AI transcript
The following is a conversation with Ed Barnhart, an archaeologist specializing
in ancient civilizations of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America.
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here’s Ed Barnhardt.
Do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth,
which we don’t know anything about? Yes, I do. And in fact, you know, we have found
some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we’ve got Gobekli Tepe
and we’ve got the stuff that’s going on in the Amazon. And there are some other less startling
things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations
we had no idea about. So yeah, it’s happened and I think it’ll happen again.
Do you think there’s a lost civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up
or is hiding the evidence of? Yes, I do. And we’re beginning to find it. There are these huge,
what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average
Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome.
And I don’t think we’re ever going to find anything that looks like
Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet,
you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there’s not a whole lot of stone.
What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of
dirt and trees and feathers and textiles. But is it possible that
all that land that’s not covered by trees is actually hiding stone, for example,
some architecture, some things that’s just very difficult to find for archaeologists?
I think at the base of the Andes, where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there’s a lot of
potential there because that’s where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into
the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground, except for a stray cliff here and there
where the river dug deep. And even then, only in the dry season because that river
rises like over 100 feet every year. That’s one of the things having visited that area,
just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water. I was humbled by the power of water
to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we’re talking about of
civilizations. Water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia.
And so if there’s something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago,
it’s very possible it was just eaten up by nature.
Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that’s almost a certainty in a lot of places.
The Grand Canyon was dug by water. There’s this wimpy little river in it right now and you can’t
possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology is really kind of
magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there’s
probably a lot that are just under the ocean and just the wave action have destroyed them and what
they haven’t destroyed buried deep. Under the ocean. So you think Atlantis ever existed?
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about
putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow
of it, my money would be on Akratiri. Akratiri is what’s left of a big city that was on the island
of Santorini. And when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it
so fast that 70 miles away in Crete, there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted
what was ever there. But what’s left on the side of the crater, Akratiri, is strangely advanced for
its age. And so if there’s anything that’s a model for Atlantis as Plato explained it,
it’s Akratiri. Akratiri, the ancient Greek city. So it says the settlement was destroyed in the
Theron eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the
remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks. So we don’t know how advanced that
civilization was. No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it’s got streets, it’s got plumbing,
it’s got little sconces for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with a lot of, especially
in terms of hydraulic engineering, it’s very advanced for being 3500 years old.
So if you check out here’s an image of the excavation. What a project.
It’s an amazing place. And you can tell that it’s just part of it because it’s pretty close to where
the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger. So in this case, there’s a lot of
evidence, but like we said, there could be civilizations that there is no, there’s very
little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence.
Right. And I think Akratiri is actually a great example of that because here we have
the side that did preserve that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was
completely obliterated. It was shot, chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete,
70 miles away. And you know, Plato says that it, it sunk. It was on an island and it sunk.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to Akratiri. I think this is what Plato was referring to.
If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.
And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written.
Right. Absolutely. That we have no record of. And it’s humbling to think that entire civilizations,
with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political
tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just
destroyed like that and forgotten completely, lost to ancient history. I reflect upon that often as
an archaeologist. I think about the, this great country that I live in and love and all the things
we’ve achieved. But you know, we’re, we’re a baby historically speaking. We’ve been around 200 years.
Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of, you know,
800, 1,000 years and now they’re ruins, but we’re barely getting started in terms of
historical civilizations. So humans, homo sapiens evolved,
but they didn’t start civilizations right away. There’s a long period of time when they did not
form these complex societies. So how do we, let’s say 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from
there to creating civilizations? I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures
that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years
ago. And that’s when, you know, our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of
things that just pressured them into especially finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the
Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough,
the mammoths died out and the bison died out. And there was just, they had to come up with
different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting
and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used
to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, there, you know, the gathering
started to be a much more important thing. And I think that led to figuring out, hey, we could
actually grow certain things and gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops. And then
people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn’t have to
roam around anymore. And that’s where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they,
they stayed in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence,
we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the
geographic region, where they’d know, okay, you know, in the mountains, well, in the, we’ll be in
the summer in the mountains, because there’s berries and things. And then in the winter,
we’ll be down here and we’ll hunt. But they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place,
I think there, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
What do you think is, there’s a lot of questions I want to ask here. What do you think is the
motivation for societies? Is it the character of the stick? So you said like, is it like when
resources run out, when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to
figure stuff out? Or is it more the character of like, there’s always this kind of human spirit
that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this
with the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas or
technological innovation, let’s call it. Well, you know, I have an explorer’s heart, so I’m kind of,
I’m biased. Right. You know, I do think that we have an innate desire to see what’s on the horizon.
And to impress other people with our achievements, things like that.
We’re social beings. That’s really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together. So I
think that it’s much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out.
But usually the carrot does the job. The really interesting story is how the first people came
to the Americas. I mean, to me, that’s pretty gangster to go from Asia, all the way potentially
during the Ice Age or maybe at the end of the Ice Age or during that whole period,
not knowing what the world looks like, going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process?
How did the first people come to the Americas? Well, first off, I agree with you. That was
pretty gangster. I mean, that’s a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts,
that guy, Jordan Jonas had the mustard, but I wouldn’t have made it crossing there.
Well, there you go. The fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas exists,
people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that’s an indication that it’s
possible. But yeah, so when do you think and how did the first people come?
The traditional theories are still somewhat valid or at least on the table that when that
land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the
game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across.
The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for
archaeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a
young archaeologist, I would have never dreamed we’d have the information we have now. And that
information, a lot of it’s coming out of Texas A&M, we see the traditional like
12,500 years ago that there was a migration. But now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly
happening closer to 30,000 years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true
is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very
first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archaeologist,
it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that. But now it’s really
very clear that they came over at least by 30,000. And the bridge opened and closed and opened and
closed. That’s during the Ice Age. Right. I mean, that’s crazy, right? That is crazy. Yeah. I mean,
they didn’t roll in and immediately make New York. But there were people. And there were
definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated.
And so we have specific kinds of haplo groups that are here in the Americas that don’t exist
otherwise. And that same haplo group game has been showing us more and more that people came
across Siberia. It’s not Africa. It’s not Western Europe. Those are still, you know,
they’ve become kind of fringe theories, but they’re not totally eradicated. I have
DNA is developing science as well. And I think we all need to keep that in mind that
it’s not like they just cracked the code. And now we know all the answers. And sometimes,
like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you
know, we don’t need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA.
But they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia that
all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.
Do you think it was a gradual process? If it’s like 30 to 60,000 years ago,
was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like
one explorer that pushed the tribe to just go, go, go, go, and go across maybe,
across 100 years, travel all the way across maybe into North America, into North North America,
where Canada is now, and then sort of like big leaps in movement versus gradual movement.
I think it was big leaps. And now this is just, you know,
mostly guess I’ll admit. But I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models
talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change, and then it settles out into
more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early
people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for
thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types
were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America.
The ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon,
most of those guys have O blood type, and they’re haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered
the US. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait.
We have no real evidence to say they came en masse across Oceania. So they made it probably
by boat along the coast all the way to South America. So there’s some kind of cultural engine
that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened tens of thousands
of years ago, but at a very rapid pace, there’s these explorers that went all the way to South
America, and there established their kind of more stable existence. And from there,
South America, Mesoamerica, North America was kind of gradually expanded into that area.
I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first
wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there, and then mixed in with
the next groups that came. That’s fascinating. Kind of like there’s an interesting correlate in
Europe where today, everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland. But actually, Celtic
people started in Eastern Europe, and it was the entire area. And when Rome kind of swept
everything, and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world,
Ireland, that they were like, “We’re not going to mess with those guys on that island. We’ll
leave them be.” So now it looks like that’s the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually,
it’s the fringe. So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans. Yeah.
And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about
very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed.
It’s, “No, he didn’t get a date of 40,000 years.” But I think we’re going to come back around to
start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand. And that’s the interesting thing
is the early humans spread throughout the world. And then, like you said, perhaps they’ve gotten
isolated, and then civilizations sprung from there. And they all have similar elements,
even though they were isolated. That’s really interesting. That’s really interesting that
there’s multiple cradles of civilization, not just one, like one good idea. Those ideas naturally
come up. Those structures naturally come up. And I wonder whether the similarities that all
those cradles have, it could be a shared, much deeper past that they all have. Or it could be
a more kind of Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of
parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development,
and that that could be the answer to it. Which one do you lean on? Which one do you lean
towards? I think it’s a case-by-case thing. I think if we look globally, I’d lean much more
towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas, and we have a shorter
time period where the things that become major civilizations now, I’ll say, up to 30,000 years
ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those
people came over with from Asia, and that as they got separated, that they had core values that then
turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I’m a big proponent that
there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a
single distant origin. You’ve spoken about the lost cradle of civilization in South America,
so South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization. South America,
Mesoamerica, can you explain? Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You’re right. I mean,
especially as an American, our country’s so big, and we are so far removed from these places,
we don’t even think about it. But more and more, we’re seeing things that predate the earliest
stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. It’s all on the Peruvian coast
that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday, we might start talking about the
Amazon more and more. But right now, what we’ve got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE
along the coast of Peru, and there are big stone-built pyramids and temples,
and they’re amazingly isolated. Even now that we’ve found them, some of them like Corral is one
of the most famous ones just north of Lima. We’ve known about it for a couple decades now,
how old it is, but every time I visit there, it’s like I visited the moon. There’s absolutely
nobody there, not for miles. It’s amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody
goes to see it. It’s not easy to get to. Do you think there’s a bunch of locations like that?
Some may not have been discovered in the Peru area. Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That
desert gets really ugly quick, and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there
that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately,
but Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands,
thousands of pyramids. Now, they weren’t built of a lot. Not all of them were built of stone. Some
of them were adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly. Now, they’re not exciting places to
visit today. You know what’s funny too? We started off talking about whether I think there’s a lost
civilization out there. There are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are
some things that were discovered 100 years ago, and archaeologists or back then they called themselves
antiquarians just kind of passed over. Corral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has
some of those pyramids that were made by the moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics
and things that you can sell for big money. But Corral was found a long time ago,
but the archaeologists was like, “God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good.
We can’t sell anything here.” And then about the 1970s or ’80s, somebody said, “Hey, no ceramics?
Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.”
So what’s the dating on Corral?
Corral, I think, starts at about 3,200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of
other cities around it until about 1,800 BCE.
So what’s the story behind looking at some of these images? What’s the story about constructions
like that? What was the idea at that thing? Isn’t that amazing?
Yeah. Gosh, I mean, it should be some sort of, I’ll be a flaky archaeologist.
This is a place where rituals took place.
So many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that’s about 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.
And 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, corrals, 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 mourn the death
of their kids. And it just happened a lot more frequently then.
One of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built
in Peru, possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true?
Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing
6,000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Waka
Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid. But it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the
elements structurally, that kind of thing? Yeah, why do humans build pyramids? And why do they build
it in all kinds of different locations in the world? Well, you know, my rude answer is pretty
boring, really. A lot of people ask me, “Why are there pyramids all over the planet? Is that a
coincidence?” I mean, 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 them down. And if he wants one that’s going to stay and be tall,
he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And 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. 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, you remember, we were just talking
about Guacaprieta and this one that’s almost 6000 BC now is the first one. That one’s a funny case.
We just talked about all these lofty goals. But actually, I’m pretty sure that
Guacaprieta’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?
Yeah, but then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the enormity of the
construction and they’re like, “Oh, maybe the next guy thought maybe we should keep building these
kinds of things.” 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 too. Probably again, you know, about stink and about,
you know, “Well, we don’t want the dogs to eat them. I maybe put them in the middle of the
shell pile.” But then that all of a sudden became this like, “That’s where my grandfather’s body is.
That’s where great grandfather’s body is.” And all of a sudden, people started being attached
to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when
the very first pyramid was built in Ohio area by the Edina 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 mounds. So where and who were the first civilizations in South America,
as in America? Well, you know, I think we’re still piecing that together. Coming back to the
first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in
South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it’s hard to answer
that question is, you know, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture?
We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the 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. Sometimes
somebody’s coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different
hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years. And then finally,
they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture.
It used to be archaeology. That was just the end-all-be-all. Civilization starts with the
invention of agriculture. And we can’t have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm.
But that’s been discounted. Peru was a big part of that, that area of Keral. It’s connected to
another city on the coast called Aspero. And Aspero starts about the same time, but they’re
all about fishing. They have no farming. And Keral, who’s upriver 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 versus the coast? I do think so. I think religion
in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old.
There’s actually 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 culture development in the Amazon. So religion, you would say, preceded
civilization. In South America, the Keral and Asbro that I was just talking about,
it’s weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and
things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there. And there’s no hints
of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get
is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE, this culture called Chavin 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. All of those things are coming out of
the Amazon. I mean, religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful
ideas. They’re the strongest myths that tie people together. And to you, it’s possible that
this powerful 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.
We can see, 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 that those are things
that archaeology just can’t get at? That’s one of the challenges of archaeology and looking into
ancient histories. You’re trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of
architecture, but understand what was going on inside their mind. That’s really what I’m in
it for, trying to understand these people and its 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. But there’s not in this room, but if you look at thousands of rooms
like it, maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled
the world, the religions, the different ideas. Tell me about this thing 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 Andean region. And the religion that practiced
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 deity who somewhere thousands
of years ago crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That
could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one
creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon
still talk about him. There, his name is Vihomase in some groups. But they say that his emissaries on
Earth are the Jaguars and that he is the creator deity. Why is the current mainstream belief is
that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic? Well, there are bona fide pantheons. You know,
Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world
were pantheons. And I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archaeologists walked in
there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to
the art looking for them. And they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess
and the sun god and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person
right here in Austin, Texas, as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art
to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology,
there’s a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming
off of his head and off of his belt. He’s got really identifiable traits. He also likes to
sever people’s heads off and carry them around. But he’s the fanged deity and he’s there. He
shows up in Chavine de Juantar, the capital of that Chavine culture. And he keeps showing up
through every culture, even thousands of miles away, throughout the next two millennium, right up
to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha. But Viracocha is the fanged deity.
He is, when we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this kind of almost
Islamic thing where they say, “You can’t understand the face of Viracocha.” So when they do put him
in a cosmogram, they’ll make him just a blob. Like he’s just unknowable, but he’s at the very top.
I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural
beings. If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course Christianity’s
monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters?
Who are all these angels and demons and, you know, Jesus Christ? And I mean, I don’t even know
who the Holy Spirit is. But he’s some sort of supernatural being, but it’s that monotheistic
system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That’s where I think the
crux of us misunderstanding ancient Dandian art is. So what is the process of analyzing art
through time to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture?
Do 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. We can pull apart the same sort of thing in
the Greek pantheon, 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 tridents or whatever it is. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them.
So that’s how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once 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 Moche and Nazca culture. You know, 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
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 Chavine, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around
severed heads, human severed heads. So they’re like in the old literature,
the Moche will call him the decapitator deity. But then they have these other like, oh, here’s
the crab deity and here’s the fox deity. But if you look at them, like the crab deity is just
that guy’s face coming off of a crab. And the fox deity is that guy’s face coming off of a fox.
So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus
was able to like, you know, turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted
and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity
manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing
stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore. And across hundreds of years, thousands of years
from Chavine to Moche to Inca, as you’re saying. Right. Wari has them too, Tiawanaco. That’s that
famous place, Pumapunku. He’s all over there. I wonder how those ideas spread in Morph of this
fanged deity. I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavine, there’s a later one in
Inca times called 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 Chavine 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 fanged
deity all over them that have like one labyrinth, they’ll have all pottery. The 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 they’re learning and then they’re going back to their
communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage
spots too. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity. Do we know much about
the relationship they had with the fanged deity and their conception of the powers of the fanged
deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all knowing God? Is it something that brings
joy and harvest? Or is it something that you’re supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals
and humans too to keep a bay? I think he had two sides of the coin. Like a lot of the Hindu gods
are, you know, 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 and ferocity. But then there are other
funny things about him. Like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a
lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts when it comes to the moche. There’s this
whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men and some of them
show their faces transforming into that fanged deity. Like he is acting through them. But the
thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged 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 healing sex scenes. In fact, I
tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with
somebody in a house and there’s a fanged deity and there’s a puppy just scratching at the door
like, “Hey, you forgot me.” And then finally, one day, I found one with the puppy having sex
with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, “Oh, he really is very involved in this.
What is this weird puppy?” So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.
This actually, this is awesomely makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote
30 years ago on shamanism and the Mocha civilization. It reads, “The Mocha are the major focus of this
paper. Sex puppies and head hunting will be shown to be related to ancient Mocha shamanism.”
So now, I understand. I was like, “Well, the puppies.”
Puppies, yeah, it’s true.
And the head hunting, that’s the decapitator.
And I’ve added rock and roll to that list since, actually. Rock and roll. 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 San Pedro cactus juice kind of, they don’t talk about the fanged 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.
They’re in like around Trujillo, they call him Iopec.
But music, in the Amazon, they play flutes. Sometimes a chorus of women sing, and that’s
supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There’s a spirit that’s hurting the
person that’s sick. And then the priest or the shaman or the corndero, whatever you want to call
him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what’s going on.
