Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446
- For the vast majority
of human existence. We've been nomadic and we've
done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic
region, but they'd move. So once humans figured out
how to stay in a place, that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization. - I think you said beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec. - What I meant by that is they
were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and, you know, ripping people's hearts out. They had this just, you know,
grotesque, violent bent. But in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who
would order the hearts of a thousand people
extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to
recite his own poetry, but they were really
just surgical about it. They'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the
ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum
down, pull up and just. - While the person was alive? - Yep, while the person was alive. - The following is a
conversation with Ed Barnhart, an archeologist specializing
in ancient civilizations of South America, Mesoamerica
and North America. This is the "Lex Fridman
Podcast," to support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ed Barnhart. Do you think there are lost
civilizations in the history of humans on Earth, which we
don't know anything about? - Yes, I do, and in fact, you know, we have found some civilizations
that we had no idea about, just in my lifetime. I mean, we've got go Gobekli Tepi and we've got the stuff
that's going on in the Amazon and there's some other
less startling things that we had no idea existed
and pushed our dates back and give us whole new
civilizations we had no idea about. So yeah, it's happened and
I think it'll happen again. - Do you think there's a lost
civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of? - Yes, I do, and we're
beginning to find it. There are these huge,
what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that
are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something
that looks like Rome. And I don't think we're
ever gonna find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet, you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there's
not a whole lot of stone. What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things
were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles. - But is it possible that all
that land that's not covered by trees is actually hiding stone? For example, some
architecture, some things that's just very difficult
to find for archeologists. - I think at the base of the
Andes where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there's a
lot of potential there 'cause that's where the stone
actually starts poking up. When you get down into
the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground
except for a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep. And even then, only in the dry season 'cause that river rises like over a hundred feet every year. - Well, that's one of the
things, having visited that area, just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water, I was
humbled by the power of water to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we're talking about of civilizations, as water can just make
everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia. And so if something existed
a very long time ago, thousands of years ago, it's very possible it was
just eaten up by nature. - Absolutely, in fact, in my opinion, that's almost a certainty
in a lot of places. You know, the Grand
Canyon was dug by water. There's this wimpy little
river in it right now, and you can't possibly imagine
that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology
is really kind of magical. And when it comes to, you
know, ancient civilizations that could be from a long time
ago, there's probably a lot that are just under the ocean. And just the wave action
have destroyed them and what they haven't
destroyed buried deep. - Under the ocean. So you think Atlantis ever existed? - I don't think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato's many parables
talking about, you know, putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow of it, my money would be on Akrotiri. Akrotiri is what's left of a big city that was on the island of Santorini. And when their volcano blew
up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so fast that 70 miles away in Crete, there are chunks of
Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted what was ever there. But what's left on the side
of the crater, Akrotiri, is strangely advanced for its age. And so if there's anything
that's a model for Atlantis, as Plato explained it, it's Akrotiri. - Akrotiri, the ancient Greek city. So it says the settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption sometime
in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash,
which preserved the remains of the frescoes and many
objects and artworks. So we don't know how advanced
that civilization was. - No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it's got
streets, it's got plumbing, it's got little sconces
for torches at night. It was a vibrant city
with a lot of, especially in terms of hydraulic engineering. It's very advanced for
being 3,500 years old. - So if you check out, here's an image of the excavation, what a project. - It's an amazing place. And you can tell that it's just part of it because it's pretty close
to where the crater begins. So the city itself was
probably much larger. - So in this case,
there's a lot of evidence. But like we said, there could be civilizations
that there is no, there's very little evidence of, because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence. - And I think Akrotiri is
actually a great example of that because here we have
the side that did preserve, that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was completely obliterated. It was shot, chunks of
that city are probably in the walls of Crete 70 miles away. And you know, Plato says that it sunk, it was on an island and it sunk. Well that's exactly what
happened to Akrotiri. - You think this is what
Plato was referring to? - If it does exist, at
least the model of it, I think this is probably
what he was talking about. - And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written? - Absolutely.
- That we have no record of. And it's humbling to think
that entire civilizations with all the dreams, the hope,
the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts,
the political tensions, all of that, the social
interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can
be just destroyed like that and forgotten, completely
lost to ancient history. - I reflect upon that
often as an archeologist. I think about this great
country that I live in and love and all the
things we've achieved. But you know, we're a baby
historically speaking. We've been around 200 years. Heck, a lot of the
cities I study in Central and South America, they had
a run of, you know, 800, a thousand years and now they're ruins. But we're barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations. - So humans, homo sapiens evolved, but they didn't start
civilizations right away. There's a long period of time when they did not form
these complex societies. So how do we, let's say
300,000 years ago in Africa actually go from there to
creating civilizations? - I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures that their environment put upon them. And you know, a lot of
things start changing right around 12,000 years ago. And that's when, you know,
our last ice age really ended. And I think there was
a whole lot of things that just pressured them into,
especially finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the Americas, a huge thing that happened was
all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed
enough, the mammoths died out and the bison died out. And there was just, they had to come up with different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with
rabbits there, you know, the gathering started to be
a much more important thing. And I think that led to figuring out, hey, we could actually
grow certain things. And gardens turned into crops,
turned into intensive crops, and then people were allowed
to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn't have to roam around anymore. And that's where we get the
first sedentary communities, which means they stayed in
the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence, we've been nomadic and we've
done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic
region where they'd know, okay, you know, in the mountains, we'll be in the summer, in the mountains 'cause there's berries and things. And then in the winter we'll be down here and we'll hunt, but they'd move. So once humans figured out
how to stay in a place, I think that's the initial trigger too, what would become civilization. - What do you think is, there's a lot of questions
I wanna ask here. What do you think is the
motivation for societies? Is it the carrot or the stick? So you said like, is it, well,
like when resources run out, when the old way of life is
no longer feeding everybody, then you have to figure stuff out. Or is it more the carrot of
like, there's always this kind of human spirit that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impress
the rest of the village or something like this with
the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming
out with different ideas or technological
innovation, let's call it? - Well, you know, I have
an explorer's heart, so I'm kind of, you know, I'm biased. You know, I do think that we have an innate desire
to see what's on the horizon. And to impress other people with our achievements, things like that. We're social beings. That's really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together. So I think that it's much more
the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out. But usually the carrot does the job. - The really interesting story is how the first people came to the Americas. I mean, to me that's pretty
gangster to go from Asia all the way potentially
during the ice age, maybe at the end of the ice age or during that whole period, not knowing what the world looks like
going into the unknown. Can you talk through that process? How did the first people
come to the Americas? - Well, first off, I agree with you. That was pretty gangster. I mean, that's a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts. Is that guy Jordan Jonas? He cut the mustard, but I wouldn't have
made it crossing there. - Well there you go, like the fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas
exists, people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that's an indication that it's possible. But yeah, so when do you think, and how did the first people come? - The traditional theories
are still somewhat valid, or at least you know,
on the table that when that land bridge occurred,
that nomadic hunters just followed the game
like they always had and the game went across there
'cause there was no barrier and they followed them across. The thing that has changed
is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game
changer for archeology. You know, we get all
these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a young archeologist, I would've never dreamed we'd have the information we have now. And that information, a
lot of it's coming out of Texas A&M, we see the traditional like 12,500 years ago that
there was a migration. But now we're seeing one that's almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness, but might be true is that it
could have been as early as 60, a lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archeologist, it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that, but now it's really very
clear that they came over at least by 30,000 and the bridge opened and closed and open and closed. - That's during the ice age.
- Right. - I mean, that's crazy,
right, that is crazy. - Yeah, I mean, you
know, they didn't roll in and immediately make New
York, but there were people and there were definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated. And so we have specific
kinds of haplogroup that are here in the Americas
that don't exist otherwise. And that same haplogroup
game has been showing us more and more that people came across Siberia. That it's not Africa,
it's not Western Europe. Those are still, you
know, they've become kind of fringe theories, but
they're not totally eradicated. DNA is a developing science as well. And I think we all need
to keep that in mind, that it's not like they
just cracked the code and now we know all the answers. And sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two
steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you know, we don't
need to have too much faith in the models that are now
being created through DNA, but they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia that all Native American people are of Asiatic descent. - Do you think it was a gradual process if it's like 30 to 60,000 years ago? Was it just gradual movement
of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like one explorer that pushed the tribe
to just go, go, go, go and go across maybe
across a hundred years, travel all the way across maybe into North America,
into North, North America where Canada is now, and then sort of like big leaps in movement
versus gradual movement? - I think it was big leaps and now this is just,
you know, mostly guess, I'll admit, but I think that
it much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that
there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern and then
something big will happen again. I do think that the
early people went as far as they could go, and
there were certain colonies that just got isolated
for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things
that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the
Americas are in South America. The ones that got separated early and didn't mix their DNA,
like the people in the Amazon, most of those guys have O blood type and they're haplogroup D,
which is the oldest one that entered the US and what
are they doing down there? I do believe they came
across the Bering Strait, I don't think it's very,
we have no real evidence to say they came in mass across Oceania. So they made it probably
by boat along the coast, all the way to South America. - So there's some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened like tens of
thousands of years ago. But in a very rapid pace,
there's these explorers, they went all the way to South America and there established their
kind of more stable existence. And from there, South
America, Mesoamerica, North America was kind of
gradually expanded into that area. - I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America. And the very first wave
made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there, and then mixed in with
the next groups that came. - That's fascinating.
- Kinda like there's, there's an interesting correlate in Europe where today everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland, but actually Celtic people
started in Eastern Europe and it was the entire area. And when Rome kind of swept everything and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge
of the Celtic world, Ireland that they were like,
ah, we're not gonna mess with those guys on that island. We'll leave them be, so now
it looks like that's the heart of Celtic tradition, but
actually it's the fringe. - So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans. - Yeah, and there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about very old Carbon
14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that
everybody just dismissed. It's, no, it didn't get
a date of 40,000 years, but I think we're gonna come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand. - And that's the interesting
thing is, you know, the early human spread
throughout the world and then like you said,
perhaps have gotten isolated and then civilization sprung from there and they all have similar elements even though they were isolated. That's really interesting. That's really interesting
that there's multiple cradles of civilization, not just
one, like one good idea, that those ideas naturally come up. Those structures naturally come up. - And I wonder whether,
you know, the similarities that all those cradles
have, it could be, you know, a shared much deeper
past that they all have. Or it could be a more kind
of Star Trek thing where, you know, captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of
parallel human development, that humans across the universe
go through certain stages of development and that that
could be the answer to it. - Which one do you lean on? Which one do you lean towards? - I think it's a case by case thing. I think if we look globally, I'd lean much more towards the
human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas, and we have a shorter time
period where, you know, the things that become
major civilizations, now I'll say, you know,
up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip
in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those people came
over with from Asia, and that as they got separated,
that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I'm a big proponent that
there are commonalities in all the cultures of the
Americas that lead back to and point to a single distant origin. - You've spoken about the lost cradle of civilization, South America. So South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization. So South America,
Mesoamerica, can you explain? - Well, we have very early
stuff in South America. You're right, I mean,
you know, especially, as an American, our country's so big and you know, that we are so
far removed from these places, we don't even think about it. But more and more we're
seeing things that predate the earliest stuff that
we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. There are things, it's
all on the Peruvian coast that we have these
cradles of civilization. Someday we might start
talking about the Amazon more and more, but right now
what we've got are things that date back into
the three thousands BCE along the coast of Peru. And there are big stone
built pyramids and temples and they're amazingly isolated, even now that we've found them. Some of them, like Caral is one of the most famous ones
just north of Lima. We've known about it for
a couple decades now, how old it is. But every time I visit there,
it's like I visited the moon, there's absolutely nobody there. Not for miles. It's amazing how such a discovery was made and yet still nobody goes to see it. It's not easy to get to. - So you think there's a
bunch of locations like that. Some may not have been
discovered in the Peru area. - Oh, there are so many, Peru has tons, that desert gets really ugly quick and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched. You know, when people
hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately. But Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands, thousands of pyramids. And now they weren't built of a lot, not all of them were built of stones. Some of them were adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly. So now they don't look, they're not exciting
places to visit today. You know what's funny too, you know, we started off talking about, you know, whether I think there's a
lost civilization out there, there are definitely things
that are still to be discovered, but there are some things that were discovered a hundred
years ago and archeologists or back then, they called
themselves antiquarians just kind of passed over. Caral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru
has some of those pyramids that were made by the
Moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics. And you know, things that
you can sell for big money, but Caral was found a long time ago, but the archeologist
was like, God, no gold, no ceramics, forget about it. This place is no good, we
can't sell anything here. And then about the 1970s or eighties, somebody said, hey, no ceramics, is that older than the
invention of ceramics. Shit, we better go take
another look at that place. - So what's the dating on Caral? - Caral I think starts at about 3,200 BCE and it lasts as a major
civilization with a lot of other cities around
it, until about 1800 BCE. - So what's the story behind, like looking at some of these images? What's the story about
constructions like that? What was the idea? - That thing, isn't that amazing? Oh that, gosh. I mean, it should be
some sort of, you know, I'll be a flaky
archeologist, like, you know, this is a place where rituals took place. So many things we say are
so just painfully vague. And that's about, you know, what we got. And a place like this. I know the one we're looking at here, I've been here a couple of times. In the pyramid behind it,
the rubble's built in a way where the building won't rock apart. This is a very earthquake prone place, but the buildings haven't fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that
all kinda wiggle around and don't allow the building to fall down. And inside these, we've also
found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there. And I don't think, there's a lot of people that see that and go, oh, look at that. They were sacrificing
babies, these monsters. I think a lot of the
things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices, Caral's
evidence being one of them, I think it's more about the tragic nature of infant mortality, in the past it was a lot more common. There were cultures
that didn't even really properly name their kid
until they got to five because chances were they were gonna die. And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices, I think they're putting
them in special places because they mourn the death of their kids and it just happened a
lot more frequently then. - One of the things you said
that really surprised me is that pyramids were built in
Peru, possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true? - Absolutely, absolutely,
in fact, there's. - That's crazy.
