Ep 616 - The Four Heavens (feat. David Stuart)

- All right, we're live. David Stewart, thank you for coming, man. - Thanks for having me. - I'm pumped, man.

I've never met an archeologist before.

- Well, yeah, it's a fun job, I gotta say. - Do you like to play in the dirt? - Absolutely, I love it. - When I was a kid, I decided that was what I wanted to do, and luck, I'm really lucky because I can do it,

as a grown-up. - Well, your parents are both archeologists too. - Yeah, my dad and my mom were both archeologists, and worked for National Geographic, in the magazine, back in the heyday of all of that.

So, they took us on trips, me and my brothers and sister.

“You know, that's how I got exposed to this stuff,”

was like going to Mexico and Guatemala back in the '70s, getting exposed to these fantastic ruins before they were turned into big tourist sites. - Yeah, yeah. - Sometimes, right?

And I just caught the bug, I just wanted to do more about it, and seeing what my dad was doing, what my mom was doing, I just wanted to keep on with that. - Nice. - Yeah, I mean, by the way, too,

we have vowed with us here today. Josh couldn't make it. Josh is actually getting, I believe, a colonoscopy. - Very important, yeah. - Someone's doing some excavating in his butt areas.

He's asleep right now and someone's looking for secrets in his butt and deciphering the text. - That's pretty cool though, man. And so like, you know, and from reading your book, by the way, the four heavens, I have it right here.

- History, a new history of the ancient mine, not the old, not the BS from before. - That's right.

“- But from reading your book, it was like,”

back, I guess when your dad was doing it, it was kind of amazing. I didn't realize how much of, you know, their history was completely unknown and lost, and I guess there was little bits and pieces.

I kind of struck me about how people were just like, even the people who lived there were just like, - Oh, no one really knew. - And this is still kind of the case in terms of people's awareness, right?

So I think it's fair to say it's new in terms of not being out there in the public arena. And certainly in Mexico, you know, there are plenty of my people around today, but they don't have much of a sense of their own history.

- Yeah. - And I find that really sad in something that needs to be fixed and corrected. So there's a Spanish edition coming out, you know, and I hope word gets out about this stuff,

and it gets into the schools and everything. But you're right. When my dad was, you know, an archaeologist and working in Maya ruins, when I was a kid, there was no history, you know.

So we've been through this amazing time in the last 50 years where we've kind of gone from zero to 100 in terms of knowing the names of kings and knowing the Dynasties and how they all, kind of game of thrones history of all these different kingdoms.

And it's the oldest history anywhere in the Americas, which is pretty mind-boggling. - And that's also crazy 'cause like, you know,

you always see stuff, and I don't know,

I always hear things on like TV and YouTube where it's like some claim they go back to like 60 million, you know, something like crazy. 'Cause I mean, I must have really chapped your ass, watch an ancient aliens back in the day.

Did you like that show? - Yeah, you know, I've been asked to be on that show several times. - Really? - And you wanna play ball about the outer space travel

or what was it planned? - Well, the thing is, I know from experience that, well, I should say, that show to me is just nonsense. - Really? - The real human story of these places

“and the monuments is, I think, the real story”

that it just is compelling. But yeah, I mean, I was invited to be on a few of those shows and what I realize from a long time ago is that when you get interviewed for a show like that as an expert quote and quote.

- Yeah. - Of course you have no control over how they're gonna edit it or how they're gonna display what you say or talk to you up. - Yeah, I think it ever sucks.

Actually, you spend your whole life trying to be incredible.

- Yeah, so I actually had friends and colleagues who, you know, so yeah, I'll do that show, you know, and I kind of get that, right? You wanna be out there and talk, but then they just kind of manipulate whatever you're gonna say,

for their generative, right? But yeah, I mean, as someone who studies the Maya and has been around the people has been around these amazing sites in Mexico and Guatemala, Belize, you know, the whole ancient aliens narrative,

it's coming from another place, it's coming from our, you know, kind of background and trying to struggle how to explain these places. That's an old struggle that goes back hundreds of years actually, but the thing is now, we have the history,

this is what people don't realize. We have the names of the people who built these monuments.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And they're doing the same stuff we do,

they have the same concern to we do. - Yeah, it was kind of cool 'cause it really goes, from what you guys have found it goes almost back, well, I guess further back or about the same is like, guys, we know about ancient Greece.

Like it goes like, what is it like? - 200 AD, yeah, so the written history we have goes back to about, not quite as far as ancient, you know, classical Greece, but let's say to about 300, 200 AD, okay, it's pretty far back.

- Yeah, I mean, it's 1200 years before Columbus. And the archeology goes back further than that in terms of seeing what people are doing on the ground and, you know, tracking how they develop over time. So we hit the story kind of midstream

in terms of being able to read about what they're writing about, what's preserved.

And that's where we have to kind of fill in the blanks

in terms of, you know, stuff they didn't write about, you know, maybe they didn't write about their, their economic situation and they didn't write about, you know, what was going on in their world beyond just the, the, the, the, the aristocrats.

They were the ones who were writing, right? And so we're literate, so it's what we have,

“I think it's super exciting, but it's not the whole picture.”

- Yeah, and then, you know, I guess there was the, I, I've like heard about this guy, Diego DeLanda. - Right, who burnt all the books? - Yeah, yeah. - I mean, do you ever just like said it night

and I just kind of curr, do you ever really get mad at that guy? 'Cause he kind of did like ruin the whole thing. - He ruined a lot, yeah. So, so this guy, he was a Franciscan friar, who later became the bishop of Yucaton,

back in the 16th century. And, he, you know, he's vilified because he burnt a lot of the Maya books and smashed their, you know, what he called the idols and so forth and he caused a lot of damage.