So when the music starts, that’s bringing those spirits in. And people don’t see them unless
they’ve imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is the salucinogen, which is in the Amazon side,
it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus. But that’s what allows you to actually
see that other world. Yeah, I went to the Amazon recently and did ayahuasca, a very high dose of
it. Bold move. Went 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 de Juanterra I 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 transforming in between. But there’s a group of them that are midway
through transformation, and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that’s coming
like down their face. San Pedro doesn’t do that to you, but ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca,
traditionally, they take a blowgun 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 3,000 years ago. So that, you think, could have been a big
component of the development of religion and shamanism? I think that hallucinogens
opened the mind then like they open the mind now. Do you think that, you know, the stoned ape theory,
do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of
civilization? In 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,
and, you know, 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 wondered to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the
creative force behind sort of art versus like literally the method by which you come up with
ideas that define a civilization. It’s like the degree to which they had a role in the formation
of civilizations. It’s kind of fun to think about psychedelics being like a critical role
in the formation of civilizations. I think in terms of South America, they probably really were.
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, you know, 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’d cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe, triggered
hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I much prefer the drugs route.
It’s the result, not the tools aren’t the thing that creates insight. It’s the result.
Is that getting to, you know, hallucinogens are poisoning us. They’re killing us. That’s,
you know, it’s a near death state. And people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that
other world. Death, you entered this other world in that when you took this mighty dose of poison,
it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.
Yeah, as Tom Wade said in that one song, I like my town with a little drop of poison.
So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first sort of
mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? Like, 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
Karal. The next one that we’ve barely even begun looking at, but it’s probably older than
Karal is Sachin culture. I 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. Karal frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. That’s,
we’ve got 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.
That’s our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.
Yeah. And it sucks when they don’t have art. If we just go back to the Amazon,
you’ve mentioned that it’s possible that there’s a law civilization that existed in the Amazon.
So it’s carried a lot of names, Law City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it’s possible it existed?
Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where
it is kind of center around towards Columbia. And the City of Z is named after a region of
Brazil called the Shingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. 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 civilizations. These big, it’s lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is
they’d make these big mounds and then they’d make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk
through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been
found in the Shingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people.
Again, you know, it’s not stone built and it’s been under the forest forever. So it’s very torn up.
But it’s there. Now, you know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And a thing
that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway
all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these, what we
call like geometric earthworks. So there’s more and more evidence of these civilizations. It’s
not a, it’s not, it could be there. It’s there for sure. By the way, the people who are trying to
protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road,
loggers will come. Yep. And they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archaeology
perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things, but from a sort of
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 very quickly. So quickly. And, you know, you just think that
across decades, you expand that to centuries, and it’s like, you could see how a civilization
could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest. And it happened for sure in the Amazon.
Yeah. You know, 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,
but they’re finding more and more of these places that they call terra preta, which is black earth,
and they’re huge swaths 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, that sometime in the distant past, that forest wasn’t there and there
was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black,
and it’s much more enriched. And 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,
and I asked them about this black earth. And they were like, yeah, that’s why we’re here.
Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra preta, and that’s where we’re
going to put our village, because that’s a place that all of our gardens work. The other places,
they don’t. One of the things you talked about literally just asked, you have to ask the right
question. And the stories, all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you.
Yeah, there’s so many of them. You know, the thing that excites the world about archaeology
right now is Gobekli Tepe. And this 10,000 now, Koran Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called
the Tos Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago. But it was just an archaeologist
rowing through the area and asking 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 shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.
So speaking of Gobekli Tepe, 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. He 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 seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on
a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art historical analysis. So I think his
research is great. 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. That would be a fun argument to be applying the law for.
So he believes he’s proposed as possible that the Amazon jungle is a man-made garden.
So it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which
that could be possible? Frankly, I agree with him. 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
terra preta, 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. So 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. Just to educate me, what’s the key idea that he’s proposing that you disagree
with? Is it the level of advancement that civilization was, or how large and centralized it was?
My main point of disagreement is that his ideas evolve like everybody’s. No scientist or researcher
in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die.
His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain, a core of them are, that there was a very advanced
single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions. The younger
driest 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.
In his early books, he suggested it’s Atlantis. I don’t think he suggests that anymore, but he
still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. All of our
ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts. We could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re
real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales. 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. Of course, it is a compelling story that there’s a single
civilization from which all of this came from because the alternative is the idea that came
across the Bering Strait, from Asia, went all the way down to South America and got isolated
and created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious
ideas that look similar to all that. Everybody has a flood myth. There’s a lot of similarities.
Everybody building pyramids. Yeah. There could be a lot of other explanations,
even if it’s a simple, compelling explanation that has to be evidence for it. What would that
evidence look like? That’s the bottom line. Everything’s theories. 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 really in a dark room.
You’re feeling around a dark room, so it’s mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences
operate in a mostly well-lit room. It’s like a dark corner, and you’re figuring out a way
to light it. Yeah, in archaeology, most of it is a mystery, right? Yes, it’s job security.
I like that part. I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm-shifting idea that
humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant.
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. 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 distinct from each other. Can you speak to this
your understanding of these tribes and their history? They’re still here today.
Well, a lot of them are. By uncontacted, we mean we don’t know anything about these guys. We know
roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one’s
allowed to go contact them. 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 there looking for them. 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.
We were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment.
It’s mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change its pressure.
One thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it,
it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there.
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. 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. They get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across.
And not just foreigners, they attack each other. The Yanamama are famous for just having
never-ending feuds with each other. What do you think is the philosophy behind that?
I don’t know. I’m a relatively peaceful person, but I’ve got the monster in me like everybody
does. It’s cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Yanamama, they really,
part of the right of passage to be a man, is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village.
They go in there. They oftentimes, the way they don’t let inbreeding 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 in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn’t seen as a
biological thing. It was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick,
the question is asked, well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him?
And then the rumor starts, well, I bet you it was Joe over there 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
McCoy’s had that thing. And the people of New Guinea also do that. So 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. It’s such a tricky thing to do to study an uncontacted tribe
without obviously contacting them to figure out their language, their philosophy of mind,
how they communicate, the hierarchy they operate under.
And yeah, you know, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like
eight years ago or something, but there was a ranger from one of the biology stations
who just in the buy and buy 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 years.
And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk
to these people. And one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him
with arrows and just killed him. And then they went back in the woods like that’s the one guy
who understands what we’re saying. We should kill him and move our village.
So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy.
You know, everybody’s got it. I think we need to listen to our better angels
because if we don’t, we as a human species can easily devolve into just using violence and
against others to get what we want. It’s a daily choice we make not to be savages.
Which is a fascinating thing to remember. What kind of thing in civilized society,
we’ve moved past all that. But it can 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’s 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. You 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.
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 Chavine culture is, about 1800 BCE. There’s a
culture that some call the Mokaya, 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 Olmec have this religion they develop and they
start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that’s
being created by the Olmec who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus
of Tuantipec. I have a lot of questions to ask here about just the natural stupid confusion I have.
So first, did the Maya or the Olmec 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 Olmecs 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. Archaeology 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 Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that’s happening
in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time. The Olmec are really bringing the religion part. But the
other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hemotype mirrors, making tools
out of obsidian and other stone types. So you’ve got Olmec in the middle, where Mexico gets skinny
and it gets swampy down there. That’s called the Isthmus of Tuantepak. That’s where the Olmec are.
Then you’ve got the Maya to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the
people called the Zapotecs, they’re rising up. And then you have the Valley of Mexico,
which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting
with each other. Can we just also draw some more lines? Yeah, sure. So what is Mesoamerica and
what is South America? And what you just said to Olmecs and the Maya, can we just linger on the
geography that we’re talking about here in the, what is this, like 1000 BC? Yeah, the time period
we’re talking about where the Olmec are there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I’d say it
starts about 1800 BCE and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone. And a whole new wave of civilization and
population increase happened. 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. They 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.
So 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 and the coast to the Pacific there. That’s Andean civilization.
So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region?
Not that archaeology can prove, but it’s almost certain that they interact with each other.
Number one, it’s just, you know, it’s biased to think that these people couldn’t travel as widely
as people on the other side of the planet did. But there’s all sorts of hints like that first
ceramics I was talking about that the Maya made. They show up strangely sophisticated
technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for a thousand years before.
So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South
America to the Maya. Did the Maya get seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait?
Or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America,
were they the ancestors of the Maya? Like, how did the migration happen here? Do we understand?
We’re still piecing it together. I don’t think, you know, I’d be lying if I told you I had the
answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. 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, you know, just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.
You’re joking, but, you know, there could be something to that.
I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, the pygmies are small and the people on the
plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small.
There’s 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, you know, typical old Mexico. I 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 stature who did it. It’s so cool that you can date the charcoal.
And it’s so cool that 10,000 years ago there 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 in a cave, they found
a woman they named Naia now. And she’s like 12,000 years old. So the best guess, maybe that you
have is it goes across the Bering Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of
cool ideas in the Amazon and start drifting back up into Mesoamerica. It was kind of a
co-evolution. The technology of ceramics, I think, got there through an interaction with.
See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn’t really have religion, didn’t have as a vibrant
religious set of ideas and they borrowed it from the Olmec. I’ve been doing a deep dive on this for
this Olmec course that I just did. And it really does seem like these other cultures that have
jade and hematite and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They 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 Deity show up there?
No, the Fang Deities 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 deity
does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.
So the Maya, the Olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions. What was their…
I’d love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I’m curious about,
what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos?
That’s a question I’ve spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as
proof of the cyclical nature of life. And certainly they saw like every ancient group did, like are
those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the Maya especially looked at it
with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night.
And if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They’re just this
blanket. They’re like this curtain behind me. They’re the stage upon which some very important
players are dancing. And that’s the moon, the sun, and the planets. There’s five planets we
can see visibly. So they started watching like, why are just those seven moving differently than
the rest? And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The 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 morning star.
That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic
with like Chichen Itza being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like if you watched Venus
day after day, it goes slowly up every day. And then when it hits its highest point as morning
star 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. Right. So this is fascinating. They just had
at the foundation a sense that life existence at the various timescales is cyclical.
That’s the starting point. And then you just look out there and if you’re extremely precise,
which is fascinating how precise they were, you can just measure the 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 Kipu, but it’s so different than
our writing. We’re still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there’s math there too.
But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next
generation who would then do it more and do it more. That’s how they figured out kind of the holy
grail of ancient astronomy, how good were they, was whether they could see the procession of the
equinoxes. The fact that we’re just barely wobbling and there’s a 26,000 year period where the stars
as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It’s 26,000 years. But the Maya were
able to figure out, wait, it’s moving one degree every 72 years and did a calculation based on
on where it should be in the ancient past. And they’re using constellations. They’re showing
us they know by saying like, this planet’s in this constellation right now. And 33,000 years ago,
it would be in this constellation. It’s just fascinating that they were able to figure this
out. I would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community.
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. And so I hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to
recognize the achievements in a different way. Yeah. I mean, unquestionably incredible scientific
work in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the sophisticated aspects
of the Mayan calendar that they’ve developed? I know you’ve got another five hours.
Yes, go. No, I’m kidding. 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. So can you speak to the three components here as I’m reading
the Tsoil Keen, the Hob and the Long Count? What are these fascinating components of the calendar?
It’s neat how obsessed they were. 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 interlocked into each other,
like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tsoil Keen’s
their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that
are living their lives based on a 260-day count, no weeks, no months. It’s just 13 numbers combined
with 20-day names for a total of 260 days, and then it goes again. Everybody in the Highlands
knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality,
and the kind of jobs that they’re supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit
and what’s supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the mom, the
grandmother, grandfather spirits, and they talk to each one of those days, and they pray to them.
There’s now an association of some 8,000 people that are called aki that are day keepers who are
keeping the days, and they’re also like community psychologists almost. People come to them and
say, “My life is mixed up. What’s wrong here? Well, let’s ask the mom. Okay, well, it looks
like you’re not doing this or that, or you’re an accountant. You’re not supposed to be an
accountant. You’re supposed to be a midwife. What are you doing? You’re living your life wrong.
You’re a key, but you need to start being a key person.
They take extremely seriously the day in which you’re born, what that means, the spirit that
embodies that day. Right. I’m a key. I’m 13-key, and it’s funny how accurate a lot of them are.
Mine is basically, 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, if you structure society where this calendar is truly sacred,
then it kind of like you manifest a lot of the, the spirit does manifest itself in the life of
the people that was 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.
Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it? From most Maya agree with this today,
and 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 kid’s 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. What’s the first cycle that we actually go through
as humans? And they picked this nine month thing. It’s, it really is our cycle and no other culture
on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
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 260 one. They say, well, we need a solar
one too. Let’s just keep counting this another 105 days and we’ll get to 365.
Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same, got it, got it, got it, got 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.
In fact, it’s even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight
math from a thousand years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently
than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of eastern Guatemala. They write me
nasty emails saying, I don’t know what time the year is, but their relatives changed it in the
1950s because their agricultural cycle was so far off, they moved it 60 days back to make it in the
spring again. But it drifts, which is strange because it’s not a very good thing for the
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.
Our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle. But it’s weird in that its estimation of the year
in the in the long count system is only 360 days. So it’s miserably off a solar year.
They count in base 20. So they count like we count in tens, we’re decimal. They count in base
20, bejesimal. And so it should be, you know, there’s ones, there’s 20s, there’s 400s, there’s
8,000s, there’s 160,000s. It’s up, it goes just like our tens, 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 in our reckoning.
So it’s, it’s mysterious that it’s, why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days?
That’s, you know, that doesn’t follow any astronomy that doesn’t, that’s not the human cycle.
Yeah, but they’re, I mean, it’s interesting that they build up towards
thinking about very long periods of time, like Bactunes is 144,000 days.
Right. Or a Bactoon is 400 of the long counts years. So it’s kind of like our millennium.
You know, we think it’s a big deal when we hit a millennium or a century. That’s,
they have a 20 year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a cartoon,
and then they have the 400 Bactoon, which is the big one. That’s like their millennium.
And 13 of those Bactunes occurred in the creation before us. They also think that we were in,
that the world has had multiple creations. They’re not alone in that. There’s lots of
ancient civilizations who say that, but we’re technically in the fourth creation. And they’re,
they have a creation story called the Popol Vu. And the Popol Vu is clear as day that
the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the hero twins. And the fourth
creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the long count.
And we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened. The fourth creation started on
August 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 Bactoon of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 Bactunes
long. Right. So, and this would be the fourth creation, the calendar starts fourth creation.
But if you do the math going from 3,114 BC and count 13 Bactunes forward, you get to 2012.
And hence the, the very popular notion that 2012, whenever that was December, December 21st,
2012 will be the end of the world. 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, like Garrett Morris and Saturday
Night Live, the, the, the apocalypse was very, very good to me. I mean, but that, that is pretty
interesting. So that’s, that, that would be, so technically would be in the, what, in the fifth.
Yeah. Technically, we’d be in the fifth. Though my argument was that actually,
if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never say anything
like that. In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that, that the fourth creation does
continue farther on, that, that Bactune place should have 20, 20 Bactunes in it, like their
counting system would dictate, not 13. And there’s, there’s a place in, in Palenque. There’s a place
in the Dresden Codex and one other place I’m forgetting that, that I’ll talk about time after
2012. So how does that happen? It’s a conflict. Is there supposed to be an overlap of the,
of the, of the, so it’s like 13 is the core of it and it’s 20 long? They, they love the number 13.
It’s all over the place. It’s a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is, is not
very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end
of the third, 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 Bactune cycle should be
13. And there are certain texts that, that go way forward in time or way
backward in time. And whenever they want to do that, there, there are higher increments than just
the Bactune. Above that, there’s the Pictune, then there’s the Calabatune, then there’s Alawatune,
and it goes on and on. And these are like, you know, 160,000 years, huge increments of time.
Whenever they want to do that and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting
13s in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they’re saying
is they’re making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time. That’s, that’s
what I think they’re, they’re telling us in those texts that time goes on forever, magically.
But they’re, they still had a conception that it didn’t go on forever before, right? That there was
other civilizations that came before in there. And this is the fourth creation.
This is the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody. The 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, but flawed in some other way. And then we’re finally made of,
of the blood of the gods and corn. We’re made out of corn. So we’re, we’re perfect. And as the,
as it explains to us, the, the Popal Voodoo does, we got it right this time. There, there is, there,
there’s no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration.
Well, one of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we 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, our mathematical
logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation is in, or also be 13.
It’s in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They’re
different time periods. Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Do they have
some kind of long multi-generational memory of prior civilizations?
It may have had some echo in the, the flood myths.
Right. It’s the same. It’s the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time.
There’s a lot of different opinions about it. And, you know, they’re like, if they were all 13,
if we have five creations, like the Aztecs said, and they were all 13,
they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional
cycle. So some people are like, they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the
equinoxes. And I mean, I don’t believe that one, but that one sure sounds good. Doesn’t it? That’s,
that’s going to get a lot of internet hits. And one of the things I do, obviously,
wonder 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, it’s, it sees filling back up.
And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that, that story.
