The Basement: Ed Barnhart | Lost Cities, Botflies, and a Magic Number

-Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/BASEMENT ! #hexcladpartner -Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code BASEMENT at https://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad -Head to https://superpower.com/basement for $50 off your membership. Get 150+ biomarkers tested every year plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://whyfileslovegold.com or call (888) 949-9172 now. -One scam can cost you everything — protect yourself now. The first 100 users get 20% off with code thewhyfiles at https://coveron.com/thewhyfiles Dr. Ed Barnhart found a Maya city nobody had ever touched. Not even the looters. Then he lost it. Thirty years later he's chasing beams of light inside Khmer temples, arguing that Inca walls were melted, and hunting a number a friend guessed 25 years before anyone found it written on a wall. Lost cities, botflies, and a .45 to the forehead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Every now and then, someone would die.

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  Risk. True stories, no holding back.

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• 0:44AJ Gentile?

  Live your authentic truth, because you never know who may come to your funeral and turn that bitch out.

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  Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they dare to share. Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00AJ Gentile?

  Today I'm talking with Dr. Ed Barnhart. In 1995, he was a grad student in the jungles of Belize with the mail order map, a machete, and a camp full of colleagues who thought he was chasing nothing. Then his students started screaming his name at the top of a pyramid. He found a lost Maya city. He was 26.

• 1:15Speaker 07

  Hey, when I was 26, I found a lost city too. Atlantic City. I lost it right back at the craps table.

• 1:22AJ Gentile?

  Everybody asked Ed about that day. Today, we're covering the parts nobody asks about. What happened when the city got handed to someone else? How around a tequila he wasn't there for got him the job of mapping Palenque? And the beams of light he chased into the temples of Cambodia? And then he told me how he thinks the Inca got those Crisco walls to fit like that. Not aliens, acid.

• 1:42Speaker 07

  Ah, the Inca were tripping balls, eh? Ah, Crisco was just a Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Ah, but with boulders.

• 1:49AJ Gentile?

  Not, not that kind.

• 1:50Speaker 07

  Ah, bubba.

• 1:51AJ Gentile?

  That one, I'm still turning over. After our conversation, I'll come back and break it all down. Let's go down to the basement.

• 2:06AJ Gentile?

  Dr. Ed Barnhart is here. Thank you for coming in today.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 2:12AJ Gentile?

  Um, Luke Caverns, Luke Reagan turned me on to your work, and I've been obsessed ever since. I really, really enjoy it.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  I love Luke. Luke is, has grown so much as an explorer too. He was just kind of a young guy with stars in his eyes when I first met him. But now, you know, he is, he is my colleague.

• 2:30AJ Gentile?

  He is legit. He, he texted me a photo a couple of days ago of him in front of a tiger or something.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, maybe I got, I, I, I saw one of a flashlight on a lion at night.

• 2:43AJ Gentile?

  That's the picture.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  What in the world?

• 2:44AJ Gentile?

  What are you doing?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  That's unadvisable. Get out of there.

• 2:47AJ Gentile?

  It's unadvisable.

• 2:52AJ Gentile?

  I want to start with, um, 1994. So you're a grad student. And, uh, before you go down, everyone knows your story about finding the lost city. We'll get to that. Did you order the map mail order?

• 3:09Speaker 03

  I did. I did.

• 3:10AJ Gentile?

  Tell me about that. What, like, where did you find that?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  It was a, uh, uh, place that mostly sold USGS maps. But then it had all over the world, every, every country, you could get their version of USGS maps. So, uh, I went to the Belize section and got a bunch of quads that were generally in the area I wanted to be. I actually bought like 10 wrong ones and then finally got the right one.

• 3:40AJ Gentile?

  You got 10 wrong ones?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I misunderstood where I was looking. It said Program for Belize, but then it didn't include the southern part that I was in.

• 3:51AJ Gentile?

  Did they, did they?

• 3:52Speaker 03

  I donated them to the project. The project used them.

• 3:55AJ Gentile?

  So they assigned you that, that area first?

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yes, my professor basically said, I don't know how he picked it. Uh, I guess he picked it because there, there's just one dirt road running through this huge area of, you know, hundreds of thousands of acres. And near mile marker 10 going east, they had found a site called Dos Sombrés. And it was only like a kilometer off the, the road. But he figured this west part is the one heading into Guatemala. Nobody's been out there. So he dropped us off at mile marker 11. And I mean, the first day it was just me and this guy, Charles Hargrove, both grad students. That was before the city.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  But he dropped us off at mile marker 11 and just said, watch your compasses, cut straight west, I'll pick you up at 3:00. And that, and that went on for a month.

• 4:54AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so this is, this is a bunch of land that was cleared by Coca-Cola, right? And they donated it back.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Well, they wanted to clear it, but they didn't.

• 5:01AJ Gentile?

  They didn't.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Because Coca-Cola got, uh, bad PR out of it.

• 5:04AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  And so before they chopped the forest down, they sold it to Belize for something like five cents an acre.

• 5:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  And so it became Program for Belize. So they said, the, the country saved it from Coca-Cola, which is nice.

• 5:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. So the protocol traditionally is straight lines, directional to, just straight line. And you said, no, I'm, I'm going to follow old logger roads?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  I mean, it does make sense in most contexts. When you're doing an initial survey, you want to work the ground like it's a piece of graph paper. You want to be on cardinal directions so you can map out better what you found. So a transect going west in most environments makes sense. I did that all the time in Texas. But this one, poor Charles and I, I, you know, we went west, like he said, and we went up one hill, down another one, up one hill, down another one. It was just ravine after ravine, like seven hills before we finally hit that British logging road. And once we hit the British logging road, I was like, hold on, let's follow this. And going north on it, we started running into Maya buildings.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Going south on it, pretty soon we hit the road again. And, and it was all, uh, 100 years overgrown, but it would have been, I did cut it out. Eventually, we had a, a truck that could go five kilometers in.

• 6:29AJ Gentile?

  It makes so much sense that to follow those roads, because the loggers probably did the same thing, right? They, they were through the jungle and they said, someone cleared roads here. Let's just work these, right?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Path of least resistance. I mean, you know, the Corps of Engineers always, you know, you, you do the topography map and you say, well, we're not going to put the road right over this.

• 6:46AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  That would be terrible. We will go around it. We'll follow the river paths. And the river paths are the way, the good places for old villages to be. So, once we started doing the road instead of the transect, and I did, my boss was not very happy that I abandoned the transect.

• 7:04AJ Gentile?

  I was going to ask you.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Uh, my compromise was, great, I'll do both.

• 7:09AJ Gentile?

  So you did both?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  I will cut the tran, we will keep cutting the transect. I did the both for two seasons. And by the time I really had a map of it, I was like, look, Fred, you know, here's the western transect. It hit one site. Here's my map of the road. I hit five sites.

• 7:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  I need to keep following this road. This is, this is doing the homework for me.

• 7:34AJ Gentile?

  Did, um, were people skeptical of, of your decision?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Oh, so skeptical. They, I, I was a relatively, uh, new grad student there. They were already established folks that had been in the project for years. And before I found the city, I was a, like, open camp joke that I was just bringing students every day to just hack in the jungle uselessly, that they were doing no archaeology. I was just torturing students out in the jungle.

• 8:05AJ Gentile?

  Wow. Who's in your corner, though? Was it, so Charles, is that Doc Charles that you're talking about?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Uh, well, no, Charles Hargrove was the first grad student, but then Doc Charles. You do know this story. Doc Charles was wonderful. My, my students were into it. They were into the adventure and we, we did find buildings.

• 8:22AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  And, uh, I, I think I treated people with a general respect. I have this, you know, chip on my shoulder about all of us are equal. And I, really bothers me when people act superior when they're not. And the camp dynamic, without naming any names, you know, that there was a group of grad students who called themselves the super elite.

• 8:46AJ Gentile?

  They called themselves that?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  They called themselves the super elite. They kind of named it after like Maya concepts, but they were the, they were the royalty of the camp and the students were scum. And, uh, I mean, in a good natured, you know, prodding kind of way. But they had their own cups in the, in the camp. Nobody could touch their cups. Everybody else had random cups that we all shared, but then their cups were special. And they got in line first for whatever the meal was. And they had the access to the trucks. So like, if anybody wanted a beer or anything else from town, you had to go through the super elite. And, uh, those guys were, it, it was difficult times.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  So there was actually much more opposition and, uh, uh, just laughter at what I was trying to do.

• 9:37AJ Gentile?

  If you, if you call yourself super elite, you're not.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. So I really, I, I bowed up against that. I made an entire crazy, like, bar out in the road. I had access to the trucks, so I would go and buy a bunch of beer and sell it to everybody for just the price I bought it. And I had a, I had a, uh, bar out in the road after nine o'clock when the lights went out. I called it the Cinnabar. And eventually it got just crazy. There'd be like 30 people a night out on the road and beer and rum. And I had like a band on the weekends. It was, it was crazy. But, and the super elite would come out there sometimes. Eventually I, I lured some of them into the fold.

• 10:17AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  But I was just kind of this like rebel in the camp. And, I mean, up until I found the city, they were right. I was, did not know where the hell I was going. I had a plan, but I didn't know it would be there.

• 10:31AJ Gentile?

  You've always been the, the, like, the clear-headed heretic. I mean, I've watched you, like, uh, it might've been the Doha debates where you're talking to other archaeologists about Graham and all of that. And you were the cool head in the room, saying, look, if we're going to win hearts and minds, you can't insult people. We just need to make the case. I thought it was, I thought it was lovely. You don't hear a lot of that.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  I appreciate that.

• 10:53AJ Gentile?

  A few of them didn't agree with you.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  No, no, you know, they really wanted somebody, they wanted Graham, of course, on that thing, or anybody that would even defend his point. And no, nobody from that, those circles would show up.

• 11:06AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  And so I kind of, by default, was the closest to that camp. And they had to stir it up, you know, they wanted, I mean, it's entertainment. They, they want a good debate, but that one guy going, I've got a secret. Ed says that archaeology isn't science. Like, oh shit, here we go.

• 11:23AJ Gentile?

  Here we go. Here it goes.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  But, yeah, I, I.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  I am who I am and I'm not scared to be that person in any context.

• 11:33AJ Gentile?

  You're not. So take us to discovery day.

• 11:40AJ Gentile?

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• 13:08Speaker 03

  The city?

• 13:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Mashna. It's actually, I'm saying it wrong.

• 13:11AJ Gentile?

  Mashna, glad I'll stop.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Glad I'll stop.

• 13:15AJ Gentile?

  Otherwise it becomes spider monkey, which they got wrong, right?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  I think, you know, there are so many Maya languages too. This is, I picked Yucatec. Maash is howler monkey. And I think that bots, bots is spider monkey.

• 13:31AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay. So what I thought was interesting about your story is when you were down there, you sent your students in the more promising direction.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:40AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Well, because they were giving their heart and soul to the project and you know, they may, these students might, this might be their only experience in archaeology their whole life. I was already committed. I know I'm going to keep doing this. I'll keep doing adventures. Why don't I give them a chance to have a life-changing experience?

• 14:02AJ Gentile?

  So when you heard screaming in the jungle, was that before the discovery?

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Well, I heard daily screaming in the jungle. The students would be shocked by so many things. Those howler monkeys, they yell so loud. The first time that a student would find that, that would make at least a girl scream. They'd like run off to go pee somewhere. Under a tree and then all of a sudden there's a huge scream above.

• 14:27AJ Gentile?

  You don't think about that. Peeing in the jungle is not, not going to be great.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  No, it's not good. It's not good. You never want to take your pants off. It's terrible.

• 14:34AJ Gentile?

  You don't. I meant screaming when you thought someone was bitten by a snake.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Oh, it was, it was two guys up on top of that pyramid.

• 14:43AJ Gentile?

  So you found it first?

• 14:45Speaker 03

  No, they, they found it.

• 14:46AJ Gentile?

  They found it.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  They were up on top. I was with you. You mentioned Doc Charles. So like, we're just doing our survey. We're, we're cutting out the road, but we are finally going uphill to the three hills that I wanted to get to. So we get up to the first one on the west and I would stop along the road and say like, okay, one crew go north, one group go south. Depending on how the road was going. Uh, let's see if there's anything out here. And if there's not, we'll keep going. If there is, we'll, we'll investigate that. So to the south of the road, we find this building.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  That's like five meters tall. It's like 15 feet tall, which you know, is, is not huge, but it's not a house.

• 15:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Like, okay, that's weird. We've never found something this big. This is exciting. Let's, we're gonna, we're gonna put this right in the center of our graph paper and we're gonna, I, back then I called it leapfrog mapping. Now I have a more technical term. I call it relational mapping. But we're hot, we're tired. Let's just work the jungle like a piece of graph paper and north is north. So you guys go straight north, you guys will go south. We came from the, uh, the east. So we don't need to go there. Well, and one more to the west. So I had six people there.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  And one of them was Doc Charles and I promised Fred I would take care of Doc Charles because he was this like 70s something retired. Doctor from Palestine, Texas.

• 16:23AJ Gentile?

  What was he doing there?

• 16:24Speaker 03

  He just was, you know, so many people dream of doing archaeology and they're more practical than me. So they go and they're, they're a doctor and they have their family and their comfortable life. And once they retire, they're like, my dream was always archaeology. I'm doing it now.

• 16:39AJ Gentile?

  Good for him.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Doc Charles was one of these guys. He was great. I loved him.

• 16:42AJ Gentile?

  And he's on the expedition that finds all this stuff. Good for him.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was great, but, but my job was really hard. The, we would just sweat gallons of water out, hurt ourselves with machetes. And Doc Charles days before had gotten overheated and fell over in the jungle and passed out. And it was scary.

• 17:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  And he was dehydrated and he was usually pretty good about that stuff, but he just wore himself out. So when we came back. My project director chewed me out about it and said, Charles is not doing this anymore. He's going, he's going to go to one of the excavations where he's just going to dig in a pit. He can't do that anymore. And then Charles came to me like a night later and he said, if I can't do this with you, I'm leaving. I don't want to do this other stupid stuff. It was your survey. I believe what you're doing. I gotta go. And so I went to bat for him. I went to Fred and said, I will be Charles's partner.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  I will be next to him the entire time. Anything that happens to him is my responsibility. I will make sure that Charles is safe. So he agreed to that. So this day was, you know, day two, or maybe even one of Charles coming back. So me and Charles took the south side.

• 18:02AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  And then there was north and then there was west. West was the one. But as Charles and I were walking south and finding buildings, I heard that yell like, Ed, Ed, come, come here, come here. And I thought it was the snakes and I had the only anti-venom kit in my backpack, that and an EpiPen. And so I actually did what I told Fred I would not do and I bolted away from Charles. I was like, I gotta go. Just stay here.

• 18:28AJ Gentile?

  Stay here.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  And I bolted through the jungle to go find them. And when I got there, they kept yelling, where are you? Where are you? I'm here, I'm here. When I got up there, they were way up there. It was at 18 meters tall.

• 18:43AJ Gentile?

  50 feet?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, yeah. 60 feet, maybe 60 feet. Six-story building.

• 18:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  I mean, just little guys up there and they, they were standing on a pyramid. I thought they would get, it was, we have this spooky thing that. On the last days of projects are when things go terribly wrong, like the worst things will happen in the last couple of days. We had that kind of superstition working and I had it in my head the whole time. Damn it.

• 19:11AJ Gentile?

  I hear it a lot.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  I was so close and now I'm going to walk out with just, you know, some, some students bitten by snakes and the, the super elite are just going to roast me. But no, they were on top of a pyramid and we did it.

• 19:24AJ Gentile?

  Did you call for Doc?

• 19:25Speaker 03

  I did. I went back and got Doc and got him up there. And then I went and found the guys that went north. I think it was Jim Eckhart and Brent.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Brent, I forget Brent's last name, but anyway, I, I was so excited to bring them back to the pyramid that I was not cutting in front of myself. I was just kind of dipping and weaving and I put my head under a big palm frond that had a wasp's nest.

• 19:56AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Right here. And I put my head directly into it and they dug into my hair and they just bit, I mean, more than a dozen stings on the top of my head. Jim Eckhart still makes fun of me. He said that I, that I just, I stood up, I threw my machete in front of me and then I said, ow, hurt, don't. Those, those are the three words that came out of my mouth.

• 20:21AJ Gentile?

  I've seen your pictures and listened to your podcast and I just go, nope, nope, nope, nope. There's a picture of you covered in like army ants. It's.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, it happens to you all the time. You really just gotta have a literal thick skin to survive it. But, uh, so we, we get up there to the top of the pyramid. Everybody's there. We're going to have lunch there. Now the whole group's up on top of it. And I asked Doc Charles, who I, I love. I said, Doc, I just got stung like a dozen times in my head. You think I'm going to be okay? And he just goes, well, anaphylactic shock sets in within a minute. So if you're not dead, you're probably fine.

• 21:01AJ Gentile?

  Reassuring.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  What a cool old Texas doctor thing to say.

• 21:06AJ Gentile?

  He's one of my favorite characters in your stories. So you guys had, what's for lunch up there? What did you talk about?

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Uh, lunch was the same thing it always was.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Ham wrapped in tortillas, like a little roll and Vienna sausage. Fred would buy these cans of Vienna sausage. Nobody wanted them, but they were easy to store. I mean, they wouldn't spill in your bag. And so, yeah, Vienna sausages and ham wraps.

• 21:35AJ Gentile?

  And what's the conversation like?

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Gosh, I mean, just thrilled. We were sitting right next to a

• 21:45Speaker 03

  a cave in to the roof of the structure. So we knew that we weren't just sitting like on the top of the super of the base. We were up there. Then there was a temple on top with a with a corbel arch. We were up here.

• 22:02AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  And there was a hole that probably a tree had fallen out and ripped the roof off there. So we could see in there. And we we fooled around. I think Jim, Jim was the one that crawled down in there to see how deep it goes. And like found still stucco on the walls and and where the doorways are. That was a that was an interesting thing. We knew we came from the east. Uh, but we did not know it was west. And so when Jim crawled in there, he was like, all the doors face that way. That's that's where we got to go. So we talked about where we would go. And so, and just then, when we were having lunch is when the howler monkeys just descended on us. There were a bunch of them.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  And they yelled and screamed at us so much. I mean, part of our conversation was drowned out by just screaming monkeys. That's why I gave it the name Mashna, because it was their house.

• 23:00AJ Gentile?

  Monkey house. Why were they so upset? Are they territorial?

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Uh, they are. They are. They're territorial with each other and with us weird talus things. They they don't like it when you're around.

• 23:13AJ Gentile?

  No. So how deep was it when he went down there? I mean, because that's an Indiana Jones moment.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Into the building?

• 23:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Well, we were on the superstructure and then there was a whole, there was like a talus of collapse that Jim could shuffle down. But from the top to where he was standing inside the building was probably

• 23:34Speaker 03

  12 feet, 15 feet, something like that. But there was a nice little talus so he could get in and out of there. So.

• 23:41AJ Gentile?

  What did it look like in there?

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Like vines growing through the the front doors. When you were inside, you could see that there were uh, more than three doors. There were there were collapses on either side, but we could see three doors. And they're totally covered up by just a thousand years of mulch roots growing through. You're always on the lookout in an environment like that for snakes or spiders.