And the way he was doing his job at the time, - Sure. - That's what they were there for. We've lost a lot of culture and a lot of history indigenous culture because of that.

But, there's one thing I will say about Landa. He was in a way, a curious figure. He was curious about the stuff he was trying to stamp out. Which sounds a little weird, but he wrote this book

that is basically a compilation of facts about

the world of the Maya before the Spanish era arrived. - I had that book in my house. I just like happened, I didn't, you know, I was funny when I was reading your book, and I go have that. I read like a little bit of it.

- Yeah. - And yeah, he does kind of does strike you as he was like recounting whatever history had or something. - Yeah, he was talking to people and he was getting, these are unique accounts that we have.

And without his book, this manuscript that was just found randomly back in the 1800s in a library in Spain. Without Landa's book, we'd be really up a creek in terms of understanding the Maya. So I have to give him some credit,

despite the fact that he did a lot of damage at the time like most Spanish priests of that era, it was this kind of give-and-take. I mean, they were trying to stamp out the idolatry, the non-Catholic rituals they were seeing,

but they were almost like anthropologists of their time. They were writing down stuff that otherwise would just be lost. - Yeah, and what was like the,

“I remember I read about Cortez and the Aztecs,”

and I was like the ritual human sacrifice. Was that the Mayans, was that kind of life? - They did some of that. - Sure, maybe not on the scale of the Aztecs, or at least on the scale of what the Spanish talk about

for the Aztecs. Some of that's exaggerated. - Yeah, I've heard that. - But the sacrifice was real. It was part of their, in Missile America in general,

we study that, we acknowledge it. One of the things about sacrifice that's hard for us to think about is that, and here I'm kind of thinking about examples that I have come across in my own research.

For the Maya, for example, there were ritual executions of war captives, and that's kind of cross-cultural. - Yeah, I mean, I call that sacrifice. - Yeah, but it's like a Roman gladiator arena,

or which is very performative and very ritualized, but it's a way of kind of dealing with your enemies and your captives in this kind of, this way of going about executing them, right? - Yeah, I mean, that's like pretty common.

I mean, even the Spanish were like cutting people's heads off. - Of course. - Of course.

“- I think the cannibalism thing is what gets people,”

kind of, if they were, I don't know if they ever munching. - But if you're also thinking just munching, I think there was some of that in ancient Mesoamerica, in the Americas, it's in a lot of places in the world.

it was not time ago, I'm not. - Yeah, it's certainly, it is. Harder up our heads around in some ways, but the indigenous people in the 1600s, and 1500s were also recounting their own background,

and their own histories, and they sometimes talked about that, or drew pictures of it. And in some scholars today dismiss it as exaggeration, I think it actually did happen.

- Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, even when they, 'cause I, you know, like when Cortez got there,

he was, he hit the Yucatan first.

- I think they didn't. - They didn't interact with the Mines or something, - That's all true.

“- All true for the Essex, you guys are the Yucatan, right?”

- Yeah, and a lot of the, there was two other expeditions that got pretty much awarded the Spanish, it's Spanish before him, right? - Yeah, that era is so interesting. - You know, these crazy expeditions, these guys,

who had just head off into the horizon, not knowing where they were going. - Yeah. - And the early expeditions, you know, they hit the coast of Yucatan,

and they didn't know where they were, or they didn't expect to see mainland right there, and the Maya are there. And yeah, they have these battles, that the Spanish more often than not get trounced.

- Yeah. - They have to head back to Cuba and then try again, and then they go back and try again, and eventually Cortez gets his group together.

- Finally, that was the one thing you always hear

“about Cortez, where the popular consensus”

people say is saying, oh, he just showed up, and he tricked the guy and the handed it over to him, and I was like, no, it was a pretty long kind of gruesome, protracted battle for like, I mean, there was like years. Years, yeah, I mean, the whole story of that

of Cortez's adventure. I'm still waiting for the big Hollywood epic movie of this. I because it's one of the greatest stories in all of history. It has a lot of painful parts to it for sure. It has a lot of drama,

but you can read firsthand accounts of it, too, that not only Cortez wrote, but one of his soldiers wrote this amazing firsthand book of his memoirs of that encounter. And it's like a science fiction novel.

- Yeah. - It's like these guys landing on another planet, and they have to go through this process. And it's long like you say. It took years for Cortez to arrive on the shore of Mexico

and then to overthrow the Aztec Empire. - Yeah. - Not a lot of years. It was kind of a short time in two and a half years. But even after that, it took a while to kind of solidify their presence

and to establish, you know, new Spain is what they called it. So that story is one of not just the Spanish coming in and beating people over the heads. Cortez had to, you know, they were just a few hundred guys. They had to make alliances with people of the Aztecs,

who hated the Aztecs. That's how he was successful. - Yeah, you know, there was this city-state called Clashgala. It's now a beautiful town in Mexico. Not far from Mexico City, but that was the center of a kingdom.

Cortez passed through it, actually, ward with them. Eventually, they realized, hey, they could together fight the Mexica, the Aztecs, you know, of Tenochtitlan. And so that's a whole drama.

That's part of this story, right? And yeah, I just find it amazing.

I always go back and read excerpts of that story,

just because it reads like an awful. It's like hydroma. - It's really, it's kind of amazing.

“Especially with the, who's the, I think Aguilera was the guy”

who got stranded out there, father Aguilera got stranded and lived among them, spoke the language and happened to, you know, he was a slave for like six years. - Yeah. - And then it's so stumbled upon, that's like the most, that's not one story.

