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

0:00:05 The following is a conversation with Ed Barnhart, an archaeologist specializing
0:00:10 in ancient civilizations of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America.
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0:08:54 here’s Ed Barnhardt.
0:09:05 Do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on earth,
0:09:12 which we don’t know anything about? Yes, I do. And in fact, you know, we have found
0:09:19 some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we’ve got Gobekli Tepe
0:09:26 and we’ve got the stuff that’s going on in the Amazon. And there are some other less startling
0:09:32 things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations
0:09:37 we had no idea about. So yeah, it’s happened and I think it’ll happen again.
0:09:44 Do you think there’s a lost civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up
0:09:52 or is hiding the evidence of? Yes, I do. And we’re beginning to find it. There are these huge,
0:10:01 what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average
0:10:05 Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome.
0:10:09 And I don’t think we’re ever going to find anything that looks like
0:10:15 Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet,
0:10:19 you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there’s not a whole lot of stone.
0:10:25 What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of
0:10:32 dirt and trees and feathers and textiles. But is it possible that
0:10:38 all that land that’s not covered by trees is actually hiding stone, for example,
0:10:42 some architecture, some things that’s just very difficult to find for archaeologists?
0:10:49 I think at the base of the Andes, where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there’s a lot of
0:10:54 potential there because that’s where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into
0:11:01 the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground, except for a stray cliff here and there
0:11:06 where the river dug deep. And even then, only in the dry season because that river
0:11:15 rises like over 100 feet every year. That’s one of the things having visited that area,
0:11:22 just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water. I was humbled by the power of water
0:11:28 to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we’re talking about of
0:11:34 civilizations. Water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia.
0:11:40 And so if there’s something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago,
0:11:43 it’s very possible it was just eaten up by nature.
0:11:49 Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that’s almost a certainty in a lot of places.
0:11:56 The Grand Canyon was dug by water. There’s this wimpy little river in it right now and you can’t
0:12:02 possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology is really kind of
0:12:08 magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there’s
0:12:15 probably a lot that are just under the ocean and just the wave action have destroyed them and what
0:12:21 they haven’t destroyed buried deep. Under the ocean. So you think Atlantis ever existed?
0:12:31 I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about
0:12:39 putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow
0:12:47 of it, my money would be on Akratiri. Akratiri is what’s left of a big city that was on the island
0:12:55 of Santorini. And when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it
0:13:04 so fast that 70 miles away in Crete, there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted
0:13:12 what was ever there. But what’s left on the side of the crater, Akratiri, is strangely advanced for
0:13:18 its age. And so if there’s anything that’s a model for Atlantis as Plato explained it,
0:13:25 it’s Akratiri. Akratiri, the ancient Greek city. So it says the settlement was destroyed in the
0:13:32 Theron eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the
0:13:39 remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks. So we don’t know how advanced that
0:13:45 civilization was. No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it’s got streets, it’s got plumbing,
0:13:53 it’s got little sconces for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with a lot of, especially
0:14:02 in terms of hydraulic engineering, it’s very advanced for being 3500 years old.
0:14:08 So if you check out here’s an image of the excavation. What a project.
0:14:15 It’s an amazing place. And you can tell that it’s just part of it because it’s pretty close to where
0:14:20 the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger. So in this case, there’s a lot of
0:14:25 evidence, but like we said, there could be civilizations that there is no, there’s very
0:14:30 little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence.
0:14:34 Right. And I think Akratiri is actually a great example of that because here we have
0:14:40 the side that did preserve that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was
0:14:46 completely obliterated. It was shot, chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete,
0:14:53 70 miles away. And you know, Plato says that it, it sunk. It was on an island and it sunk.
0:14:57 Well, that’s exactly what happened to Akratiri. I think this is what Plato was referring to.
0:15:04 If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.
0:15:07 And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written.
0:15:14 Right. Absolutely. That we have no record of. And it’s humbling to think that entire civilizations,
0:15:20 with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political
0:15:27 tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just
0:15:35 destroyed like that and forgotten completely, lost to ancient history. I reflect upon that often as
0:15:40 an archaeologist. I think about the, this great country that I live in and love and all the things
0:15:47 we’ve achieved. But you know, we’re, we’re a baby historically speaking. We’ve been around 200 years.
0:15:54 Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of, you know,
0:16:00 800, 1,000 years and now they’re ruins, but we’re barely getting started in terms of
0:16:06 historical civilizations. So humans, homo sapiens evolved,
0:16:12 but they didn’t start civilizations right away. There’s a long period of time when they did not
0:16:21 form these complex societies. So how do we, let’s say 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from
0:16:33 there to creating civilizations? I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures
0:16:40 that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years
0:16:47 ago. And that’s when, you know, our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of
0:16:54 things that just pressured them into especially finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the
0:17:01 Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough,
0:17:09 the mammoths died out and the bison died out. And there was just, they had to come up with
0:17:14 different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting
0:17:20 and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used
0:17:27 to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, there, you know, the gathering
0:17:34 started to be a much more important thing. And I think that led to figuring out, hey, we could
0:17:39 actually grow certain things and gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops. And then
0:17:45 people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn’t have to
0:17:52 roam around anymore. And that’s where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they,
0:17:58 they stayed in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence,
0:18:05 we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the
0:18:10 geographic region, where they’d know, okay, you know, in the mountains, well, in the, we’ll be in
0:18:14 the summer in the mountains, because there’s berries and things. And then in the winter,
0:18:21 we’ll be down here and we’ll hunt. But they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place,
0:18:27 I think there, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
0:18:31 What do you think is, there’s a lot of questions I want to ask here. What do you think is the
0:18:37 motivation for societies? Is it the character of the stick? So you said like, is it like when
0:18:41 resources run out, when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to
0:18:47 figure stuff out? Or is it more the character of like, there’s always this kind of human spirit
0:18:54 that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this
0:19:00 with the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with different ideas or
0:19:06 technological innovation, let’s call it. Well, you know, I have an explorer’s heart, so I’m kind of,
0:19:15 I’m biased. Right. You know, I do think that we have an innate desire to see what’s on the horizon.
0:19:19 And to impress other people with our achievements, things like that.
0:19:28 We’re social beings. That’s really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together. So I
0:19:34 think that it’s much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out.
0:19:40 But usually the carrot does the job. The really interesting story is how the first people came
0:19:49 to the Americas. I mean, to me, that’s pretty gangster to go from Asia, all the way potentially
0:19:53 during the Ice Age or maybe at the end of the Ice Age or during that whole period,
0:19:57 not knowing what the world looks like, going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process?
0:20:01 How did the first people come to the Americas? Well, first off, I agree with you. That was
0:20:08 pretty gangster. I mean, that’s a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts,
0:20:12 that guy, Jordan Jonas had the mustard, but I wouldn’t have made it crossing there.
0:20:19 Well, there you go. The fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas exists,
0:20:25 people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that’s an indication that it’s
0:20:30 possible. But yeah, so when do you think and how did the first people come?
0:20:39 The traditional theories are still somewhat valid or at least on the table that when that
0:20:45 land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the
0:20:50 game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across.
0:20:57 The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for
0:21:05 archaeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a
0:21:11 young archaeologist, I would have never dreamed we’d have the information we have now. And that
0:21:17 information, a lot of it’s coming out of Texas A&M, we see the traditional like
0:21:25 12,500 years ago that there was a migration. But now we’re seeing one that’s almost certainly
0:21:33 happening closer to 30,000 years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true
0:21:40 is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very
0:21:47 first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archaeologist,
0:21:55 it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that. But now it’s really
0:22:01 very clear that they came over at least by 30,000. And the bridge opened and closed and opened and
0:22:10 closed. That’s during the Ice Age. Right. I mean, that’s crazy, right? That is crazy. Yeah. I mean,
0:22:14 they didn’t roll in and immediately make New York. But there were people. And there were
0:22:24 definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated.
0:22:30 And so we have specific kinds of haplo groups that are here in the Americas that don’t exist
0:22:37 otherwise. And that same haplo group game has been showing us more and more that people came
0:22:44 across Siberia. It’s not Africa. It’s not Western Europe. Those are still, you know,
0:22:49 they’ve become kind of fringe theories, but they’re not totally eradicated. I have
0:22:56 DNA is developing science as well. And I think we all need to keep that in mind that
0:23:03 it’s not like they just cracked the code. And now we know all the answers. And sometimes,
0:23:10 like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you
0:23:16 know, we don’t need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA.
0:23:21 But they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia that
0:23:26 all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.
0:23:33 Do you think it was a gradual process? If it’s like 30 to 60,000 years ago,
0:23:40 was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like
0:23:50 one explorer that pushed the tribe to just go, go, go, go, and go across maybe,
0:23:58 across 100 years, travel all the way across maybe into North America, into North North America,
0:24:03 where Canada is now, and then sort of like big leaps in movement versus gradual movement.
0:24:07 I think it was big leaps. And now this is just, you know,
0:24:16 mostly guess I’ll admit. But I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models
0:24:24 talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change, and then it settles out into
0:24:32 more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early
0:24:38 people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for
0:24:45 thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types
0:24:53 were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America.
0:25:01 The ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon,
0:25:10 most of those guys have O blood type, and they’re haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered
0:25:16 the US. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait.
0:25:27 We have no real evidence to say they came en masse across Oceania. So they made it probably
0:25:34 by boat along the coast all the way to South America. So there’s some kind of cultural engine
0:25:41 that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened tens of thousands
0:25:48 of years ago, but at a very rapid pace, there’s these explorers that went all the way to South
0:25:54 America, and there established their kind of more stable existence. And from there,
0:26:01 South America, Mesoamerica, North America was kind of gradually expanded into that area.
0:26:07 I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first
0:26:13 wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there, and then mixed in with
0:26:18 the next groups that came. That’s fascinating. Kind of like there’s an interesting correlate in
0:26:30 Europe where today, everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland. But actually, Celtic
0:26:37 people started in Eastern Europe, and it was the entire area. And when Rome kind of swept
0:26:46 everything, and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world,
0:26:50 Ireland, that they were like, “We’re not going to mess with those guys on that island. We’ll
0:26:57 leave them be.” So now it looks like that’s the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually,
0:27:04 it’s the fringe. So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans. Yeah.
0:27:08 And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about
0:27:17 very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed.
0:27:23 It’s, “No, he didn’t get a date of 40,000 years.” But I think we’re going to come back around to
0:27:29 start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand. And that’s the interesting thing
0:27:35 is the early humans spread throughout the world. And then, like you said, perhaps they’ve gotten
0:27:41 isolated, and then civilizations sprung from there. And they all have similar elements,
0:27:46 even though they were isolated. That’s really interesting. That’s really interesting that
0:27:54 there’s multiple cradles of civilization, not just one, like one good idea. Those ideas naturally
0:28:02 come up. Those structures naturally come up. And I wonder whether the similarities that all
0:28:12 those cradles have, it could be a shared, much deeper past that they all have. Or it could be
0:28:20 a more kind of Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of
0:28:26 parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development,
0:28:32 and that that could be the answer to it. Which one do you lean on? Which one do you lean
0:28:38 towards? I think it’s a case-by-case thing. I think if we look globally, I’d lean much more
0:28:44 towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas, and we have a shorter
0:28:52 time period where the things that become major civilizations now, I’ll say, up to 30,000 years
0:29:00 ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those
0:29:09 people came over with from Asia, and that as they got separated, that they had core values that then
0:29:17 turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I’m a big proponent that
0:29:26 there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a
0:29:31 single distant origin. You’ve spoken about the lost cradle of civilization in South America,
0:29:39 so South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization. South America,
0:29:45 Mesoamerica, can you explain? Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You’re right. I mean,
0:29:54 especially as an American, our country’s so big, and we are so far removed from these places,
0:30:01 we don’t even think about it. But more and more, we’re seeing things that predate the earliest
0:30:11 stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. It’s all on the Peruvian coast
0:30:15 that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday, we might start talking about the
0:30:23 Amazon more and more. But right now, what we’ve got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE
0:30:32 along the coast of Peru, and there are big stone-built pyramids and temples,
0:30:40 and they’re amazingly isolated. Even now that we’ve found them, some of them like Corral is one
0:30:45 of the most famous ones just north of Lima. We’ve known about it for a couple decades now,
0:30:51 how old it is, but every time I visit there, it’s like I visited the moon. There’s absolutely
0:31:01 nobody there, not for miles. It’s amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody
0:31:06 goes to see it. It’s not easy to get to. Do you think there’s a bunch of locations like that?
0:31:11 Some may not have been discovered in the Peru area. Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That
0:31:18 desert gets really ugly quick, and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there
0:31:26 that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately,
0:31:33 but Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands,
0:31:41 thousands of pyramids. Now, they weren’t built of a lot. Not all of them were built of stone. Some
0:31:47 of them were adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly. Now, they’re not exciting places to
0:31:53 visit today. You know what’s funny too? We started off talking about whether I think there’s a lost
0:32:01 civilization out there. There are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are
0:32:07 some things that were discovered 100 years ago, and archaeologists or back then they called themselves
0:32:14 antiquarians just kind of passed over. Corral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has
0:32:23 some of those pyramids that were made by the moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics
0:32:30 and things that you can sell for big money. But Corral was found a long time ago,
0:32:36 but the archaeologists was like, “God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good.
0:32:45 We can’t sell anything here.” And then about the 1970s or ’80s, somebody said, “Hey, no ceramics?
0:32:51 Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.”
0:32:53 So what’s the dating on Corral?
0:33:02 Corral, I think, starts at about 3,200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of
0:33:06 other cities around it until about 1,800 BCE.
0:33:13 So what’s the story behind looking at some of these images? What’s the story about constructions
0:33:15 like that? What was the idea at that thing? Isn’t that amazing?
0:33:22 Yeah. Gosh, I mean, it should be some sort of, I’ll be a flaky archaeologist.
0:33:26 This is a place where rituals took place.
0:33:34 So many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that’s about what we got. And a place like
0:33:41 this, I know the one we’re looking at here, I’ve been here a couple of times, in the pyramid behind it,
0:33:45 the rubble’s built in a way where the building won’t rock apart. This is a very
0:33:51 earthquake-prone place, but the buildings haven’t fallen because they make these
0:34:00 net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wiggle around and don’t allow the building to fall down.
0:34:04 And inside these, we’ve also found a couple of things that were
0:34:09 babies, that were human babies that were buried in there.
0:34:13 And I don’t think there’s a lot of people that see that and go, “Oh, look at that,
0:34:19 they were sacrificing babies, these monsters.” I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as
0:34:27 baby sacrifices, corrals, evidence being one of them, I think it’s more about the tragic nature
0:34:34 of infant mortality. In the past, it was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn’t even
0:34:39 really properly name their kid until they got to five because chances were they were going to die.
0:34:46 And so, I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted
0:34:52 as sacrifices, I think they’re putting them in special places because they mourn the death
0:34:55 of their kids. And it just happened a lot more frequently then.
0:35:00 One of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built
0:35:06 in Peru, possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true?
0:35:12 Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, there’s one that’s now pushing
0:35:23 6,000 BCE. That’s thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one’s called Waka
0:35:32 Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid. But it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.
0:35:40 What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the
0:35:48 elements structurally, that kind of thing? Yeah, why do humans build pyramids? And why do they build
0:35:56 it in all kinds of different locations in the world? Well, you know, my rude answer is pretty
0:36:02 boring, really. A lot of people ask me, “Why are there pyramids all over the planet? Is that a
0:36:11 coincidence?” I mean, I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or
0:36:17 cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top and that
0:36:23 turns into a pyramid. You know, any kid who’s playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple
0:36:27 towers and his brother knocks them down. And if he wants one that’s going to stay and be tall,
0:36:35 he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that building something
0:36:41 big and tall together is one of those human things. Like, we built that. That will be here
0:36:49 after we’re gone. People remember who we were. If there’s any human commonality, it’s fear of our
0:36:55 own deaths and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first
0:37:00 big monuments like that were probably a group of people saying, “We’re going to do something
0:37:05 that people will remember forever.” Now, that being said, you remember, we were just talking
0:37:13 about Guacaprieta and this one that’s almost 6000 BC now is the first one. That one’s a funny case.
