#335 Ed Barnhart - The Amazon Rainforest is Hiding a Lost Civilization?

Of course, in Europe, Russian, Russian, with the greatest Russian population worldwide.

Many Russian people were waiting for them, with the lack of the refugees and the help of the Russian D.E. Thanks for inviting me. Pleasure to have you.

“But yeah, I think I ran across your YouTube channel a little while ago.”

And we've been kind of wanting to dive into some ancient civilization stuff and some historic type stuff. So we've reached out and here we are. So, you know, originally I wanted to talk about kind of just the Mayans and do a whole episode on that. But it looks like we've got a lot more to cover, so we'll see how it goes. But I love this kind of stuff. We've had a couple of, um, couple of guys, um, we've had Randall Carlson on.

We've talked with Graham Hancock a couple of times, but um, had been able to work it out. And um, yeah, we've had some guys on talking about Ancient Egypt and Tim Alvarino's been on. So, here you are.

Well, I'm happy to be here and, uh, thanks for highlighting the Americas.

A most of the archaeology people knows about is somewhere outside of our hemisphere and they're so much here. I'm thrilled to get a chance to talk about it. Perfect. Let me start you off with an introduction here. Dr. Ed Barnhart, your an archaeologist and explore best known for your work study in the Ancient Civilizations of the Americas.

You discovered and mapped the Maya city of Maxna, machna in Belize.

“And later, led the Paleng, how am I saying this? Paleng?”

Paleng? Mapping Project in Mexico. In 2003, you founded the Maya Exploration Center and have served as the director ever since. You also have a YouTube channel offering weekly deep dives into the ancient cultures of the Americas in addition

to being the host of the archaeo-ed podcast.

Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Nice introduction. Thanks for that. So, before we get started, everybody gets a gift. Those are originally gummy bears made here in the USA. Actually, up a mission again.

And it's just candy. Well, thank you. Yeah, well, I'm from Colorado. It might have had more in it, but I like candy just fine. Thank you very much, Sean. You're welcome.

You're welcome. And then one other thing to knock out. I actually heard you have a Patreon account as well. I walk into that conversation. I do have a Patreon account.

It's a fraction of what yours is. But I think Patreon's great.

“I think that, you know, Google and all those other things.”

Those algorithms are not really treating you and I, well, I think Patreon's a great way for people that care about what we do. To support us directly. Yeah. So, when I started out, I started this in my attic.

And was the had no income? It was 2019. When I started this. Yeah, I started this in 2019. I think we're very much the same.

I started my podcast. Like, right when COVID started and I was trapped at home. And I could not travel and couldn't do anything. I just went nuts and went into my holiday closet and just started talking to a microphone. I know.

They'll work out. So, these guys have been with me since the beginning. And, you know, they were the ones that really supported me and carried me through all the way to today. And so, we've turned it into one hell of a community. And one of the things I do is, they get the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

So, this is from Mad Dog Crazy. Do you believe that you believe the Mayans interacted with aliens into what degree? And how do you interpret the Mayan calendar or it's supposed to predictions when you compare them to what's happening in the world today? Let's leave out the Mayan calendar because I know we're going over that later. So, do you believe the Mayans interacted with aliens into what degree?

I see no archeological evidence that they did. Every one of their technologies. We see them building from rudimentary things to more complex things in a very understandable human fashion. I'm happy for this question because I have appeared on H&Lians like 25 times now.

At least when it comes to the Mayan that I have studied for my whole life, I see no evidence that they were influenced or in contact with aliens. Do you believe in aliens? Do you think they're out there? I do.

“I think it's a statistical impossibility that we're the only people in the universe.”

And I'll also say that the modern Mayan today, big fans of the aliens things. Every ruins I ever go to, I talk to the guards, I love to talk to the guards because they see everything.

And they're always telling me that aliens are floating over the sites at night.

No, they say they're green and red lights. Some of them say they're like spirits and some of them say they're aliens. But, you know, from here, say out of the mouths of the Mayan, they're sure interested in their ruins today. That's what they say. So, when you say there's no archaeological evidence that they were interacting with any aliens.

What, I mean, what, what archaeological evidence we're looking for? I mean, that's a good question. How do we, how do we look for an artifact that we have never seen? How do we, what would be the evidence? I would think that the evidence would be some kind of like startling technology leap.

One day, they're stone age, the next day, they're building cars. That sort of thing.

But the Mayan were, you know, the Mayan through their entire period never even got to metallurgy.

So, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I would expect some sort of large leap in technology and the kind of materials they're using, maybe in their medical sciences. But I don't see anything like that that would be, you know, unexplained other than contact. You know, we have lots of, lots of archaeological examples of one culture contacting another

and that culture immediately picking up on new technologies and changing. Gotcha. That's the sort of thing. I want to, you know, on a just a terrestrial scale, we see the evidence of that all the time. So if I was to look for something that could be alien contact,

I would expect the same kind of radical technology adoption change. And nothing in my history gives me that. Okay. Sorry. I actually don't believe in aliens.

“I mean, now the question of, do I think aliens have been here?”

That one kind of smacks of human hubris, doesn't it? It's kind of like, why would we be so important that an advanced species would even come and look at us? That one's less statistically possible. But the universe is so vast, how would we be the only sentient beings in it? I don't know. Maybe we're the only ones created.

But how did, okay, so let's get into, how did you get into this? How did you get, what, what, what, what sparked the fascination with the ancient civilizations in the Americas for you?

Well, I think that I'm one of those lucky people who have always been who I've been and I just had to figure out a way to channel it.

I was always an explorer, even as a little kid, my parents had to lock the front door because I would just open it and walk out and keep walking. I would just explore, I explored the woods behind my house, I explored, go down the street until I was tired, I could be miles away. And so, I mean, I was always just thrilled to go explore new things.

“And when I was 13 or 14, I went to the dollar theater in Irving, Texas and I saw Indiana Jones and I was like, that's what I wanted to.”

That looks cool to me. Of course, I've never gotten a fight in the Nazis or anything, but the archaeology part came true. But I was a very bad student when the opening lines came up, it said like 1936 South America, honestly I was like, there's a South America. I just thought there was America. So I went and looked it up in the library and then I became obsessed with the Inca and through high school I read all about the Inca. And at the time, they were talking about Machu Picchu being this one citadel up in the mountains, but I thought there must be many more of those if that's where they pray.

So I told the high school counselor, I said, the job counselor, she said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to find a lost city.

But, you know, I kept with it. I went to school in Colorado mostly because I wanted to ski. And low and behold, nobody knew anything about South America there or the Inca. There were no professors, but there was one for the Maya. So I started studying the Maya. And in my, I guess, sophomore year, I signed up to do a field school in Honduras. That was in a beautiful city called Copan. And I called my dad and said, hey, I made it in this field school. And he said, you're an idiot.

You've never even been out of the country. You're going to go to Honduras.

I was like, oh, yeah, I used to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world. It's a dangerous school.

“San Pedro Sula was number one for a long time. Yeah, I was once walking around there and going between my hotel and the museum and multiple people stopped me like, why are you on the street? You should get inside.”

Yeah, I've been there too. It's an interesting place. It's getting better. It's no longer number one. I think it's like number eight or something. Really, they're on the rise. Right on. Anyway, I, uh, I really fell in love with Copan. And that's where I met my mentor, Linda Sheely, who's the woman who broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. And I followed her to the University of Texas. And there, I got into the archaeology side of it and signed up to do the deepest of the jungle surveys. They allowed their students to do.

And I found a city. You, everyone was sitting in college. I did. And when I was 25, I found Machina. Everybody told me that was impossible that all the cities have been found that a student leading students couldn't do such a thing. But I used these topography maps. And I said, if I was in Maya in this huge area where would I find it, where would I put my city? And I knew they put their pyramids and try and try ads. And they symbolized the three-harts stone civilization. I knew their farmers. So I found this one spot. And, and also their pyramids are called tombwheat stone mountains. So they revered the mountains.

And I looked and I looked for the tallest peak in the area, found it. And there were two little peaks right next to it with three rivers running through on the topography map in the 1990s. It was for our phones and everything. And I just dumb luck, I guess. I said, if I was in Maya, that's where I go.

“And it took me two seasons to hike and cut out there with student groups, but it was there. How many students?”

Anywhere from 4 to 8? That's it. Yeah. And the other trick that I did is I bucked my professors kind of demand that I just went in a straight western line through the hills, because I have to up down, up down. Season one, I started finding these old overgrown logging roads that were from the British a hundred years ago. And I was like, why am I doing this transect when these roads are the path of least resistance through these hills, the same one that the Maya would have taken? I'm following these roads out there. So I liberated the roads as I went out there and ended up where I wanted to be.

And there was the city actually on the first hill, not on the tallest hill.

So hold on. So were you looking for anything in particular? I mean, you had mentioned that the professor, sorry, forgot her name already. Oh, I went to see the Hieroglyph, the Maya and Hieroglyphics. Is there something that you guys translated that said there was like a loss city or something or maybe just going, hey, there's probably cities out there that we haven't discovered yet.

“You're looking at topography going where, where would I build a city?”

It was in the art history department. My professor from the archaeology and the policy department was Fred Valdez. So he, they're two different professors. But it's just, it's just a well-known fact that there are thousands of Maya communities out there and we haven't found them all. We still have not found all the Maya cities at all. And so on my way to Moshna finding it, I found five Maya villages and we mapped those out. They'd have like 30, 40 buildings, nothing very big.

And then finally after going through, I thought I was just in another village.

But then we ran into one that was like six meters tall and square. I thought that, that's not a village building. And soon after that, we found one that was 18 meters tall and a hundred meters across. And it was part of a big plaza where we found a ball cord and a palace and fallen stealer and a big reservoir eventually.

The Maya had a ball game.

They had a ball game with a rubber ball and the courts are very obvious. They have sloping walls and little stands above and they have an open lane in the middle. And so they're easy to see even ruined the shape is very blatant that it was a ball cord. And only big cities had ball courts in their plaza's. I'm at the point where if a shirt fits weird or can handle a real day, I'm not going to wear it.

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I'm a co-founder, Glacier, downloaded on the app store, and remember, privacy isn't paranoia, it's protection. So what time frame did the minds exist? Is it Maya or Mayans? That's a funny debate. One of the frustrating things about archaeology is there's no command structure. When your world, when the general says this is the way it is, that's it. Everybody does it. But in the Maya world, it's a competing thing. So some people, like, linguists want to say Mayan.

But Linda Shealy who broke the code always want to say Maya except for Mayan languages and Mayan architecture, which is also random.

I tend to say Maya just out of homage to my mentor, but it's a debate that nobody has the authority to finalize.

“So either one's right, really. So let's give it a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. How long does this civilization exist?”

Archaeology starts calling the people down there. My, maybe 2000 BC is the earliest that we really will say those people are my 1000 BC. People down there, 10,000, 14,000. But archaeology does this thing where they have to behave a certain way before that, they're that cultural group. So they start behaving like Maya somewhere around 4,000 years ago. And then they reach their peak. We have a, a pre-classic, a classic at a post-classic Maya. The classic period where they made most of their pyramids and they really perfected their writing system and astronomy.

