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

Dr. Edwin Barnhart is an archaeologist and explorer known for his work mapping ancient Maya cities and studying the civilizations of Mesoamerica and South America. In this episode, he breaks down the Maya, Aztec and Inca empires, the revolutionary use of LiDAR to uncover lost cities beneath the jungle, the mystery of the first people in the Americas, and what modern archaeology may still be missing. He also weighs in on Graham Hancock, lost civilizations, ancient human sacrifice, Maya prophecy, and the discoveries that could still rewrite history. Privacy Isn't Paranoia. It's Protection. Download Glacier - https://srs.site/glacierapp Website - https://theglacierapp.com Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Get $10 off your first order at https://ponchooutdoors.com/shawnryan when you enter your email. Upgrade your eyewear for summer at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide at checkout. Go to https://moinkbox.com/SRS to get free chicken wings in every box for a year as long as you're a paying customer. Get 31% off Buoy unflavored liquid electrolytes for any drink with code SRS at https://justaddbuoy.com Try 30 days risk free. Get 10% Off your entire order & take advantage of Ridge’s Annual Sweepstakes by going to https://www. Ridge.com/SRS #Ridgepod NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to legal residents of the promotion territory, who have reached the age of majority in their jurisdiction of residence. Void elsewhere & where prohibited by law. Enter by 9:00 a.m. USPT on 8 September 2026. 2 winners, prizes total ARV: up to approx. $539,165 CAD / £284,170. Skill-testing question required in CA. See Official Rules at ridge.com/pages/rules for complete eligibility, entry instructions, how to enter without a purchase, entry limits, prize details, odds, and restrictions. Sponsor: The Ridge Wallet LLC. Dr. Edwin Barnhart Links: ArchaeoEd Podcast - https://www.archaeoed.com Great Courses Lectures - https://www.audible.com/search?searchNarrator=Edwin+Barnhart YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@Ed_Barnhart Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/archaeoEd 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

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  Dr. Ed Barnhart, welcome to the show.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

• 1:07Shawn Ryan?

  Pleasure to have you. But yeah, I think I ran across your YouTube channel a little while ago, and we've been kind of wanting to dive into some ancient civilization stuff and some historic type stuff. So we've reached out, and here you are. So originally, I wanted to talk about kind of just the Mayans and do a whole episode on that. But it looks like we've got a lot more to cover, so we'll see how it goes. But I love this kind of stuff. We've had a couple of guys on. We've had Randall Carlson on. We've talked with Graham Hancock a couple of times, but haven't been able to work it out.

• 1:49Shawn Ryan?

  And yeah, we've had some guys on talking about ancient Egypt, and Tim Almarino has been on. So here you are.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Well, I'm happy to be here, and thanks for highlighting the Americas. Most of the archaeology people knows about is somewhere outside of our hemisphere, and there's so much here. I'm thrilled to get a chance to talk about it.

• 2:14Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Let me start you off with an introduction here.

• 2:19Shawn Ryan?

  Dr. Ed Barnhart, you're an archaeologist and explorer best known for your work studying the ancient civilizations of the Americas. You discovered and mapped the Maya city of Maxna, Mashna, in Belize, and later led the Paleng, how am I saying this? Palenque? Mapping project in Mexico. In 2003, you founded the Maya Exploration Center and have served as the director ever since. You also have a YouTube channel offering weekly deep dives into the ancient cultures of the Americas in addition to being the host of the ArchaeoEd Podcast. Welcome to the show.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. Nice introduction. Thanks for that.

• 3:04Shawn Ryan?

  So before we get started, everybody gets a gift. Those are Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA, actually up in Michigan. And it's just candy.

• 3:16Speaker 03

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

• 3:23Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. You're welcome.

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  And then, one other thing to knock out. I actually heard you have a Patreon account as well. Did I walk into that conversation?

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I do have a Patreon account. It's a fraction of what yours is, but I think Patreon's great. I think that, you know, Google and all those other things, those algorithms are not really treating you and I well. I think Patreon's a great way for people that care about what we do to support us directly.

• 3:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So when I started out, I started this in my attic. And

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Was the year?

• 4:02Shawn Ryan?

  I had no income.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  It was 2019?

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  When I started this?

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I started this in Christmas of 2019.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  I think we're very much the same. I started my podcast like right when COVID started, and I was trapped at home, and I could not travel and couldn't do anything. I just went nuts and went into my holiday closet and just started talking to a microphone.

