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

32:27But Carole was found a long time ago but the archaeologist was like, ah 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, we better go take another look at that place. So what's the dating on Keral? Keral I think starts at about 3200 BCE and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it 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 at thing?

33:14Isn't that amazing? Yeah. I owe that. Gosh, I mean, it should be some sort of, you know, I'll be a flaky archaeologist like, you know, this is a place where rituals took place. 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 earthquake -prone place, but the buildings haven't fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wiggle around and don't allow the building to fall down.

34:01And inside these, we've also found a couple of things that were 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, corals, evidence being one of them. I think it's more about 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.

34:52And it just happened a lot more frequently than one of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built in Peru, possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. That's true. Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, there's crazy. There's one that's now pushing 6 ,000 BCE. That's thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. That one's called Waka Prieta. It was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years years before. What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the elements structurally, that kind of thing, is it, yeah, why do humans build pyramids?

35:47And why do they build it in all kinds of different locations in the world? Well, you know, my root answer is pretty boring, really. A lot of people ask me, why are their pyramids all over the planet. How is that a coincidence? I mean, who I think that 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. You know, any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks him 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 tiny top.

36:32And I think that building something big and tall together is one of 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 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 a group of people saying we're going to do something that people will remember forever. Now that being said, do you remember we were just talking about Wauka Prieta and this one that's almost 6 ,000 BC now is the first one. That one's a funny case.

37:14We just talked about all these lofty goals but actually I'm pretty sure that Wauka 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's stunk. It's on the coast. It's 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. 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?

37:58Yeah, 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, not to jump ahead, but in North America, 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.

38:45I may 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 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 an old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounts. So where and who were the first civilizations in South America, as America?

39:30Well, you know, I think we're still piecing that together. I 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, 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 megafauna. 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.

40:09Sometimes 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 Asparo.

40:50An Asparo starts about the same time but they're all about fishing. They have no farming. And Keral 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?

41:37I do think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there very old. There's actually 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 Koral and Aspero that I was just talking about, it's weird what a the D 'Earth 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.

42:24And there's no hints of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends about 1800 BCE, this culture called Chavine starts up. And they, their main temple is up in the Andes in this place of least, path of least resistance between the Amazon and the coast. It's about three days walk either way from 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.

43:17All 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 into you. It's possible that this powerful idea in South America started in the Amazon. I do. I do think it did. And you're right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archaeology can't see them at all. Sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but there's an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? Those are things that archaeology just can't get at.

44:03That'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 I'm in it for, trying to understand these people and it's real detective work and we know we're dealing with a totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. If we look around this room here, if 2000 years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left? And what would we think happened here? 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 rule the world, the religions, the different ideas.

44:59Tell me about this fang deity. One of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the religions, there's a thread that connects the different civilizations, the societies of the Indian region. And the religion I practice is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the mainstream. That is exactly what I think. And I think it's all about this Fang Diyadi who somewhere thousands of years ago crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion to cult. 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.

45:47And the people in the Amazon still talk about him. there his name is Vihomase in some groups but they say that his 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 bonafide pantheons. You know, Greece had one, Egypt had one Mesopotamia had one. and 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.

46:32And 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 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 his head and off his belt. He's got really identifiable traits. He also likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around. But he's the fang to deity and he's there.

47:18He shows up in Chivine de Hwantar, the capital of that Chivine culture. And he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away, throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inka. The Inka have a creator deity, they call Vera Cocha, but Vera Cocha is the Fang deity. He is, when we do see him, by the time you get to Inka, they do this kind of like almost Islamic thing where they say you can't understand the face of Farah Coaches. 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.

48:12If 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, yeah, 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 and So what is the process of analyzing art through time to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture?

48:58Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over? Well, certainly without the advent of writing, 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 pull apart the same sort of thing 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 Zeus by the different things they're holding, you know, lightning bolts or tridance 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.

49:45Once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say, okay, here's a deity here in Chavine culture. Now we move forward 500 years, now we're in Mochay and Nazca culture. You know, who were, 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 snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt and then Not so much in chivine, but as it goes forward he starts carting around severed heads human severed heads so they're like in the ill literature The Moe Table column the decapitated deity But then they have these other like, oh, here's the crab deity and here's the fox deity.

50:57But 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 zoos. I think that the Feng Dheed, he 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, some Shaveen to Mojit to Inka, as you're saying.

51:42Right. Wari has them too, Tia Winoco. That's the famous place, Pumapunku. He's all over there. I wonder how those ideas spread in morph of this fang -deady. I think people walked and prostilatized and places like Chavine, there's a later one in Inca times called a Pachakamak 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, Shaviyin 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 -Didi all over them that have like one labyrinth will have all pottery.

52:33The next labyrinth will 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 their 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.

52:58Somebody about the relationship they had with the Fang Dady and like their conception of the powers of the Fang Dady, is it were they afraid of the Fang Dady's and all -knowing God? Is it something that brings joy and harvest? There's something that you're supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans too to keep it, keep it bay? I think he had two sides of the coin. Like a lot of the Hindu gods are one aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. 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 in ferocity.

53:47But 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 sex acts when it comes to the mocha. There's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men. And some of them show their faces transforming into that Fang Deity, like he is acting through them. But 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.

54:34In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where the where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and his puppy. And his puppy. 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 fat. And he was like, oh, he really is very involved in the show. What is this weird puppy? So he's, yeah, he likes to take heads off. But he also has a puppy he adores. This actually, this is awesome. He makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30 years ago on shamanism and the mocha civilization, it reads, the mocha of the major focus of this paper, sex puppies and headhunting will be shown to be related to ancient mocha shamanism.

55:25So now I understand I was like, well, the puppies. The puppies, yeah, it's true. And the headhunting, that's the decapitated. And I've added rock and roll to that list, sense, actually, which is rock and roll, or even music is also a big part of it. They call spirits down. There's this whole spirit world. There's the ancestors. And the people that drink sand, 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. It was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don't talk about him much anymore that we still around.

56:04And they're in like around Trujillo, they call him I -I -A -Pek.

56:11But music, play in the Amazon, they play flute, sometimes a chorus of women saying, 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 priest or the shaman or the coroner, whatever you want to call them, has his own posse of spirits that are going 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 been by the San Pedro cactus juice, which is the salucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus.

56:57But that's what allows you to actually see that other world. Yeah, I went to the Amazon recently did Ioska, very high dose of it. Bold move.

57:12When in Rome? How far back does that go? Oh, 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, Chavine Desquantara was talking about, where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There's this wall on the backside 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.

58:03San Pedro doesn't do that to you, but Ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca traditionally they 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 depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the backside of this temple from 3000 years ago. So that, you think, could have been a big component of the development of religion and shamanism? I think that hallucinogens opened to the mind then, like they opened the mind now. Do you think that the Stone Age theory, do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of civilization?