And really they're just reforming themselves and they emerge again and they're what we call their post-classic form all the way up until the Spanish contact.

Oh, okay. So the pre-classic is this long period from, you know, it ends at that like 250 AD. But it starts 2018 100. The cool thing about my archaeology is we're still figuring it out. I mean, as we sit here, somebody could be digging up the evidence that they were actually there for 500 years earlier than we thought.

“How far did their, it, it, the, it, the height, how big was the empire? Where did it stretch from and to?”

What all of Guatemala, half of Honduras into in Mexico all the way up into the Yucatan, all of Belize.

And about halfway through Chiapas, which is the Mexican state that's adjacent to Guatemala. Okay. There, the line phrase, and there's a couple of weird, not really Maya cities, and then we're into Zapotec and before them Olmect territory. Okay. And on the other side, when you get into Honduras, there's a, there's a site called Los Naronhos on a lake. I'll go, yeah, hoa, that's half Maya and half the next culture over the Lanka people. So we see the, the border of the Maya world blurring to the east and west, but to the north and south, it's from C to C.

So a huge territory. Oh, and as a result, not all Maya are the same. The ones that grew up in the highlands with cold and snow behave differently than the ones that are down in the lowland jungles.

“Okay. What, what kind of, what were their documenting in highroglyphics? What kind of things to do learn?”

Almost entirely. At least of the things that we have to our to read left, which are all on stone. They're really broken records. All about the kings. The king was born this day. He married this person. He fought these people. He was crowned this day. He died. Kind of frustrating because the therapies of one particular. Now we get some texts out of ceramics and ceramics are much, they'll tell different topics. Like sometimes those will give us little stories of mythology.

There are some that say this is the king's cup. He drank chocolate out of it. And then we have four surviving books and those are gold. Those talk about hunting rituals. They talk about astronomy. They talk about deep time. Deep time. What is that? Well, they go back like in the codices specifically. I think the farthest they go back is 33,000 years. But that's a ridiculous long period of time to be talking about. There's these sections called the serpent pages and the Dresden Codex.

They have these serpent body that winds down the page and there are dates that go further and further back in time to 33,000 years ago. 33,000 years ago. And why did they go back that way? For a long time, we don't know. The first guys that started really understanding that. J. Eric Thompson was the big man in like the 1930s. He called the Maya esoteric time worshipers because we had nailed the calendar stuff.

And we could read things like that. They're going back 33,000 years. There's a stealer in T. Call that goes back 5 million years.

5 million years. At least when we do the math, which is right there, it goes back 5 million years. Thompson thought that was them saying that's the origin of the earth through the universe.

“But he generally said their esoteric time worshipers. He also said that these higher glyphs mean nothing. They're just about their esoteric time worship that they that's why they're going so far back in time.”

Now recently, one of my friends and colleagues, Mike Grofe has really, Michael Grofe has really nailed an argument that they're going so far back in time to exhibit their understanding of the procession of the equinoxes, which is that tiny wobble that the stars do from our perspective.

That's something that's kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy. If a culture understood the procession of the equinoxes, that meant that they were really crack astronomers.

How do we do that? You know, you can do it. Just one of the things that the Maya had that their surrounding groups did not is writing. So they could have a astronomer who would spend his entire lifetime recording the movements of the heavens, hand that book to it as a apprentice who would continue it and continue it. You can do it. I mean, we could do it today with no tools if we had enough time. Every 72 years, the stars move one degree. So if you are pegged on a star that's going to rise on the horizon at a certain time of year, 72 years later, it will rise one day later.

And if you collect a couple of generations of information, you can see that and you can prove that. But then there's a landmark. Then on we have GPS and all this other shit today. How would they use? They can't use a tree, maybe a mountain peak.

“You could use a mountain peak and then you should also use a flat constructed space. A lot of the Maya astronomy we believe was done with one person and stable viewer location with a stick.”

Another person with another stick tied to a rope. They pull it out so it's always the same distance and they mark. Okay, like if you're going to look at the the simple one, the sun of the moon.

Let's see where it rises. Today it's right here. Okay, tomorrow it's right there. Next day it's right there. Next day it's right there. Oh wait, look, it's hovering over here and it's coming back. And day after day, you'd mark it in an angular fashion and then you could orient to building to that. Same concept can be used for stars, but it just takes a lot longer to collect enough data to realize they too that that seemingly static backdrop that the moon in the sun go through is actually moving itself.

Interesting. And so that 33,000 years is talking about that the sun was in this constellation this year and 33,000 years ago, it was also in that position. Wow, this state. Wow, it's the siderial versus the psychotic period of planets. Interesting, but they were they were great astronomers were jumping the gun here. We were we were actually talking about my beginnings and now I've got you smack dab in the middle of the Maya. But that's okay, wherever the conversation flows. So let's go back to you. You're studying topography.

I mean, talking about civilization, documenting time five million years ago, 33,000 years ago.

“Beginning of seems like existence, but I think we just 4,000 years ago. I mean, has topography. How much has topography changed in 4,000 years? How do you know what you're looking at was the same to 4,000?”

Not much. 33,000. Yeah, a lot. But I mean, the mechanisms I think are not otherworldly. We are in such a world of technology. It feels like I don't know how the hell I ever survived without myself. But I did. And so did my granddad and there are. In some ways, the less you have, the more ingenuity, if you become, you probably understand that being a guy that's been in the field with not everything you need. I am totally convinced that the average ancient person was a hell of a lot more resourceful than I am. And so the methods of astronomy could be as simple as, as you say, you know, a hill from a certain position.

“I think we, you know, we undercredit farmers for a lot of their really smart stuff, the Maya were farmers and I don't think, yeah, sometimes there's a narrative that's painted that these.”

There's a route I, my priests told in a grand group of farmers when the plant and when the harvest based on the astronomical cycles. And I think it's exactly the opposite. I think every farmer knows some sort of trick like that when the sun comes over that hill. It's about time to plant when it rises in that little valley, it's time to harvest. I think that the, we have an opposite. I think that the Maya priests were actually honoring the knowledge that every Maya farmer knew and was so foundational to their survival as a society.

I mean, to meet, I mean, I'm down there every day, but change quite a bit.

That's a, that's a point. Well, taking that topography does change especially, the coastal areas can change radically. One hurricane can move the entire coastline.

“I think it began with things, you know, not as a femoral as those. I think it's, you know, mountain tops. A lot of our earliest of the Maya cities that we recognize there's some astronomy in there.”

The astronomy has to do with those mountains. Okay. And it's from, you know, from this valley, the, the farther it is away, the more solid it is, too. If it's a pyramid 100 feet from you, you know, three people will see the right alignment. Everybody, the right and left sees off, but if it's a mountain 20 miles away, an entire group of people in a plaza would see the exact same alignment.

So it began with at least Maya astronomy began with things like that that were alignments from a distance.

Okay. I've wondered whether, you know, the Maya hierarchically say that their pyramids are called two wheat stone mountains. And I wonder whether the Maya origins in the highlands when they went down into the lowland jungles with no mountains. I wonder whether they thought, Well, crap, we can't do this without mountains. We should build some.

“So how did you, I mean, on your excursion? I mean, they didn't, did you eat and I would have, I mean, now we see in documentaries and that everybody uses light arms things like that. Did you have that back then?”

I would have said no. I didn't know. I ordered, uh, I ordered topography maps from Belize the took two months to get to my house in Texas. GPS was just starting, but it was crappy. It would not see through the trees. So I had one, but I could only mark my position when there was a tree fall and I could stand in an open patch ago. We got one. We got one point guys. Now light are we'll take, you know, millions a second. I'd be like, we have a point. But it actually also got, got me in a tough situation in Belize where I, I let an assistant who was pretty new to the area. We had cut trails everywhere, but their trails were all over the place. So you could get lost.

Let him have the GPS to teach the students and they got six of them got left behind and lost us. And by the time we got to the site, I counted everybody like co-crap or missing six people.

“And me and my other assistant chased them through the jungle the whole day and it was all about them getting lost from us because they were trying to use the GPS. It was much different back.”

So I know I had nothing but old school survey methods and thoughts. And I guess luck. I mean, how much I will give it that? I was not some brilliant Sherlock Holmes discovery of mine. I had some logical thinking and probably a lot of luck. The jungle down there is pretty thick. I mean, I've humped through Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia. I was wondering if you've been in the jungle too. I love hanging out in the, I mean, it's dangerous. There's a lot of shit and now that we'll cut it to you.

But it's beautiful, isn't it? It's amazing. And you can survive off nothing.

Yeah, there's a lot of resources in there. But so I mean, how would you, I mean, some of these things are so thick that, I mean, you'd be lucky to go a kilometer a day. There were times there were sometimes, especially before I found the city. I was actually kind of the laughing stock of the camp that my students had just come back full of nettles and they'd be like, "What'd you do today? Just uselessly hack the jungle and get stung by it?" Like, yeah. I did. There's this vines that are called a biol that are like a rubber band ball just glued together.

And if you hack one part with the machete, the rest of it could come unwound and just whack everybody in the whole group with these tiny black needles that would dig flatball.

We had a guy, you know, insects will lay their larvae in that. And so we had a guy, yeah, you're supposed to wear gloves when you're in there.

“We're going to guy grab one, got infected, we're out there, we could get back, you know, we're doing some snipers stuff or something and he cut it open and the larvae started coming out.”

Oh, of his hand, we're like, oh shit, this is nasty. There was a girl in our camp who got 16 bot flies in her scalp and those things, they fester in there and then they eventually fly out as flies, but they're worms with like a tail that latches into you so you can't pull them out. We either's one that'll, you can't piss in the river down there because, and that thing'll swim up your pea string, pea stream. And then these little, it like, yeah, these spikes come out of it.

Oh, I remember the, yeah, real issues. More than once somebody's come like, oh, swim in the Amazon with me. No hard pass. I'm staying on the boat. None of that. Did you have any, did you have any interesting encounters with wildlife for, or indigenous peoples?

Oh, there, a number, a number of them. I, you know, I have never seen a Jaguar out there, but they've seen me.

There was a time back there in Belize where there was a rainstorm and then we came out the next day and followed our path up, but that day before when it rained, our feet had gone deep in the mud.

“So we made deep footprints following those footprints back out. There were Jaguar prints in our footprints, and I was just like, oh, shit, how long did that go on? How close was it to us? Was it like right behind us?”

And we didn't see it. We did it just smell our trail later. So that was that was a wake-up call, like, be careful. They're saying when we lost those students and we went running for them, me and my assistant were yelling their names. And then there was something crashing in the woods just to the right of us and we stopped and it stopped. And then we ran again and we heard it and it stopped again. I was like, oh, that's big gym. So we used to see it picked up some sticks and we were like, guys, we started just whispering, but like, we were both like, if that's a Jaguar, we're dead.

