:02.320 | and there are stone uh depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the back side of

00:51:09.280 | this temple from you know 3 000 years ago so that you think could have been a big component

00:51:15.840 | of the development of religion and shamanism i think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like

00:51:23.840 | they opened the mind now do you think that you know the stone ape theory uh do you think that actually

00:51:29.600 | could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of uh civilization in the americas yes i do though

00:51:39.600 | you know hallucinogens are not part of every uh ancient tradition in the world in fact strangely the

00:51:47.040 | majority of plants that that are actually psychotropic not just mood altering are from

00:51:53.520 | here in the americas there there are very few uh drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the

00:52:01.520 | americas of course now they're global and you know they're they can be grown all over the place but

00:52:07.280 | originally speaking very very few were outside of the americas so they were part of the experience

00:52:13.680 | here in a way that they just couldn't be in other places i wonder to what degree they were just part

00:52:19.280 | of a ritual and the creative force behind sort of art versus like literally

00:52:26.640 | the method by which you come up with ideas that define a civilization it's like the degree to which

00:52:34.880 | they had a role in the formation of civilizations it's kind of fun to think about psychedelics being

00:52:41.200 | like a critical role in formation of civilizations i think in terms of south america they probably

00:52:48.960 | really were um in north america where we're in a more northern climb here and there are less of them

00:52:55.360 | not so much at least in terms of psychedelics things like uh you know tobacco was always a big part of it

00:53:01.760 | but a lot of the you know there's there's more than one way to meet to reach a hallucinatory state the

00:53:08.560 | hard way is starvation uh sleep deprivation and for the the maya for example would go

00:53:16.320 | sleep deprivation starvation and then they cut themselves very badly and that loss of blood we

00:53:23.760 | believe triggered hallucinations and visions nothing to do with drugs i would much prefer the drugs route

00:53:31.440 | it's there's it's the result not the uh the tools aren't the thing that creates insight it's the the

00:53:39.200 | result so you're getting to you know it it's hallucinogens are poisoning us they're killing us

00:53:44.960 | that's you know it's a it's a near death state and people of the americas believed sleeping was entering

00:53:53.520 | that other world death you entered this other world and that when you took this mighty dose of poison it was

00:54:00.880 | helping you enter that other world for a period of time yeah as tom wade said in that one song i like

00:54:07.360 | my town with a little drop of poison so maybe that poison is a good uh catalyst for invention so who

00:54:15.440 | were the early first sort of mother cultures mother civilizations in south america like what what is

00:54:25.200 | if we look chronologically is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged that picture is

00:54:34.240 | evolving i mean forever it was just the shavin people that we've been talking about the ones with

00:54:39.840 | all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture and they certainly did transmit a lot

00:54:45.760 | of stuff but then all of a sudden we find uh coral the next one that we've barely even begun looking at

00:54:53.760 | but it's probably older than coral is sachin culture i was just poking around there last year and

00:55:00.320 | just just from the bus on the highway i could see like that's a pyramid out there well oh there's

00:55:08.720 | another one and i know how old the stuff we have studied there is it's again

00:55:13.280 | 3000 bc we're just barely beginning to understand them corral frustrates me to no end the lack of art

00:55:21.520 | there that's we've got you know stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on and they didn't have the

00:55:29.440 | courtesy to leave me a bunch of art i can interpret so i don't know what those people believed right so

00:55:35.120 | one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art the stories told through the art

00:55:39.760 | and then hopefully uh deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing that's our most fruitful place

00:55:45.760 | to try to get at this elusive ideas yeah and it sucks when they don't have art if we just go back

00:55:53.760 | to the amazon you've mentioned that it's possible that there's a lost civilization that existed in the

00:55:58.960 | amazon so it's carried a lot of names lost city of z or el dorado do you think it's possible it existed

00:56:06.320 | well city of z and el dorado are in pretty different places that one el dorado the the ideas of where it

00:56:14.560 | is kind of center around towards colombia okay and the city of z is named after a region of brazil called

00:56:22.720 | the shingu and so those those are uh a an america worth of distance apart you know the entire people

00:56:32.400 | don't really think about it on the map but the entire united states would fit inside the amazon

00:56:38.160 | that's how big that place is yeah and these two are on either end but both of them have evidence of

00:56:44.880 | civilizations these big you know it's it's it's lowland and it floods all the time so what they

00:56:51.120 | did is they'd make these big mounds and then they'd make huge causeways between mounds so they could

00:56:57.760 | walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated and a bunch of that stuff has been found

00:57:04.240 | in the shingu area like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people again you know it's not

00:57:11.920 | stone built and it's been under the forest forever so it's very torn up but it's there now you know

00:57:19.920 | brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now and a a thing that i think is completed now is brazil

00:57:27.040 | and bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more

00:57:36.480 | land which has found more of these what we call like uh geometric earthworks so there's more and more

00:57:43.920 | evidence of these civilizations it's not a it's not it could be there it's there for sure by the way the

00:57:50.720 | people who are trying to protect the rainforest really hate the highway one of the things i learned is if

00:57:55.600 | you build a road uh loggers will come yep and they will start cutting stuff down now from an archaeology

00:58:04.320 | perspective if you cut down trees you get to discover things but from a sort of protect a very precious

00:58:11.280 | rainforest perspective it's obviously the opposite way but it is interesting i've seen where loggers cut

00:58:19.520 | through the forest and then they uh and when they leave the forest heals itself very quickly so quickly

00:58:28.160 | and you know you just think that across decades you expand that to centuries and it's like you could see

00:58:36.880 | how a civilization could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest and it happened for sure in the amazon

00:58:44.000 | yeah you know they're one of the ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where people were in

00:58:50.160 | the amazon because yes the uh the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence but they're finding

00:58:59.520 | more and more of these places that they call uh terra preta which is black earth and they're huge swaths of

00:59:07.680 | it so uh i guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes and what they're saying is that that

00:59:18.320 | really dark earth couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes that sometime in the

00:59:24.240 | distant past that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the point

00:59:30.720 | where they totally turned the soil black and it's much more enriched and uh when i when i took a trip

00:59:38.480 | into the amazon i took i went from manaos up the river the black river a couple of days and went and met some

00:59:45.360 | different communities and i asked them about this black earth and they were like yeah that's why we're here

00:59:52.320 | sometimes we move our village but when we move we look for the terra preta and that's where we're

00:59:59.600 | going to put our village because that's a place that all of our gardens work the other places they don't

01:00:04.560 | one of the things you talked about literally just asked you have to ask the right question

01:00:08.160 | and uh the stories all the all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you

01:00:14.560 | yeah there's so many of them you know the the thing that excites the world about archaeology right now

01:00:20.800 | is gobekli tepi and this you know 10 000 now koran tepi is 11 000 the whole area is called the tas tepler

01:00:29.040 | we only found it a couple of decades ago but it was just you know a archaeologist roaming through the

01:00:35.120 | area and ask a sheep herder hey you know you guys know where anything ancient is oh yeah let me let me

01:00:40.800 | show you this and then all of a sudden we've got a lost civilization and the and the shepherds always knew

01:00:46.320 | where it was just nobody asked him so speaking of gobekli tepi uh what do you think about the work of

01:00:52.560 | graham hancock who also believes that uh there's a lost civilization in the amazon well uh i've met graham

01:01:01.600 | um and personally i like him he's a nice guy got a nice sense of humor and i think he's smart

01:01:06.880 | um and and i also think he is a a very good researcher he and i are working on the same

01:01:15.680 | set of facts the differences are interpretations i do not believe graham's uh idea that a single

01:01:25.200 | now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them i just don't see that on a number of levels

01:01:31.520 | artifact wise technology wise art historical analysis so i think his research is great um i think that he's

01:01:41.520 | he's very well read in fact better read than a lot of my colleagues but uh his conclusions i disagree with

01:01:48.720 | and he and i have talked about this and uh had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agreed

01:01:55.360 | to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation that would be a fun uh argument to

01:02:02.560 | be a fly on the wall for uh so he he believes he's proposed as possible that the amazon jungle is uh

01:02:10.000 | sort of a man-made garden so it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization is there any degree to

01:02:18.400 | which that could be possible frankly i agree with him i mean it's just like what i was just talking

01:02:24.400 | about the the it's the conclusion part that we differ from sure but the facts that he's basing that on

01:02:30.960 | are that terra preta are the huge geometric earthworks are the ever-increasing evidence of them they are now

01:02:39.200 | from you know the bottom of bolivia to uh guyana they're everywhere every time we open up the jungle

01:02:47.920 | we find these big works so yes there was a vast civilization that was there how advanced they were

01:02:55.200 | is uh is a question and also you know a perspective thing graham really focuses in on what we don't know

01:03:07.440 | and what could be what's the just to educate me what's what's the key idea that he's proposing that

01:03:13.920 | you disagree with is that it was the level of advancement the civilization was or how large and

01:03:19.360 | centralized it was uh my main point of disagreement is that his and his ideas evolve like everybody's you

01:03:26.400 | know it no no scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it

01:03:34.080 | until the day they die his ideas are evolving but his ideas remain a core of them are that there was a

01:03:41.920 | very advanced single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions and uh the

01:03:51.520 | the younger dryer uh dryest hypothesis is part of that most recently he used to not say that now he's into

01:03:58.480 | this meteor thing but he believes that that civilization was destroyed but that uh members of it escaped this

01:04:11.120 | cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to cede all of the world civilizations for the next

01:04:18.400 | revival there's where i disagree with him i think these were independent civilizations that grew up

01:04:25.520 | uh in their own ways that they were not ceded by some more advanced civilization from the past and that they all

01:04:33.840 | hold things in common because they have this common ancestry of uh you know in his early books he suggested

01:04:41.440 | it's the it's atlantis i don't think he suggests that anymore but he still hangs on to the single advanced

01:04:50.240 | now completely lost civilization and you know archaeology is so we we don't have you know we're all of our

01:04:58.640 | ideas are theories very few of them are facts and we're not you know we could have the story wrong but

01:05:04.240 | one thing we're real good at is finding stuff i mean we find fish scales so i find it just

01:05:10.800 | too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large

01:05:18.560 | that we can't even find a potsherd from yeah and of course it is a compelling story that there's a

01:05:27.440 | single civilization from which all of this came from because the alternative is you know the idea that

01:05:34.720 | we came across the bearing strait from asia went all the way down to south america and got isolated

01:05:43.280 | and created all these marvelous sophisticated civilizations and ideas including religious ideas

01:05:51.520 | that looks similar to other you know everybody has a flood myth right right so like there's a lot of

01:05:59.600 | similarities everybody building pyramids yeah uh but there could be a lot of other explanations and for

01:06:10.640 | uh even if it's a simple compelling explanation there has to be evidence for it right and what would that

01:06:16.080 | evidence that's the bottom line i mean everything's theories where we're and and as responsible

01:06:20.880 | scientists we're trying to disprove our theories we are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories

01:06:26.880 | that's that's one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps where we're supposed

01:06:33.680 | to be disproving what we think is happening not proving it yeah you don't want to lean into the mystery

01:06:42.000 | too much i mean most of it's essential it's such a weird discipline because you're operating in a

01:06:47.840 | it's like really in a dark room you're feeling around a dark room so it's mostly mystery

01:06:52.000 | i would say a lot of sciences operate we're in a mostly well-lit room it's like a dark corner

01:07:00.720 | and you're kind of uh figuring out a way to light it but in yeah in archaeology it's most of it is a

01:07:07.120 | mystery right yes it's job security i like that part you know but i i do also try to always remind

01:07:14.480 | myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans has have ever had began as heresy and lunacy you know

01:07:24.000 | that guy was crazy up to the second he was brilliant and so we got to keep our minds open to

01:07:30.560 | the things that sound outlandish because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm

01:07:38.560 | shift and if we you know if we're busy burning books of ideas that we don't like that's where we close

01:07:45.440 | our minds to the possibility of advancing things i really love that and i really appreciate that you're

01:07:50.240 | saying that um one of the fascinating things about just the amazon to me is that there's still a large

01:07:58.320 | number of uncontacted tribes as to rewind back into ancient history you can imagine all of these tribes

01:08:06.560 | that existed in the amazon that were uh isolated very sort of distinct from each other can you speak to

01:08:14.720 | this your understanding of these uh tribes and their history they're still here today well a lot of them

01:08:21.840 | are these you know by uncontacted we mean we don't know anything about these guys we know roughly where

01:08:29.040 | they are but places like ecuador have very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them

01:08:35.600 | so we have a dearth of information if they walk out of the jungle and talk to us that's one thing

01:08:41.680 | but we don't go out and they're looking for them but they do seem you know frozen in time and i don't

01:08:47.680 | think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that but you know we were saying

01:08:54.640 | earlier that you know humans change based on pressures of their environment you know it's a

01:09:01.040 | mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change its pressure and one thing the amazon is

01:09:09.680 | once you you know figure out how not to die in it it's a paradise of food food's fallen from the sky

01:09:16.640 | all the time there and if once you learn to adapt to that environment you've got very little need

01:09:22.880 | there's no pressure to make anything else things are working so for the modern humans that come across

01:09:30.080 | these uncontacted tribes one of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these tribes for

01:09:36.800 | violence so they get very aggressive in in attacking whoever they come across and not just foreigners

01:09:43.280 | they attack each other the yanamamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other

01:09:50.720 | what do you think is the philosophy behind that i don't you know i'm a relatively peaceful person but i've

01:10:00.080 | got you know i've got the monster in me like everybody does and uh i i think that these you

01:10:07.120 | know it's cultural norms that become institutionalized for the yanamamo they really part of the pat the

01:10:15.440 | rite of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village and they go in there they

01:10:24.480 | they they oftentimes uh the the way they don't let uh inbreeding set in and ruin everybody not that they

01:10:31.680 | think of it scientifically but they they typically go and steal women from far off communities and that

01:10:38.640 | starts a big fight another thing that starts fights that when nobody even fought is illness

01:10:44.960 | illness illness in the amazon and all of the ancient americas wasn't seen as a biological thing it was a

01:10:52.880 | spiritual thing so if somebody in your village gets sick the question is asked well what spirit is

01:11:00.640 | menacing him and who called it out on him and then the rumor starts well i bet you it was joe over

01:11:07.440 | there in that other community he's still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter yeah and we

01:11:11.840 | ought to go over there and kill joe yeah and then he'll get better and so this this uh this round of

01:11:18.480 | never-ending violence uh like hatfields and mccoy's had that thing and the uh the people of uh new guinea

01:11:26.640 | also do that so it's not you know there are certain areas uh mostly wooded areas now that i think about