58:56In the Americas, yes, I do. Though, you know, hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they're global. 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 a degree, there 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.

59:54It'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 the formation of civilizations. I think in terms of South America, they possibly really work. 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 tobacco was always a big part of it. But a lot of the, there's more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation, and for 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.

1:00:48Nothing to do with drugs. I was so much preferred the drugs route. It's the result, not the tools aren't the thing that creates insight. It's the result. So you're getting to, you know, 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.

1:01:30So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were where the early first sort of mother culture, as mother civilizations in South America. And they, 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 Chavine 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 Carole. The next one that we've barely even begun looking at, but it's probably older than Carole is Succine culture.

1:02:18I was just poking around there last year. And just from the bus on the highway, I could see, like, that's a pyramid out there. 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. Carole 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 deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing.

1:03:04That'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 exists in the Amazon. So it's carried a lot of names, the lost city of Z, or Alderado. The thing is possible it existed. Well, city of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. The El Dorado, the ideas of where it is, kind of center around towards Colombia. And city of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Shingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart.

1:03:51You 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. And these two are on either end, but both of them have evidence of civilization. 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.

1:04:38But it's there. Now, you know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And 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 a more of these, what we call like, geometric earthworks. So there's more and more evidence of these civilizations. It's not a, it's not a 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 that learn is if you build a road, And loggers will come.

1:05:21Yep. 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 protective, 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, and when they leave, the forest heals itself. So quickly. So quickly. And you just think that across decades, you expand that to centuries. And it's like, you could see how a civilization could completely swallow it up by the rainforest. And it happened for sure in the Amazon. You know, there, one of the ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where people were in the Amazon, because yes, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence.

1:06:19But they're finding more and more of these places that they call Terra -Pretta, which is black earth, and they're huge swathes of it. So 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. Then 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 when I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus up the river, the Black River a couple of days and went and met some different communities.

1:07:06And 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 the stories, all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you. Yeah, so many of them. You know, the thing that excites the world about archaeology right now is gobeckly teppy. And this, you know, 10 ,000 now, Kuran teppy is 11 ,000.

1:07:47The whole area is called the Toss Tepler. We only founded a couple of decades ago. But it was just, you know, what? Archaeologists rowing through the area and ask a sheep herder, hey, you know, you guys know where anything ancient is? Oh, yeah, 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 good back at happy What do you think about the work of Graham Hancock who also believes that? There's a lost civilization in the Amazon well I've met Graham and personally I like him He's a nice guy got a nice sense of humor and I think he's smart And I also think he is a very good researcher.

1:08:34He and I are working on the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham's idea that a single now lost ancient civilization seated the rest of them. I just don't see that on a number of levels. Art effect wise, technology wise, art historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he's very well read. In fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues. But his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agreed to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation.

1:09:20That would be a fun argument to be a fine law for. So he believes he's proposed as possible that the Amazon jungle is sort of a man made garden. So it was planted there by advanced, anxious 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. It's the conclusion part that we differ from. But the facts that he's basing that on are that terapreta, are the huge geometric earthworks, are the ever -increasing evidence of them. They are now from the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They're everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle, we find these big works.

1:10:10So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question and also 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 the key idea that he's proposing that you disagree with? Is it, it was the level of advancement that the civilization was or how large and centralized it was? My main point of disagreement is that his and his ideas evolved like everybody. You know, at no, no scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die.

1:10:56His 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 the younger dryer dry es 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 members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world's civilizations for the next revival. There's where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization from the past and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry of, You know in his early books he suggested it's the It's Atlantis.

1:12:05I 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 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 potchard from. Yeah. And of course, it is a compelling story that there's a single civilization from which all of this came from.

1:12:52Because the alternative is, you know, the idea that came across the bearing straight 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 look similar to all that everybody has a flood myth. Right. So there's a lot of similarities, everybody building pyramids. Yeah.

1:13:27But there could be a lot of other explanations. And for even if it's a simple compelling explanation, there has to be evidence for it, right? And what would that evidence look like? That's the bottom line. That's the top. Everything's theories. And as responsible scientists, we're trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That's one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps. 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. It's such a weird discipline because you're operating in a dark room.

1:14:10You're feeling around a dark room. So it's mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences operate in a mostly well lit room. There's a good dark corner and you're kind of a figure out a way to light it. But in archaeology, most of it is a mystery, right? Yes, it's job security. I like that part. But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans has have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. 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.

1:14:59And if we, 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. One of the fascinating things about just the Amazon to me is that there's still a large number of uncontacted tribes. To rewind back into ancient history, you can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the Amazon that were isolated, very sort of distinct from each other. Can you speak to this, your understanding of these tribes in 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.

1:15:48We 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 are looking for them. But they do seem frozen in time and I don't think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that. But we were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment. 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 figure out how not to die in it, it's a paradise of food.

1:16:35Foods 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 attacking whoever they come across. And not just foreigners, they attack each other. The Yamama 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.

1:17:25And I think that these, you know, it's cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Anamamo, they really, part of the, the right of passage to be a man is to go kill They still remain somebody from an outer village. And they go in there, they oftentimes, the way they don't let imbreding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically, but 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 and the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn't seen as a biological thing.

1:18:13It 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 mentioned it was Joe over there and that other community still passed off for that time when we stole his daughter. And we ought to go over there and kill Joe. and then he'll get better. And so this round of never -ending violence, like Hatfields and McCoys had that thing, and the people of New Guinea also do that. So it's not, you know, there are certain areas, mostly wooded areas now that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural institution.

1:19:02It'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 ranger from one of the biology stations who just in the by and by of 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 a couple of years.

1:19:42And 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. and we should kill him and move our village. So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy. You know, everybody's got it. I think, I think, you know, we need to listen to our better angels because if we don't, we as a human species can easily evolve into just using violence and against others to get what we want.

1:20:29It's a daily choice we make not to be savages. She's a fascinating thing to remember. What kind of thing can civilize society? We've moved past all that. But it can be summoned. Like in 1984, the two minutes of hate. With the right words, that primal thing can be summoned and directed and lead to a lot of destruction. And you know, our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive where somebody is not dead at the end of it. Yep. So at which point did what we now call the Maya civilization arise? That's another complicated one, another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore.

1:21:30You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the Amazon and what we're talking about now is the Patan and the mountains there. 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. But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya, very close to where the time period for that chivine culture is.

1:22:14About 1800 BCE, there's a culture that some call the mochaia, not Maya. But they're on the Pacific coast where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It's called the Socanusco. 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 Maya, the original Maya are not, there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion. But the Olmech have this religion they develop and they start exporting it.