There was there, I've got another three stories like that where I'm just absolutely sure it was right there in the woods, because it happened to other people. There was someone in Belize who got chased all the way back to our camp, but Jaguar's are cool. Jaguar's don't attack humans all that often. They're curious and they're playful. Now, the one that you've got to look out for, especially in Belize and Guatemala, is the mountain lion version down there. Cougar, they've got a number of different names for these things, but they're big and long and those have no sense of humor.

Maya have told me again and again, Jaguar's, you might live. It could be a good story. If you see a boom out there, you're dead. If they see you, it's over. Man, crocodiles. Miller Bees. Big crocodiles. Oh, the bees, boy. I had this one moment where I heard the bees coming again, and I just told my students, like, find a bush and lay down under it, lay on the ground. And they were like, why? Just shut up. Don't talk about it. Do it. Those things will kill you. They don't write over, but it's funny out in the jungle.

There's these low lying bushes. They never go under there. So I learned if you just lay totally flat on the ground, they will pass you.

Man, now then there's also the pigs who run in like 40 50 groups. So in those cases, I'd be like, find a tree without thorns and climb it right now. Like why do you smell that? They're so stinky. You can smell them before you can hear them, even before you hear their hooves. The raft comes through if the breeze is right, and you know it's the pigs coming. The first time it happened, I was totally flatfoot. They just ran up on me. I was like, what's that smell? And one came right at me and turned.

“And then another 30 just turned right after him, and I just stood there flatfooted like an idiot like, why aren't I dead?”

It's just blind luxe, but from then on I knew smell, climb. So let's get back to traversing the jungle here. So what do you got a machete at GPS and a map?

Sometimes I'd look at it and go like, well, we couldn't hear. We could be there. And I'd sometimes, like season three, we had the GPS. So I'd put a couple GPS marks on there.

But mostly I just had a compass and a machete and said, my mantra was, we're going west. We're going west. We know we entered the forest here at mile marker 11. And I can see some of these dashed lines that were where the old British logging roads would be. Sometimes they were actually roads there. Sometimes they're won't. They weren't.

But we just kind of pieced it together and followed that those roads through the path of least resistance, which brought us into a number of valleys where little villages were.

“And eventually we made it out to those three peaks. Any active villages? No, nobody out there. So I mean, what is it? How long ago did these villages exist?”

Um, people have been doing, you know, this was 1995. So people have done archaeology out there since this is a machinosa terminal classic city. So it lasted till about 900 or 1000 AD.

Okay. And then nobody, nobody's out there at all. The, you know, where I lived was a place called program for Belize, which was a big chunk of territory that was originally owned by Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola wanted to chop the whole thing down and plant oranges for their orange drink whatever it is, crush her. Yeah, I think that's it. And then Belize got up and arms about it. So Coca-Cola didn't want the bad press and sold it to them for pennies on the dollar and it became a big preserve all the way up to the Guatemalan border.

“What I mean, how are you able to pick this up? I mean, just, I don't know what these structures are made of, but I mean, you abandoned a house.”

Here in the mid-South, the Midwest probably anywhere, you know, 10, 20 years has got a tree grown through the window seal, you know, and it's, you're talking about things that are a thousand years old. Yeah, and they are very distant in the jungle. They are very destroyed, but they are made of stone. And, you know, some of the little villages, they'd have stone platforms that were probably like, you know, some of them were the size of the platform we're sitting on right now and not much higher. But you could still see the stone edges of it, see the little bit of stone walls, see, you know, irregular topography is one of the ways that I identify it. It is a trick. It's a skill to understand what's a hill and what's a ruined pyramid.

When it's 18 meters tall and 100 meters across, well, it's easier to understand. And those, but there's not any good things to say, right? It's of stone wall bits of terraces and up on the very top, where things tend to, you know, fire from the top to the bottom. The bottoms are full kind of fan out with all the wreckage trees grow up in knock hole sections of it out trees, big trees over the last thousand years grow up and fall out and take huge amounts of the building with them with their roots.

And then on top off and like the first building we found at Machina, when we got up on top of it, there were holes in the roof, the core will roof, so we could jump down inside and see there were walls around us and things. So we could definitely know that one was one. But when I was mapping Polenke, there were places where I'd say, there's a hole, there 10 meters away is a huge pile of rocks, a tree grew up into this house and when it fell, it's roots catapulted all of the bricks over there in the jungle. This building's gone, but there's the evidence that it was once here.

“It's a trick though. I really, more than once, I've brought people out to the jungle and go, see all these buildings, they're like, what the hell are you talking about?”

There's nothing but dirt and trees here. So it's drop in through a roof, what's in there? Drop into a place where there's been nobody for 1,000 years plus. There'd be stone walls, the core will roof above you. I've never gotten lucky enough to find anything that had like murals or art inside of it. No human remains pottery. Mostly those ones would be, you know, there's dirt, there's bat guano, which is actually uncool. That's you can get histoplasmosis really easily from bat guano hanging out in tunnels. I did that. I have like a calcified scar in my lung. That's the size of a quarter.

Oh yeah, I do have that tonite. That was from histoplasmosis from screwing around in in my abilities.

But yeah, there'd be the collapse where the roof fell in that would let us get the hole. So you kind of can climb down the talus of that onto the floor, which would be grown up with moss and you could, but you could see the stone walls, sometimes some of the old stucco coming off, sometimes not. But yeah, there's I've done that a bunch there. Sometimes there are big platforms that have lower kind of basement buildings inside and those are fun. You just find a little hole and all of a sudden you pop down and you're in the middle of a labyrinth.

“I love things like that, but it's the jungle. So you're also kind of but puckered going. If there's a snake in this tiny little space I really can't run, can I?”

So what's the name of the city of the big one that you found? Moshna. Moshna. It's called monkey house. Monkey house. What is the estimated population? Oh gosh, I don't think we've even gotten that far yet. I think I mapped 400 buildings, 400 buildings, but I know there were more. I'd every Friday I'd say we're doing adventure day and we'd go somewhere without mapping and just see how many buildings we could find and there were whole neighborhoods.

That I never got to map, but I left in the villages. What would it, what would it village be?

“The villages that have like 20 to 30 buildings, so if we very ploddingly estimate five people per building there'd be, you know, 150 people or something.”

So how far away would these villages be from the hub from the city? In that limited context, they were about, I'll say a kilometer apart from each other. Okay, seven of them, and from the road to the actual city was five and a half kilometers. So do we know how their civilization was actually broken up? What would take part? What would be happening in the city versus the villages? What would they commute? It was industry. Not terribly different than how we live today. You know, we were outside of Nashville that's a big city and then there are some mid-sized cities like Franklin and then there's some people who prefer to live in the countryside.

And you know, on big events, everybody goes into the big city. On the average day, you hang out in your own place. They'd have market days where, you know, the city had have the huge market and a lot of people from the surrounding area would go in there to pedal their goods. That still happens in the Maya world today, but it was very much a, it was an independent city state model like the Greeks, where there was not a capital of the Maya world, there were capitals run by, at least in the classic period, a ruling dinastic set of elite people who would be the, the families of each one of those cities.

“Because a higher eclipse, we know what their names are, we know the dynasties of these kings. And then they'd have sub cities that would have sublords called Sahals, the guy at the main cities, the a how.”

The ones that are little cities, they're Sahals. And then those Sahals would have farm land around them. So not terribly unlike how we live today.

So how would you become a leader or a king or a lord? Is that how do you, it was a dinastic thing. You were, it was a blood right that you had the magical power, because they wasn't just a political position. It was also a warlord position, but it was also a religious position. The, the right, the, what's the word I'm looking for, your, your validation of your rulership was about your sacred blood. The Maya have a religion that has a pantheon of gods up there, but nobody interacts with the gods on earth. They are alloof from us. But when the royal peoples family died, they go up into the heavens.

And living ancestors of those people can talk to the gods. They can act as a liaison up there. They're, they're dead ancestors that went up to heaven or up to the upper world instead of the lower world where everybody else's souls go. That was their right to real or ship or at least their story that they told everybody.

That's what the higher clubs are telling us. Yes, what they would all start in the lower world, the underworld, but then the spirits of the royal family's bloodline would ascend up into the heavens where the gods were.

The nice gods. They were less nice gods in the underworld. Really, yeah, what do they do?

They were the lords of death, and they'd have ugly names like pestilence and starvation and pus.

“At least that's what the Maya have, the equivalent of the Christian Bible. They have their own creation story called the Populvut, a very different story. What is that story?”

It says there were four creations that we are members of the fourth creation that are made of the blood of the gods and corn were kind of more perfect than the other creations that were made of mud or wood. The story itself centers around the moments of the end of the third creation, where a set of hero twins fight the lords of death in a Maya ball game, defeat them and through that protect the world for us humans. They resurrect their father who was killed by the lords of death, send him up into the sky, he becomes the maize god, the corn god, corn is created, we are made of corn and drops of the blood of the gods, and that's how the world started.

But a lot of the story is this really fun story of the hero twins and their fights against the lords of death and their early days, their grandmother raises them and she tries to tell them they're not ball players and hide that because that's how their fathers died. And then the story goes on where they eventually beat these terrible lords of death, but we're quite clear in that underworld Shibaba where the dead reside, the dead are doing fine down there in a Maya sense, our grandparents, everybody lived down in the underworld in a village that looks just like the village that they grew up in and they're down there farming and they're having a nice life and they're living in a house, they're just dead.

And when the sun sets on us, it rises on them and when it sets on them it rises on us.

But then there's another set of gods that live above the sky. And those guys are the ones that pull the strings on us puppets and the Maya kings to bring it back, have this special kind of blood when they bleed their own blood and burn it on paper in a bowl. That smoke goes up into the sky and it becomes a conduit through which one Maya king on earth can speak to his ancestors up in the sky and say, "Hey, would you talk to chalk for me and make sure we have a good rain for the harvest this year?"

“Or, you know, will you ask the gods to bless us in the battle or about to do against this other city?”

Interesting, so that's how it worked.

To us, it's hopeless, but two millions of Maya people, it was how things really worked. And perhaps that sort of story that was no longer believed or supported is why part of why the Maya civilization collapsed. When things started getting rough, the kings could no longer say, "Well, I'll just let my blood." And I'll ask for their favor and we'll all be fine when things weren't fine, they were like, "Well, either that's not working or you're a liar." Either way, I'm leaving the city.

“What is, you know, really got my first nation with this was Mel Gibson's Apocalypse, that was about the Maya's, correct?”

It was? What do you think about that movie? Well, I thought it was a great action movie. The bad guys were bad, the good guys were good, I was cheering for it. I don't think it was a Maya documentary.

I don't think it made a very complimentary or true picture of who the Maya were. And, you know, my colleagues, there's a mountain of bile and spit about that movie. I don't take it that hard, I don't think Mel Gibson is not a Maya academic nor did he pretend to be. I think it's Mel Gibson's story.

It was the same story.

“The good family man is threatened by the machine of society and fights it to save his family.”