- There's one that's now pushing 6,000 BCE, like that's thousands of years
before the stuff in Egypt and that one's called Huaca Prieta. And it was not a, it was
not an Egyptian pyramid. But it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before. - What do you think is the
motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand
the elements structurally, that kind of thing, is it? Why do humans build pyramids and why do they build it in all kinds of different locations in the world? - Well, you know, my root
answer is pretty boring really. A lot of people ask me, why are there pyramids
all over the planet? How is that, is that a
coincidence, I mean, who? I think that when people wanted to build a big building
without rebar or cement, you end up building
something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top
and that turns into a pyramid. You know, any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor
builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down. And if he wants one that's
gonna stay and be tall, he ends up making
something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that, you know,
building something big and tall together is one
of those human things. Like we built that, that will
be here after we're gone. People remember who we were. We are all, if there's
any human commonality, it's fear of our own deaths
and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first big
monuments like that were probably a group of people saying
we're gonna do something that people will remember forever. Now that being said, you
remember we were just talking about Huaca Prieta and this one that's almost 6,000 BC
now is the first one. That one's a funny case. We just talked about
all these lofty goals, but actually I'm pretty sure that Huaca Prieta's first
pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash. I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town. And it stunk, it's on the
coast, it stunk like fish. And somebody said, if we just
bury this thing with dirt, it won't smell anymore. And then it was a big mound
where people could get up and talk to everybody and
then said, well, it's squishy, you know, if we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell. I really think that
the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about deflating, huh? - Yeah, but then they probably saw it and they were impressed
and humbled by the sort of the enormity of the construction. And then they're like, oh, we should, maybe the next guy thought maybe we should keep building these kinds of things. - Yeah, yeah, not to jump ahead, but in North America, you know, where they also made pyramids. There's this interesting evolution where there were these
piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines,
people ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat. So these piles of shells
would be near communities and they probably became landmarks, but eventually they
started burying their dead inside those too, probably
again, you know, about stink and about, you know, well we
don't want the dogs to eat 'em. Maybe we put 'em in the
middle of the shell pile. But then that all of a
sudden became this like, that's where my grandfather's body is. That's where great grandfather's body is. And all of a sudden people
started being attached to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories
of their ancestors. So when the very first pyramid was built in Ohio area by the Adena
people, it was built outta dirt, but it's full of bodies. And I think it's an echo of
a old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds. - So where and who were
the first civilizations in South America, Mesoamerica? - Well, you know, I think we're
still piecing that together. Coming back to the first
things we talked about, I think we're still
missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it's hard
to answer that question is, you know, at what point
do we consider people a civilization or a culture? We have in the Americas
this long period of time that we call the Paleo Indian time where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called the archaic, where they're just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody's coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with
different hunting tools, but really nothing changes
for thousands of years. And then finally they start developing into these larger groups,
which for the most part has to do with agriculture,
it used to be archeology. That was just the end all,
be all, civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that's been discounted. Peru was a big part of
that, that area of Caral. It's connected to another city
on the coast called Aspero. And Aspero starts about the same time, but they're all about fishing. They have no farming. And Caral who's up river
from them is farming. But funny enough, they're
not really farming food. They're farming cotton
and they're making nets and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it's not as simple as it's
just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in how can we feed more people
than just our family? How can we together
create a food abundance so we're no longer scared
about running out of food? - So is it possible, which
is something you've argued that civilization started in the Amazon, in the jungle versus the coast? - I think so, I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. There's actually the
earliest pottery in all of the Americas of all these places that we have civilizations
that grew up, you know, where the oldest pottery is? The middle Of the Amazon. - So there's interesting cultures
developing in the Amazon. So religion, you would
say preceded civilization? - In South America, Caral and Aspero, that I was just talking about. It's weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion
we have, we have those pyramids and things that we call temples, but we don't really know
what went on in there. And there's no hints of
religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends about 1800 BCE, this culture called
Chavin starts up and they, their main temple is up in the Andes. And this place of path of least resistance between
the Amazon and the coast. It's about three days walk
either way from this place where this temple is, that's where we start seeing the very
first religious iconography. And it's all over the temples. There are things that are
definitely from the coast, but the iconography are
all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles, and those
don't come from the coast. All of those things are
coming out of the Amazon. - Religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of
the most powerful ideas. They're the strongest myths
that tie people together. And to you, it's possible
that this powerful idea in South America started in the Amazon. - I do, I do think it did. And you're right, you know, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archeology can't see them at all. We can see, sometimes we
can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but there's an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? That those are things that
archeology just can't get at. - That's one of the
challenges of archeology and looking into ancient histories. You're trying to not just understand what they were doing in
terms of architecture, but understand what was
going on inside their mind. - That's really what I'm in it for, trying to understand these people and it's real detective work and we know we're dealing
with a totally flawed record. We only have what could
preserve the test of time. You know, if we look
around this room here, if 2000 years of weathering
happened in this room, what would be left and what
would we think happened here? - Right, right, right. But there's not in this room, but if you look at
thousands of rooms like it, maybe you can start to
piece things together about the different ideologies
that ruled the world, the religions, the different ideas. Tell me about this fanged deity. One of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the religions, there's a thread that connects
the different civilizations to societies of the Indian region and the religion that
practice is more monotheistic than is currently believed
in the mainstream. - That is exactly what I think. And I think it's all
about this fanged deity who somewhere thousands of
years ago crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the
Andes and a religion took hold. That could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through
all of these cultures. And the people in the
Amazon still talk about him. There his name is Vijomase in some groups. But they say that his emissaries
on Earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity. - Why is the current
mainstream belief is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic? - Well, there are bonafide pantheons. You know, Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons. And I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the
art looking for them and they came up with
things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the
sun God and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person
right here in Austin, Texas as an art historian, you follow certain
diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology,
there's a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and
claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his
head and off of his belt. He's got really identifiable traits. He also likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around. But he's the fanged deity and he's there, he shows
up in Chavin de Huantar, the capital of that Chavin culture. And he keeps showing up
through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator
deity, they call Viracocha. But Viracocha is the fanged deity. When we do see him, by
the time you get to Inca, they do this kind of
like almost Islamic thing where they say you can't
understand the face of Viracocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they'll make him just a blob. Like he's just unknowable,
but he's at the very top. I think we're misunderstanding
a lot of things that we used to say were deities as
just supernatural beings. If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course Christianity's
monotheistic, right, it would be heresy to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons and you know, Jesus Christ and I mean, I don't even
know who the Holy Spirit is, but he's some sort of supernatural being. But it's that monotheistic
system has lots of things that have supernatural
powers that are not God. That's where I think the crux of us misunderstanding
ancient Andean art is. - So what is the process of
analyzing art through time to try to figure out what the important entities
are for that culture? Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over? - Well, certainly without
the advent of writing, depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them. And there are certain, you know, what we call diagnostic elements. Like we can pull apart the same sort of thing in like in the
Greek pantheon, you know, you know by their dress
and what they're holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things
they're holding, you know, lightning bolts or
tridents or whatever it is. So they all have these
diagnostic elements to them. So that's how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a
chronological sequence, then we can say, okay, here's a deity here in Chavin culture. Now we move forward 500
years, now we're in Moche and Nazca culture, you know, where are the deities here? And what I see is that
same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands
of years in each one of these cultures, he's got circular eyes, he's got a fanged mouth, he's got claws on his hands and feet. He's a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming
off of his head, like hair and snakes coming off of his belt. And then not so much in Chavin, but as it goes forward,
he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they're like, in the old literature, the Moche will call him
the decapitator deity. But then they have these other like, oh, here's the crab deity
and here's the fox deity. But if you look at them,
like the crab deity is just that guy's face coming off of a crab. And the fox deity is that
guy's face coming off of a fox. So I think on that particular instance, I explained it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was
able to like, you know, turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted. And he showed up in all sorts of forms. But he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged
deity manifests himself through people and animals
throughout the art. And that there are missing
stories of mythology that we don't have anymore. - And across hundreds of years, thousands of years from Chavin to Moche
to Inca as you're saying. - Right, Wari has them too. Tiwanaku, that famous place Pumapunku, he's all over there. - I wonder how those
ideas spread and morph of this fanged deity. - I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavin, there's a later one in Inca
times called Pachacamac that are pilgrimage places
where people come in to be healed if they're sick, but also just to pay homage
to the powers that be. So Chavin was a place where
people from the Amazon and people from the coast
were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in
the archeology there. There's these interesting
labyrinths under the pyramids with the fanged deity all
over them that have like, one labyrinth will have all pottery. The next labyrinth will have
a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch
of things made outta stone. So people are showing up
and giving this tribute and they're learning and then they're going
back to their community. So I think it dispersed from
certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage spots do. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity. - Do we know much about
the relationship they had with the fanged deity
and like their conception of the powers of the fanged deity? Were they afraid of the fanged deities and all knowing God? Is it something that
brings joy and harvest or is it something that you're
supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and
humans to keep at bay? - I think he had two sides of the coin. Like a lot of the Hindu
gods are, you know, one aspect is terrible,
the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that
same sorts of qualities 'cause we do see him as a fierce warrior
taking people's heads off. And he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a
certain power and ferocity. But then there are other
funny things about him. Like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing
ceremonies are involved with sex acts, when it comes to the Moche, there's this whole group of sexual pottery where
priests are having sex with women or men. And some of them show
their faces transforming into that fanged deity. Like he is acting through them. But the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged deity has a little puppy. He has a puppy that's like
just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on
him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he's in these
healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that
puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where
a priest was having sex with somebody in a house
and there's a fanged deity and there's a puppy just
scratching at the door like, hey, you forgot me. And then finally one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, oh, he really
is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy? So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores. - Actually this awesomely makes sense now because I saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30
years ago on shamanism and Moche civilization. It reads "the Moche are the
major focus of this paper, sex, puppies and headhunting
will be shown to be related to ancient Moche shamanism." So now I understand, I was
like, well, the puppies? - [Ed] Yeah, it's true. - And the headhunting,
that's the decapitate aspect. - And I've added rock and roll
to that list since actually, rock and roll are, you know, music is also a big part of it. - Oh, interesting.