• 24:06AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  It's easy to jump away from them in the jungle. But when you're in a little building like that, if you can encounter one, you're pinned.

• 24:13AJ Gentile?

  No artwork, no no frescoes?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Nothing, no artwork in there. Gosh, I wish, but but most of that's gone. That's very rare. I've actually never found a really great work of art out there surveying. I've always wished I could find a stele at Mashna. I know now that there's been more work that uh, they did find a carved stele and I walked right by it, you know, 30 times. Uh, but that's the nature of the jungle.

• 24:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like from me to you, there could be the base of a building. And if there's a big wall of like brambles, you just don't see it. So things, big things can be hidden very close to you there.

• 24:58AJ Gentile?

  We're going to get back to some of that exploration in a minute, but I wanted to ask you about something I found.

• 25:04AJ Gentile?

  IMDb has you listed as playing Han Solo. The Empire Strikes Back Uncut in 2014.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 25:12AJ Gentile?

  Is that you? And what 15 seconds of Empire did you shoot?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  It is not me.

• 25:16AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's too bad.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  But you know, I I am, I'm never asking them to take it down.

• 25:20AJ Gentile?

  No, you should never do that.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Like, yeah, I am Han Solo. That's right.

• 25:25AJ Gentile?

  You are.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Uh, but but people were getting upset with me. People would find that and go like, this guy isn't even really an archaeologist. He's some actor. Look, he plays Han Solo. Like, I know I really am an archaeologist, I swear. So I finally got curious enough to look it up. It's actually uh, a Empire Strikes Back fan cut movie.

• 25:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  So the entire thing is nothing but clips of fans playing out various scenes. And at like minute 17, there's my ex-wife and her husband with my son and daughter. And they're playing the scene where uh, Luke's being put back together in Hoth and like fuzzy Nerf herder, that scene. And Luke, she kisses him and Luke's like this. Uh, my son Edwin Barnhart is playing Han Solo.

• 26:19AJ Gentile?

  Oh, so he's Han Solo.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  It's it's like a nine year old boy playing Han Solo.

• 26:24AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  And for some reason, it's the number, it's not only on my IMDb thing, it's the first entry. Everybody sees, if they see nothing else, they see that I am Han Solo.

• 26:34AJ Gentile?

  You you guys, Star Wars fans, should go check out the Uncuts. They're one of the only fan films that that Star Wars endorses. They put it on the chat. Sure. It's so for those who don't know, they're 15 second clips of just families acting out scenes. But it could be paper art, Muppets, just costumes. And what did your son, was he was he in a costume? What did he do?

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Um, I think they had a, they had a little vest on him.

• 27:01AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  But it was really, uh, you know, my ex-wife's husband, who was such a super fan. I'm a super fan too. I love it. And I mean, I, as a child, you know, when we played the Star Wars games, I'm Han Solo. That was the first thing. That's the first thing I'd say. I'm Han Solo. Let's all be clear about that. And so when IMDb named me Han Solo, I'm never taking that down. I am never taking that down.

• 27:26AJ Gentile?

  Good for you. Yeah, sci-fi shows up in in everything I read about you. Um, 2009.

• 27:36AJ Gentile?

  For Variety, you covered Battlestar Galactica.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Ah, yes.

• 27:41AJ Gentile?

  Remember that?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  I did love that.

• 27:43AJ Gentile?

  And you said you were struggling with your attraction to Starbuck. Did you ever get, did you ever get over that?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  And and my disappointment that there was no robot dog.

• 27:53AJ Gentile?

  Right. That's how, because that's Gen X, that's us, where we watched the new BSG, which was amazing. And then you go, that's Starbuck? Oh, that's probably going to be fine. That's Katie Sakoff. That's that works for us. Why did?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  She she killed it.

• 28:08AJ Gentile?

  She killed it. I love that. I love that series. Why did they ask you to write about that?

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Funny coincidence that happened. Um, I, you know, I I lead tours around the Maya world and other places because archaeology doesn't pay a dime. You never get anything. You just spend money in archaeology. So I lead tours and whoever shows up to the tours, those are the people I lead. And it just so happened that one of the writers for Battlestar Galactica, season one, was in my group. And so we're driving to Palenque in a van and we're just getting to know each other. And you know, what do you do? What do you do? And he said, well, I write this little show, you know, his name is Bradley Thompson.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  And Bradley's one of the writers for Battlestar Galactica. And I immediately like, oh, my God, I love that show.

• 29:03AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  And we've maintained a friendship all this time. Him and his group of friends have come on multiple adventures with me now. But uh, that's how I was connected to it. In fact, I went to Bradley and Peggy Sue's wedding in the old hall that was uh, the dirty, where Dirty Dancing was filmed, this this like log cabin thing up above uh,

• 29:33Speaker 03

  LA, somewhere. It's actually a little little town over there. But anyway, they were actually having, they tricked everybody on the Battlestar Galactica crew that it was just going to be like a party to announce their wedding. But what they didn't know is that they were actually going to get married right there. And uh, Edward James Almost, Commander Adama, was going to marry them. And I love that. And I was, I was actually there to see this thing. I was the backup because I have one of those universal life church uh, things. I marry people all the time.

• 30:09AJ Gentile?

  Oh, you do?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's fun. I mostly my nieces and nephews, but you know, other people ask too. But I was the backup there. For some reason, he couldn't do it. I was going to do it, but it was so much better that he did it. It was this surprise that everybody got. And after he, after he married them, then he went, so say we all. And it was the best thing ever.

• 30:31AJ Gentile?

  Nuts.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  But I told my brother, because I was uh, in between, I was divorced now. I I'm married to my wonderful wife, 17 years now. Uh, but I was a free man then. And I was like, Fred, who, my brother's name is Fred. I'm going to hit on Starbuck.

• 30:49AJ Gentile?

  No, did you?

• 30:50Speaker 03

  She wasn't there. She wasn't there. Sorry, Katie, if you're listening to that. But uh, she she wasn't there, but I was prepared. And actually, I was dating Cassandra, my wife at the time, or we weren't even dating. We were talking on the phone.

• 31:02AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  And so like, I catfished her so hard. I went to a Hollywood wedding. That week, I was also talking to Disney Imagineering guys about making a Disney thing, which they just finally made. They finally made this big Maya temple, but way back then. But I was uh, I was doing a 2012 lecture and then I went to a Battlestar Galactica Hollywood wedding. And then I went to Disney Imagineering. I have never been that cool ever again in my life. But it was like for my, for my now wife, she was like, God, this guy.

• 31:32AJ Gentile?

  This guy's cool.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  He does all that in just one week. Like, never again. It's good timing.

• 31:37AJ Gentile?

  It is. I mean, speaking of BSG, I I was at a dinner with with a with a friend and there's tons of celebrities around. And I'm not going to bother anybody. Then I see a guy in a beard and I'm like, I I gotta go. So I go and I interrupt this gentleman in the middle of the meal and I go, Ronald Moore, I'm a huge fan. I'm sorry to do this. I just want to let you know. He's like, I never get recognized. And then I go back to the table. My friends are like, only you would bother a sci-fi writer. I'm like, Ronald B. Moore. Amazing.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  It is amazing. People like him are are the actual, you know, indispensable elements of those shows. The the movie stars are the people we know and see, but Ron Moore, that's a celeb to me.

• 32:23AJ Gentile?

  Me too. I'm a huge Steve Space Nine fan too. So you quote-

• 32:28Speaker 03

  This is so refreshing. Let's just talk about nerd sci-fi stuff.

• 32:31AJ Gentile?

  Go.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 32:33AJ Gentile?

  Oh, do you have a favorite? Star Trek, Star Wars?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Oh, Star Trek.

• 32:38AJ Gentile?

  Star Trek, that's-

• 32:39Speaker 03

  I am a Trekkie.

• 32:40AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  I'm a Trekkie. No, I love both. I mean, I wouldn't reject that, but it's just such an uplifting message, isn't it? And you know, you know, Captain Picard's hobby?

• 32:53AJ Gentile?

  Archaeology.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  He's an archaeologist. I love that. The thought that we could scan an entire planet and know where all the civilizations are and all the knowledge that they're able to collect just from space just thrills me. You know, I have a very unpopular opinion about archaeology that is destructive and we should stop.

• 33:18AJ Gentile?

  Stop digging.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  I mean, not period, but we should always make that the last resort of what we're doing because we destroy things when we dig them. And all the new remote sensing capabilities we have, like LiDAR, of course, so thrilling, so like reaching towards that Star Trek moment.

• 33:40AJ Gentile?

  What, I feel like you have to dig, don't you? Don't you have to excavate somewhat?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  I mean, we do. We do. But I think we should soberly recognize that we are destroying things when we dig them. And then the rest of humanity's time only has that person's opinion about what happened. Maybe some photos, some drawings, maybe a couple artifacts, but the context is gone. And that's so important. I mean, think about nowadays, we can take soil samples and get phytoliths out of things and know exactly what plants were in that trash pit. We love to dig trash pits.

• 34:22AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  We've dug so many trash pits. Seems safe, too. Like, it was already trash. I mean, we're not ruining anything. It was a trash pit to begin with. But trash pits are a goldmine of information. And how many thousands have we already dug and destroyed the evidence that if we did that today, we'd have so much more information out of it? That's the caution I'm talking about, that we just don't know what the archaeologists of tomorrow could glean from things that we think are worthless.

• 34:52AJ Gentile?

  It's a great example. I had a guest in here recently talking about the scrolls found at Herculaneum that have basically turned into charcoal. And they can read them now through 3D software, but most of them were destroyed by archaeologists trying to unroll them and just crumbling until finally the government was like, enough with the archaeologists. You guys are, you're just, you're just hacking and slashing. Enough. Here's something most people don't realize. When you drink caffeine, your body doesn't actually use caffeine. It breaks down into a compound called paraxanthine. That's a compound that actually gives you the lift, the focus, the energy. Caffeine is basically the middleman, and your body has to do all the work to convert it. But what if you can skip that conversion?

• 35:35AJ Gentile?

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• 36:20AJ Gentile?

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• 36:44Speaker 03

  Oh, God, the, you know, the people that are the conservation people, conservators that come in and protect things like that, they think that archaeologists are just like a pack of apes.

• 36:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, well, sometimes they are.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Sometimes they are. And oftentimes, you know, archaeology, like I said earlier, it doesn't, it doesn't make guns or butter. It doesn't get much money. You end up getting crews of maybe one person who knows what they're doing and a bunch of people that are volunteers or students who are doing it for the first time. And that's just-

• 37:17AJ Gentile?

  Why isn't there funding for this? The public loves archaeology.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's, you know, in economics terms, it makes neither guns nor butter. People are excited about it, but it does not turn a profit.

• 37:29AJ Gentile?

  That's a shame. Before I ask you this next question, what's your nonprofit? What's the website again?

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Maya Exploration Center. Thanks for asking. And it's mayaexploration.org. And we're nonprofit 501(c)(3).

• 37:44AJ Gentile?

  Everyone go donate today. The show donated as well. So you quote Lynda Shealy all the time in every interview, "Think like a Maya." But I've never heard you talk about what she was like as a person. Like, what got, what was she like when she got excited? Because she's a rock star. She's a rock star.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Thanks for asking that question. She was, I mean, just like a force of nature. She was actually very abrasive and-

• 38:09AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 38:09Speaker 03

  And rough and physical.

• 38:11AJ Gentile?

  Because she was an artist, wasn't she?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  She was. But she was also, you know, an Alabama-raised girl who was big. I think she was probably six foot tall.

• 38:23AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  And she eventually got cancer and got skinny. But at her heyday, she was also just large. In fact, you can bleep out things, right? I'll tell you what the Maya called her.

• 38:37AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  The Maya up in the Highlands had a nickname for her. And in Maya, it translated "big fucker woman."

• 38:47AJ Gentile?

  She probably liked that.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  She did love it. She told us, like, "They gave me a name."

• 38:52AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  And she thought it was great. She cursed like a sailor. She was very physical. Like, if you were having a joking conversation with her, she would physically push you.

• 39:03AJ Gentile?

  She would?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. She was, she was like that. And, I mean, smart, so enthusiastic, so passionate. That was the infectious thing about her. She was just so passionate about what she did. And even like her arch enemies who were conservative archaeologists who thought that hieroglyphs were just nonsense, she would just, just revel in riling them up and laughing at them.

• 39:28AJ Gentile?

  I mean, she got the last laugh there, didn't she?

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Well, she did in terms of hieroglyphs, yeah. I mean, a lot of archaeologists, some to this day, think that they're either, back then, they thought they were just esoteric symbols that had to do with the calendar. Or even when she started to translate the stuff, there was a crowd that said, "This is just propaganda. This is just propaganda from these kings. There's no way that that even happened. These are not real histories. These are just people telling lies to aggrandize themselves." But archaeology has proven that false, too, on a number of occasions. All the wars that she was translating, we now have the archaeological proof that they did happen.

• 40:15AJ Gentile?

  There, but there had to be some propaganda from the kings anyway, right?

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I think that's even, that's a illogical argument. I mean, I'm actually more excited about propaganda than I am straight history.

• 40:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Like, that gives us insight into their personalities-

• 40:27AJ Gentile?

  Absolutely.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  And their aspirations and, and their methods of deceit. I mean, so much, there's so much culturally packed into propaganda.

• 40:35AJ Gentile?

  There really is.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  I love that. But Lynda was a, was a character. And she was, she, on the one hand, was a loving protector of all of her students, champion to all of us. But inside the classroom, she was brutal. She, like, nowadays, totally politically incorrect, but on more than one, one occasion in my class with Lynda, she asked me publicly if I was retarded.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Like, you can't say that. Like, no, I'm not retarded. I'm trying, I'm trying to learn, Linda.

• 41:15AJ Gentile?

  It was the 80s and 90s. You said that.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, you said that all the time, all those things, the, you know, 10x sort of stuff.

• 41:21AJ Gentile?

  So she would teach the classroom and go out in the field, like, like Indy?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, she, she was not an archaeologist and she was not particularly, you know, athletic or, uh, she didn't do any digging, but she'd come in and just, she was a great artist. She could come into a tunnel and just there sketch a very good picture of what the glyphs are and then come out and think about them.

• 41:46AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  She was, she was dynamic. She like, you just wanted to be around her. She created this community. Nowadays, you know, we, we lump so much onto the name Linda Shealy, that she broke the code of hieroglyphics. Linda would be the first to say, don't say that about me. I assembled a team of people that I learned from and they learned from me and we together did something. That she was a big team builder. The first time I went into her cla- her office when I was a student of hers, she gave me this speech about like, I'm not the person you're learning from. I was being like obsequious. I look so forward to, to learning from you, Dr. Shealy.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  She'd be like, you're not gonna learn from me. If you're gonna make it in this field, it's the students you're with that, that you'll learn from. You guys are the team. Those are the people. Go meet them. Look, there's one sitting right outside waiting for me. Matt Looper. Go say hi to Matt. Those that, uh, you're in a team or you're nothing.

• 42:46AJ Gentile?

  And you applied that through your whole career.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  I've tried. I've tried. I'm a bit, you know, I am a bit of a rebel.

• 42:53AJ Gentile?

  You are.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  And my, you know, my, my wife, who's my biggest fan and biggest critic says, you know, number one, you're a control freak. And number two, she's a, she's a, uh, elementary school teacher. So she pins me with this label. You're oppositionally defiant.

• 43:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Like, I love working with teams. I hate bosses.

• 43:15AJ Gentile?

  Same. Same. I'm not, I'm not good with authority.

• 43:21AJ Gentile?

  So Linda passed away in 98, right?

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:27AJ Gentile?

  Just before you were going to Palenque.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 43:30AJ Gentile?

  Did she know what you were gonna do?

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Oh, she did. And she, uh, she was instrumental in me getting the grant. And I was so buckless, I did not, this is 98, so not everybody has a computer.

• 43:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  But I needed a computer to do this and I did not have the money and the, and the grant that I got could not buy equipment. So Linda and her husband David bought me the computer. They, uh, they bought it. My brother Fred built it. And, uh, back in those days, you know, you had, do you remember the days when you had to build your own computer?

• 44:05AJ Gentile?

  Didn't you thank Fred in, in your dissertation?

• 44:07Speaker 03

  I believe I did.

• 44:08AJ Gentile?

  You did.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  I, I owe Fred a lot.

• 44:10AJ Gentile?

  For your, as for IT support.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  But anyway, Fred, Fred built the computer and David and Linda, uh, paid for it. I think it was like $2,000.

• 44:21AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  And then they rented it to me for a penny a month into perpetuity. Which was funny. I don't know why they wanted to do that, but they, I, I was actually renting it from the Sheeleys for a penny a month.

• 44:35AJ Gentile?

  And you ended up naming some air, something after it, didn't you?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  I did. A big part of Palenque. I, you know, I, uh, I can brag that I know Palenque's unknown parts like nobody else does. And I was hunting, I mean, it was very emotional when Linda passed. A, a big group of us in Palenque heard about it. We, we planted a Save-A-Tree in the plaza, which is now a huge, beautiful tree. It'll be there for centuries, symbolizing her. But I was really hunting for the right part of the ruins to name after Linda. And I picked such a winner. It's in this generation, probably, nobody will dig it, but when they do,

• 45:21Speaker 03

  it'll be one of the coolest parts of Palenque. It's right outside the city center, right across the O2 Loom River from the cross group that's given us so much, but it's a magnificent group of terraces with a big, flat terrace with a bunch of tombs that are in that terrace, but then another pyramid on top of it. So it's like, uh, I feel like if there's any place that's Palenque's royal cemetery, that's it. And I named those the Shealy Terraces. And it stuck.

• 45:52AJ Gentile?

  And it stuck.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Thank you, Mexico, for allowing that name to go through.

• 45:57AJ Gentile?

  How, so how big do you think that city was? Cause I, I've heard you say that maybe populations are overestimated because of burial, uh, traditions.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and Palenque's not very big. It's just not very big compared to, you know, the Tikals and Caracals of the Maya world. My very unpopular and in my opinion inflated, uh, estimate is about 10,000 people.

• 46:24AJ Gentile?

  That's, that's a pretty big city.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Uh, sure. I mean, I think, uh, like, Ur was 5,000. So.

• 46:32AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  So we, we have, we have an unfair yardstick. Things are much taller over there in the old world than they are here in the new world.

• 46:40AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I know you don't like the, like comparison, comparisons, which is, I get it.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  They're, they're essential. They're important, but they can also be very culturally biased.

• 46:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes. That's very true. Uh, we'll talk about your textbook today as well and, and Cahokia.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Super.

• 46:59AJ Gentile?

  So everybody

• 47:02AJ Gentile?

  fix your story back up at Palenque. I want to take a quick break and come back with, uh, some stuff that nobody really asked you about. And that's the stretch, the two years after.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Awesome. I'm really enjoying this interview. Thanks for asking questions that aren't regular questions.

• 47:19AJ Gentile?

  So for everyone who's screaming about not getting the story of the discovery, all of that, go watch, um, Dr. Barnhart and Sean Ryan. It was just out a couple of weeks ago. You'll get the whole backstory. I'm trying to cover some stuff that Sean didn't, which is not easy, but that's what I'm trying, trying to do today. So go watch that. You were great on it.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 47:37AJ Gentile?

