for the vast majority of human existence we've been nomadic and we've done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region but they'd move so once humans figured out how to stay in a place that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization i think you said beauty and blood went hand in hand for the aztec what i meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and you know ripping people's hearts out this they had this this just you know grotesque violent bent but in the same way they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance the same aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry but they were really just surgical about it they'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down pull up and just while the person was alive yep while the person was alive the following is a conversation with ed barnhart an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of south america mesoamerica and north america this is a lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's ed barnhart do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth which we don't know anything about yes i do and in fact you know we we have found some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime i mean we've got gobekli tepi and we've got the stuff that's going on in the amazon and there's some other less startling things that we had no id existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations we had no idea about so yeah it's happened and i think it'll happen again do you think there's a lost civilization in the amazon that uh the amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of yes i do and i uh we're beginning to find it there are these huge what we call geoglyphs these mound groups that are in geometric patterns i think that the average joe when they hear the word civilization they think of something that looks like rome and i don't think we're ever going to find anything that looks like rome in the amazon i think a lot of things there i mean wherever you are on the planet you use your natural resources and in the amazon there's not a whole lot of stone what stone is there is deep deep deep so a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles but is it possible that all that land that's not covered by trees is actually hiding stone for example some architecture some things that's just very difficult to find for archaeologists i think at the base of the andes where the amazon connects to the andes there's a lot of potential there because that's where the stone actually starts poking up when you get down into the basin stone is meters and meters under the ground except for a a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep and even then only in the dry season because that river rises like over a hundred feet every year well that's one of the things having visited that area uh just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water i was uh humbled by the power of water to shape landscapes and probably a race history in the context that we're talking about of civilizations as water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia and so if there's something existed a very long time ago thousands of years ago it is very possible it was just eaten up by nature absolutely in fact in my opinion that's almost a certainty in a lot of places uh you know the grand canyon was dug by water there's this wimpy little river in it right now and you can't possibly imagine that it dug that but it did the power of nature and geology is really kind of magical and when it comes to you know ancient civilizations that could be from 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 under the ocean so you think atlantis ever existed i don't think that atlantis existed i do think it was one of plato's many parables talking about you know putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school if one did exist or a shadow of it my money would be on akrotiri akrotiri is what's left of a big city that was on the island of santorini and when their volcano blew up it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so fast that 70 miles away in crete there are chunks of santorini in their cliff so it blasted what was ever there but what's left on the side of the crater akrotiri is strangely advanced for its age and so if there's anything that's a model for atlantis as plato explained it it's akrotiri akrotiri the ancient greek city so it says the settlement was destroyed in the theron eruption sometime in the 16th century bce and buried in volcanic ash which preserved the remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks so we don't know how advanced that civilization was no but we can walk around the ruins and see that it's got streets it's got plumbing it's got little sconces for uh for torches at night it was a vibrant city with uh with a lot of especially in terms of hydraulic engineering it's it's very advanced for being 3500 years old so if you check out here's an image of the uh excavation what a project it's an amazing place and you can tell that it's just part of it because it it's pretty close to where the crater begins so the city itself was probably much larger so in this case there's a lot of evidence but like we said there could be there could be civilizations that there is no there's very little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence right and i think akrotiri is actually a great example of that because here we have the side that did preserve that looks amazing but we know there was more of the city that was completely obliterated it was shot chunks of that city are probably in the walls of crete 70 miles away and uh you know plato says that it it sunk it was on an island and it sunk well that's exactly what happened to akrotiri i think this is what plato was referring to if it does exist at least the model of it i think this is probably what he was talking about and there could be other civilizations of which plato has never written right that we have no record of and uh it's humbling to think that entire civilizations with all the dreams the hope the technological innovation the the wars the conflicts the the political tensions all of that uh the social interactions the hierarchies all of that the art can be just destroyed like that and forgotten completely lost to ancient history i reflect upon that often as an archaeologist i think about the this great country that i live in and love and all the things we've achieved but you know we're we're a baby historically speaking we've been around 200 years heck a lot of the cities i study in uh central and south america they had a run of you know 800 a thousand years and now they're ruins but we're we're barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations so humans homo sapiens evolved uh but they didn't start civilizations right away there's a long period of time there's a long period of time when they did not form these complex societies so how did we let's say 300 000 years ago in africa actually go from there to creating civilizations i think that a lot of human uh evolution had to do with uh the the pressures that their environment put upon them and you know a lot of things start changing right around 12 000 years ago and that's when you know our last ice age really ended i think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them into especially finding new ways of subsistence here in the americas a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away when the climate changed enough the the mammoths died out and the bison died out and there was just uh they had to come up with different ways of doing things we were hunters and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting and we got things we got from gathering and in the americas when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits there you know the the gathering started to be a much more important thing and i think that led to figuring out hey we could actually grow certain things and gardens turned into crops turned into intensive crops and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area they didn't have to roam around anymore and that's where we get the first sedentary communities which means they they stayed in the same place all year long for the vast majority of human existence we've been nomadic and we've done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the 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 because there's berries and things and then in the winter we'll be down here and we'll hunt but they'd move so once humans figured out how to stay in a place i think there that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization what do you think is uh there's a lot of questions i want to ask here what do you think is the motivation for societies is it the the carrot or the stick so you said like is it like when resources run out when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody then you have to figure stuff out or is it more the carrot of like there's always this kind of human spirit that wants to explore that wants to uh maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this with uh the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas sort of technological innovation let's call it well you know i i have an explorer's heart so i'm kind of uh you 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 horizon yeah and to impress other people with our achievements things like that i we're we're social beings um that's that that's really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together so i i think that it's much more the carrot than the stick when things get ugly the stick comes out but usually the carrot does the job the really interesting story is how the first people came to the americas i mean to me that's pretty gangster to go from asia all the way potentially during the ice age or maybe at the end of the ice age or during that whole period not knowing what the world looks like going into the unknown can you talk to that process how did the first people come to the americas well first off i agree with you that was pretty gangster i mean that's that's that's a hard place to live i i listened to some of your podcasts is that guy uh jordan jonas yeah the mustard but i i wouldn't have made a crossing there yeah well there you go like the fact that those guys exist that somebody like jordan jonas exists people that uh survive and thrive in these harsh conditions that that's an indication that it's possible but yeah so when when do you think and how did the first people come the traditional theories are still somewhat valid or at least you know on the table that when that land bridge occurred that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across the thing that has changed is how early that happened dna has been a total game changer for archaeology you know we we get all these uh evolutionary tracks that we could never see before when i was a young archaeologist i had i would have never dreamed we'd have the information we have now and that information a lot of it's coming out of texas a and m we see the traditional like 12 500 years ago that there was a migration but now we're seeing one that's almost certainly happening closer to 30 000 years ago and now the thing that seems like madness but might be true is that it could have been as early as 60.

a lot of the dna things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. and when i was a younger archaeologist it was heresy to go beyond this 12 500 you're a wacko if you said that but now it's really very clear that they came over at least by 30 000 and the bridge opened and closed and opened and closed that's during the ice age right i mean that's crazy right that's that is crazy yeah i mean you know they didn't roll in and immediately make new york but there were people and there were definitely not people here before that which is fascinating the uh the when the when the bridge closed dna mutated and so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the americas that don't exist otherwise and that same haplogroup game has been showing us more and more that people came across siberia it's not africa it's not western europe those are still you know they've become kind of fringe theories but they're not totally eradicated i have dna is uh developing science as well and i think we all need to keep that in mind that it's not like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers and sometimes like in any science a breakthrough puts a stew two steps backwards not forwards so i think you know we don't need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through dna but they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from siberia that all native american people are of asiatic descent do you think it was a gradual process if it's like 30 to 60 000 years ago was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals or was it like one explorer that pushed the the tribe to just go go go go and go across maybe across a hundred years travel all the way uh across maybe into north america into north north america where canada is now and then sort of like big leaps in movement versus gradual movement i think it was big leaps and now this is just you know uh mostly guess i'll i'll admit but i think that it much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more uh slow and steady pattern and then something big will happen again i do think that uh the early people went as far as they could go and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years one of the fascinating things that dna is showing us which actually blood types were showing us way before that is that the oldest people in the americas are in south america the ones that are uh that got separated early and didn't mix their dna like the people in the amazon most of those guys have uh o blood type and their haplogroup d which is the oldest one that entered the the us and what are they doing down there if i do believe they came across the bering strait i don't think it's very we have no real evidence to say they they came in mass across uh oceania so they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to south america so there's some kind of some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore so if you had to bet all your money it happened like tens of thousands of years ago but at a very rapid pace there's these explorers that went all the way to south america and there established their kind of more stable existence and from there south america mesoamerica north america was kind of gradually expanded into that area like the next waves came down and did north america and central america and the very first wave made it all the way down to south america and got isolated isolated and then mixed in with the next groups that came that's fascinating kind of like there's a there's an interesting correlate in uh in europe where today everybody feels like uh celtic people are from ireland but actually celtic people started in eastern europe and it was the entire area and when rome kind of swept everything and and rome was now the the ruler of the day it was only that far edge of the celtic world ireland that they were 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 that's the heart of celtic tradition but actually it's the fringe so if it is 60 000 years ago these are really early humans yeah and there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about uh very old carbon 14 dates in the amazon and in the andes area that everybody just dismissed this no he didn't get a date of 40 000 years but i think we're going to come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand and that's the interesting thing is you know the early humans spread throughout the world and then like you said perhaps they've gotten isolated and then civilizations sprung from there and they all have similar elements even though they were isolated that's really interesting that's really interesting that there's multiple cradles of civilization not just one like one good idea that those ideas naturally come up those structures naturally come up and i i wonder whether you know the similarities that all those cradles have it could be uh you know a shared much deeper past that they all have or it could be a more kind of star trek thing where uh you know captain kirk was always talking about the uh the theory of parallel human development that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development and that that could be the answer to it which which one do you lean on which which one do you lean towards i think it's a case-by-case thing i think if we look globally i lean much more towards the human parallel development but if i look just to the americas and we have a shorter time period where you know the the things that become major civilizations now now now i'll say you know up to 30 000 years ago which is still a blip in the time of of humans um i think that there were shared things that those people came over with from asia and that as they got separated that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and uh cultural customs that we can see i i'm a big proponent that there are uh commonalities in all the cultures of the americas that lead back to and point to a a single distant origin you've spoken about the lost cradle civilization south america so uh south america is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization south america mesoamerica can you explain well we have very early stuff in south america you're right i mean you know especially as uh uh as an american our country's so big and you know the we are so far removed from these places we don't even think about it but more and more we're seeing things that that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about like egypt and mesopotamia um there are things it's all on the peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization someday we might start talking about the amazon more and more but right now what we've got are things that date back into the 3000s bce along the coast of peru and there are big stone built pyramids and temples and they're they they're amazingly isolated even now that we've found them uh some of them like corral is one of the most famous ones just north of lima we've known about it for a couple decades now how old it is but every time i visit there it's like i've visited the moon there's absolutely nobody there not for miles i it's uh amazing how such an a such a discovery was made and yet still nobody goes to see it it's not easy to get to so you think there's a bunch of locations like that some may not have been discovered in the peru area oh there are so many peru has tons that desert gets really ugly quick and it buries things completely there are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched you know when people hear the name pyramids they think of egypt immediately but egypt has got about 140 pyramids and we have pretty much found them all peru has thousands thousands of pyramids and now they weren't built of uh a lot not all of them were built of stone some of them were adobe bricks which have weathered terribly so now they don't look they're they're not exciting places to visit today you know what's funny too you you know we started off talking about you know whether i think there's a lost civilization out there uh there are definitely things that are still to be discovered but there are some things that were discovered a hundred years ago and archaeologists or back then they they call themselves antiquarians just kind of passed over coral was one of these sites because the the coast of peru has some of those pyramids that were made by the moche are full of of gold and beautiful ceramics and you know things that you can sell for big money but coral was found a long time ago but the archaeologist was like god no gold no ceramics forget about it this place is no good we can't sell anything here and then about the 1970s or 80s somebody said hey no ceramics is that older than the invention of ceramics shit we better go take another look at that place so what's the dating on coral coral i think starts at about 3200 bce