01:11:34.240 | it where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural uh institution it's such a tricky

01:11:43.520 | thing to do to study an uncontacted tribe without obviously contacting them to figure out their language

01:11:50.160 | their philosophy of mind how they communicate the hierarchy they operate under and yeah you know there

01:11:56.880 | was a fascinating story in peru i guess it was probably like eight years ago or something but there

01:12:01.440 | was a a ranger from one of the biology stations who just in the by-and-by of uh protecting his area

01:12:09.120 | met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone not the whole tribe but he made some friends

01:12:14.640 | who would meet him in the woods not in their community and he started to learn their language over

01:12:20.080 | couple years and so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to

01:12:27.200 | talk to these people and one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him with

01:12:33.520 | arrows and just killed him and then they went back in the woods like that's the one guy who understands

01:12:38.080 | what we're saying we should kill him and move our village so those folks really lean into the uh as

01:12:44.960 | you said the monster versus the uh the puppy you know everybody's got it i i think i think uh you know

01:12:52.880 | we we need to listen to our better angels because if we don't we we we as a human species can easily

01:13:03.200 | devolve into just using violence and against others to get what we want we it's a it's a daily choice we

01:13:10.160 | make not to be savages which is a fascinating thing to remember what kind of thing in civilized society

01:13:16.080 | we've moved past all that but it can uh it can be summoned like in uh uh 1984 the two minutes of hate

01:13:28.720 | with the right words that primal thing can be summoned and directed uh and lead to a lot of

01:13:37.360 | destruction and you know our our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling

01:13:44.720 | them positive where somebody's not dead at the end of it yep uh so at which point did what we now call

01:13:55.920 | the maya civilization arise ah that's a that's another complicated one another group living mostly in a

01:14:04.720 | jungle that we have barely begun to explore you know the truth is a lot of the questions in the amazon and

01:14:12.560 | and and what we're talking about now is the paten and the mountains there those aren't places archaeologists

01:14:19.040 | want to live they're horrible i mean i've been there i don't want to live in a tent and eat rations

01:14:24.400 | i want to live in a nice town so a lot of the places where the answers are we still really haven't gotten

01:14:29.920 | there because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they're looking at and

01:14:34.720 | tough enough to want to be there i've done my tour of duty i'm now in a nice little podcast studio

01:14:41.600 | um but seriously the the maya the first hint that we see people who are culturally maya very close to

01:14:50.960 | where the time period for that chavin culture is about 1800 bce there's a culture that some call the

01:14:57.120 | mo kaya not maya but uh they're on the pacific coast uh where guatemala and mexico connect it's called the

01:15:06.480 | soconusco and those are the first people that are really going to be culturally maya and they're

01:15:12.480 | interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as mexico's mother culture which is the

01:15:19.760 | olmec they're kind of the same thing as we were talking about in south america where the the maya

01:15:26.080 | the original maya are not there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion um but the olmec

01:15:33.520 | have this religion they develop and they start exporting it and you see the maya become more and

01:15:39.200 | more involved in in the religion that's being created by the olmec who are to the north of them

01:15:45.120 | in the swamps of what we call the isthmus of tuantapac i have a lot of questions to ask here

01:15:51.600 | about just a natural stupid confusion i have so first uh did the maya or the all might come first

01:15:58.720 | and are they distinct groups like how do you maintain a distinct civilization when you're so close together

01:16:10.080 | i i just finished filming a whole thing on the olmecs and their interaction with the maya for the

01:16:15.600 | great courses i'm thrilled for it to come out next spring um i think they co-evolved archaeology in this

01:16:23.120 | regard is the worst enemy of this we we put these names on cultures we we talk about how they evolve

01:16:29.920 | from one to another we draw these lines where there aren't any we make these time periods that a culture

01:16:36.480 | magically transforms into somebody with another name where i'm pretty sure they didn't care about

01:16:41.120 | any of those names but the the maya and the olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's

01:16:49.920 | happening in mesoamerica a very dynamic time the olmec are really bringing the religion part but the

01:16:57.200 | other areas are bringing technology ceramic technology uh making hematite mirrors making uh tools out of

01:17:06.560 | obsidian and other uh other stone types so you've got the olmec in the middle where where mexico gets

01:17:16.080 | skinny and it gets swampy down there that's called the isthmus of tehuantepec that's where the olmec are

01:17:21.760 | then you've got the maya to the east of them then you have the valley of oaxaca where the people called

01:17:27.600 | the zapotex they're rising up and then you have the valley of mexico which will eventually become the

01:17:34.160 | aztecs but not for millennia all those areas are interacting with each other

01:17:40.080 | can we just also draw some more lines yeah sure so what is mesoamerica what is south america

01:17:48.720 | uh and what you just said to omics and the the maya like can we just linger on the geography that we're

01:17:55.280 | talking about here in the what is this like a thousand bc um yeah the time period we're talking about

01:18:01.920 | where the the olmec are there a thousand bc is a great uh midpoint of it i'd say it starts about 1800 bce

01:18:09.840 | and by 500 bce the olmec are gone and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happen

01:18:20.480 | in terms of mesoamerica looking at your map here i'd say about halfway through the chihuahua desert up there

01:18:28.960 | in the top left that's that's about the boundary of uh mesoamerica there's this big desert where almost

01:18:38.560 | nobody lives and once you get north enough you get into the ancestral pueblo people of what's now america

01:18:45.680 | the the four corners area they're not mesoamerican they have different lives where does modern mexico end

01:18:53.040 | modern mexico ends right you know you see the name maya there with the white line around it that's

01:18:57.520 | guatemala so guatemala cuts off most of mexico from central america got it but mesoamerica only goes

01:19:04.560 | about halfway through honduras and then it's really kind of a no man's land uh uh nicaragua costa rica

01:19:14.000 | panama they really uh they're neither they're not mesoamerica they're not south america they're more

01:19:21.680 | south america because they've got some gold there but then basically you get on the other side of panama

01:19:27.440 | and you're you're fully in south america with two distinct groups too you've got the guys that are on

01:19:33.280 | the andes on the west coast and then you have the amazon so the the west the andes is and the amazon are

01:19:41.520 | very distinct so when you say when you refer to the andean region is that referring to the andes and the

01:19:47.920 | amazon or just the andes just the andes the the and the and the coast that to to the pacific there

01:19:55.520 | that's that's andean civilization so did maya make it to the andes the andean region not that archaeology

01:20:04.080 | can prove but it's almost certain that they interact with each other number one it's just you know

01:20:10.480 | it's biased to think that these people couldn't travel as widely as people on the other side of

01:20:15.360 | the planet did but there's all sorts of hints like uh that first ceramics i was talking about that the

01:20:21.120 | maya made they show up strangely uh sophisticated technologically already and down in ecuador they had

01:20:31.600 | them for a thousand years before so a lot of people myself included think that the idea of ceramics actually

01:20:39.440 | that the maya came from south america to the maya did the maya get seeded by the second wave

01:20:46.880 | across the bering strait or did that initial wave of people that came and uh populated south america

01:20:56.080 | were they the ancestors of the maya like how did the migration happen here do we understand we're still

01:21:03.680 | piecing it together i don't think you know i'd be lying if i told you i had the answers but we do

01:21:08.720 | have evidence of maya stature people there are small people generally speaking people that grow

01:21:15.360 | up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller probably about you

01:21:20.560 | know just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not

01:21:26.000 | uh you're joking but you know there could be something i think there's some truth to it i mean

01:21:30.160 | the pygmies are small and the people on the plains in africa are big the north american indians are tall

01:21:36.480 | and the maya are small it's there is there's definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests

01:21:44.160 | but anyway um there's a cave in the yucatan called lul tune cave that has uh hand prints in the cave

01:21:53.120 | it's somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand like a negative print

01:21:57.840 | yep we can date that charcoal and it comes from 10 000 years ago and the hands are all small it's you know

01:22:07.440 | typical old mexico i i walked right up to these things and could put my hand i didn't you know

01:22:13.440 | mess with them but i put my hand next to these hands and they're all smaller than my you know northern

01:22:19.680 | european hand and so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10 000 years ago or it was people

01:22:27.120 | of maya stature who did it it's so cool that you can date the charcoal and it's so cool that 10 000

01:22:35.200 | years ago there were people leaving and and actually we have uh one that's i think 2 000 years older now

01:22:42.480 | just a couple years ago again in yucatan in a cave they found a woman they named naia now and she's like

01:22:49.840 | 12 000 years old so the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the bering strait to south america

01:23:01.280 | possibly the amazon develop a lot of cool ideas in the amazon and start drifting back up into mesoamerica

01:23:07.760 | was kind of a co-evolution the the technology of ceramics i think got there through an interaction

01:23:14.880 | with see the interesting thing is that the maya didn't really have religion didn't have as a vibrant

01:23:20.960 | religious set of ideas and they borrowed it from the all mike i've been doing a deep dive on this for this

01:23:27.840 | all my course that i just did and it really does seem like um these other cultures that have jade and

01:23:36.000 | hematite and obsidian the the olmec had none of that stuff they were living in a swamp and building things

01:23:42.560 | out of uh dirt but they were importing those materials from those areas carving them into all sorts of

01:23:51.120 | religious iconography and then exporting them back to them and still the fang deity show up no the fang

01:23:58.000 | deities nowhere in uh in central america and mesoamerica that's why there's there's jaguars there's

01:24:04.640 | jaguar iconography but it's not the same thing this this whole jaguar transformer deity does not exist there

01:24:12.560 | they do have a pantheon so the maya the olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions what was their

01:24:19.840 | uh i'd love to ask questions about who were they so one question i'm curious about what was their sense

01:24:27.040 | when they looked up at the stars what was their conception of the cosmos

01:24:32.560 | uh that's a question i've spent my entire career trying to answer i i think that they saw it as

01:24:40.480 | proof of the cyclical nature of life and certainly they saw like every ancient group did like are those

01:24:49.360 | the gods why are those things so far away but i think that the maya especially looked at it in a

01:24:56.160 | with a much more mathematical mind than most did and so they watched these things move every night

01:25:04.560 | and if you do that even today you notice that all the stars move in tandem they're just this blanket

01:25:13.280 | they're like they're they're like this curtain behind me they're the stage upon which some very important

01:25:19.200 | players are dancing and that's the moon the sun and the planets there's five planets we can see visibly

01:25:26.880 | so they started watching like why are just those seven moving differently than the rest and those are

01:25:34.560 | the things that they keyed on mathematically the the sun of course was also involved in the agricultural

01:25:39.840 | cycle so that was important in and of itself but the the planets we can see them coming up with ideas

01:25:48.480 | definitely doing the math and seeing that there's a repeated cycle and then coming up with mythology

01:25:56.160 | around them like venus for them was associated with war and they had very ritualized times to go to war

01:26:04.800 | that had something to do with venus sometimes in the classic period maya it was the first appearance of

01:26:12.240 | venus as the morning star that was a good time to go to to battle with your neighbors and when it

01:26:17.760 | became the post-classic with like chichen itza being the capital of the yucatan then it looks like if you

01:26:25.760 | watch venus day after day it goes slowly up every day and then when it hits its highest point as morning

01:26:33.840 | star in the in the morning it goes down to the earth like three times as fast all of a sudden it just

01:26:40.720 | shoots down and hits the earth and so the the people of post-classic maya civilization saw that as the

01:26:48.480 | gods shooting a spear into the earth and that was a good time to attack your neighbors that was like

01:26:55.440 | war time when the spear is going to hit the earth all right so this is fascinating they just had at the

01:27:03.280 | the foundation a sense that life existence at the various timescales is cyclical yeah that's that's

01:27:11.040 | the starting point and then you just look out there and if you're extremely precise which is fascinating

01:27:16.160 | how precise they were you can just measure the uh the cycles yeah and they did it really well now of course they they

01:27:25.280 | are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated writing system in all of the americas the south

01:27:32.720 | america had the kipu but it's so different than our writing we're still trying to figure out what the

01:27:36.960 | heck it is we know there's math there too but they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements

01:27:44.000 | and hand it to the next generation who would then do it more and do it more that's how they figured out

01:27:49.840 | kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy how good were they was whether they could see the

01:27:55.840 | procession of the equinoxes the fact that we're just barely wobbling and there's a 26 000 year period

01:28:03.280 | where the stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back it's 26 000 years

01:28:10.400 | but the maya were able to figure out wait it's moving one degree every 72 years and did a calculation

01:28:17.840 | based on uh on on where it should be in the ancient past and they're using constellations

01:28:24.640 | they're showing us they know by saying like this planet's in this constellation right now and 33 000 years

01:28:34.080 | ago it would be in this constellation it's just fascinating that they were able to figure this out

01:28:42.400 | i would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community uh if you can call it that

01:28:50.080 | i think we absolutely could and uh that's actually one of the things that i'm i'm hoping to move the needle

01:28:56.800 | on in my generation with my career is to give these cultures the the respect they deserve as standing toe

01:29:05.600 | to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect there are things that should be called

01:29:12.400 | science that are not being called science at the moment they're you know their math is incredible

01:29:17.760 | their their hydraulic engineering is incredible their chemistry is incredible and so

01:29:24.800 | i hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to recognize the achievements

01:29:31.680 | in a different way yeah i mean unquestionably incredible scientific work in the in the astronomy

01:29:38.000 | sense uh especially here can you speak to the all the sophisticated aspects of the mayan calendar

01:29:45.200 | uh that they've developed i don't know you got another five hours let's go i should uh no i'm kidding i

01:29:52.080 | i should say that you also gave me uh the 2024 mayan calendar yeah i do this just to you know show the

01:30:00.640 | world that that calendar system is evergreen it can go into the future or the past for billions

01:30:08.240 | of years in the system they made just like our system is so can you speak to the three components

01:30:13.440 | here as i'm reading the tzolkin the hob and the long count what are these fascinating components of the

01:30:19.840 | calendar it's it's a neat how obsessed they they were really math nerds they it wasn't good enough

01:30:26.640 | for them to just make one cycle to describe time yeah they had all these cycles that that interlocked

01:30:33.440 | into each other like like cogs in a machine though they never thought of it like that but uh the tzolkin's

01:30:41.600 | their oldest one and the one that still endures today there are millions of maya people that are

01:30:47.120 | living their lives based on a 260 day count no weeks no months it's just 13 numbers combined with

01:30:55.920 | 20 day names for a total of 260 days and then it goes again everybody in the highlands knows what their

01:31:03.600 | birthday is in that calendar knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that

01:31:09.680 | they're supposed to do each one of those days has their own spirit and what's supposed to happen in