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“So how did they live them? What was daily life for your typical mind, family?”

I think it was pretty laid back really, until like the 600s when kings were sending armies to war against each other and disrupted things. But the average Maya City, I think they were pretty prosperous and happy. They would, you know, they tend their little farm, they'd go to the market, they'd chat with their friends, they'd go back to their little house. I think that they felt protected within the kingdom of a king, with a standing army and the influence of the gods. I think that life was pretty nice really, there's a, you know, as we said earlier, the jungle's inhospitable, but it's also abundant.

I mean, food's falling from the sky there, and if you manage it right, I don't think people were going hungry.

I think people were feeling just fine, and I think that how all too often in humanity, when things are too good, we ruin them by gangpiling them. So part of the problem with Maya Classic Society, it was such a successful model that all of the cities swelled in population until they actually managed to crest their carrying capacity. How did they, I did they have currency? No more of a barter system. It's kind of, you know, we're still piecing together classic Maya Times.

The Maya were still here when the Spanish got here, so we've got those answers. But is that how Maya behaved 500 years earlier? That's, that's hard to say with certainty. By the time we get to the Aztecs, they're still barter system, but even in a barter system,

“you need some sort of practical, you know, what's this versus this worth?”

And for them, it was chocolate. It was chocolate beans. Okay. And so the cacao beans were not exactly currency. Nobody walked into the market with 30 beans in their pocket and walked out, but you could say, how much is that corn worth?

Three cacao beans. Gotcha. So much so that actually there were counterfeit beans. One of the things Cortez's men saw in the Aztec market before the real siege happened. Was that there were police in the Aztec market that was, you know, 60,000 people a day they said.

They said it was the biggest one in the world they had ever seen. But there were police running around busting people with counterfeit cacao beans. They'd make them out of ceramic. And they'd try to pedal them off in the market and they'd get caught by the Aztec police for counterfeit chocolate. Wow.

Wow.

Was that a big part of the mind religious culture?

“At the end, in the post-classic period, it was.”

In the classic period, not as much. They sacrificed people that were warriors that they'd capture in battles near the end of the classic period. But in the classic period, the most common and austere kind of sacrifice was the auto sacrifice that the king and his family did. They would cut themselves and bleed the blood and then burn it to contact their ancestors through the smoke. The smoke would become this snake called the boot's charm, the smoke serpent.

And it would go up into heaven and become a conduit for their ancestors to come back down and talk to them.

There's actual images of that happening. At a site called Yoshi Lomb, there's this great thing with a queen pulling a rope with thorns on it through her tongue. And the blood is dripping down her chin onto a bowl with paper. And the paper's burning and the smoke starts. But then it turns into this snake that has a head that comes down over her and it opens up its mouth.

And it burps out the dinastic founder of the Yoshi Lomb lineage, who's coming out with a shield and a spear.

And the hyperglyphs tell us she's asking him to protect her husband in the battle he's about to go to.

“Has fascinating, but that's how they did it. And so that was the sacrifice. It was auto sacrifice in the classic period.”

Western or Central Mexico was much more violent. They had a much, a much bigger pensioned for sacrifice, especially the Aztecs. And in the post-classic period of the Maya, they started getting really, they're interacting with and emulating the people from Central Mexico. That's when we see like a chechen eats out. You ever seen the chechen eats out?

I haven't. It's beautiful tourist places you need to get to. But right next to its ball court is a skull rack. And the whole thing, the base of it, is full of images of skulls on spikes. And it's almost undeniable that on top of that platform was an actual skull rack that had the skulls of thousands of sacrificed people.

How would they sacrifice them? Generally hard extraction, cutting the head off of their hard extraction. The Maya loves hard it. They loved the head thing. They loved to chop somebody's head off on the top of a pyramid and then have it dramatically rolled down the stairs like a ball. They show that in imagery in multiple places.

But hard extractions the other way, where you lean them over a rock, that's the central Mexican way, where their chest was kind of hooked out. And then they take an obsidian knife and whack, break a couple of the ribs, and then push down on one section, pull up on another, and just pull the hard out, still beating. Pretty brutal. Pretty weird at the point of that being. I don't know, but certainly the end result would be fear. I don't want to be that guy. That as text used it brilliantly. They would bring the mayor of a new town that they were trying to just get into the empire through just coercion.

They'd bring them to Tenochtitlan and show him one of these hard extraction things and be like, "Would you like for people to do that?"

“Or would you like to send us 3,000 rubber patties a month?”

I'll pick the rubber patties. Please don't do that to me. But the Aztecs are a different people than the Maya. This wasn't necessarily a religious sacrifice to the gods. This was more of an intimidation factor to people that they want to conquer. I think it was both. And in the case of the Aztecs, which is the example I was just giving you, they had a different religion than the Maya. They were associated. There were sometimes crossovers between the gods that they recognized. But the Aztecs story, the Mishika people, they believed that they were first and foremost following the god of war.

We'd see it up. And their priests said that their creation story said that the sun only rose and set because the gods had had the bravery to sacrifice themselves. And that going forward into humanity, only sacrifices would make the sun keep coming up.

And so the Aztecs, more than everybody else around them, started sacrificing people like crazy.

“Well, before we get it, let's stick with the minds right now. And so in the other sacrifice would be the head people on top of a pyramid and let the head roll down like a ball.”

So that's what we see mostly with the Maya, though they did the hard extraction in the post-classic too, and they didn't do it too much. And it was mostly, it wasn't like everybody. It wasn't like women and children. It was warriors and elite folks that had been captured in battle. So would they do this by the tens by the hundreds by the thousands? You know, by the art and by the archaeology, you know, you can you can find piles of bodies when people are killing people archaeology can find huge piles of bodies and see the pathology of them.

We do see that in the post-classic and especially the Aztec area, we don't see it so much in the Maya area, so I don't think it was a huge volume, but there aren't shows it happening again and again.

“One of the neat things, you know, you're a soldier and you know, our Western society is a lot about killing the enemy and acquiring their land.”

It's not what the Maya we're doing. When we see like a mural of Maya battles, it's so interesting when you look at it, nobody's taking a kill shot. If you were to make a battle of a mural of a battle, you'd have a lot of people getting killed. But that's not what they do. Every time, like there's a really famous one, the most famous one is from Bonham Park, big huge room full of just a battle all around you.

But all the spears are pointed down. They're stabbing each other in the legs or in the back. They want to mobilize them so they can haul them back to their their city and sacrifice them.

And you can see it in the mural. Nobody, like there's this Bonham Park has maybe 60 people in this big pitched battle, not a single person is dead or getting a kill shot in that mural. They're all getting stabbed in the legs. So they're actually going to combat to capture humans to sacrifice to their gods. But we don't know what they were sacrificing them for. Just to honor the gods, in that limited context, in the Maya and the classic Maya period, it was brave warriors, meeting each other, winning or losing and then the ceremony of taking their life back in their city and their ceremonial context instead of killing them on the battlefield.

But the interesting thing to me, and you know, let me not overstate that I know what the hell these people were thinking. I'm guessing too. I just have been guessing for 30 years and perhaps I have insight that other folks do, but I would not pretend I really know the Maya mindset.

“I think that with that caveat, I'll continue that bringing them back to this ceremonial place where they are sacrificed with the proper words and ceremony was the goal.”

It's interesting, like when they attacked each other, it was not about acquiring resources or killing people. It was about the favor of the gods. I think the Maya were always very cognizant that they're just kind of puppets on strings, that everything we're doing is to gain the favor of the gods and to protect our relationship to them through the kings and their bloodletting. So Maya battles get fought and cities win and lose, but they don't just take over that city and put their flag up. What they want is that king to use his bloodletting ability to gain the favor of the gods.

So these battles are on a practical level about acquiring that city's ability to influence the gods, not their crops, not their buildings. They still allow them to fly their same flag, but they want them to do is use their magical influence through their blood for the team that just defeated them.

Or either kill them or you coerce them to use it for you.

“Interesting. So then so the conquered cities, they wipe out the bloodline, sacrifice that to the gods to get the power or whatever you want to call it.”

They would rule the city that has been conquered. Sometimes they put their own person in, sometimes they didn't stall their own person from their bloodline or sometimes that city would just die out, or they take like the princesses from that city and marry their bloodline into them and then they were both. A huge Maya strategy was intermarriage.

There's this whole huge Maya civil war that we learned about maybe 20 years ago and now we're really just putting together this magnificent picture of the two sides of this war.

We know the two big players, their Tikal and Collock Mool. But the entire Maya world was either team Tikal or team Collock Mool. And for a long time, Collock Mool had the better of them. Tikal was the big one in Guatemala and it had all sorts of allies all around it.

“It didn't turn married. It's daughters into their lineages. They were all very intermarried. There's a new book out by a great colleague of mine, David Stewart who shows more and more how the Maya elites were intermarrying nonstop.”

But kind of like you know how Europe became so crazy and sestuous. I am near the end of their dinastic periods where everybody, you know, England's royalty is actually a bunch of Germans is actually a bunch of Austrians and that intermarriage that same thing happened with the Maya. So the Tikal thought they had everything worked out. They were like the Rome of the Maya world. They would oversee all the other cities, dynastic changes. They were the rulers, but unbeknownst to them. But Mool to the north of them was intermarrying their daughters into all these cities. And then all of a sudden attack from every angle and Tikal was defeated, but not totally taken out. They still had kings. Those kings just had to work for Collock Mool.

They sat there for 80 years without any attempt to break Collock Mool's yoke, but then Collock Mool does something unforgivable.

They convinced the brother of the Tikal King, like 80 years into this, into establishing a new city with the same Tikal emblem glyph, but it's called "We call it dose peelus." And that brother of the same bloodline starts contacting the gods with the same power that Tikal does. Tikal can't take it. That king immediately attacks the brother. And they fight back and forth. Tikal's king puts him on the run, and eventually Collock Mool helps that brother to get back and kills the Tikal King. The next Tikal King actually breaks the yoke, but I always think to myself, how was that the moment that broke Tikal? Why was that the moment that broke Tikal? It was his brother betraying him and using his same power to contact the gods. That's what snapped him.

So I mean at the beginning, you said that the minds are not really a nation with one capital or several capitals, and so I would think there would be, you know, that to me sounds like they're not communicating with each other. It's not one nation per se. I would imagine there was a lot of civil war. It got crazy, and this kind of precipitates the end of the classic period. Just like, you know, in Europe, just because, you know, France and Germany were fighting each other. That doesn't mean there weren't like undercurrents of communication between your families and spies and things. So there wasn't totally no communication, but there was definitely a, you're on my side or you're not.

“So all these, all these capitals per se within the Mayan, what the Mayan race, civilization region, yeah, sure. They would all be competing for the grace of the gods, correct?”

And there'd be tears of them. There'd be, you know, some in allies and enemies that we have this fantastic chart that's been made of all the allies in the enemies, you know, in red and green, and then there's, there's lots of intrigue and backstabbing.