- They call spirits down. There's this whole spirit world. There's the ancestors and the people that drink
San Pedro cactus juice kind of, they don't talk about
the fanged deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. You know, it was unpopular
to have a pagan deity. So they don't talk about him much anymore, though he's still around. They're in like around
Trujillo, they call him Aiapec. But music play in the
Amazon, they play flutes. Sometimes a chorus of women sing and that's supposed to
bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There's a spirit that's
hurting the person that's sick. And then the priest or the
shaman or the curandero, whatever you wanna call him,
has his own posse of spirits that are gonna help him
figure out what's going on. So when the music starts, that's bringing those spirits in and people don't see them unless they've imbibed the
San Pedro Cactus Juice, which is the hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon
side, it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro Cactus. But that's what allows you to
actually see that other world. - Yeah, I went to the Amazon recently and did Ayahuasca, a very high dose of it. - Bold move. - When in Rome. How far back does that go? - Oh, I think longer than
anybody can remember. But I mean, it's a natural
plant that's been there forever. I think that it's thousands
and thousands of years. That's another thing Chavin de
Huantar, I was talking about, where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There's this wall on the backside that faces the Amazon side. So if you're entering the
city from the Amazon path, you see this wall first. And it's a bunch of faces
that some of them are human, some of them are total jaguar and some of them are
transforming in between. But there's a group of them that are midway through transformation and they show their nostrils
leaking out this snot that's coming like down their face. San Pedro doesn't do that
to you, but ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca traditionally,
they'd take a blow gun and just shoot it up
your nose or up your ass. But a lot of times up your nose. And when it shoots up
your nose, the first thing that happens is just this
gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the backside of this temple from, you know, 3000 years ago. - So that you think could
have been a big component of the development of
religion and shamanism? - I think that hallucinogens
opened the mind then, like they opened the mind now. - Do you think that, you
know, the stoned ape theory, do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the
formation of civilization? - In the Americas, yes, I do, though, you know, hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic,
not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate
outside of the Americas. Of course now they're global and you know, they can be
grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were
outside of the Americas. So they were part of the
experience here in a way that they just couldn't
be in other places. - I wondered to a degree, they
were just part of a ritual and the creative force behind sort of art versus like literally the method by which you come up with ideas
that define a civilization. So like the degree to which they had a role in
the formation of civilizations. It's kind of fun to think
about psychedelics being like a critical role in
formation of civilizations. - I think in terms of South America, they really were. In North America where we're
in a more northern climb here and there are less of them,
not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics, things like, you know, tobacco was always a big part of it. But a lot of the, you know, there's more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation,
sleep deprivation. And for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation, and then they'd cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we
believe triggered hallucinations and visions, nothing to do with drugs. I would much prefer the drugs route. - It's the result, the tools aren't the thing
that creates insight. It's the result. - It's that getting to, you know, the hallucinogens are poisoning
us, they're killing us. That's, you know, it's a near death state. And people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that other world. Death, you entered this other world and that when you took
this mighty dose of poison, it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time. - Yeah, as Tom Waits
said in that one song, "I like my town with a
little drop of poison." So maybe that poison is a
good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first
sort of mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? And like what is, if we
look chronologically, is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged? - That picture is evolving. I mean, forever it was
just the Chavin people that we've been talking about. The ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture. And they certainly did
transmit a lot of stuff, but then all of a sudden we find Caral. The next one that we've
barely even begun looking at, but it's probably older than
Caral is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year and just from the bus on the highway, I could see like, that's
a pyramid out there. What, oh, there's another one. And I know how old the stuff
we have studied there is, it's again, 3000 BC, we're just barely beginning
to understand them. Caral frustrates me to no end. The lack of art there
that's, we've got, you know, stones and bones and not
even ceramics to go on. And they didn't have the
courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don't know what
those people believed. - Right, so one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art, the stories told through
the art, and then hopefully deciphering if they were
doing any kind of writing. - That's our most fruitful place to try to get at these elusive ideas. - Yeah, and it sucks
when they don't have art. If we just go back to the
Amazon, you've mentioned that it's possible that
there's a lost civilization that existed in the Amazon. So it's carried a lot of names,
Lost City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it's possible it existed? - Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in
pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where it is kind of center around towards Columbia. And the City of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Xingu. And so those, those are an America worth of distance apart, you know, people don't really think
about it on the map, but the entire United States
would fit inside the Amazon. That's how big that place is. And these two are on either end, but both of them have
evidence of civilizations. These big, you know, it's lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is they'd
make these big mounds and then they'd make huge
causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has
been found in the Xingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people. Again, you know, it's not stone built and it's been under the forest forever, so it's very torn up. But it's there now. You know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And a thing that I think
is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch
more land, which has found more of these, what we call
like geometric earthworks. So there's more and more
evidence of these civilizations. It's not, it could be
there, it's there for sure. - By the way, the people who are trying to protect the rainforest
really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road, loggers will come. And they'll start cutting stuff down. Now from an archeology
perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things. But from a sort of protecting very precious rainforest perspective, it's obviously the opposite way. But it is interesting I've
seen where loggers cut through the forest and when they leave the forest
heals itself very quickly. - [Ed] So quick, so quickly. - And you know, you just
think that across decades, you expand that to centuries
and it's like you could see how a civilization could
be completely swallowed up by the rainforest. - And it happened for sure in the Amazon. You know, one of the
ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where
people were in the Amazon 'cause yes, the trees and just the biomass have
eaten so much evidence, but they're finding more and more of these places
that they call terra preta, which is black earth and
there's huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes. And what they're saying is that that really dark earth
couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes that sometime in the distant
past that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black and it's much more enriched. And when I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus up the
river, the black river a couple of days and went and met
some different communities and I asked them about this black earth and they were like, yeah,
that's why we're here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move we
look for the terra preta and that's where we're
gonna put our village because that's a place that
all of our gardens work. The other places they don't. - One of the things you
talked about literally, you have to ask the right question and the stories, all
the secrets that carried by the people and they'll tell you. - Yeah, there's so many of them. You know, a thing that excites the world
about archeology right now is Gobekli Tepe and this, you know, 10,000, now
Karahan Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called the Tas Tepeler, we only found it a couple of decades ago, but it was just a, you know, a archeologist rowing through the area and ask a sheep herder, hey, you know, you guys know where anything ancient is? Oh yeah, lemme show you this. And then all of a sudden
we've got a lost civilization. And the shepherds always
knew where it was, just nobody asked him. - So speaking of Gobekli Tepe, what do you think about the work of Gram Hancock who also believes that there's a lost
civilization in the Amazon? - Well, I've met Graham
and personally I like him. He's a nice guy, got
a nice sense of humor, and I think he's smart. And I also think he is
a very good researcher. He and I are working on
the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham's idea that a single now lost
ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don't see that on a
number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he's very well read, in fact better read than
a lot of my colleagues. But his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about
this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it, and agree to disagree
without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation. - That would be a fun argument
to be a fly on the wall for. So he believes, he's proposed, it's possible that the Amazon jungle is sort of a manmade garden. So it was planted there by
advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which
that could be possible? - Frankly, I agree with him. I mean, it's just like what
I was just talking about, it's the conclusion part
that we differ from. But the facts that he's basing that on are that terra preta are the
huge geometric earthworks, are the ever increasing evidence of them. They are now from, you know, the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They're everywhere. Every time we open up the
jungle, we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast
civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question. And also, you know, a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in
on what we don't know. And what could be. - What's the, just to educate me, what's the key idea that he's proposing that you disagree with? It was the level of advancement
the civilization was, or how large and centralized it was? - My main point of
disagreement is that his, and his ideas evolve, like everybody's, you know, no scientist or researcher in anything,
has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds
it till the day they die. His ideas are evolving,
but his ideas remain, a core of them are that there
was a very advanced single, ancient civilization that
was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions. And the Younger Dryas
hypothesis is part of that, most recently, he used to not say that, now he's into this meteor thing, but he believes that that
civilization was destroyed, but that members of it
escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all
over the world to seed all of the world's civilizations
for the next revival. There's where I disagree with him, I think these were independent
civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that
they were not seeded by some more advanced
civilization from the past. And that they all hold things in common because they have this common
ancestry of a, you know, in his early books he
suggested it's Atlantis. I don't think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on
to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization
and, you know, archeology. So we don't have, you know, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we're not, you know, we
could have the story wrong, but one thing we're real
good at is finding stuff. I mean, we find fish
scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow
that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can't
even find a potsherd from. - Yeah, and of course,
it is a compelling story that there's a single
civilization from which all of this came from, because
the alternative is, you know, the idea that we came
across the Bering Strait from Asia, went all the
way down to South America and got isolated and created all these marvelous,
sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious
ideas that look similar to other, you know,
everybody has a flood myth. So like, there's a lot of similarities. Everybody building pyramids. But there could be a lot
of other explanations and even if it's a simple,
compelling explanation that has to be evidence for it, right. And what would that evidence look like? - Well, that's the bottom line. I mean, everything's theories, and as responsible scientists we're trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be
trying to prove our theories. That's one more foot
out of the science box that archeology often steps. We're supposed to be disproving what we think is
happening, not proving it. - Yeah, you don't wanna lean
into the mystery too much. I mean, it's such a weird discipline 'cause you're operating in a, it's like really in a dark room, you're feeling around a dark room. So it's mostly mystery, I would say, a lot of sciences operate
in a mostly well lit room. It's like a dark corner and you're kind of figuring
out a way to light it. But in, yeah, in archeology, it's, most of it is a mystery, right? - Yes, it's job security,
I like that part, you know. But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had
began as heresy and lunacy. You know, that guy was crazy up to the second he was brilliant. And so we gotta keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them
eventually is gonna lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if we, you know, if we're
busy burning books of ideas that we don't like, that's
where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things. - I really love that, and I really appreciate
that you're saying that. One of the fascinating things
about just the Amazon to me is that there's still a large
number of uncontacted tribes. To rewind back into ancient
history, you can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the Amazon that were isolated, very sort
of distinct from each other. Can you speak to this, your
understanding of these tribes and their history that
are still here today? - Well, a lot of them are these, you know, by uncontacted we mean we don't know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have
very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them. So we have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and talk to us, that's one thing. But we don't go out and
there looking for 'em. But they do seem, you
know, frozen in time. And I don't think any of
us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that. But, you know, we were saying
earlier that, you know, humans change based on
pressures of their environment. You know, it's a mother
necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why
we change it's pressure. And one thing the Amazon
is, once you, you know, figure out how not to die in
it, it's a paradise of food, food's falling from the
sky all the time there. And if once you learn to
adapt to that environment, you've got very little need. There's no pressure to make anything else. Things are working. - So for the modern humans that come across these uncontacted tribes, one of the things they document and notice is the propensity
of these tribes for violence. So they get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across. - And not just foreigners,
they attack each other. The Yanomami are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other. - What do you think of the
philosophy behind that? - I don't, you know, I'm a
relatively peaceful person, but I've got, you know, I've got the monster in
me like everybody does. And I think that these, you
know, it's cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Yanomami, they really, part of the rite of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody
from an outer village. And they go in there, they oftentimes, the way they don't let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically,
but they typically go and steal women from far off communities. And that starts a big fight. Another thing that starts fights when nobody even fought is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient
Americas wasn't seen as a biological thing,
it was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick, the question is asked, well,
what spirit is menacing him? And who called it out on him? And then the rumor starts, well, I bet you it was Joe over there in that other community,
he's still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter. And we ought to go over
there and kill Joe. And then he'll get better. And so this round of
never ending violence, like Hatfield and McCoys had that thing. And the people of New Guinea also do that. So it's not, you know,
there are certain areas, mostly wooded areas now
that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each other
as a cultural institution. - It's such a tricky thing to do, to study an uncontacted tribe without obviously contacting them to figure out their language,
their philosophy of mind, how they communicate, the
hierarchy they operate under. - And yeah, you know, there was
a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like
eight years ago or something, but there was a ranger from
one of the biology stations who just in the by and by
of protecting his area, met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone,
not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the
woods, not in their community. And he started to learn their
language over a couple years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day a couple of them
just came out of the woods and just plugged him with
arrows and just killed him. And then they went back in the woods. Like, that's the one guy who
understands what we're saying, we should kill him and move our village. - So those folks really lean into the, as you said, the monster versus the puppy. - You know, everybody's got it, I think, I think, you know, we need to listen to our better angels because if we don't, we as a human species can easily devolve into
just using violence and against others to get what we want. It's a daily choice we
make not to be savages. - Which is fascinating thing to remember. We kind of think in civilized society, we've moved past all that. But it can be summoned like in
1984, the two minutes of hate with the right words, that
primal thing can be summoned and directed and lead
to a lot of destruction. - And, you know, our sports are really based
on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive, where somebody's not
dead at the end of it. - Yep. So at which point did what we now call the
Maya civilization arise? - That's another complicated one. Another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is, a lot
of the questions in the Amazon and what we're talking
about now is the Peten and the mountains there. Those aren't places
archeologists wanna live. They're horrible, I mean, I've been there. I don't wanna live in
a tent and eat rations. I wanna live in a nice town. So a lot of the places
where the answers are, we still really haven't gotten there 'cause it takes a special
person to be educated enough to know what they're looking at and tough enough to want to be there. I've done my tour of duty, I'm now in a nice little podcast studio. But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are
culturally Maya very close to where the time period for that Chavin culture is about 1800 BCE. There's a culture that's some
called the Mokaya, not Maya, but they're on the Pacific coast where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It's called the Soconusco. And those are the first people that are really gonna be culturally Maya. And they're interacting with the culture that has traditionally been
seen as Mexico's mother culture, which is the Olmec. They're kind of the same thing as we were talking about in South America, where the Maya, the original Maya are not, there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion, but the Olmec have this
religion they develop and they start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the