01:31:15.440 | those days the maya collectively call them the mom the grandmother grandfather spirits and and and they talk

01:31:24.480 | to each one of those days and they pray to them they have there's now an association of some

01:31:29.440 | eight thousand people that are called aki that are day keepers who are keeping the days

01:31:36.560 | and they're also like community uh psychologists almost people come to them and say you know

01:31:43.520 | my life is mixed up what's wrong here well let's ask the mom like okay well it looks like you're not

01:31:49.840 | doing this or that or you know what you're an accountant you're not supposed to be an accountant you're

01:31:54.240 | supposed to be a you know a a midwife what are you doing you're you're living your life wrong you're

01:31:59.040 | you're you're a keeb you need to start being a keeb so they take extremely seriously the day on which

01:32:04.640 | you're born what that means like the the spirit that embodies that day right like i'm i'm keeb i'm 13

01:32:11.680 | keeb and it says my it's funny how accurate a lot of them are mine is basically is uh i'm uh i'm an

01:32:18.720 | irresponsible husband and parent but people like me so my family still prospers like oh god that's

01:32:26.880 | that's horribly that's horribly accurate i mean it's some of it is also the chicken or the egg if you

01:32:32.240 | truly believe so if you've structured society where this calendar is truly sacred then it kind of like

01:32:38.880 | you manifest a lot of the the spirit does manifest itself in the life of the people that

01:32:45.440 | are born on that spirit's day absolutely it's interesting and then and the maya really feel

01:32:51.200 | this in this system so that's the core system this 260 day calendar was the very first calendar they made

01:32:58.080 | thousands of years ago and it's the one that's most important today uh why 260 days by the way

01:33:03.680 | is there a reasoning behind it from most maya agree with this today and you know who knows what the

01:33:11.920 | original architects thousands of years ago were thinking but it's nine months it's the human

01:33:19.280 | gestation period so if you if you conceived on the day 13 monkey chances are your kids coming out

01:33:26.240 | on or near 13 monkey and uh i think it's beautiful i mean if if that's right that means the maya and the

01:33:35.120 | people of mesoamerica will all share it together um when they thought about we need we need a count of

01:33:42.160 | time that's for us they didn't look up into the heavens they looked like into their bodies what's the

01:33:48.400 | first cycle that we actually go through as humans and they picked this nine month thing it's it really is

01:33:56.000 | our cycle and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that

01:34:03.120 | uh so that's the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today uh what's the second

01:34:10.480 | one of the hub the hub is the solar calendar the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up

01:34:16.480 | with we know it's second though because when they start talking about it they use all the symbols and

01:34:22.320 | the numbers from the 261. they say well we need a solar one too let's just keep counting this another

01:34:28.880 | 105 days and we'll get to 365. oh interesting they kind of carry the same uh got it got it got it and

01:34:37.600 | that's useful because for all the sort of agriculture all those kind of reasons right though interestingly

01:34:44.000 | they never put a leap year in the hub is also called the vague year because it's just 365 which means

01:34:53.200 | every year they're off a quarter of a day and eventually it starts really adding up yeah in

01:34:59.680 | fact it's even caused modern modern problems in this calendar here i just do the straight math from

01:35:06.320 | a thousand years ago and so i place the beginning of the solar year differently than some maya groups do

01:35:16.320 | especially the guys in the highlands of eastern guatemala they write me nasty emails saying i don't

01:35:21.920 | know what time the year is but their relatives changed it in the 1950s because their agricultural

01:35:28.240 | cycle was so far off they moved it 60 days back to make it in the spring again but it drifts which is

01:35:37.760 | strange because it's not a very good thing for the the agricultural cycle it's one of these mysteries

01:35:43.600 | we still don't have an explanation for uh so that's the hub and then what's the long count the long

01:35:49.360 | counts they're really mysterious cool one because it's a linear count of days which are not like them

01:35:56.320 | it's it's a bunch of cycles like ours you know our weeks are a cycle our months are a cycle

01:36:00.800 | um but it's weird in that its estimation of the year in the in the long count system is only 360 days

01:36:11.520 | so it's miserably off uh a solar year and they count in base 20 so they count like we count in tens

01:36:21.680 | we're decimal they count in base 20 but decimal and so it should be you know there's ones there's 20s

01:36:30.080 | there's four hundreds there's eight thousands there's a hundred and sixty thousands it's up it goes

01:36:36.080 | just like our tens hundreds thousands ten thousands but it's times 20. so that third so they have days

01:36:45.840 | months of 20 days and then they have these years that are should be by their math 400 but it's only 360

01:36:54.640 | and that throws the whole thing out of whack going further up then they have a 20-year period and a 400

01:37:00.240 | year period 400 years to their calendar but it's only by that time it's only 396 years in our period

01:37:08.320 | in our reckoning so it's it's mysterious that it's why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days

01:37:17.840 | that's you know that doesn't follow any astronomy that doesn't that's not the human cycle

01:37:23.440 | yeah but they're i mean it's interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long

01:37:28.880 | periods of time like buck tunes is 144 000 days right or uh about tune is 400 of the long counts years

01:37:39.840 | so it's kind of like our millennium you know we we think it's a big deal when we hit a millennium

01:37:45.920 | or uh or or a century that's a they have a 20-year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called

01:37:53.280 | a cartoon and then they have the 400 bach tune which is the big one that's like their millennium

01:37:59.920 | and 13 of those bach tunes uh occurred in the creation before us they also think that we're in

01:38:09.360 | that the world has had multiple creations they're not alone in that there's lots of ancient civilizations

01:38:14.320 | who say that but we're technically in the fourth creation and they're they have a creation story

01:38:21.600 | called the popel vu and the popel vu is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of

01:38:30.720 | these heroes called the hero twins and the fourth creation begins and so on the maya monuments we see

01:38:38.560 | them doing the math through the long count and we can calculate it back very exactly it happened

01:38:44.400 | the fourth creation started on august 11th 3114 bc and it says it doesn't say it's day one it says it's the

01:38:56.160 | last day of the 13th bach tune of the third creation which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13

01:39:06.960 | bach tunes long right so and this would be the fourth creation the calendar starts fourth creation

01:39:13.520 | but if you do the math going from 3 114 bc and count 13 bach tunes forward you get to 2012

01:39:24.160 | and hence the uh the very popular notion that 2012 whenever that was december something december

01:39:32.800 | 21st 2012 will be the end of the world right so can you explain this those were very fruitful years for me i

01:39:40.240 | had so many lectures around the country that was that's like uh like garrett morris in saturday night

01:39:46.720 | live the the the the apocalypse was very very good to me

01:39:50.800 | uh i mean but that that is pretty interesting so that's that that would be so technically being that

01:39:57.840 | what in the fifth no yeah technically we'd be in the fifth though my argument was that actually

01:40:05.680 | if you look through all the corpus of maya mathematics and calendars they never say anything

01:40:11.680 | like that in fact there's a handful of dates that tell us uh that that the fourth creation does continue

01:40:20.080 | farther on that that bach tune place should have 20 20 bach tunes in it like their counting system would

01:40:30.720 | dictate not 13. and there's there's a place in uh in palenque there's a place in the dresden codex

01:40:38.640 | and one other place i'm forgetting that uh that all talk about time after 2012.

01:40:45.680 | so how does that happen it's a conflict is there supposed to be an overlap of the

01:40:52.560 | of the of the of uh the third so it's like 13 is the core of it and it's 20 long they they love the

01:40:58.560 | number 13 it's all over the place it's a magic number to them my explanation which i admit is is not

01:41:06.880 | very solid but uh i think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end of

01:41:16.720 | the third uh the third uh the third creation hit the magical reset button and that it just restarted

01:41:26.000 | time right there because of their magic but that was not to say that the natural bach tune cycle should

01:41:32.800 | be 13. and there are certain texts that uh that go way forward in time or way backward in time and

01:41:42.960 | whenever they want to do that there there are higher increments than just the bach tune above that

01:41:48.400 | there's the pick tune then there's the kalaba tune then there's alawa tune and it goes on and on and

01:41:54.400 | these are like you know 160 000 years huge increments of time whenever they want to do that and they talk

01:42:01.920 | about a long period of time they start putting 13s in all of those increments those higher increments

01:42:08.960 | and i think what they're saying is uh they're making an esoteric statement about the never-ending

01:42:14.000 | nature of time that's that's what i think there's they're telling us in those texts that time goes on

01:42:21.360 | forever magically but there they still had a conception that it didn't go on forever before

01:42:28.480 | right that there was other civilizations that came before in there and there this is the fourth creation

01:42:34.800 | this is the fourth creation and the gods made everybody the the first ones were made of mud and

01:42:39.760 | they melted the second ones were made of sticks but they were jerks to the animals um the the third ones

01:42:47.440 | were like us but uh but flawed and in some other way and then we're finally made of uh of the blood of the

01:42:58.560 | gods and corn we're made out of corn so we're we're perfect and as the as it explains to us

01:43:05.680 | the the the popol vu does we got it right this time there there is there there's no reason to believe

01:43:13.760 | that this creation has a set duration well one of the weird things is that the aztecs who we talk to a lot at

01:43:22.720 | the other people who have had contact they also had the concept of multiple creations before us but

01:43:28.880 | they were real clear to the spanish that they weren't all the same time element uh some of them were in

01:43:36.800 | the 300s of years some of them were in the 700s of years but they were not the same time period so

01:43:44.320 | our our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13 this one must be third creation

01:43:50.960 | is in or also be 13 it's in direct opposition to what the aztecs told us about the nature of creations

01:43:58.960 | they're different time periods why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations did they

01:44:04.640 | have some kind of long multi-generational memory of prior civilizations it may have had some echo in the

01:44:15.440 | uh the flood myths right it's the same it's the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of

01:44:22.000 | time there's a lot of different opinions about it and you know they're like if they were all 13

01:44:29.040 | if we have five creations like the aztecs said and they were all 13 they would come up to roughly 25

01:44:36.880 | 000 something years which is very close to that processional cycle so some people are like they

01:44:42.240 | designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes and i mean that the

01:44:49.440 | that i don't believe that one but that one sure sounds good doesn't it that's that's going to get a lot

01:44:54.240 | of internet hits and one of the things i do obviously uh wonder about is um why the flood

01:45:04.400 | myth is part of like most societies and most religions i think that one's pretty easy it's the end of the

01:45:12.800 | ice age when the bathtub filled back up huh so it's just the ice age it's just it's the seas filling back up

01:45:24.160 | and they without really understanding what happened they just carried that story everybody knows that

01:45:31.360 | everybody's nice coastal village went underwater yeah and they had to they had to seek higher ground

01:45:37.120 | and then just like people like talking about the weather everybody was talking about the weather

01:45:41.600 | for many generations as the sea level was going up and then uh that that myth carried why do we live

01:45:48.240 | here grandpa well we used to live over there but then the water came and then many grandpas later

01:45:55.440 | is just kind of permeates every idea it becomes mythology but global mythology so that one you

01:46:02.240 | know there's a lot of things i don't have a reasonable explanation for but the uh but the flood myth

01:46:08.320 | is almost certainly is almost certainly the the rise in sea level so the this idea that every day represents

01:46:15.520 | uh that carries a spirit uh you know there's modern day astrology you know most people kind of consider

01:46:23.920 | astrology this um maybe a bit unscientific woo-woo type of um uh set of beliefs but do you think there's some wisdom that astrology carries

01:46:36.560 | from your scholarship of the maya calendar do you think if we carry that to the

01:46:42.480 | astrological perspective on the world do you think there's some wisdom there

01:46:46.480 | i don't know you know that i i have a woo-woo part of me i i i would like to believe that stuff but i don't

01:46:56.160 | think as a scientist it makes a i cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be

01:47:06.080 | true and you know when you look at it objectively i mean really is everybody born with the sign scorpio

01:47:16.320 | a a moody person that's just uh that's just objectively not true um but it is funny how oftentimes these

01:47:26.560 | these maya uh horoscopes for lack of a better word do hit the mark there was some student who surveyed like

01:47:34.960 | three hundred people with the app i made and asked them about their greek sign and their maya sign and

01:47:41.120 | his conclusion for his term paper was that the maya one was working way better which that's that's

01:47:47.920 | fascinating at least that's that's fun but no i'm i think i'm too much of a scientist to believe

01:47:53.760 | that i i just don't have a a any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the uh

01:48:02.320 | the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny

01:48:08.240 | i agree and yet there's so much mystery all around us that uh what i do like is the uh inbuilt humility

01:48:18.480 | to that world view um that there's this whole you can call it a spiritual world but a world that we don't

01:48:26.320 | under quite understand and then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world carries

01:48:33.280 | and then you construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that and then there is where the human

01:48:39.360 | hubris can come in and you know uh but it's good to be humbled by how little we know i suppose i do love

01:48:46.960 | the mysteries of the world and i i i would i would love to find an ancient civilization but i don't

01:48:52.880 | i i don't want to solve the mysteries of the world i think they're one of the things that make world

01:48:58.160 | life worth living that's true that's true um you mentioned the uh maya writing system what are some

01:49:06.640 | interesting aspects of their language that they've used in the written language that they used well you know

01:49:12.560 | one of the things that confound me as a guy who's spent you know better portion of my life studying

01:49:18.560 | it i had the honor of being uh the student of uh linda shealy right here at the university of texas at

01:49:25.040 | austin she got the group together who broke the maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s so i learned

01:49:32.560 | from the best and and loved every minute of it i miss linda can you speak to that code actually the

01:49:38.160 | hieroglyphic code and what it takes to break it oh boy i mean what a what a thing we we had kind of a

01:49:44.800 | a rosetta stone we had a page out of diego delanda's book a priest who was converting the maya in yucatan

01:49:54.640 | asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant and he was convinced they had a

01:50:03.120 | alphabet like we do so he got this maya guy sat down in spanish and he said okay you're gonna write

01:50:09.920 | all the symbols right here in my book right write an ah here write a bay here write a say here and that

01:50:16.480 | guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write they were actually syllables they were

01:50:24.240 | vowel consonant combinations they weren't an alphabet but that turned into our rosetta stone of sorts

01:50:33.040 | the big key is that the maya still speak that same language there are millions of maya people who are

01:50:38.800 | speaking a version of maya now there's there's where i get confused that we've got a single writing

01:50:48.560 | system that is intelligible we've broken the code so we know that it's basically the same writing

01:50:54.880 | system from the top of the yucatan into guatemala and el salvador but we have 33 maya languages today

01:51:04.800 | that are mutually unintelligible and we we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that

01:51:12.160 | the glyphs are in to something called chole tea which is a combination of chor tea and chole two of those