But then behind their back with Callak Moul's backing, they take a, a princess, a young woman from dose Pulas, marry her into Naronho's line. And her son becomes the next great king there, but while he's a boy, she's a female warrior, and she's shown on steal after stealer, using her power to contact the gods as their queen, and fighting. We see her with weapons. She's like the Joan of Arc of the Maya world. She takes over, I think it's six different cities. All while he's growing up and as soon as he's 12, he becomes the king and she steps in a consort position.

“But it fascinating all the things we know. I mean, isn't it shocking that I can talk about Maya history, like its European history?”

That's the power of these higher glyphs in this art. This is the really the first American side of the world culture that we can talk about like this.

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“You mentioned hunting rituals. What were they hunting?”

Yeah, they were hunting all sorts of stuff. In those particular ones, the Madrid Codex, the one that's in Madrid now, it shows it's got like ten pages full of deer hunting. They were hunting a lot of deer. They were domesticating turkeys, and they were in the same kind of pages too about like when the best slaughter turkeys, I think. But the deer ones talk about its connection to the calendar. They're all about the timing of the calendar. And so those pages are not so much about like how to kill a deer. They're more about this is the appropriate time to go hunting.

And this is the appropriate time to eat deer, and these are inappropriate times to do that. There's a god of hunting called Eccatua. He's a weird black striped faced guy, but he's the guy who says, "You'll have good luck hunting. You'll have bad luck hunting." But they're very easy saying good luck or bad luck to the... as whatever the king says.

Okay. Not in a like annual hunting season kind of way, because I guess what I'm asking is who would get the dates? I mean, you're talking, I guess it'll be the king who's doing the blood sacrifice, right? What the smoke? And it's priestly class. And so how would that message get to him and get deciphered to everybody else's?

“Oh, I get you now. You know, not every message came from the beyond. That's what the calendar's about. The calendar is about these cycles.”

Okay. And probably they believed that their original inspiration for the calendar was the gods and their statements. But my priest would use this calendar to kind of in a... in a horoscope kind of way tell you when a good day or a bad day was for things.

The first 23 pages of the Dresden Codex, which was my translating it was my master's degree,

is nothing we call them the prognostication pages. And they use the Maya calendar, the simplest Maya calendar, the 260 day calendar, to say, these are good days to get married. These are bad days to get married. These are good days to be keep. These are bad days to be keep.

“This is a good day to build a house. They're the each one of the almond acts are telling us something different about it. It's a good day. It's a bad day. And there are little grip glyph blocks.”

Four to six glyph blocks that are saying, this guy is beekeeping. It is bad. Are they using euphemism like? And it was tortillas. And the other one, a bad one, there were five or six different little euphemisms they'd use for good or bad. Like it was burial. Or it was famine. That would be the bad things, or it was an abundance of tortillas. Or it was happy. Things like that. But they use those prognostication. So the deer hunting pages that I was talking about have much the same system where it's saying on days like, you know, that I'm just making this up.

But, you know, on on a how dog and rabbit days, those are good hunting days. Don't ever hunt on a flint day. That's a bad day to hunt. Okay. How did the calendar get developed? I mean, a lot of people was at 2012. The calendar ended. Well, a lot of people thought it ended up. A lot of people thought the the world was going to end. A whole bunch of people did. 2012. Was it you? It was very, very good to me. No, I did not. I was, I got to do a whole lecture circuit about exactly why I thought that was bullshit. That was that was great.

“No, I think that was a misunderstanding of our our understanding of the calendar and it's cyclical nature. We Westerners, you know, if I, if I asked the average Westerner to draw me a picture of time.”

They would probably draw a dot in the present. They would have a line going to the future. They would align going into the past. That question asked of a Maya would be a circle and not a clock with hands going that way. That could be somebody might draw that one for me too.

But very cyclical in nature. So the Maya feel like everything that's happened will happen again in one fashion or another. There's a cyclical nature of time. They would never predict and end.

That's just not how their conception of time works. Interesting. When they created the calendar gosh, you know, the early, if the very first calendar, if we have, is tied to about 600 BC. And it's not Maya. It's Zapotech. It's in the Valley of Waxaca. All of those cultures were kind of coming up with these ideas and bantering them back and forth about calendars and time. And just simply how to express math around that last centuries of the BC period.

But it's tricky to say when they did it because I've always said, you know, by the time somebody carbs it in stone, they've been thinking about it for a while.

By the time we archaeologists find it carbs in stone gosh, they must have, you know, perfected the system, you know, a long time earlier. That's interesting. So they thought time was a circle, a cycle. Actually, we in the western world are aberrant. If we look at most of the cultures of the world, they are much more cyclically oriented than we are. Our timeline thing is the aberration, not the, not the cycle.

Generally speaking, they were freaked out by them. They did not like them. They still don't like them. I've been in Maya villages where

Eclipses are answered by getting outside of your house and banging pots and pans in the dog's bark and they, they want to chase it off, especially like when the moon goes away. They were capable of predicting them. Not perfectly kind of a shotgun approach, but they, there's a page again out of the golden wheel.

“If we only had a hundred Maya books, God, we'd know so much from the four we have. We see so much insight. I wish, you know, where's the recipe book?”

Where's the history book? We got, we got an astronomy book, we got a hunting book, but in the Dresden Codex again, there are a couple of pages that talk about eclipses.

And they figured out that it was every five or six slenations of the moon. They figured out the concept of nodes, that they didn't, they did not know that it was the sun and the moon and the earth lining up. But they did realize that every five or six moons cycles was the only time it could happen. So there are charts that show, they say, a hundred and forty eight days, a hundred and forty eight days, a hundred and forty eight days. And then everyone's going to go, hundred and seventy seven days, hundred and forty eight hundred and forty eight, and that's five or six lunations of the moon. So we can tell they're making these shotgun approaches to try to figure out when and a clips would happen.

“And pictures right next to it show like a sky band with the, with the moon goddess hanging dead off of it and another symbol that has the sun half black half sun.”

It's, even without the numbers it's pretty blatant that they were talking about eclipses, but the numbers themselves show us that they, they weren't quite as good as the Greeks got at it.

But they did have the concept down. They understood that there were certain nodes that it could happen on. They couldn't say like, this time it won't, this time it will, but they knew, they knew the cycle. Got you. How advanced were their mathematics? Pretty darn advanced really. I mean, they could do anything with their math system that we can do, which I think just alone on a base level, that's impressive. It was their number system. Yeah, we have a system that's better than what the Romans and the Greeks were using. The Romans and the Greeks, like you know Roman numerals, it's one, two, three.

But then the next one is IV and then it's V and then it's VI and you get to 10 and it's X and then it's, you know what I'm talking about that.

“It's not a positional system of numeration. That's why, you know, did you ever get a, like a movie in the 1980s and they put the name, the year in Roman numerals instead, and it was like 20 Roman numerals like God, what a terrible system.”

Just to say 1983, that's all this mess. We have a positional system of numeration. We go 1 through 9 and then the next one is 10 and what we do is we put a 0 in the 1's column and a 1 in the 10's column. Then we get to 99, we have another position that comes up. We have a 0 in the 1's, a 0 in the 10's and a 1 in the 100's, right? That's how our system works. That's positional. Look, that's the same thing my students do like, I'm talking about math again, please go away. But you asked, the Maya have a base 20 system, so they work just like we do, we're base 10, but theirs goes up 1 through 19 when you hit 20, you have a 0 in the 1's and a 1 in the 20's.

And then you go to 400 and then you go to 6,000, 8,000. But they can do the same thing, they can express any number approaching infinity with their number system. But the cool thing is, our system, we have a 1 through a 9 and then a 0. That's 10 symbols, right? With it, we can express any number. The Maya have a bar, they have a dot for 1, they have a bar for 5 and then they have a shell or a flower for 0. They can also express every number, but they did it with just 3 symbols. And that regard, their mathematical system is more elegant than ours. They pulled it off with just 3 number, 3 symbols. We have to use 10. Wow.

The frustrating thing about the Maya math is that they're always talking about time. They're very rarely talking about big numbers of things.

And I wish I would see more, you know, why doesn't somebody tell me there's 10,000 people? I want to read that number. The reason I want to read it is because part of the Maya calendar is this really weird cycle called the long count. That's their kind of most linear count of days, but within the long count, there's days, months, years, 20 year periods, 400 year periods.

But the years, it's only 360 days. It's double weird because one year is 365 days. Why would they be five days off and just keep doing it and never correct it, which is what happened.

“That's the long count is weird like that. But the other one is mathematically, if you're in a base 20 system of the jessimal system of numeration, you should go 1, 2020, 400, 8,000, 160,000.”

But the Maya long count goes 1, 2020, 360, 7,600, and on up. So they augment that third position to 360, not 400. So a straight counting of things, are they using their system properly or are they augmenting it like they do the count of days in the long count? A thousand examples of them using this log augmented system, but nothing else. I can tell me there's 400 captives, so I can read how you do your math system with things instead of days. Interesting. It hasn't happened yet, but it's one of these confusions. I am, I'm a Maya math nerd. I've been studying this thing for my whole life.

I've been dying to see some, but some may account something that's not days to see if they actually adhere to a 20 base system or do they not. I mean, I have to, but I don't have the proof. What would they do with their debt? They bury them under their houses. They would bury them under their houses. Yep, which I think is wonderful in a way. I guess I've been infected by the Maya, but to our society, that's kind of a cob. You put them in the cemetery where you're supposed to put them, but they felt this connection, like we have these ghost stories, the Maya have no ghost stories, they are absolutely convinced that the spirits of their ancestors are here and they mean to help us.

And so having grandma under your bed as you sleep is nice to them. It would be weird to us. And we have all sorts of, you know, European baggage about ghosts and remnants, vampires, zombies and all this crap.

“The Maya have none of that, and I think it's a deep connection to their belief that their ancestors never really leave them. And their ancestors want to come home, so they just keep them there.”

What was the, what kind of ended the Maya Empire? Infectious disease, honestly, was the number one killer of the Maya Empire. And the 1500s, the Spanish came in, of course, you know, conquest and the sword didn't help either, but really, it was infectious disease that ruined everyone.

And it's proof that there was not that much contact before, because once contact really happened 90% of people were dead in the first 50 years.

“Our debate is how many people were here and today, you know, I think that I am now saying a conservative number when I say 100 million people died in the first 50 years.”

Across the Americas, that's North America to South America, but there were millions of people that got hit with 13 infectious pandemic diseases.

But it was still dormant in their population. So when the population hit the Americas who had never been exposed to this stuff, the diseases just rolled in.

“And then sadly, you know, one of the real ironies of that is they did come to conquest and they didn't slave the Indians and the Indians died off to such a great extent.”

That they still Africans and hauled them over to be slaves, but Africa brought its own infectious diseases that they had had herd immunity and that's when like yellow fever and malaria showed up. But from this moment, the first European stepped on the continent, they were dead. You know, there were ones that died by the sword, but if not for the infectious diseases, we'd be living in a different world right now. Okay. And who documented those infectious diseases without the Europeans or the Europeans? Oh, yeah. The Europeans, you know, that it's got the most tragic cases are the first contact in the Caribbean, just how fast it happened.