religion that's being created by the Olmec who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. - I have a lot of questions to ask here about just the
natural stupid confusion I have. So first, did the Maya
or the Olmec come first and are they distinct groups? Like how do you maintain
a distinct civilization when you're so close together? - I just finished filming
a whole thing on the Olmecs and their interaction with the
Maya for the great courses. I'm thrilled for it to
come out next spring. I think they co-evolved. Archeology in this regard
is the worst enemy of this. So we put these names on cultures. We talk about how they
evolve from one to another. We draw these lines
where there aren't any, we make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into
somebody with another name, where I'm pretty sure they didn't care about any of those names. But the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's happening in
Mesoamerica, very dynamic time. The Olmec are really
bringing the religion part, but the other areas are
bringing technology, ceramic technology,
making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other stone types. So you've got the Olmec in the middle where Mexico gets skinny and
it gets swampy down there. That's called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That's where the Olmec are. Then you've got the Maya
to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca where the people call the
Zapotecs, they're rising up. And then you have the Valley of Mexico, which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are
interacting with each other. - Can we just also draw some more lines? - Yeah, sure. - So what is Mesoamerica
and what is South America and what you just said,
the Olmecs and the Maya, like, can we just linger on the geography that we're talking about here in the, what is this, like a thousand BC? - Yeah, the time period
we're talking about where the Olmec are there, a thousand BC is a great midpoint of it. I'd say it starts about 1800 BCE. And by 500 BCE the Olmec are gone. And a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happen. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here,
I'd say about halfway through the Chihuahua desert
up there in the top left. That's about the boundary of Mesoamerica. There's this big desert
where almost nobody lives. And once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral pueblo people of what's now America,
the Four Corners area. They're not Mesoamerican,
they have different lives. - Where does modern Mexico end? - Modern Mexico ends, right, you know, you see the name Maya there with the white line around it. That's Guatemala, so
Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America. - Got it. - But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras. And then it's really
kind of a no man's land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. They really, they're neither, they're not Mesoamerica,
they're not South America. They're more South America 'cause they've got some gold there. But then basically you get
on the other side of Panama and you're fully in South America with two distinct groups too. You've got the guys that are
on the Andes on the West Coast, and then you have the Amazon. - So the West of the Andes and the Amazon are very distinct. So when you refer to the Andean region, is that referring to
the Andes and the Amazon or just the Andes? - Just the Andes and the
coast to the Pacific there. That's Andean civilization. - So did the Maya make it to
the Andes, the Andean region? - Not that archeology can prove, but it's almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it's just, you
know, it's biased to think that these people
couldn't travel as widely as people on the other
side of the planet did. But there's all sorts of hints. Like that first ceramics
I was talking about that the Maya made,
they show up strangely, sophisticated technologically already and down in Ecuador, they had them for a thousand years before. So a lot of people, myself
included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from
South America to the Maya. - Did the Maya get
seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait or did that initial
wave of people that came and populated South America, were they the ancestors of the Maya? Like how did the migration happen here? Do we understand that? - We're still piecing it together. I don't think, you know, I'd
be lying if I told you I had the answers, but we do have
evidence of Maya stature people, they are small people, generally speaking, people that grow up in
the forest are smaller and people that grow up in
the open plains are taller. Probably about, you know,
just generations of people that hit their head on a
branch or not. (laughs) - Joking, but, you know, there
could be something to that. - I think there's some truth to it, I mean, the Pygmies are small and the people on the
plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are
tall and the Maya are small. There's definitely a
pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, there's a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has hand prints in the cave. It's somebody who put
their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand, like a negative print. We can date that charcoal. And it comes from 10,000 years ago. And the hands are all small. It's, you know, typical Old Mexico. I walked right up to these
things and could put my hand. I didn't, you know, mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands and they're all smaller than my, you know, Northern European hand. And so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10,000 years ago, or it was people of
Maya stature who did it. - It's so cool that you
can date the charcoal. And it's so cool that 10,000 years ago there were people living. - And actually we have one that's, I think 2000 years older now, just a couple years ago,
again in Yucatan, in a cave. They found a woman they named Naia now, and she's like 12,000 years old. - So the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the Bering
Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of cool ideas in the Amazon and start drifting back
up into Mesoamerica. - Was kind of a co-evolution. The technology of ceramics, I think got there through
an interaction with it. - See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn't really have religion, didn't have as a vibrant
religious set of ideas, and they borrowed it from the Olmec. - I've been doing a deep dive on this for this Olmec course that I just did. And it really does seem
like these other cultures that have jade and hematite and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp and
building things out of dirt, but they were importing those
materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts
of religious iconography and then exporting them back to them. - And still the fanged
deity show up there? - No, the fanged deity's
nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica. There's jaguars, there's
jaguar iconography, but it's not the same thing. This whole Jaguar transformer
deity does not exist there. They do have a pantheon. - So the Maya, the Olmec and the interesting
peoples of the regions. What was their, I'd love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I'm curious about, what was their sense when
they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos? - That's a question I've spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life. And certainly they saw, like every ancient group did,
like, are those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the Maya
especially looked at it with a much more mathematical
mind than most did. And so they watched these
things move every night. And if you do that, even today, you notice that all the
stars move in tandem. They're just this blanket, they're like, they're like this curtain behind me. They're the stage upon which some very important players are dancing, and that's the moon, the
sun, and the planets. There's five planets we can see visibly. So they started watching
like, why are just those seven moving differently than the rest? And those are the things that
they keyed on mathematically. The sun, of course was also involved in the agricultural cycle. So that was important in and of itself. But the planets, we can see
them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math and seeing that there is a repeated cycle. And then coming up with
mythology around them, like Venus for them was
associated with war. And they had very ritualized
times to go to war. That had something to do with Venus. Sometimes in the classic period Maya, it was the first appearance
of Venus as the morning star. That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic with like Chichen Itza being
the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like if you
watch Venus day after day, it goes slowly up every day. And then when it hits its highest point as morningstar in the morning, it goes down to the Earth
like three times as fast. All of a sudden it just shoots
down and hits the Earth. And so the people of
post-classic Maya civilization saw that as the gods shooting
a spear into the Earth. And that was a good time
to attack your neighbors. That was like wartime when the
spear is gonna hit the Earth. - Right, so this is fascinating. They just had at the foundation a sense that life existence at the
various timescales is cyclical. That's the starting point. And then you just look out there and if you are extremely
precise, which is fascinating, how precise they were, you
can just measure the cycles. - Yeah, and they did it really well. Now of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully
elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the Quipu, but it's so different than our writing. We're still trying to figure
out what the heck it is. We know there's math there too, but they had the ability
to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand
it to the next generation who would then do it more and do it more. That's how they figured out kind of the holy grail
of ancient astronomy. How good were they was whether they could see the
procession of the equinoxes, the fact that we're just barely wobbling. And there's a 26,000 year
period where the stars as that backdrop will spin all
the way around and come back. It's 26,000 years. But the Maya were able
to figure out, wait, it's moving one degree every 72 years, and did a calculation based on where it should be in the ancient past. And they're using constellations. They're showing us they
know by saying like, this planet's in this
constellation right now and 33,000 years ago it would be in this constellation. - It's just fascinating that they were able to figure this out. I would love to sort of
understand the details of the scientific community,
if you can call it that. - I think we absolutely could. And that's actually one of
the things that I'm hoping to move the needle on in my
generation with my career, is to give these cultures
the respect they deserve as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect, there are things that
should be called science that are not being called
science at the moment. You know, their math is incredible. Their hydraulic engineering is incredible. Their chemistry is incredible. And so I hope to talk about
these things differently as a way to get people to recognize the achievements
in a different way. - Yeah, I mean, unquestionably
incredible scientific work in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to all the
sophisticated aspects of the Mayan calendar
that they've developed? - I don't know, you
got another five hours. - [Lex] Let's go. - No, I'm kidding. - I should say that you also gave me the 2024 Mayan calendar. - Yeah, I do this just to,
you know, show the world that that calendar system is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of
years in the system they made, just like our system is. - So can you speak to
the three components here as I'm reading that Tzolk'in,
the Haab and the Long Count. What are these fascinating
components of the calendar? - It's neat how obsessed, they were really math nerds. It wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that interlocked into each other. Like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tzolk'in's their oldest one and the one that still endures
today, there are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260 day count. No weeks, no months. It's just 13 numbers
combined with 20 day names for a total of 260 days. And then it goes again. Everybody in the highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means
about their personality and the kind of jobs that
they're supposed to do. Each one of those days
has their own spirit. And what's supposed to
happen in those days, the Maya collectively call them the mom, the grandmother, grandfather spirits. And they talk to each one of those days and they pray to them. There's now an association
of some 8,000 people that are called Aki that are day keepers who are keeping the days. And they're also like
community psychologists almost. People come to them and say,
you know, my life is mixed up. What's wrong here? Well, let's ask the mom, like, okay, well it looks like you're
not doing this or that. Or you know what, you're an accountant. You're not supposed to be an accountant. You're supposed to be
a, you know, a midwife. What are you doing? You're living your life wrong. You're a kib. You need to start being a kib person. - So they take extremely seriously the day on which you're born. What that means, like the
spirit that embodies that day. - Right, like I'm kib, I'm 13 kib and it says my, it's funny how
accurate a lot of them are. Mine is basically is, I'm an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me, so
my family still prospers. Like, well God, that's horribly accurate. - I mean some of it is
also the chicken or the egg if you truly believe, so, if you structure society where this calendar is truly sacred, then it kind of like you manifest a lot, the spirit does manifest itself
in the life of the people that is born on that spirit's day. - Absolutely.
- It's interesting. - And the Maya really
feel this in this system. So that's the core system. This 260 day calendar was
the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago. And it's the one that's
most important today. - Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it? - Most Maya agree with this today and you know, who knows what the original architects thousands of years ago were thinking. But it's nine months. It's the human gestation period. So if you conceived on the day 13 monkey, chances are your kids coming
out on or near 13 monkey. And I think it's beautiful. I mean, if that's right,
that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica
will all share it together. When they thought about we need a count of time, that's for us. They didn't look up into the heavens, they looked like into their bodies. What's the first cycle that we
actually go through as humans and they pick this nine month thing. It really is our cycle. And no other culture on the
planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that. - So that's the oldest one and the sacred one that still
carries through to today. What's the second one, the Haab? - The Haab is the solar
calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it's second though because when they start talking about it, they use all the symbols and
the numbers from the 260 one. They say, well we need a solar one too. Let's just keep counting
this another 105 days and we'll get to 365. - Oh, interesting, they
kind of carry the same. Got it, got it, got it, got it. And that's useful because for
all the sort of agricultural, all this kind of reasons. - Right, though interestingly, they never put a leap year in, the Haab is also called the vague year 'cause it's just 365, which means every year they're off a quarter of a day and eventually it starts really adding up. In fact, it's even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight math
from a thousand years ago. And so I place the beginning
of the solar year differently than some Maya groups
do, especially the guys in the highlands of Eastern Guatemala. They write me nasty emails saying, I don't know what time the year is, but their relatives
changed it in the 1950s because their agricultural
cycle was so far off. They moved it 60 days back to
make it in the spring again. But it drifts, which is strange 'cause it's not a very good thing for the agricultural cycle. It's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for. - So that's the Haab, and
then what's the Long Count? - The Long Count's the
really mysterious cool one because it's a linear count of days, which are not like them. It's a bunch of cycles
like ours, you know, our weeks are a cycle,
our months are a cycle. But it's weird in that
its estimation of the year in the long count system is only 360 days. So it's miserably off a solar year. They count in base 20. So they count, like we
count in tens we're decimal, they count in base 20, vigesimal. And so it should be,
you know, there's ones, there's twenties, there's four hundreds, there's eight thousands,
there's 160 thousands. It's up, it goes just like our tens, hundreds, thousands, 10 thousands. But it's times 20. So that third, so they have
days, months of 20 days. And then they have these years that are, should be by their math
400, but it's only 360. And that throws the whole thing outta whack going further up. Then they have a 20 year period and a 400 year period, 400
years to their calendar. But it's only by that
time it's only 396 years in our period, in our reckoning. So it's mysterious that
it's, why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days? That's, you know, that
doesn't follow any astronomy. That's not the human cycle. - Yeah, but they're, I
mean, it's interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long periods of time. Like baktun is 144,000 days. - Right, or a baktun is 400
of the long counts years. So it's kind of like our
millennium, you know, we think it's a big deal
when we hit a millennium or a century. They have a 20 year
period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a katun. And then they have the 400
baktun, which is the big one that's like their millennium. And 13 of those baktuns occurred
in the creation before us. They also think that we are in, that the world has had multiple creations. They're not alone in that. There's lots of ancient
civilizations who say that, but we're technically
in the fourth creation. And they have a creation
story called the Popol Vuh. And the Popol Vuh is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the hero twins. And the fourth creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math
through the long count and we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened. The fourth creation started
on August 11th, 3114 BC and it says, it doesn't say it's day one, it says it's the last
day of the 13th baktun of the third creation, which leads us to believe that a creation
is only 13 baktuns long. - Right, so, and this would be the fourth creation, the calendar. - The fourth creation. But if you do the math going from 3,114 BC and count 13 baktuns
forward, you get to 2012. - And hence the very
popular notion that 2012, whenever that was December,
something like that. - December 21st, 2012. - Will be the end of the world. So can you explain this about? - Those were very fruitful years for me. I had so many lectures
around the country that was, it's like Garrett Morrison
Saturday Night Live. The apocalypse was very, very good to me. - I mean, but that is pretty interesting. So technically it would be in
the what, in the fifth now? - Yeah, technically we'd be in the fifth. Though, my argument was
that actually, if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never
say anything like that. In fact, there's a handful
of dates that tell us that the fourth creation
does continue farther on. That that baktun place
should have 20 baktuns in it. Like their counting system
would dictate, not 13. And there's a place in Palenque, there's a place in the Dresden Codex and one other place I'm forgetting that all talk about time after 2012. So how does that happen, it's a conflict. - Is there supposed to
be an overlap of the 13? So it's like 13 is the core
of it, and it's 20 long. - They love the number 13,
it's all over the place. It's a magic number to them. My explanation, which I
admit is not very solid. But I think that the magical deeds of the hero twins in their
creation story at the end of the third creation hit
the magical reset button. And that it just
restarted time right there because of their magic. But that was not to say that the natural baktun
cycle should be 13. And there are certain texts that go way forward in time
or way backward in time. And whenever they wanna do that, there are higher increments
than just the baktun. Above that, there's the piktun, then there's the kalabatun,
then there's alawatun and it goes on and on. And these are like, you
know, 160,000 years, huge increments of time,
whenever they wanna do that, and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting thirteens
in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they're saying is they're making an esoteric statement about the never ending nature of time. That's what I think they're telling us in those texts that time
goes on forever, magically. - But they still had a conception that it didn't go on forever before. That there was other
civilizations that came before and this is the fourth creation. - This is the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody, the first ones were made
of mud and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals. The third ones were like us, but flawed in some other way. And then we are finally made of the blood of the gods and corn,