I'm like surprised, no one's ever done. - Well, the right, this is another movie that's one has to make. In fact, I think there's scripts that have been-- - That's cool. - Bandit about in Hollywood for a while,

about that story and the Cortez. But the Aguilera story, yeah. So Cortez, when he first arrives on the coast of Yucatan, the Maya that they are in contact with, realize, wait a minute, we've seen one of these weirdos before.

Who was like floating in a boat. And the Maya realized, oh, there's the slave. Who's the one of these bearded white guys who speaks the same language, right? And so they get him, they bring him in and communicate.

And it turns out, it was the shipwrecked Spanish sailor, who by that time was fluent in speaking Maya.

Cortez now has someone who can communicate for him.

“Without that, Cortez would not have been able to go very far.”

But the other part of this, it's an amazing story.

Eventually, they link up with another Maya kingdom, and interact with them. And this is where Malvinche comes from. This is the woman who eventually becomes Cortez's mistress.

- Yeah. - The strangles of his life. - The strangles of his life. - Right, she says, she speaks Maya, and she speaks the language of the Aztecs.

- Yeah. - So between those two, Aguilar and between the Spanish sailor and Malinche, they can actually converse. And Cortez is a master manipulator, right?

That comes across and all these stories. And he's talking to the Aztecs emperors and through these two. And they're actually having conversations. So it's just amazing to me that that all came together.

- Yeah. - And it was just by chance in some ways. But again, that's part of how extraordinary this story is.

- Yeah, and in your book, the part of it I never even

thought about was like, and I thought it was pretty cool that you document it was like the effort it took to decipher those like Maya and symbols and texts. And I still don't understand that you're saying like, 'cause you get, they're like higher glyphs.

They're phonetic, but also they're like, I was something I was like trying to wrap my head around when they have like sounds almost like a consonant, but then it's also just like a pictogram where it's like, this is the thing and they're, I don't know,

that was like throwing me off. I don't know how you guys did that. - Yeah, it is a little confusing. And so this is my specialty, this is what I work on, more than anything else is decoding Maya higher glyphs.

- So you literally like can look at this, and that's like, that's my drawing. - That's my drawing.

- You know what this means?

- Yeah, yeah. - You know how to do it. - That's crazy. - And it's beautiful stuff, right? I mean, visually, it's really cool.

- Cool looking. - Yeah. - Actually, this is one of the things that drew me in as a kid, 'cause by dad, I remember asking my dad, he was finding in the 70s when we were working

in this, Maya site called Coba, which is near to loom. I remember he a couple of times he found new carved tablets. And they had higher glyphs on them. And I would say, dad, what is this?

You know what, what does this say? And he's like, I don't know, I don't know, nobody can read them. And that caught me, I was like, that's interesting. And so, you know, I was really intrigued, they looked like cartoons,

they looked like, yeah, I was a board nine-year-old. Also, like, I was like crazy. - Yeah, I just, you know, I just started drawing them and copying that a book that my dad had. Just been kind of interested in what they were,

that it was like, instead of poking on cards, it was my eye or gloves, you know, for me.

“I mean, like that, so, you know, that's what caught me.”

And I got kind of obsessed with them and was asking people that my dad knew, you know, and they were like, well, we can't read these. So, it turned out that, you know, I was seeing some new patterns

other people hadn't seen, there were other people who I got to know who were also kind of on the cutting edge of stuff. And by the 80s, 90s, there were a handful of us who were these young, some people called us the young Turks,

you know, we were these up and coming guys who were new that we were onto something. And we knew we were making in reds. And so, that was a heavy time. I was so lucky to time my entry into this world.

- Yeah. - And my dad was sort of like, you know, he was like, he wasn't involved, he wasn't pushing me into any of this. It was just my own kind of interest. And he was like, hey, that's great.

What you're doing, and I think he was a little weird out at times, you were deciphering things right in the left, all of a sudden, you know, the words for names of kings and the word for chocolate, you know, which is written all over the vases, you know.

- Did you know Avocado was in my entire meter? - That kind of threw me for a loop. - Yeah, well, Avocado is, we borrowed that word from know what, which is the language of the Aztecs. - Oh, okay, that's what it was.

“- That's what it was in Aztecs, that's pretty insane.”

- Yeah, so a lot of these words for foods. Cacao is a myoward, so that's written in higher glyphs. And to go back to you, question them at about the sounds and the pictures, yeah, they're elaborate looking, but when you, when you cut to the chase,

they're spelling words and they're writing them as sounds. So, you can, the visuals distract you.

We see pictures of, you know, human figures and birds

and stuff, stuff like that in Egyptian, but they're also phonetic.

“There's just, you have to know the language to read it.”

So, you know, we really perfected our ability to read the language behind the higher glyphs. And it's a language we can connect to the language that's spoken today in that area. And by the mid 90s, I would say we could read maybe 80

or 90% of my attacks. - That's crazy, especially when you, the one thing, and if I have this right, was like, you can have different symbols, similar symbols, but different for the same sound, which I was like,

do that's pretty good.

- Yeah, yeah, well, that's crazy.

- It gets crazy because, and this is what, I hope kind of workout was just how ridiculously complex the visuals are compared to the actual system. So, you can, if they wanted to write the word "cacao", okay, for that's for chocolate.

Okay, they will write that with sounds. Cacao, wow, three, higher glyphs. Now, this is a great example because, as it turns out, you can write the sound "cah" one of a couple of ways, with two different kind of pictures.

One of them is a fish, and the other one is this thing it looks like a little comb, hair comb, but it's actually the fin of a fish. So it's the same sign. But anyway, they write it as a fish,

“and the fish is like, what does that have to do with chocolate?”