Everybody knows that everybody’s nice coastal village went underwater and they had to,
they had to seek higher ground. And then just like people like talking about the weather,
everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up. And
then, uh, that, that myth carried. Why do we live here, grandpa? Well, we used to live over there,
but then the water came. And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea.
It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, you know,
there’s a lot of things I don’t have a reasonable explanation for, but the, uh,
but the flood myth is almost certainly the, the rise in sea level.
So the, this idea that every day represents, uh, that carries a spirit, uh, you know,
there’s modern day astrology. You know, most people kind of consider astrology this, um,
maybe a bit unscientific woo woo type of, um, uh, set of beliefs. But do you think there’s
some wisdom that astrology carries from your scholarship of the Maya calendar? Do you think,
if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there’s some wisdom there?
I don’t know. You know, that I have a woo woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff,
but I don’t think as a scientist, it makes a, I cannot come up with a
biological scientific reason why that would be true. And, you know, when you look at it objectively,
I mean, really is everybody born with the sign Scorpio, uh, a moody person. That’s just,
that’s just objectively not true. Um, but it is funny how oftentimes these, these Maya, uh,
horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who
surveyed like 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, that’s fascinating. At least that’s, that’s fun. But no, I’m, I think I’m too much of
a scientist to believe that I just don’t have a, any foundation in science that would allow us to
believe that the, uh, the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.
I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that, uh, what I do like is the, uh,
inbuilt humility to that worldview, uh, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual
world, but a world that we don’t understand, quite understand. And then you can wonder about
what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you construct all kinds of systems to
try to interpret that. And then there is where the human hubris can come in and you know, uh,
but it’s good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.
I do love the mysteries of the world. And I, I would, I would love to find an ancient civilization,
but I don’t, I don’t want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they’re one of the things
that make world life worth living. That’s true. That’s true. Uh, you mentioned the, uh, 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 it, I had the honor of being, uh, the student of, uh,
Linda Shealy right here at the university of Texas at Austin. She got the group together
who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best and, and loved
every minute of it. I miss Linda. Can you speak to that code actually? The hieroglyphic code and
what takes to break it? Oh boy. I mean, what a, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone.
We had a page out of Diego DeLanda’s book, a priest who was converting the Maya in Yucatan,
asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced
they had 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, ah, here,
right a bae here, right a say here. And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told
him to write. They were actually syllables. They were vowel, consonant combinations. They weren’t an
alphabet, but that turned into our Rosetta Stone of sorts. The big key is that the Maya still speak
that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya.
Now there’s, there’s where I get confused. That we’ve got a single writing system that is
intelligible. We’ve broken the code. So we know that it’s basically the same writing system from
the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador. But we have 33 Maya languages today
that are mutually unintelligible. And we, we backwards project the language of what they
spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called choulti, which is a combination of chorti
and choulti 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 culture, acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population?
How 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 they’re distinct languages,
even though there’s a common writing system? There must have been a way that multiple languages
understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin, 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
world. But we don’t really know and there’s not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it’s
possible to have that. Right. But we did realize it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri
Konorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the
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. And he looked at Yucatec
language that they’re speaking today and he applied it to the symbol system. And he knew that there
were certain sounds. He used Landa’s alphabet and he found there was the his two key examples were
a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it. And the
dog, a dog in Yucatec is tsul. So he saw two symbols and he said this one’s probably tsul
and this one’s ul and then the turkey was kuts. So it would be ku ending in tsul. And he showed how,
look, this is tsuts, this is tsul, those two things that should be tsul are the same symbol.
And that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we’re still working on today.
That’s fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. Like how do you even figure that
out? And there’s probably still, are you aware of any written languages that haven’t been decoded
yet? Yeah, 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 harappan. Harappan, for a long time we used to say there were five independent scripts
on the planet. And those were Chinese cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian Maya, and then
harappan, which is from Northern India. That’s the only one that we’ve never cracked. And now all the
epigraphers, the people that’s the term for epigraphy is translating these languages.
They’re all ganging up on harappan 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
we just would explain why it’s so different. 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 Americas. It’s the kipu. The Inca had the kipu, this knotted string records, but it was
definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know lots. I can do the math kipus
and figure out what they’re totalling and things. Yeah, there’s a kipu right there.
Kipu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of
cultures in the region of India and South America. A kipu usually consists of cotton or
carbon fiber strings. There’s a set of strings and they’re supposed to be saying something.
There’s one long string that the little ones dangle off of. Each one of the dangling strings
have sets of knots on them. Some of them are mathematical kipus. Those, we can just do the
math. We can prove that it’s math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire
libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the
libraries would just, they’d say, pull that one down. Read that one to me. He’d pull it out and
just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. It was definitely writing,
but in the 1570s, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called
kipu kamyaks gathered up, had them read all of their kipus and transcribed them into Spanish books
and then had the kipus burned and those people murdered. Well, there you go.
And so we can’t break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language,
though it wasn’t written. It was weaved or knotted. And there’s still some kipus available that could
be there. I think now we’ve just crossed the 1000 mark. So we have a thousand kipus. There’s
enough to break the code. And I think this generation might be the one that does it.
It’s sad that so few have survived. A thousand is good, but it’s…
But see, Peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology. There’s so much out there.
There was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in
Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community
of 3,000 people, all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into
Christianity. And he had the communities, kipu kamyaks, not kipus for each person that told them
that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their
kipu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3,000 of the same kipu made and handed out to this
community. If we find that community and find it cemetery, there is a rosetta stone.
You know, it is probably the case that there’s somebody in Peru and maybe a large community
that knows this language, that understands, and you just have to show up and ask them.
And it’s like, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, 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 a parent 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 llama herders who keep a string in their pocket, and they’ve got the
knots equaling how many llamas 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 kipus, but they’re using them to affect as a record.
Is it possible through archaeology to know what the social organization of the Maya was?
Maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader,
different roles, priests, or 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
connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that’s lived in the underworld.
It also told us things about hierarchy, like that there were councils of lords underneath
the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods and that there were
revolving positions of authority. The site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent
years in the jungle there, Palenque, had lords 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 Chak Soots, who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called
the Kal Monab. And then by the time he carves this other panel, there’s another guy in the position
of Kak Ahau, which was the Fire Lord. And so he had got 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. 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 Mayapon.
But it has what is called the League of Mayapon. And it has a council of representatives from the
communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It is a Maya democracy
that happens. The individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. They each family has their own
council house at Mayapon, though they live back at their place. It’s kind of like a Maya Congress.
Representative democracy. It really was. I mean, and this happens in, I guess,
1250 AD that this Maya democracy happens. And we know the names of them. We know the families.
And of course, they were humans. So eventually, they screwed it all up. One family murdered another
family and the whole 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. You mentioned different periods in the Maya,
the classic, the post-classic, the pre-classic, the archaic. Can you just speak to that? So
archaic is before there was really a civilization. Yeah, archaic is pretty much when everybody’s
hunter-gatherers. So the classic period was the Golden Age. And then the pre-classic is the
interesting time that we were talking about. And the post-classic is when the democracy came about.
Well, midway through it, reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils.
So yeah, we have pre-classic is like the origins of civilization. They’re starting to build cities,
they’re starting to create their calendar, they’re starting to create these wonderful works of art.
And the classic period, if you look at 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. And 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 Maya’s dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below,
and he’s got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly,
but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and can act as liaisons.
So that’s the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we say 250
to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it’s interesting that it’s actually
specifically the ninth Bakhtun of their history. The ninth Bakhtun begins in like 426, and it ends
in like 829. So it’s a 400 year period of time, and before that there were no kings, and after that
there really aren’t kings. They’re heads of councils. So 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.
Strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together. But eventually,
like happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden there’s this
unwieldy, huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else, and 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. It collapsed. What do you
think explains that? What happened? I think it’s a failing of archaeology to properly see what was
happening. I think that most of those cities, populations, moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers
out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses, and all archaeology’s
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 plain as day. We know when a city was attacked
and burned. Mostly that didn’t happen. People moved and migrated, and it seems like right there
around, like between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top, 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. The word Itza is actually a word describing the people
who lived around Lake P-10 Itza in northern Guatemala. All of the Maya are super clear about
that, that the Itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. The
elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.
So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a 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 archaeologically is that every one of
the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular, and we think that they pushed the limits
of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end
of the classic period that people are seasonally starving. I remember really stark evidence in
Copan Honduras. Copan was this beautiful city, lineage of 17 kings. But the last kings and the
last elite burials that we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They
get this thing when you’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. Some of them were allied. Some of them were enemies. There was a huge
civil war that settled out about the end of the classic period. So if it was Europe, you know,
the victors would have taken over. The losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went.
But when they abandoned these cities that were independent still, they all left,
both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn’t be just as simple as spoils
go to the victor. It’s such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the
Copan Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to
note that that ninth period, that ninth 400-year period ends right then. And I think a lot of
people, you know, I can’t prove it archaeologically, but I think a lot of people said we’re coming to
the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we’re doing. When you talk
to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya say, you know,
what happens at the end of a big cycle here? They say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation,
that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles, that change is coming,
we can either be part of it or we can get steamrolled by it. The Aztecs did this neat thing
called the New Fire Ceremony. Every 52 years, which was the biggest their calendar would go,
they’d burn down perfectly good temples and they’d burn down their houses sometimes and they would
just, everybody in society would perform this, what they called 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 Bakhtun that it was time to renew the world. I think this theory makes sense because
they really internalized the calendar. I mean, it was a really big part of their culture,
the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization. That’s what I think. I think that 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? Where did these people come from? At what time and how?
You know, almost every one of the cultures we’re talking about now, we have two different versions
of the answer to that question. We have the archaeology version and we have the Aztecs themselves.
The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well
to the north called Aslan and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero’s journey
where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter 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 Chiquimostac and that all the
people who spoke the language Nahuatl came from the cave and most of them went early to the Valley
of Mexico and in the Aztecs story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to
come in and but then they show up late game and they become mercenaries. They just start working
for communities in the Valley of Mexico and this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before
Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico and they make themselves this indispensable
group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Texcoco
which is in the middle of, which is now Mexico City, it’s all dried up but those guys were
too civilized to fight with each other but they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff.
So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico.
The dirty stuff, they’re the muscle. Yeah, they’d go in and they’d kill whoever you
wanted killed and now you’re the king of this area. So one of these kings that they were working for
really liked them and decided I’m 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 but then one of their priests say we’re
going to walk around the lake and my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus
with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital and they see that but it’s out on
an island in the lake and he said well I don’t know, that’s the place. So they build up an island,
they go to that island and then they just start piling up lake mug until they make a whole city
there in the middle of the island. They make or the lake, they make an island city and all of this
occurs in about a hundred years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tinochtitlan as they
called it is really established and 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. Those guys agreed to shut
up and let the Aztecs run the show and then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down
into the Maya area. Everywhere they go they rename everybody’s towns and make them pay tribute.
Pretty short 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 Attila
the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable
and too civilized and the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know,
we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us and if you work for us you’ll be just fine.
They’d go to every town they’d go to. The first thing they do is they’d show up with a bunch of
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 and then soon after the Poch Teca were there
would come the military with the reconnaissance. So the Aztec had a huge warrior class, as you’re
saying. So what was there? Can you linger on their whole relationship with war and violence?
They worshipped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templomaior. It had two temples up on top.
One was Tutlalak, the rain god, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was
Weesila Poshli. He was, that translates, “the hummingbird on the left.” But he’s the war god.
I love that he’s a hummingbird. Maybe, you know, he’s fast and he comes from the magical side or
something. But 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 were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess,
you know, probably an analogy between like the Navy and the Air Force. You know, they had a good
natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic
warriors dressed up in all of their finery. And they would 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 a parallel to what happened in Europe. You know, the famous Henry V moment
in Agincourt, where, you know, his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France’s aristocracy with
the longbow. Like up until that moment, Europe had a very wars 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, Mesoamerica really
didn’t have huge standing armies. But the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people.
They didn’t actually have to use it a lot. It was very, it was used to great effect in the,
in the Valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mesoamerica, it was mostly the fear factor.
But there also seemed to be, you know, a celebration of violence. I think you said
that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec. Maybe like the Roman Empire, was it,
they just had maybe a different relationship with what violence where that stood in the purpose
of life, purpose of existence? Is that fair to say? I would hypothesize so. I 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, when I said that statement, I,
what I, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice
and, you know, ripping people’s hearts out. This, they had this, this just, you know, grotesque,
violent bent. But in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry
and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted
also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen
that had come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. They’re all of the
causeways leading to the Aztec capital had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum
and they had an aquarium and a zoo and they had an opera and they had a ballet.
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 that we 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 an auto
sacrifice we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other
people should die. It was a self-sacrifice thing. Can you speak to the sacrifice a bit more animal
sacrifice, human sacrifice? What 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. 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 Mesuel
America, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods.
And the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody. They did
it so much and so successfully that they didn’t have any enemies nearby. So they decided this one
poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlashkolons, 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 Tlashkolons and haul them back for a sacrifice. Cortes 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,
Cortes took over the Aztec world.” It was Cortes in 20,000 super pissed off Tlashkolons.
And they actually sacrificed so there would be these ritual
battles or is it chopping off people’s heads? Is there some interesting rituals around the
sacrifice? It’s mostly hard extraction. Sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple
so everybody can see it. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their
rib cage would come out and they’d use like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really just
like tried and true way to do it. They’d stab it in in a certain place close and then they’d push
down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage and they just so they just make a place
where they could just rip it right out with their hand. Yeah, with their hand, but they were really
just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the
ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just while the person
was alive. Yep, while the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea like there was a horrible
drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley and they came to this conclusion that
it’s because we haven’t been killing enough people. Right. We’ve got to bump this up and then when they
did and they decided they really took it out on the Tlashkolons, 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, but then it was just kind of
the thing to do when 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 trekked into eating human
like, “Hey, you liking dinner?” That was a human. So the idea was it 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 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. Yeah. 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 bought taste for the Aztec.
Yeah. Boy. All right. They really did. They really did. In fact, that’s what caused the,
have you heard of the Noche 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 them into being for him, which he does. But Pedro Alvarado is 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 close the doors and he murders everyone in the party,
women, children. Nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone. And that’s what spazes the
Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma, who was their captive, and then try to murder all of
them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado’s fault for freaking out about eating humans. Just a little
practical joke. Yeah, it was just they thought it was funny. He did not. That’s fascinating. I didn’t
realize. So I kind of assumed that some level of cannibalism would have to do with, you know,
eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this. In certain, like a, you
know, deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they just liked eating humans.
It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like,
you guys could either send us, you know, a number of cats all feathers every month,
or we could eat you. So that’s psychological warfare and actual warfare. It worked. And that’s
how they spread. And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and
messed everything up. They 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? 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. They 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 they started taking over,
what they did is they empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get
the resources, but everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca empire and they created
this incredible Mita system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they
could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of let’s say 5,000 people. The Inca would
roll up with an army of 100, 200,000 people and say, you know, would you guys like to be part of
the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire? And if your mayor here
agrees, then he can have a town. He can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month,
a big work crew would show up and they’d start building agricultural terraces and storage units.
And every month with the agricultural access, they would have big parties and everybody would eat.
So people lived well in the Inca empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be
part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.
So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was like the center of it.
Cusco in their language, Quechua, it means naval or belly button. And it’s up in the mountains.
But there’s four quarters that they called their empire Tewantinsuyu, the land of four quarters.
And the center of those four quarters was Cusco.
It sprung to life in like 1200 ADC. Yeah, we backwards project what it was. But it was probably
mid 1200s when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler came in. But it was the, I think it’s the
ninth one is Pachacute, who really started being an empire builder.
And part of that, I mean, what really defined the empire? As 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
Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part.
They’d send the Kipu Kumayak, the guys who would weave the, or not the Kipus,
as accountants. And they would go through and say, what everybody did, okay, you’re a good farmer,
you’re going to farm, you are a good weaver, you’re going to weave, all the men here are going to take
a turn at being part of the army. And they sent independent Kipu Kumayaks to that every community
had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other. And they all had to
independently send their Kipus back to Cusco. And if there were accounting discrepancies,
they were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.
So there’s like a super sophisticated record keeping system.
Yeah. And that was the 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.
Yeah, they couldn’t. At the end, they were at least 10 million people. And there was just no
way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system.
If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins?
Inca.
Inca.
I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles.
And they had that essential hearts and minds.
There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire.
For some reason, everything was owned communally except the llamas. The llamas were the kings.
And so that was one thing that like some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas,
but you 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.” Really upset people on an emotional level.
Well, I mean, so llamas are got domesticated at some point. Probably early on.
I don’t even know when, but early on.
We have rock art that progresses to make it seem like a progression from people depicted hunting
them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period,
at least, that they became friends. Yeah, but if you roll in and you own them, that’s…
Yeah, that pissed everybody off. For some reason, the Inca owned everybody’s llama instantly.
And he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day,
just sent to Cusco. They’d also take their mummies. That was a weird thing.
Everybody mourns they’re dead, but the Inca just ceased to accept it.
They would just… The mummies were still there. “Okay, he’s dead, but look,
he’s still got clothes. He’s at the party. Let’s put a beer in front of him.”
