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Speaker 1: Now let's dive in to today's episode. I like to
Speaker 1: welcome the show, Ed Barnhart. How you doing, Ed, I'm
Speaker 1: doing great.
Speaker 2: Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on the show, my friend.
Speaker 1: I am excited to talk to you about the Mayan history,
Speaker 1: Mine Lost history, all the Minds are one of my
Speaker 1: favorite cultures to study. Is one of the first ancient
Speaker 1: civilizations I was exposed to. When I couldn't go to Egypt,
Speaker 1: I was like, well, I'm in my twenties, let's go
Speaker 1: down to Mexico. And that's what I went. And I
Speaker 1: saw to Jenny, to loom Coba and a couple other
Speaker 1: sites as well, and it really kind of changed my
Speaker 1: perspective on ancient civilizations. So I am really excited to
Speaker 1: talk to you. You are an expert in Mayan civilizations and
Speaker 1: how many years have you been studying the Mayan culture
Speaker 1: in general?
Speaker 2: Oh? Gosh, you know, I get older every year. I
Speaker 2: think it's over thirty years now. Wow.
Speaker 1: Jeez. So my first question I have to ask you is,
Speaker 1: you know, the when I was down in Chichuanitza and
Speaker 1: I saw the pyramid and the observatory and that whole
Speaker 1: area of that site, the one thing I kept thinking about,
Speaker 1: even back when I was in my twenties, just like,
Speaker 1: how is it that Egypt and the Mayans, and the Chinese,
Speaker 1: and the Indonesians and the Japanese they all have pyramids,
Speaker 1: but yet none of these cultures technically should have ever
Speaker 1: known about each other or ever connected from your experience,
Speaker 1: how do you explain that kind of coincidence.
Speaker 2: If you will, Well, you know, I'm a dirt archaeologist,
Speaker 2: so my explanation might be a little boring for your audience,
Speaker 2: But I think it's basically trial and error. You know,
Speaker 2: if you give a kid a set of blocks and
Speaker 2: tell them to build the tallest structure he can, he
Speaker 2: builds a tower a couple of times, but without rebar
Speaker 2: and cement, it falls over. If you want to build
Speaker 2: a tall structure that's not going to fall down without
Speaker 2: cement or metal, then you're going to make a fat
Speaker 2: base and you're going to build it up to the
Speaker 2: tiny top. And that's how you make the biggest structure
Speaker 2: in a very basic way. And I think the trial
Speaker 2: and error for all of these groups, some of them dirt,
Speaker 2: some of them stone, they figured that out.
Speaker 1: Well, how do you explain, Like again, when I was
Speaker 1: at to Janizza, the amount of the architecture of that
Speaker 1: one site is so remarkable, how tight everything thing is,
Speaker 1: how beautifully is designed. How did the people of that
Speaker 1: time build something so sophisticated to the point where, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've done this, you sit at the steps
Speaker 1: at the bottom and you clap your hands and you
Speaker 1: hear the bird chirping kind of thing. That's a fairly
Speaker 1: sophisticated building technique. You know that generally speaking can't be
Speaker 1: I mean, I sure can be done today, but it
Speaker 1: takes another level of engineering to do stuff like that.
Speaker 1: How do you explain that? How they build it in general?
Speaker 2: Well, you know the bird call thing aside. It really
Speaker 2: chi Chen is a magnificent urban metropolis. That's what it is.
Speaker 2: What you see as a tourist is just part of it.
Speaker 2: It was a city of some thirty five thousand people,
Speaker 2: and you know, for a radius away from the big
Speaker 2: pyramid in the middle, there's buildings everywhere, So it's even
Speaker 2: more impressive than people think. But you know, it's the
Speaker 2: Maya as a culture, as a civilization went on. You know, really,
Speaker 2: if we keep the clock going till today, they've been
Speaker 2: at it for almost five thousand years. So by the
Speaker 2: time Chichen Itza was built, let's say, you know, it's
Speaker 2: it's post classic start was somewhere around nine hundred AD.
Speaker 2: The Maya had been building pyramids for almost two thousand years.
Speaker 2: So these guys stood upon the shoulders of giants who
Speaker 2: created all of their engineering and architecture and probably transmitted
Speaker 2: it through their hieroglyphic language.
Speaker 1: Well that was This is the first time, and again
Speaker 1: please excuse me, ignorance, this is the first time I've
Speaker 1: heard that the Maya being that old of a culture,
Speaker 1: you know, And so that's kind of new to me
Speaker 1: because I haven't really I knew that they were, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a thousand years prior to you know, maybe around
Speaker 1: the time of Jesus. Let's say that there was something starting.
Speaker 1: But what you're saying is they're going back towards the
Speaker 1: Egyptian times, you know. Yeah, actually that like five thousand
Speaker 1: years back. So if my math is correct and I'm
Speaker 1: not good at math. We're talking at about three thousand
Speaker 1: BC is kind of where they started. Where are if
Speaker 1: that's the case, and where are these other structures that
Speaker 1: they've been building up that you found?
Speaker 2: Oh oh, we have an entire chronological narrative of them.
Speaker 2: You know, if we go back to three thousand BC,
Speaker 2: people are building, you know, in the Maya highlands of
Speaker 2: Guatemala and down by the coast, they're building the first
Speaker 2: stone and dirt structures, and then you know, but as
Speaker 2: we go up, we go into a culture called Mokaya,
Speaker 2: and then we get into Maya, but that's still you know,
Speaker 2: we're looking at a thousand BC, So three thousand years
Speaker 2: ago they're building major pyramids in along the coast of
Speaker 2: Chiappus and up into the highlands of Guatemala. At the
Speaker 2: same time, the ole Nec culture is happening and making
Speaker 2: their you know, colossal heads and these multi ton statues
Speaker 2: that everybody's crazy about. That's going on too. And then
Speaker 2: between them and some the other cultures like the Zapaitecs
Speaker 2: and the people that are in the Valley of Mexico,
Speaker 2: they start regularly building big stone pyramids and palaces and
Speaker 2: ball courts, and all sorts of things. So, you know,
Speaker 2: but let let me revise and say it was eighteen
Speaker 2: hundred years before Cucinitza starts building their architecture, that the
Speaker 2: Maya and their neighboring civilizations are experimenting with and improving
Speaker 2: engineering and architecture.
Speaker 1: Are The Almoics are fairly mysterious because there's not as
Speaker 1: much information about them. They are a much older civilization
Speaker 1: than the Maya or the Aztecs.
Speaker 2: Correct, yes, some would call them the mother culture. They
Speaker 2: are the first real ones to start putting out big, huge,
Speaker 2: religious pieces of architecture. All of their buildings are packed earth,
Speaker 2: which is a little a little strange that they would
Speaker 2: drag a twenty ton monument into a plaza and then
Speaker 2: build an earthen pyramid in front of it. It's a
Speaker 2: little odd. It's explainable because there wasn't much stone where
Speaker 2: they chose to live. But they are the oldest ones. Nowadays,
Speaker 2: we have more of a nuanced understanding that they're kind
Speaker 2: of interacting with the people that are the proto Maya
Speaker 2: and the proto Zappaitechs and the proto kind of way
Speaker 2: proto Aztecs in the same region. Valley of Mexico, and
Speaker 2: so those cultures all kind of help each other up
Speaker 2: in what we call the pre Classic. Then we hit
Speaker 2: the Classic period where tons of Maya cities are being
Speaker 2: built up in the jungles of the ten. They're also
Speaker 2: all over Yucatan where chichen Itza is, but there are
Speaker 2: other sites that are older around it that are less visited.
Speaker 2: And then finally that all falls apart what we call
Speaker 2: the classic Maya collapse, where all of those cities get
Speaker 2: abandoned for reasons fully not understood still, and then they
Speaker 2: evolve into this post classic form where in the Yucatan
Speaker 2: Chia is the capital city.
Speaker 1: So the collapse of the Maya, which is when I
Speaker 1: was down there, that was something that they kept saying
Speaker 1: a lot of my tour guide and stuff like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they just disappeared. They just disappeared. And you know, we're
Speaker 1: talking about essentially millions of people across across the continent.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a lot of people. It's not like
Speaker 1: a village, it's a lot of people. I've heard an
Speaker 1: explanation that it was possibly the Spanish who brought over
Speaker 1: disease and just wiped out, wiped out large swaths of people,
Speaker 1: is that something that makes sense or is there any.
Speaker 2: Explore that indeed did happen, but at like fifteen hundred CE. Okay,
Speaker 2: the famous Maya collapse where everybody just abandons the city
Speaker 2: that happens between eight hundred and nine hundred a d
Speaker 2: or CE.