Well, it's because the fish is the sound "cye" word, the word for fish is "cye", right? So, that's where they get the ca sound to ca ca, what they're distracting you, writing the word, using the picture of a fish, but that's just how they do it.

And so, if you sweep through, get past all the artistic, sort of bells and whistles, there's a lot of them. You get down to the words, and that took a long time to figure out. Yeah, I was shocked, you know, I mean, I obviously make sense, but there was the, so was there a definitive kind of like deciphering

codecs that kind of like made everything, like the other Zedostone's like that then? Yeah, well, the folks in Egypt had it easy. And for some of it, so we didn't have aero Zedostone. And that was, of course, the key in the 1800s for reading Egyptian.

We had some help. One of the things that helped us was going back to Bishop Landa. In his book, he had, and this is pretty funny, he had a, what he called the alphabet of the, of the, of the Maya people, right? And it's like ABCDE.

And, and it's crazy because they didn't have an alphabet. But yeah, Landa didn't get that. He didn't understand it.

“He was like, well, if they're writing, they must have an alphabet, right?”

What, what Landa didn't realize is that he was writing down Maya glyphs for the sounds. That makes sense, that's the, of the letters as they're pronounced in Spanish. Gotcha. So, uh, bae, say, um, day, right?

It's funny, there's a syllable, right? It's Spanish, like, notoriously phonetic language itself. I remember in Spanish class, they're like, however you look at this, this is how you pronounce it pretty much. For the, well, it's pretty, the phonetics of it are pretty straightforward.

You know, as an alphabetic thing, you know, it's, it's, it the vowels are all pretty consistent. Yeah. So, Landa was, was clearly flummished, trying to describe. He called it actually this cumbersome writing that the, the people have here in

Yucatan, and he couldn't get it. What he didn't realize was, the, the, the guy he was working with, the Maya guy who was writing down all this stuff for him, they were just talking past each other. They had no idea what each other was asking or provide.

I saw that in your book at one point. And one point the guy literally just said, I'm tired. I don't know how you write down. This is, this is hilarious. He writes down in the manuscript, uh,

Martin Kati, which means, I don't want to do this anymore. That's really funny actually. Yeah, because he's just like, he's, he's like, I'm out here. Yeah, this episode is brought to you by prize picks. The regular season's done in the NBA playoffs are here.

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“It's the most important moment of my life.”

Yeah, that'll be fucking nasty. And if it doesn't go well, I'm going to leave this earth. I'm going to get pyro underneath the stage and I'm going to tell them go ahead. Yeah, just send it. Play me.

I'm out.

Guys, I picked up some comedy club dates.

All summer long, we're going to be having fun together. I'll be 65 June 5th and 6th. I'll be at the Summit City Comedy Club Fort Wayne, Indiana. And that is, that's in just a few weeks. I ran into a buzz hole over there.

Did you really? Yeah. What did you have with Abby? I was just an absolute buzz hole. No, we're just hammered.

It's a fun club. Yeah, that'll be all be there in the dog days of the summer. Liberty Live, Huntsville, Alabama, the Stardom Comedy Club, Birmingham. I'm excited for that in Spokane, Comedy Club, Spokane, Washington. Also, it's not up yet, but I have a bunch of more dates, so check them out on Met McClosek.com.

Goodbye. Hey, so what's the earliest in terms of like, because you know, that was kind of cool. Reading about how they figured out how to kind of transcribe everything, but what's like the earliest story they have that you guys can look back on that has some narrative arcs. Yeah, so the earliest story of history that we can tap into is really the beginning of these

many dynasties. We're talking about the area that's now northern Guatemala, southern part of Yucatan. We can tell that there are a lot of these great cities that are starting up. Some of them are being abandoned. There's all these cycles of rises and falls, but there's this era around 200, 300 AD when

these dynasties kind of start up and they're often connected with each other. They're often rivals with each other and we can start to read names of kings. We can start to read some narratives about what they're doing. One of the big big episodes of my history that we know about now today was in the late 300s

in 378. There was this war. It was a conquest of this really amazing city in Guatemala.

We know of today as T. Call, major site. In fact, T. Call is the rubble moon base in the first Star Wars movie. George Lucas filmed the scene of the Millennium

“Falcon taking off from the jungle and I'm going to remember that scene with your news.”

That's great news, T. Call. You haven't four, I think it is in Star Wars, right? That is T. Call. So you filmed it there. Anyway, fun fact. In 378, the king of T. Call was conquered by these outsiders who were coming all the way from Central Mexico. They were coming from a place called T. T. T. Wachan, which is up in your Mexico City. And they had had a long relationship clearly. There's this long distance

intermarriages and stuff. But there came a point where something happened where they had to take this guy down. And so they go hundreds of miles into Guatemala to conquer him. And that sets off this whole other thing. So that history really picks up. Let's say in the fourth century, then we have a lot of detailed records after that for about four or five hundred years. We have thousands of texts we can read about

hundreds of different actors and players in this drama with a lot of different kingdoms. And it does become like game of thrones. Like I said, where you have alliances being forged, those alliances often are being turned around and their turncodes and their wars in between cousins and so forth. So it becomes this really dynamic world that,

“you know, again, 30, 40 years ago we couldn't talk about any of this. That's what's exciting.”

Yeah. And now we can match up the the places that we're reading about with the actual sites that, you know, we are exploring the jungle. So that's also really cool. We can match up the name of this ancient place to this site. Oh, so you have to kind of, you know, exactly where it was. And it wasn't like, I don't know if this is because of that, but that was, I was kind of struck by how a lot of the history comes from just, it was like written on the walls of buildings. Yeah.