01:51:18.000 | languages but it doesn't work for me at all how did if there was one language maybe two back then

01:51:25.760 | how did it flower into 33 mutually unintelligible languages in just 500 years during uh culture acculturation

01:51:37.200 | and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90 percent of the population how did that happen

01:51:43.680 | so we're missing something huge here i think it's more like chinese where chinese letters uh uh writing

01:51:51.840 | can be read in multiple languages and still understood i don't know exactly the mechanics of how that would

01:51:58.800 | happen but it just seems impossible that there are more languages not less languages in the maya

01:52:05.920 | area after the last 500 years that they've been through so you think that there's some kind of

01:52:11.520 | process of either rapidly generating dialects or there always has been these dialects or i should say

01:52:17.920 | they're distinct languages even though there's a common writing system there must have been a way that

01:52:24.400 | multiple languages understood the same writing system or maybe there was something like like latin you know how

01:52:32.800 | there was a period in europe where like most people were illiterate and there was this this priesthood

01:52:40.480 | who all understood latin and they wrote in latin yeah maybe the the hieroglyphs represent a kind of

01:52:48.080 | latin in the ancient maya world but we don't really know and there's not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of

01:52:55.360 | how it's possible to have that right but we did realize it was actually a russian scholar named yuri

01:53:02.480 | konorozov who broke the code the americans and the europeans were absolutely sure that the language was

01:53:11.280 | uh that the written language was a dead language but yuri not knowing any of that not being filled with all of

01:53:18.640 | those thoughts from america and europe went about it in the way that he was taught uh in his in his grad

01:53:26.960 | school in moscow and just went to the dictionaries and he looked at yukatek language that they're speaking

01:53:34.320 | today and he applied it to the symbol system and he knew that there were certain sounds he used landa's

01:53:41.680 | alphabet and he found there was the his two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over

01:53:49.760 | it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it and the dog uh a dog in yukatek is so he saw

01:53:59.600 | two symbols and he said this one's probably sue and this one's all and then the turkey was coots

01:54:06.640 | so it would be coo ending in sue and he showed how look you know this is suits this is soul

01:54:13.040 | those two things that that should be tsu are the same symbol and that began this process of

01:54:19.920 | unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today that's fascinating just that decoding process

01:54:27.200 | is fascinating like how do you even figure that out and there's probably still is there still are you

01:54:32.560 | aware of any um written languages that haven't been decoded yet yeah yeah there's a number of them

01:54:39.440 | there's uh easter island script i was just talking to uh we've apparently made a few advances there now

01:54:46.720 | it's called rongo rongo and we only have about maybe 25 examples of texts but we're beginning to break that

01:54:55.280 | there's also the the the big one is harapan harapan for a long time we used to say there were there were

01:55:03.040 | five independent scripts on the planet and those were chinese cuneiform which is mesopotamian egyptian

01:55:14.400 | maya and then harapan which is from northern india that's the only one that we've never cracked and now all the

01:55:24.640 | epigraphers the people that's the term for epigraphy is uh translating these languages they're all

01:55:31.200 | ganging up on harapan and want to kick it off the list because we can't break it it had a big enough

01:55:36.480 | symbol set but no one's been able to crack it and now they're saying it's just an elaborate symbol set

01:55:42.320 | and doesn't reflect the the spoken word that's uh that's a hypothesis but it's which is what would

01:55:49.760 | explain why it's so different right right but you know we could just be faced with a quitter generation

01:55:54.480 | maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation these days with their the other one that fascinates

01:56:00.080 | me is from the americas it's the quipu the the inca had the quipu this knotted string records but it was

01:56:07.680 | definitely encoding more than just math we know the math i know lots i can do the math quipus and figure out

01:56:16.720 | what they're totaling and things yeah there's a quipu right there who are recording devices

01:56:20.640 | fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of andean south america

01:56:25.760 | a quipu usually consists of cotton or cabinet fiber string so there's a set of strings and they're

01:56:30.480 | supposed to what to be saying something there's one long string that the little ones dangle off of

01:56:35.680 | and each one of the the dangling strings have sets of knots on them and the knots some of them are

01:56:42.960 | mathematical keepus and those we can just do the math we can prove that it's math

01:56:47.600 | um they also encoded language in there they had entire libraries in cusco where

01:56:54.800 | spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the libraries would just put

01:57:01.120 | they'd say uh pull that one down read that one to me and he'd pull it out and just read

01:57:05.840 | a history of something that happened 200 years earlier so it was definitely writing but in the

01:57:11.920 | 1570s one uh one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called kipu kamax

01:57:21.040 | gathered up had them read all of their kippus and transcribe them into spanish books and then had the

01:57:29.200 | kippus burned and those people murdered okay well there you go and so we can't break the code still

01:57:35.520 | today but we know it was absolutely a written language though it wasn't written it was weaved or knotted

01:57:44.240 | and there's still some keepers available that could be there's i think now we've just crossed the 1000 mark

01:57:52.480 | so we have a thousand kippus there's enough to break the code um and and i think this generation

01:57:59.840 | might be the one that does it it's sad that so fewer have survived yeah i mean a thousand is good but

01:58:06.720 | it's but see there's peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology there's so much out there

01:58:14.400 | there's there was a priest i read about named diego de porres who was one of the early people in peru

01:58:22.400 | converting communities and his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of

01:58:28.960 | three thousand people all the spanish prayers the important ones for them to be converted into

01:58:34.800 | christianity and he had the the community's kipu kamax not kippus for each person that told them that

01:58:44.720 | they could read them out and memorize the prayers and if they were caught without their kipu in town they

01:58:50.240 | were flogged so he had 3 000 of the same kipu made and handed out to this community if we find that

01:58:58.480 | community and find its cemetery there is a rosetta stone you know it is probably the case there is

01:59:07.040 | somebody in peru and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands and like you

01:59:13.760 | just have to show up and ask them and that's it's like they're like oh yeah yeah they there there are some

01:59:18.960 | communities that are using them there's a couple of them that we had high hopes for and then it was

01:59:23.440 | apparent that they were just making up they didn't actually know how to read it they just knew it used

01:59:29.760 | to be read so they like made a bunch of stuff about what it says and they bring it out and they act like

01:59:33.840 | they can read it but then when you ask them the details they don't know yeah but then on a much

01:59:38.400 | simpler level there's uh llama herders who keep a string in their pocket and they've they've got uh

01:59:45.920 | the knots equaling how many llamas they have and then they have subcategories of information like this

01:59:51.280 | one's sick uh we've lost these ones this one's pregnant so they have these more simple and more

01:59:58.720 | mathematical kipus but they're using them to affect as a as a record is it possible through archaeology

02:00:06.400 | to know what you know the social organization of the maya was like what uh maybe if there was a hierarchy

02:00:16.240 | maybe what the political structure was if there was a leader of different roles you know priests or

02:00:23.040 | like who had the power who was powerless who had certain kinds of roles is it possible to know that

02:00:28.080 | actually because of hieroglyphs yeah we know a whole lot there's you know basic things that archaeology

02:00:33.040 | which is a very blunt tool can figure out like this guy lives in a rich house this guy lives in a poor

02:00:37.680 | house but um the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about uh who can rule that it was hereditary

02:00:46.640 | that uh that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and connect to the

02:00:56.000 | ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that's lived in the underworld it also told us things

02:01:01.760 | about hierarchy like that there were councils of lords underneath the king who each represented clans

02:01:10.080 | who had their own neighborhoods and that there were revolving positions of uh authority there was uh the

02:01:18.400 | the site that i mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there uh palenque had a lord's

02:01:26.000 | title named fire lord that was one of the like generals of their army and we could tell that position

02:01:34.560 | changed over time so there was one guy named chock suits who was the fire lord uh for the early part

02:01:43.760 | of a reign of a king called the kalmonab and then by the time he carves this other panel there's another

02:01:49.840 | guy in the position of kak ahal which was the fire lord and so he had got promoted it was uh well he

02:01:58.800 | could have been killed i mean the case of that but then we have the interesting case of uh in the post

02:02:05.440 | classic they shed the idea of kings they don't like kings anymore that's probably a big part of why the

02:02:11.920 | classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened people just got sick of kings

02:02:18.800 | and so they turned into this more council system at chichen itza but then when chichen itza falls

02:02:25.280 | there's a new city that's uh that's architecture looks a lot like chichen itza it's called mayapon

02:02:31.680 | but it has uh what is called the league of mayapon and it has a council of representatives from the

02:02:41.840 | communities from all around the yucatan and it is basically a democracy it's a it is a maya democracy

02:02:49.440 | that happens the individuals from all around the yucatan are there they each each family has their own

02:02:56.400 | council house at mayapon though they live back at their place it's kind of like a maya congress

02:03:02.800 | representative democracy it it really was i mean and this happens in uh i guess 1250

02:03:10.560 | a.d that this this maya democracy happens and we know the names of them we know the families and of

02:03:18.640 | course they were humans so eventually they screwed it all up one family murdered another family and the

02:03:25.120 | whole the whole city burned yeah and of course it's probably some fascinating corruption which is hard

02:03:30.800 | to discover through uh part of it was the aztecs screwing things up the aztecs came down with all

02:03:36.080 | sorts of like we'll buy everything you're making and then eventually they were like could we maybe buy some

02:03:41.760 | humans yeah and then one family was like no and the other family was like i don't know they're making

02:03:46.880 | us a lot of money so then you know they they murdered each other and the water supply got

02:03:52.880 | polluted and then the city burned it seems like slavery murder and disease is a large component

02:04:00.240 | of the story of humans um you mentioned different periods in the maya the classic the post classic

02:04:08.320 | the pre-classic the archaic can you just speak to that so archaic is before there was really a

02:04:13.040 | civilization that was uh archaic is pretty much when everybody's hunter gatherers so the classic

02:04:18.160 | period was the golden age and then the pre-classic is the interesting time that we were talking about

02:04:24.320 | and the post-classic is when the democracy came about well midway through it yeah reverted back to

02:04:31.360 | council systems the maya loved to be part of councils so yeah we have pre-classic is like the origins

02:04:38.720 | of civilization they're starting to build cities they're starting to create their calendar they're

02:04:44.240 | starting to create these wonderful works of art and the classic period if you look at at 10 different

02:04:52.000 | textbooks for the maya you'll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there but basically

02:04:57.680 | that's the that's the age of kings to me that's when these cities decide that they're going to organize

02:05:03.360 | themselves around uh elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors

02:05:10.880 | that are directly in contact with the gods the maya never contact their gods directly they contact

02:05:18.080 | their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods and so the maya age of kings has these

02:05:26.240 | dynasties sprouting up where these people have you know basically snowed the rest of the people that

02:05:32.400 | they've got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk

02:05:39.760 | to the gods where everybody every joe maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor

02:05:47.600 | but joe maya's dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he's got no influence over the gods

02:05:54.800 | but the rulers their their spirits go down briefly but then they go up into the heavens and reside

02:06:02.560 | where the gods are and can act as liaisons so that's the validation for this kingship that happens

02:06:09.200 | for about 400 years i know we we say 250 to 900 which is kind of the the encompassing edges of it but it's

02:06:18.800 | interesting that it's actually specifically the ninth bach tune of their history the ninth bach tune begins

02:06:27.760 | in like 4 26 and it ends in like 8 29 so it's a 400 year period of time and before that there were no kings

02:06:39.120 | and after that there really aren't kings they're heads of councils

02:06:44.720 | so it's i i call it the age of kings where everybody's following the directives of

02:06:49.120 | basically a despot and for a while that's great i mean cities build up populations happening uh that's

02:06:57.920 | it's i i see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too strong charismatic leaders inspire people

02:07:04.480 | to do great things together but eventually like happens all the time with power too much power

02:07:10.720 | corrupts all of a sudden there's this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by

02:07:18.960 | everybody else and uh and they start saying well i think we should fight with those guys and you guys

02:07:24.240 | should go take these things and people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities

02:07:30.160 | and that's how we get the mysterious maya collapse where all these cities are just gone that's one of the

02:07:36.320 | great mysteries of uh the maya civilization is that over a very short period of time what like 100 years

02:07:42.480 | it seems to have declined very rapidly it collapsed what do you think explains that what happened

02:07:49.040 | i think it's a failing of archaeology to properly see what was happening i think that most of those cities

02:07:59.040 | populations moved you know no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm and

02:08:06.720 | they lived in perishable houses and all archaeology signature sees is that nobody lives in the city

02:08:12.720 | center anymore we don't see a bunch of mass bodies there was no there's no evidence of people getting

02:08:19.040 | sick there are certain cities that fought with each other at the end and we see that signature plain as day

02:08:26.000 | we see we know when a city was attacked and burned mostly that didn't happen people moved and migrated

02:08:33.040 | and it seems like right there around like between 800 and 900 a lot of the elites that were on top

02:08:41.440 | in the most of it was in the rainforests of northern guatemala they move they move in two

02:08:49.040 | directions some of them move into the highlands of guatemala and some of them move up into the yucatan

02:08:55.600 | of the city of chichen itza becomes the next big capital in yucatan but the word itza is actually

02:09:05.680 | a word describing the people who lived around lake p10 itza in northern guatemala and all of the maya are

02:09:14.880 | super clear about that that the itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created chichen itza so

02:09:23.120 | the the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else

02:09:30.240 | so why was there a decline what was maybe the catalyst was there specific kind of events that

02:09:36.480 | started this was this an idea that kind of transformed the society we are still debating that we i don't

02:09:42.640 | think there is a single reason i think humans are complicated i think a lot of things led to this

02:09:49.360 | one thing we can see archaeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated they were

02:09:56.800 | too popular and we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people

02:10:03.680 | we see it in lots of the cities at the end of the classic period that people are seasonally starving

02:10:12.640 | i remember uh really stark evidence in copan honduras copan was this beautiful city lineage of 17 kings

02:10:20.960 | but the last kings and the last elite burials that we dig from the city center

02:10:26.480 | the teeth are the telling part they get this thing when you when you're growing up and you're not getting

02:10:33.760 | enough food seasonally it shows up in the enamel of your teeth that's called a dental hypoplasia

02:10:41.200 | and if somebody's seasonally starving it gets these lines in their teeth and that last generation of maya

02:10:49.840 | before they left copan even the rich people are seasonally starving so there's a problem there for sure

02:10:59.040 | but i also think it's a it's a weird thing it was not an empire it was a group of independent city

02:11:05.760 | states like greece some of them were allied some of them were enemies there was a huge civil war that

02:11:12.720 | settled out about the end of the classic period so if it was europe you know the victors would have