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 Cusco.” But they would physically bring those mummies to
Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their belief system.
I mean, I can see how that would piss people off, but it’s also a pretty powerful way to
say the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect, are now in the capital.
They’ve been elevated. We didn’t steal them. We have given them a new place of honor.
And you’re welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where
everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.
And which of the civilizations mummified people? Is it…
The Incas for sure mummified people. And even did some of that kind of
Egyptian-esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They’d put straw inside the cavity and
mummify them. But the Maya didn’t do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose, would flood tombs
with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster. And then they’d get back in there.
It was jungly, so I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in
there to get the bones. They’d open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red
cinnabar. The one that I was in in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different
times. And the last couple of times, they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it
back in, articulated on the skeleton. But they didn’t mummify. They, on purpose, would 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. And they’d pull the bones out occasionally
and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.
So there’s still a deep connection to the ancestors, through the physical manifestation
of the ancestors then. Yeah. Whether mummified or bone.
And to this day, if you do an excavation here in the United States,
Native American people don’t like it. They don’t like their graves, which is fine enough.
I wouldn’t want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it. They love it.
Every Maya person, if we find a grave, they’re like, “Yeah, look at that bone. It’s cool. Can I touch?”
Yeah, great. They’re not spooked about it at all. They think it’s exciting. I one time,
I helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get an 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, “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 dig up your dog.” And they were like, “But the kids really want to help you.” So their
kids came out. And this was like their puppy. And it died less than a year ago when we got
to it. One of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, “Wacy-sity-dose, little booty bones.
Yay.” What a weird attitude. That’s your dead dog there. But 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.
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. Halloween’s this creepy thing where they’re all monsters. But Day of
the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie
Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar. And we talk
about who they were and how they lived. And we put things on the altar that mattered in their life.
And we remember them on that day. And it turned something that was a weird “eat too much candy”
and “wear a monster mask” thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.
I have to ask about the giant stones that Inka has been able to somehow move and fit together
perfectly. Do you understand, is it understood how they were able to do that so well?
No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot
large weights. There’s a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the U.S.
who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota single-handedly, showing how
you can move big stones. So I think Wally’s already figured out how to move them. It’s the
perfectly fit, so carefully fit together that you couldn’t even put a dime in between the stones.
That’s the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archaeological 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. There is no
way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammer stone. 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 Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500 to
1,000-year-old walls are still there. And I see things like the crystals in the andesite
are almost stitched together along the seams. The andesite around it is melted and the crystals
haven’t. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. It’s just
melted. Somebody 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 these end of my archaeological career
chapters. I’m either going to prove myself wrong or prove it. But I think they used acids. My dad’s
a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there’s no way there’s no naturally occurring acids.
But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad. I don’t know
if you ever saw that show. But there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body
and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid
is so fascinating. It won’t go through plastic and you can also bring it in inert parts and then
combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the andes. And they
also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid.
You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it’s hydrofluoric acid. And that will burn
through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn’t care
whether, you know, servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these
together. And I think they’re fused together. I asked the city of Cusco 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 Quechua authorities in a place called Oleantaytambo.
And maybe I can convince them. But right now, they just think I’m a weird-ass 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 and see if there’s some kind of trace. Chemists I’m working with
say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these that a core sample right along the seam,
they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of
hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, “No, I mean,
we already know that’s true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some rocks.” But it would happen.
And that’s just chemistry. 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’d be fascinating if true. And I hope you do show
that it’s true or follow either one. I’ll try to disprove it. Disprove it, yeah. I wonder if we
discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do. Because it just feels like
if a large number of humans are 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 I just, when we think about like Stonehenger, some very challenging
architectural construction, we don’t think about a large number of humans working together.
Well, you know, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number
of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another. Right.
One of my favorite quotes is, and I’m probably going to misquote it here, but I think it’s Margaret
Mead who said, “Never underestimate the power of small groups working together.” And the truth is
that those are the only people that have ever changed the world. That small, dedicated groups of
people are what change the world. Yeah. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their
vision. Yeah. Yeah. I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across time.
And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills
that at least I personally do not. You know, I’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 was a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time.
So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early humans in North America?
Well, we go through that Paleo-Indian and Archaic period for thousands of years. You know, as we
started this conversation, probably 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 what we call the American Southwest now,
the Four Corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the Pueblo people who are
still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people. So we’ve got these two clusters that the very first
major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It’s in Northern Louisiana. People
think I’m crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in Northern Louisiana, a big one
at a site called Poverty Point that is 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. We 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 Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders. But what
they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone.
That’s 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. There were kings that lived up there.
There’s the biggest of the Mississippian cities. It’s 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, a thriving metropolis. And we in America
have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia
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 5,000 to 10,000 people each.
Were they their own thing, or was 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 a
neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of countries, I think. 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. I’m not talking about
just archaeology. We find them in archaeology now. But Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and
went for three years from—he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana.
And he’s the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years, he went through
city after city after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases.
But I mean, the documentation’s clearly there. He met collectively millions of people in a very
sophisticated and uniform civilization. So it was disease and stealing of resources,
but was there like explicit murdering going on? Unfortunately, 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. He was really—he was a brutal man.
So 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 Columbian
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 had wave after wave and
kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things. But it didn’t actually go away. It just couldn’t
spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a
sudden, these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years,
there were people who like had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But
the numbers, you know, it’s a shameful part of history. And it wasn’t something that Europe
perpetrated on them. The medical science at that time was still the four humors theory
that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. And we did things like,
well, you’ve got to bleed him. He’ll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease
was. But the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now
saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead. And that the the number of people has
increased as well. As far as the our estimates, we’re thinking it’s somewhere around 150 million
people. And 90% of them died. And with them all their knowledge, just I mean, imagine the moment
where, you know, who dies when things get bad, it’s the young and the old. So all the knowledge
keepers die suddenly. The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely
demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only
way out of it is to to accept this new Christianity. But they, you know, they don’t have bring kids
into this world where everybody’s dying. And even if they do, they can’t teach them what the old
people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn’t finish the transmission.
So in a in a single terrible moment in human history, you know, the generation loses all
their knowledge. So a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out.
But with that also just the the wisdom of the entire civilizations.
So much of what they knew was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs
and that we’ve learned a lot from that. Yeah, but not a significant integration of that wisdom into.
So it wasn’t when the Europeans came, it wasn’t like the cultures were integrated. It was
a story of domination. In North America, there’s a new term in the literature that I like,
we call it the the Mississippian Shatter Zone, that Mississippian civilization was millions of
people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this
Shatter Zone where we have ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere
else on a reservation far away. And, you know, that I’m just about to talk to a Cherokee man who
listened to some of the things I had to say and says all those Ho-Chunk things you were saying
from that Ho-Chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I can I talk
to you by phone and tell you about these things? So we’ve got the Shatter Zone where, you know,
we’re going to try to put the piece, the puzzle back together, especially in terms of
Mississippian religion. I really think we’re making headway in this generation and it’s exciting to
be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together.
Just as 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 why do you think they didn’t expand and colonize?
Because they got their ass kicked. It’s the truth. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here.
There’s a there’s a great site in Nova Scotia called Lenzo Meadows, which definitely has what’s
left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Erick 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 Dorset.
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.”
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, Leif 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, you know,
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.
But they were all very tough people.
When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over 100 million people
that were killed, do you see that as 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, you know, that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it.
There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. 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. That’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, “I’m baptizing everyone.
I baptize 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.
Yeah. 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 hard to know what to do with like
black death. It’s, I mean, infections, they don’t operate on normal human terms, right?
They just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas. All right. Just my style.
I mean, we didn’t really talk about how life originated on earth or 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
intelligent civilizations from outside of earth, aliens, ever visited?
You had me right until the ever visited thing. That one I’m not entirely sure about. I’m not
sure whether we have any. We certainly have no archaeological proof that I would 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. And, you know, take that for what it is. But the guy who
we respect on many other levels also said that. So that’s interesting. But in terms of, you know,
aliens visiting us, I don’t know. 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, do you have
anything else that you want to say? And I said, well, you know, y’all’s premise is that aliens came
down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of, you know, science and medicine,
engineering, all these things. Today, we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down.
But now all they’re doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks. Like, whatever we did,
we superpissed them off, apparently. The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly.
It’s an interesting thought you’ve mentioned. What archaeologically would you have to see
to be like, this might be an alien? A technology that doesn’t belong there,
first and foremost. I mean, you know, we got to, if we just run with the premise that somebody
was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here,
that was almost certainly mechanical. Now, you know, I love the aliens thing where, you know,
biomechanical is something that certainly could be. And that would, you know, 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, you know, 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. Right. 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. Aliens come from across the
universe to meet humans. And the thing they tell them is how to move rocks. Are you fucking
kidding me? I mean, you know, like, give them, give them antibiotics or a combustion engine
or something. You’re going to, they should, they came across the universe and they showed
them how to move big rocks. I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. That just doesn’t make any sense.
What do you think Earth will look like 10,000 years from now?
That’s an interesting question. I think it will be a lot more automated or it’ll be a
smoldering pile. I mean, there is a possibility we could end ourselves. There’s always that
possibility that we’ve really opened Pandora’s Box in some regards. I 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,
we have that capacity. That’s scary. That’s a possible future for us. But I’m an optimist.
I, you know, I’d like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make
my job better. But a thousand, 10,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and
becoming more advanced rapidly. And the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more.
So that, that’s the part that frightens me actually. I don’t know, does that frighten you?
Yes, terrifying. You know, I 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,
and the, the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. In almost any
biological system that has that fast a change over that little a time, you would, any, any other
thing you’d describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change,
it’s a crisis. From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human
ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up
with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing, innovate and create a lot of
awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering. But on the whole, on average, make a
better world. But yeah, if it, you know, like with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might
actually lead to the death of everybody. I guess there’s always that, that chance.
But I am an optimist. I, you know, I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said,
I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more
innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans
over the last thousands of years have been about, you know, we didn’t, we didn’t change the world
when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Mother necessity is the mother of
invention. And I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real
and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to, I’m going to answer a question
that you didn’t even ask me. I think we’re wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this.
We’re delusional. I’m all for electric cars and, you know, being good stewards of the environment.
But we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what’s about to happen. We’re spending
too much time pretending, you know, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric
cars will be okay. That’s bullshit. That’s not going to happen. We need to start making technologies
that desalinize water, that, you know, a host of things that, uh, that we need to use our
technological past capacity to accept it and adapt instead of Pollyanna thinking we can
make it go away. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of accept that the world will change and 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 survive, thrive. Again, we’re pretty
innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens, or we just leave this planet,
what, uh, what do you think would be found by a four mentioned alien civilizations when they visit
the anthropologists, the grad student anthropologists that visit earth and study? How much of what we
now have and love and think of as human civilization will be lost, do you think?
Well, you know, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you know,
you didn’t put a time element in there, but I would say that, you know, everything that can
perish will and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn’t perish.
So we’ll have, you know, buildings, plaques, but they won’t have any books. They won’t have any,
you know, billboards. They’ll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a,
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. And a thousand years
from now, if I was an archaeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded
by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know, Lewis and
Clark stayed one night here, but it’s just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought
about your town based on what preserved. 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 DC was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans,
because that’s what all the architecture is. Yeah. And would they be able to reconstruct
the important empires, the 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 like what
we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most like mainstream archaeology?
Just like a suspicion. What could we get completely wrong?
Well, one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civilization, like an obviously gigantic
civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago.
There’s certainly that. There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under
the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things. And everybody knew they
existed and everybody interacted with them. I think it’s our estimation of their motivations
that were probably most wrong on. My teacher, Shealy, a long time ago said, I’ve come up with
all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff. And she looked at me and she said,
“If you don’t stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put yourself in
the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it.” Which I’ve always taken
to heart. I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural
assumptions, try to think like they would think is the best I could. And it’s very different.
I mean, the Maya are cyclical. The whole sacrifice was so obsessed with that. But
that wasn’t a steer actual sacrifice on their part. They weren’t just, “Hey, let’s all get
together and kill that guy that’s pissing us off.” I mean, they were giving the best of them.
It was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bona fide sacrifice on their part,
a loss. Plus, the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with it.
I tell you, that one, I’m going to unweave that one one of these days.
One of these days. Now, that puppy appeared on Pottery. All over Pottery. He’s everywhere.
I got to write this book. This next year is the year I’m going to write my Fang Deity book.
And I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy. The mystery solved. I mean,
it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don’t know. I mean, again, humor. You don’t
know what the nature of their humor or what their jokes are. Oh, that’s a neat one too.
Then that’s so human. I’ll tell you a little side story here that when I worked with the Maya people
in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day.
And they would talk to each other in their own language. It was Celtal was the group I was working
with. But I noticed after a while, they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes and they would
laugh at jokes. But then they would also, one of them would say something and the other ones would
go, “Hoo-hoo.” And I eventually asked, “What is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo-hoo noise?”
And they 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, wit. And I think about that when I’m a
hieroglyphic translator. Like, here’s a beautiful thing that’s going to be like a poem or a
political statement. Like, and I’m just ploddingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means.
There’s probably double triple entendres all through this text. And the real meaning is the
subtext. And I’m, you know, I’m thinking they’re talking about corn and they’re talking about the
nature of life. Yeah, it could be satire. It could be, you know, as it was in the Soviet Union,
when there’s a dictator, maybe there’s overpowering king, you’re not allowed to actually speak.
You have to hide the thing you’re actually trying to say in the subtext. So, and all of that.
There was a funny Maya ceramic that had the ceramics are neat because they don’t,
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 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.
And 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 the blanket mapping it.
That’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 it will occur, but it’s going to happen because it was the jungle.
So in the jungle, what’s the process like? What do you have to do to map it?
Well, it was tricky too, because it was also a national forest. So the forestry department
didn’t want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through
the foliage and I would, 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 like, you know, 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’d bring the machine in. We’d bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information.
But on that piece of paper, I would write like, don’t bring the machine this way,
there’s a tree fall or stand on top of this building and you’ll see four different buildings
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. We couldn’t even find where our trails were. They would grow back that fast.
But you see the building so you could see. Right. And that was the fun part. I mean,
sometimes it would just be like a little neighborhood with little low buildings no
bigger than this table. But sometimes, you know, just five more meters in and I’m standing under
a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I’ve just found another one. And some days,
you know, on good days, we’d find three pyramids. And I felt that’s such a more exciting job than
the typical excavations. My buddies were all just, you know, in a hole for the whole week in the
middle of the city and where I’m dancing around through the jungle, I could find, you know,
10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today. Who knows?
What’s that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that
you’re one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing?
What’s that? What’s that feel like? It’s 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 Masha’a. It’s often the Belizean jungle.
And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost had that one almost depressed me.
I was, my entire, like, I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city.
And then I did it at 25. And I was like, God, now what do I do? 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 is some weirdo. How’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, toon, wheat, stone mountains.
I knew they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right next to it
that made a triangle. And they love those triads. And there were rivers in between them. And I thought,
that’s it. That’s where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over two seasons with students,
the other grad students were like, he’s just having his students just wandering the jungle all day.
But I came back with a city. So 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. That’s
what we do. Yeah, humans find a way. That’s the thing you see with history. When the
empires collapse, the humans that come out of that, they pick themselves up and
find another way. 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, RKOEd. If people want to listen to it,
this is a tough question, but what would you recommend? What episodes should they listen to?
Oh, that is a tough question. What is the sampling? It’s like asking a chef what’s the
best stuff on the menu. Well, different strokes for different folks. I do two different things
on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you’ve never heard about. 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. I’ve got a lot of weird adventure
stories and it’s been fun and they’ve been very well received. I can put my humor in there and
I can talk about the things that went right, the things that went wrong, the adventures that I had
are all part of this RKOEd thing. RKOEd is kind of a double entendre. It’s me, I’m just Ed,
but it’s also education. 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 amnesia that there was no great civilizations
here before Europe showed up. That’s simply not true. I think it should be part of our history
books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce, as part of
American history, the part before European contact. I think that kids in the K through 12 level should
grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492. One of these
days, I’m going to find a funder to help us put together Before the Americas. We’re going to make
it part of the curriculum for every kid in the US to know the full history of this country.
That’s a great project. Ed, thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all
the fascinating ideas that you put onto the world. I can’t wait to hear your new course.
Thank you so much, Lex. It was a real pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph
Campbell. Life is but a mask worn on the face of death and is death then but another mask.
How many can say asks the Aztec poet that there is or is not a truth beyond.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
[Music]
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here’s Ed Barnhardt.
Do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth,
which we don’t know anything about? Yes, I do. And in fact, you know, we have found
some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we’ve got Gobekli Tepe
and we’ve got the stuff that’s going on in the Amazon. And there are some other less startling
things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations
we had no idea about. So yeah, it’s happened and I think it’ll happen again.
Do you think there’s a lost civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up
or is hiding the evidence of? Yes, I do. And we’re beginning to find it. There are these huge,
what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average
Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome.
And I don’t think we’re ever going to find anything that looks like
Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet,
you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there’s not a whole lot of stone.
What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of
dirt and trees and feathers and textiles. But is it possible that
all that land that’s not covered by trees is actually hiding stone, for example,
some architecture, some things that’s just very difficult to find for archaeologists?