Speaker 1: And there's no explanation of it.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we have various theories suations, but big
Speaker 2: cities winners that there was a big civil war between
Speaker 2: the cities that basically were either team t Call or
Speaker 2: Team klack Mule, the two big cities that finally settled out,
Speaker 2: and it seemed like the winners would take their bigger
Speaker 2: chunk of land and the other ones that'd be quiet
Speaker 2: and be subsidiary. But instead everybody from the winners and
Speaker 2: loser cities, those cities depopulate.
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Speaker 2: Really, and they don't put up any more monuments. There's
Speaker 2: no more pyramids. They just walk away from them. Now,
Speaker 2: the general population, they could have gone, you know, ten
Speaker 2: ten kilometers out and started a little far and archaeology
Speaker 2: had never see it. But where did all the ruling
Speaker 2: class go. Some people think they filtered their way into
Speaker 2: places like Yucatan and back down into the highlands of
Speaker 2: Guatemala and started the post classic cities there. There's some
Speaker 2: evidence to suggest lineages from those abandoned cities started places
Speaker 2: like chichen Itza.
Speaker 1: Wide leave. It's like essentially New York, New Yorkers leaving
Speaker 1: New York and going down, going down to Colorado.
Speaker 2: Uh. You know, a general societal wide loss of faith
Speaker 2: in the power of these divine kings that could have
Speaker 2: been a factor. There are environmental factors that people bring up.
Speaker 2: Jared Diamond's books famously. He wrote one called Drought where
Speaker 2: he suggests from meso America all the way up into
Speaker 2: North America that there was this terrible period of drought
Speaker 2: that destroyed all the civilizations at its time. It doesn't
Speaker 2: really work like that, because there's tons of rivers that
Speaker 2: they that they went away from, and a lot of
Speaker 2: them clustered in one of the driest parts of the Yucatan,
Speaker 2: so that the evidence that they ran because of climate
Speaker 2: change doesn't fit everywhere. Again, the Maya world is so
Speaker 2: huge to try to say one environmental factor affected the
Speaker 2: people in the highlands and the lowlands on the coasts
Speaker 2: and the Jungles, It's it's complicated.
Speaker 1: It would it be the equivalent of something like that
Speaker 1: happening to the United States. Let's say, like one event
Speaker 1: has taken over, has taken the west coast, aust taken
Speaker 1: the east coast, alst taking, taken the middle of the
Speaker 1: country out. It's like it would have to be something
Speaker 1: so massive that it wouldn't just happen to the United States,
Speaker 1: who probably happened to the entire world.
Speaker 2: Right, even in the drought hypothesis, there were parts of
Speaker 2: the United States, like all the civilizations that grew up
Speaker 2: around the Mississippi River that didn't miss a beat when
Speaker 2: this drought period was there. It destroyed the American Southwest,
Speaker 2: but it empowered the Mississippians. No, there was another culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, very different than the Mayan. Uh. Now, there
Speaker 1: was something else I learned about, which is and I
Speaker 1: don't know if the exact name of it, but the
Speaker 1: black Earth that they figure out a way to create
Speaker 1: to regenerate soil, to make it very fertile, and it
Speaker 1: was and it was they found they have found it,
Speaker 1: but we haven't been able to redo something like that,
Speaker 1: and like making you know, a barren land fertile all
Speaker 1: of a sudden with a technique.
Speaker 2: If I understand what you're talking about right, you're talking
Speaker 2: about the stuff specifically in the Amazon.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly in the Maya.
Speaker 2: We don't have to guess whether there were people living
Speaker 2: there that build pyramids on top of it. And the Amazon,
Speaker 2: you know, we always had. The old theory was Betty
Speaker 2: Metger's theory counterfeit paradise, that though it seemed so resource
Speaker 2: rich that you couldn't possibly farm there. And then they
Speaker 2: start finding all these archaeological sites where there's clearly farms,
Speaker 2: and then there's some things where you know there's nobody there.
Speaker 2: But what you're talking about this black earth that anthropology
Speaker 2: calls it an anthropogenic landscape, that a huge area has
Speaker 2: much much richer soil than it should. The idea, the
Speaker 2: thought is that civilizations had actually been manipulating that soil
Speaker 2: for thousands of years and it turned it into this
Speaker 2: fertile soil. And the Amazonian tribes that sit on it
Speaker 2: today and farm are farming basically in thousand year old mulch.
Speaker 1: Which is why our.
Speaker 2: Civilization that we don't see because it's a perishable world.
Speaker 2: If they're all building their things out of wood and
Speaker 2: feathers and pelts. All we're going to find is black dirt.
Speaker 1: Right exactly from what I understand though, if you took
Speaker 1: some of that black dirt now, even it's so fertile
Speaker 1: that it can actually help regenerate other earth. It's like
Speaker 1: a weird I saw something about that on a documentary somewhere,
Speaker 1: maybe on the History Chattel or something, But.
Speaker 2: Well, it is incredibly fertile. And I did a couple
Speaker 2: of years back, I did a little boat trip up
Speaker 2: the Amazon and into the Rio Negro side, specifically visiting
Speaker 2: tribes and seeing where they lived. And every one of
Speaker 2: these you know, really remote tribes could talk to me
Speaker 2: intelligently about this black earth and that that's why they
Speaker 2: put their village there, because it's a big, huge patch
Speaker 2: of black earth and they can do all this farming,
Speaker 2: and that they know that there are places along the
Speaker 2: river that doesn't have the black earth, and that would
Speaker 2: be a stupid place to build their village because they
Speaker 2: can't farm. They are taking advantage of it. So in
Speaker 2: many ways, you know, archaeologists got the idea to look
Speaker 2: for this from the natives, which happens all too often.
Speaker 2: An archaeolic there's always some you know, white guy in
Speaker 2: a hat going I've discovered this with my little friend here,
Speaker 2: who showed me where it is.
Speaker 1: Exact, except I think that happens in all cultures essentially,
Speaker 1: UH and all and all UH, in all findings in archaeology,
Speaker 1: there generally seems to be that. And he jumped into
Speaker 1: his indesia. So on. One thing I was going to
Speaker 1: ask you is what, out of all the mysteries that
Speaker 1: the minds have, and there are many, which is the
Speaker 1: one that most intrigues you that it just keeps you
Speaker 1: up at night, just like how is how did that happen?
Speaker 1: Or where did that? Like questions that are just mysteries
Speaker 1: that have not been solved yet.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a good question, you know. I'm I'm a
Speaker 2: math and science nerd, so I look a lot at
Speaker 2: you know, the way their mathematics work, and their way
Speaker 2: their astronomy works. I wonder things like that. I wonder,
Speaker 2: you know, just how exactly they made their observations. I mean,
Speaker 2: like way too deep into the mechanics of the Maya calendar.
Speaker 2: And there's a couple of things that just make their
Speaker 2: math break. If we take their word for how the
Speaker 2: calendar works. There's this whole like the world resets at
Speaker 2: thirteen bocktunes thirteen four hundred year periods. It doesn't actually
Speaker 2: work with the rest of their math in many ways.
Speaker 2: And there's such magnificent mathematicians. I can't imagine they got
Speaker 2: it wrong. It bugs me that I'm probably getting it wrong.
Speaker 2: There are things even with it. For a guy like
Speaker 2: me that has studied it for twenty years, I'm still
Speaker 2: scratching my head about, you know, certain aspects of their math.
Speaker 2: Another one is the Dresden Codex's Venus pages. Teams of
Speaker 2: people for generations now have been trying to decode the
Speaker 2: entire meaning of the math that lies beneath it, and
Speaker 2: they're still unanswered questions.
Speaker 1: How could a culture that quote unquote primitive comparatively to
Speaker 1: where we are today have such an advanced understandings of
Speaker 1: mathematic and astronomy.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you know, I would respectfully say, sometimes
Speaker 2: we need to rethink our definition of primitive, because those
Speaker 2: guys were just as smart as we are. And the Maya,
Speaker 2: unlike a lot of the North, the American cultures created
Speaker 2: a writing system, so they actually had the ability for
Speaker 2: one generation to do studying of the sky and take
Speaker 2: notes and do math, and then hand it to the
Speaker 2: next generation who continues the observations and after a while
Speaker 2: you get pretty darn good at it. They get a
Speaker 2: foundation of knowledge which they build, and probably writing was
Speaker 2: a big part of that, but also they just had
Speaker 2: a mentality to understand their universe. They probably did it,
Speaker 2: you know, in the search for God rather than science
Speaker 2: like we think we're doing these days.