0:37:18 We just talked about all these lofty goals. But actually, I’m pretty sure that
0:37:28 Guacaprieta’s first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash. I think everybody piled
0:37:33 up their trash in the middle of town and it’s stunk. It’s on the coast. It’s stunk like fish.
0:37:40 And somebody said, “If we just bury this thing with dirt, it won’t smell anymore.” And then it
0:37:44 was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said, “Well, it’s squishy.
0:37:52 If we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell.” I really think that the very first
0:37:58 pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about plating, huh?
0:38:04 Yeah, but then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the enormity of the
0:38:08 construction and they’re like, “Oh, maybe the next guy thought maybe we should keep building these
0:38:16 kinds of things.” Yeah. Not to jump ahead, but in North America, where they also made pyramids,
0:38:24 there’s this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along
0:38:28 the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat.
0:38:35 So these piles of shells would be near communities and they probably became landmarks. But eventually,
0:38:42 they started burying their dead inside those too. Probably again, you know, about stink and about,
0:38:46 you know, “Well, we don’t want the dogs to eat them. I maybe put them in the middle of the
0:38:53 shell pile.” But then that all of a sudden became this like, “That’s where my grandfather’s body is.
0:38:57 That’s where great grandfather’s body is.” And all of a sudden, people started being attached
0:39:03 to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when
0:39:12 the very first pyramid was built in Ohio area by the Edina people, it was built out of dirt,
0:39:18 but it’s full of bodies. And I think it’s an echo of an old thing where they used to be putting
0:39:28 bodies in shell mounds. So where and who were the first civilizations in South America,
0:39:34 as in America? Well, you know, I think we’re still piecing that together. Coming back to the
0:39:38 first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in
0:39:43 South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it’s hard to answer
0:39:50 that question is, you know, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture?
0:39:59 We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the Paleo-Indian time,
0:40:04 where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even
0:40:09 longer period of time called the archaic, where they’re just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes
0:40:15 somebody’s coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different
0:40:21 hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years. And then finally,
0:40:28 they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture.
0:40:34 It used to be archaeology. That was just the end-all-be-all. Civilization starts with the
0:40:39 invention of agriculture. And we can’t have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm.
0:40:47 But that’s been discounted. Peru was a big part of that, that area of Keral. It’s connected to
0:40:54 another city on the coast called Aspero. And Aspero starts about the same time, but they’re
0:41:00 all about fishing. They have no farming. And Keral, who’s upriver from them, is farming,
0:41:06 but funny enough, they’re not really farming food. They’re farming cotton, and they’re making nets,
0:41:14 and they’re trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it’s not as simple as
0:41:20 it’s just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in how can we feed more people than
0:41:28 just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we’re no longer scared about
0:41:34 running out of food? So is it possible, which is something you’ve argued, that civilization started
0:41:41 in the Amazon, in the jungle versus the coast? I do think so. I think religion
0:41:46 in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old.
0:41:54 There’s actually the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have
0:42:00 civilizations that grew up. You know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.
0:42:06 So there’s interesting culture development in the Amazon. So religion, you would say, preceded
0:42:13 civilization. In South America, the Keral and Asbro that I was just talking about,
0:42:20 it’s weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and
0:42:25 things that we call temples, but we don’t really know what went on in there. And there’s no hints
0:42:33 of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get
0:42:42 is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE, this culture called Chavin starts up. And they,
0:42:51 their main temple is up in the Andes, in this place of least, path of least resistance between
0:42:57 the Amazon and the coast. It’s about three days walk either way from this place where this temple
0:43:04 is. That’s where we start seeing the very first religious iconography, and it’s all over the
0:43:11 temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast, but the iconography are all jaguars and
0:43:18 snakes and crocodiles. And those don’t come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of
0:43:24 the Amazon. I mean, religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful
0:43:29 ideas. They’re the strongest myths that tie people together. And to you, it’s possible that
0:43:38 this powerful idea in South America started in the Amazon. I do. I do think it did.
0:43:48 And you’re right. Ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archaeology can’t see them at all.
0:43:56 We can see, sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but
0:44:01 there’s an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this that those are things
0:44:06 that archaeology just can’t get at? That’s one of the challenges of archaeology and looking into
0:44:12 ancient histories. You’re trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of
0:44:18 architecture, but understand what was going on inside their mind. That’s really what I’m in
0:44:23 it for, trying to understand these people and its real detective work. And we know we’re dealing with
0:44:31 a totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. If we look around this
0:44:38 room here, if 2000 years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left? And what would
0:44:49 we think happened here? Right. But there’s not in this room, but if you look at thousands of rooms
0:44:54 like it, maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled
0:45:03 the world, the religions, the different ideas. Tell me about this thing deity. One of your more
0:45:11 controversial ideas is that you believe that the religions, there’s a thread that connects
0:45:18 the different civilizations, the societies of the Andean region. And the religion that practiced
0:45:23 is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the mainstream.
0:45:29 That is exactly what I think. And I think it’s all about this Fang deity who somewhere thousands
0:45:36 of years ago crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That
0:45:42 could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one
0:45:48 creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon
0:45:57 still talk about him. There, his name is Vihomase in some groups. But they say that his emissaries on
0:46:03 Earth are the Jaguars and that he is the creator deity. Why is the current mainstream belief is
0:46:11 that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic? Well, there are bona fide pantheons. You know,
0:46:18 Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world
0:46:25 were pantheons. And I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archaeologists walked in
0:46:30 there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to
0:46:37 the art looking for them. And they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess
0:46:44 and the sun god and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person
0:46:53 right here in Austin, Texas, as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art
0:46:57 to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology,
0:47:05 there’s a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming
0:47:12 off of his head and off of his belt. He’s got really identifiable traits. He also likes to
0:47:18 sever people’s heads off and carry them around. But he’s the fanged deity and he’s there. He
0:47:24 shows up in Chavine de Juantar, the capital of that Chavine culture. And he keeps showing up
0:47:33 through every culture, even thousands of miles away, throughout the next two millennium, right up
0:47:42 to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha. But Viracocha is the fanged deity.
0:47:48 He is, when we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this kind of almost
0:47:56 Islamic thing where they say, “You can’t understand the face of Viracocha.” So when they do put him
0:48:04 in a cosmogram, they’ll make him just a blob. Like he’s just unknowable, but he’s at the very top.
0:48:11 I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural
0:48:18 beings. If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course Christianity’s
0:48:23 monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters?
0:48:29 Who are all these angels and demons and, you know, Jesus Christ? And I mean, I don’t even know
0:48:35 who the Holy Spirit is. But he’s some sort of supernatural being, but it’s that monotheistic
0:48:44 system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That’s where I think the
0:48:51 crux of us misunderstanding ancient Dandian art is. So what is the process of analyzing art
0:48:58 through time to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture?
0:49:00 Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over?
0:49:05 Well, certainly without the advent of writing,
0:49:15 depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them. And there are certain,
0:49:22 you know, what we call diagnostic elements. We can pull apart the same sort of thing in
0:49:28 the Greek pantheon, you know, by their dress and what they’re holding, what the different
0:49:34 gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things they’re holding, you know,
0:49:40 lightning bolts or tridents or whatever it is. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them.
0:49:47 So that’s how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a chronological
0:49:55 sequence, then we can say, okay, here’s a deity here in Chavine culture. Now we move forward
0:50:04 500 years, now we’re in Moche and Nazca culture. You know, where are the deities here?
0:50:11 And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them
0:50:17 that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures.
0:50:26 He’s got circular eyes, he’s got a fanged mouth, he’s got claws on his hands and feet. He’s a
0:50:33 humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his
0:50:41 belt. And then not so much in Chavine, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around
0:50:48 severed heads, human severed heads. So they’re like in the old literature,
0:50:55 the Moche will call him the decapitator deity. But then they have these other like, oh, here’s
0:51:01 the crab deity and here’s the fox deity. But if you look at them, like the crab deity is just
0:51:07 that guy’s face coming off of a crab. And the fox deity is that guy’s face coming off of a fox.
0:51:14 So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus
0:51:19 was able to like, you know, turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted
0:51:26 and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity
0:51:33 manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing
0:51:39 stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore. And across hundreds of years, thousands of years
0:51:46 from Chavine to Moche to Inca, as you’re saying. Right. Wari has them too, Tiawanaco. That’s that
0:51:54 famous place, Pumapunku. He’s all over there. I wonder how those ideas spread in Morph of this
0:52:02 fanged deity. I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavine, there’s a later one in
0:52:10 Inca times called Pachakamak that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if
0:52:17 they’re sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So Chavine was a place where people
0:52:22 from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in the
0:52:29 archaeology there. There’s these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the fanged
0:52:34 deity all over them that have like one labyrinth, they’ll have all pottery. The next labyrinth will
0:52:39 have a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone. So people
0:52:45 are showing up and giving this tribute and they’re learning and then they’re going back to their
0:52:52 communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage
0:52:59 spots too. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity. Do we know much about
0:53:06 the relationship they had with the fanged deity and their conception of the powers of the fanged
0:53:16 deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all knowing God? Is it something that brings
0:53:22 joy and harvest? Or is it something that you’re supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals
0:53:30 and humans too to keep a bay? I think he had two sides of the coin. Like a lot of the Hindu gods
0:53:37 are, you know, one aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts
0:53:42 of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people’s heads off and he is a
0:53:48 jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity. But then there are other
0:53:54 funny things about him. Like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a
0:53:59 lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts when it comes to the moche. There’s this
0:54:07 whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men and some of them
0:54:16 show their faces transforming into that fanged deity. Like he is acting through them. But the
0:54:22 thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged deity has a little puppy.
0:54:29 He has a puppy that’s like just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on him in various
0:54:34 scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he’s in these healing sex scenes. In fact, I
0:54:42 tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with
0:54:47 somebody in a house and there’s a fanged deity and there’s a puppy just scratching at the door
0:54:54 like, “Hey, you forgot me.” And then finally, one day, I found one with the puppy having sex
0:54:59 with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, “Oh, he really is very involved in this.
0:55:05 What is this weird puppy?” So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.
0:55:10 This actually, this is awesomely makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote
0:55:17 30 years ago on shamanism and the Mocha civilization. It reads, “The Mocha are the major focus of this
0:55:23 paper. Sex puppies and head hunting will be shown to be related to ancient Mocha shamanism.”
0:55:27 So now, I understand. I was like, “Well, the puppies.”
0:55:29 Puppies, yeah, it’s true.
0:55:32 And the head hunting, that’s the decapitator.
0:55:38 And I’ve added rock and roll to that list since, actually. Rock and roll. Music is also a big part
0:55:44 of it. They call spirits down. There’s this whole spirit world. There’s the ancestors.
0:55:52 And the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice kind of, they don’t talk about the fanged deity
0:55:59 anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. It was unpopular
0:56:05 to have a pagan deity, so they don’t talk about him much anymore that we still around.
0:56:08 They’re in like around Trujillo, they call him Iopec.
0:56:17 But music, in the Amazon, they play flutes. Sometimes a chorus of women sing, and that’s
0:56:22 supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There’s a spirit that’s hurting the
0:56:28 person that’s sick. And then the priest or the shaman or the corndero, whatever you want to call
0:56:35 him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what’s going on.
0:56:43 So when the music starts, that’s bringing those spirits in. And people don’t see them unless
0:56:50 they’ve imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is the salucinogen, which is in the Amazon side,
0:57:00 it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus. But that’s what allows you to actually
0:57:07 see that other world. Yeah, I went to the Amazon recently and did ayahuasca, a very high dose of
0:57:19 it. Bold move. Went in Rome. How far back does that go? Oh, I think longer than anybody can
0:57:24 remember. But I mean, it’s a natural plant that’s been there forever. I think that it’s thousands
0:57:29 and thousands of years. That’s another thing. Chavine de Juanterra I was talking about,
0:57:36 where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There’s this wall on the backside
0:57:42 that faces the Amazon side. So if you’re entering the city from the Amazon path, you see this wall
0:57:47 first. And it’s a bunch of faces that some of them are human, some of them are total jaguar,
0:57:54 and some of them are transforming in between. But there’s a group of them that are midway
0:58:01 through transformation, and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that’s coming
0:58:09 like down their face. San Pedro doesn’t do that to you, but ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca,
0:58:15 traditionally, they take a blowgun and just shoot it up your nose or up your ass. But it was a lot
0:58:20 of times up your nose, and when it shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just this
0:58:28 gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone depictions of people uncontrollably snotting
0:58:35 on the backside of this temple from 3,000 years ago. So that, you think, could have been a big
0:58:41 component of the development of religion and shamanism? I think that hallucinogens
0:58:48 opened the mind then like they open the mind now. Do you think that, you know, the stoned ape theory,
0:58:53 do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of
0:59:03 civilization? In the Americas, yes, I do. Though, you know, hallucinogens are not part of every
0:59:10 ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually
0:59:17 psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few
0:59:24 drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they’re global,
0:59:30 and, you know, they can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few
0:59:36 were outside of the Americas. So they were part of the experience here in a way that they just
0:59:42 couldn’t be in other places. I wondered to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the
0:59:51 creative force behind sort of art versus like literally the method by which you come up with
0:59:57 ideas that define a civilization. It’s like the degree to which they had a role in the formation
1:00:04 of civilizations. It’s kind of fun to think about psychedelics being like a critical role
1:00:10 in the formation of civilizations. I think in terms of South America, they probably really were.
1:00:16 In North America, where we’re in a more northern climb here and there are less of them,
1:00:22 not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics. Things like tobacco was always a big part of it.
1:00:30 But a lot of the, you know, there’s more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way
1:00:39 is starvation, sleep deprivation. And for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation,
1:00:45 and then they’d cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe, triggered
1:00:52 hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I much prefer the drugs route.
1:01:00 It’s the result, not the tools aren’t the thing that creates insight. It’s the result.
1:01:05 Is that getting to, you know, hallucinogens are poisoning us. They’re killing us. That’s,
1:01:14 you know, it’s a near death state. And people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that
1:01:20 other world. Death, you entered this other world in that when you took this mighty dose of poison,
1:01:24 it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.
1:01:30 Yeah, as Tom Wade said in that one song, I like my town with a little drop of poison.
1:01:41 So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first sort of
1:01:47 mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? Like, what is, if we look chronologically,
1:01:52 is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged?
1:01:59 That picture is evolving. I mean, forever, it was just the Chavine people that we’ve been
1:02:03 talking about, the ones with all the first depictions of religious art, were the mother
1:02:08 culture. And they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff. But then all of a sudden, we find
1:02:16 Karal. The next one that we’ve barely even begun looking at, but it’s probably older than
1:02:23 Karal is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year and just from the bus
1:02:30 on the highway, I could see like, that’s a pyramid out there. Oh, there’s another one.
1:02:37 And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It’s again, 3000 BC. We’re just barely
1:02:42 beginning to understand them. Karal frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. That’s,
1:02:49 we’ve got stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on. And they didn’t have
1:02:53 the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don’t know what those people
1:02:58 believed. Right. So one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art, the
1:03:04 stories told through the art, and then hopefully deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing.
1:03:09 That’s our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.
1:03:15 Yeah. And it sucks when they don’t have art. If we just go back to the Amazon,
1:03:20 you’ve mentioned that it’s possible that there’s a law civilization that existed in the Amazon.
1:03:27 So it’s carried a lot of names, Law City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it’s possible it existed?
1:03:35 Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where
1:03:42 it is kind of center around towards Columbia. And the City of Z is named after a region of
1:03:52 Brazil called the Shingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. The entire,
1:03:57 people don’t really think about it on the map, but the entire United States would fit inside
1:04:04 the Amazon. That’s how big that place is. And these two are on either end. But both of them have
1:04:12 evidence of civilizations. These big, it’s lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is
1:04:18 they’d make these big mounds and then they’d make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk
1:04:24 through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been
1:04:31 found in the Shingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people.
1:04:38 Again, you know, it’s not stone built and it’s been under the forest forever. So it’s very torn up.
1:04:45 But it’s there. Now, you know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And a thing
1:04:52 that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway
1:04:59 all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these, what we
1:05:06 call like geometric earthworks. So there’s more and more evidence of these civilizations. It’s
1:05:12 not a, it’s not, it could be there. It’s there for sure. By the way, the people who are trying to
1:05:17 protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road,
1:05:24 loggers will come. Yep. And they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archaeology
1:05:29 perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things, but from a sort of
1:05:36 protective, very precious rainforest perspective, it’s obviously the opposite way.