and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it uh until about 1800 bce so what's the story behind like looking at some of these images what's the story about constructions like that what was the idea that thing isn't that amazing yeah oh that gosh i mean it should be some sort of you know i'll be a flaky archaeologist like you know this is uh this is a place where where rituals took place that's so many things we say are so just painfully vague and 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 here a couple of times in the pyramid behind it the rubble's built in a way where the building won't rock apart this is a very uh earthquake prone place but the buildings haven't fallen because they make these uh net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wiggle around and don't allow the building to fall down and inside these we've also found a couple of things that were uh babies that were human babies that were buried in there and i don't think there's a lot of people that see that and go oh look at that they were sacrificing babies these monsters i think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices corrals evidence being one of them i think it's more about the the tragic nature of infant mortality in the past it was a lot more common there were cultures that didn't even really properly name their kid until they got to five because chances were they were going to die and so i think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices i think they're putting them in special places because they they mourn the death of their kids and it just happened a lot more frequently then one of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids that pyramids were built in peru possibly hundreds of years before they were built in egypt that true absolutely absolutely in fact that's crazy there's one that's now pushing uh 6 000 bce like that's thousands of years before the stuff in egypt and that one's called waka prieta and it was not a a it was not an egyptian pyramid it was but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before what do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid the fact that it can withstand the elements uh structurally that kind of thing is it uh yeah why why do humans build pyramids and why do they build it in all kinds of different locations in the world well you know my my root answer is is is pretty boring really a lot of people ask me why are there pyramids all over the planet how is that is that a coincidence i mean who yeah i think that uh when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top and that turns into a pyramid uh you know any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down and if he wants one that's going to stay and be tall he ends up making something with a fat base and a and a tiny top and i think that uh you know building something big and tall together is one of those those human things like we built that that will be here after we're gone people remember who we were we are all if there's any human commonality it's it's fear of our own deaths and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us i think that the first big monuments like that were probably uh a group of people saying we're going to do something that people will remember forever now that being said you remember we were just talking about waka prieta and this one that's almost 6000 bc now is the first one that one's a funny case we just talked about all these lofty goals but actually i'm pretty sure that waka prieta's first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash i think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town and it stunk it's it's on the coast it stunk like fish and somebody said if we just bury this thing with dirt it won't smell anymore and then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said well it's squishy you know if we if we cap it with clay then it will really not smell i really think that the very first pyramids in peru were about trash management talk about plating huh yeah but then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the sort of the enormity of the construction and they're like oh we should maybe the next guy thought maybe we should keep building these kinds of things yeah yeah in uh not not to jump ahead but in north america you know where they also made pyramids there's this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines people ate a lot of shells that was an easy thing to collect and eat so these piles of shells would be near communities and they probably became landmarks but eventually they started burying their dead inside those two probably again you know about stink and about you know well we don't want the dogs to eat them maybe put them in the middle of the shell pile but then that all of a sudden became this like that's where my grandfather's body is that's where great grandfather's body is and all of a sudden people started being attached to place not just for the resources but for the shared memories of their ancestors so when the very first pyramid was built in 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 echo of a old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds so where and who were the first civilizations in south america as in america well you know i think we're still piecing that together coming back to the first things we talked about i think we're still missing a lot of stuff especially in south america it just keeps getting older and older part of the reason it's hard to answer that question is you know at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture we have in the americas this long period of time that we call the the paleo indian time where they were hunting mega fauna and then when those went away we get into this even longer period of time called the archaic where they're just hunters and gatherers sometimes somebody's coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead they go back and forth with different hunting tools but really nothing changes for thousands of years and then finally they start developing into these larger groups which for the most part has to do with agriculture it used to be archaeology that was just the end all be all civilization starts with the invention of agriculture and we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm but that's been discounted peru was a big part of that that area of coral it's connected to another city on the coast called aspero and aspero starts about the same time but they're all about fishing they have no farming and coral who's up river from them is farming but funny enough they're not really farming food they're farming cotton and they're making nets and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish so it's not as simple as it's just agriculture anymore but it is i think still rooted in how can we feed more people than just our family how can we together create a food abundance so we're no longer scared about running out of food so is it possible which is something you've argued that civilization started in the amazon in the jungle i do think so i think religion in south america began in the amazon i think there were people there very old there's actually uh the earliest pottery in all of the americas all these places that we have civilizations that grew up you know where the oldest pottery is the middle of the amazon so there's interesting cultures developing in the amazon so religion you would say preceded civilization in south america the uh the corral and aspero that i was just talking about it's weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have we have those pyramids and things that we call temples but we don't really know what went on in there and there's no hints of uh religious iconography uh ceremonies nothing like that the first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends about 1800 bce this culture called uh shavin starts up and they their main temple is up in the andes in this place of uh least path of re least resistance between the amazon and the coast it's about three days walk either way from this this place where this temple is that's where we start seeing the very first religious iconography and it's all over the temples there are things that are definitely from the coast but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles and those don't come from the coast all of those things are coming out of the amazon i mean religion is a really powerful idea religions are one of the most powerful ideas they're the strongest myths that tie people together and to you it's possible that this powerful uh idea in south america started in the amazon i do i do think it did um and you're right ideas are more powerful than weapons but archaeology can't see them at all we can see sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they they create and lead to but there's an interpretation problem are we right about what idea created this that those are things that archaeology just can't get at that's one of the challenges of archaeology and looking into ancient histories you're trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of architecture but understand what was going on inside their mind that's really what what i'm in it for trying to understand these people and it's real detective work and we know we're dealing with uh a totally flawed record we only have what could preserve the test of time you know if we look around this room here if uh if 2000 years of weathering happened in this room what would be left and what would we think happened here right right right right but there's not in this room but if you look at thousands of rooms like it maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled the world uh the religions the different ideas uh tell me about this feng deity one of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the rule the religions there's a thread that connects the different civilizations the societies of the andean region and the religion that practice is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the mainstream that is exactly what i think and it's i think it's all about this fang deity who somewhere thousands of years ago crawled his way out of the amazon up into the andes and a religion took hold that could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the amazon but he is the one creator deity in my opinion through all of these cultures and the people in the amazon still talk about him there his name is viho masse in some groups but they say that his uh his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity why is the current mainstream belief is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic well there are bona fide uh pantheons you know greece had one egypt had one mesopotamia had one lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons and i think that was part of the problem the earliest archaeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons and so they went to the art looking for them and they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun god and all these things but when i look at the art and i was trained by a person right here in austin texas as an art historian you follow certain uh diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time and when i look at it and use that methodology there's a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt he's he's got really identifiable traits he also likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around but he's the fanged deity and he's there he shows up in chavin de juantar the capital of that chavin culture and he keeps showing up through every culture even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium right up to the inca the inca have a creator deity they call viracocha but viracocha is the fang deity he is when we do see him by the time you get to inca they do this kind of like almost uh islamic thing where they say you you can't understand the face of viracocha so when they do put him in a cosmogram they'll make him just a blob like he's just unknowable but he's at the very top i think we're misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings if we flip the mirror on christianity and take a look at it which of course christianity's monotheistic right it would be heresy to say otherwise but who are all these other characters who are all these angels and demons and you know jesus christ and i mean i don't even know who the holy spirit is but he's some sort of supernatural being but it's that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not god that's where i think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient andean art is so what is the process of analyzing art through time to try to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture you just see what shows up over and over and over and over well certainly without the uh advent of writing uh depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them and there are certain you know what we call diagnostic elements like we can we can pull apart the same sort of thing in uh like in the greek pantheon you know you know by their dress and what they're holding what the different gods are you can tell hades from from zeus by the different things they're holding you know lightning bolts or tridents or whatever it is so they all have these diagnostic elements to them so that's how art history goes about analyzing art over time once once we can put it in a chronological sequence then we can say okay here's here's a deity here in shavin culture now we move forward 500 years now we're in moche and nazca culture you know who are who where are the deities here and what i see is that same guy with not just one or two traits but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of 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 and feet he's a he's a humanoid but he also has uh snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt and then not so much in shavin but as it goes forward he starts carting around uh severed heads human severed heads so they're like in the old literature uh the moche will call him the decapitator deity but then they have these other like oh here's the crab deity and here's the fox deity but if you look at them like the crab deity is just that guy's face coming off of a crab and the fox deity is that guy's face coming off of a fox so i think in on that particular instance i explain it similar to what zeus did you know how zeus was able to like you know turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted and he showed up in all sorts of forms but he was always zeus i think that the uh the fang deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don't have anymore and across hundreds of years thousands of years from shavin to mocha to inca as you're saying right wari has them too tiwanako that's that famous place pumapunku he's all over there i wonder how those ideas spread and morph of this fang deity i think people walked and proselytized and places like shavin there's a later one in inca times called uh pachacamac that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they're sick but also just to pay homage to the powers that be so uh shavin was a place where people from the amazon and people from the coast were all coming together in fact we saw it in the archaeology there there's these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the fang deity all over them that have like one labyrinth they'll have all pottery the next labyrinth they'll have a bunch of animal bones the next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone so people are showing up and giving this tribute and they're learning and then they're going back to their community so i think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage spots do somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fang deity do we know much about the relationship they had with the fang deity and like their conception of the powers of the fang deity is it were they afraid of the fang deities and all-knowing god is it uh something that brings joy and harvest or is it something that you're supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans to to keep it keep at the way i think he has two sides of the coin like a lot of the the hindu gods are you know one aspect is terrible the other aspect is lovely um i think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people's heads off and he is a jaguar which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity but then there are other funny things about him like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with uh sex acts when it comes to the moche there's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men um and some of them show their faces transforming into that fang deity like he is acting through them but the the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fang deity has a little puppy he has a puppy that's like just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on him in various scenes they see him again and again sometimes he's in these these healing sex scenes in fact i tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where the uh where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and there's a fang deity and there's a puppy just scratching at the door like hey you forgot me and then finally one day i found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fang deity i was like no he really is very involved in this what is this weird puppy so he's okay yeah he likes to take heads off but he also has a puppy he adores this actually this is awesomely makes sense now because i i saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30 years ago on shamanism and motor civilization it reads the mocha are the major focus of this paper sex puppies and head hunting will be shown to be related to ancient mocha shamanism uh so now i understand i was like with the puppies puppies yeah all right uh and the head hunting that's the decapitator and i've added rock and roll to that list since actually which is rock and roll or you know music is also a big part of it they they oh interesting they they call spirits down there's this whole spirit world there's the ancestors and the the people that drink san pedro cactus juice kind of they don't talk about the fang deity anymore i think christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back you know it was unpopular to have a pagan deity so they don't talk about him much anymore though he's still around they're in like around trujillo they call him i iopec but um music play in the amazon they play flutes sometimes a chorus of women sing and that's supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony there's a spirit that's hurting the person that's sick and then the the priest or the shaman or the corandero whatever you want to call him has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what's going on so when the music starts that's bringing those spirits in and people don't see them unless they've imbibed the san pedro cactus juice which is this hallucinogen which is in the amazon side it was ayahuasca on the amazon on the coast it was san pedro cactus but that's what allows you to actually see that other world yeah i i went to the amazon recently did ayahuasca uh very high dose of it bold move um when in rome well how far back does that go oh i i think longer than anybody can remember but i mean it's a natural plant that's been there forever i think that it's thousands and thousands of years that's another thing uh shavin de juantara was talking about where i think the things came the religion came from the amazon there's this wall on the back side that faces the amazon side so if you're entering the city from the amazon path you see this wall first and it's a bunch of faces that some of them are human some of them are total jaguar and some of them are trans forming in between but there's a group of them that are midway through transformation and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that's coming like down their face san pedro doesn't do that to you but ayahuasca does ayahuasca traditionally they'd 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 and when it shoots up your nose the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you