I think at the base of the Andes, where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there’s a lot of
potential there because that’s where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into
the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground, except for a stray cliff here and there
where the river dug deep. And even then, only in the dry season because that river
rises like over 100 feet every year. That’s one of the things having visited that area,
just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water. I was humbled by the power of water
to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we’re talking about of
civilizations. Water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia.
And so if there’s something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago,
it’s very possible it was just eaten up by nature.
Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that’s almost a certainty in a lot of places.
The Grand Canyon was dug by water. There’s this wimpy little river in it right now and you can’t
possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology is really kind of
magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there’s
probably a lot that are just under the ocean and just the wave action have destroyed them and what
they haven’t destroyed buried deep. Under the ocean. So you think Atlantis ever existed?
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about
putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow
of it, my money would be on Akratiri. Akratiri is what’s left of a big city that was on the island
of Santorini. And when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it
so fast that 70 miles away in Crete, there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted
what was ever there. But what’s left on the side of the crater, Akratiri, is strangely advanced for
its age. And so if there’s anything that’s a model for Atlantis as Plato explained it,
it’s Akratiri. Akratiri, the ancient Greek city. So it says the settlement was destroyed in the
Theron eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the
remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks. So we don’t know how advanced that
civilization was. No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it’s got streets, it’s got plumbing,
it’s got little sconces for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with a lot of, especially
in terms of hydraulic engineering, it’s very advanced for being 3500 years old.
So if you check out here’s an image of the excavation. What a project.
It’s an amazing place. And you can tell that it’s just part of it because it’s pretty close to where
the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger. So in this case, there’s a lot of
evidence, but like we said, there could be civilizations that there is no, there’s very
little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence.
Right. And I think Akratiri is actually a great example of that because here we have
the side that did preserve that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was
completely obliterated. It was shot, chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete,
70 miles away. And you know, Plato says that it, it sunk. It was on an island and it sunk.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to Akratiri. I think this is what Plato was referring to.
If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.
And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written.
Right. Absolutely. That we have no record of. And it’s humbling to think that entire civilizations,
with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political
tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just
destroyed like that and forgotten completely, lost to ancient history. I reflect upon that often as
an archaeologist. I think about the, this great country that I live in and love and all the things
we’ve achieved. But you know, we’re, we’re a baby historically speaking. We’ve been around 200 years.
Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of, you know,
800, 1,000 years and now they’re ruins, but we’re barely getting started in terms of
historical civilizations. So humans, homo sapiens evolved,
but they didn’t start civilizations right away. There’s a long period of time when they did not
form these complex societies. So how do we, let’s say 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from
there to creating civilizations? I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures
that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years
ago. And that’s when, you know, our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of
things that just pressured them into especially finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the
Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough,
the mammoths died out and the bison died out. And there was just, they had to come up with
different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting
and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used
to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, there, you know, the gathering
started to be a much more important thing. And I think that led to figuring out, hey, we could
actually grow certain things and gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops. And then
people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn’t have to
roam around anymore. And that’s where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they,
they stayed in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence,
we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the
geographic region, where they’d know, okay, you know, in the mountains, well, in the, we’ll be in
the summer in the mountains, because there’s berries and things. And then in the winter,
we’ll be down here and we’ll hunt. But they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place,
I think there, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
What do you think is, there’s a lot of questions I want to ask here. What do you think is the
motivation for societies? Is it the character of the stick? So you said like, is it like when
resources run out, when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to
figure stuff out? Or is it more the character of like, there’s always this kind of human spirit
that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this
with the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas or
technological innovation, let’s call it. Well, you know, I have an explorer’s heart, so I’m kind of,
I’m biased. Right. You know, I do think that we have an innate desire to see what’s on the horizon.
And to impress other people with our achievements, things like that.
We’re social beings. That’s really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together. So I
think that it’s much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out.
But usually the carrot does the job. The really interesting story is how the first people came
to the Americas. I mean, to me, that’s pretty gangster to go from Asia, all the way potentially
during the Ice Age or maybe at the end of the Ice Age or during that whole period,
not knowing what the world looks like, going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process?
How did the first people come to the Americas? Well, first off, I agree with you. That was
pretty gangster. I mean, that’s a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts,
that guy, Jordan Jonas had the mustard, but I wouldn’t have made it crossing there.
Well, there you go. The fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas exists,
people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that’s an indication that it’s
possible. But yeah, so when do you think and how did the first people come?
The traditional theories are still somewhat valid or at least on the table that when that
land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the
game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across.
The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for
archaeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a
young archaeologist, I would have never dreamed we’d have the information we have now. And that
information, a lot of it’s coming out of Texas A&M, we see the traditional like
12,500 years ago that there was a migration. But now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly
happening closer to 30,000 years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true
is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very
first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archaeologist,
it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that. But now it’s really
very clear that they came over at least by 30,000. And the bridge opened and closed and opened and
closed. That’s during the Ice Age. Right. I mean, that’s crazy, right? That is crazy. Yeah. I mean,
they didn’t roll in and immediately make New York. But there were people. And there were
definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated.
And so we have specific kinds of haplo groups that are here in the Americas that don’t exist
otherwise. And that same haplo group game has been showing us more and more that people came
across Siberia. It’s not Africa. It’s not Western Europe. Those are still, you know,
they’ve become kind of fringe theories, but they’re not totally eradicated. I have
DNA is developing science as well. And I think we all need to keep that in mind that
it’s not like they just cracked the code. And now we know all the answers. And sometimes,
like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you
know, we don’t need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA.
But they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia that
all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.
Do you think it was a gradual process? If it’s like 30 to 60,000 years ago,
was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like
one explorer that pushed the tribe to just go, go, go, go, and go across maybe,
across 100 years, travel all the way across maybe into North America, into North North America,
where Canada is now, and then sort of like big leaps in movement versus gradual movement.
I think it was big leaps. And now this is just, you know,
mostly guess I’ll admit. But I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models
talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change, and then it settles out into
more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early
people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for
thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types
were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America.
The ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon,
most of those guys have O blood type, and they’re haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered
the US. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait.
We have no real evidence to say they came en masse across Oceania. So they made it probably
by boat along the coast all the way to South America. So there’s some kind of cultural engine
that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened tens of thousands
of years ago, but at a very rapid pace, there’s these explorers that went all the way to South
America, and there established their kind of more stable existence. And from there,
South America, Mesoamerica, North America was kind of gradually expanded into that area.
I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first
wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there, and then mixed in with
the next groups that came. That’s fascinating. Kind of like there’s an interesting correlate in
Europe where today, everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland. But actually, Celtic
people started in Eastern Europe, and it was the entire area. And when Rome kind of swept
everything, and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world,
Ireland, that they were like, “We’re not going to mess with those guys on that island. We’ll
leave them be.” So now it looks like that’s the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually,
it’s the fringe. So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans. Yeah.
And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about
very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed.
It’s, “No, he didn’t get a date of 40,000 years.” But I think we’re going to come back around to
start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand. And that’s the interesting thing
is the early humans spread throughout the world. And then, like you said, perhaps they’ve gotten
isolated, and then civilizations sprung from there. And they all have similar elements,
even though they were isolated. That’s really interesting. That’s really interesting that
there’s multiple cradles of civilization, not just one, like one good idea. Those ideas naturally
come up. Those structures naturally come up. And I wonder whether the similarities that all
those cradles have, it could be a shared, much deeper past that they all have. Or it could be
a more kind of Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of
parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development,
and that that could be the answer to it. Which one do you lean on? Which one do you lean
towards? I think it’s a case-by-case thing. I think if we look globally, I’d lean much more
towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas, and we have a shorter
time period where the things that become major civilizations now, I’ll say, up to 30,000 years
ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those
people came over with from Asia, and that as they got separated, that they had core values that then
turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I’m a big proponent that
there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a
single distant origin. You’ve spoken about the lost cradle of civilization in South America,
so South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization. South America,
Mesoamerica, can you explain? Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You’re right. I mean,
especially as an American, our country’s so big, and we are so far removed from these places,
we don’t even think about it. But more and more, we’re seeing things that predate the earliest
stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. It’s all on the Peruvian coast
that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday, we might start talking about the
Amazon more and more. But right now, what we’ve got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE
along the coast of Peru, and there are big stone-built pyramids and temples,
and they’re amazingly isolated. Even now that we’ve found them, some of them like Corral is one
of the most famous ones just north of Lima. We’ve known about it for a couple decades now,
how old it is, but every time I visit there, it’s like I visited the moon. There’s absolutely
nobody there, not for miles. It’s amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody
goes to see it. It’s not easy to get to. Do you think there’s a bunch of locations like that?
Some may not have been discovered in the Peru area. Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That
desert gets really ugly quick, and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there
that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately,
but Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands,
thousands of pyramids. Now, they weren’t built of a lot. Not all of them were built of stone. Some
of them were adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly. Now, they’re not exciting places to
visit today. You know what’s funny too? We started off talking about whether I think there’s a lost
civilization out there. There are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are
some things that were discovered 100 years ago, and archaeologists or back then they called themselves
antiquarians just kind of passed over. Corral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has
some of those pyramids that were made by the moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics
and things that you can sell for big money. But Corral was found a long time ago,
but the archaeologists was like, “God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good.
We can’t sell anything here.” And then about the 1970s or ’80s, somebody said, “Hey, no ceramics?
Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.”
So what’s the dating on Corral?
Corral, I think, starts at about 3,200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of
other cities around it until about 1,800 BCE.
So what’s the story behind looking at some of these images? What’s the story about constructions
like that? What was the idea at that thing? Isn’t that amazing?
Yeah. Gosh, I mean, it should be some sort of, I’ll be a flaky archaeologist.
This is a place where rituals took place.
So many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that’s about 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.
And 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, corrals, 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 mourn the death
of their kids. And it just happened a lot more frequently then.
One of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built
in Peru, possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true?
Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing
6,000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Waka
Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid. But it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the
elements structurally, that kind of thing? Yeah, why do humans build pyramids? And why do they build
it in all kinds of different locations in the world? Well, you know, my rude answer is pretty
boring, really. A lot of people ask me, “Why are there pyramids all over the planet? Is that a
coincidence?” I mean, 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 them down. And if he wants one that’s going to stay and be tall,
he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And 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. 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, you remember, we were just talking
about Guacaprieta and this one that’s almost 6000 BC now is the first one. That one’s a funny case.
We just talked about all these lofty goals. But actually, I’m pretty sure that
Guacaprieta’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?
Yeah, but then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the enormity of the
construction and they’re like, “Oh, maybe the next guy thought maybe we should keep building these
kinds of things.” 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 too. Probably again, you know, about stink and about,
you know, “Well, we don’t want the dogs to eat them. I maybe put them in the middle of the
shell pile.” But then that all of a sudden became this like, “That’s where my grandfather’s body is.
That’s where great grandfather’s body is.” And all of a sudden, people started being attached
to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when
the very first pyramid was built in Ohio area by the Edina 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 mounds. So where and who were the first civilizations in South America,
as in America? Well, you know, I think we’re still piecing that together. Coming back to the
first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in
South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it’s hard to answer
that question is, you know, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture?
We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the 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. Sometimes
somebody’s coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different
hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years. And then finally,
they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture.
It used to be archaeology. That was just the end-all-be-all. Civilization starts with the
invention of agriculture. And we can’t have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm.
But that’s been discounted. Peru was a big part of that, that area of Keral. It’s connected to
another city on the coast called Aspero. And Aspero starts about the same time, but they’re
all about fishing. They have no farming. And Keral, who’s upriver 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 versus the coast? I do think so. I think religion
in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old.
There’s actually 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 culture development in the Amazon. So religion, you would say, preceded
civilization. In South America, the Keral and Asbro that I was just talking about,
it’s weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and
things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there. And there’s no hints
of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get
is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE, this culture called Chavin 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. All of those things are coming out of
the Amazon. I mean, religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful
ideas. They’re the strongest myths that tie people together. And to you, it’s possible that
this powerful 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.
We can see, 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 that those are things
that archaeology just can’t get at? That’s one of the challenges of archaeology and looking into
ancient histories. You’re trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of
architecture, but understand what was going on inside their mind. That’s really what I’m in
it for, trying to understand these people and its 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. But there’s not in this room, but if you look at thousands of rooms
like it, maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled
the world, the religions, the different ideas. Tell me about this thing 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 Andean region. And the religion that practiced
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 deity who somewhere thousands
of years ago crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That
could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one
creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon
still talk about him. There, his name is Vihomase in some groups. But they say that his emissaries on
Earth are the Jaguars and that he is the creator deity. Why is the current mainstream belief is
that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic? Well, there are bona fide pantheons. You know,
Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world
were pantheons. And I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archaeologists walked in
there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to
the art looking for them. And they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess
and the sun god and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person
right here in Austin, Texas, as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art
to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology,
there’s a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming
off of his head and off of his belt. He’s got really identifiable traits. He also likes to
sever people’s heads off and carry them around. But he’s the fanged deity and he’s there. He
shows up in Chavine de Juantar, the capital of that Chavine culture. And he keeps showing up
through every culture, even thousands of miles away, throughout the next two millennium, right up
to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha. But Viracocha is the fanged deity.
He is, when we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this kind of almost
Islamic thing where they say, “You can’t understand the face of Viracocha.” So when they do put him
in a cosmogram, they’ll make him just a blob. Like he’s just unknowable, but he’s at the very top.
I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural
beings. If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course Christianity’s
monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters?
Who are all these angels and demons and, you know, Jesus Christ? And I mean, I don’t even know
who the Holy Spirit is. But he’s some sort of supernatural being, but it’s that monotheistic
system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That’s where I think the
crux of us misunderstanding ancient Dandian art is. So what is the process of analyzing art
through time to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture?
Do 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. We can pull apart the same sort of thing in
the Greek pantheon, 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 tridents or whatever it is. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them.
So that’s how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once 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 Moche and Nazca culture. You know, 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
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 Chavine, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around
severed heads, human severed heads. So they’re like in the old literature,
the Moche will call him the decapitator deity. But then they have these other like, oh, here’s
the crab deity and here’s the fox deity. But if you look at them, like the crab deity is just
that guy’s face coming off of a crab. And the fox deity is that guy’s face coming off of a fox.
So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus
was able to like, you know, turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted
and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity
manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing
stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore. And across hundreds of years, thousands of years
from Chavine to Moche to Inca, as you’re saying. Right. Wari has them too, Tiawanaco. That’s that
famous place, Pumapunku. He’s all over there. I wonder how those ideas spread in Morph of this
fanged deity. I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavine, there’s a later one in
Inca times called 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 Chavine 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 fanged
deity all over them that have like one labyrinth, they’ll have all pottery. The 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 they’re learning and then they’re going back to their
communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage
spots too. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity. Do we know much about
the relationship they had with the fanged deity and their conception of the powers of the fanged
deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all knowing God? Is it something that brings
joy and harvest? Or is it something that you’re supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals
and humans too to keep a bay? I think he had two sides of the coin. Like a lot of the Hindu gods
are, you know, 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 and ferocity. But then there are other
funny things about him. Like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a
lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts when it comes to the moche. There’s this
whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men and some of them
show their faces transforming into that fanged deity. Like he is acting through them. But the
thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged 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 healing sex scenes. In fact, I
tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with
somebody in a house and there’s a fanged deity and there’s a puppy just scratching at the door
like, “Hey, you forgot me.” And then finally, one day, I found one with the puppy having sex
with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, “Oh, he really is very involved in this.
What is this weird puppy?” So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.
This actually, this is awesomely makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote
30 years ago on shamanism and the Mocha civilization. It reads, “The Mocha are the major focus of this
paper. Sex puppies and head hunting will be shown to be related to ancient Mocha shamanism.”
So now, I understand. I was like, “Well, the puppies.”
Puppies, yeah, it’s true.
And the head hunting, that’s the decapitator.
And I’ve added rock and roll to that list since, actually. Rock and roll. 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 San Pedro cactus juice kind of, they don’t talk about the fanged 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.
They’re in like around Trujillo, they call him Iopec.
But music, in the Amazon, they play flutes. Sometimes a chorus of women sing, and that’s
supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There’s a spirit that’s hurting the
person that’s sick. And then the priest or the shaman or the corndero, whatever you want to call
him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what’s going on.
So when the music starts, that’s bringing those spirits in. And people don’t see them unless
they’ve imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is the salucinogen, which is in the Amazon side,
it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus. But that’s what allows you to actually
see that other world. Yeah, I went to the Amazon recently and did ayahuasca, a very high dose of
it. Bold move. Went 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 de Juanterra I 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 transforming in between. But there’s a group of them that are midway
through transformation, and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that’s coming
like down their face. San Pedro doesn’t do that to you, but ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca,
traditionally, they take a blowgun 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 3,000 years ago. So that, you think, could have been a big
component of the development of religion and shamanism? I think that hallucinogens
opened the mind then like they open the mind now. Do you think that, you know, the stoned ape theory,
do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of
civilization? In 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,
and, you know, 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 wondered to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the
creative force behind sort of art versus like literally the method by which you come up with
ideas that define a civilization. It’s like the degree to which they had a role in the formation
of civilizations. It’s kind of fun to think about psychedelics being like a critical role
in the formation of civilizations. I think in terms of South America, they probably really were.