“They, you know, they landed in his manual and you know, to make an area that Cuba and and what's now half Dominican Republic, half Haiti. And those people like almost everybody was dead in the first 10 years.”

Just that's the, and that's they started importing slaves first there, but that was this terrible crucible where nobody could get away. They were isolated on islands and just wiped out like there was no one left to enslave. One of the things, you know, during COVID, I, everybody had their own different way of soothing themselves. I intensively studied the history of pandemics for the entire time and one of the fascinating things I saw reading all of the documents of the Caribbean is that about 10 years into it.

The Spanish started suffering these diseases too. They started dying out on the islands there too. And I wondered myself, is this was, is this the undocumented mutation of these diseases.

“It swept through the Caribbean people, the Taino to the point where it mutated enough to boomerang back onto the Spanish. I think in that limited context it did.”

But once it hit the mainland, it's, it was like a wildfire. And the poor Maya and people of Mesoamerica, nobody, the Europeans either did not know what an infectious disease was. Europe was still believing were made of the four humors were made of yellow, bile, black, bile, blood and flim. That was, you know, they were, they were putting leeches on people. That's where they were at. Maya were a much cleaner people, but they, they believed that all of diseases were a spiritual attack, a disfavor of the gods or an attacked by spirits. So they would bathe themselves together to try to, maybe it's, you know,

but they would get the disease like that. And the priests would come in and try to baptize everybody because they thought God was punishing them because they were pagans, but they take the same bowl of holy water, line them up and just splash disease on everybody's face.

So they were accelerating it in that way. By the time Pizarro got to South America and know Europeans had been there yet, the king himself of the Incah had died of smallpox.

And the Empire was in disarray because two brothers were fighting for the kingship because their father had died of smallpox. It hit the king in the Andes running like a wildfire ahead of the Spanish. Wow, did the lions had to been, did they have any medicine? They did have medicines. They had good medicines, but they, but their mentality was that it was all spirits. It's interesting how they got to the same conclusions that we do. In some ways, they have, you know, medicines were still trying to get from them because they're so effective. Things like they can, they can make kidney stones turned mud.

These interesting things. I got that stuff from some of my guys for a friend of mine who had kidney stones, but I had to like talk to a group of shamans and they were like, what are you here for? Who are you? Archaeologist, are you sure you're not a medicine?

But that side, side example here. They, they did have medicine, but they felt like it was all spiritual. Like I've got a spiritual attack happening. I need a spiritual solution.

“What kind of plant spirits can help me and they divide them into hot plants and cold plants. And most of them, they would put in a brew. They would like to, they, they boil them.”

And there'd be things that were hot spirits that you drink hot or cold spirits that you drink cold. Some of them, they'd be plants that you'd just ingest mostly. But they, they like to make brews, but their mentality was that sickness was a spiritual attack, not a physical like germs thing. Nobody on the planet understood what a germ was in the 1500s.

“Okay. But that was also their damning because they felt like everybody getting sick was proof positive that their gods had abandoned them.”

And the perfect timing of the conquistadors showing up with a bunch of priests who said, "You know why you're all sick because you're paykins." And if you just follow God instead, you'll be okay. And they were like, "That makes a lot of sense." Okay. You're God's more powerful in our God. We're sick because your God is more powerful in our God. And if we just pray to your God, we'll be okay. That really accelerated the conversion into Christianity. Every man in person today is a Christian. No kidding. So that is what created Christianity and Central South America. It certainly helped sell it. It helped sell it. That whole like Jesus God's sacrifice thing too. They were like, "Yeah, I get that too." That's good stuff. Okay. I understand where you're coming from.

So ironically, you know, "Okay, I will become a Christian. What do I got to do?" Well, I'm just going to take this bowl of water and I'm going to splash it on your face like I did. The last hundred guys in the line accidentally giving them the disease. There was a priest in the Amazon in Brazil who wrote this heartbreaking chronicle where he said, "I've done everything God's asked. I've made these utopian communities and I am baptizing people thousands of people a day." And yet God still takes them. "What am I doing wrong? Please send me a sign."

No idea that probably the bowl of holy water was what was accelerating it. Yeah, that's no dispersion on Christianity. I'm just saying. What a terrible coincidence clash of events that accelerated not that his goal was to stop it. But his actions were accelerating it.

“Very interesting. We'll take a quick break. Sounds good.”

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All right, so here we go. We're back from the break. I got a hot question for you.

Sweet. Ready? Head. We're still discovering entire human landscapes underneath the Amazon. A new nature study estimates there could be 24 to 30,000 ancient earthworks in just one region.

“And potentially millions of people living there at its peak. From an archaeologist's perspective, how badly have we underestimated what the Amazon looked like before Europeans arrived?”

And what do you think is still hidden underneath that canopy? I love that question. Yep, we did not see that coming at all. I will brag and say, I saw that coming. I saw the beginnings of that on my great courses about South America that I did in, you know, before 2012.

I think I did that in 2009. I said, this stuff is beginning in the Amazon and get back to me in a decade because what we're going to find is going to freak us out and it has.

There are thousands of these geoglyphs and that we call them geoglyphs but they're actually in closures around big communities and different places at different ways that they handled that. That wetland environment, some of them built big mounds up and cause ways in between in Bolivia. There are these magnificent huge communities that have big mounds with with raised causeways going out to little or mounds and little of people's houses. And they basically built raised roads over the wetlands and then figured out how to farm those wetlands and just turned it into an agricultural paradise and it's not.

It was still there when the Spanish arrived. There's a hundred years after the Spanish arrived, some priests went down there and tried to civilize them. And in those journals, one of the priests said, expressed his frustration. He said, they've built this magnificent magnificent system of causeways and all they used them for is to go from party to party.

These people are always having celebrations. They're not using these for commerce or education or anything they just used them to party, which I thought was hilarious.

Like these people were having a grand old time. And there's so much down there in the Amazon that, I'm no longer surprised. It's just a question of time before we see just how much is there.

“And I'm beginning to wonder, like, where are the bald patches? Where are the countryside patches?”

Really, there's that much. Wow. I think in the heart of the Amazon is probably where the bald patches, where the Amazon, you've been down there in an average year, the water level around like my nows raises a hundred feet. And the trees all have adapted to that and the wildlife has they all just go up into the trees and half the year they see the water or see the ground. And those environments probably, you know, erased causeway was not enough. But in the, and it's really, at the moment the evidence kind of rings the heart of the Amazon.

And maybe that's just how deeply archaeologists have been able to go from the known to the unknown or maybe the heart of the Amazon is so deep that even their adaptations wouldn't work there.

“That's yet to be seen. You see a lot of people, how many times have you been down there?”

To the Amazon? Yeah, just once. Just once. Yeah, I spent a week down there going from a mouse. I picked the black river instead of the Amazon to go up, but I spent on a boat going up there. And I mostly my mission that time was to talk to modern native groups and ask them why they picked where they picked. To put their village. What do they say? The answer was the same every time that there's this black soil here that's very agricultural, productive. They call it a terapreta.

And that in archaeology, we've begun talking about that as an anthropogenic landscape. And it's the evidence that thousands, well, at least hundreds of years ago, maybe thousands of years ago, humans had churned up the land there so much to farm that it's this rich soil.

They just practically pick the places that are full of this black soil that archaeology is now realized is man-made.

Interesting. And it's huge areas. We call it an anthropogenic landscape. It's the Amazon destroys everything. Like there's the evidence of earthen mountains and things just get churned up there so much that it's hard to detect human past.

“Habitation. So this anthropogenic landscape is a relatively new concept where we're analyzing the soils to see did that happen naturally or did humans do that?”

Wow. Have you ever seen anybody living off grid out there?

Well, those data, guys, yeah. But even those guys know what menouses. You mean like actual native folks living off the grid? I was just surfing around YouTube the other day. I just actually sent this channel to, I think it's called Yes Theory. Is it? Yes Theory? I found this channel called Yes Theory. I don't know much about it because I just found it, but they found this guy who's been living off grid up the Amazon river. I think somewhere in Brazil for like 39 years or something.

“Why? It's not a crazy guy that's accused of killing tourists. Is it? No, no, no, thanks for him. Well, these guys are still living all right.”

It lives out there, but do you don't want to fight it? One dude out in the middle know where just he's got a river house on the side of the Amazon somewhere and he's been out there for 39 years.

Well, I had to talk to that guy because he should be dead by now. It's fascinating. I mostly get these guys on. My work is in mostly in the rainforests of Guatemala and Mexico in those areas and those are inhospitable forests, but I'm going to say the Amazon's next level. The Amazon had like way more snakes, way more deadly plants, way more environmental changes that could kill you. But about day three, going up the black river, we stopped in a ruined city that had like European brick built houses and things, but they had trees coming out of them.

And there we walked down the street and the riverboat captain said, yeah, this was going to be manals and this was where the rubber industry started, but then the jungle just swallowed this place and they decided to move down river to manals. And I was like, what, what ended it? And he said something strange about like, they say it was ants. Like ants, Jesus Christ, ants took over a city. That's what he said to me and I, the ants there are huge and the army ants just swarm. That environment scared me and I like the jungle.

“Yeah, yeah. Where's the follow-up? If somebody gave you unlimited light art tomorrow and said you can scan one unexplored region anywhere in the Americas, where are you going?”

Oh, well, that's a good one. I mean, it's funny, it's a race right now. People are lightarring the crap out of things. If I went to, I, you know, my, my gut reaction is to say the Amazon, but stand in line, Ed, there's, you know, 50 guys out there, lightarring the Amazon, where would I go that everybody doesn't think they should look? I would probably do what my friend in colleague Luke Cameron's, Luke Reagan is doing. I would scan up and down all the rivers of North America of the United States because the Mississippi and all the way out to the east coast, there are pyramids here, but they're trapped in the woods there, they're on private properties.

And you could find so much people are doing it. I'm still, I would be behind the curve there because Luke has found almost 80 pyramids sites. Yeah, and there's another one. I've just become obsessed with somebody's Facebook page. It's LiDAR America. This guy every day is pumping out another LiDAR image of a pyramid sitting on somebody's ranch. And you don't, he shows the just the aerial shot of just the woods nothing.

No, I can't put underground. I mean, we have, you know, half a dozen major sites that are archaeological parks you could visit, but LiDAR is showing, you know, a year ago I said,

"Oh, LiDAR is not finding anything new. That's not true anymore." LiDAR has especially here right in North America, been finding dozens and dozens of big earthen pyramids that are all, they pay, they pay, they pay on the big rivers. Mississippi and civilization starts about 900 when they really get corn from Mesoamerica. Once they figure out how to grow big crops of corn, they start making huge communities along our major rivers. A lot of that area is in national parks, or it's just wilderness, or it's somebody's mega ranch of 3000 acres and it's out there, but we've never seen it before this LiDAR has been showing us just how much I, I'm so happy to see it because I knew it was there and I know how many pyramids were destroyed from like the 1700s and 1800s as we moved out into the crop land.