Yeah. I think the buildings themselves held pretty much history or just, yeah, a lot of official stuff. Just like, you know, we do in a way, right? We have monuments in our parks and so forth with some

and carved it on stone. Otherwise, we'd be up a creek. Right? Because it doesn't preserve in the jungle. Yeah. They, they wrote on pottery ceramics. So we've a lot of that stuff. We don't have anything written on paper from that era. Yeah. Because it's not gonna preserve. Yeah, sure. The stuff we have, the

books we have, which is amazing, those are much later, right? This bandage actually collected those.

Okay. So yeah, we are, we're lucky to have what we have as a way I look at it. And they, so were they like a, that was the one thing I was trying to figure out too. Were they like a transient, like they would build these giant, like, you know, cities basically. And then they would just like abandon them. Is there any idea why they would do that? It was like a famine thing or they just

“would do that. Well, this is a huge question. And this is the thing that I think a lot of people”

think about when you think about the ancient Maya is this idea of collapse. And I often get this

question, like, well, what happened to them? Because, you know, didn't they disappear? And that's

a common narrative out there that the Maya, ancient Maya just disappeared, which is kind of problematic because the Maya are still around. Yeah, as a people they didn't disappear. But what did disappear is that around 900, 800 and 900 AD, a lot of their city, some of them really large with tons of thousands of people, they collapsed. We call this the Maya collapse. This is a question that we as archaeologists and academics have been struggling with for a long time. What happened?

So, Tikal, okay, the Star Wars moon-based place, that's a good example. Huge city, 80,000 people, maybe even 100,000 people who were living there, something like that, in the general area, between about 800 and 1,000, you're going from a vibrant city to nobody really living there.

“And it gets to be overground with jungle and then explores find it in the 1800s. What happened?”

So, this idea of a loss city, this is really where it comes from. It comes from the Maya, you know, explores in 1800s. I mean, talk about romantic exploration, you know, hacking you away through the jungle, very Indiana Jones. Yeah, that's in here as a 100-foot-high pyramid that no one says explored before. I mean, that's the reality of early days of my archaeology. So, this fed into this question, what happened? They fed into a lot of crazy ideas about maybe what happened.

Did they disappeared? Well, they did disappear from those places. Yeah, they moved on. So, one of the things I'm writing about in the book is, you know, what factors went into this? I think there were tipping points. It had to do with climate for sure because we have records of drought. We know that water was hard to come by in these places. It still is. Yeah. So, you can understand how these tipping points might come up. But big populations basically couldn't

sustain themselves in some of these places. And I think also the political system, kind of, fell apart. We can also track in the records. You know, the last 100 years of this era was

there was so much of warfare. And, you know, there had always been conflict and, you know, like any,

like medieval history. But you see it ramping up. And in the last few decades there, it's just incessant warfare. And I think the system just breaks down. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think the Maya had a lot of agency in deciding what to do, the people. And I think they just voted with their feet and decided to go off to do other things. So, this is the one of the things that I really want to try to do in my narrative about this is that it wasn't like some external thing that

came, you know, UFOs with beams taking it away. It's that the Maya were going through a crisis. And they had to make some very hard decisions no doubt to do something about their dire situation in many places. And they decided to leave. Have you seen the higher glyph of a guy who's

“like looks like he's in a rocket ship looking up, though? That was the only thing that I mentioned,”

aliens. It would show that 100. Oh, yeah. They keep feeling like duty is in a rocket ship. He took off. Right. So, this is the famous or infamous image of a Maya rocket. That is actually a lid of a coffin of a sarcophagus of a great ruler whose name was Kenny Chanapakau. And he rolled a place

tomb in the 1950s, you know, this beautiful coffin with this carving, there was kind of an

interesting situation. After they found it, of course, nobody could read the higher glyphs, right, in the '50s or the '60s. There were all these texts around the coffin. It wasn't until the '70s that we could sort of read the name. Maybe in the '80s and '90s, we could read actually what it was saying. I was talking about this great king, his birth date, his death date, all his ancestors, kind of waiting for him in the afterlife and all this stuff. The scene on the top

is of Kenny Chanapakau, the king. He's kind of taking off in a way, right? But what he's doing is he's raising as the son in the east. He's being resurrected. And he's not in a rocket, he's just emerging out of the earth, out of the kind of this maw, this cave, rising up as the son into the sky. And it's a really elaborate imagery, but that's in essence what it is. So it's really cool. Not a rocket ship, but not a rocket ship. He's going in the sky anyway.

I've never just, I was watching that as like a perpetually stoned young, right? Something being like,

I knew it is awesome. It must have been driving you nuts. It's like, yeah, what are you doing?