  Stories are super fun.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Sean's a great guy.

• 47:39AJ Gentile?

  One of my favorite people in the world.

• 47:43AJ Gentile?

  You said something on a podcast that no one really followed up on is that after Palenque, you, so you mapped the site and you've got to hand it over

• 47:56AJ Gentile?

  to another university, right?

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I think you're confusing, uh, Machna with, with Palenque. Cause I did have to hand over, I mean, Palenque was already the jewel of Mexico. So.

• 48:09AJ Gentile?

  So Machna.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Right back to the government.

• 48:11AJ Gentile?

  So what happened there?

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Well, uh, back to the theme of archaeology, never has any money. Um, my project director decided that he could get more project money into our project if he invited other professors from other universities to bring their grants in. And he needed something for them to do. So, uh, he gave them Machna.

• 48:36AJ Gentile?

  Is that, is that emotional for you?

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Uh, not now, but at the time, it really was. I, I, in, in hindsight, that's exactly what needed to happen to me. At the moment, I was honestly a, a dick about it.

• 48:51AJ Gentile?

  Were you?

• 48:51Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm a little embarrassed of my behavior. I was, I was downright hostile to the people that, that showed up.

• 48:58AJ Gentile?

  That's what I wanted to hear. That's what I wanted to hear. Because that's the human answer. Cause you, I mean, cause you were there with the machete and did the hard work, you and Doc.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Eleanor King and Leslie Shaw. Sorry, I was a jerk. I was young. I was passionate.

• 49:14AJ Gentile?

  That's right. You were just a kid. You'd do, probably what, 26 at that time, 27?

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, no, I mean, not even. I mean, I think,

• 49:24Speaker 03

  gosh, 1995, I was born in 68. So, yeah. Like 26, you're right. You did the math.

• 49:32AJ Gentile?

  We're, we're, we're, what kind of assholes at that age?

• 49:35Speaker 03

  I was fired up about it. Nevertheless, I did, when I left, write them like a treasure map. Like, here's what I've mapped. Here's a huge area that I know has even bigger buildings. Nobody's ever gone back there. There's still another huge section of Machna that has big, big buildings.

• 49:55AJ Gentile?

  There's no team there now?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  There's little, there, there's little bits there here and there, uh, but not really, no.

• 50:01AJ Gentile?

  Is this funding again?

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 50:04AJ Gentile?

  Oh, this is very frustrating.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  And it's, not only is it funding, but I mean, I'm very proud of Machna, but Machna is a run-of-the-mill Maya city. If I did have money and I got to pick a city that I would do, it would not be Machna, even though it's near and dear to my heart.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  There's thousands of them.

• 50:25AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Thousands of sites and what to pick and what gets money, add in politics, uh, difficult and.

• 50:35AJ Gentile?

  Is it that expensive to put a team there?

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Well, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to dig, uh, like if we wanted to unearth one of those pyramids, yeah, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 50:49AJ Gentile?

  This, this government wastes so much money. That's nothing.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  Guns are butter. Right now, the Congress is continuing to talk about that they want government oversight on the National Science Foundation. And their mandate is if this research does not look like it will reasonably produce a profit in the future, we're canceling it. That's all of archaeology. Archaeology will never get a profit. Yeah, we set up, you know, eventually it'll become a park and you get, uh, you know, tickets as people come in. But those don't even pay all the bills for the guards and the conservators and not, not even the archaeologists and the administrators.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  ENA, which is the institution that takes care of all the Mexican, uh, archaeological sites. One in seven people in ENA is an archaeologist. Most of them are administrators and maintenance folks.

• 51:52AJ Gentile?

  Could pressure be put on the government? Do you think it would work? Like if we called our congressmen and our senators, would that work?

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Maybe, I mean, it has in the past. We've gotten, you know, we've gotten things protected. But in terms of the actual money, probably not, probably not. I mean, it's just human nature. It's

• 52:13AJ Gentile?

  And government nature. Like, who gets more funding, do you think? The NSF or DARPA and Pentagon's black budget, which is bigger?

• 52:21Speaker 03

  You know the answer to that.

• 52:23AJ Gentile?

  I do, indeed.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's sad, but and I'm, you know, a big fan of the humanities and there's a lot of us, obviously you are too. I think that, you know, especially when it comes to archaeology, we don't know who we are unless we know our past. We don't know what we're capable of until we know what we've really done. But that's not everybody's opinion and that's not people that think in a very straightforward capitalist way just see no profit in what we're doing.

• 52:55AJ Gentile?

  The public really wants it, but we don't always get what we want.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  That's why a lot of us do it for free, you know. I've been in this for 30 years now. I tell students that want to get into it, I say, you know, honestly, I spent a decade paying for it.

• 53:11AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  I spent a decade breaking even and finally, in like my third decade of archaeology, I can pay the rent.

• 53:19AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that really bothers me. Maybe we'll get some donations from today. I hope everybody does.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  I told my wife before we married, I said, you know, just to check, I'm in an arrested state of adolescence and I have very low earning potential.

• 53:38AJ Gentile?

  That wasn't on your dating profile when you catfished her?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Let's just be clear about this.

• 53:43AJ Gentile?

  I also was not at my best when I met my wife. So after 1998, you got a call from Mexico, right?

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, just somewhere right around there. It was when, it dovetails right into what you were saying, when that, when, when the project at PFB gave my site away. I was actually in Honduras and somebody saw a advertisement for a, for a field school run by these folks at Machna. Cause I was there digging the tombs of the founders in Copan with a crew from the Ivy Leagues. And one of them says like, didn't you say the site you saw, you found was called Machna? Look, there's a field school there. And I was just gobsmacked. What the heck? And I went back to my project there. That year

• 54:38Speaker 03

  I spent like eight or nine months in, in Latin America. And sure enough, he had given it away. And I was allowed to do my survey one more time. And then they were all just kind of, well, you've done such good work there, Ed. Shouldn't you go further west? You can just do the west stuff and we'll take care of this for you. I was upset about that.

• 54:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  I was rude about it. And then I went off to Palenque, to the Palenque Roundtable, which was an annual conference where all of the big guys went. And I had a target. I was gonna find Richard Hansen, because Richard Hansen was running the El Mirador project. And that was the most exciting project going at the time. Huge pre-classic city, bigger pyramids than even the classic period. And he's out in the middle of nowhere. There's so much more to find there. I was like, I'm just gonna do this again. I'm gonna go find Richard and I'll tell him that I will be his surveyor for free if I can just use his camp as a base camp to go farther out. That was my plan.

• 55:41AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  And I did meet Richard there. And, and he kept saying, well, if you think you have the cones to deal with five meter croc or alligators, then, then yeah, you can do it. And I responded, you know, well, I may not have that, but I'm sure I can hire, you know, somebody named Manuel with a gun who can, who's yours. I'll hire, I'll hire alligator killers. We'll, we'll be all right. But, so we were talking about that, but then unbeknownst to me, the project at Palenque was talking. They, it was, it was a big conference. So the heads from Mexico City were there. And I don't know how much of it is today in Mexico,

• 56:22Speaker 03

  but back then, the way you got business done is you, you, you drank with people all night. And then there was kind of a plausible deniability. If you didn't like what you said last night, you could say, I was drunk.

• 56:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  That, that deals off. But in one of these weird deals that I was not there at all, the head of Mexico's archaeology in Mexico City was giving Arnaldo Gonzalez Cruz the business. Like, you've been here as the project archaeologist for a decade and you've never even made a map. You've never even made a map of this place. We don't even know what this place looks like besides the city center. And my friend, Chris Powell, who's there drinking with them, spoke up. He said, well, my, my friend Ed's coming and he just found my city. He's really a good mapper. And the head of Ena Archaeology drunk on tequila goes, well, Arnaldo hired that guy. And Arnold said, okay. And that's how it

• 57:23Speaker 03

  happened. Like I, I came in and Chris and Alfonso Morales told me, they would like to offer you the job to map Palenque. I was like, well, that's more like it. Find like some respect around here. No, I didn't think that at all. I was gobsmacked. Like, what? Palenque's the best site in all of, all of Mexico. And I'm invited? That's ridiculous. But that's what happened.

• 57:49AJ Gentile?

  So that took some of the sting out of Machna?

• 57:51Speaker 03

  It did. I immediately had a new plan and a new dissertation. I was about to finish my dissertation on Machna, but that went to the wayside and I started again in Palenque, three years.

• 58:02AJ Gentile?

  In retrospect, how did that team do down there in Machna? Did they do okay? Were you, or did they miss some stuff?

• 58:09Speaker 03

  They've done okay.

• 58:10AJ Gentile?

  They've done okay?

• 58:12Speaker 03

  I mean, they found some cool pottery.

• 58:14AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  One of the frustrations, and again, I'm, you know, I feel bad about being a jerk about it. So I'm trying not to be a jerk about it anymore. But

• 58:23AJ Gentile?

  We don't have to name anybody.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  They, they spent, they spent the first, oh, I just, I just moved a little knob here.

• 58:31AJ Gentile?

  That's just for headphones. You're good. I've knocked this wire out. I've knocked the mic cable out and just talked to them.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Like fidgety. I just turned a knob by accident. Sorry. Sorry, sorry. So what was I saying? They spent the first two or three seasons mapping Machna. I made a map that was just tape and compass and pacing of Machna in two weeks. And at the end of the three years, they were like, wow, your map was really good. It's like, well, get on with some other shit, would you?

• 59:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Don't, don't waste your time redoing. I could have told you that. My map was good. So I was proud that, that professional survey equipment came in and like, you know, not even a meter of difference between what my map was to their map.

• 59:22AJ Gentile?

  Did they find anything that surprised you?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Well, they found a carved stele, which upset me.

• 59:29AJ Gentile?

  It did. All right. So what's a stele?

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Golly. A stele is a monolithic stone with a carving of a king or somebody on it. So they found one of those. I found one during the project and eight of us spent like four hours with wedged sticks and things slowly anchoring it up and finally flipping it over to find there was nothing on it.

• 59:53AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  But that one, that one really taught me something like, it took eight guys, four hours to flip this stone over. How the heck did the Maya get it here? Like, that was an effort.

• 1:00:08AJ Gentile?

  That's an effort.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  It was a real life thing of just how hard that is.

• 1:00:13AJ Gentile?

  I've seen some, some drawings of what my, my cities might've looked like. Do you think they did a lot of jungle clearing? I mean, I've, I've liked cities that's just lawn.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  Right. I think a lot of those reconstruction drawings are overblown. I do think that they're people. We love ornamental plants. We love, you know, we, we decorate everything we do with these plants and they live in the jungle.

• 1:00:40AJ Gentile?

  Right.

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• 1:01:47AJ Gentile?

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• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  There are some studies, not many of them, I wish there were more, that actually have investigated that question. There's a paper called Garden Cities of the Maya that was... They scraped the plazas just like 3 cm worth on the top of the plazas and took samples everywhere, specifically for nitrates in the soil, and found there were patches in front of temples, just like you'd have landscaping.

• 1:03:44AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  There was landscaping. And so these studies in the Chenae's region, no, the Puuk region, proved that up, that they were using trees. And I know from my surveys and also from old things in Tikal, there's a weird concentration of fruiting trees that are in association with residential areas. In Palenque, there were a lot of cacao groves that were there, associated with them, and there were other trees just growing. There were some that were lemons, which don't come from this side of the world. I don't know who the hell planted those lemons, but it was fun to find a lemon grove in the middle of Palenque.

• 1:04:31AJ Gentile?

  But the Maya didn't plant those lemons.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  No, no, but it did show that there was agriculturally rich soil there, that kind of anthropogenic soil that we use so effectively investigating the Amazon.

• 1:04:43AJ Gentile?

  Do you think they did burning to clear?

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they did slash and burn, just like they do now. It is so ingrained in the mind of the Maya that you must burn your field. There was a moment when we were in Palenque where, back, I guess it was 1998 or 1999, you remember those incredible fires that happened in Mexico that had so much smoke that the smoke made it to New York City?

• 1:05:11AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  I was at the epicenter of that.

• 1:05:13AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  There was a lot of smoke, a lot of fire. It was crazy.

• 1:05:18AJ Gentile?

  I remember that. Wow.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was funny. I had just given my group a speech. We were just really starting the survey. And I was like, "It's been 100 years. No one's ever made a map. Somebody's always stopped for some reason, and I swear to you, there will be no reason we will ever stop. We will not stop." And the next day, we went out and the ruins were on fire. And I was like, "We're not stopping." And they were like, "You're a psycho. Stop it." And we couldn't even, like, we couldn't... The laser goes from the machine, bounces off the prism and comes back. We couldn't make the laser go anymore, the prism go anymore than like 30 feet away, or the smoke was too thick and it wouldn't bounce back to the machine.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  In retrospect, again, I was a young psychotic man. I should have just gone home. But I had just given a speech that nothing would stop me, and I was like, "I don't care if it's on fire. Keep mapping."

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  But anyway, what was I getting with that?

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  The United States was pissed off at Mexico because they were sending all this fire their way, and they blamed it for some stupid reason on the agricultural practice of slash and burn. And so the law came down to Chiapas that the Maya couldn't burn anymore, that they would give them some money to hire extra guys to do cutting, but that the law was, nobody could burn their fields anymore. And the guys that were on the crew, they were honestly scared. The head guy, Pedro, he looked gray.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  He was just like, "If I can't burn, we are dead. We are all dead. This is the end of Maya civilization. We burn. That's what we do."

• 1:07:06AJ Gentile?

  Was that the fire caused by burning?

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:07:09AJ Gentile?

  No, of course not.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  It was the climate change stuff, early on. No, it was not their fault at all. But the fault in Mexico, sorry, Mexico, is to blame the Indians. Anything environmental.

• 1:07:22AJ Gentile?

  Right, blame the Indians.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Those weird indigenous people are the ones burning down all our forests.

• 1:07:28AJ Gentile?

  I'm glad that you mentioned that Maya farmer, because when people think of the Maya people, we conjure up this image of an extinct civilization, but there's millions of Maya people around now, speaking 30 languages.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say in Guatemala alone, there's over 10 million Maya still living there.

• 1:07:50AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Even in the United States. I mean, I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but there's more than a million Maya people living here. I always tell people, if that nice guy at the 7-Eleven is 5'2", he's probably a Maya.

• 1:08:08AJ Gentile?

  I want to hear about Plaza A. That seems to show up all the time. I want to know what's...

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Plaza A?

• 1:08:13AJ Gentile?

  Plaza A at Machna?

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  Oh. I don't think I ever named the plazas.

• 1:08:20AJ Gentile?

  You might not have. It showed up in a couple of papers.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  I guess, that's funny. Probably Leslie Shaw and Eleanor King and their team named the main plaza. Actually, the other ones are small, so that must be the first plaza with...

• 1:08:34AJ Gentile?

  Shocking, Howard and Valdez.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  But I did not know that. That must have happened after I'd gone. I was gone. But that was the 18-meter pyramid that we found first day. That was the south end of what's probably now Plaza A. And so after we finished lunch, I said, "Okay, doing the same thing. We're going to go climb down here. Somebody's going north, somebody's going south, and let's just see what we find." And everybody spread out, and within minutes, we knew that it was about 100 meters across, huge plaza. And I think it was Jim who yelled "ball court", found a ball court there, and another person yelled "pyramid", and another person yelled "pyramid".

• 1:09:18AJ Gentile?

  Wow, how did you date it?

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  I never did. I never did. I mean, well, yes, I did, to a certain extent. I guessed right.

• 1:09:26AJ Gentile?

  You guessed.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Ours was not an excavation project. It was a survey project, so I didn't put a shovel in the ground. Nevertheless, the nature of the pyramid that we found first and the second biggest one, and there was a little guy, they were long range buildings, which in the classic period, most of the pyramids are fairly square or just off square at their base. And when you get up to the top, there's a temple with three to max five doors.

• 1:09:56AJ Gentile?

  So classic period is like, what, 700 to 1,000 AD?

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  No, it's more like 400 to 800.

• 1:10:02AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  And then we get into this terminal classic period that goes from like 800 to 1,000. That's a period where all of a sudden the Maya, when they, when they abandoned those cities in that classic or that disappearance of the Maya.

• 1:10:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  When they reassemble themselves, especially up in Yucatan, they start making these buildings that are much longer. They're still up on pyramidal bases, but the building on top now is long and it has more like seven to 14 doors. And we think it's, it's indicating a much more communal way of governing, rather than like the, the age of despotic kings is done. Now we're going to get back to our more Maya communal roots and that these buildings that we call range buildings demonstrate that shared leadership, new formation. And

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  so the buildings in Mashna, I could already see like as long as it is and all these doors, this is probably terminal classic.

• 1:11:07AJ Gentile?

  I read one of your papers on it and it, and maybe you can talk about it a little bit, is the period where we think maybe they abandoned the kings in favor of the councils. And I think your paper argued that the councils were there all the time anyway.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24AJ Gentile?

  And, uh, the cargo theory, I'd love to hear about that.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Oh, those are from my dissertation, I think, from Palenque.

• 1:11:31AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Thank you for reading that.

• 1:11:33AJ Gentile?

  You're welcome.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  You're probably number 83 to read that thing.

• 1:11:36AJ Gentile?

  Read all 161 pages of it.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  That's very nice of you. Um, yeah, I do think, uh, it's reflected in Maya archaeology. It's reflected in the pantheon of the Maya gods and it's reflected today in the nature of the Maya, that they are a very council kind of people. They like a group of people to work out what the community is going to do. They've always had councils, the, uh, the cargo system in, uh, in the highlands of Chiapas is a system today that the Maya indigenous communities use, where wealthy members of the community will take on a position within the government or leadership, but they will pay their own money. They will pay

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  for the festivals. They will open up their homes. They will be there for all of the emergency meetings. They will do their part and it's cargo because it's a burden. And so they take on that position for whatever the community, it'll be like one to three years will be that position. During that time, they lose a lot of wealth, but what they gain is prestige. The community now sees them not as some rich guy out of touch with who we are. He's a person who was successful in our community and gave back to our community. And now that person can go on and they have prestige.

• 1:13:01AJ Gentile?

  Well, at the same time in Rome, you've got senators and councils and pre councils who are using the position to make money and gather power. The Maya are not like that?

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  What happened in Rome?

• 1:13:15AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it happens to all of them, all, and it's gonna happen to us too. So, but why were the Maya different? Why were they so magnanimous?

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Uh,

• 1:13:25AJ Gentile?

  Cause this is human nature?

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  We're unsure of when their pantheon, when their religion started, but it is interesting to note that it is a pantheon of deities who have various roles. And sometimes like they'll have one role in one season and one role in another, but there's no clear head of the gods. There's no Zeus. Now pseudo sources will tell you that it's, uh, Hanab Ku or something like that. But they, and there's some basis for that right at contact, but in the classic period, the gods are a council.

• 1:14:02AJ Gentile?

  The gods are a council.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  And so if the gods were a council,

• 1:14:05AJ Gentile?

  With no leader?

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  We should be a council. No leader. There is no chief Maya god.

• 1:14:11AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting. Um, does monotheism come in to their culture at some point? Or at least a more senior deity?

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  1519.

• 1:14:18AJ Gentile?