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, you know, 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’d cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe, triggered
hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I much prefer the drugs route.
It’s the result, not the tools aren’t the thing that creates insight. It’s the result.
Is that getting to, you know, hallucinogens are poisoning us. They’re killing us. That’s,
you know, it’s a near death state. And people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that
other world. Death, you entered this other world in that when you took this mighty dose of poison,
it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.
Yeah, as Tom Wade said in that one song, I like my town with a little drop of poison.
So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first sort of
mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? Like, 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
Karal. The next one that we’ve barely even begun looking at, but it’s probably older than
Karal is Sachin culture. I 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. Karal frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. That’s,
we’ve got 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.
That’s our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.
Yeah. And it sucks when they don’t have art. If we just go back to the Amazon,
you’ve mentioned that it’s possible that there’s a law civilization that existed in the Amazon.
So it’s carried a lot of names, Law City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it’s possible it existed?
Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where
it is kind of center around towards Columbia. And the City of Z is named after a region of
Brazil called the Shingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. 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 civilizations. These big, it’s lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is
they’d make these big mounds and then they’d make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk
through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been
found in the Shingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people.
Again, you know, it’s not stone built and it’s been under the forest forever. So it’s very torn up.
But it’s there. Now, you know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And a thing
that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway
all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these, what we
call like geometric earthworks. So there’s more and more evidence of these civilizations. It’s
not a, it’s not, it could be there. It’s there for sure. By the way, the people who are trying to
protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road,
loggers will come. Yep. And they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archaeology
perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things, but from a sort of
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 very quickly. So quickly. And, you know, you just think that
across decades, you expand that to centuries, and it’s like, you could see how a civilization
could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest. And it happened for sure in the Amazon.
Yeah. You know, 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,
but they’re finding more and more of these places that they call terra preta, which is black earth,
and they’re huge swaths 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, that sometime in the distant past, that forest wasn’t there and there
was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black,
and it’s much more enriched. And 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,
and I asked them about this black earth. And they were like, yeah, that’s why we’re here.
Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra preta, and that’s where we’re
going to put our village, because that’s a place that all of our gardens work. The other places,
they don’t. One of the things you talked about literally just asked, you have to ask the right
question. And the stories, all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you.
Yeah, there’s so many of them. You know, the thing that excites the world about archaeology
right now is Gobekli Tepe. And this 10,000 now, Koran Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called
the Tos Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago. But it was just an archaeologist
rowing through the area and asking 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 shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.
So speaking of Gobekli Tepe, 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. He 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 seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on
a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art historical analysis. So I think his
research is great. 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. That would be a fun argument to be applying the law for.
So he believes he’s proposed as possible that the Amazon jungle is a man-made garden.
So it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which
that could be possible? Frankly, I agree with him. 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
terra preta, 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. So 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. Just to educate me, what’s the key idea that he’s proposing that you disagree
with? Is it the level of advancement that civilization was, or how large and centralized it was?
My main point of disagreement is that his ideas evolve like everybody’s. No scientist or researcher
in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die.
His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain, a core of them are, that there was a very advanced
single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions. The younger
driest 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.
In his early books, he suggested it’s Atlantis. I don’t think he suggests that anymore, but he
still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. All of our
ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts. We could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re
real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales. 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. Of course, it is a compelling story that there’s a single
civilization from which all of this came from because the alternative is the idea that came
across the Bering Strait, from Asia, went all the way down to South America and got isolated
and created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious
ideas that look similar to all that. Everybody has a flood myth. There’s a lot of similarities.
Everybody building pyramids. Yeah. There could be a lot of other explanations,
even if it’s a simple, compelling explanation that has to be evidence for it. What would that
evidence look like? That’s the bottom line. Everything’s theories. 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 really in a dark room.
You’re feeling around a dark room, so it’s mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences
operate in a mostly well-lit room. It’s like a dark corner, and you’re figuring out a way
to light it. Yeah, in archaeology, most of it is a mystery, right? Yes, it’s job security.
I like that part. I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm-shifting idea that
humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant.
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. 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 distinct from each other. Can you speak to this
your understanding of these tribes and their history? They’re still here today.
Well, a lot of them are. By uncontacted, we mean we don’t know anything about these guys. We know
roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one’s
allowed to go contact them. 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 there looking for them. 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.
We were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment.
It’s mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change its pressure.
One thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it,
it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there.
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. 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. They get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across.
And not just foreigners, they attack each other. The Yanamama are famous for just having
never-ending feuds with each other. What do you think is the philosophy behind that?
I don’t know. I’m a relatively peaceful person, but I’ve got the monster in me like everybody
does. It’s cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Yanamama, they really,
part of the right of passage to be a man, is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village.
They go in there. They oftentimes, the way they don’t let inbreeding 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 in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn’t seen as a
biological thing. It was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick,
the question is asked, well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him?
And then the rumor starts, well, I bet you it was Joe over there 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
McCoy’s had that thing. And the people of New Guinea also do that. So 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. It’s such a tricky thing to do to study an uncontacted tribe
without obviously contacting them to figure out their language, their philosophy of mind,
how they communicate, the hierarchy they operate under.
And yeah, you know, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like
eight years ago or something, but there was a ranger from one of the biology stations
who just in the buy and buy 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 years.
And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk
to these people. And one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him
with arrows and just killed him. And then they went back in the woods like that’s the one guy
who understands what we’re saying. We should kill him and move our village.
So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy.
You know, everybody’s got it. I think we need to listen to our better angels
because if we don’t, we as a human species can easily devolve into just using violence and
against others to get what we want. It’s a daily choice we make not to be savages.
Which is a fascinating thing to remember. What kind of thing in civilized society,
we’ve moved past all that. But it can 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’s 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. You 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.
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 Chavine culture is, about 1800 BCE. There’s a
culture that some call the Mokaya, 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 Olmec have this religion they develop and they
start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that’s
being created by the Olmec who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus
of Tuantipec. I have a lot of questions to ask here about just the natural stupid confusion I have.
So first, did the Maya or the Olmec 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 Olmecs 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. Archaeology 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 Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that’s happening
in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time. The Olmec are really bringing the religion part. But the
other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hemotype mirrors, making tools
out of obsidian and other stone types. So you’ve got Olmec in the middle, where Mexico gets skinny
and it gets swampy down there. That’s called the Isthmus of Tuantepak. That’s where the Olmec are.
Then you’ve got the Maya to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the
people called the Zapotecs, they’re rising up. And then you have the Valley of Mexico,
which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting
with each other. Can we just also draw some more lines? Yeah, sure. So what is Mesoamerica and
what is South America? And what you just said to Olmecs and the Maya, can we just linger on the
geography that we’re talking about here in the, what is this, like 1000 BC? Yeah, the time period
we’re talking about where the Olmec are there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I’d say it
starts about 1800 BCE and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone. And a whole new wave of civilization and
population increase happened. 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. They 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.
So 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 and the coast to the Pacific there. That’s Andean civilization.
So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region?
Not that archaeology can prove, but it’s almost certain that they interact with each other.
Number one, it’s just, you know, it’s biased to think that these people couldn’t travel as widely
as people on the other side of the planet did. But there’s all sorts of hints like that first
ceramics I was talking about that the Maya made. They show up strangely sophisticated
technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for a thousand years before.
So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South
America to the Maya. Did the Maya get seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait?
Or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America,
were they the ancestors of the Maya? Like, how did the migration happen here? Do we understand?
We’re still piecing it together. I don’t think, you know, I’d be lying if I told you I had the
answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. 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, you know, just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.
You’re joking, but, you know, there could be something to that.
I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, the pygmies are small and the people on the
plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small.
There’s 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, you know, typical old Mexico. I 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 stature who did it. It’s so cool that you can date the charcoal.
And it’s so cool that 10,000 years ago there 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 in a cave, they found
a woman they named Naia now. And she’s like 12,000 years old. So the best guess, maybe that you
have is it goes across the Bering Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of
cool ideas in the Amazon and start drifting back up into Mesoamerica. It was kind of a
co-evolution. The technology of ceramics, I think, got there through an interaction with.
See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn’t really have religion, didn’t have as a vibrant
religious set of ideas and they borrowed it from the Olmec. I’ve been doing a deep dive on this for
this Olmec course that I just did. And it really does seem like these other cultures that have
jade and hematite and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They 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 Deity show up there?
No, the Fang Deities 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 deity
does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.
So the Maya, the Olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions. What was their…
I’d love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I’m curious about,
what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos?
That’s a question I’ve spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as
proof of the cyclical nature of life. And certainly they saw like every ancient group did, like are
those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the Maya especially looked at it
with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night.
And if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They’re just this
blanket. They’re like this curtain behind me. They’re the stage upon which some very important
players are dancing. And that’s the moon, the sun, and the planets. There’s five planets we
can see visibly. So they started watching like, why are just those seven moving differently than
the rest? And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The 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 morning star.
That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic
with like Chichen Itza being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like if you watched Venus
day after day, it goes slowly up every day. And then when it hits its highest point as morning
star 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. Right. So this is fascinating. They just had
at the foundation a sense that life existence at the various timescales is cyclical.
That’s the starting point. And then you just look out there and if you’re extremely precise,
which is fascinating how precise they were, you can just measure the 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 Kipu, but it’s so different than
our writing. We’re still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there’s math there too.
But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next
generation who would then do it more and do it more. That’s how they figured out kind of the holy
grail of ancient astronomy, how good were they, was whether they could see the procession of the
equinoxes. The fact that we’re just barely wobbling and there’s a 26,000 year period where the stars
as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It’s 26,000 years. But the Maya were
able to figure out, wait, it’s moving one degree every 72 years and did a calculation based on
on where it should be in the ancient past. And they’re using constellations. They’re showing
us they know by saying like, this planet’s in this constellation right now. And 33,000 years ago,
it would be in this constellation. It’s just fascinating that they were able to figure this
out. I would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community.
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. And so I hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to
recognize the achievements in a different way. Yeah. I mean, unquestionably incredible scientific
work in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the sophisticated aspects
of the Mayan calendar that they’ve developed? I know you’ve got another five hours.
Yes, go. No, I’m kidding. 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. So can you speak to the three components here as I’m reading
the Tsoil Keen, the Hob and the Long Count? What are these fascinating components of the calendar?
It’s neat how obsessed they were. 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 interlocked into each other,
like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tsoil Keen’s
their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that
are living their lives based on a 260-day count, no weeks, no months. It’s just 13 numbers combined
with 20-day names for a total of 260 days, and then it goes again. Everybody in the Highlands
knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality,
and the kind of jobs that they’re supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit
and what’s supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the mom, the
grandmother, grandfather spirits, and they talk to each one of those days, and they pray to them.
There’s now an association of some 8,000 people that are called aki that are day keepers who are
keeping the days, and they’re also like community psychologists almost. People come to them and
say, “My life is mixed up. What’s wrong here? Well, let’s ask the mom. Okay, well, it looks
like you’re not doing this or that, or you’re an accountant. You’re not supposed to be an
accountant. You’re supposed to be a midwife. What are you doing? You’re living your life wrong.
You’re a key, but you need to start being a key person.
They take extremely seriously the day in which you’re born, what that means, the spirit that
embodies that day. Right. I’m a key. I’m 13-key, and it’s funny how accurate a lot of them are.
Mine is basically, 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, if you structure society where this calendar is truly sacred,
then it kind of like you manifest a lot of the, the spirit does manifest itself in the life of
the people that was 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.
Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it? From most Maya agree with this today,
and 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 kid’s 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. What’s the first cycle that we actually go through
as humans? And they picked this nine month thing. It’s, it really is our cycle and no other culture
on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
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 260 one. They say, well, we need a solar
one too. Let’s just keep counting this another 105 days and we’ll get to 365.
Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same, got it, got it, got it, got 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.
In fact, it’s even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight
math from a thousand years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently
than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of eastern Guatemala. They write me
nasty emails saying, I don’t know what time the year is, but their relatives changed it in the
1950s because their agricultural cycle was so far off, they moved it 60 days back to make it in the
spring again. But it drifts, which is strange because it’s not a very good thing for the
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.
Our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle. But it’s weird in that its estimation of the year
in the in the long count system is only 360 days. So it’s miserably off a solar year.
They count in base 20. So they count like we count in tens, we’re decimal. They count in base
20, bejesimal. And so it should be, you know, there’s ones, there’s 20s, there’s 400s, there’s
8,000s, there’s 160,000s. It’s up, it goes just like our tens, 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 in our reckoning.
So it’s, it’s mysterious that it’s, why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days?
That’s, you know, that doesn’t follow any astronomy that doesn’t, that’s not the human cycle.
Yeah, but they’re, I mean, it’s interesting that they build up towards
thinking about very long periods of time, like Bactunes is 144,000 days.
Right. Or a Bactoon is 400 of the long counts years. So it’s kind of like our millennium.
You know, we think it’s a big deal when we hit a millennium or a century. That’s,
they have a 20 year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a cartoon,
and then they have the 400 Bactoon, which is the big one. That’s like their millennium.
And 13 of those Bactunes occurred in the creation before us. They also think that we were in,
that the world has had multiple creations. They’re not alone in that. There’s lots of
ancient civilizations who say that, but we’re technically in the fourth creation. And they’re,
they have a creation story called the Popol Vu. And the Popol Vu is clear as day that
the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the hero twins. And the fourth
creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the long count.
And we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened. The fourth creation started on
August 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 Bactoon of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 Bactunes
long. Right. So, and this would be the fourth creation, the calendar starts fourth creation.
But if you do the math going from 3,114 BC and count 13 Bactunes forward, you get to 2012.
And hence the, the very popular notion that 2012, whenever that was December, December 21st,
2012 will be the end of the world. 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, like Garrett Morris and Saturday
Night Live, the, the, the apocalypse was very, very good to me. I mean, but that, that is pretty
interesting. So that’s, that, that would be, so technically would be in the, what, in the fifth.
Yeah. Technically, we’d be in the fifth. Though my argument was that actually,
if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never say anything
like that. In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that, that the fourth creation does
continue farther on, that, that Bactune place should have 20, 20 Bactunes in it, like their
counting system would dictate, not 13. And there’s, there’s a place in, in Palenque. There’s a place
in the Dresden Codex and one other place I’m forgetting that, that I’ll talk about time after
2012. So how does that happen? It’s a conflict. Is there supposed to be an overlap of the,
of the, of the, so it’s like 13 is the core of it and it’s 20 long? They, they love the number 13.
It’s all over the place. It’s a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is, is not
very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end
of the third, 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 Bactune cycle should be
13. And there are certain texts that, that go way forward in time or way
backward in time. And whenever they want to do that, there, there are higher increments than just
the Bactune. Above that, there’s the Pictune, then there’s the Calabatune, then there’s Alawatune,
and it goes on and on. And these are like, you know, 160,000 years, huge increments of time.
Whenever they want to do that and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting
13s in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they’re saying
is they’re making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time. That’s, that’s
what I think they’re, they’re telling us in those texts that time goes on forever, magically.
But they’re, they still had a conception that it didn’t go on forever before, right? That there was
other civilizations that came before in there. And this is the fourth creation.
This is the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody. The 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, but flawed in some other way. And then we’re finally made of,
of the blood of the gods and corn. We’re made out of corn. So we’re, we’re perfect. And as the,
as it explains to us, the, the Popal Voodoo does, we got it right this time. There, there is, there,
there’s no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration.
Well, one of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we 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, our mathematical
logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation is in, or also be 13.
It’s in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They’re
different time periods. Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Do they have
some kind of long multi-generational memory of prior civilizations?
It may have had some echo in the, the flood myths.
Right. It’s the same. It’s the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time.
There’s a lot of different opinions about it. And, you know, they’re like, if they were all 13,
if we have five creations, like the Aztecs said, and they were all 13,
they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional
cycle. So some people are like, they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the
equinoxes. And I mean, I don’t believe that one, but that one sure sounds good. Doesn’t it? That’s,
that’s going to get a lot of internet hits. And one of the things I do, obviously,
wonder 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, it’s, it sees filling back up.
And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that, that story.
Everybody knows that everybody’s nice coastal village went underwater and they had to,
they had to seek higher ground. And then just like people like talking about the weather,
everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up. And
then, uh, that, that myth carried. Why do we live here, grandpa? Well, we used to live over there,
but then the water came. And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea.
It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, you know,
there’s a lot of things I don’t have a reasonable explanation for, but the, uh,
but the flood myth is almost certainly the, the rise in sea level.
So the, this idea that every day represents, uh, that carries a spirit, uh, you know,
there’s modern day astrology. You know, most people kind of consider astrology this, um,
maybe a bit unscientific woo woo type of, um, uh, set of beliefs. But do you think there’s
some wisdom that astrology carries from your scholarship of the Maya calendar? Do you think,
if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there’s some wisdom there?