1:05:43 But it is interesting. I’ve seen where loggers cut through the forest and then they, and when they
1:05:50 leave, the forest heals itself very quickly. So quickly. And, you know, you just think that
1:05:58 across decades, you expand that to centuries, and it’s like, you could see how a civilization
1:06:04 could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest. And it happened for sure in the Amazon.
1:06:10 Yeah. You know, one of the ways that we’re trying to push the frontier of where people
1:06:18 were in the Amazon, because yes, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence,
1:06:25 but they’re finding more and more of these places that they call terra preta, which is black earth,
1:06:35 and they’re huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes.
1:06:42 And what they’re saying is that that really dark earth couldn’t have just got that way through
1:06:47 natural forest processes, that sometime in the distant past, that forest wasn’t there and there
1:06:54 was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black,
1:07:01 and it’s much more enriched. And when I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus
1:07:07 up the river, the Black River a couple of days and went and met some different communities,
1:07:12 and I asked them about this black earth. And they were like, yeah, that’s why we’re here.
1:07:20 Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra preta, and that’s where we’re
1:07:24 going to put our village, because that’s a place that all of our gardens work. The other places,
1:07:28 they don’t. One of the things you talked about literally just asked, you have to ask the right
1:07:35 question. And the stories, all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you.
1:07:40 Yeah, there’s so many of them. You know, the thing that excites the world about archaeology
1:07:48 right now is Gobekli Tepe. And this 10,000 now, Koran Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called
1:07:55 the Tos Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago. But it was just an archaeologist
1:07:59 rowing through the area and asking a sheep herder, hey, you know, you guys know where anything
1:08:04 ancient is? Oh yeah, let me show you this. And then all of a sudden, we’ve got a lost civilization,
1:08:09 and the shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.
1:08:14 So speaking of Gobekli Tepe, what do you think about the work of Graham Hancock,
1:08:18 who also believes that there’s a lost civilization in the Amazon?
1:08:26 Well, I’ve met Graham, and personally, I like him. He’s a nice guy, got a nice sense of humor,
1:08:35 and I think he’s smart. And I also think he is a very good researcher. He and I are working on
1:08:42 the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham’s
1:08:50 idea that a single now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don’t see that on
1:08:59 a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art historical analysis. So I think his
1:09:05 research is great. I think that he’s very well read, in fact, better read than a lot of my
1:09:11 colleagues. But his conclusions, I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this,
1:09:18 and had a very civil and normal conversation about it, and agreed to disagree without spitting any
1:09:24 venom at any point in the conversation. That would be a fun argument to be applying the law for.
1:09:33 So he believes he’s proposed as possible that the Amazon jungle is a man-made garden.
1:09:39 So it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which
1:09:45 that could be possible? Frankly, I agree with him. It’s just like what I was just talking about.
1:09:52 It’s the conclusion part that we differ from. But the facts that he’s basing that on are that
1:09:59 terra preta, are the huge geometric earthworks, are the ever-increasing evidence of them. They are
1:10:08 now from the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They’re everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle,
1:10:15 we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were
1:10:28 is a question, and also a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don’t know,
1:10:35 and what could be. Just to educate me, what’s the key idea that he’s proposing that you disagree
1:10:40 with? Is it the level of advancement that civilization was, or how large and centralized it was?
1:10:50 My main point of disagreement is that his ideas evolve like everybody’s. No scientist or researcher
1:10:56 in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die.
1:11:04 His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain, a core of them are, that there was a very advanced
1:11:12 single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions. The younger
1:11:19 driest hypothesis is part of that most recently. He used to not say that. Now he’s into this
1:11:30 meteor thing, but he believes that that civilization was destroyed, but that members of it escaped
1:11:38 this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world’s civilizations
1:11:45 for the next revival. There’s where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations
1:11:52 that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization
1:11:59 from the past, and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry.
1:12:07 In his early books, he suggested it’s Atlantis. I don’t think he suggests that anymore, but he
1:12:18 still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. All of our
1:12:25 ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts. We could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re
1:12:34 real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales. I find it just too big a pill to swallow
1:12:39 that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that
1:12:48 we can’t even find a potchard from. Of course, it is a compelling story that there’s a single
1:12:56 civilization from which all of this came from because the alternative is the idea that came
1:13:03 across the Bering Strait, from Asia, went all the way down to South America and got isolated
1:13:10 and created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious
1:13:21 ideas that look similar to all that. Everybody has a flood myth. There’s a lot of similarities.
1:13:29 Everybody building pyramids. Yeah. There could be a lot of other explanations,
1:13:36 even if it’s a simple, compelling explanation that has to be evidence for it. What would that
1:13:42 evidence look like? That’s the bottom line. Everything’s theories. As responsible scientists,
1:13:47 we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories.
1:13:54 That’s one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps. We’re supposed to be
1:14:01 disproving what we think is happening, not proving it. Yeah, you don’t want to lean into the mystery
1:14:10 too much. It’s such a weird discipline because you’re operating in a really in a dark room.
1:14:15 You’re feeling around a dark room, so it’s mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences
1:14:23 operate in a mostly well-lit room. It’s like a dark corner, and you’re figuring out a way
1:14:30 to light it. Yeah, in archaeology, most of it is a mystery, right? Yes, it’s job security.
1:14:38 I like that part. I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm-shifting idea that
1:14:48 humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant.
1:14:57 We got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish because one of them eventually
1:15:04 is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift. If we’re busy burning books of ideas that we
1:15:08 don’t like, that’s where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.
1:15:13 I really love that, and I really appreciate that you’re saying that. One of the fascinating things
1:15:20 about just the Amazon to me is that there’s still a large number of uncontacted tribes.
1:15:27 To rewind back into ancient history, you can imagine all of these tribes that existed
1:15:35 in the Amazon that were isolated, very distinct from each other. Can you speak to this
1:15:40 your understanding of these tribes and their history? They’re still here today.
1:15:48 Well, a lot of them are. By uncontacted, we mean we don’t know anything about these guys. We know
1:15:54 roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one’s
1:16:00 allowed to go contact them. We have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and
1:16:07 talk to us, that’s one thing, but we don’t go out there looking for them. They do seem frozen in
1:16:13 time, and I don’t think any of us have a good estimation of how long they’ve been like that.
1:16:20 We were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment.
1:16:27 It’s mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change its pressure.
1:16:33 One thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it,
1:16:38 it’s a paradise of food. Food’s fallen from the sky all the time there.
1:16:44 Once you learn to adapt to that environment, you’ve got very little need. There’s no pressure
1:16:50 to make anything else. Things are working. For the modern humans that come across these
1:16:56 uncontacted tribes, one of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these
1:17:02 tribes for violence. They get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across.
1:17:08 And not just foreigners, they attack each other. The Yanamama are famous for just having
1:17:14 never-ending feuds with each other. What do you think is the philosophy behind that?
1:17:23 I don’t know. I’m a relatively peaceful person, but I’ve got the monster in me like everybody
1:17:34 does. It’s cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Yanamama, they really,
1:17:43 part of the right of passage to be a man, is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village.
1:17:51 They go in there. They oftentimes, the way they don’t let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody,
1:17:57 not that they think of it scientifically, but they typically go and steal women from far-off
1:18:04 communities. And that starts a big fight. Another thing that starts fights that when nobody even
1:18:12 fought is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn’t seen as a
1:18:17 biological thing. It was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick,
1:18:24 the question is asked, well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him?
1:18:29 And then the rumor starts, well, I bet you it was Joe over there and that other community
1:18:33 still passed off for that time when we stole his daughter. And we ought to go over there and kill
1:18:42 Joe, and then he’ll get better. And so this round of never-ending violence like Hatfields and
1:18:50 McCoy’s had that thing. And the people of New Guinea also do that. So there are certain areas,
1:18:58 mostly wooded areas now that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each
1:19:07 other as a cultural institution. It’s such a tricky thing to do to study an uncontacted tribe
1:19:12 without obviously contacting them to figure out their language, their philosophy of mind,
1:19:16 how they communicate, the hierarchy they operate under.
1:19:20 And yeah, you know, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like
1:19:25 eight years ago or something, but there was a ranger from one of the biology stations
1:19:31 who just in the buy and buy of protecting his area met one of these uncontacted tribes and
1:19:36 befriended someone, not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods,
1:19:41 not in their community. And he started to learn their language over a couple years.
1:19:48 And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk
1:19:53 to these people. And one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him
1:19:58 with arrows and just killed him. And then they went back in the woods like that’s the one guy
1:20:01 who understands what we’re saying. We should kill him and move our village.
1:20:08 So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy.
1:20:18 You know, everybody’s got it. I think we need to listen to our better angels
1:20:27 because if we don’t, we as a human species can easily devolve into just using violence and
1:20:32 against others to get what we want. It’s a daily choice we make not to be savages.
1:20:36 Which is a fascinating thing to remember. What kind of thing in civilized society,
1:20:47 we’ve moved past all that. But it can be summoned. Like in 1984, the two minutes of hate.
1:20:58 With the right words, that primal thing can be summoned and directed and lead to a lot of
1:21:04 destruction. And, you know, our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and
1:21:07 channeling them positive where somebody’s not dead at the end of it.
1:21:19 Yep. So at which point did what we now call the Maya civilization arise?
1:21:25 That’s another complicated one. Another group living mostly in a jungle
1:21:33 that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the Amazon
1:21:37 and what we’re talking about now is the Patan and the mountains there.
1:21:42 Those aren’t places archaeologists want to live. They’re horrible. I mean, I’ve been there. I don’t
1:21:48 want to live in a tent and eat rations. I want to live in a nice town. So a lot of the places
1:21:52 where the answers are, we still really haven’t gotten there because it takes a special person to be
1:21:56 educated enough to know what they’re looking at and tough enough to want to be there.
1:22:02 I’ve done my tour of duty. I’m now in a nice little podcast studio.
1:22:09 But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya,
1:22:16 very close to where the time period for that Chavine culture is, about 1800 BCE. There’s a
1:22:25 culture that some call the Mokaya, not Maya. But they’re on the Pacific coast where Guatemala and
1:22:30 Mexico connect. It’s called the Socanusco. And those are the first people that are really going
1:22:37 to be culturally Maya. And they’re interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen
1:22:43 as Mexico’s mother culture, which is the Olmec. They’re kind of the same thing as we were talking
1:22:49 about in South America, where the Maya, the original Maya are not, there’s not a whole lot
1:22:56 to indicate that they have a religion. But the Olmec have this religion they develop and they
1:23:02 start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that’s
1:23:08 being created by the Olmec who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus
1:23:15 of Tuantipec. I have a lot of questions to ask here about just the natural stupid confusion I have.
1:23:25 So first, did the Maya or the Olmec come first? And are they distinct groups? Like how do you maintain
1:23:33 a distinct civilization when you’re so close together? I just finished filming a whole thing
1:23:37 on the Olmecs and their interaction with the Maya for the great courses. I’m thrilled for it to come
1:23:45 out next spring. I think they co-evolved. Archaeology in this regard is the worst enemy of this.
1:23:52 We put these names on cultures. We talk about how they evolve from one to another. We draw these
1:23:58 lines where there aren’t any. We make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into
1:24:02 somebody with another name, where I’m pretty sure they didn’t care about any of those names.
1:24:10 But the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that’s happening
1:24:17 in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time. The Olmec are really bringing the religion part. But the
1:24:26 other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hemotype mirrors, making tools
1:24:37 out of obsidian and other stone types. So you’ve got Olmec in the middle, where Mexico gets skinny
1:24:41 and it gets swampy down there. That’s called the Isthmus of Tuantepak. That’s where the Olmec are.
1:24:47 Then you’ve got the Maya to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the
1:24:53 people called the Zapotecs, they’re rising up. And then you have the Valley of Mexico,
1:25:00 which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting
1:25:07 with each other. Can we just also draw some more lines? Yeah, sure. So what is Mesoamerica and
1:25:14 what is South America? And what you just said to Olmecs and the Maya, can we just linger on the
1:25:21 geography that we’re talking about here in the, what is this, like 1000 BC? Yeah, the time period
1:25:28 we’re talking about where the Olmec are there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I’d say it
1:25:39 starts about 1800 BCE and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone. And a whole new wave of civilization and
1:25:45 population increase happened. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here, I’d say about
1:25:54 halfway through the Chihuahua Desert up there in the top left, that’s about the boundary of
1:26:01 Mesoamerica. There’s this big desert where almost nobody lives. And once you get north
1:26:07 enough, you get into the ancestral Pueblo people of what’s now America, the Four Corners area.
1:26:12 They’re not Mesoamerican. They have different lives. Where does modern Mexico end?
1:26:18 Modern Mexico ends, right? You see the name Maya there with the white line around it. That’s
1:26:25 Guatemala. So Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America. But Mesoamerica only goes
1:26:34 about halfway through Honduras. And then it’s really kind of a no man’s land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica,
1:26:41 Panama, they really, they’re neither. They’re not Mesoamerica. They’re not South America.
1:26:46 They’re more South America because they’ve got some gold there. But then basically you get on
1:26:52 the other side of Panama and you’re fully in South America. With two distinct groups too,
1:26:58 you’ve got the guys that are on the Andes on the west coast and then you have the Amazon.
1:27:04 So the West, the Andes and the Amazon are very distinct. So when you say,
1:27:09 when you refer to the Andean region, is that referring to the Andes and the Amazon or just
1:27:18 the Andes? Just the Andes and the coast to the Pacific there. That’s Andean civilization.
1:27:23 So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region?
1:27:29 Not that archaeology can prove, but it’s almost certain that they interact with each other.
1:27:34 Number one, it’s just, you know, it’s biased to think that these people couldn’t travel as widely
1:27:40 as people on the other side of the planet did. But there’s all sorts of hints like that first
1:27:47 ceramics I was talking about that the Maya made. They show up strangely sophisticated
1:27:54 technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for a thousand years before.
1:28:00 So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South
1:28:10 America to the Maya. Did the Maya get seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait?
1:28:16 Or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America,
1:28:23 were they the ancestors of the Maya? Like, how did the migration happen here? Do we understand?
1:28:28 We’re still piecing it together. I don’t think, you know, I’d be lying if I told you I had the
1:28:35 answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. They’re a small people. Generally speaking,
1:28:40 people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller,
1:28:44 probably about, you know, just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.
1:28:49 You’re joking, but, you know, there could be something to that.
1:28:53 I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, the pygmies are small and the people on the
1:28:58 plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small.
1:29:05 There’s definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway,
1:29:13 there’s a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has hand prints in the cave.
1:29:18 It’s somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand like a negative
1:29:26 print. We can date that charcoal and it comes from 10,000 years ago. And the hands are all small.
1:29:33 It’s, you know, typical old Mexico. I walked right up to these things and could put my hand.
1:29:38 I didn’t mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands and they’re all smaller than my
1:29:46 Northern European hand. And so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10,000 years
1:29:54 ago or it was people of Maya stature who did it. It’s so cool that you can date the charcoal.
1:30:00 And it’s so cool that 10,000 years ago there are people leaving. And actually we have one that’s,
1:30:06 I think, 2,000 years older now, just a couple years ago. Again, in Yucatan in a cave, they found
1:30:15 a woman they named Naia now. And she’s like 12,000 years old. So the best guess, maybe that you
1:30:24 have is it goes across the Bering Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of
1:30:29 cool ideas in the Amazon and start drifting back up into Mesoamerica. It was kind of a
1:30:35 co-evolution. The technology of ceramics, I think, got there through an interaction with.
1:30:41 See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn’t really have religion, didn’t have as a vibrant
1:30:48 religious set of ideas and they borrowed it from the Olmec. I’ve been doing a deep dive on this for
1:30:55 this Olmec course that I just did. And it really does seem like these other cultures that have
1:31:02 jade and hematite and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp
1:31:09 and building things out of dirt. But they were importing those materials from those areas,
1:31:16 carving them into all sorts of religious iconography, and then exporting them back to them.
1:31:18 And still the Fang Deity show up there?
1:31:25 No, the Fang Deities nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica. That’s why there’s Jaguars,
1:31:32 there’s Jaguar iconography, but it’s not the same thing. This whole Jaguar transformer deity
1:31:34 does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.