Speaker 1: Well, the thing is one thing that was always fascinated
Speaker 1: me about the Maya as well, is that, and especially
Speaker 1: some of the pyramids and structures that they built, they're
Speaker 1: all so perfectly aligned to the stars at a level
Speaker 1: that is almost perfection, to where the equinox, the solar
Speaker 1: equinox and the lunar equinox create that dragon that comes
Speaker 1: down the steps. If I'm not mistaken, it's the equinoxes
Speaker 1: that create that twice a year. Yeah, yeah, the snake,
Speaker 1: excuse me, not dragon, but this, Yeah, the snake out
Speaker 1: of the stairs. The amount of the amount of intelligence
Speaker 1: and knowledge and engineering to do something like that at
Speaker 1: that time period seems insane to do. And as well
Speaker 1: as the as well as the bird clap thing, like
Speaker 1: I still. You know, if you could explain that to me,
Speaker 1: I'd be really interested they did that.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm not sure about the bird clap. There's
Speaker 2: a that's in a lot of Maya sites, and there
Speaker 2: there's a quality where stone will bounce off and and
Speaker 2: echo the you know, the the Greeks did it too,
Speaker 2: on purpose, to a great extent in their theaters and auditoriums.
Speaker 2: Sometimes when the.
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Speaker 2: When the sound bounces off a building like that, you
Speaker 2: know the the uh the guides always say it's the
Speaker 2: it's the voice of a catsal. Yeah, you know you
Speaker 2: know why they say it's the voice of a catsal.
Speaker 2: Nobody's ever heard.
Speaker 1: Of cats and.
Speaker 2: We will buy it. Yeah, but very few people know
Speaker 2: what the heck of ketsal sounds like. It's it's a
Speaker 2: cool effect. I do not know whether the ancient Maya
Speaker 2: meant it to sound like a bird, much less a
Speaker 2: catsal or.
Speaker 1: Even But it's like if you but you have to
Speaker 1: stand at this one space up the stairs perfectly a
Speaker 1: line if you move over five feet and move over
Speaker 1: five doesn't work. But anyway, but how but that's that's
Speaker 1: that's that's almost a parlor trick comparatively to understanding the
Speaker 1: stars and understanding the equinoxes and how the sun is
Speaker 1: going to lie it hit the pyramid at a certain
Speaker 1: time period to create this effect of the snake. How
Speaker 1: do how do you explain or is there an explanation
Speaker 1: of how they understood the stars so well?
Speaker 2: Well, it's certainly the arrangements of the buildings at certain
Speaker 2: sites like Chichinitza and this example with the snake coming
Speaker 2: down at equinox. That is, you know, that's urban planning.
Speaker 2: That is somebody getting out there with a crew and
Speaker 2: an engineer and workers and looking at where the shadows
Speaker 2: will land, first making models and then and then perfecting it.
Speaker 2: It took a lot of organization. They were a very organized,
Speaker 2: smart people, and you know they were also on agricultural people.
Speaker 2: So things with the sun are what most we see
Speaker 2: when we talk about alignments of buildings. It's a lot
Speaker 2: of the sun like this example, but not much of
Speaker 2: the planets. Only a little bit of that that we
Speaker 2: find in their books, we find their calculations. But they
Speaker 2: were so in the sun was so important because of
Speaker 2: the agricultural cycle, and so the march was the beginning
Speaker 2: of a season of the cycle. So they would all
Speaker 2: get together to celebrate that would.
Speaker 1: There be an instant and correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: If the priests, let's say, of the culture, the higher
Speaker 1: the the the royalty, whatever you'd like to call it,
Speaker 1: understood things that that they had access to the books,
Speaker 1: had access to the knowledge, and they knew that if
Speaker 1: they stand at the top of the pyramid at this day,
Speaker 1: at this time, the sun's going to come through and
Speaker 1: create this this kind of shining light and almost godlike
Speaker 1: image would appreciate it. He would, let's say that ruler
Speaker 1: would say on Tuesday at six o'clock, I will show
Speaker 1: you my power, and they would there and do that,
Speaker 1: and everybody will go, oh, is that something that is
Speaker 1: that something that would have would have happened back then?
Speaker 2: Well, it's possible. Uh, we you know, we really are
Speaker 2: all recreating the what would have happened. I prefer to
Speaker 2: look at it somewhat the opposite that if the majority
Speaker 2: of Maya are corn farmers, every farmer I've ever met
Speaker 2: knows exactly on his own, on his own land, when
Speaker 2: to plant and when to sew. He says, you know,
Speaker 2: when the sun comes up over that hill there, it's
Speaker 2: time to plant, and when it sits over near that tree,
Speaker 2: it's time. The seasons are changing. So I don't think
Speaker 2: to think that regular Joe farmer Maya didn't know how
Speaker 2: the sun worked seems strange to me. I think instead
Speaker 2: of these priests and rulers lording over special knowledge that
Speaker 2: they keep in books about what the sun's going to do,
Speaker 2: those celebrations that are happening at solar stations are honoring
Speaker 2: the farmers and the thing that ties all of society together.
Speaker 2: I think those are those are honoring shared knowledge and
Speaker 2: shared important things, rather than a elite teaching an ignorant
Speaker 2: published population how to do their job.
Speaker 1: Is the Maya. From my understanding, the Maya were not
Speaker 1: as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs, let's say, with sacrifices and
Speaker 1: throwing people off of pyramids and decapitations and things like that.
Speaker 1: Is that is that true? Or was there a phase
Speaker 1: or a stage in their evolution that because they have
Speaker 1: that game that I guess just the ball through the
Speaker 1: little hooper. It's basically a basketball essentially almost something like basketball,
Speaker 1: but if you lost, you died or something along those sides.
Speaker 1: If Apocalypto showed us.
Speaker 2: Anything, Uh, Apocalypto showed us very little. Yes, beautiful movie then,
Speaker 2: I mean it was a good movie. It was a
Speaker 2: great but it was not a accurate on the Maya
Speaker 2: by any stretch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's when I saw that because I understood that
Speaker 1: Maya were not that blood thirsty, that we were not
Speaker 1: that sacrificial. Aztecs were much more known for that than they.
Speaker 2: Well, it depends on what phase of Maya you're talking about.
Speaker 2: You just mentioned that. It really is dependent. As we
Speaker 2: see time pass. For the Maya, the Classic period people
Speaker 2: they're doing a lot of warfare against each other and
Speaker 2: they are sacrificing people that they bring back from war.
Speaker 2: So there was some sacrifice there, But the main sacrifice
Speaker 2: of the Classic period was and what we call an
Speaker 2: auto sacrifice that the king would do. He would blood
Speaker 2: let himself and then connect to his ancestors. So that was. Uh,
Speaker 2: there's more of that displayed, at least in their art
Speaker 2: than the sacrifice of people. But once that Classic period
Speaker 2: ends and the post Classic begins, the Maya get a
Speaker 2: lot more in influenced by the people from Central Mexico
Speaker 2: who eventually evolve into the Aztecs, but they are a
Speaker 2: much more bloody and sacrifice oriented civilization, and as they
Speaker 2: influence and interact with the Maya, the Maya picked that
Speaker 2: same bad habit up. Like in Chichinitza, there's actually in
Speaker 2: between the ball court and the big pyramid there is
Speaker 2: a platform that carved All the way around it are
Speaker 2: skulls on stakes, stacked like they're a shishkebob, And that
Speaker 2: looks just like the Aztec skull rack from their main
Speaker 2: city that's now Mexico City. So it looks pretty darn
Speaker 2: clear that chichen Itza had a skull rack full of
Speaker 2: people that heads that were sacrificed at that site at
Speaker 2: chichen Itza. I think by the time the toll tech
Speaker 2: start influencing them, the ASTech do get a lot more
Speaker 2: bloody and sacrifice oriented Classic period, not so much Chi
Speaker 2: in the post classic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is that so after that that stage? Is that
Speaker 1: when they disappeared after that stage or how many more
Speaker 1: years before they disappeared.
Speaker 2: No, they never really disappeared.
Speaker 1: But abandon the abandoned.
Speaker 2: Oh no, the you're talking about the mysterious collapse of
Speaker 2: my society. That's like seven hundred eight hundred, So that's
Speaker 2: that's the end of that period where they're not doing
Speaker 2: that much sacrificing. Then we have a couple hundred years
Speaker 2: that we call the Terminal Classic that we don't really
Speaker 2: everything's evolving so fast it's hard to see pinned down.
Speaker 2: And then it settles down at about a thousand into
Speaker 2: the post Classic, and that's where they interact with the
Speaker 2: Toltec and Central Mexicans more and get considerably more sacrifice happy.
Speaker 1: Were the Toltecs sacrifice happy?
Speaker 2: Yep, they seem to have been, and the as texts
Speaker 2: hold up the Toll texts as their model. So there
Speaker 2: there's an indicator for you too.