and there are stone uh depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the back side of this temple from you know 3 000 years ago so that you think could have been a big component of the development of religion and shamanism i think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like they opened the mind now do you think that you know the stone ape theory uh do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of uh civilization in the americas yes i do though you know hallucinogens are not part of every uh ancient tradition in the world in fact strangely the majority of plants that that are actually psychotropic not just mood altering are from here in the americas there there are very few uh drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the americas of course now they're global and you know they're they can be grown all over the place but originally speaking very very few were outside of the americas so they were part of the experience here in a way that they just couldn't be in other places i wonder to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the creative force behind sort of art versus like literally the method by which you come up with ideas that define a civilization it's like the degree to which they had a role in the formation of civilizations it's kind of fun to think about psychedelics being like a critical role in formation of civilizations i think in terms of south america they probably really were um in north america where we're in a more northern climb here and there are less of them not so much at least in terms of psychedelics things like uh you know tobacco was always a big part of it but a lot of the you know there's there's more than one way to meet to reach a hallucinatory state the hard way is starvation uh sleep deprivation and for the the maya for example would go sleep deprivation starvation and then they cut themselves very badly and that loss of blood we believe triggered hallucinations and visions nothing to do with drugs i would much prefer the drugs route it's there's it's the result not the uh the tools aren't the thing that creates insight it's the the result so you're getting to you know it it's hallucinogens are poisoning us they're killing us that's you know it's a it's a near death state and people of the americas believed sleeping was entering that other world death you entered this other world and that when you took this mighty dose of poison it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time yeah as tom wade said in that one song i like my town with a little drop of poison so maybe that poison is a good uh catalyst for invention so who were the early first sort of mother cultures mother civilizations in south america like what what is if we look chronologically is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged that picture is evolving i mean forever it was just the shavin people that we've been talking about the ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture and they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff but then all of a sudden we find uh coral the next one that we've barely even begun looking at but it's probably older than coral is sachin culture i was just poking around there last year and just just from the bus on the highway i could see like that's a pyramid out there well oh there's another one and i know how old the stuff we have studied there is it's again 3000 bc we're just barely beginning to understand them corral frustrates me to no end the lack of art there that's we've got you know stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on and they didn't have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art i can interpret so i don't know what those people believed right so one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art the stories told through the art and then hopefully uh deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing that's our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas yeah and it sucks when they don't have art if we just go back to the amazon you've mentioned that it's possible that there's a lost civilization that existed in the amazon so it's carried a lot of names lost city of z or el dorado do you think it's possible it existed well city of z and el dorado are in pretty different places that one el dorado the the ideas of where it is kind of center around towards colombia okay and the city of z is named after a region of brazil called the shingu and so those those are uh a an america worth of distance apart you know the entire people don't really think about it on the map but the entire united states would fit inside the amazon that's how big that place is yeah and these two are on either end but both of them have evidence of civilizations these big you know it's it's it's lowland and it floods all the time so what they did is they'd make these big mounds and then they'd make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated and a bunch of that stuff has been found in the shingu area like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people again you know it's not stone built and it's been under the forest forever so it's very torn up but it's there now you know brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now and a a thing that i think is completed now is brazil and bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land which has found more of these what we call like uh geometric earthworks so there's more and more evidence of these civilizations it's not a it's not it could be there it's there for sure by the way the people who are trying to protect the rainforest really hate the highway one of the things i learned is if you build a road uh loggers will come yep and they will start cutting stuff down now from an archaeology perspective if you cut down trees you get to discover things but from a sort of protect a very precious rainforest perspective it's obviously the opposite way but it is interesting i've seen where loggers cut through the forest and then they uh and when they leave the forest heals itself very quickly so quickly and you know you just think that across decades you expand that to centuries and it's like you could see how a civilization could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest and it happened for sure in the amazon yeah you know they're one of the ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where people were in the amazon because yes the uh the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence but they're finding more and more of these places that they call uh terra preta which is black earth and they're huge swaths of it so uh i guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes and what they're saying is that that really dark earth couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes that sometime in the distant past that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black and it's much more enriched and uh when i when i took a trip into the amazon i took i went from manaos up the river the black river a couple of days and went and met some different communities and i asked them about this black earth and they were like yeah that's why we're here sometimes we move our village but when we move we look for the terra preta and that's where we're going to put our village because that's a place that all of our gardens work the other places they don't one of the things you talked about literally just asked you have to ask the right question and uh the stories all the all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you yeah there's so many of them you know the the thing that excites the world about archaeology right now is gobekli tepi and this you know 10 000 now koran tepi is 11 000 the whole area is called the tas tepler we only found it a couple of decades ago but it was just you know a archaeologist roaming through the area and ask a sheep herder hey you know you guys know where anything ancient is oh yeah let me let me show you this and then all of a sudden we've got a lost civilization and the and the shepherds always knew where it was just nobody asked him so speaking of gobekli tepi uh what do you think about the work of graham hancock who also believes that uh there's a lost civilization in the amazon well uh i've met graham um and personally i like him he's a nice guy got a nice sense of humor and i think he's smart um and and i also think he is a a very good researcher he and i are working on the same set of facts the differences are interpretations i do not believe graham's uh idea that a single now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them i just don't see that on a number of levels artifact wise technology wise art historical analysis so i think his research is great um i think that he's he's very well read in fact better read than a lot of my colleagues but uh his conclusions i disagree with and he and i have talked about this and uh had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agreed to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation that would be a fun uh argument to be a fly on the wall for uh so he he believes he's proposed as possible that the amazon jungle is uh sort of a man-made garden so it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization is there any degree to which that could be possible frankly i agree with him i mean it's just like what i was just talking about the the it's the conclusion part that we differ from sure but the facts that he's basing that on are that terra preta are the huge geometric earthworks are the ever-increasing evidence of them they are now from you know the bottom of bolivia to uh guyana they're everywhere every time we open up the jungle we find these big works so yes there was a vast civilization that was there how advanced they were is uh is a question and also you know a perspective thing graham really focuses in on what we don't know and what could be what's the just to educate me what's what's the key idea that he's proposing that you disagree with is that it was the level of advancement the civilization was or how large and centralized it was uh my main point of disagreement is that his and his ideas evolve like everybody's you know it no no scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it until the day they die his ideas are evolving but his ideas remain a core of them are that there was a very advanced single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions and uh the the younger dryer uh dryest hypothesis is part of that most recently he used to not say that now he's into this meteor thing but he believes that that civilization was destroyed but that uh members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to cede all of the world civilizations for the next revival there's where i disagree with him i think these were independent civilizations that grew up uh in their own ways that they were not ceded by some more advanced civilization from the past and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry of uh you know in his early books he suggested it's the it's atlantis i don't think he suggests that anymore but he still hangs on to the single advanced now completely lost civilization and you know archaeology is so we we don't have you know we're all of our ideas are theories very few of them are facts and we're not you know we could have the story wrong but one thing we're real good at is finding stuff i mean we find fish scales so i find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can't even find a potsherd from yeah and of course it is a compelling story that there's a single civilization from which all of this came from because the alternative is you know the idea that we came across the bearing strait from asia went all the way down to south america and got isolated and created all these marvelous sophisticated civilizations and ideas including religious ideas that looks similar to other you know everybody has a flood myth right right so like there's a lot of similarities everybody building pyramids yeah uh but there could be a lot of other explanations and for uh even if it's a simple compelling explanation there has to be evidence for it right and what would that evidence that's the bottom line i mean everything's theories where we're and and as responsible scientists we're trying to disprove our theories we are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories that's that's one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps where we're supposed to be disproving what we think is happening not proving it yeah you don't want to lean into the mystery too much i mean most of it's essential it's such a weird discipline because you're operating in a it's like really in a dark room you're feeling around a dark room so it's mostly mystery i would say a lot of sciences operate we're in a mostly well-lit room it's like a dark corner 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 mystery right yes it's job security i like that part you know but i i do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans has have ever had began as heresy and lunacy you know that guy was crazy up to the second he was brilliant and so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift and if we you know if we're busy burning books of ideas that we don't like that's where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things i really love that and i really appreciate that you're saying that um one of the fascinating things about just the amazon to me is that there's still a large number of uncontacted tribes as to rewind back into ancient history you can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the amazon that were uh isolated very sort of distinct from each other can you speak to this your understanding of these uh tribes and their history they're still here today well a lot of them are these you know by uncontacted we mean we don't know anything about these guys we know roughly where they are but places like ecuador have very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them so we have a dearth of information if they walk out of the jungle and talk to us that's one thing 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 think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that but you know we were saying earlier that you know humans change based on pressures of their environment you know it's a mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change its pressure and one thing the amazon is once you you know figure out how not to die in it it's a paradise of food food's fallen from the sky all the time there and if once you learn to adapt to that environment you've got very little need there's no pressure to make anything else things are working so for the modern humans that come across these uncontacted tribes one of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these tribes for violence so they get very aggressive in in attacking whoever they come across and not just foreigners they attack each other the yanamamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other what do you think is the philosophy behind that i don't you know i'm a relatively peaceful person but i've got you know i've got the monster in me like everybody does and uh i i think that these you know it's cultural norms that become institutionalized for the yanamamo they really part of the pat the rite of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village and they go in there they they they oftentimes uh the the way they don't let uh inbreeding set in and ruin everybody not that they think of it scientifically but they they typically go and steal women from far off communities and that starts a big fight another thing that starts fights that when nobody even fought is illness illness illness in the amazon and all of the ancient americas wasn't seen as a biological thing it was a spiritual thing so if somebody in your village gets sick the question is asked well what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him and then the rumor starts well i bet you it was joe over there in that other community he's still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter yeah and we ought to go over there and kill joe yeah and then he'll get better and so this this uh this round of never-ending violence uh like hatfields and mccoy's had that thing and the uh the people of uh new guinea also do that so it's not you know there are certain areas uh mostly wooded areas now that i think about it where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural uh institution it's such a tricky thing to do to study an uncontacted tribe without obviously contacting them to figure out their language their philosophy of mind how they communicate the hierarchy they operate under and yeah you know there was a fascinating story in peru i guess it was probably like eight years ago or something but there was a a ranger from one of the biology stations who just in the by-and-by of uh protecting his area met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone not the whole tribe but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods not in their community and he started to learn their language over couple years and so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people and one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him with arrows and just killed him and then they went back in the woods like that's the one guy who understands what we're saying we should kill him and move our village so those folks really lean into the uh as you said the monster versus the uh the puppy you know everybody's got it i i think i think uh you know we we need to listen to our better angels because if we don't we we we as a human species can easily devolve into just using violence and against others to get what we want we it's a it's a daily choice we make not to be savages which is a fascinating thing to remember what kind of thing in civilized society we've moved past all that but it can uh it can be summoned like in uh uh 1984 the two minutes of hate with the right words that primal thing can be summoned and directed uh and lead to a lot of destruction and you know our our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive where somebody's not dead at the end of it yep uh so at which point did what we now call the maya civilization arise ah that's a that's another complicated one another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore you know the truth is a lot of the questions in the amazon and and and what we're talking about now is the paten and the mountains there those aren't places archaeologists want to live they're horrible i mean i've been there i don't want to live in a tent and eat rations i want to live in a nice town so a lot of the places where the answers are we still really haven't gotten there because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they're looking at and tough enough to want to be there i've done my tour of duty i'm now in a nice little podcast studio um but seriously the the maya the first hint that we see people who are culturally maya very close to where the time period for that chavin culture is about 1800 bce there's a culture that some call the mo kaya not maya but uh they're on the pacific coast uh where guatemala and mexico connect it's called the soconusco and those are the first people that are really going to be culturally maya and they're interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as mexico's mother culture which is the olmec they're kind of the same thing as we were talking about in south america where the the maya the original maya are not there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion um but the olmec have this religion they develop and they start exporting it and you see the maya become more and more involved in in the religion that's being created by the olmec who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call the isthmus of tuantapac i have a lot of questions to ask here about just a natural stupid confusion i have so first uh did the maya or the all might come first and are they distinct groups like how do you maintain a distinct civilization when you're so close