1:31:40 So the Maya, the Olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions. What was their…
1:31:46 I’d love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I’m curious about,
1:31:51 what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos?
1:32:01 That’s a question I’ve spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as
1:32:09 proof of the cyclical nature of life. And certainly they saw like every ancient group did, like are
1:32:16 those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the Maya especially looked at it
1:32:25 with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night.
1:32:33 And if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They’re just this
1:32:39 blanket. They’re like this curtain behind me. They’re the stage upon which some very important
1:32:46 players are dancing. And that’s the moon, the sun, and the planets. There’s five planets we
1:32:53 can see visibly. So they started watching like, why are just those seven moving differently than
1:32:59 the rest? And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The sun, of course, was also
1:33:04 involved in the agricultural cycle. So that was important in and of itself. But the planets,
1:33:12 we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math and seeing that there is a
1:33:20 repeated cycle. And then coming up with mythology around them, like Venus for them was associated
1:33:27 with war. And they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus.
1:33:34 Sometimes in the classic period, Maya, it was the first appearance of Venus as the morning star.
1:33:40 That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic
1:33:47 with like Chichen Itza being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like if you watched Venus
1:33:54 day after day, it goes slowly up every day. And then when it hits its highest point as morning
1:34:01 star in the morning, it goes down to the earth like three times as fast. All of a sudden, it just
1:34:09 shoots down and hits the earth. And so the people of post-classic Maya civilization saw that as the
1:34:15 gods shooting a spear into the earth. And that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was
1:34:23 like wartime when the spear is going to hit the earth. Right. So this is fascinating. They just had
1:34:29 at the foundation a sense that life existence at the various timescales is cyclical.
1:34:35 That’s the starting point. And then you just look out there and if you’re extremely precise,
1:34:41 which is fascinating how precise they were, you can just measure the cycles.
1:34:50 Yeah. And they did it really well. Now, of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated
1:34:55 writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the Kipu, but it’s so different than
1:34:59 our writing. We’re still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there’s math there too.
1:35:05 But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next
1:35:11 generation who would then do it more and do it more. That’s how they figured out kind of the holy
1:35:17 grail of ancient astronomy, how good were they, was whether they could see the procession of the
1:35:24 equinoxes. The fact that we’re just barely wobbling and there’s a 26,000 year period where the stars
1:35:31 as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It’s 26,000 years. But the Maya were
1:35:39 able to figure out, wait, it’s moving one degree every 72 years and did a calculation based on
1:35:46 on where it should be in the ancient past. And they’re using constellations. They’re showing
1:35:55 us they know by saying like, this planet’s in this constellation right now. And 33,000 years ago,
1:36:02 it would be in this constellation. It’s just fascinating that they were able to figure this
1:36:08 out. I would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community.
1:36:15 If you can call it that. I think we absolutely could. And that’s actually one of the things that
1:36:22 I’m hoping to move the needle on in my generation with my career is to give these cultures the
1:36:29 respect they deserve as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect.
1:36:36 There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment.
1:36:42 Their math is incredible. Their hydraulic engineering is incredible. Their chemistry
1:36:50 is incredible. And so I hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to
1:36:56 recognize the achievements in a different way. Yeah. I mean, unquestionably incredible scientific
1:37:04 work in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the sophisticated aspects
1:37:09 of the Mayan calendar that they’ve developed? I know you’ve got another five hours.
1:37:14 Yes, go. No, I’m kidding. I should say that you also gave me
1:37:23 the 2024 Mayan calendar. Yeah, I do this just to show the world that that calendar system
1:37:30 is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system
1:37:35 they made, just like our system is. So can you speak to the three components here as I’m reading
1:37:40 the Tsoil Keen, the Hob and the Long Count? What are these fascinating components of the calendar?
1:37:48 It’s neat how obsessed they were. They were really math nerds. It wasn’t good enough for them to just
1:37:54 make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that interlocked into each other,
1:38:02 like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tsoil Keen’s
1:38:07 their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that
1:38:16 are living their lives based on a 260-day count, no weeks, no months. It’s just 13 numbers combined
1:38:23 with 20-day names for a total of 260 days, and then it goes again. Everybody in the Highlands
1:38:28 knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality,
1:38:34 and the kind of jobs that they’re supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit
1:38:40 and what’s supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the mom, the
1:38:47 grandmother, grandfather spirits, and they talk to each one of those days, and they pray to them.
1:38:56 There’s now an association of some 8,000 people that are called aki that are day keepers who are
1:39:03 keeping the days, and they’re also like community psychologists almost. People come to them and
1:39:09 say, “My life is mixed up. What’s wrong here? Well, let’s ask the mom. Okay, well, it looks
1:39:14 like you’re not doing this or that, or you’re an accountant. You’re not supposed to be an
1:39:19 accountant. You’re supposed to be a midwife. What are you doing? You’re living your life wrong.
1:39:22 You’re a key, but you need to start being a key person.
1:39:28 They take extremely seriously the day in which you’re born, what that means, the spirit that
1:39:35 embodies that day. Right. I’m a key. I’m 13-key, and it’s funny how accurate a lot of them are.
1:39:45 Mine is basically, I’m an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me so my family
1:39:52 still prospers. Like, “Oh, God, that’s horribly accurate.” I mean, some of it is also the chicken
1:39:58 or the egg. If you truly believe, if you structure society where this calendar is truly sacred,
1:40:05 then it kind of like you manifest a lot of the, the spirit does manifest itself in the life of
1:40:11 the people that was born on that spirit’s day. Absolutely. It’s interesting. And the Maya really
1:40:17 feel this in this system. So that’s the core system. This 260-day calendar was the very
1:40:22 first calendar they made thousands of years ago, and it’s the one that’s most important today.
1:40:30 Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it? From most Maya agree with this today,
1:40:35 and who knows what the original architects thousands of years ago were thinking, but
1:40:44 it’s nine months. It’s the human gestation period. So if you, if you conceived on the day
1:40:51 13 monkey, chances are your kid’s coming out on or near 13 monkey. And I think it’s beautiful. I
1:40:58 mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together.
1:41:06 When they thought about, we need, we need a count of time that’s for us. They didn’t look up into
1:41:12 the heavens. They looked like into their bodies. What’s the first cycle that we actually go through
1:41:19 as humans? And they picked this nine month thing. It’s, it really is our cycle and no other culture
1:41:23 on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
1:41:29 So that’s the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today.
1:41:34 What’s the second on the hub? The hub is the solar calendar, the one that everybody
1:41:40 on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it’s second though, because when they start talking
1:41:47 about it, they use all the symbols and the numbers from the 260 one. They say, well, we need a solar
1:41:52 one too. Let’s just keep counting this another 105 days and we’ll get to 365.
1:41:59 Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same, got it, got it, got it, got it. And that’s useful
1:42:04 because for all the sort of agriculture, all this kind of reasons. Right. Though interestingly,
1:42:11 they never put a leap year in. The hub is also called the vague year because it’s just 365,
1:42:19 which means every year they’re off a quarter of a day and eventually it starts really adding up.
1:42:25 In fact, it’s even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight
1:42:34 math from a thousand years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently
1:42:41 than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of eastern Guatemala. They write me
1:42:46 nasty emails saying, I don’t know what time the year is, but their relatives changed it in the
1:42:54 1950s because their agricultural cycle was so far off, they moved it 60 days back to make it in the
1:43:01 spring again. But it drifts, which is strange because it’s not a very good thing for the
1:43:06 agricultural cycle. It’s one of these mysteries we still don’t have an explanation for.
1:43:12 So that’s the hub. And then what’s the long count? The long counts, they’re really mysterious cool
1:43:19 one because it’s a linear count of days, which are not like them. It’s a bunch of cycles like ours.
1:43:28 Our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle. But it’s weird in that its estimation of the year
1:43:37 in the in the long count system is only 360 days. So it’s miserably off a solar year.
1:43:44 They count in base 20. So they count like we count in tens, we’re decimal. They count in base
1:43:52 20, bejesimal. And so it should be, you know, there’s ones, there’s 20s, there’s 400s, there’s
1:43:59 8,000s, there’s 160,000s. It’s up, it goes just like our tens, hundreds, thousands,
1:44:09 10,000s, but it’s times 20. So that third, so they have days, months of 20 days. And then they have
1:44:16 these years that are should be by their math 400. But it’s only 360. And that throws the whole thing
1:44:23 out of whack going further up, then they have a 20 year period and a 400 year period, 400 years to
1:44:29 their calendar. But it’s only by that time, it’s only 396 years in our period in our reckoning.
1:44:38 So it’s, it’s mysterious that it’s, why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days?
1:44:43 That’s, you know, that doesn’t follow any astronomy that doesn’t, that’s not the human cycle.
1:44:47 Yeah, but they’re, I mean, it’s interesting that they build up towards
1:44:54 thinking about very long periods of time, like Bactunes is 144,000 days.
1:45:02 Right. Or a Bactoon is 400 of the long counts years. So it’s kind of like our millennium.
1:45:09 You know, we think it’s a big deal when we hit a millennium or a century. That’s,
1:45:15 they have a 20 year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a cartoon,
1:45:20 and then they have the 400 Bactoon, which is the big one. That’s like their millennium.
1:45:30 And 13 of those Bactunes occurred in the creation before us. They also think that we were in,
1:45:33 that the world has had multiple creations. They’re not alone in that. There’s lots of
1:45:39 ancient civilizations who say that, but we’re technically in the fourth creation. And they’re,
1:45:47 they have a creation story called the Popol Vu. And the Popol Vu is clear as day that
1:45:55 the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the hero twins. And the fourth
1:46:01 creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the long count.
1:46:07 And we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened. The fourth creation started on
1:46:18 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
1:46:28 13th Bactoon of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 Bactunes
1:46:34 long. Right. So, and this would be the fourth creation, the calendar starts fourth creation.
1:46:44 But if you do the math going from 3,114 BC and count 13 Bactunes forward, you get to 2012.
1:46:54 And hence the, the very popular notion that 2012, whenever that was December, December 21st,
1:47:00 2012 will be the end of the world. So can you explain this? Those were very fruitful years for
1:47:07 me. I had so many lectures around the country that was, it’s like, like Garrett Morris and Saturday
1:47:15 Night Live, the, the, the apocalypse was very, very good to me. I mean, but that, that is pretty
1:47:19 interesting. So that’s, that, that would be, so technically would be in the, what, in the fifth.
1:47:25 Yeah. Technically, we’d be in the fifth. Though my argument was that actually,
1:47:32 if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never say anything
1:47:40 like that. In fact, there’s a handful of dates that tell us that, that the fourth creation does
1:47:50 continue farther on, that, that Bactune place should have 20, 20 Bactunes in it, like their
1:47:57 counting system would dictate, not 13. And there’s, there’s a place in, in Palenque. There’s a place
1:48:05 in the Dresden Codex and one other place I’m forgetting that, that I’ll talk about time after
1:48:12 2012. So how does that happen? It’s a conflict. Is there supposed to be an overlap of the,
1:48:20 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.
1:48:27 It’s all over the place. It’s a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is, is not
1:48:37 very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end
1:48:47 of the third, the third creation hit the magical reset button and that it just restarted time right
1:48:53 there because of their magic. But that was not to say that the natural Bactune cycle should be
1:49:02 13. And there are certain texts that, that go way forward in time or way
1:49:07 backward in time. And whenever they want to do that, there, there are higher increments than just
1:49:13 the Bactune. Above that, there’s the Pictune, then there’s the Calabatune, then there’s Alawatune,
1:49:20 and it goes on and on. And these are like, you know, 160,000 years, huge increments of time.
1:49:24 Whenever they want to do that and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting
1:49:30 13s in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they’re saying
1:49:37 is they’re making an esoteric statement about the never-ending nature of time. That’s, that’s
1:49:44 what I think they’re, they’re telling us in those texts that time goes on forever, magically.
1:49:50 But they’re, they still had a conception that it didn’t go on forever before, right? That there was
1:49:55 other civilizations that came before in there. And this is the fourth creation.
1:50:00 This is the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody. The first ones were made of mud and
1:50:05 they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals.
1:50:16 The third ones were like us, but, but flawed in some other way. And then we’re finally made of,
1:50:24 of the blood of the gods and corn. We’re made out of corn. So we’re, we’re perfect. And as the,
1:50:32 as it explains to us, the, the Popal Voodoo does, we got it right this time. There, there is, there,
1:50:37 there’s no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration.
1:50:44 Well, one of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we talked to a lot at contact,
1:50:52 they also had the concept of multiple creations before us, but they were real clear to the Spanish
1:50:59 that they weren’t all the same time element. Some of them were in the 300s of years. Some of
1:51:07 them were in the 700s of years, but they were not the same time period. So our, our mathematical
1:51:14 logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation is in, or also be 13.
1:51:19 It’s in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They’re
1:51:25 different time periods. Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Do they have
1:51:32 some kind of long multi-generational memory of prior civilizations?
1:51:37 It may have had some echo in the, the flood myths.
1:51:42 Right. It’s the same. It’s the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time.
1:51:49 There’s a lot of different opinions about it. And, you know, they’re like, if they were all 13,
1:51:53 if we have five creations, like the Aztecs said, and they were all 13,
1:52:00 they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional
1:52:07 cycle. So some people are like, they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the
1:52:14 equinoxes. And I mean, I don’t believe that one, but that one sure sounds good. Doesn’t it? That’s,
1:52:20 that’s going to get a lot of internet hits. And one of the things I do, obviously,
1:52:30 wonder about is why the flood myth is part of like most societies and most religions.
1:52:36 I think that one’s pretty easy. It’s the end of the Ice Age when the bathtub filled back up.
1:52:42 Huh. So it’s just the Ice Age bathtub. It’s, it’s, it sees filling back up.
1:52:49 And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that, that story.
1:52:56 Everybody knows that everybody’s nice coastal village went underwater and they had to,
1:53:00 they had to seek higher ground. And then just like people like talking about the weather,
1:53:05 everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up. And
1:53:11 then, uh, that, that myth carried. Why do we live here, grandpa? Well, we used to live over there,
1:53:18 but then the water came. And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea.
1:53:23 It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, you know,
1:53:26 there’s a lot of things I don’t have a reasonable explanation for, but the, uh,
1:53:31 but the flood myth is almost certainly the, the rise in sea level.
1:53:40 So the, this idea that every day represents, uh, that carries a spirit, uh, you know,
1:53:46 there’s modern day astrology. You know, most people kind of consider astrology this, um,
1:53:53 maybe a bit unscientific woo woo type of, um, uh, set of beliefs. But do you think there’s
1:54:00 some wisdom that astrology carries from your scholarship of the Maya calendar? Do you think,
1:54:07 if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there’s some wisdom there?
1:54:16 I don’t know. You know, that I have a woo woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff,
1:54:21 but I don’t think as a scientist, it makes a, I cannot come up with a
1:54:30 biological scientific reason why that would be true. And, you know, when you look at it objectively,
1:54:40 I mean, really is everybody born with the sign Scorpio, uh, a moody person. That’s just,
1:54:48 that’s just objectively not true. Um, but it is funny how oftentimes these, these Maya, uh,
1:54:53 horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who
1:55:01 surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya
1:55:06 sign. And his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better,
1:55:13 which that’s, that’s fascinating. At least that’s, that’s fun. But no, I’m, I think I’m too much of
1:55:19 a scientist to believe that I just don’t have a, any foundation in science that would allow us to
1:55:28 believe that the, uh, the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.
1:55:38 I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that, uh, what I do like is the, uh,
1:55:45 inbuilt humility to that worldview, uh, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual
1:55:51 world, but a world that we don’t understand, quite understand. And then you can wonder about
1:55:56 what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you construct all kinds of systems to
1:56:03 try to interpret that. And then there is where the human hubris can come in and you know, uh,
1:56:06 but it’s good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.