Speaker 1: How did the how did the Toll text create some
Speaker 1: of those these giant heads that everyone talks about. There's
Speaker 1: they're pretty sophisticated carvings for such a brutal quote unquote
Speaker 1: time in their in their evolution. It's sometimes it just
Speaker 1: doesn't connect with me. Where you know a culture that
Speaker 1: would build something like Chichnitza have that intelligence of the
Speaker 1: stars and mathematics and are pretty pretty smart and pretty evolved.
Speaker 1: Yet they are sacrificing and you know, cutting hearts out
Speaker 1: and cutting heads off and putting them on steaks and
Speaker 1: things like that. There's a disconnect for me there because
Speaker 1: like right now, we are quote unquote at a very
Speaker 1: civilized time in our in our history as as as
Speaker 1: a as a as a as a society quote unquote,
Speaker 1: I say, but at least most of us, exactly. And
Speaker 1: there are sections of the world that are very barbaric
Speaker 1: and still are doing barbaric things. And there are sections
Speaker 1: of the world, like in the Amazon, who are living
Speaker 1: like they did five hundred years ago almost exactly. So
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of everything all over the place.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious on what you think, how do you
Speaker 1: kind of put that those two things together. Something that's
Speaker 1: i mean, the intelligence and the wisdom of mathematics and
Speaker 1: almost like almost philosophical the Greek period almost in philosophy,
Speaker 1: that they were so advanced, but yet just killing people,
Speaker 1: decapitating them and shoving them down spikes. It just seems
Speaker 1: a real big disconnect.
Speaker 2: I totally agree with you, And you know, from our
Speaker 2: Western perspective, those two elements of society do not belong together.
Speaker 2: But you know, my mentor Linda Sheila used to tell
Speaker 2: me when I was a student and if you don't
Speaker 2: stop thinking like a Westerner and try to put yourself
Speaker 2: in the shoe of how these Mesu American people live,
Speaker 2: you're never going to understand anything. And I think that,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm still struggling to understand, but I have
Speaker 2: at least accepted that the Aztecs, the Maya, the Zappatas,
Speaker 2: especially the Aztecs are proof that, you know, a lot
Speaker 2: of things that we count as civilized behavior and barbaric
Speaker 2: behavior can coexist in a single society. The Aztecs, they
Speaker 2: probably really did sacrifice twenty thousand people in a three
Speaker 2: day period to inaugurate a temple.
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Speaker 2: But on the other hand, their leaders were supposed to
Speaker 2: be poets and statesmen, and they were supposed to be
Speaker 2: able to at a party just get up and re
Speaker 2: site a poem that everybody knew, or maybe a new
Speaker 2: one they made. And they could play instruments, and they
Speaker 2: were the and they loved flowers. The gardens of the
Speaker 2: Aztecs were magnificent. There were so many aspects of art
Speaker 2: and culture and nature and beauty that they appreciated hand
Speaker 2: in hand with murdering each other. And uh, you know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of one of the magnificent things about studying anthropology.
Speaker 2: There's there's a revelation humans can actually live and prosper
Speaker 2: like that too, and did prosper When the Spanish out there,
Speaker 2: they said that the Tenos Tittlan was the biggest market
Speaker 2: that they had ever seen in their life. There were
Speaker 2: sixty thousand people mulling around a very prosperous economic market.
Speaker 1: That must have been mind blowing to the Spanish when
Speaker 1: they came. I mean it must have didn't No, I know,
Speaker 1: the Spanish basically took over most of South America as well.
Speaker 1: They mostly all speak Spanish now. But how I know
Speaker 1: the stories of the Aztecs and what they did with
Speaker 1: the Aztecs and the Inca, they did the same thing
Speaker 1: with the Mayans as far as they just came in
Speaker 1: and they gave them disease, you know, accidentally or on purpose,
Speaker 1: and they just basically destroyed them essentially. Is that true?
Speaker 2: Yeap, That is you know, in a nutshell, that is
Speaker 2: absolutely true. It took them a little while longer to
Speaker 2: get to the Maya because the Maya had nothing. They
Speaker 2: want no gold, cities have any gold, and they didn't
Speaker 2: have much in the way of commerce. Eventually they figured
Speaker 2: out they had some things they wanted, and they were
Speaker 2: also independent city states. Where the Aztecs you could really
Speaker 2: chop the head off the snake and just go through
Speaker 2: the rest of it. If you took out the capital city,
Speaker 2: you owned the empire. But the Maya you had to
Speaker 2: do it city by city by city, and it was
Speaker 2: much more tedious to get to them all. And they
Speaker 2: didn't really have any gold they were looking for, you know,
Speaker 2: they were golden city goals to convert, so they were
Speaker 2: you know, they were on the list, but they were there.
Speaker 2: But I think the lack of resources that they were
Speaker 2: looking for kept the Maya safe for a bit. But eventually,
Speaker 2: you know, really before the Spanish even started swinging swords
Speaker 2: in the Maya area, people were getting sick everywhere, the
Speaker 2: deadly diseases. You know. I think that modern studies now
Speaker 2: are proving fairly conclusively that ninety to maybe ninety five
Speaker 2: percent of people died in the first fifty to one
Speaker 2: hundred years of contact. There were like ten percent of
Speaker 2: Maya left by the time the Spanish really started taking over.
Speaker 1: Now with the new technology that we have with a
Speaker 1: sonar and aerial sonar. If I'm not mistaken, they're discovering
Speaker 1: pyramids throughout the Amazon, completely covered and have not been
Speaker 1: excavated yet. How exciting is that for you? And where
Speaker 1: do you think? Is there any site that you have
Speaker 1: seen that they go, Oh my god, there is this
Speaker 1: giant temple there. It's just you can't get to it
Speaker 1: right now. It's costing too much money or something like
Speaker 1: that to even get to that place. Are there any
Speaker 1: site that you've heard about that you were just dying
Speaker 1: to get to?
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I mean, there is a lot of progress.
Speaker 2: It's coming too fast and furious. I don't even know
Speaker 2: what's going to come next. It's a lightar is the
Speaker 2: technology that's it, and it kind of takes the trees
Speaker 2: away and shows us the landscape, and we're seeing all
Speaker 2: sorts of interesting networks of cities down in the Amazon.
Speaker 2: What they do is they build up these big earthen
Speaker 2: berms and they live on top of those, and then
Speaker 2: they make causeways to other earthen berms, and the whole
Speaker 2: thing looks like a big spiderweb from the sky, but
Speaker 2: collectively it's like city centers and naborhoods that have tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of people, some of them some of them
Speaker 2: in the Bolivian rainforest and a part called a Beny.
Speaker 2: Have these just huge civilizations. And it's funny the researchers
Speaker 2: down there looked through all of the religious conversion documents
Speaker 2: from the Franciscans and Jesuits that there were people down
Speaker 2: there in the late fifteen hundreds that were trying to
Speaker 2: Christianize Amazonians and they saw these big pure these big mounds,
Speaker 2: and the causeways going out, and they were they grumped about.
Speaker 2: They said, They've built this incredible network in the urban
Speaker 2: center in the middle of the jungle, and all they
Speaker 2: ever used these causeways for is to go from party
Speaker 2: to party. These people are totally unproductive and won't do
Speaker 2: what they're told. So they were having a grand old
Speaker 2: time living in a big city that nobody ever realized
Speaker 2: was there. The Jesuits did, they just gave up on
Speaker 2: them because they were shiftless.
Speaker 1: Which brings me, which brings me to my next question
Speaker 1: about the Catholic Church, which is obviously with when Spain
Speaker 1: came over, they brought over Jesus because obviously God forbid
Speaker 1: that these these heathens have not not been exposed to Christianity.
Speaker 1: But from what I understand, they were priests who burned
Speaker 1: all of the knowledge and libraries of I guess scrolls
Speaker 1: or what did they hold this written knowledge that you're
Speaker 1: talking about.
Speaker 2: Codexes. They were kind of fan fold books that you
Speaker 2: could open up in the pages. Instead of having a
Speaker 2: spine and opening up like like wings, you'd open it
Speaker 2: up like an accordion and lay it long ways across
Speaker 2: the table to read it. Right.
Speaker 1: So, they that they burned so much knowledge and history
Speaker 1: of the Maya. Is that a true statement.
Speaker 2: It's exaggerated, but true. There are sometimes we get the
Speaker 2: impression that they just, you know, they burned them everywhere.
Speaker 2: There was one big episode where uh Diego de Landa
Speaker 2: and the Yucatan burned a whole pire of books and
Speaker 2: people too. He burned people with the stakes in the
Speaker 2: same in the same event. We tend to not talk
Speaker 2: about that as well as the books in this conversation,
Speaker 2: but uh, yeah, they were burning them. They were they
Speaker 2: were looking to eradicate, especially religion, to replace it with
Speaker 2: the new one.