together i i just finished filming a whole thing on the olmecs and their interaction with the maya for the great courses i'm thrilled for it to come out next spring um i think they co-evolved archaeology in this regard is the worst enemy of this we we put these names on cultures we we talk about how they evolve from one to another we draw these lines where there aren't any we make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name where i'm pretty sure they didn't care about any of those names but the the maya and the olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's happening in mesoamerica a very dynamic time the olmec are really bringing the religion part but the other areas are bringing technology ceramic technology uh making hematite mirrors making uh tools out of obsidian and other uh other stone types so you've got the olmec in the middle where where mexico gets skinny and it gets swampy down there that's called the isthmus of tehuantepec that's where the olmec are then you've got the maya to the east of them then you have the valley of oaxaca where the people called the zapotex they're rising up and then you have the valley of mexico which will eventually become the aztecs but not for millennia all those areas are interacting with each other can we just also draw some more lines yeah sure so what is mesoamerica what is south america uh and what you just said to omics and the the maya like can we just linger on the geography that we're talking about here in the what is this like a thousand bc um yeah the time period we're talking about where the the olmec are there a thousand bc is a great uh midpoint of it i'd say it starts about 1800 bce and by 500 bce the olmec are gone and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happen in terms of mesoamerica looking at your map here i'd say about halfway through the chihuahua desert up there in the top left that's that's about the boundary of uh mesoamerica there's this big desert where almost nobody lives and once you get north enough you get into the ancestral pueblo people of what's now america the the four corners area they're not mesoamerican they have different lives where does modern mexico end modern mexico ends right you know you see the name maya there with the white line around it that's guatemala so guatemala cuts off most of mexico from central america got it but mesoamerica only goes about halfway through honduras and then it's really kind of a no man's land uh uh nicaragua costa rica panama they really uh they're neither they're not mesoamerica they're not south america they're more south america because they've got some gold there but then basically you get on the other side of panama and you're you're fully in south america with two distinct groups too you've got the guys that are on the andes on the west coast and then you have the amazon so the the west the andes is and the amazon are very distinct so when you say when you refer to the andean region is that referring to the andes and the amazon or just the andes just the andes the the and the and the coast that to to the pacific there that's that's andean civilization so did maya make it to the andes the andean region not that archaeology can prove but it's almost certain that they interact with each other number one it's just you know it's biased to think that these people couldn't travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did but there's all sorts of hints like uh that first ceramics i was talking about that the maya made they show up strangely uh sophisticated technologically already and down in ecuador they had them for a thousand years before so a lot of people myself included think that the idea of ceramics actually that the maya came from south america to the maya did the maya get seeded by the second wave across the bering strait or did that initial wave of people that came and uh populated south america were they the ancestors of the maya like how did the migration happen here do we understand we're still piecing it together i don't think you know i'd be lying if i told you i had the answers but we do have evidence of maya stature people there are small people generally speaking people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller probably about you know just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not uh you're joking but you know there could be something i think there's some truth to it i mean the pygmies are small and the people on the plains in africa are big the north american indians are tall and the maya are small it's there is there's definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests but anyway um there's a cave in the yucatan called lul tune cave that has uh hand prints in the cave it's somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand like a negative print yep we can date that charcoal and it comes from 10 000 years ago and the hands are all small it's you know typical old mexico i i walked right up to these things and could put my hand i didn't you know mess with them but i put my hand next to these hands and they're all smaller than my you know northern european hand and so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10 000 years ago or it was people of maya stature who did it it's so cool that you can date the charcoal and it's so cool that 10 000 years ago there were people leaving and and actually we have uh one that's i think 2 000 years older now just a couple years ago again in yucatan in a cave they found a woman they named naia now and she's like 12 000 years old so the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the bering strait to south america possibly the amazon develop a lot of cool ideas in the amazon and start drifting back up into mesoamerica was kind of a co-evolution the the technology of ceramics i think got there through an interaction with see the interesting thing is that the maya didn't really have religion didn't have as a vibrant religious set of ideas and they borrowed it from the all mike i've been doing a deep dive on this for this all my course that i just did and it really does seem like um these other cultures that have jade and hematite and obsidian the the olmec had none of that stuff they were living in a swamp and building things out of uh dirt but they were importing those materials from those areas carving them into all sorts of religious iconography and then exporting them back to them and still the fang deity show up no the fang deities nowhere in uh in central america and mesoamerica that's why there's there's jaguars there's jaguar iconography but it's not the same thing this this whole jaguar transformer deity does not exist there they do have a pantheon so the maya the olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions what was their uh i'd love to ask questions about who were they so one question i'm curious about what was their sense when they looked up at the stars what was their conception of the cosmos uh that's a question i've spent my entire career trying to answer i i think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life and certainly they saw like every ancient group did like are those the gods why are those things so far away but i think that the maya especially looked at it in a with a much more mathematical mind than most did and so they watched these things move every night and if you do that even today you notice that all the stars move in tandem they're just this blanket they're like they're they're like this curtain behind me they're the stage upon which some very important players are dancing and that's the moon the sun and the planets there's five planets we can see visibly so they started watching like why are just those seven moving differently than the rest and those are the things that they keyed on mathematically the the sun of course was also involved in the agricultural cycle so that was important in and of itself but the the planets we can see them coming up with ideas definitely doing the math and seeing that there's a repeated cycle and then coming up with mythology around them like venus for them was associated with war and they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with venus sometimes in the classic period maya it was the first appearance of venus as the morning star that was a good time to go to to battle with your neighbors and when it became the post-classic with like chichen itza being the capital of the yucatan then it looks like if you watch venus day after day it goes slowly up every day and then when it hits its highest point as morning star in the in the morning it goes down to the earth like three times as fast all of a sudden it just shoots down and hits the earth and so the the people of post-classic maya civilization saw that as the gods shooting a spear into the earth and that was a good time to attack your neighbors that was like war time when the spear is going to hit the earth all right so this is fascinating they just had at the the foundation a sense that life existence at the various timescales is cyclical yeah that's that's the starting point and then you just look out there and if you're extremely precise which is fascinating how precise they were you can just measure the uh the cycles yeah and they did it really well now of course they they are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated writing system in all of the americas the south america had the kipu but it's so different than our writing we're still trying to figure out what the heck it is we know there's math there too but they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next generation who would then do it more and do it more that's how they figured out kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy how good were they was whether they could see the procession of the equinoxes the fact that we're just barely wobbling and there's a 26 000 year period where the stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back it's 26 000 years but the maya were able to figure out wait it's moving one degree every 72 years and did a calculation based on uh on on where it should be in the ancient past and they're using constellations they're showing us they know by saying like this planet's in this constellation right now and 33 000 years ago it would be in this constellation it's just fascinating that they were able to figure this out i would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community uh if you can call it that i think we absolutely could and uh that's actually one of the things that i'm i'm hoping to move the needle on in my generation with my career is to give these cultures the the respect they deserve as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect there are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment they're you know their math is incredible their their hydraulic engineering is incredible their chemistry is incredible and so i hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way yeah i mean unquestionably incredible scientific work in the in the astronomy sense uh especially here can you speak to the all the sophisticated aspects of the mayan calendar 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 i should say that you also gave me uh the 2024 mayan calendar yeah i do this just to you know show the world that that calendar system is evergreen it can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system they made just like our system is so can you speak to the three components here as i'm reading the tzolkin the hob and the long count what are these fascinating components of the calendar it's it's a neat how obsessed they they were really math nerds they it wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time yeah they had all these cycles that that interlocked into each other like like cogs in a machine though they never thought of it like that but uh the tzolkin's their oldest one and the one that still endures today there are millions of maya people that are living their lives based on a 260 day count no weeks no months it's just 13 numbers combined with 20 day names for a total of 260 days and then it goes again everybody in the highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they're supposed to do each one of those days has their own spirit and what's supposed to happen in those days the maya collectively call them the mom the grandmother grandfather spirits and and and they talk to each one of those days and they pray to them they have there's now an association of some eight thousand people that are called aki that are day keepers who are keeping the days and they're also like community uh psychologists almost people come to them and say you know my life is mixed up what's wrong here well let's ask the mom like okay well it looks like you're not doing this or that or you know what you're an accountant you're not supposed to be an accountant you're supposed to be a you know a a midwife what are you doing you're you're living your life wrong you're you're you're a keeb you need to start being a keeb so they take extremely seriously the day on which you're born what that means like the the spirit that embodies that day right like i'm i'm keeb i'm 13 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 irresponsible husband and parent but people like me so my family still prospers like oh god that's that's horribly that's horribly accurate i mean it's some of it is also the chicken or the egg if you truly believe so if you've structured society where this calendar is truly sacred then it kind of like you manifest a lot of the the spirit does manifest itself in the life of the people that are born on that spirit's day absolutely it's interesting and then and the maya really feel this in this system so that's the core system this 260 day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago and it's the one that's most important today uh why 260 days by the way is there a reasoning behind it from most maya agree with this today and you know who knows what the original architects thousands of years ago were thinking but it's nine months it's the human gestation period so if you if you conceived on the day 13 monkey chances are your kids coming out 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 people of mesoamerica will all share it together um when they thought about we need we need a count of time that's for us they didn't look up into the heavens they looked like into their bodies what's the first cycle that we actually go through as humans and they picked this nine month thing it's it really is our cycle and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that uh so that's the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today uh what's the second one of the hub the hub is the solar calendar the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with we know it's second though because when they start talking about it they use all the symbols and the numbers from the 261.

they say well we need a solar one too let's just keep counting this another 105 days and we'll get to 365. oh interesting they kind of carry the same uh got it got it got it and that's useful because for all the sort of agriculture all those kind of reasons right though interestingly they never put a leap year in the hub is also called the vague year because it's just 365 which means every year they're off a quarter of a day and eventually it starts really adding up yeah in fact it's even caused modern modern problems in this calendar here i just do the straight math from a thousand years ago and so i place the beginning of the solar year differently than some maya groups do especially the guys in the highlands of eastern guatemala they write me nasty emails saying i don't know what time the year is but their relatives changed it in the 1950s because their agricultural cycle was so far off they moved it 60 days back to make it in the spring again but it drifts which is strange because it's not a very good thing for the the agricultural cycle it's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for uh so that's the hub and then what's the long count the long counts they're really mysterious cool one because it's a linear count of days which are not like them it's it's a bunch of cycles like ours you know our weeks are a cycle our months are a cycle um but it's weird in that its estimation of the year in the in the long count system is only 360 days so it's miserably off uh a solar year and they count in base 20 so they count like we count in tens we're decimal they count in base 20 but decimal and so it should be you know there's ones there's 20s there's four hundreds there's eight thousands there's a hundred and sixty thousands it's up it goes just like our tens hundreds thousands ten thousands but it's times 20.

so that third so they have days months of 20 days and then they have these years that are should be by their math 400 but it's only 360 and that throws the whole thing out of whack going further up then they have a 20-year period and a 400 year period 400 years to their calendar but it's only by that time it's only 396 years in our period 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 that's you know that doesn't follow any astronomy that doesn't that's not the human cycle yeah but they're i mean it's interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long periods of time like buck tunes is 144 000 days right or uh about tune is 400 of the long counts years so it's kind of like our millennium you know we we think it's a big deal when we hit a millennium or uh or or a century that's a they have a 20-year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a cartoon and then they have the 400 bach tune which is the big one that's like their millennium and 13 of those bach tunes uh occurred in the creation before us they also think that we're in that the world has had multiple creations they're not alone in that there's lots of ancient civilizations who say that but we're technically in the fourth creation and they're they have a creation story called the popel vu and the popel vu is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the hero twins and the fourth creation begins and so on the maya monuments we see them doing the math through the long count and we can calculate it back very exactly it happened 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 last day of the 13th bach tune of the third creation which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 bach tunes long right so and this would be the fourth creation the calendar starts fourth creation but if you do the math going from 3 114 bc and count 13 bach tunes forward you get to 2012 and hence the uh the very popular notion that 2012 whenever that was december something december 21st 2012 will be the end of the world right so can you explain this those were very fruitful years for me i had so many lectures around the country that was that's like uh like garrett morris in saturday night live the the the the apocalypse was very very good to me uh i mean but that that is pretty interesting so that's that that would be so technically being that what in the fifth no yeah technically we'd be in the fifth though my argument was that actually if you look through all the corpus of maya mathematics and calendars they never say anything like that in fact there's a handful of dates that tell us uh that that the fourth creation does continue farther on that that bach tune place should have 20 20 bach tunes in it like their counting system would dictate not 13.

and there's there's a place in uh in palenque there's a place in the dresden codex and one other place i'm forgetting that uh that all talk about time after 2012. so how does that happen it's a conflict is there supposed to be an overlap of the 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 number 13 it's all over the place it's a magic number to them my explanation which i admit is is not very solid but uh i think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end of the third uh the third uh the third creation hit the magical reset button and that it just restarted time right there because of their magic but that was not to say that the natural bach tune cycle should be 13.