1:22:58And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that's being created by the Olmech who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call the isthmus of Twantapak. I have a lot of questions to ask here, but just a natural stupid confusion I have. So first, 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 just finished filming a whole thing on the Olmex and their interaction with the Maya for the great courses. I'm thrilled for it to come out next spring. I think they co -evolved.

1:23:42Archaeology in this regard is the worst enemy of this. We put these names on cultures. 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 Maya and the Olmeck are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's happening in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time. The Olmeck are really bringing the religion part. But the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other stone types.

1:24:32So you've got the Olmeck in the middle where Mexico gets skinny and it gets swampy down there. That's called the isthmus of Tuanquepec. That's where the Olmeca are. Then you've got the Maya to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca where the people call 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 Mesoamerican? What is South America? Okay. And what you just said to Omics and the Maya, like can we just linger on the geography that we're talking about here in the, what is this like 1000 BC?

1:25:20Yeah, the time period we're talking about where the Olmecker there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I'd say it starts about 1800 BCE and by 500 BCE, the Olmecker 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 about the boundary of 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 four corners area. They're not Mesoamerican.

1:26:09They have different lives. Where does modern Mexico end? Modern Mexico ends, right? 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. But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras. And then it's really kind of a no man's land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, they really, 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 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.

1:26:59So the West, the Andes 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 Ande coast to the Pacific there. That's Andean civilization. So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region? Not that archaeology could 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 that first ceramics I was talking about that the Maya made, they show up strangely sophisticated, technologically already.

1:27:49And 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 came from South America to the Maya. Did the Maya get ceded by the second wave across the bearing straight or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America? Were they the ancestors of the Maya? How did the migration happen here? Do we understand that? 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. They're a 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 just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.

1:28:46I used to joke, but that could be something to that. I think there's some truth to it. I mean, the pigmeas are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big. the North American Indians are tall and the Mayr are small. There is definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, there's a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has 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. We can date that charcoal and it comes from 10 ,000 years ago. And the hands are all small. It's typical old Mexico.

1:29:30I walked right up to these things and could put my hand. I didn't mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands. And they're all smaller than my 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 Statcher who did it. It's so cool that you can date the charcoal and then so cool that 10 ,000 years ago, there are people leaving. And actually we have one that's I think 2 ,000 years older now just a couple years ago. Again, in Yucatan and Akave, they found a woman they named Naia now. And she's like 12 ,000 years old.

1:30:12So the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the barren straight to South America possibly the Amazon develop a lot of cool ideas in the Amazon and start drifting back up into as America was kind of a co -evolution the technology of ceramics I think got there through an interaction with the interesting thing is that the Maya didn't really have religion and didn't have as a vibrant religious set of ideas and they borrowed it from the all -mect. I've been doing a deep dive on this for this all -mect course that I just did, and it really does seem like these other cultures that have Jade and hematite and obsidian, the all -mect had none of that stuff.

1:31:00They were living in a swamp and building things out of 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 D .E .D. Show up now. No, the Fang D .E .D. is nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica. That's why there's Jaguars. There's Jaguar iconography, but it's not the same thing. This whole Jaguar transformer D .E .D. does not exist there. They do have a pantheon. So the Maya, the all -max are the interesting peoples of the regions. What was their? I'd love to ask questions about who were they?

1:31:45So one question I'm curious about. What was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos? That's a question. I've spent my entire career trying to answer.

1:32:02I 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 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?

1:32:54And those are the things that they the keyed on mathematically. The sun, of course, was also involved in the agricultural cycle. So that was important in and of itself. But the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math and seeing that there is 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 Morningstar. That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors.

1:33:38And 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 Morningstar 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 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 wartime when the spear is going to hit the earth. All right, so this is fascinating.

1:34:22They just had, at the foundation, a sense that life exists at the various timescales is cyclical. Yeah. That's a 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 cycles. Yeah. And they did it really well. Now, of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the Kippu, 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.

1:35:09That's how they figured out kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy, me. 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 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.

1:35:59It's just fascinating that they were able to figure this out. I would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community, if you can call it that. I think we absolutely could. And that's actually one of the things that I'm hoping to move the needle on in my generation with my career, is to give these cultures 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. Their math is incredible. Their hydraulic engineering is incredible. Their chemistry is incredible.

1:36:44And 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 astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the sophisticated aspects of the Mayan calendar that they've developed? I know you got another five hours. Yes, go. No, I'm getting... I should say that you also gave me the 2024 Mayan calendar. Yeah, I do this just to 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.

1:37:32So can you speak to the three components here as I'm reading the Tsoken, the Hob and the Long Count? What are these fascinating components of the calendar? It's a neat how obsessed. They were really math nerds. It wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. 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 the soul keens their oldest one and the one that's still in Ders today. There are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260 day count. No weeks, no months.

1:38:17It's for a total of 260 days and then it goes again. Everybody in the Highlands knows what their birthday is and 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 they talk to each one of those days and they pray to them. They have, there's now an association of some 8 ,000 people that are called A -Kee that are daykeepers who are keeping the days. And they're also like community psychologists almost.

1:39:02People 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 what? a midwife, what are you doing? You're living your life wrong. You're a you're a keeb. You need to start being a keeb. First. Take extremely seriously the day on which you're born, what that means, like the spirit that embodies that day. Right. Like I'm I'm keeb. I'm 13 keeb and it says, it's funny how accurate a lot of them are.

1:39:35Mine is basically as I'm an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me so my family still prospers. Like, oh, God, that's horribly accurate. I mean, some of it is also the chicken or the egg if you truly believe, sort of if you've structured society with this calendar is truly sacred, then it kind of like you manifest a lot of the spirit does manifest itself in the life of the people that is born on that spirit's day. Absolutely. It's interesting. 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.

1:40:22Why 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 I think it's beautiful. I mean, if that's right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together. 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.

1:41:08What's the first cycle that we actually go through as humans? And they picked this nine -month thing. It really is our cycle. And no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that. So, that's the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today. What's the second on 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.

1:41:53Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same gutter. right, a guy to get it. And that's useful because for all the sort of agriculture, all this 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.

1:42:40They 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 agricultural cycle. It's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for. 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 a bunch of cycles like ours, you know our weeks are a cycle our months are a cycle But it's weird in that it's estimation of the year in the in the long count system is only 360 days So it's miserably off a Solar year They count in base 20 so they count like we count in tens were decimal they count in base 20 and so it should be, you know, there's ones, there's 20s, there's 400s, there's 8 ,000s, there's 160 ,000s.

1:43:55It's up, it goes just like R10s, hundreds, thousands, 10 ,000s, 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 and our reckoning. So 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.