“What are you doing? I know, yeah, it does drive me nuts because, you know, well, here's the thing,”

right? Those narratives and, and it's not, long before ancient aliens, long before the show, right? There were movies, Eric Fundone again in his book, you know, "Tree So The Gods." Yeah, talking about all this stuff in the '70s. That was at a time when no one could come up with a counter narrative, right? So that takes hold. It fills a void, right, to explain this

stuff. Yeah. And now we can explain it. So this is the conundrum that I'm facing is, you know,

we do understand it, culturally, historically, but it is hard for us to fight against, you know, ancient aliens, which is on TV, almost every night, yeah, or whatever, right? That's what people, the people who are curious about this stuff generally curious don't have a whole lot to go to to understand it and they may come up with a show like ancient aliens and that's like, oh, okay, that must be the consensus view or something like that, right? Yeah, not knowing that

any archeologists thinks that's BS. Yeah. We're just not very good at communicating with the

“public to be honest. That's what we do know. Yeah. And I'll be the first one to say that academics”

are terrible at communicating some of the realities we think are, you know, that are out there, in terms of history and culture. So I mean, this book, I hope is a small effort to, you know, tell what's really going on to explain some of what we think we know. That's pretty. So in terms of like, you know, being in archeologists and like kind of like the, um, I guess like the day to day, like I just like give her a people because it is, you know, you're out there, you're digging,

like you have people who like break stuff all the time and like how do you do? That must be, that must be like really tough, like how really high stakes of like a, yeah, yeah, it's, so archeology is, well, it is a lot of fun. You're out in the, in the bunnies,

“often living in a camp with a bunch of people for months at a time. That's what I was doing”

in my younger days at least, um, you know, in remote places. And it is a little crazy. I mean, you're, you're, you're studying the, this ancient stuff, but you're also kind of isolated and, you know, I just remember living in the jungle before there was any internet or anything like that, you know, you kind of go a little bit in it. Yeah. But also, um, yeah, they're, when you're digging, not necessarily a big parameter. So I mean, let's just say you're digging a ancient house.

And it might be a pile of rocks. It's a couple of feet high, you know, a platform in the jungle. There's pottery everywhere. There's a lot of stones, you know, wall stones. It's boring. Maybe, um, even for a specialist, it can be kind of boring. Yeah. You don't find cool things every day. Maybe once in a while, there's something. Um, and usually, in my experience,

I'm sure what do we do? Like a tomb, you know, a royal tomb or something. Yeah. This is typical,

right? Cause, you know, after you dig deep deep in a lot of time passes, then you find the cool stuff. So it can be stressful that way if you find something special. There's a lot of bureaucracy involved.

“Yeah. You have to let people know what you found in the government. Yeah. I tried to.”

And you mean, you need to get guards down to protect it. I was wondering about the theft, because I imagine it's like, you guys have a pretty decent sized crew digging. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine, you know, if I was just there digging, that wasn't archeologists. I would definitely snag like an old mug. Like, you know, you'd want to, right? Well, I know for a fact

that stuff does get taken by the laborers we sometimes have or, you know, back in the old day,

archeologists were notorious themselves for stealing stuff, you know, in a way that probably, at the time, maybe didn't seem unethical, but, you know, 100 years ago, archeologists working in Mexico, you know, you'd go to their archives and you'd actually find artifacts that they brought out. You know, you wouldn't do that today. No, yeah. But what's the penalty? You just get like, lose your like license? Like how do you, yeah. Nowadays, it's as a professional archeologist.

“You all artifacts have to be catalogued. You have to report them to, if you're working in a foreign”

country. Of course, you have to report everything you have and that you've found. But, you know, there are, there's a dark side to all of this, too, which is like the art market in the market in looting ancient sites. And that's what we're often fighting again, sometimes directly, you know, looters in the field. I've come across gangs of looters in northern Guatemala who were tunneling in the pyramids looking for tombs. Yeah, that's my next question. What do you do for,

I guess you just said, you get security around the site, because I'd be kind of like nervous. I thought, yeah, I drew a little bit of a mile on a digging precious artifacts. I would assume someone's going to be like, yeah, let me get that. Yeah, yeah. The tunnel underneath it. Yeah, well, this is what we do, too, as archeologists, we have to tunnel into, if the building is large enough and stable enough,

“that's the best way to understand its history is to actually start digging a tunnel,”

it's like you're mining. Yeah, you know, into a pyramid. And the looters do the same thing. So the irony of a lot of this, too, is that the guys that archeologists have trained to dig when we go home, they don't have a lot to do necessarily. And they're like, hey, let's go to the thing. We know how to dig these things now. Yeah. And they go to town. And so this actually is what happened a lot in the 70s and 80s. Like, there isn't an ancient Maya building in northern Guatemala,

it doesn't have a trend right through it, mostly by looting. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really sad. But a lot of the stuff you see in museums today in the States, fantastic Maya pottery or whatever, a lot of that's not dug by archeologists, but found by looters sold on the art market, collected by either museums or private collectors. I understand that because it's beautiful stuff. Yeah, if I had the money and wasn't archeologists, I would understand, you know, I'd love to have

Maya chocolate based in my living room. Yeah. So there's, there's, there's that constant struggle, right? There aren't enough archeologists to go around. And there are a lot of people who are really interested in digging the stuff up, who maybe aren't scientists. And, you know, what's interesting is that all of this kind of becomes as big mix. It becomes this way of, of accessing the ancient

past. It may not always be through archeology, but I'll tell you, the stuff in museums now that

maybe doesn't have any context to it or we don't know where it's from exactly. Sometimes those objects have stories to tell that we can read or we can figure out, we can reconstruct it. And, and so that's part of it, too, right? I do a lot of work with museums instead of digging in the dirt, because, uh, and there's still not enough of us doing this kind of research, frankly, so it's overwhelming. Yeah, as you're saying, there's just like a ton of stuff that's

been found and it's just the matter of taking the time to decipher. Right, figure out. Yeah, yeah, we have thousands of, it's like having a bookcase or a library of thousands of books and there may be, I don't know, 10 or 15 of us who can read them. Yeah. And, you know, we have jobs and other things

this stuff out. So, in terms of, like, you know, um, do you guys have a good sense of like what the

minds, I guess, like philosophy, the religious world view was and, you know, where were they at and how how do they compare to, like, as tax or is there, like, big differences or, yeah, great question.