and there are certain texts that uh that go way forward in time or way backward in time and whenever they want to do that there there are higher increments than just the bach tune above that there's the pick tune then there's the kalaba tune then there's alawa tune and it goes on and on and these are like you know 160 000 years huge increments of time whenever they want to do that and they talk about a long period of time they start putting 13s in all of those increments those higher increments and i think what they're saying is uh they're making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time that's that's what i think there's they're telling us in those texts that time goes on forever magically but there they still had a conception that it didn't go on forever before right that there was other civilizations that came before in there and there this is the fourth creation this is the fourth creation and the gods made everybody the the first ones were made of mud and they melted the second ones were made of sticks but they were jerks to the animals um the the third ones 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 gods and corn we're made out of corn so we're we're perfect and as the as it explains to us the the the popol vu does we got it right this time there there is there there's no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration well one of the weird things is that the aztecs who we talk to a lot at the other people who have had contact they also had the concept of multiple creations before us but they were real clear to the spanish that they weren't all the same time element uh some of them were in the 300s of years some of them were in the 700s of years but they were not the same time period so our our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13 this one must be third creation is in or also be 13 it's in direct opposition to what the aztecs told us about the nature of creations they're different time periods why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations did they have some kind of long multi-generational memory of prior civilizations it may have had some echo in the uh the flood myths right it's the same it's the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time there's a lot of different opinions about it and you know they're like if they were all 13 if we have five creations like the aztecs said and they were all 13 they would come up to roughly 25 000 something years which is very close to that processional cycle so some people are like they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes and i mean that the 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 of internet hits and one of the things i do obviously uh wonder about is um why the flood myth is part of like most societies and most religions i think that one's pretty easy it's the end of the 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 and they without really understanding what happened they just carried that story everybody knows that everybody's nice coastal village went underwater yeah and they had to they had to seek higher ground and then just like people like talking about the weather everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up and then uh that that myth carried why do we live here grandpa well we used to live over there but then the water came and then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea it becomes mythology but global mythology so that one you know there's a lot of things i don't have a reasonable explanation for but the uh but the flood myth is almost certainly is almost certainly the the rise in sea level so the this idea that every day represents uh that carries a spirit uh you know there's modern day astrology you know most people kind of consider 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 from your scholarship of the maya calendar do you think if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world do you think there's some wisdom there 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 think as a scientist it makes a i cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true and you know when you look at it objectively i mean really is everybody born with the sign scorpio a a moody person that's just uh that's just objectively not true um but it is funny how oftentimes these these maya uh horoscopes for lack of a better word do hit the mark there was some student who surveyed like three hundred people with the app i made and asked them about their greek sign and their maya sign and his conclusion for his term paper was that the maya one was working way better which that's that's fascinating at least that's that's fun but no i'm i think i'm too much of a scientist to believe that i i just don't have a a any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the uh the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny i agree and yet there's so much mystery all around us that uh what i do like is the uh inbuilt humility to that world view um that there's this whole you can call it a spiritual world but a world that we don't under quite understand and then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world carries and then you construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that and then there is where the human 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 the mysteries of the world and i i i would i would love to find an ancient civilization but i don't i i don't want to solve the mysteries of the world i think they're one of the things that make world life worth living that's true that's true um you mentioned the uh maya writing system what are some interesting aspects of their language that they've used in the written language that they used well you know one of the things that confound me as a guy who's spent you know better portion of my life studying it i had the honor of being uh the student of uh linda shealy right here at the university of texas at austin she got the group together who broke the maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s so i learned from the best and and loved every minute of it i miss linda can you speak to that code actually the hieroglyphic code and what it takes to break it oh boy i mean what a what a thing we we had kind of a a rosetta stone we had a page out of diego delanda's book a priest who was converting the maya in yucatan asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant and he was convinced they had a alphabet like we do so he got this maya guy sat down in spanish and he said okay you're gonna write all the symbols right here in my book right write an ah here write a bay here write a say here and that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write they were actually syllables they were vowel consonant combinations they weren't an alphabet but that turned into our rosetta stone of sorts the big key is that the maya still speak that same language there are millions of maya people who are speaking a version of maya now there's there's where i get confused that we've got a single writing system that is intelligible we've broken the code so we know that it's basically the same writing system from the top of the yucatan into guatemala and el salvador but we have 33 maya languages today that are mutually unintelligible and we we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called chole tea which is a combination of chor tea and chole two of those languages but it doesn't work for me at all how did if there was one language maybe two back then how did it flower into 33 mutually unintelligible languages in just 500 years during uh culture acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90 percent of the population how did that happen so we're missing something huge here i think it's more like chinese where chinese letters uh uh writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood i don't know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen but it just seems impossible that there are more languages not less languages in the maya area after the last 500 years that they've been through so you think that there's some kind of process of either rapidly generating dialects or there always has been these dialects or i should say they're distinct languages even though there's a common writing system there must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system or maybe there was something like like latin you know how there was a period in europe where like most people were illiterate and there was this this priesthood who all understood latin and they wrote in latin yeah maybe the the hieroglyphs represent a kind of latin in the ancient maya world but we don't really know and there's not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it's possible to have that right but we did realize it was actually a russian scholar named yuri konorozov who broke the code the americans and the europeans were absolutely sure that the language was uh that the written language was a dead language but yuri not knowing any of that not being filled with all of those thoughts from america and europe went about it in the way that he was taught uh in his in his grad school in moscow and just went to the dictionaries and he looked at yukatek language that they're speaking today and he applied it to the symbol system and he knew that there were certain sounds he used landa's alphabet and he found there was the his two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it and the dog uh a dog in yukatek is so he saw two symbols and he said this one's probably sue and this one's all and then the turkey was coots so it would be coo ending in sue and he showed how look you know this is suits this is soul those two things that that should be tsu are the same symbol and that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today that's fascinating just that decoding process is fascinating like how do you even figure that out and there's probably still is there still are you aware of any um written languages that haven't been decoded yet yeah yeah there's a number of them there's uh easter island script i was just talking to uh we've apparently made a few advances there now it's called rongo rongo and we only have about maybe 25 examples of texts but we're beginning to break that there's also the the the big one is harapan harapan for a long time we used to say there were there were five independent scripts on the planet and those were chinese cuneiform which is mesopotamian egyptian maya and then harapan which is from northern india that's the only one that we've never cracked and now all the epigraphers the people that's the term for epigraphy is uh translating these languages they're all ganging up on harapan and want to kick it off the list because we can't break it it had a big enough symbol set but no one's been able to crack it and now they're saying it's just an elaborate symbol set and doesn't reflect the the spoken word that's uh that's a hypothesis but it's which is what would explain why it's so different right right but you know we could just be faced with a quitter generation maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation these days with their the other one that fascinates me is from the americas it's the quipu the the inca had the quipu this knotted string records but it was definitely encoding more than just math we know the math i know lots i can do the math quipus and figure out what they're totaling and things yeah there's a quipu right there who are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of andean south america a quipu usually consists of cotton or cabinet fiber string so there's a set of strings and they're supposed to what to be saying something there's one long string that the little ones dangle off of and each one of the the dangling strings have sets of knots on them and the knots some of them are mathematical keepus and those we can just do the math we can prove that it's math um they also encoded language in there they had entire libraries in cusco where spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the libraries would just put they'd say uh pull that one down read that one to me and he'd pull it out and just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier so it was definitely writing but in the 1570s one uh one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called kipu kamax gathered up had them read all of their kippus and transcribe them into spanish books and then had the kippus burned and those people murdered okay well there you go and so we can't break the code still today but we know it was absolutely a written language though it wasn't written it was weaved or knotted and there's still some keepers available that could be there's i think now we've just crossed the 1000 mark so we have a thousand kippus there's enough to break the code um and and i think this generation might be the one that does it it's sad that so fewer have survived yeah i mean a thousand is good but it's but see there's peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology there's so much out there there's there was a priest i read about named diego de porres who was one of the early people in peru converting communities and his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of three thousand people all the spanish prayers the important ones for them to be converted into christianity and he had the the community's kipu kamax not kippus for each person that told them that they could read them out and memorize the prayers and if they were caught without their kipu in town they were flogged so he had 3 000 of the same kipu made and handed out to this community if we find that community and find its cemetery there is a rosetta stone you know it is probably the case there is somebody in peru and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands and like you 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 communities that are using them there's a couple of them that we had high hopes for and then it was apparent that they were just making up they didn't actually know how to read it they just knew it used to be read so they like made a bunch of stuff about what it says and they bring it out and they act like they can read it but then when you ask them the details they don't know yeah but then on a much simpler level there's uh llama herders who keep a string in their pocket and they've they've got uh the knots equaling how many llamas they have and then they have subcategories of information like this one's sick uh we've lost these ones this one's pregnant so they have these more simple and more mathematical kipus but they're using them to affect as a as a record is it possible through archaeology to know what you know the social organization of the maya was like what uh maybe if there was a hierarchy maybe what the political structure was if there was a leader of different roles you know priests or like who had the power who was powerless who had certain kinds of roles is it possible to know that actually because of hieroglyphs yeah we know a whole lot there's you know basic things that archaeology which is a very blunt tool can figure out like this guy lives in a rich house this guy lives in a poor house but um the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about uh who can rule that it was hereditary that uh that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that's lived in the underworld it also told us things about hierarchy like that there were councils of lords underneath the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods and that there were revolving positions of uh authority there was uh the the site that i mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there uh palenque had a lord's title named fire lord that was one of the like generals of their army and we could tell that position changed over time so there was one guy named chock suits who was the fire lord uh for the early part of a reign of a king called the kalmonab and then by the time he carves this other panel there's another guy in the position of kak ahal which was the fire lord and so he had got promoted it was uh well he could have been killed i mean the case of that but then we have the interesting case of uh in the post classic they shed the idea of kings they don't like kings anymore that's probably a big part of why the classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened people just got sick of kings and so they turned into this more council system at chichen itza but then when chichen itza falls there's a new city that's uh that's architecture looks a lot like chichen itza it's called mayapon but it has uh what is called the league of mayapon and it has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the yucatan and it is basically a democracy it's a it is a maya democracy that happens the individuals from all around the yucatan are there they each each family has their own council house at mayapon though they live back at their place it's kind of like a maya congress representative democracy it it really was i mean and this happens in uh i guess 1250 a.d that this this maya democracy happens and we know the names of them we know the families and of course they were humans so eventually they screwed it all up one family murdered another family and the whole the whole city burned yeah and of course it's probably some fascinating corruption which is hard to discover through uh part of it was the aztecs screwing things up the aztecs came down with all sorts of like we'll buy everything you're making and then eventually they were like could we maybe buy some humans yeah and then one family was like no and the other family was like i don't know they're making us a lot of money so then you know they they murdered each other and the water supply got polluted and then the city burned it seems like slavery murder and disease is a large component of the story of humans um you mentioned different periods in the maya the classic the post classic the pre-classic the archaic can you just speak to that so archaic is before there was really a civilization that was uh archaic is pretty much when everybody's hunter gatherers so the classic period was the golden age and then the pre-classic is the interesting time that we were talking about and the post-classic is when the democracy came about well midway through it yeah reverted back to council systems the maya loved to be part of councils so yeah we have pre-classic is like the origins of civilization they're starting to build cities they're starting to create their calendar they're starting to create these wonderful works of art and the classic period if you look at at 10 different textbooks for the maya you'll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there but basically that's the that's the age of kings to me that's when these cities decide that they're going to organize themselves around uh elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in contact with the gods the maya never contact their gods directly they contact their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods and so the maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have you know basically snowed the rest of the people that they've got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the gods where everybody every joe maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor but joe maya's dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he's got no influence over the gods but the rulers their their spirits go down briefly but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and can act as liaisons so that's the validation for this kingship that happens 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 interesting that it's actually specifically the ninth bach tune of their history the ninth bach tune begins 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 and after that there really aren't kings they're heads of councils so it's i i call it the age of kings where everybody's following the directives of basically a despot and for a while that's great i mean cities build up populations happening uh that's it's i i see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too strong charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together but eventually like happens all the time with power too much power corrupts all of a sudden there's this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else and uh and they start saying well i think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go take these things and people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities and that's how we get the mysterious maya collapse where all these cities are just gone that's one of the great mysteries of uh the maya civilization is that over a very short period of time what like 100 years it seems to have declined very rapidly it collapsed what do you think explains that what happened i think it's a failing of archaeology to properly see what was happening i think that most of those cities populations moved you know no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm and they lived in perishable houses and all archaeology signature sees is that nobody lives in the city center anymore we don't see a bunch of mass bodies there was no there's no evidence of people getting sick there are certain cities that fought with each other at the end and we see that signature plain as day we see we know when a city was attacked and burned mostly that didn't happen people moved and migrated and it seems like right there around like between 800 and 900 a lot of the elites that were on top in the most of it was in the rainforests of northern guatemala they move they move in two