  Ah, that's, that's not the deity I was asking about.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  Um, no, I don't, I don't think so. I think there was, uh, there, there's a, there's a god called Itzamna in the classic period. And he's probably Kawiil, I mean, post classic and he's Kawiil in the classic period, who's a god of like royal magic and, uh, the, the connection to their ancestors. So oftentimes he's featured more than the other gods, but that's because all the texts are written by kings who were, uh, identifying with that guy.

• 1:14:55AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  And he's validating their right to rulership, but they never say he's the, he's the Zeus.

• 1:15:01AJ Gentile?

  Um, are you, didn't Linda find some, some texts that were just documentation of administration, things like that? I just wanted, actually what I'm getting at is I just want to know what a Tuesday is like at, if you're a Maya, at the height of the civilization, you wake up in the morning, what, take us through the day.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  I think that before the wars really took on, that people were living a very safe, secure and abundant life. And like, if we take Palenque as the example, you know, I, I mapped 2,000 buildings there.

• 1:15:38AJ Gentile?

  2,000.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  A lot, a lot of them are houses. I think that those people, they're in these little, uh, courtyard groups. So I think like an extended family lived in a courtyard group and they got up and they cooked together. I've lived with Maya families before in modern times that work much the same way, a little compound and everybody at night and in the morning meets in the kitchen area and talks about things, but then they would probably, uh, some of them would have craft industries like right there. So, you know, mom and the daughters get to be weaving and the boys would be making pottery that they would then, once a week, they would go to Palenque's market. On a, on a typical Tuesday, they

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  might say, you know, even if they're not going to sell stuff there, they might go over there. They might, you know, go get some, some food from their favorite restaurant or go get a haircut. I mean, there were, there were public places, the, where the, where Palenque's parking lot is right now. It's there because it's the closest place next to the ruins, next to the, the temples in the middle that had no buildings. Palenque is very, very dense. And yet there was a parking lot sized place right next to like maybe a hundred meters from the, the palace. That had to be the market. So I think a lot of people gathered in there and I think they felt very safe because they had the, you

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  know, the religious authority of their king who had the favor of the gods, but they were also just a big, huge area producing huge amounts of food. In the case of Palenque, it was up on a, uh, uh terrace. So they were some hundred meters, uh, above the plains so they could see people coming. They had the mountain at their back. I think they felt great about things until powerful people screwed up, started fighting each other.

• 1:17:36AJ Gentile?

  I think, I think it was, um, the Maya were the first to have pressurized water there. Wasn't that discovered?

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  I doubt we could boast they were the first. I mean, I imagine somebody over there in the, you know, the Indus Valley or something or,

• 1:17:52AJ Gentile?

  I just mean in, on, on this side.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  Hmm. They certainly did have pressurized water. Uh, Palenque was incredible like that. They had six rivers running through the, the city that came from the mountain springs and down to the plains to, to the big river. So they had moving water already, which was essential. Uh, but then they would put these pipes into the river, especially the ones going up into the palace. And we found some of those pipes and we can see that as they go up to toilets in the palace, they constrict in size. So it's big and then it gets, it constricts and that's just a simple way to use gravity and pressure to

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  push it up.

• 1:18:40AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  A simple, I mean, you know, a lot of our most profound engineering is based on very simple things.

• 1:18:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  It's, that's the foundation. And this is one of those things, how to make water pressure. But the Maya figured it out.

• 1:18:56AJ Gentile?

  How did the cities interact with each other? Did each one have a king or was there a hierarchy?

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  There was a hierarchy. There was a kind of tiered system, probably not unlike the feudal system in Europe, where there were major cities that had kings and then they would have a kingdom. Like Palenque, for example, the city center where the kings lived, that was actually named Lakamha, big water or water gift. And then the kingdom of Palenque was called Baknal, Skull Place or Bone, Place of Bones, which probably meant ancestors, not creepy stuff like I think it does. But within the city, within the kingdom

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  of Baknal, we know of at least five cities that were smaller and had kings or, or, let me say mayors. They, they, a king is in a howl. A mayor of a littler town is a sahal. And so they'd name themselves sahal's. They would have hieroglyphic panels and temples, but the temples would instead name, instead of naming that sahal or showing him, they'd show the king of Palenque. So we could really see that there was a kingdom with subsidiary lords and then those kingdoms would abut each other. Some of them would intermarry and become an even bigger, nice kingdom.

• 1:20:23AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Some of them would fight. And so there was, they were like the Greeks, independent, uh, city-states.

• 1:20:30AJ Gentile?

  They were.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  Who had alliances and, uh, enemies.

• 1:20:36AJ Gentile?

  It's a shame we don't know more about that.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  You know, I, I will plug a colleague of mine's book that just came out, uh, David Stewart's book, The Four Heavens that just came out. Dave's done an amazing job of really cross analyzing the texts and the genealogies of these cities. And he's finding some amazing stuff that they, they're really, you know how Europe got to that point where every king was related to every other king, you know, like really got to be weird incestuous. The, the Maya were doing the same thing. They were, they were intermarrying to each other and you could see where as time went on, there was really just one or two families that were the royals for all of the cities.

• 1:21:24AJ Gentile?

  And it, you know, it sounds creepy to us and incestuous, but they were really just trying to form alliances.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:31AJ Gentile?

  I'd love to read the Peloponnesian War version of what was going on down there.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  Uh, I, you know, me too. And I think it's amazing that we're coming up with it. It is so beautiful to me that it was only the 1970s that we broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. But now every day, their stories and their words are coming back to us, just like the Greeks. It, it's a day that probably Edward Thompson thought would never come. But here we are. And every time we come up with a new text, we now have a team of experts. I mean, within two days, we've got the translation and we know what's happening. And like, oh, this guy is the brother-in-law of that guy. And it's, it's all coming forward and it's, it's a beautiful thing to see.

• 1:22:21AJ Gentile?

  But it's not fully compiled yet, right?

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  Not compiled yet. And we have so many, you know, barriers. We have the propaganda thing. We have, you know, they're spread out across five countries. Uh, we've got the money thing. That's always, that's always trouble. You know, you find a beautiful panel full of hieroglyphs and carvings of a, of a king, but that sucker's two tons and it's out in the middle of the jungle. What are you gonna do about that? And if you don't protect it, looters will come with chainsaws and, and destroy it. So like, there's, there's a scary thing about finding a beautiful piece of art.

• 1:23:02AJ Gentile?

  Right. So you can't just grab a couple of photos and call it done. You've got to protect that.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, years ago, when I was a student in Copan, before I went back to, uh, Machna, I went into Guatemala and I, I had a friend who told me where, uh, Steve Houston's project uh, house was. But they hide those things because they have the ceramics and all that stuff in the house and looters will come and beat you up. Um, so I'm in Antigua, Guatemala. I'm walking down the street. There's a, a white guy walking with a box.

• 1:23:38AJ Gentile?

  Uh oh.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Um, and I just, you know, took a chance, like, what are the chances? I mean, everybody else is a Maya around here. I bet you that's Steve Houston. So I went up and I was like, are you Steve Houston? And he looked scared. So like, cause he had a box with a beautiful painted ceramic in it. And he was trying to sneak his ass from his house to the lab without getting known. And here's this guy meeting him in the street. It, it freaked him out. And that's, I mean, he was right. I mean, gosh, did it, did, am I a looter? Is the next thing gonna be a punch in your face and take that box out of your hand?

• 1:24:12AJ Gentile?

  I didn't consider looters. Um, when we talk about those temples being empty, maybe they weren't, you know, how you find empty pyramids in Egypt, but they weren't empty. They were just robbed.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  There's a lot of things that got robbed in antiquity for sure and destroyed. I mean, after the days of any classic culture, then, you know, the roughnecks move in.

• 1:24:34AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  We, every Maya city has clear evidence of squatters. Like the, the plazas will have crappy little, uh, just post holes where we know somebody just put a, a, a thatch and pole house up. But they, they were living in there and they were taking stuff. They're people just like us. They were probably, you know, looking for antiques.

• 1:25:01AJ Gentile?

  Um, your, your podcast is super fun. What, what's the name of it? So people could find your podcast?

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  Uh, Archeo Ed.

• 1:25:07AJ Gentile?

  Archeo Ed.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  That's it. I always come up with these names that nobody can spell. Nobody can find it. Cause I'd like, how do you spell Archeo? I, I do this to myself all the time. I thought it was clever, but.

• 1:25:17AJ Gentile?

  Well, it's fun because if you want to learn more about specific, like you'll be on a, go on a podcast and tell a four minute story. But if we go to your podcast, you could be 10, you could do 10 episodes on certain things.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  I do that. And I, I like to think of the podcast as, uh, my most casual thing. I am really just talking off the cuff, honestly, like you and I are doing right now. My YouTube channel is where I put in, you know, some more professionally and polished things, history information that people could use. But the podcast is me just talking crap about my adventures.

• 1:25:55AJ Gentile?

  Um, I love this. The descriptions sound like a, like a pulp novel. Um, forest fires, mangoes and skinny dipping, more snakes, more temples and a robbery at gunpoint. I got by with a little help from my friends. What happened at gunpoint?

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. In Palenque, there were, there were two like 20 something boys who were just walking. There's a, there's a myriad of trails out in the woods around Palenque. So you can get to it from any direction and the local folks really know those trails. I got to know them. But there were two boys. It was me and this, this English traveler named Elizabeth Coran, who really just, uh, like, she was just a traveler and I needed somebody for my project. People had fallen through and for, I bought her a pair of boots and she worked with me for a month. But we were, we were in some little group drawing and I had my machete boys and the expensive machine, thank goodness, closer to the parking lot. I was having them cut some things we do tomorrow. But Elizabeth and I are drawing

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  and measuring things. And I see these two boys moving fast through the woods. And I was like, oh, Elizabeth, get up. Those guys looked like they were trouble. And they sure enough were. I mean, I didn't even move three steps before they turned back around, came into the little group we were in, and one of them pulled out a 45 and just walked right up. He had it pointed at me until it was on my forehead. I was like, oh.

• 1:27:23AJ Gentile?

  What did he want?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  Money. Money. It was a funny exchange. They, uh, they, they were boys. They were trying, they were playing good cop, bad cop. The one with the gun was obviously bad cop. I, he yelled some things at me. I said, I don't speak Spanish. He hit me in the head with the gun. He, he like pistol whipped me a couple of times. And I was like, listen, you gotta talk slow, be calm, and then I'll understand what you want. In my bad Spanish at the time. And it turned out that, you know, they wanted our money. Like, sure. Like here's, here's my money. Here's things in my bag. They, at one point, he tried to take, uh, Elizabeth's ring off.

• 1:28:02AJ Gentile?

  Oh no.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  And Elizabeth said in her broken Spanish, no, it's a gift from my mother. Don't take my ring. And, and good cop was like, hey, it's from her mom. Put it back. And that's when I knew we weren't gonna die. Like, yeah, this guy's caring about Elizabeth's mom. We're, we're okay. And so in the end of it, they, uh, they, they took my money, which was, I, I was a Friday, so I had my huge amount of money in my pocket to pay my boys, which was, both of them got $35 a week.

• 1:28:34AJ Gentile?

  I was gonna ask, were they disappointed?

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. He, he got like 70 bucks off me. And, and not only that, he took it all and then good cop counts it and he, he gets a 50 peso bill and he hands it back to me. He's like, he said, para su paciencia. That's for your patience. Like, oh, well, this has been nice. Thanks, guys. Come rob me again sometime. So it wasn't quite as dangerous as you'd think it was. It wasn't like gorillas getting me in the woods. It, it was boys with a gun that they should not have.

• 1:29:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. I mean, uh, you said, I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow.

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15AJ Gentile?

  So besides gunpoint, what else?

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Oh yeah.

• 1:29:19AJ Gentile?

  What other dangers?

• 1:29:20Speaker 03

  Certainly the, the gunpoint was unexpected.

• 1:29:22AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  That was not, that was not one of the dangers. The dangers are just like, you know, twisting your ankle and rocks or, uh, bugs or snakes or, uh, lots, everything in the jungle has thorns on it. So, and a lot of it is like trigger loaded. So you could cut with a machete here on a vine and it unravels one over here, which comes, hits you in the neck. And now you've got a bunch of spines in your neck. And that was the sort of thing. Every day we would get hurt just going through the jungle. That's just how it was. You would come out bloody. It's funny. People think, oh, it's so hot there. You should dress in shorts and a t-shirt. No way. Me and the Maya had full clothes on and

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  those clothes would get ripped. I mean, my, my jeans got ripped. And you just get hurt all the time. Uh, there was one that the boys, the Maya just laughed at me forever about where, uh, again, it was wasps and we, we stirred up some wasps. We all spread out, but one of them got in my ear.

• 1:30:27AJ Gentile?

  Oh no.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  And then I tried to pull it out of my ear, but I just dug it way in my ear. And it was like, ah, and I was just like dancing around the jungle, freaking out like, ah, ah, ah, ah, trying to get it out. And like I'd get a stick and put it in my ear. Like they were just rolling on the ground going, look at that idiot gringo. He's really dying over there.

• 1:30:46AJ Gentile?

  How did you get it out? Just smashed it?

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  Uh, I eventually just smashed it until it stopped buzzing. And then back at, at home, I showered and just got a bunch of water in my ear. Just like dumped it until I saw the, the wasp on the shower floor. Like, ah, that's done. And just bugs everywhere. My, uh, uh, but I had, my first wife at the time was there sometimes to visit, but she didn't like it at all. At, to a point like, when I'd come home, she'd say like,

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

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• 1:32:11AJ Gentile?

  You gave your dog ticks?

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  I gave my dog ticks and she would be like, that's it. Go into the bathroom and, and strip. I'm not letting you in the house until I know that you're not covered in ticks, which I might have been. I might have been.

• 1:32:24AJ Gentile?

  Didn't you have a student that had a bunch of botflies in her hair?

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:29AJ Gentile?

  I, I've covered.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  For Belize.

• 1:32:31AJ Gentile?

  I've covered botflies. Can you tell us about how those work?

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  Oh, God, they're so gross.

• 1:32:36AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah. And painful.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  Um, some other, like mosquitoes carry their eggs. And they just find animals mostly, you know, but humans if they want them. And they insert the egg into a person. And then that grows into a worm.

• 1:32:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  And the worm has got like pinchers in the front. Where it just hangs on. So you don't, uh, as it grows, it'll grow for about six weeks.

• 1:33:08AJ Gentile?

  Spikes around its body.

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then it, and then it flies out of you.

• 1:33:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  If it goes to term, you know, for the normal, like, you know, peccary, it's on six weeks. It's on its way. But humans, you know, we'd squeeze them. Once they get big enough, you can squeeze where they are. Cause they've always got a little air hole right there. And the tail will come out and flash.

• 1:33:32AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  We did, we had a, again, Jim Eckhart had one in his arm. And there was a reporter from Toledo with us who came out to my weird little bar in the, in the.

• 1:33:44AJ Gentile?

  Your bar.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  In the street, in the, on the dirt road. And we were doing this thing, not for their sake. It was just something we did occasionally that we referred to as juicing Jim. We would take a like snake bite extractor kit and put it over his, uh, his botfly and then pump. So that it would pull it up and the, and the tail would come out and flash and everybody go, ah, how gross. And then it would, we'd stop and it'd suck back in and you know, Jim, just go to sleep. That's the way it was. But this one girl, I, I think that, uh, nice shampoo attracts them. Because the girls got it in their hair more than anybody. And I was a dirty person. I, I never got one.

• 1:34:32AJ Gentile?

  You were too gross?

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  I was too gross for even botflies. That's, that's a statement, isn't it?

• 1:34:38AJ Gentile?

  What did she do? Did she let them grow for six weeks?

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you couldn't even get to them.

• 1:34:43AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  Unless you shaved her head and she had this beautiful, long hair. So, I mean, she never came back to the field.

• 1:34:48AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  I would see her at night, sitting alone in the, in the cafeteria, just drinking vodka. Oh, she's soured on it so badly. And there was a girl that had one in her hair and didn't know it. And we went back to UT Austin. And in the middle of class, in the middle of anthropology class, a botfly flew out of her hair. Oh, God, was that a botfly?

• 1:35:16AJ Gentile?

  Oh, God.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  She didn't know it.

• 1:35:19AJ Gentile?

  She, she didn't know it was there the whole time?

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:35:22AJ Gentile?

  Gross.

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  I did get a botfly. I got one in my arm. And unlike the other guys, I asked, I, I like to ask the Maya things. They always know what to do.

• 1:35:32AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  And some, some uncle of one of the Rangers told me, he said, it's a simple solution. All you gotta do, take some tobacco from a cigarette, get it wet on your tongue. And then rub it into the, the air hole. That makes it drunk. And then you can pull it out. And I did it. I, I rubbed the tobacco on it and I squeezed. And when the tail came out, I pulled it all the way out without it. If you try to pull it out, it'll break off.

• 1:36:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  And then you're infected for sure.

• 1:36:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  But I was able to pull one out with, with tobacco.

• 1:36:13AJ Gentile?

  It gets drunk.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Some, some old Maya uncle told me it'll make him drunk and he'll release. And you can pull it out. And he was right.

• 1:36:25AJ Gentile?

  I gotta ask the locals.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  Always ask the locals. They, they know, and they know where all the ruins are too.

• 1:36:32AJ Gentile?

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• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Uh, no, that was a strange one. And the, the Rangers were very surprised. Because the other sites in Program for Belize have a lot of looters trenches. And they had some idea of them, but the, when I brought the Rangers to Mashna, they were all like, "Nice job of exploring, kid."

• 1:38:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  None of us knew this was here at all. And as proof, there are no looters trenches at Mashna. I really did find one that not even the looters got to.

• 1:38:29AJ Gentile?

  Have they gotten to it yet?

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  I'm unaware. Hopefully not. It's so far away from any community that you'd really.

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  It's unlikely because there's ruins right in their backyard.

• 1:38:42AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  Why would they go five kilometers into the jungle off of the nearest dirt road? It's gonna take them a while to get to that one.

• 1:38:51AJ Gentile?

  How many cities could be there, do you think?

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  In the Maya area? Gosh, I mean, conservatively hundreds.

• 1:38:59AJ Gentile?

  Conservatively.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, somewhat, the answer to that question depends on your definition of city. Which is the struggle. And, uh, you know, archaeology doesn't have a grand poobah that tells us what the numbers are.

• 1:39:12AJ Gentile?

  True.

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  You know, I, I, I just recently in, uh, on my YouTube, kind of threw out there like, you know, a hundred people is a village. A thousand people is a city or a town. You know, over a thousand people, you're getting into city range.

• 1:39:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  And so if we, if that totally arbitrary out of my mouth, uh,

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  uh, assessment is right, then the number is thousands.

• 1:39:41AJ Gentile?

  Wow, that would be.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  But if we're talking about a city, you know, if we, we, we benchmark it of, you know, it's gotta have at least 5,000 people. Then I'd put it down into the hundreds, but still huge area.

• 1:39:54AJ Gentile?

  About a year ago, you said, um, LIDAR, not much was happening. It was mostly just for clicks, I think was how you phrased it. But recently you said there has been some developments.

• 1:40:04Speaker 03

  There really have been.

• 1:40:05AJ Gentile?