02:11:18.960 | taken over the losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went but when they abandoned these cities

02:11:25.440 | that were independent still they all left both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war so it

02:11:31.120 | couldn't be just as simple as spoils go to the victor um it's such a wide area not everybody was

02:11:38.640 | starving like the people in the copan valley so i i personally think it was calendrically timed it is

02:11:46.640 | interesting to note that that ninth period that ninth 400 year period ends right then and i think a lot of

02:11:54.160 | people you know i can't prove it archaeologically but i think a lot of people said we're coming to the

02:11:59.920 | end of a great cycle and we need to renew we need to change what we're doing when you talk to the maya

02:12:07.200 | today like at the end of this uh 2012 thing if you actually talk to maya say you know what happens at

02:12:13.680 | the end of a big cycle here they say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation that it is all of our

02:12:23.280 | obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles that change is coming we can either be

02:12:29.200 | part of it or we can get steamrolled by it the aztecs did this neat thing called the new fire ceremony

02:12:36.160 | every 52 years which was the biggest their calendar would go they'd burn down perfectly good temples

02:12:43.360 | and they'd burn down their houses sometimes and they would just everybody in in society would perform this what they call the new fire

02:12:52.880 | ceremony and they would renew the world so i think my personal theory is that the maya

02:13:00.160 | decided at the end of the ninth bach tune that it was time to renew the world i think this theory makes

02:13:06.400 | sense because they really internalized the calendar i mean it was a really big part of their culture

02:13:10.960 | the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization that's what i think i think that uh that they created that

02:13:20.400 | calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it yeah uh you mentioned aztec what was the origin of

02:13:28.480 | the aztec where did these where do these people come from at what time and how you know almost every

02:13:37.200 | one of the cultures we're talking about now we have two different versions of the answer to that question

02:13:43.360 | we have the archaeology version and we have the aztecs themselves the aztecs have this wonderful

02:13:50.800 | migration story where they say that they came from a place well to the north called aslan and that they

02:14:00.080 | had this migration that went through kind of a hero's journey where they go to this snake mountain place

02:14:06.880 | and they encounter uh the birth of the war god that they'll worship after this and how they stepped

02:14:14.560 | into the valley of mexico as the last the lost brothers of everyone in the valley of mexico they said that they

02:14:23.920 | all came from the north near aslan is a place a cave with seven different passages called uh chiqui mostac and that

02:14:34.640 | all the people who spoke the language nahuatl came from the cave and most of them went early to the valley

02:14:41.440 | of mexico and in the aztecs uh story they were just the lost tribe they were the last brothers to come in

02:14:50.480 | and but then they show up late game and they become mercenaries they just start working for

02:14:58.080 | communities in the valley of mexico and this takes place

02:15:02.000 | in the 1300s so about 200 years before cortez shows up the aztecs show up to the valley of mexico

02:15:11.440 | and they make themselves this uh indispensable group of mercenaries they do the dirty work

02:15:19.040 | the all the all the all the civilized uh communities around lake texcoco which is in the middle of the

02:15:26.880 | which is now mexico city it's all dried up but uh those guys were too civilized to fight with each other

02:15:33.680 | but they could hire the aztecs to do their dirty stuff so the aztecs did that and really changed the

02:15:38.880 | politics in the game of the valley of mexico the dirty stuff does the load of the muscle yeah they'd go in and

02:15:47.360 | and they they'd kill whoever you wanted killed and now you're the king of this area so one of these

02:15:53.280 | kings that they were working for really liked them and decided i'm gonna make the aztecs part of our

02:15:59.280 | ancestry i'm gonna give them my daughter to marry the head of the aztecs

02:16:08.080 | and the aztecs sacrificed her and that really pissed that guy off so he took like his whole

02:16:15.040 | army and ran the aztecs out for a while they say they live in this horrible desert section eating

02:16:21.200 | lizards but then one of their priests say we're gonna walk around the lake and my visions say that

02:16:28.240 | where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital

02:16:36.480 | and they see that but it's out on an island in the lake and they he said well i don't know that's

02:16:44.080 | that's the place so they build up an island they go to that island and then they just start piling up lake

02:16:52.400 | muck until they make a whole city there in the middle of the island they make or the lake they

02:16:58.720 | make an island city and all of this occurs in about a hundred years so they show up about 1300

02:17:06.080 | the capital of tenochtitlan as they called it uh is really established and from there they quickly

02:17:14.560 | take over the entire valley they make uh what they call the triple alliance which is the two other big

02:17:22.000 | communities of the lake are now their allies but they're not really allies the the aztecs were brutal

02:17:27.680 | they were just those guys agreed to shut up and let the aztecs run the show

02:17:33.360 | and then the aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down into the maya area everywhere they go they

02:17:38.880 | rename everybody's towns and make them pay tribute pretty short lasting civilization uh spread extremely

02:17:47.120 | quickly uh famous what what what are some defining qualities that explain that i think they were very

02:17:54.400 | much like they they had an attitude like attila the hun they just had no problem ripping your skin off

02:18:02.080 | everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized and the aztecs were just mercenary they

02:18:10.400 | told everybody you know we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us and if you work for us you'll

02:18:17.280 | be just fine they'd go to every town they'd go to the first thing they do is they'd show up with a bunch of uh

02:18:22.720 | merchants there was a merchant class who were also military they were really the the the people who assessed

02:18:30.080 | where they were going to attack next they'd go in with a bunch of aztec products and say we'd like to trade

02:18:36.080 | with you but all the time they were assessing their military prowess what uh what products they had that

02:18:43.200 | they could take and then soon after the pocheteca were there would come the military with the reconnaissance

02:18:51.600 | so the the aztec had a huge warrior class as you're saying so what was there just can you

02:18:57.200 | uh linger on their whole relationship with war and violence they they worshipped a war deity their main

02:19:07.040 | temple was uh the templo mayor it had two temples up on top one was to tlaloc the rain god who liked a lot of

02:19:15.920 | sacrifice himself but then the other one was we seal up poshli he was that translates the hummingbird on

02:19:23.920 | the left but he's the war god i love that he's a hummingbird maybe you know he's fast and he comes

02:19:29.680 | from the magical side or something but uh then then right next to the temple on either side were the two

02:19:37.600 | temples of the warriors one was the eagle warrior clan the other one was the jaguar warrior clan

02:19:44.240 | and they they were symbolically in competition with each other though a unified force i guess you know

02:19:50.480 | probably an analogy between like the navy and the air force you know they had a good natured competition

02:19:57.360 | of who was better but they were the same force so those were their symbolic warriors dressed up in all

02:20:04.640 | of their finery and they would they they would come at people uh with these two forces and it was very unlike

02:20:13.200 | uh anything that had happened before in mesoamerica again i think i could draw a parallel to what

02:20:19.760 | happened in europe you know the famous uh henry v moment in agincourt where you know his kind of uh

02:20:28.800 | ragtag army wipes out half of france's aristocracy with the longbow like up until that moment europe had a very

02:20:38.880 | uh wars for the elite classes kind of attitude and then after france lost half their aristocracy then

02:20:46.640 | i was like maybe we should be hiring from the villages the same sort of thing happened with the aztec that

02:20:53.440 | there was a mesoamerica really didn't have huge standing armies but the aztec put this army together and they

02:21:02.560 | intimidated people they didn't actually have to use it a lot it was very it was used to great effect

02:21:08.240 | in the in the valley of mexico and for the rest of mesoamerica it was mostly the fear factor

02:21:13.760 | but there also seemed to be um you know a celebration of uh of violence i think you said

02:21:22.480 | uh that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the aztec maybe like the roman empire was it they just

02:21:30.160 | had maybe a different relationship with what violence where that stood in uh the purpose of life

02:21:37.840 | purpose of existence is that fair to say i would hypothesize so i mean that you know i think it's one

02:21:45.040 | of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures you know knowing what our human capacity is

02:21:51.120 | and the aztecs uh when i when i said that statement i what i what i meant by that is they were absolutely

02:21:59.040 | comfortable with human sacrifice and you know ripping people's hearts out this they had this this just

02:22:05.360 | you know grotesque violent bent but in the same way they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and

02:22:17.360 | music and dance the same aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted also would stand

02:22:28.160 | up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen that had come before

02:22:35.600 | him and they spent money on things like flower gardens they're all of the causeways leading to the aztec

02:22:44.000 | capital had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum and they had an aquarium and a zoo and they had an

02:22:53.680 | opera and they had a ballet yeah and and these things existed together there was not in the aztec mind

02:23:02.400 | any conflict between witnessing someone's heart getting ripped out one moment in the evening we'd go to the

02:23:10.800 | ballet um how does that contrast the relationship with war and violence with the with the other

02:23:16.880 | civilizations of mesoamerica and south america maybe the maya what was their relationship like with war

02:23:23.440 | the maya were certainly influenced by the aztec at the end so we get a we get a skewed perspective from

02:23:30.080 | the contact period accounts because the maya were much more violent and sacrifice oriented in their

02:23:39.120 | post-classic rendition but in the classic period it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing

02:23:47.440 | the sacrificing of themselves that we know that the maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that

02:23:57.040 | blood onto paper and uh the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they'd they'd uh commune

02:24:05.760 | with their ancestors but they'd actually tie this paper onto their penis cut it and then dance so the

02:24:13.200 | blood splattered but it was them cutting themselves it was different than killing a bunch of other people

02:24:20.000 | for it it was a auto sacrifice we call it still very macabre but very different than deciding a whole bunch

02:24:26.560 | of other people should die it was a self-sacrifice thing can you speak to sacrifice a bit more animal

02:24:32.720 | sacrifice human sacrifice what what role did that play in in um for the maya for the aztec for the different

02:24:38.720 | cultures here was that religious in nature it was absolutely religious in nature and the aztecs were of the

02:24:46.000 | opinion that uh that the war god demanded people were captured and sacrificed and it had to be valuable

02:24:55.680 | people there was a lot of uh before they made that big standing army they had just ritual battles that

02:25:03.360 | they would have and they'd take captives uh in fact all around mesoamerica they wanted captives so that

02:25:10.640 | they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods and the aztecs deciding to specifically

02:25:18.400 | follow the war god did this more than anybody they did it so much and so successfully that they didn't

02:25:24.400 | have any enemy enemies nearby so they decided this one poor sucker group uh not that far away called the

02:25:32.880 | talash collins that they were never going to uh make peace with them so that they could go close by every

02:25:41.440 | year and just have a little symbolic war with the talash collins and haul them back for sacrifice cortez met

02:25:49.200 | those guys and he was like here are people who hate their guts i'll just use these guys so you know we say

02:25:56.720 | oh cortez took over the aztec world it was it was cortez and 20 000 super pissed off talash collins

02:26:03.520 | and the actual sacrifice what so there would be kind of these ritual battles or is it chopping off

02:26:10.080 | people's heads and uh like is there is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice it's mostly

02:26:16.240 | hard extraction sometimes heads but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see it and they

02:26:21.920 | they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their rib cage would come out and

02:26:28.080 | they they'd use uh like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really just uh like tried and true way to

02:26:35.520 | do it they'd stab it in in a certain place close and then they'd push down on the sternum as they ripped

02:26:41.840 | up on the rib cage and they just so they just make a place where they could just rip it right out with

02:26:47.280 | their hand yeah with their hand but they were really just surgical about it they'd use a thick

02:26:52.160 | obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum

02:26:58.320 | down pull up and just while the person was alive yep while the person was alive and the aztecs had this

02:27:05.760 | idea like there was a there was a horrible drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley and

02:27:11.440 | they came to this conclusion that it's because we haven't been killing enough people right we've got

02:27:17.200 | to bump this up and then when they did and they decided they they really took it out on the clash

02:27:22.640 | collins it rained again so it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that

02:27:27.440 | and they ate people as well they really did as part of the sacrifice or is this after the sacrifice

02:27:36.640 | then they would eat them and this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started but then

02:27:41.600 | it was just kind of the thing to do when uh when cortez got there they were still having certain

02:27:47.280 | special feasts that involved humans and and it really upset the spanish that they would be like

02:27:55.600 | uh tricked into eating human like hey you liking dinner that was a human so the idea was it actually uh

02:28:04.480 | having having having a taste for human flesh or is it just you know these kinds of ideas of like if

02:28:11.040 | you eat a person's heart that you can get their spirit and their strength and in the case of the

02:28:15.440 | aztecs it seemed like they just liked it uh this guy sahagun who was a very responsible uh chronicler

02:28:22.400 | that was pretty specific that like uh there was a distribution thing yeah like the uh the the elites got

02:28:29.920 | butts the butts were the best part so the the butt cheeks those are the best parts to eat and then

02:28:36.080 | like it went down the chain until some people just got like fingers and toes literally bought taste

02:28:42.160 | for the aztec yeah boy all right they really they really did they really did in fact that's what caused

02:28:48.320 | the uh have you heard of the noche triste the sad night the night that the aztecs really go nuts on the

02:28:55.840 | spanish and kick them out it's all triggered by this this one guy um pedro de alvarado who's left in

02:29:04.880 | charge by cortez as cortez goes to the coast and tries to uh talk to the new force talk him into being

02:29:12.560 | for him which he does but pedro alvarado's left back in town in charge and they're doing another one of

02:29:19.840 | these huge aztec buffets and uh parties to honor them and it happens the guy says you know hey do you

02:29:28.640 | like dinner like oh yeah it's a nice dinner well it's humans you're eating humans see i told you they

02:29:32.800 | were good and alvarado just freaks out and he has the the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in

02:29:41.760 | the in the party women children nobody has weapons he just murders everyone and that's what spazzes the

02:29:50.960 | the aztecs out to eventually murder montezuma who was their captive and then try to murder all of them

02:29:59.120 | and it was all it was all pedro alvarado's fault for freaking out about eating humans just a little

02:30:05.680 | practical joke yeah it was just they thought it was funny he did not that's fascinating i didn't

02:30:10.400 | realize so i kind of assumed that some level of cannibalism would have to do with you know eating

02:30:15.200 | the heart to um to gain the spirit of the person or something like this but in in certain like a you

02:30:20.960 | know deer hunting rituals things for sure but the aztecs no they just liked eating humans it was part of

02:30:25.840 | the fear factor too i mean they could walk into a new town and be like you guys could either send us you

02:30:31.520 | know a number of quetzal feathers every month or we could eat you so that's psychological warfare and

02:30:38.320 | actual warfare it worked and that's how they spread and they were just about to take over the maya when

02:30:44.720 | the spanish came and messed everything up they they were they had the maya surrounded and they were about