directions some of them move into the highlands of guatemala and some of them move up into the yucatan of the city of chichen itza becomes the next big capital in yucatan but the word itza is actually a word describing the people who lived around lake p10 itza in northern guatemala and all of the maya are super clear about that that the itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created chichen itza so the the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else so why was there a decline what was maybe the catalyst was there specific kind of events that started this was this an idea that kind of transformed the society we are still debating that we i don't think there is a single reason i think humans are complicated i think a lot of things led to this one thing we can see archaeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated they were too popular and we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people we see it in lots of the cities at the end of the classic period that people are seasonally starving i remember uh really stark evidence in copan honduras copan was this beautiful city lineage of 17 kings but the last kings and the last elite burials that we dig from the city center the teeth are the telling part they get this thing when you when you're growing up and you're not getting enough food seasonally it shows up in the enamel of your teeth that's called a dental hypoplasia and if somebody's seasonally starving it gets these lines in their teeth and that last generation of maya before they left copan even the rich people are seasonally starving so there's a problem there for sure but i also think it's a it's a weird thing it was not an empire it was a group of independent city states like greece some of them were allied some of them were enemies there was a huge civil war that settled out about the end of the classic period so if it was europe you know the victors would have taken over the losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went but when they abandoned these cities that were independent still they all left both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war so it couldn't be just as simple as spoils go to the victor um it's such a wide area not everybody was starving like the people in the copan valley so i i personally think it was calendrically timed it is interesting to note that that ninth period that ninth 400 year period ends right then and i think a lot of people you know i can't prove it archaeologically but i think a lot of people said we're coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew we need to change what we're doing when you talk to the maya today like at the end of this uh 2012 thing if you actually talk to maya say you know what happens at the end of a big cycle here they say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles that change is coming we can either be part of it or we can get steamrolled by it the aztecs did this neat thing called the new fire ceremony every 52 years which was the biggest their calendar would go they'd burn down perfectly good temples 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 ceremony and they would renew the world so i think my personal theory is that the maya decided at the end of the ninth bach tune that it was time to renew the world i think this theory makes sense because they really internalized the calendar i mean it was a really big part of their culture the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization that's what i think i think that uh that they created that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it yeah uh you mentioned aztec what was the origin of the aztec where did these where do these people come from at what time and how you know almost every one of the cultures we're talking about now we have two different versions of the answer to that question we have the archaeology version and we have the aztecs themselves the aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well to the north called aslan and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero's journey where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter uh the birth of the war god that they'll worship after this and how they stepped into the valley of mexico as the last the lost brothers of everyone in the valley of mexico they said that they all came from the north near aslan is a place a cave with seven different passages called uh chiqui mostac and that all the people who spoke the language nahuatl came from the cave and most of them went early to the valley of mexico and in the aztecs uh story they were just the lost tribe they were the last brothers to come in and but then they show up late game and they become mercenaries they just start working for communities in the valley of mexico and this takes place in the 1300s so about 200 years before cortez shows up the aztecs show up to the valley of mexico and they make themselves this uh indispensable group of mercenaries they do the dirty work the all the all the all the civilized uh communities around lake texcoco which is in the middle of the which is now mexico city it's all dried up but uh those guys were too civilized to fight with each other but they could hire the aztecs to do their dirty stuff so the aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the valley of mexico the dirty stuff does the load of the muscle yeah they'd go in and and they they'd kill whoever you wanted killed and now you're the king of this area so one of these kings that they were working for really liked them and decided i'm gonna make the aztecs part of our ancestry i'm gonna give them my daughter to marry the head of the aztecs and the aztecs sacrificed her and that really pissed that guy off so he took like his whole army and ran the aztecs out for a while they say they live in this horrible desert section eating lizards but then one of their priests say we're gonna walk around the lake and my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital 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 that's the place so they build up an island they go to that island and then they just start piling up lake muck until they make a whole city there in the middle of the island they make or the lake they make an island city and all of this occurs in about a hundred years so they show up about 1300 the capital of tenochtitlan as they called it uh is really established and from there they quickly take over the entire valley they make uh what they call the triple alliance which is the two other big communities of the lake are now their allies but they're not really allies the the aztecs were brutal they were just those guys agreed to shut up and let the aztecs run the show and then the aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down into the maya area everywhere they go they rename everybody's towns and make them pay tribute pretty short lasting civilization uh spread extremely quickly uh famous what what what are some defining qualities that explain that i think they were very much like they they had an attitude like attila the hun they just had no problem ripping your skin off everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized and the aztecs were just mercenary they 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 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 merchants there was a merchant class who were also military they were really the the the people who assessed where they were going to attack next they'd go in with a bunch of aztec products and say we'd like to trade with you but all the time they were assessing their military prowess what uh what products they had that they could take and then soon after the pocheteca were there would come the military with the reconnaissance so the the aztec had a huge warrior class as you're saying so what was there just can you uh linger on their whole relationship with war and violence they they worshipped a war deity their main 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 sacrifice himself but then the other one was we seal up poshli he was that translates the hummingbird on the left but he's the war god i love that he's a hummingbird maybe you know he's fast and he comes from the magical side or something but uh then then right next to the temple on either side were the two temples of the warriors one was the eagle warrior clan the other one was the jaguar warrior clan and they they were symbolically in competition with each other though a unified force i guess you know probably an analogy between like the navy and the air force you know they had a good natured competition of who was better but they were the same force so those were their symbolic warriors dressed up in all of their finery and they would they they would come at people uh with these two forces and it was very unlike uh anything that had happened before in mesoamerica again i think i could draw a parallel to what happened in europe you know the famous uh henry v moment in agincourt where you know his kind of uh ragtag army wipes out half of france's aristocracy with the longbow like up until that moment europe had a very uh wars for the elite classes kind of attitude and then after france lost half their aristocracy then i was like maybe we should be hiring from the villages the same sort of thing happened with the aztec that there was a mesoamerica really didn't have huge standing armies but the aztec put this army together and they intimidated people they didn't actually have to use it a lot it was very it was used to great effect in the in the valley of mexico and for the rest of mesoamerica it was mostly the fear factor but there also seemed to be um you know a celebration of uh of violence i think you said uh that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the aztec maybe like the roman empire was it they just had maybe a different relationship with what violence where that stood in uh the purpose of life purpose of existence is that fair to say i would hypothesize so i mean that you know i think it's one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures you know knowing what our human capacity is and the aztecs uh when i when i said that statement i what i what i meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and you know ripping people's hearts out this they had this this just you know grotesque violent bent but in the same way they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance the same aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen that had come before him and they spent money on things like flower gardens they're all of the causeways leading to the aztec capital had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum and they had an aquarium and a zoo and they had an opera and they had a ballet yeah and and these things existed together there was not in the aztec mind any conflict between witnessing someone's heart getting ripped out one moment in the evening we'd go to the ballet um how does that contrast the relationship with war and violence with the with the other civilizations of mesoamerica and south america maybe the maya what was their relationship like with war the maya were certainly influenced by the aztec at the end so we get a we get a skewed perspective from the contact period accounts because the maya were much more violent and sacrifice oriented in their post-classic rendition but in the classic period it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves that we know that the maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper and uh the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they'd they'd uh commune with their ancestors but they'd actually tie this paper onto their penis cut it and then dance so the blood splattered but it was them cutting themselves it was different than killing a bunch of other people for it it was a auto sacrifice we call it still very macabre but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other people should die it was a self-sacrifice thing can you speak to sacrifice a bit more animal sacrifice human sacrifice what what role did that play in in um for the maya for the aztec for the different cultures here was that religious in nature it was absolutely religious in nature and the aztecs were of the opinion that uh that the war god demanded people were captured and sacrificed and it had to be valuable people there was a lot of uh before they made that big standing army they had just ritual battles that they would have and they'd take captives uh in fact all around mesoamerica they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods and the aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody they did it so much and so successfully that they didn't have any enemy enemies nearby so they decided this one poor sucker group uh not that far away called the talash collins that they were never going to uh make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the talash collins and haul them back for sacrifice cortez met those guys and he was like here are people who hate their guts i'll just use these guys so you know we say oh cortez took over the aztec world it was it was cortez and 20 000 super pissed off talash collins and the actual sacrifice what so there would be kind of these ritual battles or is it chopping off people's heads and uh like is there is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice it's mostly hard extraction sometimes heads but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see it and they they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their rib cage would come out and they they'd use uh like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really just uh like tried and true way to do it they'd stab it in in a certain place close and then they'd push down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage and they just so they just make a place where they could just rip it right out with their hand yeah with their hand but they were really just surgical about it they'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down pull up and just while the person was alive yep while the person was alive and the aztecs had this idea like there was a there was a horrible drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley and they came to this conclusion that it's because we haven't been killing enough people right we've got to bump this up and then when they did and they decided they they really took it out on the clash collins it rained again so it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that and they ate people as well they really did as part of the sacrifice or is this after the sacrifice then they would eat them and this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started but then it was just kind of the thing to do when uh when cortez got there they were still having certain special feasts that involved humans and and it really upset the spanish that they would be like uh tricked into eating human like hey you liking dinner that was a human so the idea was it actually uh having having having a taste for human flesh or is it just you know these kinds of ideas of like if you eat a person's heart that you can get their spirit and their strength and in the case of the aztecs it seemed like they just liked it uh this guy sahagun who was a very responsible uh chronicler that was pretty specific that like uh there was a distribution thing yeah like the uh the the elites got butts the butts were the best part so the the butt cheeks those are the best parts to eat and then like it went down the chain until some people just got like fingers and toes literally bought taste for the aztec yeah boy all right they really they really did they really did in fact that's what caused the uh have you heard of the noche triste the sad night the night that the aztecs really go nuts on the spanish and kick them out it's all triggered by this this one guy um pedro de alvarado who's left in charge by cortez as cortez goes to the coast and tries to uh talk to the new force talk him into being for him which he does but pedro alvarado's left back in town in charge and they're doing another one of these huge aztec buffets and uh parties to honor them and it happens the guy says you know hey do you like dinner like oh yeah it's a nice dinner well it's humans you're eating humans see i told you they were good and alvarado just freaks out and he has the the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the in the party women children nobody has weapons he just murders everyone and that's what spazzes the the aztecs out to eventually murder montezuma who was their captive and then try to murder all of them and it was all it was all pedro alvarado's fault for freaking out about eating humans just a little practical joke yeah it was just they thought it was funny he did not that's fascinating i didn't realize so i kind of assumed that some level of cannibalism would have to do with you know eating the heart to um to gain the spirit of the person or something like this but in in certain like a you know deer hunting rituals things for sure but the aztecs no they just liked eating humans it was part of the fear factor too i mean they could walk into a new town and be like you guys could either send us you know a number of quetzal feathers every month or we could eat you so that's psychological warfare and actual warfare it worked and that's how they spread and they were just about to take over the maya when the spanish came and messed everything up they they were they had the maya surrounded and they were about to take over the whole yucatan so you think without the spanish there would be this aztec empire that would last for a very long time well i think there would have been an aztec empire i think they would have finished dominating everybody but they did it through hate and everybody hated the aztecs they so it wouldn't have lasted forever they did not they were not ruling justly they were ruling by force and that that can only go on so long before revolution happens the inca empire i think that would have gone on forever because they were really community oriented once the inca took over like no one in the inca empire starved they built architecture everyone was safe they was it was a society that could have lasted a long time what was the origin of the inca empire well it was bloody at first like most of them are but once uh one once they started taking over that what they did is they empire built they everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get the resources but everybody they raided they turned them into the inca empire and they created this uh incredible uh mita system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth so a town of let's say 5 000 people uh the inca would roll up with an army of 100 200 000 people and say you know would you guys like to be part of the empire or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire and if your mayor here agrees then he can have a town he can have a house in cusco but then the very next month a big work crew would show up and they'd start building agricultural terraces and storage units and every month with the agricultural uh excess they would have big parties and everybody would eat so people lived well in the inca empire it was a rough beginning but everybody who agreed to be part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had so they started in south america and peru and cusco cusco was like the center of it cusco in their language quechua it means naval or belly button and it's up in the the mountains but there's four quarters that they called their empire tiwantinsuyu the land of four quarters and the center of those four quarters was cusco it sprung to life what in like 12 1200 a d c yeah we we backwards project what it was but it was probably mid 1200s when the first sapa inca the first ruler came in but it was the i think it's the ninth one is pachacute who really started being an empire builder and part of that i mean what really really defined empire as you said roads they build a massive road network roads and uh in the same way that the the roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure and then every place they took over they'd create certain key pieces of roman architecture that kind of made that city roman and they'd rename it something the inca did the same thing they had certain signature inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part they'd send uh they'd send the khipu kumayak the the the guys who would weave the or not the khipus as accountants and they would go through and say what everybody did okay you know you're a good farmer you're going to farm you are a good weaver you're going to weave all the men here are going to take a turn at being part of the army and and they then they sent independent khipu kumayaks to that every community had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other and they all had to independently send their khipus back to cusco and if there were accounting discrepancies they were called to cusco to figure out who was lying about what so there's like a super sophisticated record keeping system yeah and that was the khipu and the spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all but that's an interesting development for for an empire because that allows you to really expand and uh have some kind of management some some level of control yeah they couldn't at the end they were at least 10 million people and there was just no way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system if the inca had to face aztec who wins inca inca i mean the aztecs were psychotic but the inca had just reserves for miles right and they had that