1:56:12 I do love the mysteries of the world. And I, I would, I would love to find an ancient civilization,
1:56:18 but I don’t, I don’t want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they’re one of the things
1:56:26 that make world life worth living. That’s true. That’s true. Uh, you mentioned the, uh, Maya writing
1:56:31 system. What are some interesting aspects of their language that they’ve used and the written
1:56:37 language that they used? Well, you know, one of the things that confound me as a guy who’s spent,
1:56:42 you know, better portion of my life studying it, I had the honor of being, uh, the student of, uh,
1:56:48 Linda Shealy right here at the university of Texas at Austin. She got the group together
1:56:55 who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best and, and loved
1:56:59 every minute of it. I miss Linda. Can you speak to that code actually? The hieroglyphic code and
1:57:06 what takes to break it? Oh boy. I mean, what a, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone.
1:57:15 We had a page out of Diego DeLanda’s book, a priest who was converting the Maya in Yucatan,
1:57:23 asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced
1:57:29 they had an alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya guy sat down in Spanish and he said,
1:57:33 okay, you’re going to write all the symbols right here in my book, right, right in, ah, here,
1:57:41 right a bae here, right a say here. And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told
1:57:48 him to write. They were actually syllables. They were vowel, consonant combinations. They weren’t an
1:57:56 alphabet, but that turned into our Rosetta Stone of sorts. The big key is that the Maya still speak
1:58:03 that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya.
1:58:10 Now there’s, there’s where I get confused. That we’ve got a single writing system that is
1:58:16 intelligible. We’ve broken the code. So we know that it’s basically the same writing system from
1:58:25 the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador. But we have 33 Maya languages today
1:58:31 that are mutually unintelligible. And we, we backwards project the language of what they
1:58:37 spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called choulti, which is a combination of chorti
1:58:45 and choulti of those languages. But it doesn’t work for me at all. How did, if there was one language,
1:58:52 maybe two back then, how did it flower into 33 mutually unintelligible languages in just 500
1:59:02 years during culture, acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population?
1:59:07 How did that happen? So we’re missing something huge here. I think it’s more like
1:59:16 Chinese where Chinese letters, writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood.
1:59:22 I don’t know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible that
1:59:29 there are more languages, not less languages in the Maya area after the last 500 years that
1:59:34 they’ve been through. So you think that there’s some kind of process of either rapidly generating
1:59:40 dialects or there’s always has been these dialects or I should say they’re distinct languages,
1:59:46 even though there’s a common writing system? There must have been a way that multiple languages
1:59:53 understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like Latin, how there was a
2:00:02 period in Europe where most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood who all understood
2:00:11 Latin and they wrote in Latin. Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya
2:00:16 world. But we don’t really know and there’s not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it’s
2:00:23 possible to have that. Right. But we did realize it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri
2:00:30 Konorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the
2:00:38 written language was a dead language. But Yuri not knowing any of that, not being filled with
2:00:45 all of those thoughts from America and Europe, went about it in the way that he was taught
2:00:53 in his grad school in Moscow and just went to the dictionaries. And he looked at Yucatec
2:00:59 language that they’re speaking today and he applied it to the symbol system. And he knew that there
2:01:07 were certain sounds. He used Landa’s alphabet and he found there was the his two key examples were
2:01:13 a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it. And the
2:01:23 dog, a dog in Yucatec is tsul. So he saw two symbols and he said this one’s probably tsul
2:01:30 and this one’s ul and then the turkey was kuts. So it would be ku ending in tsul. And he showed how,
2:01:38 look, this is tsuts, this is tsul, those two things that should be tsul are the same symbol.
2:01:44 And that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we’re still working on today.
2:01:50 That’s fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. Like how do you even figure that
2:01:57 out? And there’s probably still, are you aware of any written languages that haven’t been decoded
2:02:03 yet? Yeah, yeah, there’s a number of them. There’s Easter Island script. I was just talking to,
2:02:10 we’ve apparently made a few advances there now. It’s called rongo rongo. And we only have about
2:02:17 maybe 25 examples of texts. But we’re beginning to break that. There’s also the big one
2:02:26 is harappan. Harappan, for a long time we used to say there were five independent scripts
2:02:37 on the planet. And those were Chinese cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian Maya, and then
2:02:45 harappan, which is from Northern India. That’s the only one that we’ve never cracked. And now all the
2:02:51 epigraphers, the people that’s the term for epigraphy is translating these languages.
2:02:55 They’re all ganging up on harappan and want to kick it off the list because we can’t break it.
2:03:01 It had a big enough symbol set, but no one’s been able to crack it. And now they’re saying it’s just
2:03:08 an elaborate symbol set and doesn’t reflect the spoken word. That’s a hypothesis, but
2:03:14 we just would explain why it’s so different. But we could just be faced with a quitter
2:03:20 generation. Maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation. The other one that fascinates me
2:03:28 is from the Americas. It’s the kipu. The Inca had the kipu, this knotted string records, but it was
2:03:35 definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know lots. I can do the math kipus
2:03:39 and figure out what they’re totalling and things. Yeah, there’s a kipu right there.
2:03:43 Kipu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of
2:03:48 cultures in the region of India and South America. A kipu usually consists of cotton or
2:03:53 carbon fiber strings. There’s a set of strings and they’re supposed to be saying something.
2:03:59 There’s one long string that the little ones dangle off of. Each one of the dangling strings
2:04:06 have sets of knots on them. Some of them are mathematical kipus. Those, we can just do the
2:04:13 math. We can prove that it’s math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire
2:04:20 libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the
2:04:25 libraries would just, they’d say, pull that one down. Read that one to me. He’d pull it out and
2:04:31 just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. It was definitely writing,
2:04:40 but in the 1570s, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called
2:04:48 kipu kamyaks gathered up, had them read all of their kipus and transcribed them into Spanish books
2:04:53 and then had the kipus burned and those people murdered. Well, there you go.
2:05:01 And so we can’t break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language,
2:05:07 though it wasn’t written. It was weaved or knotted. And there’s still some kipus available that could
2:05:15 be there. I think now we’ve just crossed the 1000 mark. So we have a thousand kipus. There’s
2:05:21 enough to break the code. And I think this generation might be the one that does it.
2:05:27 It’s sad that so few have survived. A thousand is good, but it’s…
2:05:35 But see, Peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology. There’s so much out there.
2:05:42 There was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in
2:05:49 Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community
2:05:55 of 3,000 people, all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into
2:06:04 Christianity. And he had the communities, kipu kamyaks, not kipus for each person that told them
2:06:09 that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their
2:06:17 kipu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3,000 of the same kipu made and handed out to this
2:06:24 community. If we find that community and find it cemetery, there is a rosetta stone.
2:06:30 You know, it is probably the case that there’s somebody in Peru and maybe a large community
2:06:35 that knows this language, that understands, and you just have to show up and ask them.
2:06:41 And it’s like, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” There are some communities that are using them.
2:06:45 There’s a couple of them that we had high hopes for, and then it was a parent that they were just
2:06:50 making shit up. They didn’t actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read.
2:06:54 So they made a bunch of stuff about what it says, and they bring it out, and they act like they
2:06:59 can read it. But then when you ask them the details, they don’t know. But then on a much
2:07:06 simpler level, there’s llama herders who keep a string in their pocket, and they’ve got the
2:07:11 knots equaling how many llamas they have, and then they have subcategories of information,
2:07:18 like, “This one’s sick. We’ve lost these ones. This one’s pregnant.” So they have these more
2:07:24 simple and more mathematical kipus, but they’re using them to affect as a record.
2:07:32 Is it possible through archaeology to know what the social organization of the Maya was?
2:07:40 Maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader,
2:07:45 different roles, priests, or who had the power, who was powerless,
2:07:48 who had certain kinds of roles, is it possible to know that?
2:07:53 Actually, because of hieroglyphs, yeah, we know a whole lot. There’s basic things that archaeology,
2:07:57 which is a very blunt tool, can figure out, like, “This guy lives in a rich house. This
2:08:05 guy lives in a poor house.” But the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule,
2:08:15 that it was hereditary, that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and
2:08:21 connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that’s lived in the underworld.
2:08:27 It also told us things about hierarchy, like that there were councils of lords underneath
2:08:33 the king who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods and that there were
2:08:42 revolving positions of authority. The site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent
2:08:49 years in the jungle there, Palenque, had lords title named Fire Lord. That was one of the,
2:08:59 like, generals of their army. And we could tell that position changed over time. So there was
2:09:05 one guy named Chak Soots, who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called
2:09:11 the Kal Monab. And then by the time he carves this other panel, there’s another guy in the position
2:09:19 of Kak Ahau, which was the Fire Lord. And so he had got promoted. It was, well, he could have been
2:09:27 killed. I mean, in the case of that. But then we have the interesting case of, in the post classic,
2:09:32 they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the
2:09:38 classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of
2:09:45 kings. And so they turn into this more council system at Chichen Itza. But then when Chichen Itza
2:09:52 falls, there’s a new city that’s architecture looks a lot like Chichen Itza. It’s called Mayapon.
2:10:02 But it has what is called the League of Mayapon. And it has a council of representatives from the
2:10:10 communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It is a Maya democracy
2:10:17 that happens. The individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. They each family has their own
2:10:22 council house at Mayapon, though they live back at their place. It’s kind of like a Maya Congress.
2:10:29 Representative democracy. It really was. I mean, and this happens in, I guess,
2:10:38 1250 AD that this Maya democracy happens. And we know the names of them. We know the families.
2:10:45 And of course, they were humans. So eventually, they screwed it all up. One family murdered another
2:10:50 family and the whole city burned. And of course, it’s probably some fascinating corruption,
2:10:55 which is hard to discover through. Part of it was the Aztecs screwing things up. The Aztecs came
2:11:00 down with all sorts of, like, “We’ll buy everything you’re making.” And then eventually, they were
2:11:06 like, “Could we maybe buy some humans?” And then one family was like, “No.” And the other family was
2:11:12 like, “I don’t know. They’re making us a lot of money.” So then, you know, they murdered each other
2:11:19 and the water supply got polluted and then the city burned. It seems like slavery, murder and disease
2:11:27 is a large component of the story of humans. You mentioned different periods in the Maya,
2:11:32 the classic, the post-classic, the pre-classic, the archaic. Can you just speak to that? So
2:11:36 archaic is before there was really a civilization. Yeah, archaic is pretty much when everybody’s
2:11:42 hunter-gatherers. So the classic period was the Golden Age. And then the pre-classic is the
2:11:48 interesting time that we were talking about. And the post-classic is when the democracy came about.
2:11:55 Well, midway through it, reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils.
2:12:02 So yeah, we have pre-classic is like the origins of civilization. They’re starting to build cities,
2:12:07 they’re starting to create their calendar, they’re starting to create these wonderful works of art.
2:12:14 And the classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya,
2:12:19 you’ll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically, that’s the age
2:12:25 of kings to me. That’s when the cities decide that they’re going to organize themselves around
2:12:32 elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are
2:12:39 directly in contact with the gods. The Maya never contact their gods directly. They contact their
2:12:46 ancestors who are up there, who act like liaisons to the gods. And so the Maya age of kings has these
2:12:53 dynasties sprouting up where these people have basically snowed the rest of the people that
2:13:00 they’ve got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick
2:13:06 and talk to the gods, where everybody, every Joe Maya can let their blood and burn it
2:13:12 and contact their ancestor. But Joe Maya’s dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below,
2:13:20 and he’s got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly,
2:13:26 but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and can act as liaisons.
2:13:33 So that’s the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we say 250
2:13:40 to 900, which is kind of the encompassing edges of it, but it’s interesting that it’s actually
2:13:52 specifically the ninth Bakhtun of their history. The ninth Bakhtun begins in like 426, and it ends
2:14:01 in like 829. So it’s a 400 year period of time, and before that there were no kings, and after that
2:14:07 there really aren’t kings. They’re heads of councils. So I call it the Age of Kings, where
2:14:14 everybody’s following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while, that’s great. I mean
2:14:22 cities build up, populations happening. I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment, too.
2:14:28 Strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together. But eventually,
2:14:33 like happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden there’s this
2:14:42 unwieldy, huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else, and they start saying,
2:14:46 “Well, I think we should fight with those guys, and you guys should go take these things.”
2:14:51 And people eventually get sick of it, and they walk away from these cities, and that’s how we get the
2:14:56 mysterious Maya collapse, where all these cities are just gone.
2:15:01 That’s one of the great mysteries of the Maya civilization is that over a very short period
2:15:07 of time, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly. It collapsed. What do you
2:15:15 think explains that? What happened? I think it’s a failing of archaeology to properly see what was
2:15:25 happening. I think that most of those cities, populations, moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers
2:15:30 out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses, and all archaeology’s
2:15:36 signature sees is that nobody lives in the city center anymore. We don’t see a bunch of mass
2:15:43 bodies. There’s no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with
2:15:49 each other at the end, and we see that signature plain as day. We know when a city was attacked
2:15:56 and burned. Mostly that didn’t happen. People moved and migrated, and it seems like right there
2:16:05 around, like between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top, most of it was in the
2:16:11 rainforests of northern Guatemala, they move. They move in two directions. Some of them move
2:16:19 into the highlands of Guatemala, and some of them move up into the Yucatan. The city of Chichen Itza
2:16:28 becomes the next big capital in Yucatan. The word Itza is actually a word describing the people
2:16:36 who lived around Lake P-10 Itza in northern Guatemala. All of the Maya are super clear about
2:16:44 that, that the Itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. The
2:16:50 elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.
2:16:56 So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a specific kind of
2:17:01 events that started this? Was this an idea that kind of transformed the society?
2:17:06 We are still debating that. I don’t think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated.
2:17:13 I think a lot of things led to this. One thing we can see archaeologically is that every one of
2:17:21 the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular, and we think that they pushed the limits
2:17:28 of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end
2:17:36 of the classic period that people are seasonally starving. I remember really stark evidence in
2:17:44 Copan Honduras. Copan was this beautiful city, lineage of 17 kings. But the last kings and the
2:17:51 last elite burials that we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They
2:17:57 get this thing when you’re growing up and you’re not getting enough food seasonally. It shows up
2:18:05 in the enamel of your teeth. It’s called dental hypoplasia. And if somebody’s seasonally starving,
2:18:12 it gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of Maya before they left Copan,
2:18:18 even the rich people are seasonally starving. So there’s a problem there, for sure.
2:18:26 But I also think it’s a weird thing. It was not an empire. It was a group of independent city
2:18:32 states like Greece. Some of them were allied. Some of them were enemies. There was a huge
2:18:38 civil war that settled out about the end of the classic period. So if it was Europe, you know,
2:18:42 the victors would have taken over. The losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went.
2:18:48 But when they abandoned these cities that were independent still, they all left,
2:18:54 both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn’t be just as simple as spoils
2:19:00 go to the victor. It’s such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the
2:19:08 Copan Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to
2:19:14 note that that ninth period, that ninth 400-year period ends right then. And I think a lot of
2:19:20 people, you know, I can’t prove it archaeologically, but I think a lot of people said we’re coming to
2:19:27 the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we’re doing. When you talk
2:19:33 to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya say, you know,
2:19:42 what happens at the end of a big cycle here? They say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation,
2:19:49 that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles, that change is coming,
2:19:54 we can either be part of it or we can get steamrolled by it. The Aztecs did this neat thing
2:20:00 called the New Fire Ceremony. Every 52 years, which was the biggest their calendar would go,
2:20:06 they’d burn down perfectly good temples and they’d burn down their houses sometimes and they would
2:20:14 just, everybody in society would perform this, what they called the New Fire Ceremony and they
2:20:22 would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the Maya decided at the end of
2:20:27 the ninth Bakhtun that it was time to renew the world. I think this theory makes sense because
2:20:31 they really internalized the calendar. I mean, it was a really big part of their culture,
2:20:40 the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization. That’s what I think. I think that they created
2:20:48 that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it. Yeah, you mentioned the Aztec. What was
2:20:55 the origin of the Aztec? Where did these people come from? At what time and how?
2:21:01 You know, almost every one of the cultures we’re talking about now, we have two different versions
2:21:08 of the answer to that question. We have the archaeology version and we have the Aztecs themselves.