  And Luke, Luke was here talking about some cool stuff with the LIDAR.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  You know, Luke is, uh, has, has charmed his way into, uh, having some friends.

• 1:40:14AJ Gentile?

  He's a charming fellow.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  That have a lot of this LIDAR data and they've shared it with Luke and Luke, with his eyes and experience, has been using it to find pyramids here in the United States and a lot of them. He's not the first guy to do it. But Luke's been finding some amazing stuff and I'm actually looking forward to one of these days. Luke is going to invite me to, to go take a look at some of these things. A lot of them are on private land. It's a trick. You know, uh, you don't just row up to them. Some, you'll get shot in the middle of Alabama. So we gotta, we gotta do some, uh, some politicking, which that's where Luke needs me. Cause I'm, I'm good at talking, good old boy.

• 1:41:01AJ Gentile?

  If, if, yeah, I had one, one LiDAR plane, it was funded, where would you send it? Yeah, just get one.

• 1:41:09Speaker 03

  Hmm, just one?

• 1:41:11AJ Gentile?

  Just one, like, I gotta know what's there.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  Hmm, I'll give you a random new answer to that.

• 1:41:17AJ Gentile?

  Okay, I'd love it.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Cambodia.

• 1:41:20AJ Gentile?

  Cambodia?

• 1:41:21Speaker 03

  Cambodia. Uh, there are, you know, you know Angkor Wat?

• 1:41:25AJ Gentile?

  I do.

• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  Everybody knows, you know, the city of Angkor. But there are huge cities out there. That was the capital of an empire of millions of people. I mean, heck, just Angkor had almost a million people.

• 1:41:39AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  And so there are cities out there all over the place. I've been told about them multiple times and I would love to know where they are. I think Cambodia, especially Cambodia is such a poor country. There's, besides, again and again, LiDAR-ing Angkor, we need to go out into the jungle there. Years and years ago, when I was being, doing the survey in, in the Maya area, a, uh, grand old man of archaeology, Michael Ko, uh, he was from Yale, that very, very decorated career, but Ko calls me, for some reason, he was also over in Cambodia doing things.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Uh, and he had returned there late in life and he said, Ed, you've got to get over there and do the surveys that you're doing in the Maya world because the field over there is dominated by just French people and Australian people and we need an American presence up there. He was very, you know, patriotic in that regard. But I was like, Mike, I mean, aren't all of those places full of landmines still, which they are?

• 1:42:51AJ Gentile?

  They are, that's right.

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  Poor Cambodia is just full of landmines and people, you know, children with one leg. It just sucks.

• 1:42:57AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  And it's such a process there. They are, they estimate they have taken like thirty percent of the landmines out and there's seventy percent of them still out there waiting to kill a child.

• 1:43:10AJ Gentile?

  Don't get me started.

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  It's so terrible.

• 1:43:12AJ Gentile?

  Don't get me started.

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  So terrible. But I was like, Mike, what about all the landmines? He was like, don't worry about it. They've trained chickens who go ahead of you and they peck the landmines. It's like, I'm not gonna just have a

• 1:43:25AJ Gentile?

  Just murder chickens?

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  Of murdered chickens in the end of me. I was like, oh, Mike, my wife doesn't even want me to be in Central America. I think Cambodia is gonna be a hard sell, Mike.

• 1:43:34AJ Gentile?

  You won't kill a Fear to Land snake unless you have to. You're not gonna harm a chicken.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  Oh, God, wouldn't that be just bizarre if you just had like, I need more chickens. Had a good day, we blew up twenty chickens.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  How bizarre. But, but the point that I was long-windedly getting to was that, oh, we have known for a long time that there are a hell of a lot more Angkor's out there in Cambodia.

• 1:43:59AJ Gentile?

  Could it be as dense as, as, as Maya?

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  I think it could. I think it could. I mean, just the ones we know and they've cleared the landmines, they're, it's insane how many, uh, I bring people out there to Cambodia, which is lovely. The Buddhists are there. I mean, anybody who, who's worried about going over there, don't be. The people there are so sweet. I tell my people like, please don't get angry. You're gonna freak people out. These are like the most passive, nice people you'll ever meet in your life.

• 1:44:24AJ Gentile?

  And Angkor Wat, I think, has been active, and still active for a thousand years.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Uh, it's, it's a living temple.

• 1:44:29AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  It's so neat. Unlike the Maya area, the people walk into those temples and it's their same religion still. In fact, every one of the temples in Angkor have nuns and monks that are attending each one of them with their incense and they sit in there all day long. There's a, there's a staff of, you know, there must be three, four hundred monks and, and nuns who are just out there maintenance-ing the temples of their current religion, which I think is beautiful.

• 1:44:59AJ Gentile?

  I do too.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  The continuity.

• 1:45:00AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Is there a library there?

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  Uh, you mean like modern library?

• 1:45:05AJ Gentile?

  No, no, no. I mean, like, how far back in history were monks scribbling the history? Like, are the scrolls stashed somewhere?

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  There, I don't know. It's a jungle environment, so I think a lot of the scrolls have gone away, but they were scrolls and they do know, uh, like, every one of those big complexes, like Angkor Wat, for example, you, if you picture it in your mind, you've got that long causeway.

• 1:45:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  That goes to the big temples, right?

• 1:45:31AJ Gentile?

  The beehives.

• 1:45:32Speaker 03

  Midway along that causeway are two big buildings that they refer to as libraries. And that is a standard formation. There must be, you know, a dozen different things within the city of Angkor that have the moat, the causeway, the big temples, and all along the causeway midway are the, uh, are the libraries that held all the scrolls and they have carvings on the walls still and they say, I'm fascinated because they have a astronomical component that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe it doesn't, maybe I'm not going to, but they say that they are the, they're a pair of libraries because one is to the waning moon and one is to the waxing moon.

• 1:46:13AJ Gentile?

  Very interesting.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  So I have spent hours standing on those causeways, like, if it's here, does it work? What did my compass say here? But maybe here, I'll stand next to the Naga. No, not that one. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out why the heck they're called the temple, the libraries of the waning and the waxing moon, but it must be astronomy.

• 1:46:33AJ Gentile?

  It must be. And we're gonna talk, we're gonna talk astronomy and math a little bit later, if you don't mind, because I'm fascinated by it.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  My favorite subjects. Thanks for asking.

• 1:46:40AJ Gentile?

  Really? Archaeo astronomy?

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  Archaeo astronomy. I love that.

• 1:46:45AJ Gentile?

  Me too. It's kind of off topic, but it just got me thinking about Nama Dal and how nobody really knows what that was. Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  I, I don't have a whole lot of, uh, study of that particular area. I've been asked for, I think, one time, I think that, that show the proof is out there.

• 1:47:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:05Speaker 03

  They love to give me things that I don't know about to study and, and give my opinion. So, Nama Dal is, is very cool. I, I don't find it particularly mysterious, though. I mean, they're in a regular time period. I, I think the most mysterious thing is their lack of contact with the other major civilizations around them. When huge temples are being built in Java and in Cambodia and Vietnam, why are they so isolated? They, they are major, uh, constructions, but not much evidence of them contacting or being dominated by those guys or China that was coming through at the same time.

• 1:47:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's strange because they have irrigation, they have plumbing, all of that. They had to get that knowledge somewhere. So they must have communicated.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Uh, they must have. But they, I mean, they seem isolationist.

• 1:47:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  They seem like intentionally isolationist. They're, they're, uh, I hope I'm not thinking of the wrong site, but the, the way they build their, their buildings out of that columnar basalt, that makes them look like a, a log cabin.

• 1:48:14AJ Gentile?

  Cabin out of, yeah, igneous rock.

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  So fascinating. And I think that its island is one of these weird places where, uh, volcanic lava went through water and cooled super fast into those, uh, hexagonal shaped columns.

• 1:48:33AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  And so I, I've never actually seen, have you seen where the quarry is on that island?

• 1:48:39AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  It must be a huge quarry full of those, because you can see it in the pictures. They're not just columns, like the Olmec ones are, are columns. They're, they're just like cylinders.

• 1:48:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  But you can see the hexagonal patterns on the, the logs in Nama Dal. So somewhere on that island is a quarry that, that has those hexagonal things. They, uh, they, there's one in, there's one in Northern Ireland, there's, uh, there, there's a couple of them around the world where this, geologically, it's just flowing lava hitting water and super fast cooling into these cool hexagonal shapes.

• 1:49:19AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. We'll talk about Easter Island a little bit.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Love those guys too.

• 1:49:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, you, uh, you're, I love what you did there. So you flew fixed wing drones over Easter Island, nine day win, nine days, right?

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Yep, we just got nine days in. We're dying to get back there.

• 1:49:40AJ Gentile?

  Well, what I thought was kind of funny is in nine days, you got, you covered more area than you'd spent like twenty-five years with a machete.

• 1:49:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true. Gosh, it's so, you know, they, they just did LiDAR of Palenque.

• 1:49:56AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  My map held up, thank God. They did find some pyramid. They found a pyramid that I didn't see.

• 1:50:02AJ Gentile?

  You, your maps always seem to hold up.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  I, you know, I'm, I'm anal. I'm an anal retentive person. I, I, uh, if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it right and to the best of my ability and, uh, yeah.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  Sort of is not good enough for me.

• 1:50:17AJ Gentile?

  Well, Easter Island was, I think you were talking about how some, some families didn't even know what land they had anymore. What was the problem there?

• 1:50:25Speaker 03

  It's a trick. It's, I mean, it's a crisis for the entire community of the, you know, the remaining Rapanui people, which I think maybe this year they're climbing to 6,000 people, which is a ridiculously small amount.

• 1:50:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:38Speaker 03

  For the descendants that made those incredible statues. The, the tragedies upon tragedies that happened to this community.

• 1:50:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  Such a, such a human resilience story that they even still exist.

• 1:50:50AJ Gentile?

  And its height was about what, 30,000?

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  Uh, I think that's what they say. 20, 30,000. And the island is tiny. I mean, it's the its longest distance is 12 miles.

• 1:51:01AJ Gentile?

  You can't find it. Good luck finding it on Google Earth. You need to know exactly where it is. It's nowhere.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  Such a speck.

• 1:51:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  And such an interesting thing, but they, we do know that they had, I think it's like nine to 12 clans. And that those clans each had their own territory. And we can see it from the Ahus and the Moai where, where the centers of those territories are. What we don't know is where their borders are. And neither do the Rapanui. And they're not very, they fight each other about it. There's a few families of those 6,000. They have names that are connected to those clans. And they want to know where their ancestral land is. A lot of them have, uh, their own opinions.

• 1:51:49AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  About where that land is. But, uh, they, they don't know. And that's one, that's, that's my goal in the mapping project or one of my goals. I, I may fail in it. I mean, I'm trying to find a way to see if we do a settlement pattern survey map. Can we find things that mark the borders from one clan to another? Now, geez, I hope I don't start like some crazy clan war if that happens, but there's, it's funny, the, the island works just like it used to. There, in the ancient past, we know there was a head clan, the Miru clan, and they had the best land and the biggest land. And then there were a number of scrappy clans. Uh, same thing's happening on Rapanui today.

• 1:52:35AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:52:36Speaker 03

  The, uh, the, the, the, the rich family are the Rappus.

• 1:52:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:52:40Speaker 03

  And families like the Pakarattis. They don't, they're, they're, they have their own, uh, popularity, but they're not as rich as the Rappus. And the people get pissed at the Rappus.

• 1:52:52AJ Gentile?

  Did you, did you find like borders? Did you help solve any of that?

• 1:52:56Speaker 03

  Um, no.

• 1:52:58AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  No, in fact, I gotta get back there because the, the thing that really

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  trick, tripped me up is that I couldn't find the houses. I found the rich houses near the plazas. Uh, they're called, uh, Hari Panengas. And they look like boats and they're built of stone. But where are all the houses that everybody else was living in? I find the stone chicken coops. And I find the stone garden areas called manifies, or sometimes they're spread out gardens. Where are the houses? I don't, I, I did not know how to find them then. I think now I do. I looked back into the oldest records. I read everything I could read. And there was one smart guy that was a surveyor. Uh, surveying the land where the airport is now in the 1970s.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  And he figured out a connection between those Hari Panengas that are the boat ones. They have these, uh, patios of rounded stones called poro. And poro are like, good luck, good manna for your house. Every house should have one. What he was finding was that they were building perishable houses, but still had the circular stone Hari Panengas. And those are like under the grass. So now I gotta go back and walk that land, find a couple of these and then use my, uh, my photogrammetry to say, okay, that's what, that's where it is. Let's zoom in. Let's look at it. What are the signatures?

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Once I know that, then I can go to the rest of the photogrammetry and find them.

• 1:54:39AJ Gentile?

  Lidar, Lidar can't find these, huh?

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  Uh, I, I don't think so because it's, it's weird. It's volcanic rock on volcanic rock when it, and they're so low. I mean, Vol, Lidar's incredible. It can find things that are like, you know, less than a meter. But these are boulders about like river cobbles or stone, uh, the beach cobbles like this big. And they've dug into the earth, you know, rains have just pushed them into the earth. So they're like only this much out of the earth if they are. So Lidar's not going to find them for us.

• 1:55:13AJ Gentile?

  Got to do it on the ground.

• 1:55:14Speaker 03

  Got to do it on the ground. Luckily it's a tiny little patch of thing. I swear if they just, uh, I, I'm waiting to be invited back. I am doing it for the Rapanui. They are very distrusting of archaeologists from the mainland. And there's been a couple of archaeologists from the United States who have rubbed them the wrong way. I went out with the, uh, the director of Maualhenua, which is their, uh, cultural association that now protects the ruins. Or, you know, the places of their ancestors. And we, we had some beers and he talked pretty openly about a couple of people who, who he does not want to invite back on the island anymore, but.

• 1:55:55AJ Gentile?

  Well, you were generous and, and you gave them the data, didn't you? No charge.

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  I gave him all the data. He was funny in that conversation, cause we did that in July of 2019.

• 1:56:07AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:56:08Speaker 03

  And then COVID hit.

• 1:56:09AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:56:11Speaker 03

  And, and the island went into lockdown for four years. Nobody got on that island. And in the interim, that crazy politics I was talking about that are modern. A bunch of people just whooped some Rappu people and, uh, the, the chief archaeologist was a Rappu. Um, and a lot of his staff were Rappus. And so when this all went down, they ransacked the, the archaeological office. And all of the computers that had all of the GIS data and everything that I had given them was taken.

• 1:56:50AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  Uh,

• 1:56:51AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  Well, because screw the Rappus. That's why.

• 1:56:55AJ Gentile?

  That's it? Just vandalism?

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  Like you guys were misrunning it. We're, we're taking over. None of your stuff. You don't get it back. But then he did recover one of the computers.

• 1:57:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  From, I mean, it's a tiny island. I don't know who, where they were hiding.

• 1:57:09AJ Gentile?

  We know where it is.

• 1:57:10Speaker 03

  Somebody's chicken coop or something. But, uh, but he, he said, we found one of the computers and we fired it up. And it had your map on it, but it didn't have your name or anything. And we were like, who the heck made this map? This is a map of all of the, the settlement stuff that nobody's ever done. He said, and then the computer crashed and we lost it. And that was like six months ago.

• 1:57:36AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  Now I realize that was you. And at the time I was like, well, I'm in, this is great. Uh, but something else political has happened. Um, and I'm just waiting. I, I'm relentlessly sending them requests and various things, but I don't want to be too much of a pushy American. So. My guys who are really the guys who make the map, uh, Jeff, uh, Kraschik is, is my guy. And he is ready to go and ready to volunteer and use his stuff and his skills. He's frustrated with me. He, he really wishes I would win the day. Me too.

• 1:58:14AJ Gentile?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:58:14Speaker 03

  I gotta, you know, you gotta approach these things with respect though. I can't just like demand, do you know who I am? I'm an important archaeologist. You little Rappu people should let me in here. That's not how I roll. So I mean, I've got to be invited. This has got to be the Rapanui trusting me and inviting me. And trust in these communities is a long road. And you never get that way being pushy.

• 1:58:41AJ Gentile?

  No. It feels like there's gotta be so much more than, than Moai heads, right? There's gotta, there's gotta be more stuff there.

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, there's, there's the communities. There's the people.

• 1:58:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  There's, uh, there's caves full of petroglyphs. There's, there's so much beautiful to focus on. There's their astronomy. They have astronomy towers. There's their prowess as sailors. I mean, how the heck did they get there?

• 1:59:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  That's, you know, the, the catamarans that they made were, uh, technologically, uh, amazing inventions. Uh, as the, as humans progressed out into the Pacific and the South Pacific, there was a technology point that they could not cross with their boats. It, you know, for a thousand years, they were at one point and they couldn't go any farther. And then an invention and an improvement on the size and functioning of catamarans allowed them to get to Hawaii. And to, uh, to Easter Island. So, I mean, just that alone, just their, their prowess as sailors.

• 1:59:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. You look at the map and it's just like, how did they, anyone even do this? My phone rang last week and the caller ID said it was my bank. The area code matched. Everything looked right. A calm voice said there was suspicious activity on my account and needed to verify my card number. Classic move. 10 years ago, I might've fallen for it. Instead I hung up and called the number on the back of my card. It was a fake call, obviously, but it wasn't just gut instinct that made me suspicious. Cover on had pinged me two days earlier that my info showed up at a breach. That's probably where they got enough of my bio to salvage it in the first place. Cover on isn't just a monitoring app though. It's a protection service. It watches the dark web and your accounts for exposure.

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• 2:01:13Speaker 03

  And they have their whole oral tradition, you know, they know, they, they will tell you exactly how it happened to you. It was, uh,

• 2:01:23Speaker 03

  what's his name? Their, their first king, Hotumatua is the first king who's, whose priests had a vision that there was a new land that they could get to. And he believed them enough to send a crew in these new boats out and it took them 30 days to get there. They came back, they brought people, they landed on a beach uh, that everybody knows Anakanah Beach is where Hotumatua landed. And he had nine sons who established the clans's and they have so much oral tradition that they're very humble about. They always, they always qualify like according to oral tradition.

• 2:02:04Speaker 03

  But I mean, like who's, who are these Moai? We know who the Moai is. The, the Rapanui can say in certain Moai, that's ancestor such and such. He was famous for this. He protected this clan and, and we made him a Moai.

• 2:02:22AJ Gentile?

  That's, I never considered that, that every one of those statues has a story.

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  They're a person and when you put the eyes in, their spirit can come through. But when the eyes come out, they're just a rock again.

• 2:02:34AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  That's what they tell me. I mean, I, you know, I, I spend a lot of time listening to indigenous people, not just because it's fascinating, but you know, I believe

• 2:02:44AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:02:45Speaker 03

  that they know better than me.

• 2:02:47AJ Gentile?

  They do. They do. Um, let's take a quick break and come back and talk about math and the stars. All right. Before we get into math and stuff, the last page of your dissertation, page 161. You mentioned, um, and you thank your dog Loki and your cat Vlad. Did, is that Vlad the Impaler?

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  It was Vlad the Impaler. He was a black cat whose, whose fangs were so long, even when his mouth was closed, you could see them hanging out of him. So.

• 2:03:17AJ Gentile?

  So he earned it.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  Vlad. Yeah.

• 2:03:21AJ Gentile?