1:44:44Yeah, but they're, I mean, it's interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long periods of time, like, bucktoons is 144 ,000 days. Right. Or a bucktoon 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 a century. That's it. They have a 20 -year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a cartoon, and then they have the 400 -box -tune, which is the big one. That's like their millennium. And 13 of those box -tunes occurred in the creation before us. They also think that the world has had multiple creations.

1:45:32They're not alone in that. There's lots of ancient civilizations who say that. but we're technically in the fourth creation. And there, they have a creation story called the Popul Vue. And the Popul Vue 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 11, 3 ,114 BC. And it says, it doesn't say it's day one, it says it's the last day of the 13th Focktune of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 Focktunes long.

1:46:28Right. 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 Bocktunes forward you get to 2012 and hence the The very popular notion that 2012 whenever that was December December 21st 2012. Yeah, 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, it's like Garrett Morris and Saturday Night Live, the apocalypse was better, better good to me. But that is pretty interesting. So that will be technical being in the fifth. Yeah, technically we'd be in the fifth.

1:47:23Though my argument was that actually, If you look through all the corpus of my amathematics and calendars, they never say anything like that. In fact, there's a handful of dates that tell us that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that that bok -tun place should have 20 bok -tunes in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13. And there's a place in Palenque, there's a place in the Dresden Codex, and one other place I'm forgetting that I'll talk about time after 2012. So how does that happen? It's a conflict. Is this supposed to be an overlap of the 13th, so it's like 13 is the Corvitt and his 20 long.

1:48:18They love the number 13. It's all over the place. It's a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is not very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end of 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 bok -tune cycle should be 13. And there are certain texts that go way forward in time or way backward in time. And whenever they want to do that, there are higher increments than just the bactune. Above that there's the pictune and there's the calibatune and there's alawatune and it goes on and on and these are like you know 160 ,000 years.

1:49:19Huge 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 they're making an esoteric statement about the never ending nature of time. That's what I think they're telling us in those texts that time goes on forever, magically. But they still had a conception that it didn't go on forever before, right? That there was other civilizations that came before in there. This is the fourth creation. This is the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody.

1:49:58The first ones were made of mud and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals. The third ones were like us, but flawed in some other way. And then we're finally made of the blood of the gods and corn.

1:50:26We're made The the purple voodoo's we got it right this time there there is there There's no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration What one of the weird things is that the Aztecs who we talked to a lot at 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 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 mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation is also be 13.

1:51:14It's in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They're different time periods. What 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 flood myths. 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 Aztec said and they were all 13, they would come up to roughly 25 ,000 something years, which is very close to that processional cycle.

1:52:01So some people are like, they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes. And I mean that... I don't believe that one, but that one sure sounds good, doesn't it? That's gonna get a lot of internet hits. And one of the things I do obviously, one or about is 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 bathtub. It's just the days. It sees filling back up. And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that story.

1:52:50Everybody knows that everybody's nice coastal village went under water. 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 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 grandpa's 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 flood myth is almost certainly the rise and sea level.

1:53:32So the this idea that every day represents that carries a spirit, you know, there's modern day astrology. You know, most people kind of consider astrology this maybe a bit unscientific, wooboo type of sort 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, I have a woo -woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff, but I don't think as a scientist it makes, I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true.

1:54:28And you know, when you look at it objectively, I mean, really is everybody born with the sign Scorpio, a moody person. That's just that's just objectively not true. But it is funny how oftentimes these these Maya horoscopes for lack of a better word do hit the mark. There was some student who surveyed like 300 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 fascinating, at least that's fun. But no, I think I'm too much of a scientist to believe that I just don't have any foundation in science that it would allow us to believe that the the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.

1:55:29I agree. And yet there's so much mystery all around us that what I do like is the in built humility to that worldview that there's this whole you can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we don't understand, and then you can wander about what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that. And then there is where the human hubris can come in, but it's good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose. I do love the mysteries of the world, and I would love to find an ancient civilization, but I don't want to solve the mysteries of the world.

1:56:16I think they're one of the things that make world life worth living. That's true. That's true. You mentioned the Maya writing system. What are some interesting aspects of their language that they've used and 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. And I had the honor of being the student of 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 I loved every minute of it.

1:56:56I miss Linda Can you speak to that code actually the higher group of code and what takes to break it? Oh boy, I mean what a what a thing we had kind of a rose that a stone We had a page out of Diego de Landa'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 an alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya guy sat down in Spanish and he said, okay, you're going to write all the symbols right here in my book, right? right in A here, right in Bay here, right in Se here. And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write.

1:57:42They 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.

1:58:01There are Maya. Now 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 backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called chol -t, which is a combination of chort -t and chol -t, 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 a culture, a culture and horrible infectious diseases is that killed 90 % of the population.

1:59:03How did that happen? So we're missing something huge here. I think it's more like Chinese, where Chinese letters, 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's always has been these dialects or I should say their 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.

1:59:53You know how there was a period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin. Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya War. 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 Konorosov, who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure 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 in his grad school in Moscow and just went to the dictionaries.

2:00:51And he looked at you could take language that they're speaking today. And he applied it to the symbol system. And he knew that there were certain sounds. He used land as 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. in the dog, a dog in Eukatek's soul. So he saw two symbols. And he said, this one's probably Tsuu, and this one's Ul. And then the Turkey was Kuts. So it would be Kuu ending in Tsuu. And he showed how, look, you know, this is Tsuts, this is Tsuu. Those two things that should would be two are the same symbol and that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today.

2:01:45That's fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. How do you even figure that out? Is there still a year aware of any written languages that haven't been decoded yet? Yeah. There's a number of them. There's Easter Island script. I was just talking to 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 big one is Harapan. Harapan, for a long time, we used to say there were five independent scripts on the planet. And those were Chinese, Qunaiiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian Maya, and then Harapan, which is from Northern India.

2:02:41That's the only one that we've never cracked. And now all the epigraphers, the people that's the term epigraphy is 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 spoken word. That's a hypothesis, but which would explain why it's so different. Right. But we could just be faced with a quitter generation. Maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation. The other one that fascinates me is from the America's.

2:03:22It's the Kippu. So the, the Inca had the Kippu, this nodded string records, but it was definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know a lot, I can do the math Kippus and figure out what they're totalling and things. Yeah, there's a Kippu right there. Kippu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of Andean South America. A Kippu usually consists of cod and their calendar 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 keepers and those we can just do the math.

2:04:06We can prove that it's math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries in Kusko where Spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the libraries would just put they'd say 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 one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called Kippur Camaiaks gathered up, had them read all of their Kippus and transcribed them into Spanish books, and then had the Kippus burned and those people murdered.

2:04:52Well, 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 noted. And there's still some Kippus available that could be... I think now we've just crossed the 1000 mark. So we have a 1000 key poos. There's enough to break the code. 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 was a priest I read about named Diego de Polo, who was one of the early people in Peru converting communities.