I was worried they were all gone, but LiDAR has been showing me, nope, they're still probably hundreds of them.

Wow, I would love to stumble across one of those, you know, is this property like 30 acres? I would bet you my bottom dollar, you have Mississippi and civilization right here on this property. That would be cool. How will we find that out? You know, survey, out in, out in these woods, you could go to Nashville. There are contract archaeology firms for not very much, they would survey your entire land, phase one and tell you where the archaeology is and I guarantee you there's a lot of stuff here, Sean. I'm going to do that. Do it. Tell me how it goes.

Alright, here's the bonus because we're getting into this anyways. Graham Hancock believes there have been, excuse me, Graham Hancock believes there may have been an advanced loss civilization that influenced later cultures.

“You know his work, but you disagree with that conclusion. We're exactly, do you think he gets it wrong?”

I think that Graham has oversimplified the situation. His, you know, like any person who studies something for their lifetime, his ideas have evolved over the years.

But he still sticks with this idea that there was a single advanced civilization and that's a buzzword advanced that was epically destroyed by some kind of cataclysm about 12,000 years ago, but that it provided the seeds for every other major civilization around the planet.

“Where I, and I think the majority of my colleagues believe that civilizations began independently of one another grew up and then met where he believes they started at a single place spread out grew up met again never remembering their common origin.”

That's an overly simplistic thing. I can't prove it. He can't prove it right. I can't prove it wrong. There's not enough evidence to say, but it doesn't make. I think I can make a better argument than him that civilizations developed independent of each other. Human civilizations are kind of, you know, human commonality finding things like math and science that are the same in every culture, or at least the products of them are two plus two is four whether we're here or on the moon.

“Do you think they interacted with each other? I think they eventually interacted with each other, but I think they grew up independently.”

It's like, for example, you know, Egypt and China, you know, they developed on their own track and they ended up making, you know, sedentary life crops houses, you know, then eventually cities. The same thing happened in Peru, but there's no way there's the times and space are wrong for China to have taught Peru how to do this or, you know, in Hancock's vision, it's somewhere around the Mediterranean.

But he's still going, yeah, he's he's no longer saying it's Atlantis, but he is saying it's some sort of ancient civilization. He loves and I love go backly tapping that turned everything on its head. That was a perfect example where I do agree with him is that there are ancient civilizations that we know nothing about, that we are still, we could still discover or at least I share that optimism.

“I mean, I can't remember where I said, let's go back to the Bions for example. I should have asked this. I mean, how big were their structures?”

Were they, I mean, are they comparable to Egyptian architecture? Well, nothing compares to the pyramid in Giza in terms of height. It's 150 meters tall. The tallest my building is 70 meters tall. So half the height. But volume wise, Giza's not the biggest. The biggest is actually in Mexico. It's the Chalula pyramid. It's not as tall, but it's area is much much wider like the pyramid in the Giza's pretty steep. But the one in in Chalula is very wide. So volumetrically, it's bigger.

And the third one is the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan, just north of Mexico City. So two of the three largest pyramids in the world are in Mexico, neither one of those are Maya.

“But like number five, I think, is the complex in El Mirodor, which is a BC period Maya site. So that's that's exciting. So how would they have built it?”

Man, you will labor, brick by brick. One of the things they weren't, they weren't huge blocks like in some cases. Mirador, the early days, they made, they used some bigger blocks. But generally speaking, most of the Maya, most of the Mesoamerican pyramids are made of blocks that a single block could be carried by a person by a single person. So that's different. Like in the case of Egypt, they're massive blocks. There's not a stone source anywhere near they built them. So they had to bring them down a river and then they had to drag them across a desert and then they had to drag them up there. The scale of Egypt.

In my opinion, it's an archaeologist. It is unfair to compare any other civilizations architecture, T-Egypt, Egypt blows the amount of the water. Even, you know, the second one that I would say is in second place is not the Maya or any of these things in America. It's the Kamar in Cambodia.

The anchor and the Kamar civilization. The scale of their architecture is also mind-blowing. I've never even heard of this. I don't know if you haven't heard an anchor what.

I don't think so. Holy moly, you're in for a ride. If you like archaeology, the scale of things there. The city's called Anchor. I've done a lot of work over there. I love the astronomy there. I've got some cool stuff going. And they're all such nice Buddhists there. Everybody's so freaking kind. When I bring groups of tourists there, I have to tell them don't get mad because you're just going to freak some people out. These people don't work like that. If your meal comes late, please don't be angry. You'll make somebody cry. It'll freak them out.

Anyway, Anchor is in the middle of Cambodia and there's a single compound there called Anchor Tom that the entire city of Tikal would fit inside.

It's just one section. Let's say it like 1200/80. Anchor had a population of just shy of a million people. It's crazy. But Egypt is still on a tear above them.

“I can't remember if I saw this from Graham Hancock's work. Is it true? Is it true that a lot of these ancient wonders like Giza, I think Stonehenge, Easter Island?”

Were these all built on top of major fault lines? No. It's not true. No, that's not true. I mean, I said that very fluently. I mean, I could take a moment to think about that. If I remember right there, I don't think they were all the same.

Nor is Egypt really. Parus got a ton of earthquakes, but I'm not sure that Easter Island has ever had an earthquake.

“I could be off. I could be off, you know, maybe Easter Island. I've seen and this is much of nature, I think. There were sand.”

Parus got a ton of earthquakes, that's for sure. But England, not that many. One thing I did see that this is that now I'm preaching on crackpot here, but it's interesting to me how the cradle of civilization.

Hover along the places in the world where magnetic interferences zero. You know how, like when you use your compass, it always points magnetic north, but that's not really true north.

It could be off to a certain time, like the Boy Scouts are all about.

“They make, they post this map of the world every year where the magnetic declination is. So like up in New England, you have to set your compass to like 15 degrees off to be true north, the magnetic and true north are pretty off there.”

But there's a, there's a sine wave that goes through the earth where it's zero. And it fluctuates a little by year by year. It doesn't go way off, but it's, it's a yearly thing that it moves. But I was tracking that one time just using my compass and things back. And I noticed that in the topic, you can tan it zero in Egypt, it's zero where Harapah, it's zero in southeast Asia, it's zero. The one, the line, like tags, the cradles of civilization. And that's, that's totally crack pot of music, because there's no evidence that magnetic declination means anything to the ancient people. I just, it's an interesting observation that in all the places where the cradle of civilization has, we're not suffering any magnetic disturbance.

“And we know we're electromagnetic people. Is there something about, you know, having no magnetic interference that does something different to the human mind?”

There are certainly big businesses that have fallen and risen about rubbing magnets on your body to have special healing powers. I just, yeah, I probably shouldn't have even said that, but it's an observation I've made that it's weird that it's zero in all the cradle of civilization. I've been using Ridge for a while, and what I like about them is they take everyday gear and make it cleaner, tougher, and more functional, while it's power banks, luggage, travel gear, all the stuff you actually carry in use.

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That's Ridge.com and use code SRS. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. How would you begin to look into that? Well, how would I prove it is the thing? There's a thousand great ideas about archaeology, but how about geologically prove that? I mean, the truth of the magnetic zero, it's just there on the Boy Scout map. You can just see it there. You can Google right now, magnetic declination of the earth, and it'll show you where it's zero and where it goes off of zero up to like 25 degrees off.

But how I would prove that it had any effect on the birth of civilization? Well, I can't. And that's what makes it a creme archaeological theory and something that probably shouldn't have come out of my mouth in this interview.

Did you said something had, uh, oh, we were talking about Atlantis, I think, and you said there was something that turned it on its head.

Well, you know, I know you had Randall Carlson on a couple years ago, and I saw that that one and you guys talked a lot about the younger dryest theory and how the, you know, the idea is that that maybe a comet hit the earth. And turned everything on its head, that's the time period. Graham is very excited about this whole younger dryest thing because it seems to be in lines would what he's been saying for years, but didn't have, you know, the language to talk about why did everything come apart. We have the comet and the younger dryest does, does, uh, help his argument. And you know, I'd like to say to that Graham and I are friends. I worked with him on his, uh, ancient apocalypse thing and we spent three days in, uh,

in Clanket together and I love that series. I, uh, thanks. That was fun. That was fun to be apart. But I, you know, I really got to know him and I've met a lot of people that are, you know, in the pseudo archaeology sphere and some of them are charlatans and I don't like those guys. I would imagine. Uh, Graham's not a charlatan. He's just wrong. And, uh, and I've said it to him and he said it to me. I've seen him actually publicly say, Ed and I are friends. He doesn't believe what I have to say and that's okay, which I think is nice. We should all be like that.

“There's, uh, you know, Graham has brought millions of people to get excited about archaeology and I don't think my colleagues should be spitting on him. And if he's wrong, you know, the truth, the truth is immutable. The truth always comes out.”

People spell bullshit every day. But you don't have to get upset about it. If you, if the, the truth will come out, regardless of what anybody says. So, why spend time fighting about it when this guy has actually garnered the audience that we've always wanted. What do you think about it, uh, Atlantis? I think that's a possibility. Yeah, personally, I think that it was a parable that Plato told to talk about the potential downfall of society and how things happen. I do not think there's an Atlantis out there. I'm sad to say I wish there was.

“I think there may be a story that he used as the foundation to talk about Atlantis. And if in that scenario, the best candidate, if I do say, you know,”

if there's something even like Atlantis, I think it would be a criteria. On the island of what's that, what's that island that everybody loves to go to in the Mediterranean outside of Greece, some blank on its name, but everybody goes to it. I've got the volcano in the middle, I don't know why I'm blanking on it. It's like the most famous with the, with the white places with the blue roofs. Anyway, that's an island out there in the, in the, in the adjian that a huge volcano blew up and blew the whole island to pieces.

So much so that 70 miles away and creeps, there are chunks of Santorini. Santorini is the island, but there's a section of a city that's still there called Akritiri, it's only a section of it because the crater blew up most of the city.

“But it's from like, I think I want to say 1200 BC and it's very advanced. It has like streets and street lamps and all sorts of things that were very advanced, but the volcano blew up destroyed Akritiri, put chunks of it into creates cliffs.”

From the description of a city that was out in the water and then exploded and sunk, Santorini and Akritiri, if there's, if there's anything that does match the description of Atlantis, it's that.

But that's just my opinion and when it comes to Atlantis, boy, there are a lot of opinions out there. Do you think that it's an impossibility that there is, there potentially was a, a super technological advanced civilization? We're talking about the Mayan calendar that goes back 15 million years. A lot could happen in 15 million years. Well, just because we talk about 15 million years doesn't mean there was somebody back there.

We, you know, we can be very sure about what we know, but we don't know what we don't know. So, part of me hopes that we're totally wrong.

“But when it comes to, you know, super advanced type civilizations or even just a major civilization, let's not even give it, you know, all the bluster of some advanced technology.”