essential hearts and minds right and there was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the inca empire for some reason everything was owned communally except the llamas the llamas were the kings and so that was one thing that like some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas but you know you don't own your llama anymore and and people are really attached to their llamas to this day yeah they are like family members so it'd be like everybody walked in and said everybody's family dog is now mine like really upset people on an emotional level well i mean so llamas uh got domesticated at some point probably early i mean what i don't even know when but early on it's uh we we have rock art that progresses to make it see like a progression from people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones yeah so it was still in that archaic period at least that they became friends uh yeah but if you roll in and you own them that's uh yeah that pissed everybody off that for some reason the inca owned everybody's llama instantly and he would take anything he wanted a lot of them would just get carted away that day just sent to cusco they'd also take their mummies that was a weird thing everybody mourns they're dead but the inca just like ceased to accept it they would just the mummies were still there okay he's dead but look he still got clothes he's at the party let's put a beer in front of him they just like they just kept people as mummies and so the ancestral mummies of every town part of the being absorbed into the the empire was okay your most important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful house in cusco but they would physically bring those mummies to cusco to make now cusco the spiritual heart of their their belief system i mean i could see how that would piss people off but it's also a pretty powerful way to say like the ancestors that you idolize that you respect are now in the capital they've been elevated we didn't steal them we have given them a new place of honor and you're welcome to come visit them all the time and they did they have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the inca world would come to cusco and uh which of the civilizations mummified people is it is it the incas for sure mummified people and even did some of that kind of uh like egyptian-esque taking out of organs and preparing the body they put like straw inside the cavity and mummify them but the maya didn't do it at all the maya in fact on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster and then they'd get back in there it was jungly so i think the bugs probably had part of it too but then they would get back in there to get the bones they'd open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red cinnabar the one that i was in in copan we had evidence that they had gone in there four different times and the last couple times they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it back in articulated in the on the skeleton but they they didn't mummify they on purpose would like grossly float the bodies so so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones but would they keep the bones yeah they'd keep the bones and they'd pull the bones out occasionally and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in so there's a still a deep connection to the ancestors to the physical manifestation of the ancestors then yeah well they're mummified or bone and to this day like if if you do an excavation here in the united states native american people don't like it they don't like their graves which is fine enough i wouldn't want somebody digging up my grandma either but the maya they love it they love it every maya person if we find a grave they're like yeah look at that bones cool can i touch yeah they they're not spooked about it at all they think it's exciting i one time as uh helped out a a physical anthropologist in town and in copan to get a osteology collection together of various animals so if we got bones from a uh an excavation we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection and this family said uh well we our family dog died last year and buried him in the backyard you go dig him 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 but the kids really want to help you so their kids came out yeah and this was like their puppy and it died you know less than a year ago when we got to it that like that one of them just like grabbed up a bone and he was like we see see those like little bitty bones yeah like what a weird attitude that's your dead dog there but they just they have a different relationship with the dead it's some sense that's a beautiful attitude right yeah why um pretend like we're not mortal and there's not 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 day of the dead is all about and i love day of the dead uh you know halloween's this creepy thing where they're all monsters but day of the dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors i convinced my kids after the movie coco came out now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar and we talk about who they were and how they lived and we put things on the altar that mattered in their life and we remember them on that day and it turned something that was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from i have to ask about the giant stones the inca has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly do you understand is it understood how they were able to do that so well no um you know the moving of it i think that we have reasonable theories you know there there are ways to pivot large weights uh there's a there's a great guy uh named wally wallington a retired contractor here in the u.s who built stonehenge in his backyard in minnesota single-handedly showing how you can move big stones so i you know i think wally's already figured out how to move them it's the it's the perfectly fit so carefully fit together that you couldn't even put a diamond between the stones that's the one that i think still has people baffled the the common archaeological wisdom that you'd find out of uh textbook is that they just kept packing away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect which has to be that is there is no way that they just were that meticulous i mean everybody's got a hammerstone i i personally think it's acids i think they melted them um together and there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones which i've done a number of times i'm going back next month to uh machu picchu and especially cusco i walk around in the alleys where these 500 you know to a thousand year old walls are still there and uh you see i see things like the the crystals in the andesite are uh almost stitched together along the seams like there's the the andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven't and there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall like it's just melted like somebody like took a rag and wiped it while it was soft lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too i i haven't been able to prove it this is one of these you know end of my archaeological career chapters i'm either going to prove myself wrong or prove it but i think they used acids my dad's a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there's no way there's no naturally occurring acids but my current theory actually i got the idea initially from the show breaking bad i don't know if you ever saw that show but there's a point in which they're trying to dissolve a body yeah and they're using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling that hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating it you know it it won't go through plastic and you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it um the the inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite fluorite is big in the andes and they also mind a lot of things for gold and silver and the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid you put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it's hydrofluoric acid and that will burn through andesite or anything and if you learned how to do it you know judiciously and then you didn't care whether you know servants lost a an arm or two then you could actually use them to fuse these together and i i think they're fused together i i asked the city of cuzco if i could take some core samples and they said go away gringo don't touch our walls so this actually this next this next time i'm going to go try to talk to the more quechua authorities in a place called oleantaytambo and maybe i can convince them but right now they just think i'm a i'm a weird ass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls it's a fascinating theory and so the how could you get to the the bottom of that so getting core samples to see if there's some kind of trace chemists i'm working with say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these that a core sample right along a seam they they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid i wanted to go straight to burning rocks but they were like no i mean we already know that's true i mean yeah we can burn some rocks but it would happen that's just chemistry we gotta we gotta prove that it would happen in the walls so go get us samples and that was before covid and all sorts of you know you know how it is you probably are the same guy where you've got a a thousand ideas and you know the ones that that are fruitful you run with and the other 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 either one yeah i'll try to disprove it yeah i wonder if we discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do because it just feels like if a large number of humans are eight are just working a little bit chipping away at stuff at scale that can do miraculous things so the question is how can a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing um because i just when we think about like stonehenger some very challenging architectural construction we don't think about a large number of humans working together well you know that large number of humans uh are motivated to work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another right one of my favorite quotes is and i'm probably going to misquote it here but i think it's margaret mead who said never underestimate the power of small groups working together and the truth is that those are the only people that have ever changed the world that small dedicated groups of people are what changed the world yeah and they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision yeah yeah yeah i think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do uh across time and we are way less capable than we used to be i mean the average human had all 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 that's for somebody else to do you've also lectured about uh which i really enjoyed about north america and also helped teach me that there's a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time so maybe can we start at the beginning who were the early humans in north america well we go through that paleo indian and archaic period for thousands of years you know as we started this conversation probably you know 30 000 years as a conservative now humans first enter the americas but the first cultures we get here are mound builders around the mississippi and to the east and then also a totally separate group in the what we call the american southwest now the four corners who will develop into mostly the people we call the pueblo people who are still there today like zuni and hopi people so we've got these two clusters that the very first major community in north america is in the most unlikely place it's in northern louisiana people think i'm crazy when i say this but there is a pyramid 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 as the pyramids in egypt and it is a giant thing just poking out of the bayous of louisiana and uh people don't believe me when i say it but it's there the mound builders what was that society like in comparison to everything else we've been talking about in mesoamerica they they evolved over thousands of years we call them mound builders this is something i you know object to i think we should have a better we do the last uh version of them we call the mississippians now but generally speaking we call all these guys mound builders but what they built were pyramids they look like mounds now and they didn't build them out of stone that's you know that's kind of our just inherent western bias something that's built out of stone is is sophisticated and something that's built out of dirt is rudimentary but in their full living form they did have cores of dirt but then they also had uh kind of clay caps so they had terraces they had whole complexes of buildings up on top there were kings that lived up there there's uh the the biggest of the mississippian cities is called cahokia and it's right outside of uh st louis and it was huge it had a population of 20 000 people and pyramids all over the place a huge palisade wall around it it was absolutely gigantic a thriving metropolis and we in america have kind of a collective amnesia like we we never hear about these massive civilizations cahokia was the the big first city but then it spread from the mississippi all the way to the atlantic there were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had you know five to ten thousand people each were they their own thing or is there some kind of thread connecting all of them they had a unified religion and culture they were again not an empire so there were warring city-states there were kind of uh territories that were owned by big kings and then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings and then one one one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight so they were they were kind of uh countries i think for yeah we could safely say there were different countries within this patchwork that was eastern united states and you know it's so weird that we don't know this because it was clearly documented by the by the spanish it's this i'm not talking about just archaeology we find them in archaeology now but hernando de soto landed in florida and went for three years from he went up into the carolinas and over down into alabama and louisiana and he's the first one to see the mississippi up there but for three years he went through city after city after city unfortunately decimating them eating all their corn giving them diseases but uh i mean the documentation is clearly there he met collectively millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization those disease and uh stealing of resources but was there like explicit murdering going on unfortunately yeah he was a murderer and a psycho and a liar he uh he he snowed them that he was some kind of deity actually learned a trick from the inca who he was with pizarro in his first run and got went back to spain was rich had a wife a castle then he got bored and he decided to have a reign of terror on northern america for three years but he had people uh burned at the stake he had his dogs ripped them apart he was very very brutal he he ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody he made promises and broke them all the time he was really he was a brutal man so this whole period when uh christopher columbus came how did that change everything well you know there's a there's a great uh anthropological uh body of literature it's it's called the columbian exchange based on columbus but it's you know all this trade back and forth between the new world and the old world and the the old world got just wonderful stuff all of a sudden their diet didn't suck all these vegetables came in the the new world got uh herd animals it got pigs and cows and goats that it didn't have but it also got 13 infectious diseases uh europe had had wave wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things but it didn't actually go away it just couldn't spread like a wildfire through the community so when they arrived to the americas all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people i think in the first 20 30 years there were people who like had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them but the numbers you know it's it's a it's a shameful part of history and it wasn't something that europe perpetrated on them the medical science at that time was still the four humors theory that people were made of yellow bile black bile blood and phlegm and we did things like well you've got to bleed him he'll feel better then so we had no idea what an infectious disease was but the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone and the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that it 90 of everybody was dead and that the the number of people has increased as well as far as the our estimates we're thinking it's somewhere around 150 million people and 90 of them died and with them all their knowledge just i mean imagine the moment where you know who dies when things get bad it's the young and the old so all the knowledge keepers die suddenly the children die this next generation that's half taught and now completely demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack that their gods hate them that the only way out of it is to uh to accept this new christianity but they you know they don't have bring kids into this world where everybody's dying and even if they do they can't teach them what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmission so in a in a single terrible moment in human history you know the generation loses all their knowledge so a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out but with that also just the the wisdom of the entire civilizations so much of what they knew was just lost at that moment we have the maya who had those hieroglyphs and that we've learned a lot from that yeah but not a significant integration of that wisdom into so it wasn't uh when the europeans came it wasn't like the cultures were integrated it was um a story of domination in the north in north america there's a a new term in the literature that i like we call it the uh the mississippian shatter zone that mississippian civilization was millions of people but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries and now we have this shatter zone where we have how ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away and you know that i'm just about to talk to a cherokee man who listened to some of the things i had to say and says all those ho-chunk things you were saying from that ho-chunk culture my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too can i can i talk to you by phone and tell you about these things so we've got this shatter zone where you know we're gonna try to put the piece the puzzle back together especially in terms of mississippian religion i really think we're making headway in this generation and it's exciting to be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together just as uh since a lot of people kind of refer to christopher columbus as the person who discovered america um i read that the vikings reached north america uh much earlier in um 1000 ce and uh why do you think they didn't expand and colonize because they got their ass kicked okay it's the truth yeah it is absolutely true that the vikings were here there's a there's a great uh site in nova scotia called lenso meadows which definitely has what's left of a viking colony it was leaf eric and his father eric the red who they got kind of kicked out of europe because they apparently couldn't stop murdering people and so they went to greenland and then kind of island hopped over to canada but i think the culture that was in that area it was named the dorset but they would have nothing to do with the vikings they they attacked the viking settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it you know the vikings attacked ireland and they just found a bunch of you know monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going we're men of god we don't fight and the vikings were like this is great that's great this will be easy then we'll just loot all these easter eggs but the native americans in canada were like not having it they kicked their ass in fact uh leaf ericsson's brother thor died there the the natives killed him he was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement but they they just killed him so a lot of the native american cultures were also i mean they're sophisticated warring cultures also yes they fought especially the the mississippians boy they were tough and so were uh you know the the five nations the mohawk the huron those the ones that that kicked the viking's ass up there they were probably uh algonquin speakers but they were connected like you know just above the the great lakes but they were all a very tough people when you think about the spaniards and the the portuguese and the over 100 million people that were killed um do you see that as a tragedy of history or is it just the way of history i think that the epidemics i i consider it a tragedy that did not have to happen and that was not you know that was not a fair fight nobody knew what to do about it there was just a a tragic perfect storm of events it was not you know they i think that the spanish and the portuguese get unfairly maligned in what's been called the the black legend that they just marched into america and murdered everyone that's not the fact that it was the diseases that murdered everyone in fact there was a a really poignant 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 and he was bringing people in that were getting sick and he he