2:05:44And his Chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of 3 ,000 people all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into Christianity. And he had the communities, Kippur Kamiyaks, 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 Kippu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3 ,000 of the same Kippu made and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find it cemetery, there is a Rosetta stone. You know, it is probably the case that there is somebody in Peru and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands.

2:06:34And like, you just have to show up and ask them. And it's like, they're like, oh yeah, yeah. 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 shit up. They didn't actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read. So they 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. But then on a much simpler level, there's Lama herders who keep a string in their pocket, and they've got the knots equaling how many lamas they have, and then they have subcategories of information like this one's sick, we've lost these ones, this one's pregnant, so they have these more simple and more mathematical keepers, but they're using them to affect as a record.

2:07:25Is it possible through archaeology to know what, you know, the social organization of the Maya was? Like what? Maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader, 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 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 the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule, that it was hereditary, that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and a connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that's lived in the underworld.

2:08:20It 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 authority. There was the site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there, Palenque, had 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 Chakzuts, who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called the Kalmonob. And then by the time he carves this other panel, there's another guy in the position of Cock Ahau, which was the Fire Lord.

2:09:16And so he had... God promoted. It was, well, he could have been killed, I mean, in the case of that. But then we have the interesting case of, 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. things. And so they turn into this more council system at Chichen Itza. But then when Chichen Itza falls, there's a new city that's architecture looks a lot like Chichen Itza. It's called Mayapan. But it has what it's called the League of Mayapan.

2:09:57And 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 Maya Pond or they live back at their place. It's kind of like a Maya Congress and they represented a democracy. It really was. I mean, and this happens in I guess 1250 AD 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.

2:10:42One's family murdered another family and the whole the whole city burned. And of course it's probably some fascinating corruption which is hard to discover through. 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. 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 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.

2:11:25You 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 those archaics 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 in the post -classic as when the democracy came about. Well midway through it. Yeah. Revered it 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.

2:12:02They're starting to create their calendar. They're starting to create these wonderful works of art. And the classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you'll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically, that's the age of kings to me. That's when the cities decide that they're going to organize themselves around 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.

2:12:43And so the Maya Age of Kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have 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 May is dead. It's just a corn farmer who lives down below and he's got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and connect his liaisons. So, that's the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years.

2:13:31I know 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 box tune of their history. The ninth box tune begins in like four 26 and it ends in like 829. So it's 400 -year period of time and before that there were no kings and after that they're really aren't kings. They're heads of councils. So 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. I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too.

2:14:22Strong, 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 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 the Maya civilization is that over a very short period of time, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly.

2:15:07It 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, 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's no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end and we see that signature plane as day. We know when a city was attacked and burned.

2:15:49Most of the time, it seemed like there were 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. 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 Cheach and Itza, so that the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.

2:16:51So why was there a decline? Well, 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. 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 archeologically 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 really stark evidence in Copan Honduras.

2:17:38Copan 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're growing up and you're not getting enough food seasonally. It shows up in the enamel of your teeth. It's called 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 weird thing. It was not an empire. It was a group of independent city states like Greece.

2:18:27Some 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. It's such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the Copon Valley. So I personally think it was cylindrically 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 I you know I can't prove it archeologically, 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 2012 thing if you actually talk to Maya So, you know, what happens at the end of a big cycle here?

2:19:36They 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 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 Bok -Toon that it was time to renew the world.

2:20:26I think this theory makes It 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 they created that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it. Yeah. You mentioned the Aztec. What was the origin of the Aztec? What did these people come from? the 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.

2:21:08The 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 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 as a place, a cave with seven different passages called Chiquimostok, and that all the people who spoke the language now -waddle came from the cave, and most of them went early to the of Mexico and in the Aztecs story they were just the lost tribe.

2:22:08They 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 indispensable group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Teshcoca, which is in the middle of the, which is now Mexico City. It's all tried up. But those guys were too civilized to fight with each other, but they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff.

2:22:57So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico. The dirty stuff, those, those are the muscle. Yeah, they'd go in and they'd kill whoever you want to kill. 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 going to make the Aztecs part of our ancestry. I'm going to 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.

2:23:42But then one of their priests say, we're going to walk around the lake and my vision 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 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 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, is really established.

2:24:33And from there, they quickly take over the entire valley. They make 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 Aztecs were brutal. They were just those guys agreed 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 last thing, civilization. Spread extremely quickly, famous. What are some defining qualities that explain that? I think they were very much like, they had an attitude like a till of the Hun.

2:25:18They just had no problem ripping your skin off. If 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 merchants. There was a merchant class who were also military. They were really 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 products they had that they could take.

2:26:05And then soon after the poach tech over there would come the military with the reconnaissance. So they asked that kind of huge warrior class, as you're saying. So what was there just King's Lingar in their whole relationship with war and violence they they worshiped a War deity their main temple was The temple of my or it had two temples up on top one was to Tla 'lok the rain god Who liked a lot of sacrifice himself, but then the other one was we see Lepotchley 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 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.

2:27:21So those were their symbolic warriors dressed up in all of their finery, and they would come at people with these two forces, and it was very unlike anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again, I think I could draw parallel to what happened in Europe. Europe, the famous Henry V moment in Ashen Core, where his kind of rag tag army wipes out half of France's aristocracy with the Longbow. Up until that moment, Europe had a very war for the elite classes kind of attitude. And then after France lost half their aristocracy, then it was like, maybe we should be hiring from the villages. The same sort of thing happened with the Aztec that there was a...

2:28:16Mesoamerica 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 Valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mesoamerica it was mostly the fear factor. But there also seem to be a celebration of violence. I think you said that a beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec. Maybe like the Roman Empire. They just had maybe a different relationship with what violence where that stood in the purpose of life, purpose of existence, that fair to say. I would hypothesize so.

2:29:04I mean, 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, when I said that statement, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people's hearts out. They had this just grotesque, violent bent, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same as Ted 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.

2:29:57And they spent money on things like flower gardens. 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 and they had an opera and they had a ballet. 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. How does that contrast the relationship with war and violence 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 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.

2:31:10We know that the Maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper and the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they'd 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 autosacrifice, 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 the sacrifice a bit more animal sacrifice human sacrifice?

2:31:54What role did that play in 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 the war God demanded people were captured and sacrificed and it had to be valuable people. There was a lot of, before they made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles that they would have and they'd take captives. In fact, all around Mesoamerica, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back sacrifice them for the gods. And the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody.

2:32:42They did it so much and so successfully that they didn't have any enemies nearby. So they decided this one poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlash Collins, that they were never going to make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the Tlash 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 Cortez in 20 ,000 superpessed off Tlash Collins. And they actually sacrifice what so there would be kind of these ritual battles or is it chopping off people's heads in a like is there is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice?