Speaker 1: And how many of these these the accordion esque books
Speaker 1: have you found of ancient minds have been found and
Speaker 1: been translated.
Speaker 2: We have four. We have four left on the planet.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's all we've got. I have found them archaeologically,
Speaker 2: But in the jungle they're like stains. They're just goo,
Speaker 2: piles of pigment. The paper's all gone, and so I
Speaker 2: we they used to have tons, a lot of them did.
Speaker 2: That's why I said exaggerated a lot of the books.
Speaker 2: Just you know, if you put a book on a
Speaker 2: shelf in a jungle, it's gone in ten years.
Speaker 1: But in the desert of but the deserts of Egypt,
Speaker 1: it holds because it's dry.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly all those things held up, all those scrolls.
Speaker 2: So the ones that we have were ones that the
Speaker 2: Spanish took to Europe and then they filtered around for
Speaker 2: a couple centuries until somebody figured out, hey, those are Maya.
Speaker 2: One of them almost got burned up in the library
Speaker 2: in Paris. It was in a stack that was going
Speaker 2: to go into the furnace to keep the building warm
Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds, and somebody somebody said, hey, yeah,
Speaker 2: isn't that a isn't that a Maya codex? We should
Speaker 2: we should keep that.
Speaker 1: So how did was there a Rosetta stone that allowed
Speaker 1: us to figure out that the writing of the Mia.
Speaker 2: Not exactly a Rosetta stone, but there it's actually worked
Speaker 2: thanks to the work of the same guy that did
Speaker 2: all the book burning, Diego Dealanda. He did a big
Speaker 2: ethnography talking to the Maya, and he had an informed
Speaker 2: and try to explain to him how their alphabet worked.
Speaker 2: So he had him say out like he said in Spanish,
Speaker 2: right ah here, right be here, right, say here, and
Speaker 2: the guy just wrote, he wrote what he heard. They
Speaker 2: actually have a syllabarry, so that not really in alphabet
Speaker 2: that DeLanda recorded his book in the fifteen hundreds turned
Speaker 2: out to be the key to helping us break the code.
Speaker 1: Now you talk about religion, you know, trying to eradicate
Speaker 1: the first religion to bring in the new religion of Christianity.
Speaker 1: What was their religion or spiritual practices throughout the from
Speaker 1: as far back as we can go to where to
Speaker 1: where they till the Spanish showed up.
Speaker 2: Well, from the Maya they had a pantheon of gods
Speaker 2: that that evolved and changed slightly over the thousands of years.
Speaker 2: But there was a pantheon. There's not necessarily a king
Speaker 2: of the Maya gods like Zeus, which like Maya society
Speaker 2: with their city states. They it was kind of a
Speaker 2: council of gods.
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Speaker 2: And so you know there's there's a number of them.
Speaker 2: There's a corn god, there's a sun god, there's a
Speaker 2: death god. So it's a you know, that's fairly you know,
Speaker 2: run of the mill kind of assignment of natural forces gods.
Speaker 2: But they followed those gods until the Spanish showed up. Now,
Speaker 2: the thing about that was so that the circumstances were
Speaker 2: perfect for this conversion in the regard that Maya and
Speaker 2: really all of the Native American societies before the europe
Speaker 2: showed up, believe that illness is a supernatural attack. It's
Speaker 2: not a it's it's not a physical thing. You don't
Speaker 2: get a cold, you get imbued by some spirit, some
Speaker 2: bad spirit makes you sick, and you're well, not necessarily possessed,
Speaker 2: but you know, it's it's the disfavor of some supernatural thing.
Speaker 2: Like so when somebody gets sick, they think, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: some witch made them sick. We got to make we
Speaker 2: got to bring our nice switch over here to Corindero
Speaker 2: to fix them, because everything has kind of you're all
Speaker 2: part of an animate spirit. But when everybody starts getting sick,
Speaker 2: then they conclude that their gods are angry with them
Speaker 2: and that the gods are making everyone sick. So that's
Speaker 2: that's how they interpreted everybody getting sick, just in time
Speaker 2: for these guys in brown robes to show up and say, oh,
Speaker 2: by the way, there's only one God, and if you
Speaker 2: just let me splash this water on your face, you'll
Speaker 2: be baptized and maybe you'll save you. Oh jeez, was
Speaker 2: that water infected? Oh sorry about that. I guess I
Speaker 2: actually accelerated the disease with that.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. You see the more you get into history,
Speaker 1: sometimes you see how.
Speaker 2: Long that was the real tragedy. Those those priests really
Speaker 2: did want those people to stay alive and be good Christians,
Speaker 2: but baptizing was actually accelerating the spread of the disease.
Speaker 2: One bowl of holy water would be splashed on one
Speaker 2: hundred people who would walk up willingly to follow this
Speaker 2: new God if it meant they stopped dying, But they
Speaker 2: got delivered the disease right to their face.
Speaker 1: So as far as spirituality is concerned. Was it more,
Speaker 1: Was there ever a point where they began to transcend
Speaker 1: these these kind of elemental gods, and was there always
Speaker 1: it was it always kind of like a poly when
Speaker 1: there's multiple gods, I forgot the word, you know that
Speaker 1: kind of like worshiping multiple gods. Or did they ever
Speaker 1: at one point exactly did they ever look inward kind
Speaker 1: of like the Vedic texts or the or the Vedic
Speaker 1: cultures or the Indian cultures, that they start to look
Speaker 1: inward for answers as opposed to always looking outward.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think we have any hint of that.
Speaker 2: And again, you know wonders of anthropology, everybody does something different.
Speaker 2: They were very unique religions. Now there were elements of
Speaker 2: things that we would call shamanism or ancestor worship that
Speaker 2: were part of it. An interesting thing about the Maya
Speaker 2: who have a pantheon of gods, say, versus the Greeks
Speaker 2: who have a pantheon of gods. The Greek gods and
Speaker 2: humans are interacting all the time. The Maya never directly
Speaker 2: interact with the gods. They have their ancestral spirits who
Speaker 2: live in the world of the gods act as liaisons.
Speaker 2: That was somewhat of the right to rulership for Maya kings,
Speaker 2: that they had people in important places that could act
Speaker 2: as liaisons. But gods did not directly communicate with humans. Humans.
Speaker 2: They communicate with the spirit world, which is somewhere between
Speaker 2: the level of the gods and the spirits, and a
Speaker 2: lot of what happens in the spirit world is communicating
Speaker 2: with ancestors. The modern Maya today who live in Guatemala,
Speaker 2: have a group of people called daykeepers. There's over seven
Speaker 2: thousand daykeeper priests and an association still, so it's a
Speaker 2: strong tradition. Millions of people see this and they talk
Speaker 2: about the twenty days of the Maya calendar as spirits
Speaker 2: that are all ancestors, and that they all have different
Speaker 2: powers and do different things, and they're all collectively called
Speaker 2: the mom, which is the grandmother's grandfather spirits, and these
Speaker 2: daykeepers can commune with those spirits and divine what's going on.
Speaker 2: They kind they can help people that are sick. Why
Speaker 2: are you sick, Well, you need to do this, You
Speaker 2: need to pray at this shrine to this particular mom.
Speaker 2: Or should I get married to this girl? Well, you
Speaker 2: know your grandparents up there and and say that they
Speaker 2: argued back in the forth, and you need to mend
Speaker 2: some fences here before you should get happily married, that
Speaker 2: sort of thing. But they implore wisdom from this middle level,
Speaker 2: not the gods, but this spirit level that's all about ancestors.
Speaker 2: And when we talk about that, then it falls into
Speaker 2: the category of ancestor worship, which also happens all over
Speaker 2: China today and in the past, so that in that regard,
Speaker 2: they're not completely isolated in what they think. They have
Speaker 2: a lot in common with early religions of China, I think.
Speaker 1: Which is odd as well, since they should have never
Speaker 1: spoken to each other. But also it seems but it
Speaker 1: also seems that they have something in common with the
Speaker 1: Native Americans up in the north, which are very much
Speaker 1: ancestral worship and also animal worship or elemental worships as well. Correct.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, there's a lot of overlap or you know,
Speaker 2: core similarities, I should say, between all of the religions
Speaker 2: of the America's North America, meso America like we're talking
Speaker 2: about here, and South America. I see it as you know,
Speaker 2: my theory is that twelve thousand years ago, now maybe
Speaker 2: you know, starting thirty three thousand years ago, people started
Speaker 2: coming across from Asia and as they filtered through they
Speaker 2: developed their own cultures. But just like languages can be
Speaker 2: reconstructed to a core language, I think that religions also
Speaker 2: work that way, where they're core principles, that they're all
Speaker 2: they're the foundations of all of these religions and they
Speaker 2: turn out to flower in different ways, but when you
Speaker 2: look at the core things, they're all the same. Like
Speaker 2: for example, North America versus the Maya, both of them
Speaker 2: at the core of how they think are cosmos is constructed.