  I thought it was funny. It came out of nowhere.

• 2:03:24Speaker 03

  Oh, that's, I totally forgot that. So me to thank my dog.

• 2:03:29AJ Gentile?

  It was, you did.

• 2:03:32AJ Gentile?

  Um, so when you were talking to Sean, you said you could spend an hour on Kameh, on the Kameh temples?

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:39AJ Gentile?

  I, I don't know if we need to do an hour, but I'd like to, to hear more about them, like starting with the hole in the roof, the, the Oculus, I think they're called.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I hadn't heard that term, but yes, there, it is a viewing point at the top of it.

• 2:03:53AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  It, you know, I went there looking for archaeoastronomy because we had found so much evidence in the Maya area of this one particular phenomena called Zenith Passage that we don't get up here in the States. If you're not in the tropics, Zenith Passage does not occur.

• 2:04:15AJ Gentile?

  So Zenith Path, Passages, so that it's

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  Simply it's the day that the sun goes directly over your head and at noon you cast no shadow. Noticeable. Absolutely.

• 2:04:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep. Only happens around 15 degrees or so latitude.

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  Uh, well, it happens between 23 and a half north and 23 and a half south. It is what defines the tropics. You know, the, the concept of the tropics was around in antiquity.

• 2:04:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42Speaker 03

  India knew it very well. They put their astronomical capital right at 23 and a half degrees. And my fairly solid, I think, theory is that they were judging it by Zenith Passage. But what's fascinating about Zenith Passage is that it's latitude dependent. It happens at different days depending on your latitude. Summer solstice, June 21st, everywhere on the planet, even in the southern hemisphere, it's, it's winter solstice, but it's still June 21st. Zenith Passage changes by your latitude. At 23 and a half degrees, it is summer solstice.

• 2:05:24AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:05:25Speaker 03

  It's just one day.

• 2:05:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:05:27Speaker 03

  And you go farther north, you'll always have a shadow all year long. But south of 23 and a half degrees, then you start, the days start dividing. You get two Zeniths a year. You go down like 20 miles, all of a sudden your Zenith Passages are five days apart. You go further, they're 10, 20, and it gets to be months until the, uh, until the zero line, until the equator, and then it reverses towards 23 and a half. But this gives you a fascinating insight into the communications between astronomers. Because, you know, in the Maya world, we could clearly see the guys at Chichen Itza

• 2:06:12Speaker 03

  knew that their Zenith was different than the guys in Copan Honduras.

• 2:06:17AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  And they would talk about it and they would sometimes align their buildings to not their Zenith Passage, but somebody else's Zenith Passage.

• 2:06:25AJ Gentile?

  Why would they do that?

• 2:06:27Speaker 03

  Honoring geographically important places, especially Copan. There's a weird thing that happens at that latitude and across the Maya world at that latitude. It's like, uh, 15.5 degrees, I think. That's what you were saying.

• 2:06:40AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  Where the, the year is divided by the Zenith Passages into 260 days and 105 days, 365 total.

• 2:06:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:52Speaker 03

  But the Maya have this sacred calendar of 260 days. So they all recognized that at that latitude, their sacred calendar was defined by the two Zenith Passages, north and south, it was not. So we see places, perhaps even Teotihuacan and their weird orientation of all the buildings. It's just a fact that they're actually, that orientation sees the setting sun, rising and setting sun at

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  the Zenith Passage day of Copan. It's a theory.

• 2:07:27AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  But so does Edsnaw. There's a number of places. I, I found one in Chichen Itza in the, uh, observatory there. There's a window that points out, it doesn't point at their Zenith, it points at the one down there at 15.5. So all this information, we kind of ran out of ways to understand Zenith Passage. So I kind of innocently asked the question, well, let's look at what other ancient civilizations thought about Zenith Passage. And I quickly discovered that most of the ancient civilizations that we consider the big ones are outside of the tropics. So they never did that. It was not a question. It wasn't a tool in the astronomers kit.

• 2:08:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  But Cambodia is at the same latitude as the Maya. So I went over there thinking, well, let's see if we can find something, not knowing anything. And those holes in the roof

• 2:08:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:08:21Speaker 03

  are Zenith tubes. And they, that, that one hole on Zenith Day, a beam of light like Indiana Jones just comes down and illuminates the central temple.

• 2:08:33AJ Gentile?

  Have you seen that?

• 2:08:34Speaker 03

  Oh, I've seen, I've documented it so many times now. And the trick was that the first couple of times we went there, I clearly showed that it would function like that. That's not good enough to say that's why they did it. They could have had a hole in the roof for all sorts of reasons.

• 2:08:49AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  Maybe they want the rain to come in.

• 2:08:51AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  I don't know. You know, there, there's a lot of reasons.

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• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  And all the Kameh temples are very cardinal direction oriented. They're north, south, east, west, maybe a degree off in certain places, but they're cardinal direction people. So my trick of finding orientations in the Maya world was not working.

• 2:09:42AJ Gentile?

  It was not working. Okay.

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  In the Cambodian world, but I found a site called Kokere.

• 2:09:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  Which somebody else, a guy named, uh, uh, Giglio, I think is, is his name. I, I totally slaughtered that name. Sorry, buddy. But he's an Italian astronomer who saw it before me, but he saw it on paper that the orientation of Kokere looks like it's totally looking at the day that the sun rises in Zenith Passage. This is a little counterintuitive. Like if you're looking at the day that it's straight up, it's not, it's not, but all these ancient cultures are horizon based astronomers. They make everything fit in by looking at the rising and settings. So even though the day was the day with no shadow, they would fit it into their astronomy

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  by looking at when the sun, where the sun rose that day. And this complex, only one complex in Kokere is oriented to their day of Zenith Passage. The rest of it's cardinal directions, but there's this weird place in the middle that they on purpose tweet. And so I went down there and there's a huge pyramid there looking over a complex. And I was able to record that the sun is indeed on Zenith Passage going right there. It goes right over a temple, but at noon. The beam comes down.

• 2:11:04AJ Gentile?

  Wow. So what is it about Koh Khare that was it a temple in that community?

• 2:11:10Speaker 03

  It's a big complex within that larger community and it's a it's a strange place. It's the temporary capital of the fourth king of the Khmer civilization. The first three kings are at Angkor. The fifth king returns to Angkor, but for some reason, this king went out and made his own capital. And he oriented one of the sections to look at Zenith Passage. And I think that is a smoking gun that is intentional. I can link the holes in the roofs, which they used to have a capstone. When the capstone was on there and the hole went through it, the hole was only like, you know, six inches tops.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  And that would concentrate the light in to make such a tight beam. And it would only happen on those days of Zenith. Even a day off, it wouldn't.

• 2:12:01AJ Gentile?

  Nothing.

• 2:12:02Speaker 03

  So, but they all the capstones have been knocked off because there was a jewel box up in the roof with a hole in it. There's a, there's a square box with a hole in it, so the light can still come through. There, there's also ones jewel boxes underneath the altars inside the pyramid.

• 2:12:20AJ Gentile?

  Actual jewels?

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  Actual jewels.

• 2:12:22AJ Gentile?

  So that could have done magic with the light then through almost like a prison.

• 2:12:26Speaker 03

  I wonder about that, like, how would that function? Did that, I mean, if it shot a rainbow of light in there, that would be fantastic.

• 2:12:32AJ Gentile?

  That would be fantastic.

• 2:12:33Speaker 03

  So I don't, I, I've tried to piece out how that would actually happen. At the moment, I don't, I don't see that happening, but gosh, what a missed opportunity.

• 2:12:43AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:43Speaker 03

  But Hindu temples today, uh, they do, they bury different kinds of precious gems in the foundations of the buildings. It's just part of their establishment of a holy place. So it's still happening today. But the, so there's jewel boxes underneath the altars inside those BK bee hive looking temples. There's a hole in the top jewel box with a hole in it. And then it comes down and it hits exactly on the top of the linga, which acts like a little gnomon inside the temple, because it has no shadow when the light comes down. And then underneath the altar is another jewel box, but those jewel boxes don't have the hole. The hole is very intentional.

• 2:13:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  And unfortunately, the looters knew that these things were here. So they climb up on the top, they knock the, the capstone off and they get the jewel box. And now they're littered around the temples. I always find the, the knocked off capstone and sometimes the jewel box.

• 2:13:49AJ Gentile?

  What kind of jewels do they use?

• 2:13:51Speaker 03

  Things like emeralds and rubies, the stuff that you'd find in, in India typically, but different color ones, sapphire, sapphire is a big one in, uh, in Cambodia. They have a lot of sapphire, so blue, green, red, like rainbow stuff.

• 2:14:06AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it would be, even if it was just quartz, it would be beautiful.

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  So now when they've knocked the capstones off, now the hole in the top of the roof is like this big.

• 2:14:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  So the things I'm recording happen a couple of days and like the light will come in this way one day and that way the other day. But on the actual day, it still comes directly down onto the Linga Yani complex. And the, the, the linga is, is a phallus. It's a, it's a, it's a phallic symbol, but it points straight up. So it's like a little gnomon inside the temple. When the light comes down at noon, it casts no shadow. And the French were so interested in the architecture that they never really thought about the astronomy.

• 2:14:49AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:50Speaker 03

  And so this astronomy is, is there and clear. When I first came in, uh, there were priests and, and nuns who would attend these, these shrines deep inside, like the Bayon is this huge one with 52 towers like that. So the, the light show inside is incredible. But I go deep inside and talk to a nun, be like, are you ever sitting in here in this dark place and all of a sudden the whole chamber lights up? It's like, yeah, that happens sometimes.

• 2:15:21AJ Gentile?

  That's why.

• 2:15:22Speaker 03

  Do you know what's gonna happen in 15 minutes?

• 2:15:25AJ Gentile?

  Did you do that?

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  What? And I say, yeah, I'll come back. We'll talk about it.

• 2:15:30AJ Gentile?

  You're like a Yankee.

• 2:15:31Speaker 03

  So I was running around there and I came back in to this nun who's lived her whole life in there and she's standing there looking like just standing there in the light going, who the hell are you?

• 2:15:40AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  Why did you know that?

• 2:15:43AJ Gentile?

  Like a time traveler.

• 2:15:44Speaker 03

  That, one of the last times I went over there, it was so cute. I love, I mean, I'm so honored that I've affected the way people are seeing these things. I came into that same temple complex with the 52 different ones, the Bayon in Angkor Thom. And it's about to happen again. I've got a little group where, you know, it's so funny. I've got 10 minutes twice a year to record this.

• 2:16:08AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:16:09Speaker 03

  And I don't know which one's gonna work and which one's not. So every time I go, I say, I'll spread out everybody. You take that tower, you take that tower, you take that tower. Let's see what happens, because we've only got 10 minutes. I can't run to all of them. So I'm running around placing people in places. And this little kid comes up and he's like, do you want to see the coolest thing that could happen here? It happens every day, but at noon, I can take a special picture of you with a beam of light coming down inside the temple. And I did not tell this kid who I was at all. I was like, all right, kid, I'm in, Johnny. And he had a cool little thing that he could do. He took my iPhone and he like had just the right angle where somebody could stand there with the beam of light coming down. And I was like, when does this hap, how did you know this would happen?

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

  He was like, oh, it happens every day, which was wrong.

• 2:16:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:16:56Speaker 03

  But, uh, but he was definitely, I, I paid him my five bucks. I was like, nice job, kid. Thanks for the picture. But it's like, that's so beautiful. I just like, I just made this little kid money. This little kid's making money for his family on this funny little thing I found.

• 2:17:10AJ Gentile?

  Worth it, totally worth it.

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  Just beautiful. Like, I felt like, oh my gosh, did what I do just help modern Khmer people? I would love that. And they're starting to do things. There's guides that know. And so, you know, I've, I've come into the center temple of the Bayon where guides are talking about it and they're all witnessing it together. And they're bringing their tourists in to see it. And I'm just standing there like fly on the wall, like, yeah, I did that. That's cool. The second time I went into the, the second time I did it, I went back into the central temple of the Bayon where I had explained to the nuns and priests that it's gonna happen. And then they were excited about it, it seemed. I came back in with my wife and my baby.

• 2:17:54Speaker 03

  I had my little baby Alice was like a year and a half. I, I just brought her with me to Cambodia. That's normal, right?

• 2:18:00AJ Gentile?

  It's normal.

• 2:18:01Speaker 03

  Um, but I came into the central temple and one of them was like, it's him. And I was like, oh, you remember me? And one of them said, get the guards. I was like, oh shit, I'm in trouble. But when the guards came in, because I was like, I'm not running, I'm not doing anything wrong. When the guards came in, the nuns and priests asked them, can we please take down this parasol? Because this is about to happen. He's here again. And if we take down the parasol, it'll actually hit the statue. It's, it's blocking it. And so the guards allowed them to take the parasol down so that the effect was even better.

• 2:18:39AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:18:39Speaker 03

  And I was so happy. I had a moment like, oh my God, I'm an intruder, I'm gonna get arrested. But then they just wanted to see it better. They, they totally understood what I was talking about. And the, the, the psychological effect it has on them makes me feel like I am on to something.

• 2:18:55AJ Gentile?

  You are.

• 2:18:55Speaker 03

  This is hitting accord with these folks in a real way.

• 2:19:00AJ Gentile?

  Um, just going to a different part of the world. But everybody, um, looks at the Cusco wall, has the same thought that that's not possible with hammers. And you have a theory that sounds crazy and it's not aliens about how those stones got stuck together.

• 2:19:19Speaker 03

  What? Acid. I think that they are melting them together.

• 2:19:23AJ Gentile?

  Hydrofluoric acid.

• 2:19:24Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I'm a little crazy to say hydrofluoric acid.

• 2:19:27AJ Gentile?

  Why? Why is that crazy?

• 2:19:28Speaker 03

  Uh, because that's a dangerous substance.

• 2:19:31AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:19:31Speaker 03

  I mean, a super dangerous substance. You would have to, I mean, I think we haven't looked for it yet, but we should find like melted fingers. I mean, we should find people that were damaged by hydrofluoric acid if they're using it. And I have no proof of that. And, uh, but conceptually it can be done.

• 2:19:51AJ Gentile?

  What, what turned you on to that idea?

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  I've thought it was acids for a long time.

• 2:19:56AJ Gentile?

  What did you see that made you think that?

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  There's a number of places in Cusco and outside of Cusco that the walls get rocked apart, where you can see the stones on the inside. And they're fused together. Especially there, there's a, there's a neat one in Cusco called the, the Palace of Inco Roca. It's megalithic stones. There's, uh, most of the stuff in Cusco is made of the imperial style, which are these small blocks, which I also think are melted together. But the ones, the megalithic ones, there's a section of it that is not the tourist section that was rocked apart by earthquakes. And you can see one stone below, one stone above.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  And the stone below has like a muddy footprint in it. It like curves up and wraps along the, the stone above. I can't explain it by chipping away at it. Why would they make a lip?

• 2:20:57AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:20:57Speaker 03

  Why would it, why would it be an indention? So it looks like the, the weight of the upper stone squished into the lower stone. And I've got lots of pictures of it. I mean, it's, I've, I've puzzled about it for a while. And then in the imperial architecture, there's a place

• 2:21:16Speaker 03

  in between the main plaza and the coro concha, which is the golden enclosure, the big temple of the ancients that's still there. There's a church over it, but there's a wall that you walk down on one of these streets. And there's a place on one of the blocks, they do this pillowing, they, it's a, it, it kind of pillows out of the wall, each one of the blocks. There's one that has a wipe on it, like somebody took a rag and wiped a section clean. And you just, you don't wipe and a site. There's, I do not know how that wipe occurred. That's not the only place I've seen wipes, but there's a really great one that's just like, it's across the street from the JW Marriott.

• 2:22:00Speaker 03

  It's like right out in front of everybody, but I always bring people like, somebody tell me how that happened.

• 2:22:06AJ Gentile?

  You're, you're the, you're the first person that I've heard say this. What acid would it be if it's an hydrofluor-

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  Oh, there's people have been saying there, it's acids for a while. There's a lot of anecdotal things from the contact period. There's a little bird that, that pecks into cliffs using acidic plants that it barfs up onto them. People have been trying to explain it as acids for a long time, but the problem is that no naturally occurring acid can do it. My dad was a chemist.

• 2:22:37AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:22:37Speaker 03

  His whole life. And so, you know, when I came back with this theory first, I called my dad. Cause he knows what, and he read me the riot act. You're an idiot. There's no way, there's no natural, there's no natural acids. I've looked into it. There's a lot of acids that get created, like the Atacama Desert is full of the acids that we make nitroglycerin, glycerin out of. That's why Chile stole it from Bolivia. Bolivia's got no coast because Chile wanted to make dynamite.

• 2:23:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

  And all those acids, right south of Cusco, there's an evaporated lake that has very high concentrations of acid. In fact, that little valley blew up about 30, 40 years ago. A lightning strike hit it and ignited something and the acid caught on fire.

• 2:23:27AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:23:27Speaker 03

  The whole thing blew up. It was, you know, big news in Peru. So there, these acids are here, but no naturally occurring acid could do it. So I've been working with

• 2:23:39Speaker 03

  a chemist in New England named Charlie Nguyen, who's been great. In fact, Charlie's been the driving force. I'm not, you know, I try not to get too far out of my lane. So I have chemists who are, who I'm consulting with. Just the other day, he was having some, some conversation with Claude that excited him.

• 2:23:59AJ Gentile?

  Well, is there, is there fluoride there and have it, is there mining there?

• 2:24:04Speaker 03

  There's my, the, the gold and silver mining all over the place, right? They're famous for it. The Inca and cultures before them, a byproduct that's coming out of the mines today, that's an environmental disaster is hydrochloric acid.

• 2:24:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:24:18Speaker 03

  It's a byproduct of the mining. It's pouring out of all the mines. It's actually an environmental disaster. Fluoride is in huge quantity in Peru. In fact, the Inca were making lots of jewelry out of fluoride. And Charlie and I have been going back and forth and he, we're, we're, we're sure that hydrochloric acid and fluoride with, you know, there's a little, it's more, a little more complicated than that. It's not just peanut butter and jelly. But you could make small targeted places of HF.

• 2:24:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:24:50Speaker 03

  With these two things, it could be done. It is, it is possible. Now we got to prove it. Now, Charlie, I, I've been arguing with him, not arguing, but begging him and his chemist friends like, let's just do it. Let's just get some and a site and get it into the lab and burn it. Let's, let's burn it up and, and record it. And their, their opinion is, listen, Ed, we all know we can do that. It's not a, it's not an experiment. That's a known. What you've got to prove is that the residues of these acids are still in the seams of the walls. In between, if, if this really happened, you can get a sample

• 2:25:33Speaker 03

  and we can do neutron activation and we can see exactly what chemicals and things are in between those cracks. And if it was an acid, we'll be able to see it because it'll seep into the stone.

• 2:25:47AJ Gentile?

  So have we seen it yet?

• 2:25:48Speaker 03

  No, I haven't gotten that far. I, I know, I, at one point Charlie hooked me up with a guy in Washington who said, I'll send a student down with you. We've got this machine that looks like a drill. We drill in, we get a sample of about the size of a, a wine cork. And we can analyze it and we will do all this for you. So I wrote to the heads of conservation in Cusco. And they hated it.