2:21:16 The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well
2:21:25 to the north called Aslan and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero’s journey
2:21:31 where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter the birth of the war god that
2:21:39 they’ll worship after this and how they stepped into the Valley of Mexico as the last, the lost
2:21:47 brothers of everyone in the Valley of Mexico. They said that they all came from the north near
2:21:55 Aslan as a place, a cave with seven different passages called Chiquimostac and that all the
2:22:02 people who spoke the language Nahuatl came from the cave and most of them went early to the Valley
2:22:09 of Mexico and in the Aztecs story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to
2:22:18 come in and but then they show up late game and they become mercenaries. They just start working
2:22:28 for communities in the Valley of Mexico and this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before
2:22:36 Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico and they make themselves this indispensable
2:22:46 group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Texcoco
2:22:52 which is in the middle of, which is now Mexico City, it’s all dried up but those guys were
2:22:57 too civilized to fight with each other but they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff.
2:23:04 So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico.
2:23:09 The dirty stuff, they’re the muscle. Yeah, they’d go in and they’d kill whoever you
2:23:15 wanted killed and now you’re the king of this area. So one of these kings that they were working for
2:23:22 really liked them and decided I’m going to make the Aztecs part of our ancestry. I’m going to give
2:23:32 them my daughter to marry the head of the Aztecs and the Aztecs sacrificed her and that really
2:23:38 pissed that guy off. So he took like his whole army and ran the Aztecs out for a while. They say
2:23:45 they live in this horrible desert section eating lizards but then one of their priests say we’re
2:23:53 going to walk around the lake and my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus
2:23:59 with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital and they see that but it’s out on
2:24:08 an island in the lake and he said well I don’t know, that’s the place. So they build up an island,
2:24:16 they go to that island and then they just start piling up lake mug until they make a whole city
2:24:22 there in the middle of the island. They make or the lake, they make an island city and all of this
2:24:30 occurs in about a hundred years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tinochtitlan as they
2:24:38 called it is really established and from there they quickly take over the entire valley. They make
2:24:44 what they call the triple alliance which is the two other big communities of the lake are now
2:24:50 their allies but they’re not really allies. The Aztecs were brutal. Those guys agreed to shut
2:24:57 up and let the Aztecs run the show and then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down
2:25:02 into the Maya area. Everywhere they go they rename everybody’s towns and make them pay tribute.
2:25:12 Pretty short last thing, civilization, spread extremely quickly, famous. What are some defining
2:25:17 qualities that explain that? I think they were very much like, they had an attitude like Attila
2:25:24 the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable
2:25:32 and too civilized and the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know,
2:25:39 we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us and if you work for us you’ll be just fine.
2:25:42 They’d go to every town they’d go to. The first thing they do is they’d show up with a bunch of
2:25:48 merchants. There was a merchant class who were also military. They were really the
2:25:55 people who assessed where they were going to attack next. They’d go in with a bunch of Aztec
2:26:01 products and say, “We’d like to trade with you.” But all the time they were assessing their military
2:26:08 prowess, what products they had that they could take and then soon after the Poch Teca were there
2:26:15 would come the military with the reconnaissance. So the Aztec had a huge warrior class, as you’re
2:26:22 saying. So what was there? Can you linger on their whole relationship with war and violence?
2:26:33 They worshipped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templomaior. It had two temples up on top.
2:26:39 One was Tutlalak, the rain god, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was
2:26:46 Weesila Poshli. He was, that translates, “the hummingbird on the left.” But he’s the war god.
2:26:51 I love that he’s a hummingbird. Maybe, you know, he’s fast and he comes from the magical side or
2:27:00 something. But then right next to the temple on either side were the two temples of the warriors.
2:27:04 One was the Eagle Warrior Clan. The other one was the Jaguar Warrior Clan.
2:27:10 And they were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess,
2:27:16 you know, probably an analogy between like the Navy and the Air Force. You know, they had a good
2:27:23 natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic
2:27:31 warriors dressed up in all of their finery. And they would come at people with these two
2:27:38 forces. And it was very unlike anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again,
2:27:44 I think I could draw a parallel to what happened in Europe. You know, the famous Henry V moment
2:27:54 in Agincourt, where, you know, his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France’s aristocracy with
2:28:04 the longbow. Like up until that moment, Europe had a very wars for the elite classes kind of attitude.
2:28:09 And then after France lost half their aristocracy, then it was like, maybe we should be hiring from
2:28:17 the villages. The same sort of thing happened with the Aztec that there was a, Mesoamerica really
2:28:24 didn’t have huge standing armies. But the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people.
2:28:29 They didn’t actually have to use it a lot. It was very, it was used to great effect in the,
2:28:34 in the Valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mesoamerica, it was mostly the fear factor.
2:28:43 But there also seemed to be, you know, a celebration of violence. I think you said
2:28:50 that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec. Maybe like the Roman Empire, was it,
2:28:58 they just had maybe a different relationship with what violence where that stood in the purpose
2:29:05 of life, purpose of existence? Is that fair to say? I would hypothesize so. I mean, you know,
2:29:09 I think it’s one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures, you know,
2:29:16 knowing what our human capacity is. And the Aztecs, when I, when I said that statement, I,
2:29:21 what I, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice
2:29:28 and, you know, ripping people’s hearts out. This, they had this, this just, you know, grotesque,
2:29:37 violent bent. But in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry
2:29:46 and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted
2:29:55 also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen
2:30:02 that had come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. They’re all of the
2:30:09 causeways leading to the Aztec capital had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum
2:30:16 and they had an aquarium and a zoo and they had an opera and they had a ballet.
2:30:25 And these things existed together. There was not in the Aztec mind any conflict between
2:30:31 witnessing someone’s heart getting ripped out one moment in the evening we’d go to the ballet.
2:30:37 How does that contrast the relationship with war and violence with the other
2:30:42 civilizations of Mesoamerica and South America, maybe the Maya? What was their relationship
2:30:49 like with war? The Maya were certainly influenced by the Aztec at the end. So we get a skewed
2:30:57 perspective from the contact period accounts because the Maya were much more violent and
2:31:02 sacrifice-oriented in their post-classic rendition. But in the classic period,
2:31:11 it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves that we know
2:31:22 that the Maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper and the paper would
2:31:28 burn and become the smoke through which they’d commune with their ancestors. But they’d actually
2:31:37 tie this paper onto their penis, cut it, and then dance so the blood splattered. But it was them
2:31:41 cutting themselves. It was different than killing a bunch of other people for it. It was an auto
2:31:47 sacrifice we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other
2:31:53 people should die. It was a self-sacrifice thing. Can you speak to the sacrifice a bit more animal
2:31:59 sacrifice, human sacrifice? What role did that play in for the Maya, for the Aztec, for the
2:32:04 different cultures here? Was that religious in nature? It was absolutely religious in nature.
2:32:14 And the Aztecs were of the opinion that the war god demanded people were captured and sacrificed.
2:32:20 And it had to be valuable people. Before they made that big standing army, they had
2:32:28 just ritual battles that they would have, and they’d take captives. In fact, all around Mesuel
2:32:34 America, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods.
2:32:42 And the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody. They did
2:32:49 it so much and so successfully that they didn’t have any enemies nearby. So they decided this one
2:32:57 poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlashkolons, that they were never going to
2:33:04 make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war
2:33:11 with the Tlashkolons and haul them back for a sacrifice. Cortes met those guys and he was like,
2:33:17 “Here are people who hate their guts. I’ll just use these guys.” So, you know, we say, “Oh,
2:33:24 Cortes took over the Aztec world.” It was Cortes in 20,000 super pissed off Tlashkolons.
2:33:28 And they actually sacrificed so there would be these ritual
2:33:35 battles or is it chopping off people’s heads? Is there some interesting rituals around the
2:33:41 sacrifice? It’s mostly hard extraction. Sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple
2:33:46 so everybody can see it. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their
2:33:53 rib cage would come out and they’d use like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really just
2:34:00 like tried and true way to do it. They’d stab it in in a certain place close and then they’d push
2:34:06 down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage and they just so they just make a place
2:34:10 where they could just rip it right out with their hand. Yeah, with their hand, but they were really
2:34:16 just surgical about it. They’d use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the
2:34:21 ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just while the person
2:34:28 was alive. Yep, while the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea like there was a horrible
2:34:34 drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley and they came to this conclusion that
2:34:39 it’s because we haven’t been killing enough people. Right. We’ve got to bump this up and then when they
2:34:45 did and they decided they really took it out on the Tlashkolons, it rained again. So it was
2:34:52 proof positive that they should just keep doing that. And they ate people as well. They really
2:34:58 did. Asked part of the sacrifice or is this after the sacrifice, then they would eat them.
2:35:03 And this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started, but then it was just kind of
2:35:10 the thing to do when when Cortez got there, they were still having certain special feasts that
2:35:17 involved humans and it really upset the Spanish that they would be like trekked into eating human
2:35:22 like, “Hey, you liking dinner?” That was a human. So the idea was it actually
2:35:32 having a taste for human flesh or is it just these kinds of ideas of like if you eat a person’s
2:35:37 heart that you can get their spirit and their strength? In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed
2:35:44 like they just liked it. This guy, Sahagun, who was a very responsible chronicler that was pretty
2:35:51 specific that like there was a distribution thing. Yeah. Like the elites got butts. The butts were
2:35:58 the best part. So the butt cheeks, those are the best parts to eat. And then like it went down the
2:36:03 chain until some people just got like fingers and toes. Literally bought taste for the Aztec.
2:36:09 Yeah. Boy. All right. They really did. They really did. In fact, that’s what caused the,
2:36:16 have you heard of the Noche tree stay, the sad night? The night that the Aztecs really go nuts
2:36:24 on the Spanish and kick them out. It’s all triggered by this one guy, Pedro de Alvarado,
2:36:32 who’s left in charge by Cortez. As Cortez goes to the coast and tries to talk to the new force,
2:36:38 talk them into being for him, which he does. But Pedro Alvarado is left back in town,
2:36:45 in charge. And they’re doing another one of these huge Aztec buffets and parties to honor them.
2:36:50 And it happens. The guy says, you know, hey, do you like dinner? Like, oh, yeah, it’s a nice
2:36:55 dinner. Well, it’s humans. You’re eating humans. See, I told you they were good. And Alvarado just
2:37:04 freaks out and he has the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the party,
2:37:11 women, children. Nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone. And that’s what spazes the
2:37:19 Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma, who was their captive, and then try to murder all of
2:37:26 them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado’s fault for freaking out about eating humans. Just a little
2:37:31 practical joke. Yeah, it was just they thought it was funny. He did not. That’s fascinating. I didn’t
2:37:35 realize. So I kind of assumed that some level of cannibalism would have to do with, you know,
2:37:41 eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this. In certain, like a, you
2:37:46 know, deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they just liked eating humans.
2:37:50 It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like,
2:37:55 you guys could either send us, you know, a number of cats all feathers every month,
2:38:00 or we could eat you. So that’s psychological warfare and actual warfare. It worked. And that’s
2:38:06 how they spread. And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and
2:38:11 messed everything up. They had the Maya surrounded and they were about to take
2:38:16 over the whole Yucatan. So you think without the Spanish, there would be this Aztec empire
2:38:21 that would last for a very long time? I think there would have been an Aztec empire. I think
2:38:27 they would have finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate. And everybody hated
2:38:34 the Aztecs. So it wouldn’t have lasted forever. They were not ruling justly. They were ruling
2:38:41 by force and that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca empire, I think
2:38:47 that would have gone on forever because they were really community oriented. Once the Inca took over,
2:38:55 like no one in the Inca empire starved. They built architecture. Everyone was safe. It was
2:39:00 a society that could have lasted a long time. What was the origin of the Inca empire?
2:39:08 Well, it was bloody at first, like most of them are. But once they started taking over,
2:39:12 what they did is they empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get
2:39:19 the resources, but everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca empire and they created
2:39:28 this incredible Mita system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they
2:39:35 could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of let’s say 5,000 people. The Inca would
2:39:42 roll up with an army of 100, 200,000 people and say, you know, would you guys like to be part of
2:39:47 the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire? And if your mayor here
2:39:52 agrees, then he can have a town. He can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month,
2:40:00 a big work crew would show up and they’d start building agricultural terraces and storage units.
2:40:09 And every month with the agricultural access, they would have big parties and everybody would eat.
2:40:15 So people lived well in the Inca empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be
2:40:21 part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.
2:40:27 So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was like the center of it.
2:40:35 Cusco in their language, Quechua, it means naval or belly button. And it’s up in the mountains.
2:40:42 But there’s four quarters that they called their empire Tewantinsuyu, the land of four quarters.
2:40:46 And the center of those four quarters was Cusco.
2:40:55 It sprung to life in like 1200 ADC. Yeah, we backwards project what it was. But it was probably
2:41:04 mid 1200s when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler came in. But it was the, I think it’s the
2:41:09 ninth one is Pachacute, who really started being an empire builder.
2:41:16 And part of that, I mean, what really defined the empire? As you said, roads, they build a
2:41:24 massive road network. Roads and in the same way that the Roman strategy of building roads and
2:41:31 infrastructure and then every place they took over, they’d create certain key pieces of Roman
2:41:36 architecture that kind of made that city Roman and they’d rename it something.
2:41:41 The Inca did the same thing. They had certain signature
2:41:47 Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part.
2:41:54 They’d send the Kipu Kumayak, the guys who would weave the, or not the Kipus,
2:42:02 as accountants. And they would go through and say, what everybody did, okay, you’re a good farmer,
2:42:07 you’re going to farm, you are a good weaver, you’re going to weave, all the men here are going to take
2:42:14 a turn at being part of the army. And they sent independent Kipu Kumayaks to that every community
2:42:18 had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other. And they all had to
2:42:24 independently send their Kipus back to Cusco. And if there were accounting discrepancies,
2:42:27 they were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.
2:42:31 So there’s like a super sophisticated record keeping system.
2:42:36 Yeah. And that was the Kipu and the Spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all.
2:42:42 But that’s an interesting development for an empire, because that allows you to really expand
2:42:47 and have some kind of management, some level of control.
2:42:52 Yeah, they couldn’t. At the end, they were at least 10 million people. And there was just no
2:42:57 way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system.
2:42:59 If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins?
2:43:00 Inca.
2:43:02 Inca.
2:43:06 I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles.
2:43:10 And they had that essential hearts and minds.
2:43:15 There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire.
2:43:23 For some reason, everything was owned communally except the llamas. The llamas were the kings.
2:43:29 And so that was one thing that like some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas,
2:43:34 but you don’t own your llama anymore. And people are really attached to their llamas.
2:43:40 To this day, they are like family members. So it’d be like everybody walked in and said,
2:43:45 “Everybody’s family dog is now mine.” Really upset people on an emotional level.
2:43:52 Well, I mean, so llamas are got domesticated at some point. Probably early on.
2:43:54 I don’t even know when, but early on.
2:44:03 We have rock art that progresses to make it seem like a progression from people depicted hunting
2:44:10 them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period,
2:44:15 at least, that they became friends. Yeah, but if you roll in and you own them, that’s…
2:44:22 Yeah, that pissed everybody off. For some reason, the Inca owned everybody’s llama instantly.
2:44:26 And he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day,
2:44:31 just sent to Cusco. They’d also take their mummies. That was a weird thing.
2:44:37 Everybody mourns they’re dead, but the Inca just ceased to accept it.
2:44:40 They would just… The mummies were still there. “Okay, he’s dead, but look,
2:44:42 he’s still got clothes. He’s at the party. Let’s put a beer in front of him.”
2:44:50 They just kept people as mummies. And so the ancestral mummies of every town,
2:44:58 part of the being absorbed into the empire, was, “Okay, your most important mummies are now
2:45:05 going to have their own beautiful house in Cusco.” But they would physically bring those mummies to
2:45:11 Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their belief system.
2:45:16 I mean, I can see how that would piss people off, but it’s also a pretty powerful way to
2:45:23 say the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect, are now in the capital.
2:45:29 They’ve been elevated. We didn’t steal them. We have given them a new place of honor.
2:45:33 And you’re welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where
2:45:38 everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.
2:45:43 And which of the civilizations mummified people? Is it…
2:45:48 The Incas for sure mummified people. And even did some of that kind of
2:45:56 Egyptian-esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They’d put straw inside the cavity and
2:46:05 mummify them. But the Maya didn’t do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose, would flood tombs
2:46:13 with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster. And then they’d get back in there.
2:46:18 It was jungly, so I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in
2:46:24 there to get the bones. They’d open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red
2:46:30 cinnabar. The one that I was in in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different
2:46:36 times. And the last couple of times, they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it
2:46:44 back in, articulated on the skeleton. But they didn’t mummify. They, on purpose, would grossly
2:46:50 float the bodies so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones.