wrote you know i'm baptizing everyone you know i have baptized 10 000 people a day and yet god's still killing them why is he doing this to them they're doing everything that i asked them to do they are submitting to the will of god but this guy doesn't realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptizing them in he's just wiping the disease on everybody's faces he's accelerating it when he doesn't even realize he thinks he's saving them but he's actually killing them yeah that's a trap that's a tragedy you know that's not just like spoils go to the victor stuff that's just straight up tragedy yeah yeah but that one is even hard to know what to do with like black death it's i mean infections they don't operate on normal human terms right they just they just go through entire populations back to wild ideas all right just my style um i mean we didn't really talk about how life originated on earth or how uh how humans have evolved and we did talk about that there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient history we haven't even uncovered yet uh do you think it's possible that other intelligent civilizations from outside of earth aliens ever visited you had me right until the ever visited thing that one i'm not entirely sure about i'm not sure whether we have any we certainly have no archaeological proof that i would uh cite or contemplate as the evidence of such but you know uh you know the guys that that discovered dna watson and crick uh watson uh who actually habitually used hallucinogens to to uh invigorate his thinking he said that he thought that dna on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period that it had at its disposal and that his guess was that our dna was somehow seeded from outside of our planet and you know take that for what it is but the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that um so that's interesting but in terms of you know aliens visiting us i i don't know i it does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think we're important enough for some advanced species to give a about us statistically speaking the universe is way too big we can't be the only sentient beings there's got to be somebody else out there whether they care about us that's a question i've been on ancient aliens a number of times i show up and you know i'm an educator i mean refusing to be part of the conversations an immediate fail in my book um but there was one time where they asked me at the 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 is that aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of you know science and medicine engineering all these things today we also have a lot of uh stories of the aliens coming down but now all they're doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks like whatever we did we super pissed them off apparently the quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly um what it's interesting thought you've mentioned what archaeologically would you have to see to be like this might be an alien a technology that doesn't belong there first and foremost i mean you know we gotta it if we just run with the premise that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here that was almost certainly mechanical now i you know i love the aliens thing where you know biomechanical is something that that certainly could be and that would you know that that would uh disintegrate we wouldn't see that at all but i would expect some kind of uh technology that that showed up out of the blue and change things that would be something um but but i would think you know mechanical right or you know a substance that's not from here but of course we would only see the the results of that mechanical you mean like literally a mechanical thing right some sort of thing like that uh you know it the typical thing people say is like you know how did they move these giant stones right but you know let's just just look at that on the face for a second aliens come from across the universe to meet humans and the thing they tell them is how to move rocks are you fucking kidding me i mean you know like give them give them antibiotics or a combustion engine or something you're gonna they said they came across the universe and they showed them how to move big rocks i mean that doesn't make any sense that just doesn't make any sense what do you think earth will look like 10 000 years from now that's an interesting question i think it will be a lot more automated or it'll be a smoldering pile i mean if there is a possibility we could end ourselves there's always that possibility that we've really opened pandora's box in some regards i i did listen to one of your podcast guests with the uh what would happen in the case of nuclear war yeah that was chilling her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes apparently so we we have that capacity that's scary that's a possible future for us but i'm an optimist i'd you know i'd like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make my job better but a thousand ten thousand years is a long time and uh technology is improving and becoming more advanced rapidly and uh the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more so that that's the part that frightens me actually i don't know does that frighten you yes terrifying you know i i i heard somebody say i forget who it was but you know uh systems of any kind human systems biological systems can be put on a graph that's change over time and any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the and the the line starts going straight up that is a system in crisis in almost any biological system that has that fast a change over that little time you would any any other thing you'd describe it as a crisis when you apply that chart to technologies change it's a crisis from that perspective absolutely but i also have a faith in human ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with ways to uh get out of that difficult situation and in so doing innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering but on the whole on average uh make a better world but yeah if it you know like with nuclear weapons the bad stuff might actually lead to the death of everybody i guess there's always that that chance but i am an optimist i you know i think you're an optimist too i i think exactly as you just said i think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate and we are never more innovative than when we're under distress i think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about you know we didn't we didn't change the world when we were comfortable it was when we were in crisis mother necessity is the mother of invention and i think we'll be all right i think that uh this impending uh climate crisis is real and happening i actually personally think that uh i'm gonna i'm gonna answer a question that you didn't even ask me um i think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this we're uh delusional i'm all for electric cars and uh you know uh being good stewards of the environment but uh you know uh being good stewards of the environment but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what's about to happen we're spending too much time pretending you know the average american thinks if we all just drive electric cars will be okay that's bullshit that's not going to happen we need to start making technologies that desalinize water that you know a host of things that uh that we need to use our technological past capacity to accept it and adapt instead of pollyanna thinking we can make it go away yeah yeah kind of accept that the world will change and uh a lot of big problems will arise and just develop technology that addresses them i think you have some some guys that have their finger on the pulse there we need to start thinking about how we're going to survive this not that we're going to make it go away and not just survive thrive um again we're pretty innovative in that regard but if some catastrophic thing happens or we just leave this planet what uh what do you think would be found by a aforementioned alien civilizations when they visit the anthropologists the grad student anthropologists that visit earth and study how much of what we now have and love and think of as human civilization will be lost do you think well you know time moves on and things that are perishable perish so you know you didn't put a time element in there but i would say that you know everything that can perish will and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn't perish so we'll have you know buildings plaques but they won't have any books they won't have any you know billboards there they'll have the incomplete record i have i i one time did a did a talk in sue falls and i said you know i drove in here and there was a big obelisk in front of the town and everywhere i go i see the names lewis and clark and a thousand years from now if i was an archaeologist investigating this place i would think that it was founded by the egyptians and their kings were named lewis and clark but the truth is you know lewis and clark stayed one night here but it's just a big deal so i would be so wrong about what i thought about your town based on what preserved this is so beautiful as a thought experiment like what would archaeologists be really wrong about and what would they could possibly be right about washington dc was clearly made by a combination of the egyptians and the greeks and the romans because that's what all the architecture is yeah and would they be able to reconstruct the important empires the the the powerful empires and the the warring empires for that matter have me and my colleagues done that at all i i'm almost certain that the maya would just gut laugh at what i think i know what they were i wonder do you ever think about like what we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most like mainstream archaeology just like a suspicion what what could we get completely wrong uh well one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civils like an obviously gigantic civilization that was there along with the maya or something like this in the 10 000 years ago there's certainly that there could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things and everybody knew they existed and everybody interacted with them it was i think i think i think it's our estimation of their motivations that were probably most wrong on my uh my teacher shealy a long time ago said you know i i've come up with all sorts of theories i was always thinking about stuff and she looked at me and she said if you don't stop thinking like a western european and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people you will never understand any of it which i've always taken to heart i mean i really do when i approach these things i try to step out of my cultural assumptions trying to think like they would think is the best i could and it's very different i mean this whole you know the maya are are cyclical you know this the the whole sacrifice we're so you know obsessed with that but you know that was an austere actual sacrifice on their part they weren't just you know hey let's all get together and kill that guy that's pissing us off i mean they were like you know giving the best of them it was it was a different mentality this was not brutal this was a you know bona fide sacrifice on their part a loss plus the whole mystery of of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with this i tell you that one i'm gonna unweave that one one of these days one of these days now this that puppy appeared on the on pottery all over pottery yeah he's he's 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 have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy the mystery solved i mean it could just be the birth of memes of humor i don't know i mean again humor you don't know what the nature of their humor of what 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 side story here that uh when i worked with the maya people in palenque i spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day and they would talk to each other in their own language uh it was uh sell tall was the group i was working with but i noticed after a while they were they were big jokers they loved to make jokes and they would laugh at jokes but then they would also one of them would say something and the other ones would go hoo hoo and i eventually asked you know what is that why do you guys always make that hoo hoo noise they said that's because he made a really smart pun it was like he said three different things at once it was a turn of phrase that was smart and they didn't make laughs at that it was there they had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever yeah so there's also that like you know just clever turn of speech yeah wit and i think about that when i'm a uh uh hieroglyphic translator like here's a beautiful thing that's going to be like a poem or a political statement like and i'm just plottingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means there's probably double triple entendres all through this text and the real meaning is the subtext and i'm you know i'm thinking they're talking about corn and they're talking about the nature of life yeah it could be satire it could be you know as it was in the soviet union when there's a dictator maybe there's an overpowering king you're not allowed to actually speak uh you have to hide the thing you're you're actually trying to say uh in the subtext so and all of that there was a funny uh maya ceramic that had the ceramics are neat because they don't the the the monuments can be kind of broken records i'm the king i was born this time i beat these people up i married this woman i died but the ceramics will tell us like things out of mythology stories and there was this one with a rabbit looking at the merchant god and nobody could translate the text and finally this uh eastern european actually a ukrainian guy translated it and the rabbit saying to uh to the merchant god bend over and smell my ass it's like oh man we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology but no it translates bend over and smell my ass that's great that's human as we mentioned previously human nature does not change uh you you mentioned uh plank and mapping it it's just out of curiosity what is that process like it seems fascinating oh it was uh it was a great adventure i loved it but it was it was difficult i i woke up every morning thinking i will be hurt today somehow i don't know how i don't know how badly where on my body it will occur but it's going to happen because it was the jungle so in the jungle what's what's the process like what what what do you have to do to map it well it was tricky too because it was also a a national forest so the forestry department didn't want us to cut down anything more than we had to so we basically just cut tunnels through the foliage and i would uh we'd map everything twice the first thing 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 guys go north you guys go east west find other buildings and when you find them paste back to this 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 we'd bring the machine in we'd bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information but on that piece of paper i would write like don't bring the machine this way there's a tree fall or stand on top of this building and you'll see four different buildings at once from this one nice and all of this is in dense jungle right and the deeper we got off the road the deeper it was sometimes it would clear out but certain places if it was low it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast sometimes we would cut just uh uh tunnels through tall grass and we'd come back like five days later and they were gone yeah like we did we couldn't even find where our trails were they would grow back that fast but you see the building so you could see right and that was the fun part i mean sometimes it would just be like a little neighborhood with little low buildings no bigger than this table but sometimes you know just five more meters in and i'm standing under a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped like wow i've just found another one and some days you know on good days we'd find three pyramids and i i i felt uh that's that's such a more exciting job than the typical excavations although my buddies were all just you know in a hole for the whole week in the middle of the city and where i'm dancing around through the jungle i could find you know 10 buildings today i might find a pyramid today who knows what's that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that you're one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing what's that what's that feel like it's it's great i love that feeling i i am you know i'm an explorer at heart um so finding something like that you know when i was uh 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 the belisian jungle and that was just just outrageous i mean it almost dead that one almost depressed me i was my my entire like i had this great life ambition that i would find a lost city and then i did it at 25 and i was like god now what do i do i thought that was supposed to take me my whole life i actually uh i wrote a bunch of letters to nasa trying to get them to let me be the first uh archaeologist on mars i never got a single reply back i'm sure i'm on nasa's list as some weirdo um how'd you find a mayan city i uh i used a topography map of the area and i played the game if i was a maya where would my favorite place to live in this big area be i i looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of their pyramids tun wheat stone mountains i knew they loved mountains and when i found that mountain there were two others right next to it that made a triangle and they love those triads and there were rivers in between them and i thought that's it that's where i would build the city and i hiked out there over two seasons with students the other grad students were like he's just having his students just wander in the jungle all day but i came back with the city so given that you've looked into the deep pasts of uh humanity what gives you hope about our future maybe our deep future of this human civilization that's a good one and i do have hope i do have hope i i believe in the spirit of humankind i i as a person who have studied history i kind of feel like history does kind of a sine wave there's highs and there's lows but no matter how low we go we get up again and and we climb and i think that humanity will continue that we will rise to the challenges now some of the challenges may be created by ourselves as well but we will adapt and overcome that's that's what we do yeah humans find a way right that's that's like uh that's the thing you see with with history you when the empires collapse they uh the humans that come out of that they pick themselves up and find another way they build a new thing and the people i study believe in the cyclical nature of life that you really can't life can't continue without death being part of the cycle we get our lows we get our highs but the cycle continues forever i should mention that you have a lot of great lectures uh on the great courses but you have also an amazing podcast archaeo ed if people want to listen to it this is a tough question but what uh would you recommend what episodes should they listen to what's the oh that is a tough 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 well different strokes for different folks you know i do two different things on that podcast sometimes i just teach about cultures that you've never heard about or yeah i i love i i start off by saying it's my podcast and i'll talk about whatever the heck i want to talk about sometimes i talk about really uh specific things like a tool type or an animal type but my favorite ones have become when i just tell my stories of my adventures i've got a lot of weird adventure stories and uh it's it's been fun and they've been very well received i've got you know i can put my humor in there and i can talk about you know the the things that went right the things that went wrong the adventures that i had are all part of part of this archaeo ed thing it's an archaeo ads kind of a double entendre it's me i'm just dead but it's also education you know what i'm really trying to do with this too it's specifically the americas i want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here especially north america i i think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before europe showed up that's simply not true i think it should be part of our history books in fact i have a program called before the americas that uh would introduce as part of american history the part before european contact and i think that kids in the k-12 level should grow up 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 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 know the full history of this country that's a great project ed thank you so much thank you for talking today thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put onto the world and uh i can't wait to hear your new course thank you so much lex it was a real pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with ed barnhart to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from joseph campbell life is but a mask worn on the face of death and is death then but another mask how many can say asks the aztec poet that there is or is not a truth beyond thank you for listening and hope to see you next time and hope to see you next time and hope to see you next time and hope to see you next time Thank you.