2:33:36It's mostly hard extraction sometimes heads but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see it and they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their ribcage would come out and they'd use like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really they just 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'd just, so they'd 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, quw.

2:34:20Well, the person was alive. Yep, well, the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea like 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. We've got to bump this up and then when they did and they decided they really took it out on the slosh 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. Asked 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.

2:35:01But then it was just kind of the thing to do. When Cortez got there, they were still having certain special feasts that involved humans. and it really upset the Spanish that they would be like tricked into eating human like, hey, you like in dinner? That was a human. So the idea was that actually having a taste for human flesh or is it just these kinds of ideas of like if you eat a person's heart that you can get their spirit and their strength in? In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy, Sahagun, who was a very responsible chronicler, that was pretty specific, that like, there was a distribution thing.

2:35:48Yeah. Like the elites got butts. The butts were the best part. So 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 butt taste for the Aztec. Yeah? Boy. They really did. They really did. In fact, that's what caused the, have you heard of the No -Chay Tree stay, the sad night, the night that the Aztecs really go nuts on the Spanish and kick them out? It's all triggered by this one guy, Pedro de Alvarado, who's left in charge by Cortez. As Cortez goes to the coast and tries to talk to the new force, talk him into being for him, which he does.

2:36:34but Pedro Alvarado's left back in town in charge and they're doing another one of these huge Aztec buffets and 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 guards closed the doors and he murders everyone in the But in the party, women, children, nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone. And that's what spaz is the Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma who was their captive and then try to murder all of them.

2:37:19And it was all Pedro Alvarado's fault for freaking out about eating humans. Just a little practical joke. Yeah, it's just they thought it was funny. He did not. That's fascinating. I didn't realize, so I kind of assume that some level of cannibalism would have to do with, you know, eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this. And in certain, like, you know, dear 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 Ketsal feathers every month, or we could eat you.

2:37:56So that's psychological warfare and actual warfare, they work. 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 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. So it wouldn't have lasted forever. They were not ruling justly.

2:38:33They were ruling by force, and 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. 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 Once they started taking over that what they did is they Empire built They everybody else had just rated their neighbors to get the resources, but everybody they rated They turned them into the Inca Empire and they created this incredible Meta system where you took turns working and And they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth.

2:39:31So a town of let's say 5 ,000 people, 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 Kusko. 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 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.

2:40:22So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was like the center of it. Cusco in their language, Ketchua, it means naval or belly button. And it's up in the mountains. But there's four quarters that they called their empire, Tijuana Tingsu, the land of four quarters. And the center of those four quarters was Cusco. It's sprung to life in like 1200 ADC. Yeah, we backwards project what it was, but it was probably mid 1200s when the first Sapa Enka, the first ruler came in, but it was the, I guess the ninth one is Pachikute, who really started being an empire builder. And part of that, I mean, what really defined the empire?

2:41:14As you said, roads, they build a massive road network. Roads and in the same way that 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 ink architecture that they would build in as the administrative part. They'd send the people Komayak, the guys who would weave the, or not the Kippus, 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.

2:42:03You or 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 they sent independent people to come I X to. Every community had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other. And they all had to independently send their keepers back to Kusko. And if they were accounting discrepancies, they were called to Kusko to figure out who was lying about what. So there's like a super sophisticated record keeping system. Yeah. And that was the Kipu. And the Spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all. But that's an interesting development for an empire because that allows you to really expand and have some kind of management, some level of control.

2:42:47Yeah, 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, ask that. Who wins? Inca. Inca. I mean the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles. And they had that essential hearts and minds. 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.

2:43:29but you know, you don't own your llama anymore. And people are really attached to their llamas. To this day, 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 are got domesticated at some point, probably, I mean, what, I don't even know when, but early on. It's a 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 Yeah, but if you roll in in your own them that's yeah, that pissed everybody off that for some reason The Enka 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 Kusko.

2:44:29They'd also take their mummies. That was a weird thing. Everybody mourns their dead, but the Incas 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 empire was, okay, your most important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful house in Kusko, but they would physically bring those mummies to Kusko to make now Kusko the spiritual heart of their belief system.

2:45:12I mean, I can see how they would piss people off, but it's also a pretty powerful way to say like the ancestors that you idolized, the respect, are now in the capital. They've been elevated. 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 Kusko. And which of the civilizations mummified people? Is it? The anchors for sure mummified people and even did some of that kind of like Egyptian ask 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 get back in there.

2:46:13It 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 cinnivar. 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 skeleton. but they didn't mummify. They on purpose would like grossly float the bodies 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.

2:46:53And 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 still a deep connection to the ancestors, through the physical manifestation of the ancestors then? Yeah, well they're mummified or bone. And to this day, like 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. Every Maya person if we find a grave, they're like, yeah, look at that bones cool Can I touch?

2:47:30Yeah, great. They're not spooked about it. Oh, they think it's exciting. I one time as helped out a a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get a osteology collection together of various animals. So if we got bones from an excavation, we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection. And this family said, well, 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 and this was like, they're puppy.

2:48:12And they died less than a year ago when we got to it. That one of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, wait, C -C -D -D -Dos, like little booty bones. Yeah, you're 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 pretend like we're not mortal and there's not this is just the process of it. 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. You know, Halloween's this creepy thing where they're all monsters.

2:48:49But 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's earned something that was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing and something beautiful where we discuss where we came from. I have to ask about the giant stones that 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?

2:49:33No.

2:49:38The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. You know, there are ways to pivot large weights. There's a great guy named Wally Wallynton, a retired contractor here in the US who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota, single -handedly, showing how you can move big stones. So I think Wally's already figured out how to move him. It's the perfectly fit. It 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 common archeological wisdom that you'd find out of a 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 bullshit.

2:50:33That is, there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean everybody's got a hammerstone. I personally think it's acids. I think they melted them 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 Machu Picchu and especially Kusko. I walk around in the alleys where these 500, to 1 ,000 year old walls are still there. And you see, I see things like the crystals in the andesite are almost stitched together along the seams. Like there's the andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven't.

2:51:24And 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 haven't been able to prove it. This is one of the 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.

2:52:07But there's a point in which they're trying to dissolve a body. And they're using hydrophloric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrophloric acid is so fascinating. It won't go through plastic. And you can also bring it in in -ert parts and then combine it. The the encommade tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes and they also mind a lot of things for golden silver and the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid. You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it's hydrofluoric acid and And that will burn through and to sight or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously, and that you didn't care whether, you know, servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these together.