2:46:55 But would they keep the bones? Yeah, they’d keep the bones. And they’d pull the bones out occasionally
2:47:00 and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.
2:47:04 So there’s still a deep connection to the ancestors, through the physical manifestation
2:47:08 of the ancestors then. Yeah. Whether mummified or bone.
2:47:12 And to this day, if you do an excavation here in the United States,
2:47:17 Native American people don’t like it. They don’t like their graves, which is fine enough.
2:47:23 I wouldn’t want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it. They love it.
2:47:29 Every Maya person, if we find a grave, they’re like, “Yeah, look at that bone. It’s cool. Can I touch?”
2:47:34 Yeah, great. They’re not spooked about it at all. They think it’s exciting. I one time,
2:47:44 I helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get an osteology collection together
2:47:50 of various animals. So if we got bones from an excavation, we could see what kind of animal
2:47:59 it was based on the collection. And this family said, “Our family dog died last year and buried
2:48:05 him in the backyard. You go dig him up.” And so we were like, “Okay, yeah. I mean, we do need a dog.
2:48:09 We’ll go dig up your dog.” And they were like, “But the kids really want to help you.” So their
2:48:14 kids came out. And this was like their puppy. And it died less than a year ago when we got
2:48:21 to it. One of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, “Wacy-sity-dose, little booty bones.
2:48:28 Yay.” What a weird attitude. That’s your dead dog there. But they have a different relationship
2:48:32 with the dead. It’s some sense. That’s a beautiful attitude, right? Yeah. Why
2:48:36 pretend like we’re not mortal and there’s not. This is just the process of it.
2:48:44 As you say it now, it kind of would be cool. That’s what Day of the Dead is all about. And
2:48:49 I love Day of the Dead. Halloween’s this creepy thing where they’re all monsters. But Day of
2:48:56 the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie
2:49:01 Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar. And we talk
2:49:06 about who they were and how they lived. And we put things on the altar that mattered in their life.
2:49:12 And we remember them on that day. And it turned something that was a weird “eat too much candy”
2:49:17 and “wear a monster mask” thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.
2:49:25 I have to ask about the giant stones that Inka has been able to somehow move and fit together
2:49:31 perfectly. Do you understand, is it understood how they were able to do that so well?
2:49:45 No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot
2:49:54 large weights. There’s a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the U.S.
2:50:02 who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota single-handedly, showing how
2:50:07 you can move big stones. So I think Wally’s already figured out how to move them. It’s the
2:50:15 perfectly fit, so carefully fit together that you couldn’t even put a dime in between the stones.
2:50:21 That’s the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archaeological wisdom that
2:50:28 you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept packing away at it with hammer stones and
2:50:35 setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit. There is no
2:50:42 way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammer stone. I personally
2:50:49 think it’s acids. I think they melted them together. And there are weird places when you
2:50:54 really look at closely to these stones, which I’ve done a number of times. I’m going back next
2:51:02 month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500 to
2:51:14 1,000-year-old walls are still there. And I see things like the crystals in the andesite
2:51:23 are almost stitched together along the seams. The andesite around it is melted and the crystals
2:51:30 haven’t. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. It’s just
2:51:38 melted. Somebody took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft stones turning
2:51:46 hard too. I haven’t been able to prove it. This is one of these end of my archaeological career
2:51:52 chapters. I’m either going to prove myself wrong or prove it. But I think they used acids. My dad’s
2:51:57 a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there’s no way there’s no naturally occurring acids.
2:52:05 But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad. I don’t know
2:52:10 if you ever saw that show. But there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body
2:52:16 and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid
2:52:24 is so fascinating. It won’t go through plastic and you can also bring it in inert parts and then
2:52:35 combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the andes. And they
2:52:42 also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid.
2:52:51 You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it’s hydrofluoric acid. And that will burn
2:52:57 through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn’t care
2:53:03 whether, you know, servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these
2:53:10 together. And I think they’re fused together. I asked the city of Cusco if I could take some
2:53:19 core samples and they said, “Go away, Gringo. Don’t touch our walls.” So this next time,
2:53:25 I’m going to go try to talk to the more Quechua authorities in a place called Oleantaytambo.
2:53:32 And maybe I can convince them. But right now, they just think I’m a weird-ass Gringo who wants
2:53:41 to put holes in their walls. I guess a fascinating theory. And so how could you get to the bottom
2:53:46 of that? So getting core samples and see if there’s some kind of trace. Chemists I’m working with
2:53:52 say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these that a core sample right along the seam,
2:54:00 they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of
2:54:04 hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, “No, I mean,
2:54:09 we already know that’s true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some rocks.” But it would happen.
2:54:14 And that’s just chemistry. We got to prove that it would happen in the walls. So go get us samples.
2:54:19 And that was before COVID and all sorts of, you know, you know how it is, you probably are the
2:54:25 same guy where you’ve got a thousand ideas and, you know, the ones that are fruitful you run with
2:54:30 and the other ones you’ll get back to. That’d be fascinating if true. And I hope you do show
2:54:37 that it’s true or follow either one. I’ll try to disprove it. Disprove it, yeah. I wonder if we
2:54:46 discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do. Because it just feels like
2:54:54 if a large number of humans are just working a little bit chipping away at stuff, at scale,
2:54:59 they can do miraculous things. So the question is, how can a large number of humans be motivated
2:55:08 to do a thing? Because I just, when we think about like Stonehenger, some very challenging
2:55:12 architectural construction, we don’t think about a large number of humans working together.
2:55:19 Well, you know, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number
2:55:24 of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another. Right.
2:55:29 One of my favorite quotes is, and I’m probably going to misquote it here, but I think it’s Margaret
2:55:38 Mead who said, “Never underestimate the power of small groups working together.” And the truth is
2:55:44 that those are the only people that have ever changed the world. That small, dedicated groups of
2:55:50 people are what change the world. Yeah. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their
2:55:57 vision. Yeah. Yeah. I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across time.
2:56:02 And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills
2:56:09 that at least I personally do not. You know, I’m wearing a shirt, but I can’t make a shirt.
2:56:15 That’s for somebody else to do. You’ve also lectured about,
2:56:23 which I really enjoyed about North America, and also helped teach me that
2:56:30 there was a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time.
2:56:35 So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early humans in North America?
2:56:42 Well, we go through that Paleo-Indian and Archaic period for thousands of years. You know, as we
2:56:50 started this conversation, probably 30,000 years is a conservative now, humans first entered the
2:56:58 Americas. But the first cultures we get here are mound builders around the Mississippi and to the
2:57:04 East, and then also a totally separate group in what we call the American Southwest now,
2:57:11 the Four Corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the Pueblo people who are
2:57:18 still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people. So we’ve got these two clusters that the very first
2:57:28 major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It’s in Northern Louisiana. People
2:57:34 think I’m crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in Northern Louisiana, a big one
2:57:42 at a site called Poverty Point that is 3500 years old, so it’s the same age as the
2:57:50 pyramids in Egypt. And it is a giant thing just poking out of the bayous of Louisiana.
2:57:54 And people don’t believe me when I say it, but it’s there.
2:57:59 The mound builders, what was that society like in comparison to everything else we’ve been talking
2:58:04 about in Mesoamerica? They evolved over thousands of years. We call them mound builders. This is
2:58:11 something I object to. I think we should have a better, we do, the last version of them we call
2:58:17 the Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders. But what
2:58:23 they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone.
2:58:28 That’s kind of our just inherent Western bias. Something that’s built out of stone
2:58:36 is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary. But in their full
2:58:43 living form, they did have cores of dirt, but then they also had kind of clay caps. So they had
2:58:50 terraces. They had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there.
2:58:57 There’s the biggest of the Mississippian cities. It’s called Cahokia, and it’s right outside of
2:59:07 St. Louis. And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place,
2:59:16 a huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic, a thriving metropolis. And we in America
2:59:23 have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia
2:59:31 was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic.
2:59:38 There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had 5,000 to 10,000 people each.
2:59:44 Were they their own thing, or was there some kind of thread connecting all of them?
2:59:50 They had a unified religion and culture. They were, again, not an empire. So there were warring
2:59:57 city-states. There were kind of territories that were owned by big kings, and then the cities around
3:00:06 them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. And then one kingdom could either ally with a
3:00:14 neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of countries, I think. We could safely say there
3:00:22 were different countries within this patchwork that was eastern United States. And it’s so weird
3:00:30 that we don’t know this, because it was clearly documented by the Spanish. I’m not talking about
3:00:37 just archaeology. We find them in archaeology now. But Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and
3:00:45 went for three years from—he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana.
3:00:51 And he’s the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years, he went through
3:00:59 city after city after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases.
3:01:08 But I mean, the documentation’s clearly there. He met collectively millions of people in a very
3:01:16 sophisticated and uniform civilization. So it was disease and stealing of resources,
3:01:23 but was there like explicit murdering going on? Unfortunately, yeah. He was a murderer and a
3:01:32 psycho and a liar. He snowed them that he was some kind of deity, actually learned a trick from the
3:01:38 Inca, who he was with Pizarro in his first run and went back to Spain, was rich, had a wife,
3:01:45 a castle. Then he got bored and he decided to have a reign of terror on Northern America
3:01:52 for three years. But he had people burned at the stake. He had his dogs ripped them apart.
3:02:01 He was very, very brutal. He ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for
3:02:10 anybody. He made promises and broke them all the time. He was really—he was a brutal man.
3:02:17 So this whole period when Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything?
3:02:26 Well, you know, there’s a great anthropological body of literature. It’s called the Columbian
3:02:32 Exchange based on Columbus. But it’s all this trade back and forth between the new world and the
3:02:39 old world. And the old world got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden, their diet didn’t suck.
3:02:49 All these vegetables came in. The new world got herd animals. It got pigs and cows and goats that
3:02:57 it didn’t have. But it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and
3:03:02 kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things. But it didn’t actually go away. It just couldn’t
3:03:09 spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a
3:03:16 sudden, these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years,
3:03:24 there were people who like had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But
3:03:31 the numbers, you know, it’s a shameful part of history. And it wasn’t something that Europe
3:03:36 perpetrated on them. The medical science at that time was still the four humors theory
3:03:42 that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. And we did things like,
3:03:47 well, you’ve got to bleed him. He’ll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease
3:03:54 was. But the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now
3:04:03 saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead. And that the the number of people has
3:04:11 increased as well. As far as the our estimates, we’re thinking it’s somewhere around 150 million
3:04:18 people. And 90% of them died. And with them all their knowledge, just I mean, imagine the moment
3:04:25 where, you know, who dies when things get bad, it’s the young and the old. So all the knowledge
3:04:34 keepers die suddenly. The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely
3:04:40 demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only
3:04:47 way out of it is to to accept this new Christianity. But they, you know, they don’t have bring kids
3:04:52 into this world where everybody’s dying. And even if they do, they can’t teach them what the old
3:04:57 people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn’t finish the transmission.
3:05:05 So in a in a single terrible moment in human history, you know, the generation loses all
3:05:10 their knowledge. So a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out.
3:05:17 But with that also just the the wisdom of the entire civilizations.
3:05:26 So much of what they knew was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs
3:05:32 and that we’ve learned a lot from that. Yeah, but not a significant integration of that wisdom into.
3:05:38 So it wasn’t when the Europeans came, it wasn’t like the cultures were integrated. It was
3:05:46 a story of domination. In North America, there’s a new term in the literature that I like,
3:05:53 we call it the the Mississippian Shatter Zone, that Mississippian civilization was millions of
3:05:59 people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this
3:06:05 Shatter Zone where we have ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere
3:06:12 else on a reservation far away. And, you know, that I’m just about to talk to a Cherokee man who
3:06:17 listened to some of the things I had to say and says all those Ho-Chunk things you were saying
3:06:22 from that Ho-Chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I can I talk
3:06:27 to you by phone and tell you about these things? So we’ve got the Shatter Zone where, you know,
3:06:33 we’re going to try to put the piece, the puzzle back together, especially in terms of
3:06:39 Mississippian religion. I really think we’re making headway in this generation and it’s exciting to
3:06:45 be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together.
3:06:50 Just as a lot of people kind of refer to Christopher Columbus as the person who
3:06:59 discovered America, I read that the Vikings reached North America much earlier in 1000 CE.
3:07:03 And why do you think they didn’t expand and colonize?
3:07:12 Because they got their ass kicked. It’s the truth. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here.
3:07:20 There’s a there’s a great site in Nova Scotia called Lenzo Meadows, which definitely has what’s
3:07:26 left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Erick and his father, Eric the Red, who they got kind of
3:07:29 kicked out of Europe because they apparently couldn’t stop murdering people.
3:07:35 And so they went to Greenland and then kind of island hopped over to
3:07:39 Canada. But I think the culture that was in that area was named the Dorset.
3:07:45 But they would have nothing to do with the Vikings. They attacked the Viking settlement
3:07:51 every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it.
3:07:56 You know, the Vikings attacked Ireland and they just found a bunch of, you know,
3:08:01 monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going, “We’re men of God. We don’t fight.”
3:08:06 Vikings were like, “This is great. That’s great. This will be easy then. We’ll just
3:08:11 loot all these Easter eggs.” But the Native Americans in Canada were like not having it.
3:08:18 They kicked their ass. In fact, Leif Erickson’s brother Thor died there. The natives killed him.
3:08:24 He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but they just killed him.
3:08:28 So a lot of the Native American cultures were also, I mean,
3:08:30 they’re sophisticated, warring cultures also.
3:08:37 Yes. They fought, especially the Mississippians. Boy, they were tough. And so were, you know,
3:08:45 the Five Nations, the Mohawk, the Huron. The ones that kicked the Vikings ass up there,
3:08:52 they were probably Algonquin speakers, but they were connected just above the Great Lakes.
3:08:55 But they were all very tough people.
3:09:02 When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over 100 million people
3:09:08 that were killed, do you see that as a tragedy of history or is it just the way of history?
3:09:16 I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen.
3:09:20 And that was not, you know, that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it.
3:09:29 There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get
3:09:36 unfairly maligned in what’s been called the black legend that they just marched into America
3:09:41 and murdered everyone. That’s not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone.
3:09:50 In fact, there was a really poignant story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon.
3:09:55 In the Brazilian northern part of the Amazon, where he made this utopian community
3:10:01 and he was bringing people in that were getting sick and he wrote, “I’m baptizing everyone.
3:10:08 I baptize 10,000 people a day and yet God’s still killing them. Why is he doing this to them?
3:10:13 They’re doing everything that I ask them to do. They are submitting to the will of God.
3:10:19 But this guy doesn’t realize that the same bowl of holy water that he’s baptizing them in,
3:10:24 he’s just wiping the disease on everybody’s faces. He’s accelerating it
3:10:28 when he doesn’t even realize. He thinks he’s saving them, but he’s actually killing them.
3:10:37 Yeah. That’s a tragedy. You know, that’s not just like spoils go to the victor stuff.
3:10:44 That’s just straight up tragedy. Yeah. Yeah. But that one is hard to know what to do with like
3:10:50 black death. It’s, I mean, infections, they don’t operate on normal human terms, right?
3:11:00 They just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas. All right. Just my style.
3:11:09 I mean, we didn’t really talk about how life originated on earth or how humans have evolved.
3:11:15 And we did talk about that there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient history
3:11:21 we haven’t even uncovered yet. Do you think it’s possible that other
3:11:27 intelligent civilizations from outside of earth, aliens, ever visited?
3:11:34 You had me right until the ever visited thing. That one I’m not entirely sure about. I’m not
3:11:40 sure whether we have any. We certainly have no archaeological proof that I would cite or
3:11:49 contemplate as the evidence of such. But you know, the guys that discovered DNA, Watson and Crick,
3:11:57 Watson, who actually habitually used hallucinogens to invigorate his thinking,
3:12:05 he said that he thought that DNA on this planet was way too complex to have developed
3:12:12 over the time period that it had at its disposal and that his guess was that our DNA was somehow
3:12:19 seeded from outside of our planet. And, you know, take that for what it is. But the guy who
3:12:26 we respect on many other levels also said that. So that’s interesting. But in terms of, you know,
3:12:34 aliens visiting us, I don’t know. It does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think were important
3:12:40 enough for some advanced species to give a shit about us. Statistically speaking, the universe
3:12:45 is way too big. We can’t be the only sentient beings. There’s got to be somebody else out there.