02:30:50.000 | to take over the whole yucatan so you think without the spanish there would be this aztec empire that

02:30:56.320 | would last for a very long time well i think there would have been an aztec empire i think they would

02:31:01.280 | have finished dominating everybody but they did it through hate and everybody hated the aztecs

02:31:07.760 | they so it wouldn't have lasted forever they did not they were not ruling justly they were ruling by

02:31:14.080 | force and that that can only go on so long before revolution happens the inca empire i think that

02:31:20.960 | would have gone on forever because they were really community oriented once the inca took over like

02:31:27.280 | no one in the inca empire starved they built architecture everyone was safe

02:31:33.120 | they was it was a society that could have lasted a long time what was the origin of the inca empire

02:31:39.600 | well it was bloody at first like most of them are but once uh

02:31:44.640 | one once they started taking over that what they did is they empire built they everybody else had just

02:31:50.800 | raided their neighbors to get the resources but everybody they raided they turned them into the

02:31:56.560 | inca empire and they created this uh incredible uh mita system where you took turns working

02:32:04.720 | and they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth so a town of let's

02:32:11.760 | say 5 000 people uh the inca would roll up with an army of 100 200 000 people and say you know would

02:32:20.000 | you guys like to be part of the empire or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire

02:32:24.880 | and if your mayor here agrees then he can have a town he can have a house in cusco but then the very next

02:32:31.840 | month a big work crew would show up and they'd start building agricultural terraces and storage units and

02:32:39.840 | every month with the agricultural uh excess they would have big parties and everybody would eat so

02:32:49.360 | people lived well in the inca empire it was a rough beginning but everybody who agreed to be part of it

02:32:55.200 | immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had so they started in

02:33:02.800 | south america and peru and cusco cusco was like the center of it cusco in their language quechua

02:33:10.320 | it means naval or belly button and it's up in the the mountains but there's four quarters that they

02:33:17.360 | called their empire tiwantinsuyu the land of four quarters and the center of those four quarters was

02:33:24.720 | cusco it sprung to life what in like 12 1200 a d c yeah we we backwards project what it was but it was

02:33:34.320 | probably mid 1200s when the first sapa inca the first ruler came in but it was the i think it's the

02:33:43.840 | ninth one is pachacute who really started being an empire builder and part of that i mean what really

02:33:52.480 | really defined empire as you said roads they build a massive road network roads and uh in the same way

02:34:00.640 | that the the roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure and then every place they took over

02:34:06.720 | they'd create certain key pieces of roman architecture that kind of made that city roman and they'd rename

02:34:14.880 | it something the inca did the same thing they had certain signature inca architecture that they would

02:34:24.240 | build in as the administrative part they'd send uh they'd send the khipu kumayak the the the guys who

02:34:32.000 | would weave the or not the khipus as accountants and they would go through and say what everybody did

02:34:39.920 | okay you know you're a good farmer you're going to farm you are a good weaver you're going to weave

02:34:44.720 | all the men here are going to take a turn at being part of the army and and they then they sent

02:34:50.720 | independent khipu kumayaks to that every community had like five or six that were not allowed to work

02:34:56.480 | with each other and they all had to independently send their khipus back to cusco and if there were

02:35:02.240 | accounting discrepancies they were called to cusco to figure out who was lying about what

02:35:07.680 | so there's like a super sophisticated record keeping system yeah and that was the khipu

02:35:12.480 | and the spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all but that's an interesting development

02:35:18.560 | for for an empire because that allows you to really expand and uh have some kind of management some some

02:35:25.520 | level of control yeah they couldn't at the end they were at least 10 million people and there was just

02:35:31.600 | no way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system if the inca had

02:35:37.520 | to face aztec who wins inca inca i mean the aztecs were psychotic but the inca had just reserves for

02:35:45.600 | miles right and they had that essential hearts and minds right and there was only one thing that

02:35:52.160 | everybody got pissed off about when they joined the inca empire for some reason everything was owned

02:35:58.000 | communally except the llamas the llamas were the kings and so that was one thing that like some of them would stay in

02:36:07.360 | town just to be work llamas but you know you don't own your llama anymore and and people are really

02:36:12.960 | attached to their llamas to this day yeah they are like family members so it'd be like everybody walked

02:36:19.040 | in and said everybody's family dog is now mine like really upset people on an emotional level well i mean

02:36:26.000 | so llamas uh got domesticated at some point probably early i mean what i don't even know when but early on

02:36:34.080 | it's uh we we have rock art that progresses to make it see like a progression from people depicted hunting

02:36:42.480 | them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones yeah so it was still in that archaic period at

02:36:49.680 | least that they became friends uh yeah but if you roll in and you own them that's uh yeah that pissed

02:36:56.400 | everybody off that for some reason the inca owned everybody's llama instantly and he would take anything

02:37:02.800 | he wanted a lot of them would just get carted away that day just sent to cusco they'd also take their

02:37:09.360 | mummies that was a weird thing everybody mourns they're dead but the inca just like ceased to accept it

02:37:16.480 | they would just the mummies were still there okay he's dead but look he still got clothes he's at the

02:37:20.880 | party let's put a beer in front of him they just like they just kept people as mummies and so the

02:37:27.440 | ancestral mummies of every town part of the being absorbed into the the empire was okay your most

02:37:36.720 | important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful house in cusco but they would physically

02:37:43.680 | bring those mummies to cusco to make now cusco the spiritual heart of their their belief system

02:37:51.200 | i mean i could see how that would piss people off but it's also a pretty powerful way to

02:37:55.600 | say like the ancestors that you idolize that you respect are now in the capital they've been elevated

02:38:04.880 | we didn't steal them we have given them a new place of honor and you're welcome to come visit them all the

02:38:11.040 | time and they did they have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the inca world would

02:38:16.960 | come to cusco and uh which of the civilizations mummified people is it is it the incas for sure

02:38:24.560 | mummified people and even did some of that kind of uh like egyptian-esque taking out of organs and

02:38:32.560 | preparing the body they put like straw inside the cavity and mummify them but the maya didn't do it at all

02:38:39.440 | the maya in fact on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons

02:38:50.000 | faster and then they'd get back in there it was jungly so i think the bugs probably had part of it

02:38:55.760 | too but then they would get back in there to get the bones they'd open it back up and take the bones out

02:39:02.000 | and paint them with red cinnabar the one that i was in in copan we had evidence that they had gone in

02:39:08.560 | there four different times and the last couple times they only took the skull out and repainted

02:39:14.720 | it and then put it back in articulated in the on the skeleton but they they didn't mummify they on purpose

02:39:22.400 | would like grossly float the bodies so so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones but would

02:39:30.080 | they keep the bones yeah they'd keep the bones and they'd pull the bones out occasionally

02:39:34.400 | and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in so there's a still a deep

02:39:40.960 | connection to the ancestors to the physical manifestation of the ancestors then yeah well

02:39:45.600 | they're mummified or bone and to this day like if if you do an excavation here in the united states

02:39:51.760 | native american people don't like it they don't like their graves which is fine enough i wouldn't want

02:39:57.600 | somebody digging up my grandma either but the maya they love it they love it every maya person if we

02:40:04.320 | find a grave they're like yeah look at that bones cool can i touch yeah they they're not spooked about

02:40:11.360 | it at all they think it's exciting i one time as uh helped out a a physical anthropologist in town and

02:40:19.440 | in copan to get a osteology collection together of various animals so if we got bones from a uh

02:40:26.800 | an excavation we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection

02:40:31.680 | and this family said uh well we our family dog died last year and buried him in the backyard you go dig him

02:40:40.560 | up and so we were like okay yeah i mean we do need a dog we'll go take up your dog and then they were like

02:40:46.960 | but the kids really want to help you so their kids came out yeah and this was like their puppy and it

02:40:51.920 | died you know less than a year ago when we got to it that like that one of them just like grabbed up

02:40:56.480 | a bone and he was like we see see those like little bitty bones yeah like what a weird attitude that's

02:41:04.000 | your dead dog there but they just they have a different relationship with the dead it's some sense

02:41:08.960 | that's a beautiful attitude right yeah why um pretend like we're not mortal and there's not

02:41:14.720 | this is just the process of it and it's kind of as you say it now it kind of would be cool that's what

02:41:21.840 | day of the dead is all about and i love day of the dead uh you know halloween's this creepy thing where

02:41:27.840 | they're all monsters but day of the dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors i

02:41:33.600 | convinced my kids after the movie coco came out now we have an altar with all of our great

02:41:39.120 | grandparents on the altar and we talk about who they were and how they lived and we put things on

02:41:44.480 | the altar that mattered in their life and we remember them on that day and it turned something that was a

02:41:49.680 | weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing into something beautiful where we discuss where

02:41:56.000 | we came from i have to ask about the giant stones the inca has been able to somehow move and fit together

02:42:04.480 | perfectly do you understand is it understood how they were able to do that so well no

02:42:13.680 | um you know the moving of it i think that we have reasonable theories you know there there are ways to

02:42:24.400 | pivot large weights uh there's a there's a great guy uh named wally wallington a retired contractor

02:42:33.040 | here in the u.s who built stonehenge in his backyard in minnesota single-handedly showing how you can move

02:42:42.720 | big stones so i you know i think wally's already figured out how to move them it's the it's the perfectly

02:42:49.200 | fit so carefully fit together that you couldn't even put a diamond between the stones that's the

02:42:54.960 | one that i think still has people baffled the the common archaeological wisdom that you'd find out of uh

02:43:02.240 | textbook is that they just kept packing away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them

02:43:09.520 | until they were perfect which has to be that is there is no way that they just

02:43:16.160 | were that meticulous i mean everybody's got a hammerstone i i personally think it's acids i think

02:43:24.080 | they melted them um together and there are weird places when you really look at closely to these

02:43:30.960 | stones which i've done a number of times i'm going back next month to uh machu picchu and especially

02:43:36.960 | cusco i walk around in the alleys where these 500 you know to a thousand year old walls are still there

02:43:44.160 | and uh you see i see things like the the crystals in the andesite are uh almost stitched together along

02:43:57.840 | the seams like there's the the andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven't and there are other

02:44:04.400 | places where there are weird wipes on the wall like it's just melted like somebody like took a rag

02:44:12.640 | and wiped it while it was soft lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too i i haven't been able

02:44:20.080 | to prove it this is one of these you know end of my archaeological career chapters i'm either going to

02:44:26.480 | prove myself wrong or prove it but i think they used acids my dad's a chemist and he told me a long time

02:44:33.120 | ago that there's no way there's no naturally occurring acids but my current theory actually

02:44:40.000 | i got the idea initially from the show breaking bad i don't know if you ever saw that show but

02:44:46.880 | there's a point in which they're trying to dissolve a body yeah and they're using hydrofluoric acid and

02:44:52.720 | it goes right through the ceiling that hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating it you know it it won't go

02:44:58.720 | through plastic and you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it um the the inca made tons

02:45:08.640 | of jewelry out of fluorite fluorite is big in the andes and they also mind a lot of things for gold and

02:45:17.760 | silver and the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid you put sulfuric acid and fluorite together

02:45:27.360 | and it's hydrofluoric acid and that will burn through andesite or anything and if you learned how to do

02:45:33.600 | it you know judiciously and then you didn't care whether you know servants lost a an arm or two

02:45:40.000 | then you could actually use them to fuse these together and i i think they're fused together

02:45:46.320 | i i asked the city of cuzco if i could take some core samples and they said go away gringo don't touch

02:45:55.520 | our walls so this actually this next this next time i'm going to go try to talk to the more quechua

02:46:02.320 | authorities in a place called oleantaytambo and maybe i can convince them but right now they just think i'm

02:46:09.680 | a i'm a weird ass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls it's a fascinating theory and so the

02:46:18.400 | how could you get to the the bottom of that so getting core samples to see if there's some kind

02:46:23.760 | of trace chemists i'm working with say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these that

02:46:30.160 | a core sample right along a seam they they can separate out the elements in there and detect

02:46:37.200 | whether there was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid i wanted to go straight to burning rocks but

02:46:42.640 | they were like no i mean we already know that's true i mean yeah we can burn some rocks but it would

02:46:48.080 | happen that's just chemistry we gotta we gotta prove that it would happen in the walls so go get us samples

02:46:53.840 | and that was before covid and all sorts of you know you know how it is you probably are the same guy where

02:46:59.840 | you've got a a thousand ideas and you know the ones that that are fruitful you run with and the other

02:47:05.520 | ones you'll get back to you that would be fascinating if true and i hope you do show that it's true or follow

02:47:11.520 | either one yeah i'll try to disprove it yeah i wonder if we discount how much amazing stuff a collection of

02:47:21.520 | humans can do because it just feels like if a large number of humans are eight are just working

02:47:29.520 | a little bit chipping away at stuff at scale that can do miraculous things so the question is how can

02:47:37.040 | a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing um because i just when we think about like stonehenger

02:47:45.440 | some very challenging architectural construction we don't think about a large number of humans working

02:47:51.440 | together well you know that large number of humans uh are motivated to work together by a small number of

02:47:59.200 | administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another right one of my favorite quotes is

02:48:06.160 | and i'm probably going to misquote it here but i think it's margaret mead who said never underestimate

02:48:11.840 | the power of small groups working together and the truth is that those are the only people that have

02:48:20.000 | ever changed the world that small dedicated groups of people are what changed the world yeah and they inspire big

02:48:27.280 | groups of people to embrace their vision yeah yeah yeah i think we sometimes underestimate how much humans

02:48:35.440 | can do uh across time and we are way less capable than we used to be i mean the average human had all

02:48:41.520 | sorts of skills that at least i personally do not you know i i i'm wearing a shirt but i i can't make a shirt

02:48:49.840 | that's for somebody else to do you've also lectured about uh which i really enjoyed about north america

02:48:58.960 | and also helped teach me that there's a lot more complex societies going on here

02:49:06.480 | for a long period of time so maybe can we start at the beginning who were the early humans in north america

02:49:15.200 | well we go through that paleo indian and archaic period for thousands of years you know as we

02:49:21.360 | started this conversation probably you know 30 000 years as a conservative now humans first enter the

02:49:29.440 | americas but the first cultures we get here are mound builders around the mississippi and to the east

02:49:38.880 | and then also a totally separate group in the what we call the american southwest now the four corners

02:49:45.200 | who will develop into mostly the people we call the pueblo people who are still there today like zuni and

02:49:52.320 | hopi people so we've got these two clusters that the very first major community in north america is in the most

02:50:02.720 | unlikely place it's in northern louisiana people think i'm crazy when i say this but there is a pyramid