2:53:04And I think they're fused together. I asked the city of Kusko if I could take some core samples and they said, go away, Gringo, don't touch our walls. So this next time I'm going to go try to talk to the more catchable authorities in a place called Oli Untightombo, and maybe I can convince them. But right now they just think I'm a weird ask Gringo who wants to put holes in their walls. I guess a fascinating theory. And so how could you get to the bottom of that? So getting core samples to see if there's some kind of trace? chemists some working with say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these that a core sample right along the seam they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid.

2:54:01I 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 got a we got to 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 thousand ideas and, you know, the ones that are fruitful you run with and the other ones you'll get back to. That would be fascinating if, Trun, I hope you do show that it's true or follow the either one. I'll try to disprove it.

2:54:35Disprove 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 just working a little bit chipping away at stuff, at scale they can do miraculous things. So the question is how can a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing? Because when we think about stone hinders, 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 are motivated to work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another.

2:55:24One of my favorite quotes is, and I'm probably going to misquote it here, but I think it's Margaret Meade 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. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision. Yeah, yeah. I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across the sky. 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.

2:56:05You know, I'm wearing a shirt, but I can't make a shirt. That's for somebody else to do. You've also lectured about, 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 paleoendian and archaic period for thousands of years. As we started this conversation, probably, 30 ,000 years is a conservative now, humans first entered 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.

2:57:14So 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 3500 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 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 evolved over thousands of years.

2:58:03We call them mound builders. This is something I object to. I think we should have a better, we do. The last version of them we call the Mississippi in SNOW. 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 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 kind of clay caps. So they had terraces, they had whole complexes of buildings up on top.

2:58:48There were kings that lived up there. There's the biggest of the Mississippi in cities is called Cahokia. And it's right outside of 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. I thriving metropolis. and we in America have kind of a collective amnesia. Like we never hear about these massive civilizations. Gauquia was 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 five to 10 ,000 people each.

2:59:39Were 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 territories that were owned by big kings. And then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary Lords and kings. And then one kingdom could either ally with the neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of countries, I think, for, yeah, we could safely say there were different countries within this patchwork that was Eastern United States. And it's so weird that we don't know this because it was clearly documented by the Spanish.

3:00:29I'm not talking about just archaeology. We find him 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's clearly there. He met collectively millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization. Those disease and stealing of resources, but was there like explicit murdering going on?

3:01:20Unfortunately, yeah. He was a murderer and a psycho and a liar. 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 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 burned at the stake, he had his dogs ripped them apart. He was very, very brutal. He ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody. He made promises and broke them all the time. It was really, it was a brutal man.

3:02:10So this whole period when Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything? Well, you know, there's a great anthropological body of literature. It's called the Columbia and Exchange, based on Columbus, but it's all this trade back and forth between the New World and the Old World and the Old World got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn't suck. All these vegetables came in. The new world got herd animals. It got pigs and cows and goats that it didn't have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things, but it didn't actually go away.

3:03:02It just couldn't spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, because 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 had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But the numbers, it's a shameful part of history. And it wasn't something that you're perpetrated on them. The medical science at that time was still the four humor theory that people were made of yellow, black, black, blood and flim. And we did things like, well, you've got to bleed him. He'll feel better then.

3:03:45So we had no idea what an infectious disease was. But the reality was that this hoard of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that at 90 % of everybody was dead. and that the number of people has increased as well as far as our estimates, we're thinking it's somewhere around 150 million people and 90 % of them died and with them all their knowledge, just 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 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 but the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmission.

3:04:58So 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 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 in that we've learned a lot from that. Yeah, but not a significant integration of that wisdom and two. So it wasn't when the Europeans came, it wasn't like the cultures were integrated. It was a story of domination in North America. In North America, there's a new term in the literature that I like.

3:05:46we call it the Mississippi and Shatter Zone. That Mississippi and 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 ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away. And 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 talk to you by phone and tell you about these things?

3:06:25So we've got the shatter zone where we're going to try to put the puzzle back together, especially in terms of Mississippi and 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 a lot of people kind of refer to Christopher Columbus as the person who discovered America, I read that the Vikings reached North America much earlier in 1000 CE. And what do you think they and expand and colonize. Because they got their ass kicked. Okay. It's the truth. Yeah. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here.

3:07:12There's a great site in Nova Scotia called Lensol Meadows, which definitely has what's left of a Viking colony. It was Lee Farrick 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 was named the Dorse set, but they would have nothing to do with the Vikings. 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.

3:08:01The 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, Lee F. Erickson's brother Thor died there. The natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but 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 Mississippians boy, they were tough. And so were the five nations, the Mohawk, the Huron. The ones that kicked the Vikings ass up there, they were probably Algonquin speakers, but they were connected just above the Great Lakes.

3:08:52but they were all a very tough people. When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over a hundred million people that were killed, do you see there's a tragedy of history or is it just the way of history? I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen. And that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. It was not, you know, I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what's been called the black legend that they just marched into America and murdered everyone.

3:09:37That's not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone. In fact, there was a really poignant story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon, 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 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 ask 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.

3:10:31Yeah. 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 a hard to know what to do with like black death and it's I Mean infections. They don't operate on normal human terms, right? They just go through entire populations Back to wild ideas All right, just my style I Mean we didn't really talk about how life originate on earth or how 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. Do you think it's possible that other intelligence civilizations from outside of Earth, aliens, ever visited?

3:11:28You 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 archeological proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such. But you know, the guys that discovered DNA Watson and Crick, Watson, who actually habitually used hallucinogens to 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. Take that for what it is, but the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that.

3:12:24So that's interesting. But in terms of, you know, aliens visiting us, I don't know it. It does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think were important enough for some advanced species to give a shit 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 and immediate fail in my book But there was one time where they asked me at the end, you know, if you have anything else Do you want to say?

3:13:08And I said well, you know, yeah, y 'all's premises that Aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of science and medicine, engineering, all these things. Today we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down. But now all they're doing is mutilating cows and satanizing red necks. Like whatever we did, we superpest them off apparently. The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly. What is 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.

3:13:58I mean, 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 love the aliens thing where biomechanical is something that certainly could be. And that would disintegrate. We wouldn't see that at all. But I would expect some kind of technology that showed up out of the blue and changed things. That would be something. But I would think, you know, mechanical or a substance that's not from here. But of course we would only see the results of that mechanical, you mean like literally a mechanical thing.

3:14:45Right. Some sort of thing like that. The typical thing people say is like, you know, how did they move these giant stones? Right? But you know, just look at that on the face for a second. But 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 a given man, a biotic, sir, a combustion engine or something. 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?

3:15:29That'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. words. I did listen to one of your podcast guests with the what would happen in the case of nuclear war. That was chilling. Her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes, apparently. So we have that capacity. That's scary. That's a possible future for us. But I'm an optimist. I'd like to think that guys like you are going to friendly robots who make my job better.