we're made out of corn. So we're perfect. And as it explains to
us, the Popol Vuh does, we got it right this time. There's no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration. One of the weird things
is that the Aztecs, who we talked to a lot at contact, they also had the concept of
multiple creations before us. But they were real clear to the Spanish that they weren't all
the same time element. Some of them were in the
three hundreds of years. Some of them were in the
seven hundreds of years, but they were not the same time period. So our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third
creation or also be 13. It's in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us
about the nature of creations. They're different time periods. - Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Did they have some kind of long multi-generational
memory of prior civilizations? - It may have had some
echo in the flood myths. - It's the same kind of major myths carried
through long periods of time. - There's a lot of
different opinions about it. And you know, like if they were all 13, if we have five creations,
like the Aztec said, and they were all 13, they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to
that processional cycle. So some people are like,
they designed it all to be one completion of the
procession of the equinoxes. - And I mean that. - I don't believe that one, but that one sure sounds good, doesn't it? That's gonna get a lot of internet hits. - And one of the things
I do obviously wonder about is why the flood myth is part of like most societies and most religions? - I think that one's pretty easy. It's the end of the ice age
when the bathtub filled back up. - So it's just the ice age bathtub refill. - It's the seas filling back up. - And without really
understanding what happened, they just carried that story? - Everybody knows that everybody's nice coastal
village went underwater. And they had to seek higher ground. - And then just like people
like talking about the weather, everybody was talking about the
weather for many generations as the sea level was going up. And then that myth carried? - Why do we live here, grandpa? Well, we used to live over
there, but then the water came. - And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea. - It becomes mythology,
but global mythology. So that one, you know, there's a lot of things I don't have a
reasonable explanation for, but the flood myth is almost certainly the rise in sea level. - So this idea that every day represents, that carries a spirit. You know, there's modern
day astrology, you know, most people kind of
consider astrology this maybe a bit unscientific woowoo type of set of beliefs. But do you think there's some
wisdom that astrology carries from your scholarship
of the Maya calendar? Do you think if we carry that to the astrological
perspective on the world, do you think there's some wisdom there? - I don't know, you know, I have a woowoo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff, but I don't think as a scientist it makes, I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true. And you know, when you
look at it objectively, I mean really is everybody
born with the sign Scorpio, a moody person? That's just objectively not true. But it is funny how oftentimes
these Maya horoscopes, for lack of a better
word, do hit the mark. There was some student who
surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked
them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better. Which that's fascinating. At least that's fun. But no, I think I'm
too much of a scientist to believe that, I just don't have any foundation in science
that would allow us to believe that the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our
personality and destiny. - I agree, and yet there's so much mystery all around us that what I do like is the inbuilt humility to that worldview. That there's this whole, you
can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we
don't quite understand. And then you can wander
about what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you can construct
all kinds of systems to try to interpret that. And then there is where the
human hubris can come in and, you know, but it's good to be humbled by how
little we know, I suppose. - I do love the mysteries of the world and I would love to find
an ancient civilization, but I don't want to solve
the mysteries of the world. I think they're one of the things that make life worth living. - That's true, that's true. You mentioned the Maya writing system. What are some interesting
aspects of their language that they've used and the
written language that they used? - Well, you know, one of
the things that confound me as a guy who spent, you
know, better portion of my life studying it, I had
the honor of being the student of Linda Schele right here at the University of Texas at Austin. She got the group together
who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best. And loved every minute
of it, I miss Linda. - Can you speak to that code actually, the hieroglyphic code and
what it takes to break it? - Oh boy, I mean, what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone. We had a page out of
Diego de Landa's book, a priest who was converting
the Maya in Yucatan asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced they
had a alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya
guy sat down in Spanish and he said, okay, you're gonna write all the
symbols right here in my book. Write an A here, write a
B here, write a C here. And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to write. They were actually syllables, they were vowel consonant combinations. They weren't an alphabet. But that turned into our
Rosetta stone of sorts. The big key is that the Maya
still speak that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya. Now, there's where I get confused that we've got a single writing
system that is intelligible. We've broken the code. So we know that it's basically
the same writing system from the top of the Yucatan
into Guatemala and El Salvador. But we have 33 Mayan languages today that are mutually unintelligible. And we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then. That the glyphs are in to
something called Cholti which is a combination of Chorti and Chol, two of those languages. But it doesn't work for me at all. How did, if there was one
language, maybe two back then, how did it flower into 33
mutually unintelligible languages in just 500 years during acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population? How did that happen? So we're missing something huge here. I think it's more like
Chinese, where Chinese letters, writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood. I don't know exactly the mechanics
of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible
that there are more languages, not less languages in the Maya area after the last 500 years
that they've been through. - So you think that there's
some kind of process of either rapidly generating dialects or there always has been these dialects, or I should say they're
distinct languages, even though there was a
common writing system? - There must have been a
way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something
like Latin, you know, how there was a period in Europe where like most people were illiterate and there was this priesthood
who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin. Maybe the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world. - But we don't really know. And there's not clear
evidence to fill in the gaps of how it's possible to have that. - Right, but we did
realize it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri
Knorozov who broke the code. The Americans and the
Europeans were absolutely sure that the language was, that the written language
was a dead language. But Yuri not knowing any
of that, not being filled with all of those thoughts
from America, and Europe went about it in the
way that he was taught in his grad school in Moscow. And just went to the dictionaries and he looked at Yucatec language that they're speaking today and he applied it to the symbol system and he knew that there
were certain sounds. He used Lambda's alphabet. And he found there was,
his two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey
with a symbol over it. And the dog, a dog in Yucatec is "zool." So he saw two symbols and he said, this one's probably "zool"
and this one's "ul". And then the Turkey was "kuuts," so it would be "kuu" ending in "tsu". And he showed how, look,
you know, this is "tsu," this is "zool," those two things that should
be "ts" are the same symbol. And that began this process
of unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today. - That's fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. Like how do you even figure that out? And there's probably still,
is there still, are you aware of any written languages that
haven't been decoded yet? - Yeah, yeah, there's a number of them. There's Easter Island Script,
I was just talking to. We've apparently made
a few advances there. Now it's called Rongorongo. And we only have about
maybe 25 examples of texts, but we're beginning to break that. There's also the big one is Harappan. Harappan for a long time we used to say there were five independent
scripts on the planet and those were Chinese, Cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Maya, and then Harappan, which
is from Northern India. That's the only one that
we've never cracked. And now all the epigraphers,
the people, that's the term for epigraphy is
translating these languages. They're all ganging up on Harappan and want to kick it off the
list 'cause we can't break it. It had a big enough symbol set, but no one's been able to crack it. And now they're saying it's
just an elaborate symbol set and doesn't reflect the spoken word. - That's a hypothesis, which is what would explain
why it's so difficult. - Right, but you know,
we could just be faced with the quitter generation. Maybe somebody will pick up
the baton next generation. - Kids these days with their. - The other one that fascinates
me is from the Americas. It's the Quipu, the Inca had the Quipu. This nodded string records, but it was definitely
encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know lots, I can do the math Quipus and figure out what they're
totaling and things. Yeah, there's a Quipu right there. - Quipu are recording devices
fashioned from strings, historically used by a number
of cultures in the region of Indian and South America,
a Quipu who usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber strings. So there's a set of strings and they're supposed to
what, to be saying something? - There's one long string that the little ones dangle off of. And each one of the
dangling strings have sets of knots on them. And the knots, some of them
are mathematical Quipus and those, we can just do the math, we can prove that it's math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries in Cusco where Spanish conquistadors
were brought through. And the caretakers of the
libraries would just put, they'd say, pull that one
down, read that one to me. And he'd pull it out and just
read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. So it was definitely writing. But in the 1570s, one head of the church
there had all of the people that could read them called quipucamayocs, gathered up, had them
read all of their Quipus and transcribe them into Spanish books, and then had the Quipus burned
and those people murdered. - Okay, well there you go. - And so we can't break
the code still today, but we know it was
absolutely a written language though it wasn't written,
it was weaved or knotted. - And there's still some
Quipus available that could be. - There's, I think now we've
just crossed the 1000 mark. So we have a thousand Quipus, there's enough to break the code. And I think this generation might be the one that does it. - It's sad that so few have survived. I mean a thousand is good, but it's. - But see, there's, Peru
has barely scratched the surface with archeology. There's so much out there. There was a priest I read
about named Diego De Porres, who was one of the early people in Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is
real clear that he wanted to teach this community of 3000 people, all the Spanish prayers,
the important ones for them to be converted
into Christianity. And he had the communities'
quipucamayocs knot Quipus for each person that told them that they could read them
out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught
without their Quipu in town, they were flogged. So he had 3000 of the same Quipu made and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find its cemetery,
there is a Rosetta Stone. - You know, it is probably
the case there is somebody in Peru and maybe a large community that knows this language
that understands, and like, you just have to show up and ask them. And it's like, they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. - There are some communities
that are using them. There's a couple of them
that we had high hopes for. And then it was apparent that they were just making shit up. They didn't actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read. So they like made a bunch
of stuff about what it says. And they bring it out and they
act like they can read it, but then when you ask 'em
the details, they don't know. But then on a much simpler level, there's llama herders who
keep a string in their pocket and they've got the knots equaling how many llamas they have. And then they have subcategories
of information like, this one's sick, we've lost
these ones, this one's pregnant. So they have these more simple
and more mathematical Quipus but they're using them
to affect as a record. - Is it possible through
archeology to know what, you know, the social organization of the Maya was? Like, what maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader, different
roles, you know, priests or like who had the
power, who was powerless, who had certain kinds of roles,
is it possible to know that? - Actually because of hieroglyphs, yeah, we know a whole lot. There's, you know, basic
things that archeology, which is a very blunt
tool, can figure out like, this guy lives in a rich house, this guy lives in a poor house. But the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule,
that it was hereditary. That that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that's lived in the underworld. It also told us things
about hierarchy like that there were councils of
lords underneath the king who each represented clans, who
had their own neighborhoods, and that there were revolving
positions of authority. There was the site that I
mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the
jungle there, Palenque, had lord's title named Fire
Lord, that was one of the, like, generals of their army. And we could tell that
position changed over time. So there was one guy named Chak
Suutz, who was the Fire Lord for the early part of a reign of a king called the Ahkal Mo' Naab. And then by the time he
carves this other panel, there's another guy in the
position of yajawk' ahk', which was the fire Lord. And so he had.
- Got promoted? - Well he could have been killed. I mean, in the case of that, but then we have the interesting case of, in the post-classic, they
shed the idea of kings. They don't like kings anymore. That's probably a big part of
why the classic disappearance and the abandonment of
all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings. And so they turned into
this more council system at Chichen Itza. But then when Chichen Itza
falls, there's a new city, that's architecture looks
a lot like Chichen Itza. It's called Mayapan, but it has what it's called
the League of Mayapan. And it has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It is a Maya democracy that happens. The individuals from all
around the Yucatan are there. Each family has their own
council house at Mayapan though they live back at their place. It's kind of like a Maya Congress. - They have representative democracy. - it really was, I mean, and this happens in I guess 1250 AD that this Maya democracy happens and we know the names of
them, we know the families, and of course they were humans. So eventually they screwed it all up. One family murdered another family and the whole city burned. - Yeah, and of course it's probably some fascinating corruption, which is hard to discover through. - Part of it was the
Aztec screwing things up. The Aztecs came down
with all sorts of like, we'll buy everything you're making. And then eventually they were like, could we maybe buy some humans? And then one family was like, no. And the other family
was like, I don't know, they're making us a lot of money. So then, you know, they
murdered each other and the water supply got polluted
and then the city burned. - It seems like slavery, murder and disease is a large component
of the story of humans. As you mentioned, different
periods in the Maya, the classic, the post-classic,
the pre-classic, the archaic, can you just speak to that? So archaic is before there was really a civilization that was. - Archaic is pretty much when
everybody's hunter-gatherers. - So the classic period
was the golden age. And then the pre-classic
is the interesting time that we were talking about and the post-classic is when
the democracy came about. - Well, midway through it. Reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils. So yeah, we have, pre-classic is like the
origins of civilization. They're starting to build cities. They're starting to create their calendar. They're starting to create
these wonderful works of art. And the classic period, if you look at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you'll get 10 different dates
that wiggle around in there. But basically that's
the age of kings, to me, that's when these cities decide that they're gonna organize themselves around elite royal families
that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in
contact with the gods. The Maya never contact
their gods directly. They contact their
ancestors who are up there, who act like liaisons to the gods. And so the Maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have, you know, basically snowed the rest of the people, that they've got a special
quality of their blood and only their offspring
can do the same trick and talk to the gods where everybody, every Joe Maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor but Joe Maya's dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below, and he's got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their
spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods
are and can act as liaisons. So that's the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we say 250 to 900, which is kind of the
encompassing edges of it. But it's interesting that
it's actually specifically the ninth baktun of their history. The ninth baktun begins in like 426, and it ends in like 829. So it's a 400 year period of time. And before that, there were no kings. And after that, there really aren't kings. They're heads of councils. So I call it the age of kings, where everybody's following the directives of basically a despot and
for a while that's great. I mean, cities build up,
populations happening. I see it as kind of a cult
of personality moment too, strong, charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together, but eventually, like happens
all the time with power, too much power corrupts, all of a sudden there's this
unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated
special by everybody else. And they start saying, well,
I think we should fight with those guys, and
you guys should go cut, take these things. And people eventually get sick of it, and they walk away from these cities. And that's how we get the
mysterious Maya collapse where all these cities are just gone. - That's one of the great mysteries of the Maya civilization is
that over a very short period of time, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly. It collapsed, what do
you think explains that? What happened? - I think it's a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those
cities, populations, moved, you know, no more than
20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses. And all archeology signature sees is that nobody lives in
the city center anymore. We don't see a bunch of mass bodies. There's no evidence of
people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end, and we see that signature plain as day. We know when a city was
attacked and burned, mostly that didn't happen. People moved and migrated. And it seems like right there around like between 800 and 900, a lot of
the elites that were on top in the most of it was in the rainforests of northern Guatemala. They move, they move in two directions. Some of them move into the
highlands of Guatemala, and some of them move up into the Yucatan. The city of Chichen Itza becomes the next big capital in Yucatan. But the word Itza is
actually a word describing the people who lived
around Lake Peten Itza in northern Guatemala. And all of the Maya are
super clear about that, that the Itza came in as
immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. So the elites who were no longer welcome
in their cities just moved and set up shops somewhere else. - So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a specific kind
of events that started this? Was this an idea that kind
of transformed the society? - We are still debating that. I don't think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated. I think a lot of things led to this. One thing we can see
archeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular, and we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to
feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end of the classic period that
people are seasonally starving. I remember really stark
evidence in Copan, Honduras. Copan was this beautiful
city, lineage of 17 kings. But the last kings and the last elite burials that
we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They get this thing,
when you're growing up and you're not getting
enough food seasonally, it shows up in the enamel of your teeth. It's called dental hypoplasia. And if somebody's seasonally starving, it gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of
Maya before they left Copan, even the rich people
are seasonally starving. So there's a problem there for sure. But I also think, it's a weird thing. It was not an empire. It was a group of independent
city states like Greece. Some of them were allied,
some of them were enemies. There was a huge civil
war that settled out about the end of the classic period. So if it was Europe, you know, the victors would've taken over. The losers would've beat it
and gone wherever they went. But when they abandoned these cities that were independent
still, they all left, both the guys that won and
the guys that lost the war. So it couldn't be just as simple
as spoils go to the victor. It's such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the Copan Valley. So I personally think it
was cylindrically timed. It is interesting to note
that that ninth period, that ninth 400 year
period ends right then, and I think a lot of people, you know, I can't prove it archeologically, but I think a lot of people
said, we're coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we're doing. When you talk to the Maya
today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if
you actually talk to Maya, say, you know what happens at
the end of a big cycle here, they say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation. That it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles, that change is coming. We can either be part of it or
we can get steamrolled by it. The Aztecs did this neat thing called the New Fire
Ceremony every 52 years, which was the biggest
their calendar would go, they'd burn down perfectly good temples and they'd burn down
their houses sometimes. And they would just, everybody in society would perform this, what they
call the new fire ceremony, and they would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the Maya decided at
the end of the ninth baktun that it was time to renew the world. - I think this theory makes sense because they really
internalized the calendar. I mean, that was a really
big part of their culture, the sense of the cyclical
nature of civilization. - That's what I think. I think that they created that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it. - You mentioned Aztec, what
was the origin of the Aztec? Where did these people come
from, at what time and how? - You know, almost every one of the cultures we're talking about now, we have two different versions of the answer to that question. We have the archeology version, and we have the Aztecs themselves. The Aztecs have this
wonderful migration story where they say that
they came from a place, well to the north called Aztlan, and that they had this
migration that went through kind of a hero's journey where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter the
birth of the war god, that they'll worship after this. And how they stepped into the
valley of Mexico as the last, the lost brothers of everyone
in the Valley of Mexico, they said that they all
came from the north. Near Aztlan is a place, a cave with seven different
passages called Chicomoztoc. And that all the people who spoke the language
nahuatl came from the cave. And most of them went early
to the Valley of Mexico. And in the Aztecs story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to come in. But then they show up late game, and they become mercenaries. They just start working for communities in the valley of Mexico. And this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to
the Valley of Mexico, and they make themselves this indispensable group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work, all
the civilized communities around Lake Texcoco,
which is now Mexico City. It's all dried up, but those
guys were too civilized to fight with each other,
but they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff. So the Aztecs did that and really changed the
politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico. - The dirty stuff, they're the muscle. - Yeah, they'd go in and they'd kill whoever you wanted killed. Now you're the king of this area. So one of these kings
that they were working for really liked them and decided, I'm gonna make the Aztecs
part of our ancestry. I'm gonna give them my daughter to marry the head of the Aztecs. And the Aztecs sacrificed her, and that really pissed that guy off. So he took like his whole army and ran the Aztecs out. For a while, they say they live in this horrible desert
section eating lizards, but then one of their
priests say, we're gonna walk around the lake, and my
visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus
with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital. And they see that, but it's
out on an island in the lake. And he said, well, I don't know. That's the place. So they build up an island,
they go to that island, and then they just start piling
up lake muck until they make a whole city there in
the middle of the island. They make, or the lake,
they make an island city. And all of this occurs
in about a hundred years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tenochtitlan,
as they called it, is really established. And from there, they quickly
take over the entire valley. They make what they call
the triple alliance, which is the two other big communities of the lake are now their allies, but they're not really allies. The Aztecs were brutal. They were just, those
guys agreed to shut up and let the Aztecs run the show. And then the Aztecs spread like
a wildfire all the way down into the Maya area. Everywhere they go, they
rename everybody's towns and make them pay tribute. - Pretty short last thing, civilization, spread extremely quickly. Famous, what are some defining
qualities that explain that? - I think they were very much like, they had an attitude, like Attila the Hun. They just had no problem
ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too
comfortable and too civilized. And the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know, we can either rip your heart
out or you can work for us, and if you work for us,
you'll be just fine. They'd go to every town they'd go to. The first thing they do is they'd show up with a bunch of merchants. There was a merchant class
who were also military. They were really the people who assessed where they were gonna attack next. They'd go in with a bunch
of Aztec products and say, we'd like to trade with you. But all the time they were
assessing their military prowess, what products they had
that they could take. And then soon after the
Pochteca were there, would come the military
with the reconnaissance. - So the Aztec had a huge warrior class, as you're saying. So can you linger on
their whole relationship with war and violence? - They worshiped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templo Mayor. It had two temples up on top. One was to Tlaloc the rain God, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one
was Huitzilopochtli. He was, that translates the
hummingbird on the left. But he's the war God, I love
that he's a hummingbird. Maybe, you know, he's fast and he comes from the
magical side or something. But then right next to the temple on either side were the two temples of the warriors. One was the eagle warrior clan, the other one was the jaguar warrior clan. And they were symbolically in competition with each other. Though a unified force, I guess, you know, probably an analogy between
like the Navy and the Air Force. You know, they had a
good natured competition of who was better, but
they were the same force. So those were their symbolic warriors, dressed up in all of their finery. And they would come at
people with these two forces. And it was very unlike anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again, I think I could draw a parallel to what happened in Europe. You know, the famous Henry the
V moment in Agincourt where, you know, his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France's
aristocracy with the longbow. Like up until that moment, Europe had a very wars for the elite
classes kind of attitude. And then after France lost
half their aristocracy, then it was like, maybe we should be
hiring from the villages. The same sort of thing
happened with the Aztec, that there was a, Mesoamerica really didn't
have huge standing armies, but the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people. They didn't actually have to use it a lot. It was used to great effect in the valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mesoamerica. It was mostly the fear factor. - But there also seemed to be, you know, a celebration of violence. I think you said that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec, maybe like the Roman Empire. Was it they just had a maybe
a different relationship with what violence, where that stood in the purpose of life, purpose of existence, is that fair to say? - I would hypothesize
so, I mean, you know, I think it's one of the wonderful things about studying these
ancient cultures, you know, knowing what our human capacity is. And the Aztecs, when
I said that statement, what I meant by that is they
were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and, you know, ripping people's hearts out. They had this just, you know, grotesque, violent bent. But in the same way they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who
would order the hearts of a thousand people
extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen
that had come before him. And they spent money on
things like flower gardens. All of the causeways leading to the Aztec capital had
beautiful flower gardens. And they had a museum,
and they had an aquarium and a zoo, and they had an
opera and they had a ballet. And these things existed together. There was not in the
Aztec mind any conflict between witnessing someone's
heart getting ripped out, one moment, in the evening
we'd go to the ballet. - How does that contrast
the relationship with war and violence, with the other civilizations of Mesoamerica and South
America, maybe the Maya? What was their relationship like with war? - The Maya were certainly influenced by the Aztec at the end. So we get a skewed perspective from the contact period accounts, because the Maya were much more violent and sacrifice oriented in
their post-classic rendition. But in the classic period,
it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing
the sacrificing of themselves, that we know that the Maya
kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper and the paper would burn and become the smoke
through which they'd commune with their ancestors, but
they'd actually tie this paper onto their penis, cut it, and then dance. So the blood splattered, but
it was them cutting themselves. It was different than killing a bunch of other people for it. It was a auto sacrifice, we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than
deciding a whole bunch of other people should die. It was a self sacrifice thing. - Can you speak to the
sacrifice a bit more? Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. What role did that play in for the Maya, for the Aztec, for the
different cultures here? Was that religious in nature? - It was absolutely religious in nature. And the Aztecs were of the opinion that the war God demanded
people were captured and sacrificed, and it
had to be valuable people. There was a lot of, before they
made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles
that they would have, and they'd take captives. In fact, all around Mesoamerica,
they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods and the Aztecs deciding
to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody. They did it so much and so successfully that they didn't have any enemies nearby. So they decided this
one poor sucker group, not that far away, called the Tlaxcallans, that they were never going
to make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic
war with the Tlaxcallans and haul 'em back for a sacrifice. Cortez met those guys and he was like, here are
people who hate their guts. I'll just use these guys. So, you know, we say, oh, Cortez
took over the Aztec world. It was Cortez and 20,000
super pissed off Tlaxcallans. - And they actual sacrifice what, so there would be kind
of these ritual battles, or is it chopping off people's heads, like is there some interesting
rituals around the sacrifice? - It's mostly heart
extractions, sometimes heads, but they bring them up
on top of the temple so everybody can see it. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over, so their ribcage would come out and they'd use like a
thick obsidian knife. And they had a really just like
tried and true way to do it. They'd stab it in a certain place close, and then they'd push down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage. And they just, so they just make a place where they could just rip it right out - With their hand?
- Yeah, with their hand. But they were really
just surgical about it. They'd use a thick obsidian
knife where they could just break the ribs
right along the sternum and then push the sternum down. Pull up and just. - While the person was alive? - Yep, while the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea, like there was a horrible
drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley. And they came to this conclusion that it's because we haven't been
killing enough people. We've got to bump this up. And then when they did and they decided, they really took it out on the
Tlaxcallans, it rained again. So it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that. And they ate people as
well, they really did. - As part of the sacrifice, or is this? - After the sacrifice,
then they would eat them. And this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started, but then it was just
kind of the thing to do. When Cortez got there,
they were still having certain special feasts
that involved humans. And it really upset the Spanish that they would be like
tricked into eating human. Like, hey, you liking dinner? That was a human. - So the idea, was it actually, having a taste for human flesh or is it just, you know,
these kinds of ideas of like, if you eat a person's heart that you can get their
spirit and their strength. - In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy, Sahagun, who was a
very responsible chronicler that was pretty specific. That like, there was a distribution thing. Like the elites got butts. The butts were the best part. So the butt cheeks, those
are the best parts to eat. And then like, it went down the chain until some people just
got like fingers and toes. - Literally about taste for the Aztec. Boy, all right, well. - They really did, they really did. In fact, that's what caused the, have you heard of the Noche
Triste, the sad night, The night that the Aztecs really go nuts on the Spanish and kicked them out. It's all triggered by this one guy, Pedro de Alvarado, who's
left in charge by Cortez. As Cortez, goes to the coast and tries to talk to the New Force, talk him into being
for him, which he does. But Pedro Alvarado's left
back in town in charge, and they're doing another one
of these huge Aztec buffets and parties to honor them, and it happens. The guy says, you know,
hey, do you like dinner? Like, oh yeah, it's a nice dinner. Well, it's humans, you're eating humans. See, I told you they were good. And Alvarado just freaks out. And he has the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the party. Women, children, nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone, and that's what spazzes the Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma
who was their captive, and then try to murder all of them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado's fault for freaking out about eating humans. - Just a little practical joke. - It was just, they thought
it was funny, he did not. - That's fascinating, I didn't realize. So I kind of assume that some level of cannibalism would have
to do with, you know, eating the heart to gain the spirit of the person or something like this. - In certain, like, you know, deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they
just liked eating humans. It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like, you guys could
either send us, you know, a number of Quetzal feathers every month, or we could eat you. - So that psychological warfare and actual warfare, it worked. And that's how they spread quickly. - And they were just about to take over the Maya
when the Spanish came and messed everything up. They had the Maya surrounded and they were about to take
over the whole Yucatan. - So you think without the Spanish there would be this Aztec empire that would last for a very long time? - Mm, I think there would've
been an Aztec empire. I think they would've
finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate. And everybody hated the Aztecs. So it wouldn't have lasted forever. They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so
long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think
that would've gone on forever 'cause they were really
community oriented. Once the Inca took over, like no one in the Inca empire starved, they built architecture,
everyone was safe. It was the society that could have lasted a long time. - What was the origin of the Inca Empire? - Well, it was bloody at
first, like most of them are. But once they started taking over that, what they did is they empire built. Everybody else had just
raided their neighbors to get the resources, but
everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca Empire. And they created this
incredible Mita system where you took turns working and they created the road
system so they could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of let's say 5,000 people, the Inca would roll up with an army of a hundred, 200,000 people and say, you know, would you guys like to be part of the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire? And if your mayor here agrees,
then he can have a town, he can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month,
a big work crew would show up and they'd start building
agricultural terraces and storage units. And every month with
the agricultural excess, they would have big parties
and everybody would eat. So people lived well in the Inca Empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be part of it immediately had access to
a whole bunch of resources and security they never had. - So they started in South
America and Peru and Cusco, Cusco was like the center of it? - Cusco in their language, Quechua it means navel or belly button. And it's up in the mountains. But there's four quarters. They called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the Land of Four Quarters. And the center of those
four quarters was Cusco. - It sprung to life,
what, in like 1200 DC? - Yeah, we backwards project what it was. But it was probably mid 1200s when the first Sapa Inca,
the first ruler came in, but it was the, I think it's
the ninth one is Pachacuti who really started
being an empire builder. - And part of that, I mean,
what really defined the empire, as you said, roads, they
build a massive road network. - Roads, and in the same
way that the Roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure. And then every place they took over, they'd create certain key
pieces of Roman architecture that kind of made that city Roman. And they'd rename it something,
the Inca did the same thing. They had certain signature
Inca architecture that they would build in
as the administrative part. They'd send the quipucamayoc, the guys who would weave the, or knot
the Quipus as accountants. And though they would go through and say what everybody
did, okay, you know, you're a good farmer, you're gonna farm. You are a good weaver, you're gonna weave. All the men here are gonna take a turn at being part of the army. And they sent independent
quipucamayocs too, that every community had like five or six that were not allowed
to work with each other. And they all had to
independently send their Quipus back to Cusco. And if there were
accounting discrepancies, they were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what. - So there's like a super sophisticated record keeping system. - Yeah, and that was the Quipu and the Spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all. - But that's an interesting
development for an empire 'cause that allows you to really expand and have some kind of management, some level of control. - Yeah, they couldn't,
at the end they were at least 10 million people and there was just no way to do that. Without some sort of sophisticated
record keeping system. - If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins? - Inca. I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles. And they had that
essential hearts and minds. And there was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire. For some reason everything
was owned communally, except the llamas. The llamas were the king's. And so that was one thing that like some of them would stay in
town just to be work llamas. But you know, you don't
own your llama anymore. And people are really
attached to their llamas. To this day, they are like family members. So it'd be like everybody walked in and said everybody's