02:50:10.240 | in northern louisiana a big one at a site called poverty point that is uh 3 500 years old so it's the same age

02:50:20.960 | as the pyramids in egypt and it is a giant thing just poking out of the bayous of louisiana

02:50:31.200 | and uh people don't believe me when i say it but it's there the mound builders what was that society

02:50:37.120 | like in comparison to everything else we've been talking about in mesoamerica they they evolved over

02:50:41.760 | thousands of years we call them mound builders this is something i you know object to i think we should

02:50:46.400 | have a better we do the last uh version of them we call the mississippians now but generally speaking

02:50:54.800 | we call all these guys mound builders but what they built were pyramids they look like mounds now

02:51:00.640 | and they didn't build them out of stone that's you know that's kind of our just inherent western bias

02:51:06.400 | something that's built out of stone is is sophisticated and something that's built out of dirt is rudimentary

02:51:14.080 | but in their full living form they did have cores of dirt but then they also had uh kind of clay caps so

02:51:22.640 | they had terraces they had whole complexes of buildings up on top there were kings that lived up there

02:51:30.880 | there's uh the the biggest of the mississippian cities is called cahokia and it's right outside of

02:51:37.440 | uh st louis and it was huge it had a population of 20 000 people and pyramids all over the place a huge

02:51:47.440 | palisade wall around it it was absolutely gigantic a thriving metropolis and we in america have kind

02:51:56.320 | of a collective amnesia like we we never hear about these massive civilizations cahokia was the the big

02:52:04.720 | first city but then it spread from the mississippi all the way to the atlantic there were hundreds and

02:52:12.720 | hundreds of these big cities that had you know five to ten thousand people each were they their own

02:52:20.480 | thing or is there some kind of thread connecting all of them they had a unified religion and culture they

02:52:26.720 | were again not an empire so there were warring city-states there were kind of uh territories that

02:52:33.200 | were owned by big kings and then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings

02:52:40.720 | and then one one one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight so they were they were

02:52:49.040 | kind of uh countries i think for yeah we could safely say there were different countries within

02:52:56.320 | this patchwork that was eastern united states and you know it's so weird that we don't know this because

02:53:04.640 | it was clearly documented by the by the spanish it's this i'm not talking about just archaeology we find

02:53:11.760 | them in archaeology now but hernando de soto landed in florida and went for three years from he went up

02:53:19.760 | into the carolinas and over down into alabama and louisiana and he's the first one to see the mississippi

02:53:28.000 | up there but for three years he went through city after city after city unfortunately decimating them

02:53:36.640 | eating all their corn giving them diseases but uh i mean the documentation is clearly there he met

02:53:43.920 | collectively millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization those disease

02:53:53.920 | and uh stealing of resources but was there like explicit murdering going on unfortunately yeah he

02:54:01.520 | was a murderer and a psycho and a liar he uh he he snowed them that he was some kind of deity actually

02:54:10.720 | learned a trick from the inca who he was with pizarro in his first run and got went back to spain was

02:54:17.040 | rich had a wife a castle then he got bored and he decided to have a reign of terror on northern america

02:54:24.400 | for three years but he had people uh burned at the stake he had his dogs ripped them apart he was very very

02:54:34.160 | brutal he he ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody he made promises and

02:54:43.760 | broke them all the time he was really he was a brutal man so this whole period when uh christopher columbus

02:54:53.120 | came how did that change everything well you know there's a there's a great uh anthropological uh body

02:55:03.360 | of literature it's it's called the columbian exchange based on columbus but it's you know all this trade back

02:55:09.680 | and forth between the new world and the old world and the the old world got just wonderful stuff all of

02:55:17.120 | a sudden their diet didn't suck all these vegetables came in the the new world got uh herd animals it got

02:55:26.160 | pigs and cows and goats that it didn't have but it also got 13 infectious diseases uh europe had had wave

02:55:35.840 | wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things but it didn't actually go away

02:55:41.040 | it just couldn't spread like a wildfire through the community

02:55:44.640 | so when they arrived to the americas all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people

02:55:52.880 | i think in the first 20 30 years there were people who like

02:55:57.840 | had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them but the numbers you know it's

02:56:06.080 | it's a it's a shameful part of history and it wasn't something that europe perpetrated on them

02:56:11.920 | the medical science at that time was still the four humors theory that people were made of yellow bile

02:56:18.560 | black bile blood and phlegm and we did things like well you've got to bleed him he'll feel better then

02:56:24.720 | so we had no idea what an infectious disease was but the reality was that this

02:56:29.600 | horde of diseases hit everyone and the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that it

02:56:36.960 | 90 of everybody was dead and that the the number of people has increased as well as far as the

02:56:45.520 | our estimates we're thinking it's somewhere around 150 million people and 90 of them died and with them

02:56:55.200 | all their knowledge just i mean imagine the moment where you know who dies when things get bad it's the

02:57:02.240 | young and the old so all the knowledge keepers die suddenly the children die this next generation that's half

02:57:11.680 | taught and now completely demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack that their gods hate them

02:57:19.520 | that the only way out of it is to uh to accept this new christianity but they you know they don't have

02:57:26.400 | bring kids into this world where everybody's dying and even if they do they can't teach them

02:57:31.600 | what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmission

02:57:37.280 | so in a in a single terrible moment in human history you know the generation loses all their knowledge

02:57:45.360 | so a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out but with that also just the the wisdom of

02:57:53.920 | the entire civilizations so much of what they knew was just lost at that moment we have the maya who had

02:58:04.640 | those hieroglyphs and that we've learned a lot from that yeah but not a significant integration of

02:58:10.000 | that wisdom into so it wasn't uh when the europeans came it wasn't like the cultures were integrated

02:58:17.520 | it was um a story of domination in the north in north america there's a a new term in the literature

02:58:24.960 | that i like we call it the uh the mississippian shatter zone that mississippian civilization was millions of

02:58:32.800 | people but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries and now

02:58:37.360 | we have this shatter zone where we have how ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins

02:58:44.560 | are somewhere else on a reservation far away and you know that i'm just about to talk to a cherokee man

02:58:51.520 | who listened to some of the things i had to say and says all those ho-chunk things you were saying from

02:58:56.880 | that ho-chunk culture my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too can i can i talk to you by

02:59:02.480 | phone and tell you about these things so we've got this shatter zone where you know we're gonna try to

02:59:07.920 | put the piece the puzzle back together especially in terms of mississippian religion i really think we're

02:59:15.920 | making headway in this generation and it's exciting to be part of piecing this old religion and its

02:59:23.200 | mythology back together just as uh since a lot of people kind of refer to christopher columbus as the

02:59:29.280 | person who discovered america um i read that the vikings reached north america uh much earlier in um 1000

02:59:38.640 | ce and uh why do you think they didn't expand and colonize because they got their ass kicked

02:59:45.280 | okay it's the truth yeah it is absolutely true that the vikings were here there's a there's a great

02:59:53.360 | uh site in nova scotia called lenso meadows which definitely has what's left of a viking colony it was

03:00:02.320 | leaf eric and his father eric the red who they got kind of kicked out of europe because they

03:00:07.280 | apparently couldn't stop murdering people and so they went to greenland and then kind of island

03:00:13.200 | hopped over to canada but i think the culture that was in that area it was named the dorset

03:00:18.960 | but they would have nothing to do with the vikings they they attacked the viking settlement every day

03:00:25.600 | and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it you know the

03:00:31.840 | vikings attacked ireland and they just found a bunch of you know monasteries full of gold with a bunch

03:00:38.160 | of guys going we're men of god we don't fight and the vikings were like this is great that's great this

03:00:43.920 | will be easy then we'll just loot all these easter eggs but the native americans in canada were like

03:00:50.160 | not having it they kicked their ass in fact uh leaf ericsson's brother thor died there the the natives

03:00:57.680 | killed him he was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement but they they just killed

03:01:03.120 | him so a lot of the native american cultures were also i mean they're sophisticated warring cultures also

03:01:10.240 | yes they fought especially the the mississippians boy they were tough and so were uh you know the the

03:01:17.360 | five nations the mohawk the huron those the ones that that kicked the viking's ass up there they were

03:01:24.800 | probably uh algonquin speakers but they were connected like you know just above the the great lakes but

03:01:32.640 | they were all a very tough people when you think about the spaniards and the the portuguese and the

03:01:40.560 | over 100 million people that were killed um do you see that as a tragedy of history or is it just the way of

03:01:47.760 | history i think that the epidemics i i consider it a tragedy that did not have to happen and that was

03:01:56.320 | not you know that was not a fair fight nobody knew what to do about it there was just a a tragic perfect

03:02:03.440 | storm of events it was not you know they i think that the spanish and the portuguese get unfairly maligned

03:02:10.800 | in what's been called the the black legend that they just marched into america and murdered everyone

03:02:16.480 | that's not the fact that it was the diseases that murdered everyone in fact there was a a really poignant

03:02:23.120 | uh story i read of a a spanish priest in the amazon in the in the brazilian northern part of the amazon where he made this utopian community

03:02:35.680 | and he was bringing people in that were getting sick and he he wrote you know i'm baptizing

03:02:40.400 | everyone you know i have baptized 10 000 people a day and yet god's still killing them why is he doing

03:02:47.360 | this to them they're doing everything that i asked them to do they are submitting to the will of god

03:02:53.280 | but this guy doesn't realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptizing them in he's just wiping

03:02:59.920 | the disease on everybody's faces he's accelerating it when he doesn't even realize he thinks he's saving

03:03:05.920 | them but he's actually killing them yeah that's a trap that's a tragedy you know that's not just like

03:03:14.560 | spoils go to the victor stuff that's just straight up tragedy yeah yeah but that one is even hard to know

03:03:22.720 | what to do with like black death it's i mean infections they don't operate on normal human

03:03:28.960 | terms right they just they just go through entire populations back to wild ideas all right just my style

03:03:39.440 | um i mean we didn't really talk about how life originated on earth or how

03:03:47.280 | uh how humans have evolved and we did talk about that there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient

03:03:54.400 | history we haven't even uncovered yet uh do you think it's possible that other intelligent civilizations

03:04:02.960 | from outside of earth aliens ever visited you had me right until the ever visited thing that one i'm not

03:04:11.920 | entirely sure about i'm not sure whether we have any we certainly have no archaeological proof that i would

03:04:18.560 | uh cite or contemplate as the evidence of such but you know uh you know the guys that that discovered dna

03:04:27.920 | watson and crick uh watson uh who actually habitually used hallucinogens to to uh invigorate his thinking he

03:04:37.680 | said that he thought that dna on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period

03:04:46.240 | that it had at its disposal and that his guess was that our dna was somehow seeded from outside of our

03:04:54.880 | planet and you know take that for what it is but the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that

03:05:02.960 | um so that's interesting but in terms of you know aliens visiting us i i don't know i it does smack

03:05:10.880 | of a kind of human hubris that we think we're important enough for some advanced species to give

03:05:17.280 | a about us statistically speaking the universe is way too big we can't be the only sentient beings

03:05:23.920 | there's got to be somebody else out there whether they care about us that's a question i've been on

03:05:29.920 | ancient aliens a number of times i show up and you know i'm an educator i mean refusing to be part of

03:05:36.160 | the conversations an immediate fail in my book um but there was one time where they asked me at the

03:05:43.040 | end you know do you have anything else uh do you want to say and i said well you know yeah y'all's premise

03:05:51.120 | is that aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of you know science

03:05:58.160 | and medicine engineering all these things today we also have a lot of uh

03:06:04.240 | stories of the aliens coming down but now all they're doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing

03:06:11.680 | rednecks like whatever we did we super pissed them off apparently the quality of the gifts has decreased

03:06:20.320 | rapidly um what it's interesting thought you've mentioned what archaeologically would you have to

03:06:28.880 | see to be like this might be an alien a technology that doesn't belong there first and foremost i mean

03:06:37.760 | you know we gotta it if we just run with the premise that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that

03:06:45.520 | could get them from somewhere far away to here that was almost certainly mechanical now i you know i love

03:06:53.440 | the aliens thing where you know biomechanical is something that that certainly could be and that would

03:06:58.560 | you know that that would uh disintegrate we wouldn't see that at all but i would expect some kind of uh

03:07:05.520 | technology that that showed up out of the blue and change things that would be something um but but i

03:07:12.000 | would think you know mechanical right or you know a substance that's not from here but of course we

03:07:18.560 | would only see the the results of that mechanical you mean like literally a mechanical thing right some

03:07:24.960 | sort of thing like that uh you know it the typical thing people say is like you know how did they move

03:07:31.120 | these giant stones right but you know let's just just look at that on the face for a second aliens come

03:07:37.680 | from across the universe to meet humans and the thing they tell them is how to move rocks are you

03:07:45.920 | fucking kidding me i mean you know like give them give them antibiotics or a combustion engine or something

03:07:51.280 | you're gonna they said they came across the universe and they showed them how to move big rocks i mean

03:07:57.200 | that doesn't make any sense that just doesn't make any sense what do you think earth will look like

03:08:04.480 | 10 000 years from now that's an interesting question i think it will be a lot more automated

03:08:14.400 | or it'll be a smoldering pile i mean if there is a possibility we could end ourselves

03:08:21.200 | there's always that possibility that we've really opened pandora's box in some regards

03:08:27.200 | i i did listen to one of your podcast guests with the uh what would happen in the case of nuclear war

03:08:34.720 | yeah that was chilling her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes

03:08:41.120 | apparently so we we have that capacity that's scary that's a possible future for us but i'm an optimist

03:08:47.760 | i'd you know i'd like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make my job better

03:08:52.320 | but a thousand ten thousand years is a long time and uh technology is improving and becoming more advanced

03:09:03.840 | rapidly and uh the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more so that that's the part that frightens me

03:09:11.680 | actually i don't know does that frighten you yes terrifying you know i i i heard somebody say i forget

03:09:17.680 | who it was but you know uh systems of any kind human systems biological systems can be put on a graph

03:09:27.680 | that's change over time and any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the and the the line

03:09:39.520 | starts going straight up that is a system in crisis in almost any biological system that has that fast a

03:09:47.600 | change over that little time you would any any other thing you'd describe it as a crisis when you apply

03:09:54.880 | that chart to technologies change it's a crisis from that perspective absolutely but i also have a faith

03:10:02.800 | in human ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with ways to uh

03:10:12.960 | get out of that difficult situation and in so doing innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and

03:10:19.200 | sometimes cause a lot of suffering but on the whole on average uh make a better world but yeah if it you

03:10:27.280 | know like with nuclear weapons the bad stuff might actually lead to the death of everybody i guess