3:16:15But a thousand, 10 ,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and becoming more advanced rapidly. And the rate of that improvement is increasing every more. So that's the part that frightens me actually. I don't know. Does that frighten you? Yes. Terrifying. You know, I heard somebody say I forget who it was, but, you know, 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 line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. And almost any biological system that has that fast to change over that little of time, you would any other thing you'd describe it as a crisis.

3:17:14When you apply that chart to technology's 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 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 an average make a better world but yeah if it you know 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 I think you're an optimist too.

3:18:01I 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, we didn't change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. that some other necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we'll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real. And happening, I actually personally think that, I'm gonna answer a question that you didn't even ask me. Good.

3:18:45I think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this, we're delusional. I'm all for electric cars and 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 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 desalionize water, that a host of things that that we need to use our technological capacity to accept it and adapt instead of Polyanna thinking we can make it go away.

3:19:31Yeah, yeah, kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big problems will arise and just develop technology that addresses them. I think you have 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 I just arrived, drive. Again, we're pretty innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens, or we just leave this planet, what do you think would be found by a form mentioned alien civilizations when they visit the anthropologist,

3:20:19the and think of us human civilization will be lost, do you think? Well, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you didn't put a time element in there, but I would say that 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 buildings, plaques, but they won't have any books, They won't have any billboards. They'll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a talk in Sioux 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.

3:21:10And 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 It's so beautiful as a thought experiment like what Would archaeologists be really wrong about and what would they could possibly be right about? Washington, D .C. was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, because that's what all the architecture is.

3:21:52Yeah, and would they be able to reconstruct the important empires, the powerful empires, and the warring empires? For that matter, have me and my colleagues done that at all. 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 what we, just as a human civilization, are wrong about the most mainstream archaeology? Just like suspicion. What could we get completely wrong? Well one way to get something wrong is totally like law -civilization. Like an obviously gigantic civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10 ,000 years ago.

3:22:37There'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 interact with them It was I think I think I think of our estimation of their motivations that were probably most wrong on My my teacher Shelly a long time ago said you know I've come up with all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff and she looked at me and she said And 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.

3:23:18I mean, I really do when I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural assumptions, try to think like they would think is the best I could. And it's very different. I mean, this whole, you know, the Mayer are cyclical. You know, the whole sacrifice were so, you know, obsessed with that. But, you know, that was in a steer 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. There was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a, you know, bona fide sacrifice on their part.

3:23:57A loss. plus the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with his relationship. I tell you that one. I'm gonna unwive that one one of these days. One of these days. Now this one that puppy appeared on on pottery. All over pottery he's he's everywhere. I got to write this book. This next year is the year I'm gonna write my Fang D. Edie 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 or what their jokes are. Oh, that's a neat one too.

3:24:36Then that's so human. I'll tell you a little side story here that when I worked with the Maya people in Polenka, 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. I was a cell 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, Ho Ho! And I eventually asked you know what is that? Why do you guys always make that Ho Ho noise?

3:25:13And I said that's cause 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. So there's also that, like, you know, just clever turn of speech. Yeah. What? And I think about that when I'm a high -roglyphic translator. Like here's a beautiful thing that's going to be like a poem or a political statement. Like, and I'm just plotting looking in a dictionary of what that word means. there's probably double triple -on -tondra is 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.

3:26:01Yeah it could be satire it could be you know as it was in the Soviet Union where there's a dictator maybe there's overpowering king you're not allowed to actually speak. You have to hide the thing you're you're actually trying to say in the subtext so and all of that There was a funny Maya ceramic that had the ceramics or neat because they don't that the The monuments can be kind of broken records. I'm the king. I was born this time I beat these people up, but married this woman I died But the ceramics will tell us like things out of mythology stories and there was this one of with a rabbit looking at the merchant God and nobody could translate the text and finally this Eastern European actually a Ukrainian guy translated it and the rabbit saying to the merchant god, bend over and smell my ass.

3:26:58And 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. You mentioned applying I think I'm mapping it. It's just out of curiosity. What is that process like? It seems fascinating. Oh, it was a great adventure. I loved it, but it was difficult. 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? Well, it will occur, but it's going to happen. Because it was the jungle. So in the jungle, what's the process like?

3:27:38What do you have to do to map it? Well, it was tricky, too, because it It was also a national forest, so the forestry department didn't want us to cut down anything more than we had to. We basically just cut tunnels through the foliage, and we'd map everything twice. The first thing we do is I'd go in, find a building, draw it on a piece of graph paper, and I'd say, you guys go north, you guys go east, west, find other buildings, and when you find them, pace back to this one. And so I'd start making a map and I'd make the whole, one piece of graph paper was enough to then we bring the machine in.

3:28:18We'd bring the laser theodilite 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 it wants from this one. 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 tunnels through tall grass, and we'd come back like five days later, and they were gone.

3:28:58Like 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 a little low building, so 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 felt that's such a more exciting job than the typical excavation. Say, 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.

3:29:41I might find a pyramid today. Who knows? What's that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that you want the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing? What's that, what's that feel like? I, it's, it's great. I love that feeling. I am, you know, I'm an explorer at heart. So finding something like that. You know, when I was 25 years old, I found a whole Maya city. I got to name it, its name is Moshnath, it's often the Beletian jungle. And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost did that one almost depressed me. I was my entire, like I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city.

3:30:26And 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, I wrote a bunch of letters to NASA trying to get them to let me be the first archaeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back. I'm sure I'm on NASA's list. It's somewhere now.

3:30:47How'd you find a Mayan city? 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 looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of their pyramids, tuned 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 loved 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 having his students just wander in the jungle all day, but I came back with the city.

3:31:32So given that you've looked into the deep past of 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 believe in the spirit of humankind. 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 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.

3:32:19That's what we do. Yeah, humans find a way, right? That's like a thing you see with history. You win the Empire's collapse. They are the humans that come out of that. They pick themselves up and find another way. They build a new... 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 their lows, we get our highs. but the cycle continues forever. I should mention that you have a lot of great lectures on the great courses, but you have also an amazing podcast, Arkeo Ed. If people want to listen to it, this is a tough question.

3:33:08What would you recommend what episodes should they listen to? What's the answer? Oh, that is a tough question. 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 I love, 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 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.

3:33:47I've got a lot of weird adventure stories and 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 things that went right, the things that went wrong, the adventures that I had are all part of this Archaeo Ed thing. It's in Archaeoids 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 think that we have a group of amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before Europe showed up, that's simply not true.

3:34:35I think it should be part of our history books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce as part of American history, the part before European contact. And I think that kids in the K through 12 levels 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. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking today.

3:35:20Thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put on to the world. And I can't wait to hear your you of 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.