family dog is now mine. Like really upset people
on an emotional level. - Well, the, I mean, so llamas got domesticated at some
point, probably early. I mean, I don't even
know when, but early on. - We have rock art that
progresses to make it seem, like a progression from
people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing
next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period at least that they became friends. - Yeah, but if you roll in
and you own them, that's. - Yeah, that pissed everybody off. For some reason the Inca owned
everybody's llama instantly. And he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just
get carted away that day, just sent to Cusco. They'd also take their mummies,
that was a weird thing. Everybody mourns their dead. But the Inca just like
ceased to accept it. They would just, the
mummies were still there. Okay, he's dead, but look, he still got clothes, he's at the party. Let's put a beer in front of him. They just like, they just
kept people as mummies. And so the ancestral
mummies of every town, part of the being absorbed
into the empire was, okay, your most important
mummies are now gonna have their own beautiful house in Cusco. But they would physically
bring those mummies to Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their belief system. - I mean, I could see how
that would piss people off, but it's also a pretty
powerful way to say, like, the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect are now in the capitol. - They've been elevated,
we didn't steal them. We have given them a new place of honor, and you are welcome to come
visit them all the time. And they did, they have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco. - And which of the
civilizations mummified people? - The Incas for sure mummified people. And even did some of that kind of like Egyptian esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They'd put like straw inside
the cavity and mummify them. But the Maya didn't do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float
off the skeletons faster. And then they'd get back
in there, it was jungley. So I think the bugs
probably had part of it too. But then they would get back
in there to get the bones. They'd open it back up
and take the bones out and paint them with red cinnabar. The one that I was in in
Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in
there four different times, and the last couple times
they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it back in
articulated on the skeleton. But they didn't mummify, they on purpose would like
grossly float the bodies. So they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones. - But would they keep the bones? - Yeah, they'd keep the bones
and they'd pull the bones out occasionally and do rituals to them or commune with them and
then put them back in. - So there's a still a deep connection to the ancestors through
the physical manifestation of the ancestors then. Whether mummified or bone. - And to this day, like, if you do an excavation
here in the United States, Native American people don't like it. They don't like their
graves, which is fine enough. I wouldn't want somebody
digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it. And every Maya person, if we find a grave, they're like, yeah, look
at that, bones, cool. Can I touch? They're not spooked about it at all. They think it's exciting. I one time helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get a osteology collection
together of various animals. So if we got bones from an
excavation, we could see what kind of animal it was
based on the collection. And this family said, well, our family dog died last year and buried him in the backyard,
you could go dig him up. And so we were like, okay,
yeah, I mean, we do need a dog. We'll go dig up your dog. And they were like, but the
kids really want to help you. So their kids came out, and
this was like their puppy. And it died, you know, less
than a year ago when we got to it, that like, one of them
just like grabbed up a bone and he was like, "huesitos,"
like little bitty bones, yay. Like what a weird attitude,
that's your dead dog there. But they just, they have a different
relationship with the dead. - In some sense that's a
beautiful attitude, right? - Yeah. - Why pretend like we're not mortal and there's not this is
just the process of it, and it's kind of, as you say it now, it
kind of would be cool. - That's what Day of
the Dead is all about. And I love Day of the Dead, you know, Halloween's this creepy thing
where they're all monsters, but Day of the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after
the movie Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar. And we talk about who they
were and how they lived. And we put things on the altar
that mattered in their life. And we remember them on that day. And it turned something that
was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing
into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from. - I have to ask about the giant stones that Inca has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly. Do you understand? Is it understood how they
were able to do that so well? - No. (laughs) You know, the moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. You know, there are ways
to pivot large weights. There's a great guy
named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the US who built Stonehenge in
his backyard in Minnesota, single handedly showing how
you can move big stones. So you know, I think Wally's already figured out how to move 'em. It's the perfectly fit
so carefully fit together that you couldn't even put a
dime in between the stones. That's the one that I think
still has people baffled. The common archeological
wisdom that you'd find out of a textbook is that they
just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them
until they were perfect. Which has to be bullshit. There is no way that they
just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody's got a hammer stone. I personally think it's acids. I think they melted them together. And there are weird places
when you really look at closely to these stones, which I've
done a number of times. I'm going back next month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco, I
walk around in the alleys where these 500, you know, to a thousand year old
walls are still there. And you see, I see
things like the crystals in the andesite are
almost stitched together along the seams. Like the andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven't. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. Like it's just melted, like
somebody like took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft
stones turning hard too, I haven't been able to prove it. This is one of these, you know, end of my archeological career chapters. I'm either gonna prove
myself wrong or prove it. But I think they used acids. My dad's a chemist and he told me a long time
ago that there's no way, there's no naturally occurring acids. But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially
from the show Breaking Bad, I don't know if you ever saw that show, but there's a point in
which they're trying to dissolve a body. And they're using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating. You know, it won't go through plastic. And you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it. The Inca made tons of
jewelry out of fluoride. Fluoride is big in the Andes. And they also mined a lot of
things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that
mining is sulfuric acid. You put sulfuric acid
and fluoride together and it's hydrofluoric acid and that will burn through
andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do
it, you know, judiciously, and then you didn't care
whether, you know, servants lost an arm or two, then you
could actually use them to fuse these together. And I think they're fused together. I asked the city of Cusco if I could take some core
samples and they said, go away, gringo, don't touch our walls. So this actually, this next time I'm gonna go try to talk to the more Quechuan authorities in a place called Ollantaytambo. And maybe I can convince them, but right now they just
think I'm a weirdass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls. - That's a fascinating theory. And so how could you get
to the bottom of that? So getting core samples to see if there's some kind of trace? - Chemists I'm working with say that if there was hydrofluoric
acid in between these, that a core sample right along a seam, they they can separate
out the elements in there and detect whether there
was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, no, I mean,
we already know that's true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some
rocks, but it would happen. That's just chemistry. We gotta prove that it
would happen in the walls. So go get us samples. And that was before COVID and all sorts of, you know how it is, you probably are the same guy where you've got a thousand
ideas and you know, the ones that are fruitful you run with and the other ones you'll get back to. - That would be fascinating if true. And I hope you do show that it's true or false, either one. - I'll try to disprove it. - Disprove it, yeah, I
wonder if we discount how much amazing stuff of
collection of humans can do 'cause it just feels like
if a large number of humans are just working a
little bit chipping away at stuff at scale, they
can do miraculous things. So the question is, how can a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing? Because I just, when we
think about like Stonehenge or some very challenging
architectural construction, we don't think about a large number of humans working together. - Well, you know, that large
number of humans are motivated to work together by a small
number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing
in some way or another. One of my favorite quotes is, and I'm probably gonna misquote it here, but I think it's Margaret Mead who said, "never underestimate the power of small groups working together. And the truth is that
those are the only people that have ever changed the world." That small dedicated groups of people are what change the world. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we sometimes underestimate
how much humans can do across time, across scale. - And we are way less
capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human
had all sorts of skills that at least I personally
do not, you know, I'm wearing a shirt, but I can't make a shirt,
that's for somebody else to do. - You've also lectured about, which I really enjoyed about North America and also helped teach me that there was a lot more complex
societies going on here for a long period of time. So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early
humans in North America? - Well, we go through that paleoindian and archaic period for thousands of years. You know, as we started
this conversation, probably, you know, 30,000 years
as a conservative now humans first enter the Americas. But the first cultures we
get here are mound builders around the Mississippi and to the east. And then also a totally
separate group in the, what we call the American southwest now, the four corners who will develop into mostly the people
we call the Pueblo people who are still there today,
like Zuni and Hopi people. So we've got these two clusters. The very first major
community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It's in northern Louisiana. People think I'm crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid
in northern Louisiana, a big one at a site called Poverty Point that is 3,500 years old. So it's the same age as
the pyramids in Egypt. And it is a giant thing just poking out of the
bayous of Louisiana. And people don't believe me
when I say it, but it's there. - The mound builders. What was that society like in comparison to everything else we've been
talking about in Mesoamerica? - They evolved over thousands of years. We call 'em mound builders. This is something I, you know, object to. I think we should have a better, the last version of them we
call the Mississippians now, but generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders. But what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now. And they didn't build them out of stone. That's, you know, that's kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that's built
outta stone is sophisticated and something that's built
outta dirt is rudimentary. But in their full living form, they did have cores of dirt. But then they also had kind of clay caps. So they had terraces,
they had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. The biggest of the Mississippian cities, it's called Cahokia, and it's
right outside of St. Louis. And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place. A huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic,
a thriving metropolis. And we in America have kind
of a collective amnesia. Like we never hear about
these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big
cities that had, you know, five to 10,000 people each. - Were they their own thing or was there some kind of
thread connecting all of them? - They had a unified religion and culture. They were, again, not an empire. So there were warring city states. There were kind of
territories that were owned by big kings. And then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. And then one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight. So they were kind of
countries I think for, yeah, we could safely say there
were different countries within this patchwork that
was Eastern United States. And you know, it's so weird
that we don't know this because it was clearly
documented by the Spanish. I'm not talking about just archeology, we find them in archeology now. But Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and went for three years from,
he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana. And he's the first one to
see the Mississippi up there. But for three years he went
through city after city, after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn,
giving them diseases. But I mean, the
documentation's clearly there. He met collectively, millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization. - So it was disease and
stealing of resources. But was there like explicit
murdering going on? - Unfortunately, yeah. He was a murderer and a psycho and a liar. He snowed them that he
was some kind of deity, actually learned a trick from the Inca he was with Pizarro in his first run and went back to Spain, was
rich, had a wife, a castle. Then he got bored and he
decided to have a reign of terror on Northern
America for three years. But he had people burned at the stake. He had his dogs rip them apart. He was very, very brutal. He ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody. He made promises and
broke them all the time. He was really, he was a brutal man. - So this whole period when
Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything? - Well, you know, there's a great anthropological
body of literature. It's called the Colombian
Exchange, based on Columbus. But it's, you know, all this trade back and forth between the new
world and the old world. And the old world got
just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn't suck. All these vegetables came in. The new world got herd animals. It got pigs and cows and
goats that it didn't have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had herd
immunity on a lot of things. But it didn't actually go away. It just couldn't spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20,
30 years there were people who like had contracted
multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But the numbers, you know, it's a shameful part of history. And it wasn't something that
Europe perpetrated on them, but the medical science at that time was still
the four humors theory that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. And we did things like,
well, you've gotta bleed him. He'll feel better then. So we had no idea what an
infectious disease was, but the reality was that this hoard of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now
saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead. And that the number of
people has increased as well. As far as our estimates, we're thinking it's somewhere
around 150 million people and 90% of them died. And with them all their knowledge and just, I mean, imagine
the moment where, you know, who dies when things get bad,
it's the young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers die suddenly, the children die. This next generation that's half taught and now completely demoralized, thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them. That the only way out of it is to accept this new Christianity. But they, you know, they
don't wanna bring kids into this world where everybody's dying. And even if they do, they can't teach them what the old people were gonna teach them 'cause the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmission. So in a single terrible
moment in human history, you know, the generation
loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out. - But with that also just the wisdom of the entire civilizations. - So much of what they knew
was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs and that we've learned a lot from that. - Yeah, but not a significant integration of that wisdom into, so it wasn't, when the Europeans came, it wasn't like the
cultures were integrated. It was a story of domination,
of erasure, essentially. - In North America, there's a new term in the
literature that I like, we call it the Mississippian shatter zone. That Mississippian civilization
was millions of people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this shatter zone where we have ruins and the people that were actually from those
ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away. And, you know, I'm just about
to talk to a Cherokee man who listened to some of
the things I had to say and says all those Ho-Chunk
things you were saying from that whole Ho-Chunk culture. My grandparents talk about
this sort of thing too. Can I talk to you by phone and tell you about these things? So we've got this shatter
zone where, you know, we're gonna try to put
the puzzle back together. Especially in terms of
Mississippian religion. I really think we're making
headway in this generation. And it's exciting to be part
of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together. - Just since a lot of people kind of refer to Christopher Columbus as the person who discovered America. I read that the Vikings
reached North America much earlier in 1000 BCE. And why do you think they
didn't expand and colonize? - Because they got their ass kicked. - Okay, simple.
- It's the truth. It is absolutely true that
the Vikings were here. There's a great site in Nova Scotia called L'Anse aux Meadows, which definitely has what's
left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Erik and his father Erik the
Red, who they got kind of kicked outta Europe
'cause they apparently couldn't stop murdering people. And so they went to Greenland and then kind of island
hopped over to Canada. But I think the culture that was in that area
was named the Dorset. But they would have nothing
to do with the Vikings. They attacked the Viking
settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless. And they left it, you know,
the Vikings attacked Ireland and they just found a bunch of, you know, monasteries full of gold
with a bunch of guys going, we're men of God, we don't fight. And the Vikings were like,
this is great, that's great. This'll be easy then we'll just
loot all these Easter eggs. But the Native Americans in
Canada were like not having it. They kicked their ass, in fact, Leif Erikson's brother Thor died there. The natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge
of expanding the settlement, but they just killed him. - So a lot of the Native
American cultures were also, I mean, they're sophisticated
warring cultures also. - Yes, they fought,
especially the Mississippians, boy, they were tough. And so were, you know, the
Five Nations, the Mohawk, the Huron, the ones that kicked
the Vikings' ass up there. They were probably Algonquian speakers, but they were connected like, you know, just above the Great Lakes. But they were all very tough people. - When you think about the
Spaniards and the Portuguese and over a hundred million
people that were killed, do you see that as a tragedy of history or is it just the way of history? - I think that the epidemics,
I consider it a tragedy that did not have to happen. And that was not, you know,
that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. There was just a tragic,
perfect storm of events. It was not, you know, I
think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what's been called the black legend that they just marched into
America and murdered everyone. That's not the fact. It was the diseases
that murdered everyone. In fact, there was a really
poignant story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon in the Brazilian northern
part of the Amazon where he made this utopian community and he was bringing people
in that were getting sick. And he wrote, you know,
I'm baptizing everyone, you know, I have baptized
10,000 people a day, and yet God's still killing them. What, why is he doing this to them? They're doing everything
that I ask them to do. They are submitting to the will of God. But this guy doesn't
realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptizing them in, he's just wiping the disease
on everybody's faces. He's accelerating it when
he doesn't even realize. He thinks he's saving them,
but he's actually killing them. - Yeah.