03:10:35.120 | there's always that that chance but i am an optimist i you know i think you're an optimist too i i think

03:10:41.840 | exactly as you just said i think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate and

03:10:48.480 | we are never more innovative than when we're under distress i think that a lot of the developments of

03:10:56.000 | humans over the last thousands of years have been about you know we didn't we didn't change the world when

03:11:02.720 | we were comfortable it was when we were in crisis mother necessity is the mother of invention and i think we'll be

03:11:10.480 | all right i think that uh this impending uh climate crisis is real and happening i actually personally

03:11:19.120 | think that uh i'm gonna i'm gonna answer a question that you didn't even ask me

03:11:22.560 | um i think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this we're uh delusional i'm all for

03:11:33.200 | electric cars and uh you know uh being good stewards of the environment but uh you know uh being good

03:11:36.480 | stewards of the environment but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what's about

03:11:44.080 | to happen we're spending too much time pretending you know the average american thinks if we all just drive

03:11:50.560 | electric cars will be okay that's bullshit that's not going to happen we need to start making

03:11:55.920 | technologies that desalinize water that you know a host of things that uh that we need to use our

03:12:02.160 | technological past capacity to accept it and adapt instead of pollyanna thinking we can make it go away

03:12:10.080 | yeah yeah kind of accept that the world will change and uh a lot of big problems will arise

03:12:19.760 | and just develop technology that addresses them i think you have some some guys that have their finger

03:12:24.800 | on the pulse there we need to start thinking about how we're going to survive this not that we're going

03:12:28.160 | to make it go away and not just survive thrive um again we're pretty innovative in that regard

03:12:35.360 | but if some catastrophic thing happens or we just leave this planet what uh what do you think would be

03:12:44.080 | found by a aforementioned alien civilizations when they visit the anthropologists the grad student

03:12:50.960 | anthropologists that visit earth and study how much of what we now have and love and think of as human

03:12:59.680 | civilization will be lost do you think well you know time moves on and things that are perishable perish

03:13:07.840 | so you know you didn't put a time element in there but i would say that you know everything that can

03:13:14.640 | perish will and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn't perish so we'll have

03:13:21.200 | you know buildings plaques but they won't have any books they won't have any you know billboards there

03:13:28.480 | they'll have the incomplete record i have i i one time did a did a talk in sue falls and i said you

03:13:38.880 | know i drove in here and there was a big obelisk in front of the town and everywhere i go i see the names

03:13:48.480 | lewis and clark and a thousand years from now if i was an archaeologist investigating this place i would

03:13:54.880 | think that it was founded by the egyptians and their kings were named lewis and clark but the truth is

03:14:02.000 | you know lewis and clark stayed one night here but it's just a big deal so i would be so wrong about what

03:14:09.200 | i thought about your town based on what preserved this is so beautiful as a thought experiment like what

03:14:16.880 | would archaeologists be really wrong about and what would they could possibly be right about washington

03:14:23.120 | dc was clearly made by a combination of the egyptians and the greeks and the romans because

03:14:28.800 | that's what all the architecture is yeah and would they be able to reconstruct the important empires

03:14:35.760 | the the the powerful empires and the the warring empires for that matter have me and my colleagues

03:14:43.360 | done that at all i i'm almost certain that the maya would just gut laugh at what i think i know what they

03:14:49.120 | were i wonder do you ever think about like what we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most

03:14:56.560 | like mainstream archaeology just like a suspicion what what could we get completely wrong

03:15:02.720 | uh well one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civils like an obviously gigantic

03:15:10.960 | civilization that was there along with the maya or something like this in the 10 000 years ago there's

03:15:17.520 | certainly that there could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that

03:15:22.880 | would completely change the way we think about things and everybody knew they existed and everybody

03:15:28.000 | interacted with them it was i think i think i think it's our estimation of their motivations that were

03:15:33.520 | probably most wrong on my uh my teacher shealy a long time ago said you know i i've come up with all

03:15:40.160 | sorts of theories i was always thinking about stuff and she looked at me and she said if you don't stop

03:15:45.440 | thinking like a western european and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people you

03:15:52.800 | will never understand any of it which i've always taken to heart i mean i really do when i approach these

03:15:59.280 | things i try to step out of my cultural assumptions trying to think like they would think is the best i could

03:16:07.680 | and it's very different i mean this whole you know the maya are are cyclical you know this the the whole

03:16:13.280 | sacrifice we're so you know obsessed with that but you know that was an austere actual sacrifice on

03:16:20.480 | their part they weren't just you know hey let's all get together and kill that guy that's pissing us off i

03:16:25.840 | mean they were like you know giving the best of them it was it was a different mentality this was not brutal this

03:16:32.880 | was a you know bona fide sacrifice on their part a loss plus the whole mystery of of the puppy

03:16:40.240 | that eventually starts having sex with this i tell you that one i'm gonna unweave that one one of these

03:16:46.240 | days one of these days now this that puppy appeared on the on pottery all over pottery yeah he's he's

03:16:53.760 | he's everywhere i gotta write this book i this next year is the year i'm gonna write my fang deity book and i will

03:16:59.840 | have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy the mystery solved i mean it could just be the birth of

03:17:07.760 | memes of humor i don't know i mean again humor you don't know what the nature of their humor of what

03:17:13.280 | their jokes are oh that's a neat one too then that's so human you know that i'll tell you a little like

03:17:19.280 | side story here that uh when i worked with the maya people in palenque i spent three years making this map

03:17:27.120 | of the city and hiking through the jungle every day and they would talk to each other in their own

03:17:33.280 | language uh it was uh sell tall was the group i was working with but i noticed after a while they were

03:17:38.880 | they were big jokers they loved to make jokes and they would laugh at jokes but then they would also

03:17:43.680 | one of them would say something and the other ones would go hoo hoo and i eventually asked you know

03:17:49.680 | what is that why do you guys always make that hoo hoo noise they said that's because he made a really

03:17:55.680 | smart pun it was like he said three different things at once it was a turn of phrase that was smart

03:18:02.240 | and they didn't make laughs at that it was there they had a noise for when somebody said something just

03:18:08.320 | super clever yeah so there's also that like you know just clever turn of speech yeah wit and i think

03:18:16.000 | about that when i'm a uh uh hieroglyphic translator like here's a beautiful thing that's going to be

03:18:21.760 | like a poem or a political statement like and i'm just plottingly looking in a dictionary of what that

03:18:28.800 | word means there's probably double triple entendres all through this text and the real meaning is the

03:18:35.040 | subtext and i'm you know i'm thinking they're talking about corn and they're talking about the nature of

03:18:40.080 | life yeah it could be satire it could be you know as it was in the soviet union when there's a dictator

03:18:46.960 | maybe there's an overpowering king you're not allowed to actually speak uh you have to hide the thing

03:18:53.440 | you're you're actually trying to say uh in the subtext so and all of that there was a funny uh maya

03:19:02.000 | ceramic that had the ceramics are neat because they don't the the the monuments can be kind of broken

03:19:08.960 | records i'm the king i was born this time i beat these people up i married this woman i died but the

03:19:14.880 | ceramics will tell us like things out of mythology stories and there was this one with a rabbit looking

03:19:20.560 | at the merchant god and nobody could translate the text and finally this uh eastern european actually a

03:19:26.880 | ukrainian guy translated it and the rabbit saying to uh to the merchant god bend over and smell my ass

03:19:36.960 | it's like oh man we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology but no it translates bend over and

03:19:43.760 | smell my ass that's great that's human as we mentioned previously human nature does not change uh you you

03:19:51.600 | mentioned uh plank and mapping it it's just out of curiosity what is that process like it seems

03:19:56.880 | fascinating oh it was uh it was a great adventure i loved it but it was it was difficult i i woke up

03:20:04.320 | every morning thinking i will be hurt today somehow i don't know how i don't know how badly where on my

03:20:10.960 | body it will occur but it's going to happen because it was the jungle so in the jungle what's what's the

03:20:16.320 | process like what what what do you have to do to map it well it was tricky too because it was also a

03:20:22.880 | a national forest so the forestry department didn't want us to cut down anything more than we had to so

03:20:28.480 | we basically just cut tunnels through the foliage and i would uh we'd map everything twice the first thing

03:20:35.280 | we do is i'd go in uh find a building draw it on a piece of graph paper and i'd say like you know you

03:20:42.560 | guys go north you guys go east west find other buildings and when you find them paste back to this

03:20:48.960 | one and so i'd start making a map and i'd make the whole uh one piece of graph paper was enough to then

03:20:55.920 | we'd bring the machine in we'd bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information but on that

03:21:01.360 | piece of paper i would write like don't bring the machine this way there's a tree fall or stand on top of

03:21:07.760 | this building and you'll see four different buildings at once from this one nice and all of this is in

03:21:13.200 | dense jungle right and the deeper we got off the road the deeper it was sometimes it would clear out

03:21:20.080 | but certain places if it was low it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast sometimes

03:21:29.200 | we would cut just uh uh tunnels through tall grass and we'd come back like five days later

03:21:36.160 | and they were gone yeah like we did we couldn't even find where our trails were they would grow back

03:21:41.680 | that fast but you see the building so you could see right and that was the fun part i mean sometimes

03:21:47.440 | it would just be like a little neighborhood with little low buildings no bigger than this table but

03:21:51.840 | sometimes you know just five more meters in and i'm standing under a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped

03:21:58.800 | like wow i've just found another one and some days you know on good days we'd find three pyramids and

03:22:04.320 | i i i felt uh that's that's such a more exciting job than the typical excavations although my buddies were

03:22:12.160 | all just you know in a hole for the whole week in the middle of the city and where i'm dancing around

03:22:17.680 | through the jungle i could find you know 10 buildings today i might find a pyramid today who knows what's

03:22:23.200 | that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that you're one of the only humans that are not from

03:22:28.880 | that civilization to ever see this thing what's that what's that feel like it's it's great i love that

03:22:35.680 | feeling i i am you know i'm an explorer at heart um so finding something like that you know when i was uh

03:22:42.400 | when i was 25 years old i i found a whole maya city i got to name it its name is mash nah it's off in

03:22:49.680 | the belisian jungle and that was just just outrageous i mean it almost dead that one almost depressed me

03:22:57.680 | i was my my entire like i had this great life ambition that i would find a lost city and then i did

03:23:06.720 | it at 25 and i was like god now what do i do i thought that was supposed to take me my whole life

03:23:11.920 | i actually uh i wrote a bunch of letters to nasa trying to get them to let me be the first uh

03:23:17.840 | archaeologist on mars i never got a single reply back i'm sure i'm on nasa's list as some weirdo

03:23:26.160 | um how'd you find a mayan city i uh i used a topography map of the area and i played the game

03:23:34.640 | if i was a maya where would my favorite place to live in this big area be i i looked for the biggest

03:23:40.640 | mountain because they call all of their pyramids tun wheat stone mountains i knew they loved mountains

03:23:48.640 | and when i found that mountain there were two others right next to it that made a triangle and they love

03:23:53.520 | those triads and there were rivers in between them and i thought that's it that's where i would build

03:23:59.680 | the city and i hiked out there over two seasons with students the other grad students were like

03:24:05.440 | he's just having his students just wander in the jungle all day but i came back with the city so

03:24:12.880 | given that you've looked into the deep pasts of uh humanity what gives you hope about our future

03:24:19.360 | maybe our deep future of this human civilization that's a good one and i do have hope i do have

03:24:27.840 | hope i i believe in the spirit of humankind i i as a person who have studied history i kind of feel like

03:24:36.720 | history does kind of a sine wave there's highs and there's lows but no matter how low we go we get up

03:24:44.160 | again and and we climb and i think that humanity will continue that we will rise to the challenges now some of the

03:24:53.840 | challenges may be created by ourselves as well but we will adapt and overcome that's that's what we do

03:25:00.400 | yeah humans find a way right that's that's like uh that's the thing you see with with history you

03:25:07.440 | when the empires collapse they uh the humans that come out of that they pick themselves up and find

03:25:15.680 | another way they build a new thing and the people i study believe in the cyclical nature of life that

03:25:21.120 | you really can't life can't continue without death being part of the cycle we get our lows we get our

03:25:27.520 | highs but the cycle continues forever i should mention that you have a lot of great lectures uh on the great

03:25:35.440 | courses but you have also an amazing podcast archaeo ed if people want to listen to it this is a tough

03:25:45.840 | question but what uh would you recommend what episodes should they listen to what's the oh that is a tough

03:25:55.120 | question what what is uh what is the sampling you know it's like asking a chef like what's the best stuff on the menu

03:26:03.440 | well different strokes for different folks you know i do two different things on that podcast

03:26:07.440 | sometimes i just teach about cultures that you've never heard about or yeah i i love i i start off by

03:26:13.280 | saying it's my podcast and i'll talk about whatever the heck i want to talk about sometimes i talk about

03:26:17.440 | really uh specific things like a tool type or an animal type but my favorite ones have become when i just

03:26:24.800 | tell my stories of my adventures i've got a lot of weird adventure stories and uh it's it's been fun and

03:26:32.320 | they've been very well received i've got you know i can put my humor in there and i can talk about

03:26:36.880 | you know the the things that went right the things that went wrong the adventures that i had are all

03:26:42.640 | part of part of this archaeo ed thing it's an archaeo ads kind of a double entendre it's me

03:26:48.960 | i'm just dead but it's also education you know what i'm really trying to do with this too it's

03:26:54.960 | specifically the americas i want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations

03:27:03.040 | here especially north america i i think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations

03:27:10.960 | here before europe showed up that's simply not true i think it should be part of our history books in fact i

03:27:18.560 | have a program called before the americas that uh would introduce as part of american history

03:27:26.720 | the part before european contact and i think that kids in the k-12 level should grow up

03:27:33.600 | not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492 and one of these days i'm going to find a funder to

03:27:44.400 | help us put together before the americas and we're going to make it part of the curriculum for every kid in the u.s to

03:27:52.480 | know the full history of this country that's a great project ed thank you so much thank you for talking today

03:27:59.360 | thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put onto the world and uh i can't wait to hear your new course

03:28:06.720 | thank you so much lex it was a real pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with ed barnhart

03:28:13.440 | to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some

03:28:19.440 | words from joseph campbell life is but a mask worn on the face of death and is death then but another

03:28:28.720 | mask how many can say asks the aztec poet that there is or is not a truth beyond thank you for listening

03:28:39.440 | and hope to see you next time

03:28:41.520 | and hope to see you next time

03:28:41.680 | and hope to see you next time

03:28:44.320 | and hope to see you next time

03:28:46.320 | Thank you.

Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446

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