I really feel like archaeology would see at least the evidence of it. We're not great at interpreting things, but damn we're good at finding things. I mean, we find fish scales. I just feel it's, it's very improbable that there was a civilization massive enough to have trade relations with the rest of the planet that we don't even have a brick from it anymore.

Now, part of what Graham says, which is legit, is that back at 12,000 years ago, the sea levels were different. The sea has risen 300 feet.

That might be more at 600 feet. And so, a ton of archaeology must be under the ocean right now, and it could have been just buried, churned up by the ocean waves. It could be miles out on the out under the water. So, I agree with him on that point. There is probably all sorts of archaeological evidence under the ocean that our current technology isn't allowing us to see. Maybe light are a change that I've been hearing that people are developing light are not to just go through the air, but go through the water. If we can map out with light are the whole ocean floor, maybe find some of that stuff.

But it could get buried very deep, you know, one hurricane puts, you know, a whole beach onto the land. What's it doing to the bottom of the ocean? So, I totally agree that there's a lot of stuff under the ocean. There has to be. But how do we get to it until we find it? It doesn't exist. It's what we don't know. I mean, how do you explain, or maybe you don't, but I mean, you've got to be stumped on it. I mean, things like stone hinge or the pyramids, or the, I think there's those caves in Turkey that are like entire cities that are on the ground or capedosia.

“Where was it? I can't remember where I saw this. It was probably one of Graham's things, but there's a cave. I think it's an India or something, but they were saying that the cave walls inside are flatter than a glass top table.”

They brought this instrument in and I don't know about those ones. And they're saying these caves are ancient and that it would have been, you know, to light it up down there, you would have been fired. And the people would have died because of smoke because it's just a little hole that goes into this cave and it would have been, you know, hammered. They're certain humans made it or they just saw something they are. That's another one, like, you know, some of Graham's research or evidence is actually geology.

And it's not human and it very much looks human and if you're not, you know, somebody who intensively studied geology, totally understandable that you'd look at something like that huge wall in Montana. And say, like, there's no way humans didn't make that. But, you know, what I lately say is, you know, what's magical is geology, which is a total nerd ass thing to say. But it's true, I mean geology makes some amazing stuff there, you know, like I was one time on the salt flats of Uyuni in Bolivia. And it's just as far as you can see this, these flats with perfect hexagons connected to hexagons connected to hexagons, 70 miles of them.

“And it's just like, it's so perfectly geometrical, be like, how did nature make this? How did this not, how was this not drawn and yet?”

There's amazing things the geology makes that looks amazing, you know, to the, to the layman, it just feels like there's no explanation other than man, but there is.

So what do you work it on today? Well, lately I've been trying to be talking head on the internet, but, you know, I'm kind of in the, in the sunset of my career, I'm 57 now, I still feel good, my kids are raised, I might go out and have another adventure, but I do so really realize that I could break a hip on a pyramid any day.

One is the archaeo astronomy in southeast Asia, I found some, you know, the, the French have mostly done all the work in in Cambodia, but they haven't focused on their astronomy at all, and I have found some really cool stuff there stuff that's like Indiana Jones tricks of light and shadow, you know, like when the, when the beam of light comes in and he knows where the arc of the covenant is like that kind of stuff. And Cambodia, that's a, I could spend an hour telling you about that, but I'm thrilled about that stuff, because I'm really, I'm really doing something for the people of Cambodia and that too, it's getting exciting, they're starting to like make events around the astronomy stuff I figured out.

“Yeah, that sounds fascinating. I love it. I wish it wasn't so freaking far away. If you want, actually, the other side of the planet, let me hear one thing of the over there.”

Most of my stuff is about phenomenon called zenith passage, something that only happens in the tropics, the day that the sun goes directly over our head, here in the United States, it will never go directly over our head that only happens in the tropics, that's why the tropics are defined as they are.

The zenith passage is within them and it changes from latitude to latitude day to day. It's not like like we all see

Summer solstice on June 21st, it's not that way with zenith. It changes from latitude to latitude, so they can be discussing this astronomical phenomena, like it happened for us on August 17th, when did it happen for you to the south. Oh, it didn't happen for us until September 5th, how strange. So it's already very foreign to us as far as a sun phenomena. But all of those, you know, those be shaped in Hindu temples, like beehive shaped, they have a hole in the roof and a altar on the bottom and the roof goes, the hole goes all the way through the roof and only on the day of zenith passage, this really bright beam of light comes down and lights up the whole temple on the inside.

And that's why their temples are designed like that. And they have this great cap, like roof cap that has a hole going right through it that it's only about like that wide. So it focuses the light into what looks like a laser. I mean later on, when I can pull my phone out, I'll show you tons of photos of this phenomena, but it's incredible and all the temples do it. So I've been, I've been trying to prove that that happens on purpose. And I finally found one of their capitals that was set away that's actually oriented to see the sunrise on zenith passage. The whole city's oriented to the day that the Sun will rise at that latitude at zenith. And then when it comes up, it shoots beams of light through all that time.

“And it's so cool. And I just kind of stumbled into it. I had been studying archaeo astronomy in the Maya world for so long and we had really documented that the Maya are paying attention to zenith passage and talking to each other about it.”

And we ran out of ways to figure it out. So I was like, "Well, Cambodia is in the tropics too. Why don't we go over there and see what they're doing?" And I found more than I could possibly imagine.

That sounds fascinating. It was great. I love it. And I love the people there. I love the environment, the jungle, it's beautiful. So that's one of my things.

“Another one is I have made one third of a map of Easter Island, four of the people of Rappanui. And I would like to continue.”

But I did it just before COVID and then the entire island went into lockdown for three years and now the administration's different and chilly doesn't really want me doing it because I'll make a better map than they've ever made and give it to the Rappanui who will then have control of their own patrimony. And that's inconvenient to probably shouldn't be saying all this shit. That's inconvenient for the government and universities of Chile.

I've got good friends on the island. What I want to do, I went in there with my heart on my sleeve and said, "You guys have now finally gotten control of your patrimony.

But you don't know where any of your stuff is. Every archaeologist has just come in, mapped the mowi, asked you a failure instead it in left. I will map all of your villages. I will figure out where all your crops are, where all your houses are, where all your chicken coops are. And I will put back together where hopefully where you're clan, there are 13 clans there, but they don't know where their land is anymore. And I said, as you move out, you don't want to destroy your ancestor stuff.

I was almost there. I bought the head of Malhannua, a dinner when I was out there the last time and we were agreed.

“Something weird has happened. I think that archaeologists that don't want me there are thwarting me. But I'm very stubborn. I will get there.”

I'm flying back there again. I'm going to buy them dinner again. And I'll finish a map of Rappanui that I will give to them. That's part of the thing. They think I'm weird. You don't want me money. You're just going to give it to us. I'm just going to give that. I would love to go there. I actually love to go on there. It's beautiful. It's so easy, too. Sean, you don't need a guy like me to go there. You fly from Santiago, five hours out to Rappanui, but once you get there, the town of Rangaroa is lovely.

It's got hotels, their foodies. The food there is wonderful. There's only like 6,000 Rappanui people left sadly.

But they are some of the nicest people I've ever met.

And those heads, they have full bodies under the ground. They all have full bodies. The heads were just a misunderstanding. Those are the ones that are standing in the quarry and the erosion has buried their bodies. But every one of them, there's not a single head on Easter Island. They're all bodies. You know how many we've recorded now? Over a thousand. There's over a thousand on Easter Island. When you see the pictures, you're like, "Oh, God, are there 50 of them? That's a lot of stuff. No, there's a thousand."

Oh, man. I would love to chat with you about that. We're going to have to bring it back on. We've got a lot more to talk about. That's good. I love to do something for the Rappanui people. I like the stuff in Southeast Asia. And I want to prove that the ink fused their walls together with acid.

“I think they did. I think they melted those walls together.”

I don't think they carved them so neat that they fit together, like perfect blocks. I think they melted them together with one. Hydrofloric acid is my guess. They definitely had a lot of acid. They had a lot of hydrochloric acid that comes out of their minds. When you mined gold and silver, one of the byproducts is hydrochloric acid and they have a lot of fluoride. See, it's Andesite. So no natural acid alone would melt them.

But there are places where I see like wipe marks in Cusco. There are places where like there's something where like somebody took a rag and wiped a muddy part off of a piece of granite, which is impossible. And I see places where where crystals are scissored across the seam between two rocks, two bricks, that's impossible.

“So again, kind of a hair-brain theory, but that's what I got from my mentor, Linda Sheely,”

used to tell us all, we're the lunatic fringe. We come up with the weird ideas that are impossible. But those are the ones that change the way we think about things.

So I'm always trying to be honoring her by being on the lunatic fringe.

This definitely classifies. But there's a ton of fluorite in the Andes Mountains. The Inca were making jewelry out of fluorite. And if you combine hydrochloric acid and fluorite, you get HF. That's hydrofluoric acid. Did you watch Breaking Bad? You know that scene where they're trying to dissolve the body in the tub and it comes through from the upstairs to the downstairs.

What they're pouring on is hydrofluoric acid. And it burns right through rocks, ceramic, things, but it won't burn through plastic. And it won't actually burn through certain other substances, too. If you brought fluorite and hydrochloric acid and applied them together on site, they would melt and a site.

And I think that they did weird little layers of just enough of this acid and put one rock on another and melted them together. There are lots of places in Cusco that, unlike this rock, made a muddy footprint into the one below it. That nobody carved that. How the hell did that happen? This lower rock was soft when this big rock came on top of it.

Lots of people think that it was acid and weird people say things like, "Oh, it was urine."

“Or there's a weird bird in the Amazon that eats certain plants that are acidic and then goes to a cliff and spits it onto the cliff.”

And it melts the rock and makes it soft so they can pack a little nest into there. They think maybe it's that. There's weird stories from Spanish conquistadors talking about people around Lake Titicaca,

could make stone, soft and turn it into statues.

There's a weird story about a near-a-mind where some Spanish were trying to make an ink slave drink something out of a weird jar.

“And he was like, "No, no, no." And then it spilled on the ground and the Spanish reporter in the Chronicle said,”

"And the granite beneath it got all soft and muddy after it dumped out of there." I don't know whether that's just bullshit or what, but there's lots of little stories like that.

I'm certainly not the first person to say it might have been acids.

I might be the first person to try to suggest it's hydrophloric acid. So I went to Cusco with this, I wrote him a letter in Spanish and said,

“"If I could just take some samples out of the walls, I can have them studied through neutron activation."”

And I can figure out whether there's any traces of acids in there and they were like, "Don't touch our walls, you weird ass Gringo." So I'm waiting for that guy's position to change. I'll send the next guy to let her again. See what happens right on. Well, I'd love to see you again, and thank you for making the trip out.

This was a fascinating interview. Thanks. I hope I didn't talk too long, but I'd be happy to come back. Perfect. Perfect. Well, we'll see you soon. All right.

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