Speaker 2: They have the four directions and the three levels of
Speaker 2: the universe, and both of them make all sorts of
Speaker 2: art talking about that fours and those three levels, but
Speaker 2: they never met each other. That's a core principle of
Speaker 2: religion that I think came over tens of thousands of
Speaker 2: years ago.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean at the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism,
Speaker 1: and Islam at the core have very similar ideas.
Speaker 2: Oh, they are a group called you know, Joseph Campbell
Speaker 2: calls them all the Judeo Christian religions, and then you've
Speaker 2: got the Asian religions that he called what do you
Speaker 2: called Confucius their son?
Speaker 1: Not Confucius, Buddhism.
Speaker 2: You know, there's another word. I'm missing that, but there's
Speaker 2: They lump all those ones together as well, Hinduism and
Speaker 2: Buddhism of course, are you know Buddhism sprung out of Hinduism.
Speaker 2: That's that's what the book says.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty fascinating now about twelve years ago, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of hoopla going around. The Maya were
Speaker 1: really in the news in twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: But those were good times for me.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure they were. I'm sure you were an
Speaker 1: hiden answer, and I demand back then you're speaking right, must.
Speaker 2: Like loved Maya math like a nerd was all of
Speaker 2: a sudden somebody people wanted to hear from. Those were
Speaker 2: interesting years.
Speaker 1: Exactly what what can you explain to people what that
Speaker 1: whole end of the mind calendar was? You know, what
Speaker 1: the prophecy was and what it actually meant? And did
Speaker 1: the calendar restart itself after twenty twelve or that was
Speaker 1: just the end of was it? Obviously it was an
Speaker 1: end of the world, because you and I are still talking,
Speaker 1: but it seemed to have been an end of an era,
Speaker 1: and then certain things have to happen or are happening
Speaker 1: after this era. What's your take on it?
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, you know, back in those days, I had
Speaker 2: a whole hour lecture explaining it. Can I do that
Speaker 2: in a couple of sentences? Let's let let's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll give you. I'll give you, like a few
Speaker 1: more than a few sentences, go ahead, Okay.
Speaker 2: Well, the crux of the problem was that people believe
Speaker 2: that the Maya calendar re set itself to start the
Speaker 2: fourth creation of my of the Maya Creation story in
Speaker 2: the year three thousand, one hundred and fourteen BC, specifically
Speaker 2: August thirteenth, and so if it reset itself, it went
Speaker 2: thirteen sets of four hundred years bocktunes in Maya and
Speaker 2: then it reset to zero like the odometer on your car.
Speaker 2: So that meant, if you followed that math logically, that
Speaker 2: when we get to thirteen more four hundred year periods
Speaker 2: from three thy one hundred and fourteen BC, the clock's
Speaker 2: going to reset again and we're going to start the
Speaker 2: fifth creation. Uh oh, what happens to us? The last
Speaker 2: four creations got totally trashed. Everybody died, and if you
Speaker 2: do the math, you get to December twenty first, twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: and so mathematically it looked like the Maya were saying,
Speaker 2: the world's going to reset in twenty twelve.
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Speaker 2: But that's not really what they meant, and it didn't happen.
Speaker 2: You can see. Like a math nerd guy like me,
Speaker 2: I've looked through all of the calindrical math that we
Speaker 2: have available to us in the Maya, and there are
Speaker 2: a number of places where they talk about time well
Speaker 2: after twenty twelve, and they talk about time way before
Speaker 2: three and fourteen BC. So we were misunderstanding the cycle.
Speaker 2: I still don't have a good answer why the calendar
Speaker 2: reset at thirteen, five thousand years ago. I think it's
Speaker 2: the creation story implies that the magical deeds of the
Speaker 2: hero Twins reset it like pressing the button on eurodometer.
Speaker 2: But then normally it should run. Each cycle should run
Speaker 2: in groups of twenty. Maya math is base twenty, ours
Speaker 2: is base ten decimal, theirs is base twenty vagessimal. So
Speaker 2: in our little uh odometer analogy, when it clicked to
Speaker 2: thirteen and zero, zero zero. The next number was zero
Speaker 2: zero zero zero one for its first day. But the
Speaker 2: Maya math can't work out like that. That was something
Speaker 2: I was saying at the start. It the uh, the
Speaker 2: whole system breaks if it jumps at thirteen there, because
Speaker 2: it's base twenty, it should be a twenty there. And
Speaker 2: there are a few texts that actually do tell us
Speaker 2: that it is a twenty there. Because backtuness, four hundred
Speaker 2: year periods is not the biggest period. The Maya also
Speaker 2: talk about a pictun which is a eight thousand year period,
Speaker 2: and a column tomb which is one hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: thousand year period, and there are bigger ones too. Sometimes
Speaker 2: they'll talk about millions of years in a calculation. So
Speaker 2: and that whole, that whole math system of how they
Speaker 2: tell me to go back five million years, it breaks
Speaker 2: if it's a thirteen Mathematically the Maya would have never
Speaker 2: done that.
Speaker 1: So this was this was an example of Y two
Speaker 1: K essentially.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was, Yes, it was. You know, they were
Speaker 2: both good excuses to have great parties, weren't they.
Speaker 1: That's without question, without question.
Speaker 2: I attended to people. They were fantastic.
Speaker 1: No, what's fascinating to me is the the the lens
Speaker 1: that we look back at ancient civilizations across across the world.
Speaker 1: We look at them through the lenses of our technology today,
Speaker 1: and we look at them as primitive because they don't
Speaker 1: have an iPhone or the inn. But yet they in
Speaker 1: many ways could have been more advanced than us in
Speaker 1: other aspects of our lives, whether it be mathematics in
Speaker 1: a way that we just can't grasp anymore. It'd be
Speaker 1: the equivalent of someone finding an iPhone five hundred years
Speaker 1: from now and there's then Amazon somewhere and they're picking
Speaker 1: this up. They're like, what is this? How do I
Speaker 1: explain it? They have no context or I like, like,
Speaker 1: you're like your mentor said, you have to think like them,
Speaker 1: But it's very difficult to think like them if you
Speaker 1: weren't there.
Speaker 2: But that's that's the fun of the job, to recreate
Speaker 2: these stories. And I'll admit openly, you know, sometimes archaeology
Speaker 2: is the best story wins. Yeah, that's the coolest story
Speaker 2: of the that would fit the facts, gets the most,
Speaker 2: gets the most loved.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you this. Being an archaeologist, there
Speaker 1: is a lot of there's a lot of theories. I
Speaker 1: mean there's just so many theories flying around about ancient civilizations. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the History Channel is built an entire billion dollar business
Speaker 1: around it, without question. But it seems to me that
Speaker 1: there is some things that when they're brought up to
Speaker 1: mainstream archaeology in all aspects, that they're very resistance to change.
Speaker 1: So an example is, to my understanding, the concept that
Speaker 1: the Great Pyramid of Gizas were tombs came from a
Speaker 1: white guy in the eighteen hundreds who said, oh, this
Speaker 1: must have been this, this, and this, and they just
Speaker 1: kind of ran with that idea. And please correct me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, But inside of the Pyramid of Giza,
Speaker 1: there is no tomb, there is no hieroglyphs. And Egyptians
Speaker 1: were very well known to do all of that and
Speaker 1: to talk about everything they've ever done because they love
Speaker 1: the press. So why do you think that sometimes and
Speaker 1: do you agree that sometimes mainstream archaology might be resistance
Speaker 1: to change, as as with physics, as with medicine, as
Speaker 1: with any major institution.
Speaker 2: Well, it is a conservative to field based on you know,
Speaker 2: we have very few facts to go on, and we
Speaker 2: try to conservatively put forward our theories based on those
Speaker 2: few facts. But yeah, and there are there is a
Speaker 2: there's a generational thing that goes on. I want to
Speaker 2: say that I partially agree with that statement, and I
Speaker 2: partially don't the part that I do. There are people
Speaker 2: who are just people who have spent their entire life
Speaker 2: championing an idea and the thought that some new person
Speaker 2: is going to come with a brand new idea that
Speaker 2: invalidates your idea and via that your entire life is
Speaker 2: a hard pill to swallow, fair enough, And people who
Speaker 2: just will will fight their wrong theories till their deathbed,
Speaker 2: and they exist within the field definitely. But I'd like
Speaker 2: to say that also, you know, myself and a lot
Speaker 2: of my colleagues are very open minded about things. We
Speaker 2: are actually thrilled when we prove each other wrong or
Speaker 2: or prove ourselves wrong. That's what we're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 2: We're supposed to be advancing for understanding, and oftentimes it
Speaker 2: means giving up what we previously thought. And I think that,
Speaker 2: you know, the whole idea of mainstream archaeology is funny.