“So, we do know a lot about my, uh, philosophy and, and religion. I think it's hard to distinguish”

those things. Yeah. Um, and it is a lot like the Aztecs because they're all part of the same kind of Mesoamerican world, which is sort of like, you know, think of Greece and Rome, or the Mediterranean world, where, um, a lot of those myths and religious ideas are kind of the same,

but maybe with different flavors. Same idea. Um, one of the things that excites me and, and I'm thinking

of my next book, actually, a little bit, um, is one about this about my, uh, religion and philosophy. Because as much as we can read about kings and wars and dynasties, we can also read about their gods and about their outlook on the world and their cosmology. And the Maya of today have a lot of the same ideas about, you know, the way the sun moves around the sky and how that creates this kind of overall structure of the universe and that structure is reflected in a lot of other things.

There's this really elegant cosmology to these folks and it's not just a Mesoamerica. I think a lot of it is indigenous, American about the structure of the world and they, they were observing their world just like scientists do, like they didn't have the tools of modern science, but they were smart and they could see how the world was working, the patterns of the seasons and of time

“and of agriculture and this kind of cadence of the world around them that, that's what created”

their philosophy. It's rooted in literally, rooted in kind of the earth and in the sky and not to get too abstract about it. This, this is stuff that really I find fascinating because it's, it's like an archetype, you know, it's like one of these things that a lot of cultures share, even beyond the Americas. I mean, if you go to traditional societies in China or, or, or philosophy there in Asia, in Africa, you see a lot of the same ideas about cosmology and structure

that, I don't know, we've kind of forgotten some of this stuff in our world, but I don't know, if you're a farmer in a traditional society and you're relying on the seasons and you're relying on on, you know, how the sun works and how it moves in the rain. I mean, that creates a template

“that's kind of universal in, in, in, in, in the human experience, I think. And so I'm kind of”

interested. I don't know, well, talking about outside Mesoamerica, but I'm really interested in and kind of probing those deeper ideas, not that people were sharing those ideas, but I think they're old. I think that's really fundamental about, about existing on the, on the earth and, uh, and we can tap into it some. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I, uh, from just like the little bit I read about the Cortez and the Aztecs, there was this idea with the Aztecs that like, if they didn't

complete this sacrifices, like that blood, the blood was like some universal life force that they would like, you know, display to a piece of gods. And if they didn't, the skies, like, would literally crash down. And I think there was like a balance held by all this stuff that if they didn't do the rituals, right, it would just look like the sun would fall out of the sky, it would just everything would fall apart. Yeah. Yeah. But this, this is part of a bigger idea of, of renewal. It's all about renewing

the world. And sometimes it involves the offering of one's own blood in bloodletting or sacrifice. It could also involve lots of different transactions with the forces of nature to ensure renewal. So if you step back a bit and look at the bigger picture, there is a philosophy behind it, right, which is

that humans have a responsibility to renew things. I think that's very powerful. You know,

we don't do that in our world. We kind of do the opposite of that. But in this pre-industrial, whatever world, you know, they were, they saw that, you know, there were problems with climate sometimes or years of drought and so forth. You know, not everything was stable every year, right? So

that, that's different, maybe from other cultures, but the underlying idea there is that

“that humans have to do certain things. We can call that ritual. They didn't have a word for,”

this is ritual. They just saw it as the work they had to do. Yeah. To ensure that, yeah, the sun would come up again after the 52-year cycle or that, you know, it would be as strong as it once was or that the rains would come. I've been part of ceremonies as a kid. I was a part of ceremonies as a kid in coba and this little Maya village, now it's a bigger town. The rains that weren't coming when you're that we were there, my dad's project,

and the, the, the village was in crisis. Because without that rain,

there was, you couldn't even hunt the animals because they weren't around anymore. And people could not grow their corn. So the, the local priest decided to have a rain ceremony. And this was completely genuine. This was not some kind of tourist thing for this. This was for the village. And, and we had, they constructed an altar in the plaza of the ancient ruins. I mean, talk about atmospheric. I mean, it was wild. And it was an all night ceremony

to renew rain. And it's called the Chachak, which means to summon Chak, the rain deity. It was a deity we see in the ancient art, by the way. And as one of the, I was young, I was nine years old. The, the, the, the shaman, it called a command, a door. He needed kids to be part of the ceremony. So he asked me to be one of the kids that would rotate around every, like an hour here, an hour there. There were a lot of us to sit under this table, makeshift table. It was his altar.

And it was a foresighted model of the universe for the four world directions. And I was one of the four kids that sat under the table facing in the work directions to call the rain god. And I had to sit there for an hour. In the middle of the night, going, what, what, what, what, what, how old I was nine. Well, I was a frog. Yeah, that's awesome. And I was calling the rain god. And well, we're all sitting there and going, what, what, what. And, you know, there's, there's fermented drinks going around.

And it's just wild. You know, no women were allowed. It was just men and the boys. And, um, I mean, I was a kid from North Carolina. And I was, all of a sudden, you know, kind of in this thing. Yeah. And my dad was eating pictures and, uh, being the anthropologist. And I was just sort of going there. I don't want to wait to. But I, that experience for me was, it really, really brought home in retrospect to this idea that you, you know, we have to do things to renew the world.

“And all religions do this, right? That the, and a Catholic mass is kind of a renewal ceremony, right?”

Yeah. Um, all sorts of ceremonies or, or renewals of the cosmos. And, and, and they're doing their way, right? And they do it in these weird ways that we think are, well, they are kind of nuts. I mean, sometimes these, you know, the human sacrifices of the assets we're doing was a kind of renewal to, because the life force is the blood of these people. Mm-hmm. And, and the cosmos needs its life force. Um, there are a lot of complicated ideas behind all of these things. Yeah.