- That's a tragedy. You know, that's not just like spoils go to the victor stuff. That's just straight up tragedy. - Yeah, yeah, but that one is hard to know what to do with like black death. It's, I mean, infections, they don't operate on
normal human terms, right. They just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas. - All right, just my style. - I mean, we didn't really talk about how life originated on Earth or how humans have evolved. And we did talk about that
there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient history
we haven't even uncovered yet. Do you think it's possible that other intelligent civilizations from outside of Earth,
aliens ever visited? - You had me right until
the ever visited thing. That one I'm not entirely sure about. I'm not sure whether we have any, we certainly have no archeological
proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such. But, you know, the guys
that discovered DNA, Watson and Crick, Watson, who actually
habitually used hallucinogens to invigorate his thinking,
he said that he thought that DNA on this planet
was way too complex to have developed over the time period that it had at its disposal. And that his guess was that our DNA was somehow seeded
from outside of our planet and, you know, take that for what it is. But the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that. So that's interesting,
but in terms of, you know, aliens visiting us, I don't know, it does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think we're important enough for some advanced species
to give a shit about us. Statistically speaking, the
universe is way too big. We can't be the only sentient beings. There's gotta be somebody else out there whether they care about
us, that's a question. I've been on "Ancient
Aliens" a number of times. I show up and, you know, I'm an educator. I mean, refusing to be part of the conversation's an
immediate fail in my book. But there was one time where
they asked me at the end, you know, do you have anything
else that you wanna say? And I said, well, you know, yeah. Y'all's premise is that aliens
came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these
wonderful gifts of, you know, science and medicine,
engineering, all these things. Today we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down, but now all they're
doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks. Like whatever we did, we super
pissed them off, apparently. - The quality of the gifts
has decreased rapidly. What it's an interesting
thought you've mentioned. What archeologically would you have to see to be like, this might be an alien? - A technology that doesn't belong there, first and foremost. I mean, you know, we gotta, if we just run with the premise
that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from
somewhere far away to here, that was almost certainly mechanical. Now, you know, I love the
aliens thing where, you know, biomechanical is something
that certainly could be and that would, you know,
that would disintegrate. We wouldn't see that at all. But I would expect some kind of technology that showed up out of the
blue and changed things. That would be something. But I would think, you know, mechanical. Or, you know, a substance
that's not from here. - But of course we would
only see the results of that mechanical, you mean like literally
a mechanical thing? - Right, some sort of thing like that. The typical thing people
say is like, you know, how did they move these
giant stones, right? But, you know, just look at that on the face for a second. Aliens come from across
the universe to meet humans and the thing they tell
them is how to move rocks. Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, you know, like
give them antibiotics or a combustion engine or something. They came across the universe and they showed 'em how to move big rocks. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that just doesn't make any sense. - What do you think Earth will look like 10,000 years from now? - That's a interesting question. I think it will be a lot more automated or it'll be a smoldering pile. I mean, there is a possibility
we could end ourselves. There's always that possibility that we've really opened
Pandora's box in some regards. I did listen to one of your podcast guests with the what would happen
in the case of nuclear war. That was chilling. Her opinion was certainly
we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes apparently. So we have that capacity, that's scary. That's a possible future
for us, but I'm an optimist. You know, I'd like to think that guys like you are
gonna make friendly robots who make my job better. - But a thousand, 10,000
years is a long time and technology is improving and becoming more advanced rapidly, and the rate of that improvement
is increasing evermore. - That's the part that
frightens me actually. I dunno, does that frighten you? - Yeah, it's terrifying.
- You know, I heard somebody say, I forget who it was, but, you know, systems of any kind, human systems, biological
systems can be put on a graph that's change over time. And any graph that the change is way
faster than the time. And the line starts going straight up. That is a system in crisis in almost any biological system that has that fast change
over that little a time. Any other thing, you'd
describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change, it's a crisis. - From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human ingenuity that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with ways to get out of that difficult situation. And in so doing, innovate and
create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering, but on the whole, on
average, make a better world. But yeah, you know, like
with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might actually
lead to the death of everybody. - I guess there's always that chance. But I am an optimist. You know, I think you're an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said, I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more innovative than when we're under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands
of years have been about, you know, we didn't change the world when we were comfortable, it
was when we were in crisis. Mother necessity is the
mother of invention. And I think we'll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I'm gonna answer a question that you didn't even ask me. I think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this. We're delusional, I'm
all for electric cars and, you know, being good
stewards of the environment, but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting
to what's about to happen. We're spending too much
time pretending, you know, the average American thinks if we all just drive
electric cars, we'll be okay. That's bullshit, that's not gonna happen. We need to start making
technologies that desalinize water, that, you know, a host
of things that we need to use our technological
capacity to accept it and adapt instead of Pollyanna thinking we can make it go away. - Yeah, yeah, kind of accept
that the world will change and a lot of big problems will arise and just develop technology
that addresses them. - I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we're gonna survive this. Not that we're gonna make it go away. - And not just survive, thrive. Again, we're pretty
innovative in that regard, but if some catastrophic thing happens or we just leave this planet, what do you think would be found by aforementioned alien civilizations when they visit. The anthropologist, the
grad student anthropologist that visit Earth and study, how much of what we now have and love and think of
as human civilization will be lost, do you think? - Well, you know, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you know, you didn't
put a time element in there, but I would say that, you know, everything that can perish will, and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn't perish. So we'll have, you know,
buildings, plaques, but they won't have any books. They won't have any, you know, billboards. They'll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a talk in Sioux Falls and I said, you know, I drove in here and there was a big obelisk
in front of the town and everywhere I go, I see
the names Lewis and Clark. And a thousand years from now, if I was an archeologist
investigating this place, I would think that it was
founded by the Egyptians and their kings were
named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know, Lewis and Clark stayed one night here, but it's just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about
what I thought about your town based on what preserved. - That's so beautiful
as a thought experiment. Like what would archeologists
be really wrong about and what would they could
possibly be right about. - Washington DC was clearly
made by a combination of the Egyptians and the
Greeks and the Romans, because that's what all
the architecture is. - Yeah, and would they be able to reconstruct the important empires, the powerful empires
and the warring empires. - For that matter, have me and my colleagues
done that at all? I'm almost certain that the
Maya would just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were. - I wonder, do you ever
think about like what we just as a human civilization
are wrong about the most, like mainstream archeology,
just like a suspicion, what could we get completely wrong? Well, one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civilization. Like an obviously gigantic
civilization that was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago. - There's certainly that
there could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change
the way we think about things. - And everybody knew they existed and everybody interact with 'em. - I think that's our estimation of their motivations that
we're probably most wrong on. My teacher Sheila, a long time ago said, you know, I've come up
with all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about
stuff and she looked at me and she said, if you don't stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put
yourself in the mindset of these people, you will
never understand any of it. Which I've always taken to
heart, I mean, I really do. When I approach these
things, I try to step out of my cultural assumptions, try to think like they would think as the best I could. And it's very different. I mean this whole, you
know, the Maya are cyclical, you know, the whole sacrifice, were so, you know, obsessed with that. But, you know, that was a
austere actual sacrifice on their part. They weren't just, you know,
hey, let's all get together and kill that guy that's pissing us off. I mean, they were like, you
know, giving the best of them. It was a different mentality,
this was not brutal. This was a, you know, bonafide sacrifice on their part, a loss. - Plus the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts
having sex with this. - I tell you, that one,
I'm gonna unweave that one, one of these days. - Now that puppy appeared on pottery. - All over pottery. He's everywhere, I gotta write this book. This next year is the year I'm gonna write my fanged deity book. And I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy. - Mystery solved, I mean, it could just be the
birth of memes, of humor. I don't know, I mean,
again, humor, you don't know what the nature of their
humor, of what their jokes are. - Oh, that's a neat one
too, and that's so human. You know, I'll tell you a
little like side story here that when I worked with the
Maya people in Palenque, I spent three years making
this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day. And they would talk to each
other in their own language. It was tseltal was the
group I was working with. But I noticed after a
while, they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes and
they would laugh at jokes, but then they would also, one
of them would say something and the other ones would go, hoo hoo. And I eventually asked,
you know, what is that? Why do you guys always
make that hoo hoo noise? And he said, that's 'cause
he made a really smart pun. It was like he said three
different things at once. It was a turn of phrase that was smart. And they didn't make laughs at that. It was, they had a noise for when somebody said
something just super clever. So there's also that like, you know, just clever turn of speech. - Yeah, wit. - And I think about that when
I'm a hieroglyphic translator. Like, here's a beautiful thing
that's gonna be like a poem or a political statement. Like, and I'm just plottingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means. There's probably double, triple entendres all through this text. And the real meaning is the subtext. And I'm, you know, I'm thinking
they're talking about corn and they're talking
about the nature of life. - Yeah, it could be satire,
it could be, you know, as it was in the Soviet Union
when there's a dictator, maybe there's a overpowering king. You're not allowed to actually speak. You have to hide the thing you're actually trying
to say in the subtext. So, and all of that. - There was a funny Maya ceramic that had, the ceramics are neat 'cause they don't, the monuments can be
kind of broken records. I'm the king, I was born this
time, I beat these people up. I married this woman, I died. But the ceramics will
tell us like things out of mythology stories. And there was this one
with a rabbit looking at the merchant god, and nobody
could translate the text. And finally this eastern European, actually a Ukrainian guy translated it and the rabbit's saying
to the merchant god, bend over and smell my ass. And like, oh man, we were expecting this
wonderful piece of mythology. But no, it translates bend
over and smell my ass. That's great, that's human. - As we mentioned previously,
human nature does not change. You mentioned Palenque, mapping it. Just outta curiosity, what is that process like,
it seems fascinating. - Oh, it was a great
adventure, I loved it. But it was difficult. I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow. I don't know how, I don't know how badly, where on my body it will
occur, but it's gonna happen because it was the jungle. - So in the jungle,
what's the process like? Like what do you have to do to map it? - Well, it was tricky too because it was also a national forest. So the forestry department didn't want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut
tunnels through the foliage and I would, we'd map everything twice. The first thing we'd do is
I'd go in, find a building, draw it on a piece of graph paper, and I'd say like, you
know, you guys go north, you guys go east, west,
find other buildings, and when you find them
pace back to this one. And so I'd start making a map and I'd make the whole, one
piece of graph paper was enough to then we'd bring the machine in, we'd bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information. But on that piece of
paper, I would write like, don't bring the machine this way. There's a tree fall or stand
on top of this building and you'll see four different buildings at once from this one. - And all of this is in dense jungle. - Right, and the deeper
we got off the road, the deeper it was, sometimes
it would clear out, but certain places, if it was low, it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast. Sometimes we would cut just
tunnels through tall grass and we'd come back like five
days later and they were gone. We couldn't even find
where our trails were. They would grow back that fast. - But you see the
building so you could see. - Right, and that was the fun part. I mean, sometimes it would just be like a little neighborhood
with little low buildings, no bigger than this table,
but sometimes, you know, just five more meters in. And I'm standing under a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I've just found another one. And some days, you know, on good days we'd find three pyramids. And I felt that's such a more exciting job than the typical excavations. Although my buddies were all
just, you know, in a hole for the whole week in
the middle of the city and where I'm dancing
around through the jungle, I could find, you know,
10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today, who knows. - What's that feel like
to find like a pyramid or buildings that you are
one of the only humans that are not from that civilization
to ever see this thing? What's that feel like? - It's great, I love that feeling. I am, you know, I'm an explorer at heart, so finding something like that, you know, when I was 25 years old,
I found a whole Maya city. I got to name it, its name is Ma'ax Na, it's off in the Belizean jungle. And that was just, just outrageous. I mean, it almost, that
one almost depressed me. My entire, like, I had
this great life ambition that I would find a lost city. And then I did it at 25 and I was like, God, now what do I do? I thought that was supposed
to take me my whole life. I actually, I wrote a bunch
of letters to NASA trying to get them to let me be the
first archeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back. I'm sure I'm on NASA's
list as some weirdo. - How'd you find a Mayan city? - I used a topography map of the area and I played the game. If I was a Maya, where
would my favorite place to live in this big area be? I looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of
their pyramids tunwits, stone mountains, I knew
they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right
next to it that made a triangle. And they loved those triads and there were rivers in between them. And I thought, that's it. That's where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over
two seasons with students. The other grad students were like, he's just having his students just wander in the jungle all day, but
I came back with the city. - So given that you've looked into the deep pasts of humanity, what gives you hope about our future, maybe our deep future of
this human civilization? - That's a good one, and I do have hope. I do have hope, I believe
in the spirit of humankind. I, as a person who have studied history, I kind of feel like history
does kind of a sine wave. There's highs and there's lows, but no matter how low we go, we get up again and we climb. And I think that humanity
will continue that, we will rise to the challenges. Now, some of the challenges
may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome. That's what we do. - Yeah, humans find a way, right? That's like, that's the
thing you see with history, even when the empires collapse. The humans that come outta that, they pick themselves up
and find another way. - And the people I study
believe in the cyclical nature of life that you really can't, life can't continue without
death being part of the cycle. We get our lows, we get our highs, but the cycle continues forever. - I should mention that you
have a lot of great lectures on the great courses, but you
have also an amazing podcast, ArchaeoEd, if people wanna listen to it, this is a tough question, but what would you recommend, what episodes should they
listen to, what's the entry? - Oh, that is a tough question. - What is the sampling? You know, it's like asking a chef, like what's the best stuff on the menu? - Well, different strokes
for different folks. You know, I do two different
things on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you've never heard about. I start off by saying it's my podcast and I'll talk about whatever
the heck I wanna talk about. Sometimes I talk about
really specific things like a tool type or an animal type. But my favorite ones have become, when I just tell my
stories of my adventures, I've got a lot of weird adventure stories and it's been fun and they've
been very well received. I've got, you know, I
can put my humor in there and I can talk about, you know, the things that went right, the things
that went wrong, the adventures that I had are all part
of this ArchaeoEd thing. And ArchaeoEd's kind of a double entendre. It's me, I'm just Ed,
but it's also education. You know what I'm really
trying to do with this too, it's specifically the Americas. I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these
great civilizations here, especially North America. I think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before Europe showed up,
that's simply not true. I think it should be part
of our history books. In fact, I have a program
called Before the Americas that would introduce as
part of American history, the part before European contact. And I think that kids in the K through 12 level should grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before
we showed up in 1492. And one of these days
I'm gonna find a funder to help us put together
Before the Americas and we're gonna make it
part of the curriculum for every kid in the US to know the full history of this country. - That's a great project,
Ed, thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put out into the world and I can't wait to hear your new course. - Thank you so much, Lex,
it was a real pleasure. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some
words from Joseph Campbell. "Life is but a mask worn
on the face of death and is death then, but another mask, how many can say asks the Aztec poet that there is or is not a truth beyond?" Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.