Speaker 2: That's it's really just a collection of guys like me
Speaker 2: that get paid professor wages, where mainstream Graham Hancock is
Speaker 2: mainstream archaeology. We hide in the foxholes of academia with
Speaker 2: the smaller voices.
Speaker 1: Right, But you're absolutely right, and I have heard that
Speaker 1: though there are the new generations coming up, the younger uh,
Speaker 1: the younger professors, the younger just different generations, they're becoming
Speaker 1: more open to this because you're exactly right. We should
Speaker 1: be disproving ourselves constantly, because, as history has shown us,
Speaker 1: man always thought they had it figured out at the
Speaker 1: moment that they figured it out. And you know, when
Speaker 1: Zeus was around, I was Zeus. You know, there was
Speaker 1: there's nothing else. It was Zeus, God forbid it was
Speaker 1: anything else. And same thing goes. And so when quantum
Speaker 1: physics showed up through a monkey rented to physics, they're
Speaker 1: still trying to to try to deal with that. But newer,
Speaker 1: newer generations are going, no, wait a minute, they have
Speaker 1: no attachment to the status quo, to those old things,
Speaker 1: those ideas and theories that have been held onto for centuries.
Speaker 1: They're like, well, wait a minute, there's a new way
Speaker 1: of doing this. There's a new idea. Let's deal. Let's
Speaker 1: go into that new idea.
Speaker 2: Would your new techniques give us new information? Things like
Speaker 2: light ar is is a miracle for archaeology. Another one
Speaker 2: is DNA studies. I mean, gosh, we have gotten answers
Speaker 2: to things about, you know, fundamental things like you know,
Speaker 2: who migrated where were? You know that some of those
Speaker 2: were terribly wrong in the early publications of archaeology, and
Speaker 2: DNA has turned us around and really given us a
Speaker 2: dimension that you know, when I was a young archaeologist,
Speaker 2: I never thought we'd have that kind of information at
Speaker 2: our disposal, and it really does change some things we
Speaker 2: thought were fundamental. And I think it's my job as
Speaker 2: this generation guys, to accept that and move forward instead
Speaker 2: of die on my own sword of my old theories.
Speaker 1: Now, you were talking about the cycles that the Mayan
Speaker 1: were talking about in their calendars. Is there a correlation
Speaker 1: with the Indian yugas, which is a twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: or twenty four thousand cycle that repeats itself constantly. Is
Speaker 1: there any correlation.
Speaker 2: I don't think a cultural correlation, but they are structured similarly. Well,
Speaker 2: I'd say that they are similar in that they cover
Speaker 2: vast periods of time. You know, if you take mya
Speaker 2: period as thirteen bock tunes, which I just explained, I
Speaker 2: really don't five one hundred and twenty five years, and
Speaker 2: if you take five of them, that's twenty five thousand years.
Speaker 2: The important number there is that that is the full
Speaker 2: cycle of procession for it, which is closed all the
Speaker 2: way around US three hundred and sixty five degrees and
Speaker 2: come back takes twenty five thousand years, which is essentially
Speaker 2: about that one degree of procession is seventy two years.
Speaker 2: And so they would watch that and sometimes that number
Speaker 2: would pop up in their numerology in weird ways that
Speaker 2: that's one of the numbers that drive me crazy, and
Speaker 2: I hunt.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it does sound that there is a correlation,
Speaker 1: at least structurally, because it.
Speaker 2: Is twelve hundred, twenty four hundred, thirty six hundred, forty
Speaker 2: eight hundred, and it goes in a cycle. That's the
Speaker 2: difference here that once the forty eight hundred one ends,
Speaker 2: a new twelve hundred year one starts and then the
Speaker 2: cycle keeps going. The Maya calendar does not cycle, at
Speaker 2: least at least the long count it is, which is
Speaker 2: weird because the Maya aren't linear people. They're cycle people.
Speaker 1: But that twenty five thousand year cycle, regardless of how
Speaker 1: it's peace field seems to have correlition with the stars
Speaker 1: of all the stars wrapping around, so they two different
Speaker 1: groups figured that out.
Speaker 2: And that's like the holy grail of archaeo astronomy. If
Speaker 2: your culture could actually calculate procession of the equinoxes, they
Speaker 2: were bad ass astronomers. And the Maya did it, like
Speaker 2: maybe earliest. It's either the Babylonians or the Maya who
Speaker 2: did it earliest. And then the Greeks figured it out.
Speaker 2: The Hindu figured it out, but a lot of cultures.
Speaker 1: Chinese does Chinese figure it out. We'll be right back
Speaker 1: after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
Speaker 1: the show.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know. I think that, I mean,
Speaker 2: everybody did eventually, but I know for archaeology is like, well,
Speaker 2: did they hear it from those guys or did they
Speaker 2: actually calculated on their own? The the Babylonians in the
Speaker 2: Maya pretty sure they calculated on their own. The Babylonians
Speaker 2: probably told everybody else and just you know, it kind
Speaker 2: of fell into a dark hole for a couple centuries
Speaker 2: and then somebody rediscovered it along for the rest of
Speaker 2: time exactly.
Speaker 1: Now, during with your with your research, have you ever
Speaker 1: heard of any mystical stories, mystical experiences in the Mayan
Speaker 1: mythology or religion, anything of anything in the mystical spent
Speaker 1: in space.
Speaker 2: Well it defined mystical.
Speaker 1: Mystical uh god like, well things that would if we sound,
Speaker 1: if we heard today, would be like, oh, well, that's
Speaker 1: kind of interesting, you know, because there's mystical things that
Speaker 1: happen in the in the Hindu traditions, there's mystical things
Speaker 1: that happened in the Chinese tradition, there's mystical things even
Speaker 1: in the in the Arthurian tradition.
Speaker 2: And you're talking about you know, mythology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mythology exactly, Yeah, mystical mystical mythology kind of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well along the lines of you justified, the Popo
Speaker 2: Vu is full of that stuff. Their their creation document
Speaker 2: is full of all sorts of magical mystical things that happen.
Speaker 2: We follow the adventures of these hero twins who who
Speaker 2: talk to animals and turn people into monkeys and go
Speaker 2: down into the underworld and play a ballgame against the
Speaker 2: lords of death and turn into catfish and dogs, and
Speaker 2: it's it's a really fun adventure.
Speaker 1: So they so they have again it's fascinating that a
Speaker 1: culture does not connect it to any other culture. They
Speaker 1: always figure on other cultures on the other side of
Speaker 1: the world. They have an underworld, they have they have
Speaker 1: these kind of similar aspects, you know, the connect I'm
Speaker 1: trying to connect the dots. It's one of my favorite
Speaker 1: things to do with with everything I do on this show.
Speaker 1: It's the connect dots to things that I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to put it all together. Now just one piece. The
Speaker 1: Maya is one piece. But there's thousands of cultures around
Speaker 1: the world at different time periods, and I always like
Speaker 1: to see what's similar in them. So obviously the Greeks
Speaker 1: said the underworld, obviously, the Egyptians and now the Maya.
Speaker 1: Is that something that's innate in humanity to feel that
Speaker 1: there is an underworld in a heaven if you will.
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of world cultures do think of it
Speaker 2: that way, a three tiered universe, the world of the living,
Speaker 2: the upper world in the lower world. I for the Maya,
Speaker 2: it's a little in Mesmo American in general, it's a
Speaker 2: little more convoluted. The underworld is not necessarily hell, and
Speaker 2: the upper world is not necessarily heaven, and the entrance
Speaker 2: from this world to that is the same. It's you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes I want to call it the other world, because
Speaker 2: there's things that are going on in that supernatural world,
Speaker 2: some low, some above, but they're not necessarily like a
Speaker 2: bad place. It is that there are scary lords of
Speaker 2: death in the Maya one, but that's where everybody lives.
Speaker 2: That's where all the dead people continue living. That's the
Speaker 2: world of the dead, and the lords of death are
Speaker 2: scary guys to the people that are living, but to
Speaker 2: the people that live in their realm, they're just the
Speaker 2: people's grandparents are still just hanging out in villages and
Speaker 2: farming and getting water from the river, just like it
Speaker 2: is on the on the world above. That's what that's
Speaker 2: what the heroes Wind's fine down there.
Speaker 1: So it's almost it's I wouldn't call it parallel realities,
Speaker 1: but definitely different dimensions of existence essentially.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's a little different than you know, the
Speaker 2: Christian idea of we all go up to the heavens
Speaker 2: or the hell idea that we reincarnate.