• 2:26:17AJ Gentile?

  They hated it?

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  Well, you know, they said, it was kind of rude, really. I, that, and it, that's not Peru saying this. It's one guy in a chair in, in Cusco who said, you're ignorant. This is stupid. You can't touch the walls and it's clear that you have no understanding of, you, you've never read anything about Peruvian archaeology, which is patently unfair. I've read a lot about Peruvian archaeology. So the guy just said, I'm ignorant. I have no idea what even studies. Wrote back saying like, well, if there are studies about this, could you please share them? No response. So I kind of got dead ended there.

• 2:26:55AJ Gentile?

  There's always anxiety loss.

• 2:26:56Speaker 03

  You know, life happens. So, you know, I'm in, I'm in Cambodia. I'm doing all these other things. It's a, it's a project I need to get back to. What I really need to do, which I screwed up to the beginning, is all of these things are teams and partnerships. Here I am trying to be important, gringo, just writing a letter. I guess, you know, just, I'm going to come in and, and take some cores out of your walls. That, that was not the right approach. But when I get back to it, what I need is a Peruvian archaeologist partner.

• 2:27:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:26Speaker 03

  And I need to let them take the lead and I just provide resources. I'm not, you know, I'm not interested in being the guy that solved it. I'm just interested in solving it. So next time around, I'm going to be in the background and I'm going to support somebody from that country. And maybe it'll happen. I think the people in Olly on Titamba would be a lot cooler. So I might just skip Cusco altogether and go out to a more purely Quechua community.

• 2:27:54AJ Gentile?

  That's a good idea. That's a big discovery.

• 2:27:57Speaker 03

  It's all just a harebrained scheme at the moment, but you know, this is, this is what Shealy taught me. Shealy, Shealy, I, I, what I loved about her, she shot from the hip, people would argue, but she would come up with out of the box things, challenge people to prove her wrong. And when she was wrong, she would never be mad about it. She would laugh and say, now we've advanced the field together. How else can I piss you off and motivate you to figure this stuff out?

• 2:28:25AJ Gentile?

  That's the value of Graham Hancock, who I, I don't agree with a lot of his work, but he, he makes people talk.

• 2:28:31Speaker 03

  You're absolutely right. He is challenging us to prove him wrong and I like that.

• 2:28:37AJ Gentile?

  And he's okay with that, I think.

• 2:28:38Speaker 03

  Oh, he's totally cool with that. You know, they're, they're pretty, some of the conservative people in my community of archaeologists are pretty pissed off about him, but you know, personally, I've said it on a number of shows. I'll say it again. I like Graham. I think he's smart. He has a good sense of humor. He is very well researched. That's the one that really pisses off my colleagues.

• 2:28:59AJ Gentile?

  That got you in trouble when you said that. Oh, you got in trouble with that.

• 2:29:02Speaker 03

  I stand by it. I mean, I saw, you know, Graham and I, when we first met in Palenque for his ancient apocalypse thing, we sat for three hours, kind of having a intellectual tit for tat. And he'd bring up some research, I'd bring up some research. I'd bring, he'd bring up my research. I'd bring up his research. I like, you know, I did, I actually do read all your books. I don't find, I don't find it fair to criticize someone unless you've heard them out. And, and we were very clear. I do not believe his primary theory. That's okay.

• 2:29:32AJ Gentile?

  It's okay.

• 2:29:33Speaker 03

  We can still be friends and disagree. That's, isn't that what academia is supposed to do?

• 2:29:38AJ Gentile?

  It is. I mean, speaking of Graham, what's your theory on the, on the Fang deity?

• 2:29:44Speaker 03

  Oh, well, is, is Graham on board with my Fang deity theory? That'd be super.

• 2:29:49AJ Gentile?

  Probably not. Probably not, but I thought it was cool.

• 2:29:54Speaker 03

  I think all too often we project our own ideas about religion.

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  As archaeologists, we, we paint a model on things and we come up with false truths. In the case of Peru, we've forever been talking about this loose pantheon of gods.

• 2:30:15Speaker 03

  But it's never smacked right to me. And when you really look into what's religious art, you see a face again and again and again. It's a humanoid guy with goggle eyes, fangs, claws on his hands and feet, and snakes coming out of his belt. They come out like this and out of his head. And so diagnostic. I mean, this is a very specific character.

• 2:30:39AJ Gentile?

  I thought that all the gods were equal in the pantheon.

• 2:30:42Speaker 03

  I don't think there's a pantheon at all. I think that there is. I think that Peru is monotheistic and that there's a single god, the Fang deity. You can also call him Veracocha. You could also call him Pachacamac. You could also call him Ayayapek. It goes through time. But if you look at, you know, the art historical analysis and the way that Linda Shealy taught me to do it, and it was in Linda Shealy's class long time ago, that I first came up with this theory, and she gave me an A++ and sent me to talk to the people in Peru, who thought I was full of shit. And I was, you know, 22. Yeah, why,

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  why, why wouldn't I be full of shit? But I've continued with this theory, and I've found nothing but strength in it. You know, Lucas, it busts me every week to like, when are you gonna write that book, Ed?

• 2:31:39AJ Gentile?

  You've been talking about that book for a couple of years.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  I know. I'm such a flake. You know, this, this is my genre. I like to talk to people. I'm actually a terrible writer.

• 2:31:49AJ Gentile?

  So we can see that that Fang deity now, can't we?

• 2:31:52Speaker 03

  Oh, he's everywhere. I mean, you mean in modern times?

• 2:31:55AJ Gentile?

  I mean, the Milky Way.

• 2:31:57Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, do tell. I wish I could find him in the Milky Way. There's, the Milky Way has constellations in it, but I don't know of any of them called Veracocha or a god. There's a fox, there's a, a bag of coal for some reason. There's a llama and her mama.

• 2:32:13AJ Gentile?

  I mean, all the cultures that see the Milky Way, the actual planet of the ecliptic as the road to the afterlife.

• 2:32:20Speaker 03

  Oh, that is very true. And that's across the Americas, too. That's another paper I did way back, oh, when in Chile days. The Milky Way is the path to the other world. From the tip of Chile to Alaska, every group that's gonna talk to you about the Milky Way, even today, know that it is the path to the other world. For the Maya, it's the world tree. It's the primordial, as it, as it moves through the night sky, it turns into different things. It starts as the primordial sea as it's laying down on the horizon. And then as it tilts up, it's the canoe that brings the hero twins' father up into the

• 2:32:58Speaker 03

  sky to become the corn god. And then as it finally erects it north, south, just at dawn on August 5th, August 13th, I'm sorry, it becomes the world tree. And the story plays out. Shealy's great book, Maya Cosmos, talks about it from the hieroglyphs position and modern day people. Modern day people in the Maya world totally see it as that. And everybody in this country, all the indigenous people here, see the Milky Way as the path of souls or the path to the other world. And what's really fascinating is, you know, the Milky

• 2:33:42Speaker 03

  Way squirrely, it goes, it moves like the stars. The planets are always, you know, they're, they're gonna, they're in our solar system.

• 2:33:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:33:49Speaker 03

  The stars move, but it's that northwest position. It locks in like one of those wheelhouses of a train. It's, you can't cross the Milky Way to the other world in every position. It's when it locks in north, south, that's the opening of the road.

• 2:34:06AJ Gentile?

  Oh, so if you die and it's not locked in, what happens?

• 2:34:10Speaker 03

  I think you have to wait. In fact, I think that, you know, we haven't even talked about Mississippian civilization right here in North America that were pyramid builders, cities of tens of thousands of people. They have this interesting pattern in their burials where they have a charnel house, they prepare the bodies, but then they put them in the mounds in groups. They, they, they will hold them for an unknown period of time. But when we see these like groups of people that are buried in the mounds, they don't have any like pathology in their skeletons that say that they were wounded, you know, they were people killed in a battle, killed all at once. They were obviously, obviously died

• 2:34:52Speaker 03

  at different times, but they're all interred at once. I think they might be waiting for the Milky Way. I think that they were grouping them together and doing the final ceremony that would send them on their way when the road opens up.

• 2:35:07AJ Gentile?

  There's no way to prove that, is there? That's a great theory.

• 2:35:11Speaker 03

  No. There's, my, my colleague, Bill Romaine, has been doing some super work about orientations of things within Mississippian cities. He's noticing even in Big Cahokia, that there are just off north, south alignments that are happening between major buildings. And that's just what the Milky Way does. And Bill was the first one to enlighten me about this. I hadn't really thought this in depth about it. But since the Milky Way kind of curves, you're never gonna get a moment where it's pegged to the south and the north. If it's pegged on the north, it's off a few degrees on the south. If it's pegged to the south, it's off a few degrees on the north. And he's been finding example after example

• 2:35:56Speaker 03

  of, after example of things oriented just off north, south. And that's just what the Olmec huge platforms do.

• 2:36:08AJ Gentile?

  They do it also?

• 2:36:09Speaker 03

  They do it just off north, south. And there are these long, kilometer long things that would, you know, I think they're mirroring the road. This is again, you know, Shealy taught me to be part of the lunatic fringe and publicly say things like this, that no, I can't substantiate them, but it gets us thinking.

• 2:36:29AJ Gentile?

  It does. And it's one of the things I like about you is how you talk about, if you have enough post holes, you can make them line up with anything.

• 2:36:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:36AJ Gentile?

  It doesn't mean anything, you know?

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  I'm jealously protective of the reputation of archaeoastronomy. It was, you know, at the start of my career, archaeoastronomers were crackpots.

• 2:36:47AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah. You're still a little wacky.

• 2:36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're still a little kind of crackpots. But now we have enough legitimacy where I get upset when I see a published article that's really just shooting blanks like that, you know, like, well, you can't, I mean, there's, there were 50 other options here. Don't,

• 2:37:05Speaker 03

  don't, don't shoot us down by publishing irresponsible stuff. Let's be solid about this.

• 2:37:11AJ Gentile?

  Agreed. So, so speaking of what-

• 2:37:12Speaker 03

  I can talk all the shit I want, but I'm not, you know, I'm not publishing this conversation.

• 2:37:17AJ Gentile?

  What's, what's the puzzle with 360 day calendar that's, that's bothering you? What's that puzzle you're trying to solve?

• 2:37:24Speaker 03

  360 day? You mean the 260 day one or? No.

• 2:37:29AJ Gentile?

  Don't, don't the Maya have a 360 day year?

• 2:37:32Speaker 03

  Um, oh, okay. I know. I understand what you're talking about. You're talking about the year within the long count.

• 2:37:37AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Yes.

• 2:37:39Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, that is a weird one. Uh, the Maya are very cyclical. They have many different calendars. Uh, you know, we, we oftentimes misstate that they had the most accurate calendar in the ancient world. A better statement would be they have the most elaborate calendar in the ancient world because so many different cycles. On a typical Maya stele, you'll have at least five independent calendar cycles that just were carved to tell you what day it is.

• 2:38:09AJ Gentile?

  What, and what are those five counting?

• 2:38:11Speaker 03

  The oldest one is the 260 day calendar.

• 2:38:14AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:38:14Speaker 03

  That's their sacred calendar, still the most important today. The second one, we call the hob, that's the solar calendar. It's 365 days, no leap year. It, it drifts.

• 2:38:25AJ Gentile?

  It drifts.

• 2:38:26Speaker 03

  Um, then they have, uh, the, the lunar count. And that's six, uh, it's grouped in six lunations, six from new to full. And then within that, it's either 29 or 30 days. And so there are five or six glyphs that tell us, uh, which moon is it of the six? How many days are we into it? What's that moon's name? And, and another glyph we don't really understand. Um, so there's, there's three of them. Then they have a weird, uh, nine day cycle. That's like a week. We call it the nine lords of the night. But that just revolves through too. We, we, very little understanding of why the heck they're doing that nine cycle.

• 2:39:08AJ Gentile?

  Venus. Venus is a nine day cycle.

• 2:39:12Speaker 03

  Is it?

• 2:39:13AJ Gentile?

  I think so.

• 2:39:16AJ Gentile?

  And what's the, and what's the last one that we can't figure?

• 2:39:19Speaker 03

  Um, the long count.

• 2:39:20AJ Gentile?

  The long count.

• 2:39:21Speaker 03

  The long count is the neatest one because it's, if anything was linear counts of days for the Maya, it was the long count.

• 2:39:28AJ Gentile?

  So this is how the apocalypse was very good for you?

• 2:39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, 2012, 2012.

• 2:39:33AJ Gentile?

  You were the biggest voice of the apocalypse for a couple of years.

• 2:39:38Speaker 03

  I don't know about the biggest, but you know, like Garrett Morris said, the 2012 was pretty, pretty good to me.

• 2:39:44AJ Gentile?

  Right, you're selling calendars, which I think is cool.

• 2:39:48Speaker 03

  But I think mathematically, they did not say that it was 2012.

• 2:39:52AJ Gentile?

  Well, that's why you were kind of a drag to a lot of people because you're like, it's gonna be fine, you know, it continues.

• 2:39:59Speaker 03

  Who knows what's gonna happen in the future, but I can clearly tell you that the Maya did not say that. In fact, we know exactly how this started. It was my old friend, Mike Ko, the same one that wanted me to go out and kill chickens in Cambodia.

• 2:40:12AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 2:40:13Speaker 03

  And I, and I asked Ko about it at some dinner party. He wrote in the textbook that he had inherited from professors before him, just simply called the Maya. He wrote in like the 1960s, well, if you do the math, if it's, if it reset at the 13th bak tune, which is part of the long count, at 3,112 and 14 BCE, then if we go 13, 400 year periods into the future, we get to 2012. And so, you know, if it, if it reset at 13 and that's 13, 400

• 2:40:53Speaker 03

  year periods as well, well, maybe we should brace ourselves for an apocalypse. And Mike told me clearly, he was like, I was just trying to be funny. Like, if I knew all this stuff was gonna happen.

• 2:41:06AJ Gentile?

  It goes back to that one guy?

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  I would have never said that. Goes back to Ko saying that, and then it goes on a very, you know, wormhole kind of thing where Jose Argüés of the dream spell system gets involved. There's a guy named like Tony Shear, I think his name is, a reporter from Denver who's very into Aztec stuff. And he somehow mixes up the Aztec stuff with the, with the Maya stuff and predicts that the Aztecs predicted that from the approach of Cortez going forward that will hit 2012 as well. So the two combined to some kind of mezuzah American thing. And

• 2:41:50Speaker 03

  then Jose Argüés is a huge figure. He's the one who creates the harmonic convergence. You remember that time when hippies all around the planet gathered into archaeological sites to try to, uh, uh, do the harmonic convergence? That was linked into all of this as well.

• 2:42:12AJ Gentile?

  So what is the 360 puzzle that, that you're working on?

• 2:42:16Speaker 03

  So the long count has five basic positions of it. It's got days, months, years, 20 years, 400 years. That's a bak tune's 400 years.

• 2:42:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:42:28Speaker 03

  So days, one day, sun. They even call it keen. They call it sun. Months, they decided 20 days.

• 2:42:38AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:42:39Speaker 03

  All pretty normal so far. I mean, I, we do 30 days because that's a lunar cycle.

• 2:42:46AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:42:46Speaker 03

  But they picked 20 because their, their counting system is a vigesimal system. It's, it's base 20. We're base 10 decimal. The Maya were vigesimal, base 20. So 20 days, that's just their counting system. That's like us favoring 10. Uh, but then it's the next one up. If you're in a 20 base system, you should go 1, 20, 400, 8,160,000. That should be your progression up in the positional system of enumeration. So the long count goes 1, 20, 360, and then 7,200 and 144,000. So it augments at the year called the tune.

• 2:43:33Speaker 03

  And obviously, they're such good astronomers, they weren't off by five days, but why didn't they pick the 400 that is their mathematical system? The easy answer is, well, they were just picking a, you know, a 20 base number that was closest to the year.

• 2:43:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:43:54Speaker 03

  But for a primarily agrarian society that, you know, lives and dies on the changes of the seasons and the passage of the year, that's a stinky system. Five days off every year? I mean, a farmer, that's useless to them.

• 2:44:10AJ Gentile?

  It's useless. Could it have anything to do with procession?

• 2:44:14Speaker 03

  Uh, it's possible. Uh, the, the best theories that I know of are from my friend and colleague, Christopher Powell, who made a ridiculously long chart. It wouldn't even fit on this table, but he just went through it. Chris is great about thinking like a Maya. So he just said, they're all about synchronicities. They're mathematically, they're about, uh, highest common divisor, lowest common multiple. Did I say that right? Um, so he just started going through with the long count and the 584 days, that's the, that's Venus, the 780, that's Mars, the 117, that's Mercury, and, and the 260 day sacred calendar, and the

• 2:44:59Speaker 03

  365. He just started playing out the days. And he said, as you go forward, all of a sudden, all of these synchronicities start lining up with the long count, where none of that would happen if they picked 365 or 400. This system makes synchronicities between cycles happen like fireworks.

• 2:45:24AJ Gentile?

  Wow. That's, this is a good job for machine learning.

• 2:45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would actually, um, Chris could be out there asking Claude about his chart right now, as far as I know. Um, he's, he's quit archaeology years ago. He's a, he's a, a Spanish professor in a, uh, in a low income place in San Francisco. They, these guys, they, they don't know what the heck this, this guy with all these adventures are doing there.

• 2:45:50AJ Gentile?

  How cool would it be that the planets figured into the long count? I love that idea.

• 2:45:54Speaker 03

  It really did. Chris has infected my mind with, he, he saw something that actually we learned was found in the 1930s as well. But it's this number, 949. It is a magic number in the Maya. It is the foundation of the long count. Um, 949 days, as you plug that into math, it starts popping out even increments of all the long count. And, I mean, Chris has shown it. I, I can't talk math here too much, or your, your, your people will turn, turn your podcast off.

• 2:46:28AJ Gentile?

  Not these people.

• 2:46:29Speaker 03

  But, but the freaky thing is about 949 is not only is it the mathematical foundation of the long count, as Chris has clearly shown in his dissertation, which is on mayaexploration.org, his whole dissertation, or master's actually for that one, is there. You can see this chart, see what I'm talking about. Um, 949 is 365 plus 584, which is the sun and Venus. And so that number is actually rooted in the sun and Venus, but it does all these magical divisions within the long count. And then Chris went further, because there's another

• 2:47:12Speaker 03

  count late in the period called the 819 count, that back in the seventies, we discovered was the Maya way of incorporating Jupiter and Saturn into all of their data.

• 2:47:24AJ Gentile?

  I've got to read this thing.

• 2:47:25Speaker 03

  They weren't able to do that before.

• 2:47:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:27Speaker 03

  And it was developed at Palenque by Konbalam and Pakal. And then in 20 years, it was in Honduras, like a very, uh, well celebrated new cycle. But Chris showed how the 949's uh, system and the 819 system mirror each other, that they used the structure of the long count system with 949 as its base to create the 819 system. And they all meet just like the Maya would do in a single number that is like 1,193,000 and something. And back in the nineties, me and Chris are in his little apartment, you know, spilling wine

• 2:48:12Speaker 03

  late at night. And Chris shows me this whole thing and says, and it all culminates in this number.