I don’t know. You know, that I have a woo woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff,
but I don’t think as a scientist, it makes a, I cannot come up with a
biological scientific reason why that would be true. And, you know, when you look at it objectively,
I mean, really is everybody born with the sign Scorpio, uh, a moody person. That’s just,
that’s just objectively not true. Um, but it is funny how oftentimes these, these Maya, uh,
horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who
surveyed like 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, that’s fascinating. At least that’s, that’s fun. But no, I’m, I think I’m too much of
a scientist to believe that I just don’t have a, any foundation in science that would allow us to
believe that the, uh, the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.
I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that, uh, what I do like is the, uh,
inbuilt humility to that worldview, uh, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual
world, but a world that we don’t understand, quite understand. And then you can wonder about
what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you construct all kinds of systems to
try to interpret that. And then there is where the human hubris can come in and you know, uh,
but it’s good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.
I do love the mysteries of the world. And I, I would, I would love to find an ancient civilization,
but I don’t, I don’t want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they’re one of the things
that make world life worth living. That’s true. That’s true. Uh, you mentioned the, uh, 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 it, I had the honor of being, uh, the student of, uh,
Linda Shealy right here at the university of Texas at Austin. She got the group together
who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best and, and loved
every minute of it. I miss Linda. Can you speak to that code actually? The hieroglyphic code and
what takes to break it? Oh boy. I mean, what a, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone.
We had a page out of Diego DeLanda’s book, a priest who was converting the Maya in Yucatan,
asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced
they had 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, ah, here,
right a bae here, right a say here. And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told
him to write. They were actually syllables. They were vowel, consonant combinations. They weren’t an
alphabet, but that turned into our Rosetta Stone of sorts. The big key is that the Maya still speak
that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya.
Now there’s, there’s where I get confused. That we’ve got a single writing system that is
intelligible. We’ve broken the code. So we know that it’s basically the same writing system from
the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador. But we have 33 Maya languages today
that are mutually unintelligible. And we, we backwards project the language of what they
spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called choulti, which is a combination of chorti
and choulti 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 culture, acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population?
How 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 they’re distinct languages,
even though there’s a common writing system? There must have been a way that multiple languages
understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin, 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
world. But we don’t really know and there’s not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it’s
possible to have that. Right. But we did realize it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri
Konorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the
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. And he looked at Yucatec
language that they’re speaking today and he applied it to the symbol system. And he knew that there
were certain sounds. He used Landa’s alphabet and he found there was the his two key examples were
a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it. And the
dog, a dog in Yucatec is tsul. So he saw two symbols and he said this one’s probably tsul
and this one’s ul and then the turkey was kuts. So it would be ku ending in tsul. And he showed how,
look, this is tsuts, this is tsul, those two things that should be tsul are the same symbol.
And that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we’re still working on today.
That’s fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. Like how do you even figure that
out? And there’s probably still, are you aware of any written languages that haven’t been decoded
yet? Yeah, 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 harappan. Harappan, for a long time we used to say there were five independent scripts
on the planet. And those were Chinese cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian Maya, and then
harappan, which is from Northern India. That’s the only one that we’ve never cracked. And now all the
epigraphers, the people that’s the term for epigraphy is translating these languages.
They’re all ganging up on harappan 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
we just would explain why it’s so different. 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 Americas. It’s the kipu. The Inca had the kipu, this knotted string records, but it was
definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know lots. I can do the math kipus
and figure out what they’re totalling and things. Yeah, there’s a kipu right there.
Kipu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of
cultures in the region of India and South America. A kipu usually consists of cotton or
carbon fiber strings. There’s a set of strings and they’re supposed to be saying something.
There’s one long string that the little ones dangle off of. Each one of the dangling strings
have sets of knots on them. Some of them are mathematical kipus. Those, we can just do the
math. We can prove that it’s math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire
libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the
libraries would just, they’d say, pull that one down. Read that one to me. He’d pull it out and
just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. It was definitely writing,
but in the 1570s, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called
kipu kamyaks gathered up, had them read all of their kipus and transcribed them into Spanish books
and then had the kipus burned and those people murdered. Well, there you go.
And so we can’t break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language,
though it wasn’t written. It was weaved or knotted. And there’s still some kipus available that could
be there. I think now we’ve just crossed the 1000 mark. So we have a thousand kipus. There’s
enough to break the code. And I think this generation might be the one that does it.
It’s sad that so few have survived. A thousand is good, but it’s…
But see, Peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology. There’s so much out there.
There was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in
Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community
of 3,000 people, all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into
Christianity. And he had the communities, kipu kamyaks, not kipus for each person that told them
that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their
kipu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3,000 of the same kipu made and handed out to this
community. If we find that community and find it cemetery, there is a rosetta stone.
You know, it is probably the case that there’s somebody in Peru and maybe a large community
that knows this language, that understands, and you just have to show up and ask them.
And it’s like, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, 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 a parent 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 llama herders who keep a string in their pocket, and they’ve got the
knots equaling how many llamas 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 kipus, but they’re using them to affect as a record.
Is it possible through archaeology to know what the social organization of the Maya was?
Maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader,
different roles, priests, or 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
connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that’s lived in the underworld.
It also told us things about hierarchy, like that there were councils of lords underneath
the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods and that there were
revolving positions of authority. The site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent
years in the jungle there, Palenque, had lords 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 Chak Soots, who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called
the Kal Monab. And then by the time he carves this other panel, there’s another guy in the position
of Kak Ahau, which was the Fire Lord. And so he had got 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. 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 Mayapon.
But it has what is called the League of Mayapon. And it has a council of representatives from the
communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It is a Maya democracy
that happens. The individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. They each family has their own
council house at Mayapon, though they live back at their place. It’s kind of like a Maya Congress.
Representative democracy. It really was. I mean, and this happens in, I guess,
1250 AD that this Maya democracy happens. And we know the names of them. We know the families.
And of course, they were humans. So eventually, they screwed it all up. One family murdered another
family and the whole 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. You mentioned different periods in the Maya,
the classic, the post-classic, the pre-classic, the archaic. Can you just speak to that? So
archaic is before there was really a civilization. Yeah, archaic is pretty much when everybody’s
hunter-gatherers. So the classic period was the Golden Age. And then the pre-classic is the
interesting time that we were talking about. And the post-classic is when the democracy came about.
Well, midway through it, reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils.
So yeah, we have pre-classic is like the origins of civilization. They’re starting to build cities,
they’re starting to create their calendar, they’re starting to create these wonderful works of art.
And the classic period, if you look at 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. And 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 Maya’s dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below,
and he’s got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly,
but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and can act as liaisons.
So that’s the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we say 250
to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it’s interesting that it’s actually
specifically the ninth Bakhtun of their history. The ninth Bakhtun begins in like 426, and it ends
in like 829. So it’s a 400 year period of time, and before that there were no kings, and after that
there really aren’t kings. They’re heads of councils. So 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.
Strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together. But eventually,
like happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden there’s this
unwieldy, huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else, and 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. It collapsed. What do you
think explains that? What happened? I think it’s a failing of archaeology to properly see what was
happening. I think that most of those cities, populations, moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers
out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses, and all archaeology’s
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 plain as day. We know when a city was attacked
and burned. Mostly that didn’t happen. People moved and migrated, and it seems like right there
around, like between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top, 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. The word Itza is actually a word describing the people
who lived around Lake P-10 Itza in northern Guatemala. All of the Maya are super clear about
that, that the Itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. The
elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.
So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a 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 archaeologically is that every one of
the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular, and we think that they pushed the limits
of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end
of the classic period that people are seasonally starving. I remember really stark evidence in
Copan Honduras. Copan was this beautiful city, lineage of 17 kings. But the last kings and the
last elite burials that we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They
get this thing when you’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. Some of them were allied. Some of them were enemies. There was a huge
civil war that settled out about the end of the classic period. So if it was Europe, you know,
the victors would have taken over. The losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went.
But when they abandoned these cities that were independent still, they all left,
both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn’t be just as simple as spoils
go to the victor. It’s such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the
Copan Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to
note that that ninth period, that ninth 400-year period ends right then. And I think a lot of
people, you know, I can’t prove it archaeologically, but I think a lot of people said we’re coming to
the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we’re doing. When you talk
to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya say, you know,
what happens at the end of a big cycle here? They say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation,
that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles, that change is coming,
we can either be part of it or we can get steamrolled by it. The Aztecs did this neat thing
called the New Fire Ceremony. Every 52 years, which was the biggest their calendar would go,
they’d burn down perfectly good temples and they’d burn down their houses sometimes and they would
just, everybody in society would perform this, what they called 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 Bakhtun that it was time to renew the world. I think this theory makes sense because
they really internalized the calendar. I mean, it was a really big part of their culture,
the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization. That’s what I think. I think that 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? Where did these people come from? At what time and how?
You know, almost every one of the cultures we’re talking about now, we have two different versions
of the answer to that question. We have the archaeology version and we have the Aztecs themselves.
The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well
to the north called Aslan and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero’s journey
where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter 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 Chiquimostac and that all the
people who spoke the language Nahuatl came from the cave and most of them went early to the Valley
of Mexico and in the Aztecs story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to
come in and but then they show up late game and they become mercenaries. They just start working
for communities in the Valley of Mexico and this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before
Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico and they make themselves this indispensable
group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Texcoco
which is in the middle of, which is now Mexico City, it’s all dried up but those guys were
too civilized to fight with each other but they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff.
So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico.
The dirty stuff, they’re the muscle. Yeah, they’d go in and they’d kill whoever you
wanted killed and now you’re the king of this area. So one of these kings that they were working for
really liked them and decided I’m 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 but then one of their priests say we’re
going to walk around the lake and my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus
with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital and they see that but it’s out on
an island in the lake and he said well I don’t know, that’s the place. So they build up an island,
they go to that island and then they just start piling up lake mug until they make a whole city
there in the middle of the island. They make or the lake, they make an island city and all of this
occurs in about a hundred years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tinochtitlan as they
called it is really established and 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. Those guys agreed to shut
up and let the Aztecs run the show and then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down
into the Maya area. Everywhere they go they rename everybody’s towns and make them pay tribute.
Pretty short 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 Attila
the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable
and too civilized and the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know,
we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us and if you work for us you’ll be just fine.
They’d go to every town they’d go to. The first thing they do is they’d show up with a bunch of
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 and then soon after the Poch Teca were there
would come the military with the reconnaissance. So the Aztec had a huge warrior class, as you’re
saying. So what was there? Can you linger on their whole relationship with war and violence?
They worshipped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templomaior. It had two temples up on top.
One was Tutlalak, the rain god, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was
Weesila Poshli. He was, that translates, “the hummingbird on the left.” But he’s the war god.
I love that he’s a hummingbird. Maybe, you know, he’s fast and he comes from the magical side or
something. But 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 were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess,
you know, probably an analogy between like the Navy and the Air Force. You know, they had a good
natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic
warriors dressed up in all of their finery. And they would 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 a parallel to what happened in Europe. You know, the famous Henry V moment
in Agincourt, where, you know, his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France’s aristocracy with
the longbow. Like up until that moment, Europe had a very wars 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, Mesoamerica really
didn’t have huge standing armies. But the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people.
They didn’t actually have to use it a lot. It was very, it was used to great effect in the,
in the Valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mesoamerica, it was mostly the fear factor.
But there also seemed to be, you know, a celebration of violence. I think you said
that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec. Maybe like the Roman Empire, was it,
they just had maybe a different relationship with what violence where that stood in the purpose
of life, purpose of existence? Is that fair to say? I would hypothesize so. I 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, when I said that statement, I,
what I, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice
and, you know, ripping people’s hearts out. This, they had this, this just, you know, grotesque,
violent bent. But in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry
and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted
also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen
that had come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. They’re all of the
causeways leading to the Aztec capital had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum
and they had an aquarium and a zoo and they had an opera and they had a ballet.
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 that we 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 an auto
sacrifice we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other
people should die. It was a self-sacrifice thing. Can you speak to the sacrifice a bit more animal
sacrifice, human sacrifice? What 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. 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 Mesuel
America, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods.
And the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody. They did
it so much and so successfully that they didn’t have any enemies nearby. So they decided this one
poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlashkolons, 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 Tlashkolons and haul them back for a sacrifice. Cortes 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,
Cortes took over the Aztec world.” It was Cortes in 20,000 super pissed off Tlashkolons.
And they actually sacrificed so there would be these ritual
battles or is it chopping off people’s heads? Is there some interesting rituals around the
sacrifice? It’s mostly hard extraction. Sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple
so everybody can see it. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their
rib cage would come out and they’d use like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really just
like tried and true way to do it. They’d stab it in in a certain place close and then they’d push
down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage and they just so they just make a place
where they could just rip it right out with their hand. Yeah, with their hand, but they were really
just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the
ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just while the person
was alive. Yep, while the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea like there was a horrible
drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley and they came to this conclusion that
it’s because we haven’t been killing enough people. Right. We’ve got to bump this up and then when they
did and they decided they really took it out on the Tlashkolons, 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, but then it was just kind of
the thing to do when 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 trekked into eating human
like, “Hey, you liking dinner?” That was a human. So the idea was it 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 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. Yeah. 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 bought taste for the Aztec.
Yeah. Boy. All right. They really did. They really did. In fact, that’s what caused the,
have you heard of the Noche 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 them into being for him, which he does. But Pedro Alvarado is 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 close the doors and he murders everyone in the party,
women, children. Nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone. And that’s what spazes the
Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma, who was their captive, and then try to murder all of
them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado’s fault for freaking out about eating humans. Just a little
practical joke. Yeah, it was just they thought it was funny. He did not. That’s fascinating. I didn’t
realize. So I kind of assumed that some level of cannibalism would have to do with, you know,
eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this. In certain, like a, you
know, deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they just liked eating humans.
It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like,
you guys could either send us, you know, a number of cats all feathers every month,
or we could eat you. So that’s psychological warfare and actual warfare. It worked. And that’s
how they spread. And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and
messed everything up. They 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? 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. They 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 they started taking over,
what they did is they empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get
the resources, but everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca empire and they created
this incredible Mita system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they
could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of let’s say 5,000 people. The Inca would
roll up with an army of 100, 200,000 people and say, you know, would you guys like to be part of
the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire? And if your mayor here
agrees, then he can have a town. He can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month,
a big work crew would show up and they’d start building agricultural terraces and storage units.
And every month with the agricultural access, they would have big parties and everybody would eat.
So people lived well in the Inca empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be
part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.
So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was like the center of it.
Cusco in their language, Quechua, it means naval or belly button. And it’s up in the mountains.
But there’s four quarters that they called their empire Tewantinsuyu, the land of four quarters.
And the center of those four quarters was Cusco.
It sprung to life in like 1200 ADC. Yeah, we backwards project what it was. But it was probably
mid 1200s when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler came in. But it was the, I think it’s the
ninth one is Pachacute, who really started being an empire builder.
And part of that, I mean, what really defined the empire? As 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
Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part.
They’d send the Kipu Kumayak, the guys who would weave the, or not the Kipus,
as accountants. And they would go through and say, what everybody did, okay, you’re a good farmer,
you’re going to farm, you are a good weaver, you’re going to weave, all the men here are going to take
a turn at being part of the army. And they sent independent Kipu Kumayaks to that every community
had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other. And they all had to
independently send their Kipus back to Cusco. And if there were accounting discrepancies,
they were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.
So there’s like a super sophisticated record keeping system.
Yeah. And that was the 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.
Yeah, they couldn’t. At the end, they were at least 10 million people. And there was just no
way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system.
If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins?
Inca.
Inca.
I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles.
And they had that essential hearts and minds.
There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire.
For some reason, everything was owned communally except the llamas. The llamas were the kings.
And so that was one thing that like some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas,
but you 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.” Really upset people on an emotional level.
Well, I mean, so llamas are got domesticated at some point. Probably early on.
I don’t even know when, but early on.
We have rock art that progresses to make it seem like a progression from people depicted hunting
them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period,
at least, that they became friends. Yeah, but if you roll in and you own them, that’s…
Yeah, that pissed everybody off. For some reason, the Inca owned everybody’s llama instantly.
And he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day,
just sent to Cusco. They’d also take their mummies. That was a weird thing.
Everybody mourns they’re dead, but the Inca just ceased to accept it.
They would just… The mummies were still there. “Okay, he’s dead, but look,
he’s still got clothes. He’s at the party. Let’s put a beer in front of him.”
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 Cusco.” But they would physically bring those mummies to
Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their belief system.
I mean, I can see how that would piss people off, but it’s also a pretty powerful way to
say the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect, are now in the capital.
They’ve been elevated. We didn’t steal them. We have given them a new place of honor.
And you’re welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where
everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.
And which of the civilizations mummified people? Is it…
The Incas for sure mummified people. And even did some of that kind of
Egyptian-esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They’d put straw inside the cavity and
mummify them. But the Maya didn’t do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose, would flood tombs
with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster. And then they’d get back in there.
It was jungly, so I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in
there to get the bones. They’d open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red
cinnabar. The one that I was in in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different
times. And the last couple of times, they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it
back in, articulated on the skeleton. But they didn’t mummify. They, on purpose, would 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. And they’d pull the bones out occasionally
and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.