But in a nutshell, it is about renewal. That's pretty. So what's, what's like the pantheon, like the mind pantheon looking like, do they, do you have a good sense of like all the different gods like they do? Yeah. Well, they, they had it, so they, they existed in, and what we would call me be an animate universe in that, you know, we know that we're living beings and plants are living beings and animals. But they also saw an animation in mountains, in the earth, in the sky.

Anything that the sun that moves around, you know, it has animation, it's, it has agency in a way, right? So, and when we're talking about gods, we're talking about, in many ways, these kind

“of natural forces. Mm-hmm. And, and so they gave names to these, the rain deity, right?”

Who is still venerated? Um, yeah, he's, he's one of the most important, right, because he's a

storm. He's, he's, he's like a storm cloud. Chuck is exactly what they call him. When, when there's

they, Chuck. Here comes Chuck. Hey, he's coming. He's coming. Right? And he's coming with his

machete to break the clouds to bring the rain. And in ancient times, it was an axe. Yeah. Stone axe. But, um, these ideas don't die, right? They're, they're, they're still there. And it's

“easy to say. It's like mythology. And so, like that. But, but this is part of their lives, you know?”

And, and I think, um, they, they had all of these deities and, and so-called gods and forces in their world. Um, some of them are ancestors, some of them are forces of nature, some of them are combinations of all of these things, right? So, it gets to be very, very complicated, very quickly, but yeah, they were, you know, like a lot of other cultures. They just saw this kind of animation in the universe around them. That's pretty. And, and there, I know there were notorious, the calendars,

the big one. Yeah, time, time was animate. Time was little living thing. Yeah, that was kind of cool.

Because I've always heard about the mind calendar, but in the book, you're talking a little bit

about how they, they seemed almost like pretty hell bent, unlike really nailing down all those

“little kind of swirling gears of time and how it all fit together. And it's pretty, I was”

pretty neat. And that was one of the reasons it was, I guess, easier to decipher as they had such a good, a strong calendar system that you're able to validate. Aren't we lucky that they wrote everything down according to the very day when things happen, right? So, I've actually had these conversations with, um, people who study Egyptian history, or, or even Greek history, like, there's a lot, we know about that, but they may not know the exact day when Tutankam and died.

I mean, they might know the year or more or less within a couple of years. We know because of the my calendar and the way they mesh with our calendar, the very day when, can you try not a polenke died and was resurrected? You know, we know when the war of 378 happened. A T-call that was on January the 16th. We know when all sorts of things happened, you know, to the very day. And it's, that's really unusual any time and ancient history, no matter where you

are in the world. So, we're really lucky we have that for the Maya. They were so interested in their cosmos and in the patterns of time and everything that they wrote that down with precision. So, yeah, it's great for us. How many days was a mine year? Was it 360 or? Well, they had our year too. I mean, they had 365 days. What? They had that. They had, um, a notion, well, this is cool. There, we have a base 10 counting system, right? They had a base 20 counting system.

How's that? How's that? Because we count our fingers, but they also counted toes. Didn't even think of toes. So, I'm going to do a math with my six-year-old daughter. I'm going to

boss my toes out now. So, once you get that idea of fingers and toes, that's basically funny. So,

they have a counting system that's 20, instead of 10, 100,000, right? It goes 20, 400,000, well. And so, I mentioned this because they, they understood time to be 365 days, like we do, even with the leap days in there. But they also had this idea of 360 days. Because 20 will go into that. They liked that. And they were like, okay, we'll use that as sort of a basic idea of a year in this calendar that they developed. And it doesn't track with real time, but they used it.

And they used it to create this massive calendar, the scale of which dwarfs are cosmology in terms of the big bang. Like, the dates they were writing sometimes in mythology go back, billions and billions of millions of years. So, that's another kind of cool topic. But, well, so their mythology has dates. Yeah, yeah. And they're talking about gods doing things way before our big bang. Yeah, it's really crazy when you think about it.

What is their like Genesis myth that they have like a standard Genesis myth? There's just kind of, yeah, they do. In fact, this is something I've been working on in the last few months.

“I haven't even published on this really. But I think there's one essential myth about”

the raising of the earth out of primordial sea, you know, which sounds like a lot of myths. Yeah, all right. And it's this stone. It is the surface of the earth. And there are four guys who kind of hold up this big table like stone and create the world.

The, it's interesting because Maya kings talk about renewal when they were marking their

“calendar of festivities, they would have to recreate that myth by by raising stones.”

These are the monuments we sometimes see at Maya sites today or the stones that are symbols of of that. And there's another myth that's about kind of a hearth that is created in primordial

time, three stones that get set in the triangle and that's called the first hearth place. And that

“seems to be a really essential event in the creation of kind of the order of everything, right?”

We have these, here's the struggle right now, among us who are studying this stuff,

is we have these little episodes of myth and mythology. I'm trying to create more of a narrative

out of them all, like what's the real story? How do they all connect, right? How does the stones over here connect to those stones over there? Anyway, I'm, I'm really optimistic then in the next several years we're going to be able to talk about Maya mythology, ancient Maya mythology,

“in a way that we talk about Egyptian or even Greek or Roman mythology in terms of this stuff, right?”

So that's exciting. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Well nice. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, man. And yeah, if anyone wants to book, it is the four heavens by David Stewart. Good job. Thank you, my self is great. Good job getting figured out with this stuff means I couldn't do it. It's more than two. That's great fun. Thank you, man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Watch new episodes of Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Spotify. Do it.