Speaker 1: So it's not fear based. It's not a fear based
Speaker 1: mythology in the sense that if you go down to
Speaker 1: the underworld. You're going to be poked in with a
Speaker 1: with a pitchfork kind of thing.
Speaker 2: It is a scary place for the living who don't
Speaker 2: want to die. But once you're dead, they lay off.
Speaker 2: Then you just get to go live there.
Speaker 1: And is it a nice place to live or is
Speaker 1: it a dark place to live?
Speaker 2: It's a nice enough place to live. When the sun
Speaker 2: goes down, it rises in the underworld, and so they
Speaker 2: get sun to sun themselves and grow their crops and
Speaker 2: do their things.
Speaker 1: Now about and how about the other world. But they're
Speaker 1: the the above world.
Speaker 2: The upper world is where the gods live. And as
Speaker 2: I said earlier, they're totally disconnected from the Meso Americans
Speaker 2: except for liaison of dead ancestral spirits. Maya King's the
Speaker 2: classic period. Basically, their story of their right to rulership
Speaker 2: was that their spirits, the ants, their ancestral spirits, went up,
Speaker 2: they started down, but then they were allowed to ascend
Speaker 2: to the level of the heavens and they could act
Speaker 2: as liaisons. Not Joe. Maya's parents are just down in
Speaker 2: the underworld. He could do he could do rituals to
Speaker 2: contact them, but he'd just get his grandpa. The king
Speaker 2: gets his grandpa who's up in heaven and has obviously
Speaker 2: has has has connections.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he knows, he knows, he knows what palms the.
Speaker 2: Grease because his dad is up in heaven talking, negotiating.
Speaker 1: Well for us, it's fascinating, which is fascinating, which is
Speaker 1: very similar to a priest or an organization saying well,
Speaker 1: if you want to talk to God, you got to
Speaker 1: come through us, and we're the ones that have the
Speaker 1: privilege of going. So it's again similar ideas that seem
Speaker 1: to be innate in human just humanity's brain essentially, you.
Speaker 2: Know, or or aligned to gain power that we just
Speaker 2: keep falling for.
Speaker 1: There is that, my friend, There is the oh you
Speaker 1: are you scared? I know someone I follow me, I
Speaker 1: can help you. I got this though, well he says,
Speaker 1: he's got it. Let's go follow Joe, and Joe goes up.
Speaker 1: It is it is really fascinating, the connections between all
Speaker 1: these cultures and the Maya and I could talk to
Speaker 1: you for another hour.
Speaker 2: It's like it's star Trek, which I'm also that kind
Speaker 2: of nerdy. They had a theory of human parallel development
Speaker 2: that it was going all over the universe. Of course
Speaker 2: that was you know, a little too far, but I
Speaker 2: like to think of something akin to that, that there
Speaker 2: are certain qualities that all of us humans, regardless of
Speaker 2: of the color of our scanner, where we are on
Speaker 2: the planet, go through levels of discovery and evolution a
Speaker 2: different time periods, but there's kind of a commonality that
Speaker 2: you know, that thing that we said at the very start,
Speaker 2: where humans all across the planet decided that they wanted
Speaker 2: to build something tall, and they ended up with a
Speaker 2: pyramid because the because the tower kept falling over.
Speaker 1: What is it? And remind me the I always forget
Speaker 1: the name of it, The Pyramid of the Suna kan
Speaker 1: Tertia Khan exactly. That's Aztec. I'm mistaking correct.
Speaker 2: Before the Aztecs they're actually were enigma. They're not even
Speaker 2: a culture. We name that culture for the city Tao Tubacan.
Speaker 1: So that culture that created those pyramids was not is
Speaker 1: not they They.
Speaker 2: Weren't the Aztecs, No, they were that city burned to
Speaker 2: the ground in six point fifty AD.
Speaker 1: So the pyramids, but the pyramids, so the pyramids were there,
Speaker 1: so but we don't know who built those pyramids.
Speaker 2: Then oh no, we know who the Tao Tubacanos are.
Speaker 2: It's just a weird culture. They don't They act different
Speaker 2: than everybody else, and for a while they imposed their
Speaker 2: will on everybody else all the way down into the
Speaker 2: Maya world. Tao Tubacan took over, and then the city
Speaker 2: burned and every and things changed.
Speaker 1: Well, isn't there a lot of coincidences between Tootua Khan
Speaker 1: and Iza in the way it's set up astrologically, The
Speaker 1: size of the base of Tootuba Khan is the same
Speaker 1: size as the base of the pyramid, which is exactly
Speaker 1: half the size. I mean, that's that coincidental, to say
Speaker 1: the least.
Speaker 2: I consider that a coincidence. That the dimasal dimensions are
Speaker 2: not perfect perfect, they're pretty close, which is weird. And
Speaker 2: they are. You know that the biggest pyramid by a
Speaker 2: stretch is Giza Gimes and then well, actually, depending on
Speaker 2: who I as said that, I mean, I really think
Speaker 2: that I've betrayed my own hand. But the numbers volumetrically
Speaker 2: say that the biggest pyramid of the world in the
Speaker 2: world is Chilula, which is a couple hours away from
Speaker 2: Teotia Khan and the Pyramid of the Sun. So number
Speaker 2: two is Giza. Number three is the Pyramid of the
Speaker 2: Sun in Teotia Kan Both two of the three biggest
Speaker 2: are in the Valley of Mexico. But they it is
Speaker 2: weird that they're you know, they're not aligned the same.
Speaker 2: That is not true. Neither of all three of them
Speaker 2: have different alignments. The Chilula is way wider at its
Speaker 2: base than Giza, and Giza and Tao Tuba Khan have
Speaker 2: almost it's not perfect, but they are similar in their base,
Speaker 2: though totally different in the way they pitched. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: they have one has one has step, one doesn't, and
Speaker 2: one is just smooth and exhibit some some neat geometry
Speaker 2: that the others don't.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
Speaker 1: and now back to the show. And it is a
Speaker 1: fascinating story, my friend. It's the stuff that you could
Speaker 1: talk to about for thirty years, as you have been
Speaker 1: doing so, sir, and we'll continue to do so. I
Speaker 1: appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us
Speaker 1: about all this amazing stuff. Where can people find out
Speaker 1: more about you and the work that you're doing.
Speaker 2: Oh, thanks for asking. Well, I'm the director of my
Speaker 2: exploration center, which has all sorts of free for the
Speaker 2: public use. Information on the website. I also run a
Speaker 2: couple of tours around the world through that most of
Speaker 2: them are actually sold out this year. Funny enough, I
Speaker 2: also do a podcast that's you know, that's my biggest hope.
Speaker 2: If my appearance on your podcast, I hope it helps
Speaker 2: my podcast, which is rchaeo ed. It's a bit of
Speaker 2: a weird spelling. But if it's on all the major
Speaker 2: podcast things and it's really just me talking like I
Speaker 2: just did to you for an hour and a half
Speaker 2: on varying subjects, I'm I'm really happy with it. It's
Speaker 2: my own thing. I don't have a big crew, it's
Speaker 2: just me, but I put it out once a month
Speaker 2: and I hope that your your audience takes a look
Speaker 2: at it. Now your audience is mostly filmmakers, right.
Speaker 1: No, No, that's another podcast, so my podcast. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: original podcast was Indie Filmhuscle, which is that was all
Speaker 1: filmmaker based, but my current one is more our ancient
Speaker 1: civilization's lost history, spirituality, near death experiences.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you have some overlap, and I'm always available
Speaker 2: to help out with films and things. I love doing that,
Speaker 2: but that also hits your audience very well. Demographically that yes,
Speaker 2: is the sort of stuff you talk about, so I
Speaker 2: hope absolutely take a look at it.
Speaker 1: My friend. I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for giving us a really great hour
Speaker 1: of fun stories and information. So I appreciate you, my friend.
Speaker 2: Thank you, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for
Speaker 2: having me, Alex.
Speaker 1: Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today.
Speaker 1: If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll
Speaker 1: find the show notes for this episode at Next levelsoul
Speaker 1: dot com Forward slash four three zero and if your
Speaker 1: soul is craving an even deeper journey, step into Next
Speaker 1: Level Soul TV, our streaming sanctuary for spiritual films, documentaries,
Speaker 1: original shows, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audiobooks, and transformative teachings.
Speaker 1: Space created to support your awakening, your healing, and your
Speaker 1: return to the truth of who you really are. Begin
Speaker 1: your journey at Next levelsoul dot tv. Until next time,
Speaker 1: keep expanding, keep seeking, and keep walking your path towards
Speaker 1: the next level of your soul.