3:12:51 Whether they care about us, that’s a question. I’ve been on ancient aliens a number of times.
3:12:58 I show up and, you know, I’m an educator, I mean, refusing to be part of the conversations and immediate
3:13:04 fail in my book. But there was one time where they asked me at the end, you know, do you have
3:13:13 anything else that you want to say? And I said, well, you know, y’all’s premise is that aliens came
3:13:19 down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of, you know, science and medicine,
3:13:28 engineering, all these things. Today, we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down.
3:13:34 But now all they’re doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks. Like, whatever we did,
3:13:41 we superpissed them off, apparently. The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly.
3:13:49 It’s an interesting thought you’ve mentioned. What archaeologically would you have to see
3:13:56 to be like, this might be an alien? A technology that doesn’t belong there,
3:14:02 first and foremost. I mean, you know, we got to, if we just run with the premise that somebody
3:14:08 was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here,
3:14:15 that was almost certainly mechanical. Now, you know, I love the aliens thing where, you know,
3:14:22 biomechanical is something that certainly could be. And that would, you know, that would disintegrate.
3:14:28 We wouldn’t see that at all. But I would expect some kind of technology that showed up out of
3:14:33 the blue and changed things. That would be something. But I would think, you know,
3:14:38 mechanical or, you know, a substance that’s not from here.
3:14:42 But of course, we would only see the results of that mechanical,
3:14:46 you mean like literally a mechanical thing. Right. Some sort of thing like that.
3:14:53 The typical thing people say is like, you know, how did they move these giant stones?
3:14:59 Right? But, you know, just look at that on the face for a second. Aliens come from across the
3:15:06 universe to meet humans. And the thing they tell them is how to move rocks. Are you fucking
3:15:11 kidding me? I mean, you know, like, give them, give them antibiotics or a combustion engine
3:15:14 or something. You’re going to, they should, they came across the universe and they showed
3:15:22 them how to move big rocks. I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. That just doesn’t make any sense.
3:15:28 What do you think Earth will look like 10,000 years from now?
3:15:37 That’s an interesting question. I think it will be a lot more automated or it’ll be a
3:15:42 smoldering pile. I mean, there is a possibility we could end ourselves. There’s always that
3:15:50 possibility that we’ve really opened Pandora’s Box in some regards. I did listen to one of your
3:15:56 podcast guests with the, what would happen in the case of nuclear war. That was chilling. Her
3:16:02 opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes apparently. So we,
3:16:08 we have that capacity. That’s scary. That’s a possible future for us. But I’m an optimist.
3:16:12 I, you know, I’d like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make
3:16:23 my job better. But a thousand, 10,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and
3:16:29 becoming more advanced rapidly. And the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more.
3:16:34 So that, that’s the part that frightens me actually. I don’t know, does that frighten you?
3:16:39 Yes, terrifying. You know, I heard somebody say, I forget who it was, but you know,
3:16:49 systems of any kind, human systems, biological systems can be put on a graph that’s change
3:16:58 over time. And any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the,
3:17:05 and the, the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. In almost any
3:17:12 biological system that has that fast a change over that little a time, you would, any, any other
3:17:17 thing you’d describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change,
3:17:24 it’s a crisis. From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human
3:17:32 ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up
3:17:38 with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing, innovate and create a lot of
3:17:45 awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering. But on the whole, on average, make a
3:17:52 better world. But yeah, if it, you know, like with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might
3:17:58 actually lead to the death of everybody. I guess there’s always that, that chance.
3:18:03 But I am an optimist. I, you know, I think you’re an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said,
3:18:10 I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more
3:18:17 innovative than when we’re under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans
3:18:23 over the last thousands of years have been about, you know, we didn’t, we didn’t change the world
3:18:28 when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Mother necessity is the mother of
3:18:36 invention. And I think we’ll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real
3:18:42 and happening. I actually personally think that I’m going to, I’m going to answer a question
3:18:49 that you didn’t even ask me. I think we’re wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this.
3:18:58 We’re delusional. I’m all for electric cars and, you know, being good stewards of the environment.
3:19:06 But we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what’s about to happen. We’re spending
3:19:11 too much time pretending, you know, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric
3:19:17 cars will be okay. That’s bullshit. That’s not going to happen. We need to start making technologies
3:19:22 that desalinize water, that, you know, a host of things that, uh, that we need to use our
3:19:29 technological past capacity to accept it and adapt instead of Pollyanna thinking we can
3:19:37 make it go away. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big
3:19:44 problems will arise and just develop technology that addresses them. I think you have some guys
3:19:48 that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive
3:19:54 this, not that we’re going to make it go away. And I just survive, thrive. Again, we’re pretty
3:20:00 innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens, or we just leave this planet,
3:20:10 what, uh, what do you think would be found by a four mentioned alien civilizations when they visit
3:20:17 the anthropologists, the grad student anthropologists that visit earth and study? How much of what we
3:20:21 now have and love and think of as human civilization will be lost, do you think?
3:20:28 Well, you know, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you know,
3:20:35 you didn’t put a time element in there, but I would say that, you know, everything that can
3:20:41 perish will and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn’t perish.
3:20:46 So we’ll have, you know, buildings, plaques, but they won’t have any books. They won’t have any,
3:20:53 you know, billboards. They’ll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a,
3:21:03 did a talk in Sioux Falls and I said, you know, I drove in here and there was a big obelisk
3:21:12 in front of the town. And everywhere I go, I see the names Lewis and Clark. And a thousand years
3:21:16 from now, if I was an archaeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded
3:21:23 by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know, Lewis and
3:21:30 Clark stayed one night here, but it’s just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought
3:21:36 about your town based on what preserved. It’s so beautiful as a thought experiment. Like, what
3:21:43 would archaeologists be really wrong about? And what would they could possibly be right about?
3:21:49 Washington DC was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans,
3:21:54 because that’s what all the architecture is. Yeah. And would they be able to reconstruct
3:22:00 the important empires, the powerful empires and the warring empires?
3:22:07 For that matter, have me and my colleagues done that at all. I’m almost certain that the Maya would
3:22:13 just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were. I wonder, do you ever think about like what
3:22:18 we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most like mainstream archaeology?
3:22:23 Just like a suspicion. What could we get completely wrong?
3:22:31 Well, one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civilization, like an obviously gigantic
3:22:37 civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago.
3:22:42 There’s certainly that. There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under
3:22:47 the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things. And everybody knew they
3:22:53 existed and everybody interacted with them. I think it’s our estimation of their motivations
3:23:00 that were probably most wrong on. My teacher, Shealy, a long time ago said, I’ve come up with
3:23:03 all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff. And she looked at me and she said,
3:23:11 “If you don’t stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put yourself in
3:23:17 the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it.” Which I’ve always taken
3:23:23 to heart. I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural
3:23:29 assumptions, try to think like they would think is the best I could. And it’s very different.
3:23:36 I mean, the Maya are cyclical. The whole sacrifice was so obsessed with that. But
3:23:43 that wasn’t a steer actual sacrifice on their part. They weren’t just, “Hey, let’s all get
3:23:49 together and kill that guy that’s pissing us off.” I mean, they were giving the best of them.
3:23:56 It was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bona fide sacrifice on their part,
3:24:03 a loss. Plus, the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with it.
3:24:07 I tell you, that one, I’m going to unweave that one one of these days.
3:24:14 One of these days. Now, that puppy appeared on Pottery. All over Pottery. He’s everywhere.
3:24:19 I got to write this book. This next year is the year I’m going to write my Fang Deity book.
3:24:26 And I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy. The mystery solved. I mean,
3:24:31 it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don’t know. I mean, again, humor. You don’t
3:24:36 know what the nature of their humor or what their jokes are. Oh, that’s a neat one too.
3:24:44 Then that’s so human. I’ll tell you a little side story here that when I worked with the Maya people
3:24:50 in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day.
3:24:56 And they would talk to each other in their own language. It was Celtal was the group I was working
3:25:01 with. But I noticed after a while, they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes and they would
3:25:07 laugh at jokes. But then they would also, one of them would say something and the other ones would
3:25:12 go, “Hoo-hoo.” And I eventually asked, “What is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo-hoo noise?”
3:25:19 And they said, “That’s ’cause he made a really smart pun.” It was like he said three different
3:25:24 things at once. It was a turn of phrase that was smart. And they didn’t make laughs at that. It was
3:25:31 there. They had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever. So there’s also that,
3:25:37 like, you know, just clever turn of speech. Yeah, wit. And I think about that when I’m a
3:25:43 hieroglyphic translator. Like, here’s a beautiful thing that’s going to be like a poem or a
3:25:50 political statement. Like, and I’m just ploddingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means.
3:25:55 There’s probably double triple entendres all through this text. And the real meaning is the
3:26:00 subtext. And I’m, you know, I’m thinking they’re talking about corn and they’re talking about the
3:26:06 nature of life. Yeah, it could be satire. It could be, you know, as it was in the Soviet Union,
3:26:11 when there’s a dictator, maybe there’s overpowering king, you’re not allowed to actually speak.
3:26:19 You have to hide the thing you’re actually trying to say in the subtext. So, and all of that.
3:26:25 There was a funny Maya ceramic that had the ceramics are neat because they don’t,
3:26:32 the monuments can be kind of broken records. I’m the king. I was born this time. I beat these
3:26:37 people up, but married this woman. I died. But the ceramics will tell us like things out of
3:26:43 mythology stories. And there was this one with a rabbit looking at the merchant god. And nobody
3:26:48 could translate the text. And finally, this Eastern European, actually a Ukrainian guy
3:26:57 translated it. And the rabbit saying to the merchant god, bend over and smell my ass.
3:27:03 And like, oh man, we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology, but no,
3:27:08 it translates bend over and smell my ass. That’s great. That’s human.
3:27:14 As we mentioned previously, human nature does not change. You mentioned the blanket mapping it.
3:27:18 That’s just out of curiosity. What is that process like? It seems fascinating.
3:27:25 Oh, it was a great adventure. I loved it, but it was difficult. I woke up every morning
3:27:30 thinking, I will be hurt today somehow. I don’t know how, I don’t know how badly,
3:27:34 where on my body it will occur, but it’s going to happen because it was the jungle.
3:27:40 So in the jungle, what’s the process like? What do you have to do to map it?
3:27:46 Well, it was tricky too, because it was also a national forest. So the forestry department
3:27:51 didn’t want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through
3:27:57 the foliage and I would, we’d map everything twice. The first thing we do is I’d go in,
3:28:04 find a building, draw it on a piece of graph paper and I’d say like, you know, you guys go north,
3:28:09 you guys go east, west, find other buildings. And when you find them, pace back to this one.
3:28:16 And so I’d start making a map and I’d make the whole, one piece of graph paper was enough to,
3:28:21 then we’d bring the machine in. We’d bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information.
3:28:26 But on that piece of paper, I would write like, don’t bring the machine this way,
3:28:30 there’s a tree fall or stand on top of this building and you’ll see four different buildings
3:28:37 it wants from this one. And all of this is in dense jungle. Right. And the deeper we got off
3:28:42 the road, the deeper it was, sometimes it would clear out, but certain places, if it was low,
3:28:48 it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast. Sometimes
3:28:56 we would cut just tunnels through tall grass and we’d come back like five days later
3:29:03 and they were gone. We couldn’t even find where our trails were. They would grow back that fast.
3:29:07 But you see the building so you could see. Right. And that was the fun part. I mean,
3:29:11 sometimes it would just be like a little neighborhood with little low buildings no
3:29:16 bigger than this table. But sometimes, you know, just five more meters in and I’m standing under
3:29:22 a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I’ve just found another one. And some days,
3:29:30 you know, on good days, we’d find three pyramids. And I felt that’s such a more exciting job than
3:29:36 the typical excavations. My buddies were all just, you know, in a hole for the whole week in the
3:29:40 middle of the city and where I’m dancing around through the jungle, I could find, you know,
3:29:43 10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today. Who knows?
3:29:46 What’s that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that
3:29:52 you’re one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing?
3:29:57 What’s that? What’s that feel like? It’s great. I love that feeling. I am, you know,
3:30:04 I’m an explorer at heart. So finding something like that, you know, when I was 25 years old,
3:30:11 I found a whole Maya city. I got to name it. Its name is Masha’a. It’s often the Belizean jungle.
3:30:18 And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost had that one almost depressed me.
3:30:25 I was, my entire, like, I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city.
3:30:31 And then I did it at 25. And I was like, God, now what do I do? That was supposed to take
3:30:37 me my whole life. I actually, I wrote a bunch of letters to NASA, trying to get them to let
3:30:43 me be the first archaeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back. I’m sure I’m on NASA’s
3:30:54 list is some weirdo. How’d you find a Mayan city? I used a topography map of the area and I played
3:31:00 the game. If I was a Maya, where would my favorite place to live in this big area be? I looked for
3:31:07 the biggest mountain because they call all of their pyramids, toon, wheat, stone mountains.
3:31:12 I knew they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right next to it
3:31:17 that made a triangle. And they love those triads. And there were rivers in between them. And I thought,
3:31:24 that’s it. That’s where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over two seasons with students,
3:31:30 the other grad students were like, he’s just having his students just wandering the jungle all day.
3:31:38 But I came back with a city. So given that you’ve looked into the deep past of humanity,
3:31:44 what gives you hope about our future? Maybe our deep future of this human civilization?
3:31:53 That’s a good one. And I do have hope. I do have hope. I believe in the spirit of humankind. I
3:31:59 as a person who have studied history, I kind of feel like history does kind of a sine wave.
3:32:07 There’s highs and there’s lows, but no matter how low we go, we get up again and we climb.
3:32:13 And I think that humanity will continue that. We will rise to the challenges. Now,
3:32:20 some of the challenges may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome. That’s
3:32:29 what we do. Yeah, humans find a way. That’s the thing you see with history. When the
3:32:36 empires collapse, the humans that come out of that, they pick themselves up and
3:32:42 find another way. And the people I study believe in the cyclical nature of life that you really can’t,
3:32:48 life can’t continue without death being part of the cycle. We get their lows, we get our highs, but
3:32:55 the cycle continues forever. I should mention that you have a lot of great lectures on the
3:33:04 great courses, but you have also an amazing podcast, RKOEd. If people want to listen to it,
3:33:13 this is a tough question, but what would you recommend? What episodes should they listen to?
3:33:20 Oh, that is a tough question. What is the sampling? It’s like asking a chef what’s the
3:33:27 best stuff on the menu. Well, different strokes for different folks. I do two different things
3:33:32 on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you’ve never heard about. I love,
3:33:36 I start off by saying it’s my podcast and I’ll talk about whatever the heck I want to talk about.
3:33:44 Sometimes I talk about really specific things like a tool type or an animal type, but my favorite
3:33:49 ones have become when I just tell my stories of my adventures. I’ve got a lot of weird adventure
3:33:56 stories and it’s been fun and they’ve been very well received. I can put my humor in there and
3:34:02 I can talk about the things that went right, the things that went wrong, the adventures that I had
3:34:10 are all part of this RKOEd thing. RKOEd is kind of a double entendre. It’s me, I’m just Ed,
3:34:17 but it’s also education. What I’m really trying to do with this too, it’s specifically the Americas.
3:34:23 I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here,
3:34:31 especially North America. I think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations
3:34:38 here before Europe showed up. That’s simply not true. I think it should be part of our history
3:34:46 books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce, as part of
3:34:53 American history, the part before European contact. I think that kids in the K through 12 level should
3:35:03 grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492. One of these
3:35:09 days, I’m going to find a funder to help us put together Before the Americas. We’re going to make
3:35:15 it part of the curriculum for every kid in the US to know the full history of this country.
3:35:21 That’s a great project. Ed, thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all
3:35:27 the fascinating ideas that you put onto the world. I can’t wait to hear your new course.
3:35:30 Thank you so much, Lex. It was a real pleasure.
3:35:35 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast,
3:35:41 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Joseph
3:35:49 Campbell. Life is but a mask worn on the face of death and is death then but another mask.
3:35:57 How many can say asks the Aztec poet that there is or is not a truth beyond.
3:36:09 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
3:36:18 [Music]