• 2:48:20Speaker 03

  And I was like, you're crazy. It was like the Maya must have known this number. I was like, well, we can never prove that. That's crazy. I mean, I see how it all works. Twenty five years later, somebody digs up a, a house in the ruins of Schultun in northern Guatemala. It's an astronomer's house. He's written calculations all over the walls. There's Chris's number.

• 2:48:45AJ Gentile?

  No shit.

• 2:48:46Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Gives me chills talking about it. Like, I was like, holy shit, is that true? I had to go back and get his masters and go. Yeah, the, the Ivy League guys who posted it didn't read Chris's dissertation, so they didn't see it. But I called Chris up and I was like, Chris, your number.

• 2:49:06Speaker 03

  And he was like, huh, that's neat.

• 2:49:08AJ Gentile?

  He knew.

• 2:49:09Speaker 03

  Chris is amazing. He, he kind of just gave up on this stuff. He's a, his thing is, is ancient geometry and all this cool stuff I'm talking about, about the astronomy. That was actually side studies that he was doing as geometry is his main stuff. His stuff about Maya geometry is absolutely groundbreaking. It's paradigm shifting. It's amazing. I, I wish there was more out there. I'm kind of his acolyte in this. But now, Chris, last time I talked to him, he's like, he's got another paper, the stack of papers that's two foot tall on his, on his desk and he's figured out

• 2:49:49Speaker 03

  geometry things we don't know about the Egyptians, about Renaissance art, about, I mean, so many things.

• 2:49:55AJ Gentile?

  We gotta get him in here.

• 2:49:57Speaker 03

  Chris is amazing. I mean, if you, I would love to see that. You was, you should bring Chris Powell in. He will blow your mind. He is such, Chris, Chris has this way about him. I, I used to always say like, Chris could look you in the eyes and go, the moon is made of cheese. And you'd be like, God, is it? He's just like, he's so like convincing, but he's not full of shit. He actually knows. I mean, he predicted a number like 1,193,000 460 or something. Twenty five years before we found it on a Maya wall. I really thought that would never happen, but there it is. That's kind of the, the, the thing that keeps me in archaeology, just the what ifs out there.

• 2:50:41Speaker 03

  And the craziest things when they, this moment, you know, that's it. I'm going to be a lunatic for the rest of my life.

• 2:50:46AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:50:49AJ Gentile?

  Um, tell me about the textbook before America, or is it before the Americas?

• 2:50:54Speaker 03

  Before the Americas. Thanks for asking. You know, right now it's conceptual. But I think we have enough data now. Not just about South America and Mesoamerica, but North America as well. Where we can tell the story of the history of civilizations before European contact. And it's so important. Uh, the, the part that I'm really thrilled about is North America. Nobody here in this, in this country realizes the great civilizations that were on this land before us.

• 2:51:29AJ Gentile?

  Nobody's heard of Cahokia here.

• 2:51:31Speaker 03

  Nobody's heard of Cahokia. Nobody knows. I, you know, I've been on a rant these days on my YouTube channel. I've just been doing Pyramids of Alabama, Pyramids of Georgia. Next week is Pyramids of Oklahoma. I'm going to do Pyramids of Wisconsin and just go through state by state and go, here it is. It's actually a public park. Go visit. But we have, we've swept it under the rug. But there are civilizations here, and especially in North America, I think our, our high school kids would benefit and our society would benefit if they just had some understanding that America wasn't some blank slate that was just waiting for Europeans.

• 2:52:13Speaker 03

  Just like everywhere else on the planet, there were major civilizations that rose and fell here.

• 2:52:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, we're not, we're, we're taught about American Indians, but it always goes to Buffalo and teepees and stuff. And maybe you get a day advanced to talk about air coordination a little bit.

• 2:52:28Speaker 03

  You know, it's a product somewhat, that's a product of scholarship.

• 2:52:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:52:32Speaker 03

  By the time we as, you know, Western civilization got interested in doing things like ethnologies, we were two, 300 years into the conquest. And so those guys on their horses, you know, out there with their feather headdresses there, they're living in a post-apocalyptic world. Those are the people that have survived the downfall of a civilization. This is, you know, those guys that, that Buffalo Bill met, that was like Mad Max.

• 2:53:02AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:03Speaker 03

  I, they, they, it was over, but before that, there were civilized cities, independent city-states that fought against each other and made alliances, but with, you know, with engineering, with houses that were like subdivision complexes and social hierarchies.

• 2:53:21AJ Gentile?

  Are there?

• 2:53:22Speaker 03

  Advanced.

• 2:53:23AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, advanced. Is there a Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great? Are those people in our history, you think?

• 2:53:30Speaker 03

  Not yet in, well, let me, let me correct myself for a minute. Not really in North America yet, because we don't have a written language. That's a tough one. But at contact, we have the names of some people who I think, you know, maybe not a Julius Caesar, but we have, we have important and noble leaders of entire kingdoms. We have, you know, for one, the big one that I just talked about was Tuscaloosa. You know, it, almost everybody on, that's listening to this, Tuscaloosa, I know that. It's a town in Alabama.

• 2:54:03AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:54:04Speaker 03

  No, it's a Mississippian king who beat the crap out of De Soto on his way through.

• 2:54:10AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:54:11Speaker 03

  Tricked him. Now Tuscaloosa lost and he probably died, burned in a town called Mabila. But he was a great king. And before that, he demolished the, De Soto demolished the civilization of, of another one in South Carolina. A beautiful queen called Kofitakachi, who welcomed him in, saved him and his guys from the wilderness. They were about to starve to death. And she and an entourage show up with all sorts of food, guide them into her city. And he responds by, uh, taking her hostage, putting a big ring around her neck and walking her towards Tuscaloosa.

• 2:54:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:52Speaker 03

  Some of her loyal people, uh, save her.

• 2:54:57Speaker 03

  And that's an interesting story. It is an interesting story. There's a, I mean, that's one, you know, for your, for your curious audience. Just start looking into the De Soto expedition of the 15, 1539 to 1541, when he dies at the Mississippi. But he goes through kingdom after kingdom after kingdom. That's what I want my textbook to be. I have it already. I've got a, I've got an outline. It would cover North America, part one. Mesoamerica, part two, South America, part three. And the trick would be with this, the reason we can't do this yet is because we have, you know, for lack of a better word, guilt.

• 2:55:41Speaker 03

  Societal guilt. We all are pretty aware that there, that infectious diseases killed billions of people upon contact. That's a, that's a horrible tragedy on our hands. Not our fault, certainly not us modern people's fault.

• 2:55:56AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 2:55:57Speaker 03

  But we have a hard time getting to the real conversation because that's a stumbling block. What my textbook will do is never touch that. I'll leave that to other people. We'll just talk about like, my textbook will end at like 1500.

• 2:56:12AJ Gentile?

  Well, what's chapter?

• 2:56:13Speaker 03

  A couple of decades before. Uh, I start off, I start off with South America and then end with North America, but that's the one I really want to get by. I'm, I'm making them like volumes so that uh, a teacher could choose just North America, but I'd love to see, you know, a, a pre-American history course, just to give people an appreciation that there was a continuation on the land we now sit. And it wasn't the tribes that everybody thinks it was. There's a deeper, more beautiful, more civilization wide thing. There's the Mississippians. There's also the people of the American Southwest, the people that built Chaco Canyon,

• 2:56:58Speaker 03

  the ancestral pueblo, and their people are still here. We can talk to them. The Ho'ohokam of Arizona, nobody knows about these guys, but they built the largest aqueduct system, ancient aqueduct system on the planet. Over 700 miles of very sophisticated irrigation systems. They're in Arizona. I mean, we're close by here, you know, you, you know about the monsoons. And, you know, it's like two weeks a year that you get a lot of rain.

• 2:57:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:57:26Speaker 03

  And then it's dry as a bone.

• 2:57:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:57:28Speaker 03

  The Ho'ohokam made a system 700 miles worth of these aqueducts or the, uh, what do you call them? Irrigation canal systems that would take that water and spread it across Arizona. They turned Arizona like a thousand years ago, Arizona was green. And it wasn't because it was a different climate. It was because the Ho'ohokam managed the entire place.

• 2:57:56AJ Gentile?

  That's more than Rome.

• 2:57:57Speaker 03

  It's huge. It's absolutely huge. And, and actually a lot of the systems that Arizona uses today are on the foundations of the Ho'ohokam's superior hydraulic engineering.

• 2:58:11AJ Gentile?

  Why not? It's still gravity and water.

• 2:58:12Speaker 03

  And shouldn't we know about that?

• 2:58:14AJ Gentile?

  We should.

• 2:58:14Speaker 03

  Shouldn't, shouldn't our kids have an appreciation that there was this magnificent civilization here before us that did these great things? And that they were, you know, on par with the Greeks. We're so like, you know, we come from the Greeks and they came from the Egyptians and the Romans and, you know, we got this line and we tend to ignore that the beauty that these inventions have happened independently around the planet. Which to me means that we humans are more the same than we are alike on a very genetic level, whether our skin is black or red or yellow or whatever color we want to call it. We're kind of pink, actually.

• 2:58:55AJ Gentile?

  We have a lot more in common.

• 2:58:56Speaker 03

  But we're, there, there's a, a human independent spirit that has been replicated independently around the world. And I think that's wonderful. That's a reason that a deeper connection that we should all see each other as brothers.

• 2:59:10AJ Gentile?

  I agree. Um, I've heard this number and I want to know if it's correct, that 90% of the people died in a 50 year period here?

• 2:59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:59:21AJ Gentile?

  Is that true?

• 2:59:22Speaker 03

  Uh, that's the conservative number.

• 2:59:25AJ Gentile?

  Conservative.

• 2:59:25Speaker 03

  Some people say more like 95. But the infectious diseases say 13 different infectious diseases hit the Americas.

• 2:59:36Speaker 03

  In the first 50 years.

• 2:59:37AJ Gentile?

  What do you think?

• 2:59:38Speaker 03

  And it's kind of proof that there was not substantial contact before.

• 2:59:42AJ Gentile?

  Right. What did we lose?

• 2:59:44Speaker 03

  Uh, millions of people.

• 2:59:47AJ Gentile?

  I mean, knowledge. What went into the ground?

• 2:59:49Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I wish I knew. That's my whole, that's my whole career trying to dig this stuff back out. But I think some things are just gonna be gone. If you really think about the moment that, you know, these multiple infectious diseases come to the Americas, of people who believe that illness is a supernatural thing, that it's a spiritual thing, that your spirit is sick, and spirit plants can help you not be sick. But they don't know what an infectious disease is. So they're using their spiritual methods that are not working at all. And you get entire communities where, you know, a disease,

• 3:00:30Speaker 03

  an epidemic disease comes in, multiple come in. Who are the first people to get wiped out? The old and the young.

• 3:00:37AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:00:38Speaker 03

  So you got no children, the next generation, the ones you're teaching, and you got no old people. And in a, in a oral tradition society that doesn't, hasn't developed writing yet, that's the transmission. And the transmission gets broken.

• 3:00:54AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:00:54Speaker 03

  The old people aren't there to tell you, the young people aren't there to learn it, the middle people are struggling to bury the dead.

• 3:01:01AJ Gentile?

  And they're terrified to raise a family.

• 3:01:03Speaker 03

  Yes. Who would bring a baby into this world?

• 3:01:06AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:01:07Speaker 03

  And, and then all of their stuff that is, you know, we divide church and state supposedly, that seems to be going badly at this.

• 3:01:14AJ Gentile?

  It's going badly.

• 3:01:16Speaker 03

  But, but they did not. Church, state, science, religion, they were all one thing. So the disheartening thought, when, when a couple of people get sick, it's a, it's an evil spirit, or, you know, maybe a witch doing something, sicking spirits on them. When everybody gets sick, that's the gods.

• 3:01:39AJ Gentile?

  That's the gods.

• 3:01:40Speaker 03

  That's the gods. And then terrible timing for these guys in brown robes to show up and go, you know what your problem is? That there's only one true god.

• 3:01:48AJ Gentile?

  And you need more of this.

• 3:01:49Speaker 03

  And you've got to convert, or you will all die. I mean, from a people who already had a perspective that gods make you sick, this was proof positive that, that Christianity's god existed, and they converted, and they were, you know, willingly converted, and they were willingly rejected their old ways. And at that moment, the, the loss of knowledge, unfathomable.

• 3:02:16AJ Gentile?

  I thought I heard you say, it might have been on Sean's show, that these missionaries were baptizing people with infected water, making it worse.

• 3:02:27Speaker 03

  Innocent, innocent. They, they thought they were doing the right thing.

• 3:02:31AJ Gentile?

  They did.

• 3:02:31Speaker 03

  But, but now we understand that, how infectious diseases communicate. And that was exactly the wrong thing to do.

• 3:02:39AJ Gentile?

  Speaking of generations, your family celebrates the Day of the Dead. You have an altar?

• 3:02:46Speaker 03

  We do.

• 3:02:46AJ Gentile?

  Who's on there?

• 3:02:48Speaker 03

  Well, you know, as, as they grow, a growing amount of people. There's, I like it to be people that we, that we know.

• 3:02:57AJ Gentile?

  Well, tell them, a lot of Americans.

• 3:02:59Speaker 03

  Sheely's on there.

• 3:03:00AJ Gentile?

  A lot of Americans don't even really know what the dead is. Can you explain it? Because it's kind of important.

• 3:03:04Speaker 03

  I think it's beautiful. I think it's, you know, we, the same time of year, we celebrate Halloween, ghouls and ghosts and vampires. It's all very connected to the world of the dead, our Halloween stuff. It's based on All Saints' Day, which was in Europe. But there's also a tradition in Mesoamerica. Essentially, what it is, is just venerating our ancestors, a, a holiday specifically to remember and love our past ancestors. And you make this altar full of beautiful flowers and food. You try to put out things, like my, my sister Cheryl's up there, and I put a little thing of raspberry absolute vodka

• 3:03:47Speaker 03

  there, which was terrible. I hated that she, she drank that.

• 3:03:50AJ Gentile?

  It's terrible, but she liked it.

• 3:03:51Speaker 03

  But it was, that was the Cheryl thing. So, you know, there you go, Cheryl. That's, that's what you do. You give them, you put things that they loved in their life near them, and you put kind of a little pyramid of, of, of pictures up in frames. Everybody does them different. They're very much like, you know, your family tradition. I like to, I'm very orderly, so the oldest guys are on the top, and the youngest ones are on the bottom.

• 3:04:15AJ Gentile?

  How far back does, does your pyramid go?

• 3:04:17Speaker 03

  Uh, back to my great, great grandfather. I am, I am Edwin Lawrence. My dad was Edwin Lewis. My grandfather was Edwin Leroy, and his father was Edwin Lawrence again. And my son is Edwin Lloyd.

• 3:04:34AJ Gentile?

  That's beautiful.

• 3:04:34Speaker 03

  But, but so I've got, I've got one from the 1800s up there. But I've got my mom, my dad, I've got my, my wife's deceased folks as well. She still has both of her parents, thank goodness. But that's what you do. And it's just a beautiful way. I, I love that instead of talking about monsters and ghouls and candy with my kids, we talk about stories of who these people were. When we put up the altar, it's a very, you know, it goes up on Halloween night, and then it stays through the first and the second, and then we'll take it down. But when you light the incense and the smell of the flowers, it's

• 3:05:14Speaker 03

  got to be marigolds, those smells and smoke make a road, like Milky Way, for the dead to come back and to commune with you. And, and that's what we do. We talk about, you know, my, my dad passed away a year and a half ago now. He's the newest member on our altar, and I will spend the day talking about stories of my dad. So my kids know who he is.

• 3:05:41AJ Gentile?

  What, what little object do you have up there for dad?

• 3:05:44Speaker 03

  Oh, I haven't even thought yet. It's kind of, geez, I don't know. That's a great question. I do have a couple of like artifacts from him that, that I got from his house. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll put like, is it, he was a scientist chemist. Maybe I'll put his slide rule right in front of him.

• 3:06:02AJ Gentile?

  That would be cool.

• 3:06:02Speaker 03

  He loved that slide rule. Nobody even knows what a slide rule is now. But when you were like a chemist, your slide rule was everything.

• 3:06:09AJ Gentile?

  But if he's, if he's coming down, he would, he would really, he'd like to see it there.

• 3:06:15Speaker 03

  I think so. It's something that just said, you know, we know, we remember who you are. Have you seen the movie Coco?

• 3:06:20AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 3:06:21Speaker 03

  That's the one that got it for my kids. I mean, what a beautiful thing that was.

• 3:06:24AJ Gentile?

  It's a really beautiful tradition. I wish we had more of it. Last question for you. What do you want on the altar for you?

• 3:06:32Speaker 03

  Wow, that's a good one. Hmm. You know, nothing that would aggrandize me. I wouldn't want something that was like an accolade of mine, because I don't think, I think those things are worthless. I think that, that, that moment when you die and you see the flash before your eyes, you don't see your trophies or bank account. You see the people you loved and who loved you. So I would try to make it something that my kids would remember that I loved them.

• 3:07:11AJ Gentile?

  Dr. Ed Barnhart was here. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.

• 3:07:14Speaker 03

  Pleasure. Thank you.

• 3:07:16AJ Gentile?

  Bye, everybody. That was Dr. Ed Barnhart, genuinely a great person. We had a blast. But let's break down our conversation, starting with the city. I pulled the published report on Mashna from the team that followed him. The discovery paragraph credits a reconnaissance team. Ed's paper gets one citation filed under Edward. His name is Edwin. We left them a treasure map anyway, and apologized to them on this show. Now, the number. In the 90s, Ed's friend Chris Powell worked out the number where the Maya calendar cycles line up. I found the thesis. It's right there. 1,195,740. In 2012, a Boston University team published an astronomer's painted workshop at Jolto in Guatemala. In science, on the north wall,

• 3:08:02AJ Gentile?

  1,195,740. Chris wrote it down more than a decade before anyone found the wall. How does that not give you goosebumps? Then the acid. Ed thinks the Inca fused the Cusco stones with hydrofluoric acid. He has no proof and says so. No one has tested a scene. The man in Cusco whose desk it landed on said, no, it's a hypothesis with a chemist attached, one chemist ahead of the alien theory. Ed calls his guesses guesses, and that's rarer than a lost city. Ed's on YouTube at the Archaeo Ed Podcast, A R C H A E O, and mayaexploration.org. Everything I mentioned is linked below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 3:09:01Speaker 07

  I played for Libya in Area 51 A secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my UFOs and paranormal fun As well as music So I'm singing like I should But then another conspiracy theory Becomes the truth, my friends And it never ends No, it never ends

• 3:09:38Speaker 07

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside Mel's home With MKL trucks I'm being only too aware Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone? On a film set, were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told And his name was Cold And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more loving me all through the night

• 3:10:19Speaker 07

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth And one more loving me all through the night

• 3:10:44Speaker 07

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms Still come to have got the secret city underground Mysterious number stations Planet circle to Project Stargate And what the dark watchers found In a simulation, don't you worry though The Black Knight satellite told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more loving me all through the night

• 3:11:25Speaker 07

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth And one more loving me all through the night Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more loving me all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth And one more loving me all through the night Girlie loves to dance Girlie loves to dance

• 3:12:07Speaker 07

  Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor Because she is a camel And camels love to dance When the feeling is right on wasting time Girlie loves to dance