So there’s still a deep connection to the ancestors, through the physical manifestation
of the ancestors then. Yeah. Whether mummified or bone.
And to this day, if you do an excavation here in the United States,
Native American people don’t like it. They don’t like their graves, which is fine enough.
I wouldn’t want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it. They love it.
Every Maya person, if we find a grave, they’re like, “Yeah, look at that bone. It’s cool. Can I touch?”
Yeah, great. They’re not spooked about it at all. They think it’s exciting. I one time,
I helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get an 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, “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 dig up your dog.” And they were like, “But the kids really want to help you.” So their
kids came out. And this was like their puppy. And it died less than a year ago when we got
to it. One of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, “Wacy-sity-dose, little booty bones.
Yay.” What a weird attitude. That’s your dead dog there. But 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.
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. Halloween’s this creepy thing where they’re all monsters. But Day of
the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie
Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar. And we talk
about who they were and how they lived. And we put things on the altar that mattered in their life.
And we remember them on that day. And it turned something that was a weird “eat too much candy”
and “wear a monster mask” thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.
I have to ask about the giant stones that Inka has been able to somehow move and fit together
perfectly. Do you understand, is it understood how they were able to do that so well?
No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot
large weights. There’s a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the U.S.
who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota single-handedly, showing how
you can move big stones. So I think Wally’s already figured out how to move them. It’s the
perfectly fit, so carefully fit together that you couldn’t even put a dime in between the stones.
That’s the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archaeological 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. There is no
way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammer stone. 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 Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500 to
1,000-year-old walls are still there. And I see things like the crystals in the andesite
are almost stitched together along the seams. The andesite around it is melted and the crystals
haven’t. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. It’s just
melted. Somebody 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 these end of my archaeological career
chapters. I’m either going to prove myself wrong or prove it. But I think they used acids. My dad’s
a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there’s no way there’s no naturally occurring acids.
But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad. I don’t know
if you ever saw that show. But there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body
and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid
is so fascinating. It won’t go through plastic and you can also bring it in inert parts and then
combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the andes. And they
also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid.
You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it’s hydrofluoric acid. And that will burn
through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn’t care
whether, you know, servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these
together. And I think they’re fused together. I asked the city of Cusco 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 Quechua authorities in a place called Oleantaytambo.
And maybe I can convince them. But right now, they just think I’m a weird-ass 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 and see if there’s some kind of trace. Chemists I’m working with
say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these that a core sample right along the seam,
they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of
hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, “No, I mean,
we already know that’s true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some rocks.” But it would happen.
And that’s just chemistry. 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’d be fascinating if true. And I hope you do show
that it’s true or follow either one. I’ll try to disprove it. Disprove it, yeah. I wonder if we
discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do. Because it just feels like
if a large number of humans are 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 I just, when we think about like Stonehenger, some very challenging
architectural construction, we don’t think about a large number of humans working together.
Well, you know, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number
of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another. Right.
One of my favorite quotes is, and I’m probably going to misquote it here, but I think it’s Margaret
Mead who said, “Never underestimate the power of small groups working together.” And the truth is
that those are the only people that have ever changed the world. That small, dedicated groups of
people are what change the world. Yeah. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their
vision. Yeah. Yeah. I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across time.
And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills
that at least I personally do not. You know, I’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 was a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time.
So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early humans in North America?
Well, we go through that Paleo-Indian and Archaic period for thousands of years. You know, as we
started this conversation, probably 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 what we call the American Southwest now,
the Four Corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the Pueblo people who are
still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people. So we’ve got these two clusters that the very first
major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It’s in Northern Louisiana. People
think I’m crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in Northern Louisiana, a big one
at a site called Poverty Point that is 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. We 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 Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders. But what
they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone.
That’s 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. There were kings that lived up there.
There’s the biggest of the Mississippian cities. It’s 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, a thriving metropolis. And we in America
have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia
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 5,000 to 10,000 people each.
Were they their own thing, or was 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 a
neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of countries, I think. 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. I’m not talking about
just archaeology. We find them in archaeology now. But Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and
went for three years from—he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana.
And he’s the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years, he went through
city after city after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases.
But I mean, the documentation’s clearly there. He met collectively millions of people in a very
sophisticated and uniform civilization. So it was disease and stealing of resources,
but was there like explicit murdering going on? Unfortunately, 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. He was really—he was a brutal man.
So 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 Columbian
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 had wave after wave and
kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things. But it didn’t actually go away. It just couldn’t
spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a
sudden, these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years,
there were people who like had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But
the numbers, you know, it’s a shameful part of history. And it wasn’t something that Europe
perpetrated on them. The medical science at that time was still the four humors theory
that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. And we did things like,
well, you’ve got to bleed him. He’ll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease
was. But the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now
saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead. And that the the number of people has
increased as well. As far as the our estimates, we’re thinking it’s somewhere around 150 million
people. And 90% of them died. And with them all their knowledge, just I mean, imagine the moment
where, you know, who dies when things get bad, it’s the young and the old. So all the knowledge
keepers die suddenly. The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely
demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only
way out of it is to to accept this new Christianity. But they, you know, they don’t have bring kids
into this world where everybody’s dying. And even if they do, they can’t teach them what the old
people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn’t finish the transmission.
So in a in a single terrible moment in human history, you know, the generation loses all
their knowledge. So a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out.
But with that also just the the wisdom of the entire civilizations.
So much of what they knew was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs
and that we’ve learned a lot from that. Yeah, but not a significant integration of that wisdom into.
So it wasn’t when the Europeans came, it wasn’t like the cultures were integrated. It was
a story of domination. In North America, there’s a new term in the literature that I like,
we call it the the Mississippian Shatter Zone, that Mississippian civilization was millions of
people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this
Shatter Zone where we have ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere
else on a reservation far away. And, you know, that I’m just about to talk to a Cherokee man who
listened to some of the things I had to say and says all those Ho-Chunk things you were saying
from that Ho-Chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I can I talk
to you by phone and tell you about these things? So we’ve got the Shatter Zone where, you know,
we’re going to try to put the piece, the puzzle back together, especially in terms of
Mississippian religion. I really think we’re making headway in this generation and it’s exciting to
be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together.
Just as 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 why do you think they didn’t expand and colonize?
Because they got their ass kicked. It’s the truth. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here.
There’s a there’s a great site in Nova Scotia called Lenzo Meadows, which definitely has what’s
left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Erick 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 Dorset.
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.”
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, Leif 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, you know,
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.
But they were all very tough people.
When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over 100 million people
that were killed, do you see that as 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, you know, that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it.
There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. 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. That’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, “I’m baptizing everyone.
I baptize 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.
Yeah. 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 hard to know what to do with like
black death. It’s, I mean, infections, they don’t operate on normal human terms, right?
They just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas. All right. Just my style.
I mean, we didn’t really talk about how life originated on earth or 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
intelligent civilizations from outside of earth, aliens, ever visited?
You had me right until the ever visited thing. That one I’m not entirely sure about. I’m not
sure whether we have any. We certainly have no archaeological proof that I would 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. And, you know, take that for what it is. But the guy who
we respect on many other levels also said that. So that’s interesting. But in terms of, you know,
aliens visiting us, I don’t know. 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, do you have
anything else that you want to say? And I said, well, you know, y’all’s premise is that aliens came
down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of, you know, science and medicine,
engineering, all these things. Today, we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down.
But now all they’re doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks. Like, whatever we did,
we superpissed them off, apparently. The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly.
It’s an interesting thought you’ve mentioned. What archaeologically would you have to see
to be like, this might be an alien? A technology that doesn’t belong there,
first and foremost. I mean, you know, we got to, if we just run with the premise that somebody
was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here,
that was almost certainly mechanical. Now, you know, I love the aliens thing where, you know,
biomechanical is something that certainly could be. And that would, you know, 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, you know, 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. Right. 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. Aliens come from across the
universe to meet humans. And the thing they tell them is how to move rocks. Are you fucking
kidding me? I mean, you know, like, give them, give them antibiotics or a combustion engine
or something. You’re going to, they should, they came across the universe and they showed
them how to move big rocks. I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. That just doesn’t make any sense.
What do you think Earth will look like 10,000 years from now?
That’s an interesting question. I think it will be a lot more automated or it’ll be a
smoldering pile. I mean, there is a possibility we could end ourselves. There’s always that
possibility that we’ve really opened Pandora’s Box in some regards. I 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,
we have that capacity. That’s scary. That’s a possible future for us. But I’m an optimist.
I, you know, I’d like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make
my job better. But a thousand, 10,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and
becoming more advanced rapidly. And the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more.
So that, that’s the part that frightens me actually. I don’t know, does that frighten you?
Yes, terrifying. You know, I 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,
and the, the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. In almost any
biological system that has that fast a change over that little a time, you would, any, any other
thing you’d describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change,
it’s a crisis. From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human
ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up
with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing, innovate and create a lot of
awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering. But on the whole, on average, make a
better world. But yeah, if it, you know, like with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might
actually lead to the death of everybody. I guess there’s always that, that chance.
But I am an optimist. I, you know, I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said,
I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more
innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans
over the last thousands of years have been about, you know, we didn’t, we didn’t change the world
when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Mother necessity is the mother of
invention. And I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real
and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to, I’m going to answer a question
that you didn’t even ask me. I think we’re wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this.
We’re delusional. I’m all for electric cars and, you know, being good stewards of the environment.
But we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what’s about to happen. We’re spending
too much time pretending, you know, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric
cars will be okay. That’s bullshit. That’s not going to happen. We need to start making technologies
that desalinize water, that, you know, a host of things that, uh, that we need to use our
technological past capacity to accept it and adapt instead of Pollyanna thinking we can
make it go away. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of accept that the world will change and 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 survive, thrive. Again, we’re pretty
innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens, or we just leave this planet,
what, uh, what do you think would be found by a four mentioned alien civilizations when they visit
the anthropologists, the grad student anthropologists that visit earth and study? How much of what we
now have and love and think of as human civilization will be lost, do you think?
Well, you know, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you know,
you didn’t put a time element in there, but I would say that, you know, everything that can
perish will and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn’t perish.
So we’ll have, you know, buildings, plaques, but they won’t have any books. They won’t have any,
you know, billboards. They’ll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a,
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. And a thousand years
from now, if I was an archaeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded
by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know, Lewis and
Clark stayed one night here, but it’s just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought
about your town based on what preserved. 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 DC was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans,
because that’s what all the architecture is. Yeah. And would they be able to reconstruct
the important empires, the 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 like what
we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most like mainstream archaeology?
Just like a suspicion. What could we get completely wrong?
Well, one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civilization, like an obviously gigantic
civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago.
There’s certainly that. There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under
the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things. And everybody knew they
existed and everybody interacted with them. I think it’s our estimation of their motivations
that were probably most wrong on. My teacher, Shealy, a long time ago said, I’ve come up with
all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff. And she looked at me and she said,
“If you don’t stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put yourself in
the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it.” Which I’ve always taken
to heart. I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural
assumptions, try to think like they would think is the best I could. And it’s very different.
I mean, the Maya are cyclical. The whole sacrifice was so obsessed with that. But
that wasn’t a steer actual sacrifice on their part. They weren’t just, “Hey, let’s all get
together and kill that guy that’s pissing us off.” I mean, they were giving the best of them.
It was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bona fide sacrifice on their part,
a loss. Plus, the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with it.
I tell you, that one, I’m going to unweave that one one of these days.
One of these days. Now, that puppy appeared on Pottery. All over Pottery. He’s everywhere.
I got to write this book. This next year is the year I’m going to write my Fang Deity book.
And I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy. The mystery solved. I mean,
it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don’t know. I mean, again, humor. You don’t
know what the nature of their humor or what their jokes are. Oh, that’s a neat one too.
Then that’s so human. I’ll tell you a little side story here that when I worked with the Maya people
in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day.
And they would talk to each other in their own language. It was Celtal was the group I was working
with. But I noticed after a while, they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes and they would
laugh at jokes. But then they would also, one of them would say something and the other ones would
go, “Hoo-hoo.” And I eventually asked, “What is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo-hoo noise?”
And they 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, wit. And I think about that when I’m a
hieroglyphic translator. Like, here’s a beautiful thing that’s going to be like a poem or a
political statement. Like, and I’m just ploddingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means.
There’s probably double triple entendres all through this text. And the real meaning is the
subtext. And I’m, you know, I’m thinking they’re talking about corn and they’re talking about the
nature of life. Yeah, it could be satire. It could be, you know, as it was in the Soviet Union,
when there’s a dictator, maybe there’s overpowering king, you’re not allowed to actually speak.
You have to hide the thing you’re actually trying to say in the subtext. So, and all of that.
There was a funny Maya ceramic that had the ceramics are neat because they don’t,
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 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.
And 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 the blanket mapping it.
That’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 it will occur, but it’s going to happen because it was the jungle.
So in the jungle, what’s the process like? What do you have to do to map it?
Well, it was tricky too, because it was also a national forest. So the forestry department
didn’t want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through
the foliage and I would, 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 like, you know, 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’d bring the machine in. We’d bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information.
But on that piece of paper, I would write like, don’t bring the machine this way,
there’s a tree fall or stand on top of this building and you’ll see four different buildings
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. We couldn’t even find where our trails were. They would grow back that fast.
But you see the building so you could see. Right. And that was the fun part. I mean,
sometimes it would just be like a little neighborhood with little low buildings no
bigger than this table. But sometimes, you know, just five more meters in and I’m standing under
a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I’ve just found another one. And some days,
you know, on good days, we’d find three pyramids. And I felt that’s such a more exciting job than
the typical excavations. My buddies were all just, you know, in a hole for the whole week in the
middle of the city and where I’m dancing around through the jungle, I could find, you know,
10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today. Who knows?
What’s that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that
you’re one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing?
What’s that? What’s that feel like? It’s 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 Masha’a. It’s often the Belizean jungle.
And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost had that one almost depressed me.
I was, my entire, like, I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city.
And then I did it at 25. And I was like, God, now what do I do? 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 is some weirdo. How’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, toon, wheat, stone mountains.
I knew they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right next to it
that made a triangle. And they love those triads. And there were rivers in between them. And I thought,
that’s it. That’s where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over two seasons with students,
the other grad students were like, he’s just having his students just wandering the jungle all day.
But I came back with a city. So 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. That’s
what we do. Yeah, humans find a way. That’s the thing you see with history. When the
empires collapse, the humans that come out of that, they pick themselves up and
find another way. 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, RKOEd. If people want to listen to it,
this is a tough question, but what would you recommend? What episodes should they listen to?
Oh, that is a tough question. What is the sampling? It’s like asking a chef what’s the
best stuff on the menu. Well, different strokes for different folks. I do two different things
on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you’ve never heard about. 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. I’ve got a lot of weird adventure
stories and it’s been fun and they’ve been very well received. I can put my humor in there and
I can talk about the things that went right, the things that went wrong, the adventures that I had
are all part of this RKOEd thing. RKOEd is kind of a double entendre. It’s me, I’m just Ed,
but it’s also education. 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 amnesia that there was no great civilizations
here before Europe showed up. That’s simply not true. I think it should be part of our history
books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce, as part of
American history, the part before European contact. I think that kids in the K through 12 level should
grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492. One of these
days, I’m going to find a funder to help us put together Before the Americas. We’re going to make
it part of the curriculum for every kid in the US to know the full history of this country.
That’s a great project. Ed, thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all
the fascinating ideas that you put onto the world. I can’t wait to hear your new course.
Thank you so much, Lex. It was a real pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph
Campbell. Life is but a mask worn on the face of death and is death then but another mask.
How many can say asks the Aztec poet that there is or is not a truth beyond.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
[Music]
Ed Barnhart is an archaeologist and explorer specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas. He is the Director of the Maya Exploration Center, host of the ArchaeoEd Podcast, and lecturer on the ancient history of North, Central, and South America. Ed is in part known for his groundbreaking work on ancient astronomy, mathematics, and calendar systems.
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Transcript:
https://lexfridman.com/ed-barnhart-transcript
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EPISODE LINKS:
Ed’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/@archaeoedpodcast
Ed’s Website: https://archaeoed.com/
Maya Exploration Center: https://mayaexploration.org
Ed’s Lectures on The Great Courses: https://thegreatcoursesplus.com/edwin-barnhart
Ed’s Lectures on Audible: https://adbl.co/4dBavTZ
2025 Mayan Calendar: https://mayan-calendar.com/
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(08:59) – Lost civilizations
(16:04) – Hunter-gatherers
(19:36) – First humans in the Americas
(29:28) – South America
(34:57) – Pyramids
(42:01) – Religion
(55:05) – Shamanism
(57:02) – Ayahuasca
(1:03:15) – Lost City of Z
(1:08:09) – Graham Hancock
(1:15:11) – Uncontacted tribes
(1:21:12) – Maya civilization
(1:37:00) – Mayan calendar
(1:52:17) – Flood myths
(2:20:46) – Aztecs
(2:38:12) – Inca Empire
(2:56:13) – Early humans in North America
(3:02:10) – Columbus
(3:06:46) – Vikings
(3:10:55) – Aliens
(3:15:23) – Earth in 10,000 years
(3:31:33) – Hope for the future
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