• 4:26Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. It worked out. So these guys have been with me since the beginning, and they were the ones that really supported me and carried me through all the way to today. And so we've turned it into one hell of a community. And one of the things I do is they get the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is from Mad Dog Crazy.

• 4:52Shawn Ryan?

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

• 5:09Speaker 03

  That's a long one. That's a long one.

• 5:10Shawn Ryan?

  So do you believe the Mayans interacted with aliens? And to what degree?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  I see no archaeological evidence that they did. Every one of their technologies, we see them building from rudimentary things to more complex things in a very understandable, human fashion. I'm happy for this question, because I have appeared on Ancient Aliens like 25 times now, so people could get the impression that I'm pro-alien theory. At least when it comes to the Maya that I have studied for my whole life, I see no evidence that they were influenced or in contact with aliens.

• 5:52Shawn Ryan?

  Do you believe in aliens? Do you think they're out there?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  I do. I think it's a statistical impossibility that we're the only people in the universe. And I'll also say that the modern Maya today, big fans of the aliens things. Every ruins I ever go to, I talk to the guards. I love to talk to the guards, because they see everything. And they're always telling me that aliens are floating over the sites at night.

• 6:17Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Palenque, they say there's green and red lights. There's... Some of them say they're like spirits, and some of them say they're aliens. But you know, from hearsay, out of the mouths of the Maya, they're sure interested in their ruins today. That's what they say.

• 6:34Shawn Ryan?

  So when you say there's no archaeological evidence that they were interacting with any aliens, what, I mean, what archaeological evidence?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  What would we be looking for? I mean, that's a good question. I mean, how do we? How do we look for an artifact that we have never seen? How do we? What would be the evidence? I would think that the evidence would be some kind of like startling technology leap. One day, they're Stone Age. The next day, they're building cars. That sort of thing. But the Maya were, you know, the Maya through their entire period never even got to metallurgy. So that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I would expect some sort of large leap in technology in the kind of materials they're using, maybe in their medical sciences.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  But I don't see anything like that that would be, you know, unexplained other than contact. You know, we have lots of con... Lots of archaeological examples of one culture contacting another, and that culture immediately picking up on new technologies and changing.

• 7:48Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  That's the sort of thing. And on a, you know, on just a terrestrial scale, we see the evidence of that all the time. So if I was to look for something that could be alien contact, I would expect the same kind of radical technology adoption change. And nothing in Maya history gives me that.

• 8:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 8:12Shawn Ryan?

  No, I actually don't believe in aliens.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, now, the question of do I think aliens have been here? That one kind of smacks of human hubris, doesn't it? It's kind of like, why would we be so important that an advanced species would even come and look at us? That one's less statistically possible. But the universe is so vast. How would we be the only sentient beings in it?

• 8:43Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. Maybe we're the only ones created. But how did? Okay, so let's get into... I just, how did you get into this? How did you get in? What sparked the fascination with the ancient civilizations in the Americas for you?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think that I'm one of those lucky people who have always been who I've been, and I just had to figure out a way to channel it. I was always an explorer. Even as a little kid, my parents had to lock the front door because I would just open it and walk out and keep walking. I would just explore. I explored the woods behind my house. I explored down the street until I was tired. I could be miles away. And so, I mean, I was always just thrilled to go explore new things. And when I was 13 or 14, I went to the Dollar Theater in Irving, Texas, and I saw Indiana Jones. And I was like, that's what I wanted

• 9:46Speaker 03

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

• 10:29Speaker 03

  the high school counselor, I said, the job counselor, she said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to find a lost city. She said, that is not a practical job, Ed. You should try to find an actual career. But, you know, I kept with it. I went to school in Colorado, mostly because I wanted to ski. And lo and behold, nobody knew anything about South America there, the Inca. There were no professors, but there was one for the Maya. And so I started studying the Maya. And in my, I guess, sophomore year, I signed up to do a field school in Honduras, that was in a beautiful city called Copan. And

• 11:14Speaker 03

  I called my dad and said, hey, I made it in this field school. And he said, you're an idiot. You've never even been out of the country. You're going to go to Honduras? I was like, yeah.

• 11:26Shawn Ryan?

  That used to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

• 11:28Speaker 03

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

• 11:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I've been there too. It's an interesting place.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  It's getting better. It's no longer number one. I think it's like number eight or something. They're really, they're on the rise.

• 11:52Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Anyway, I really fell in love with Copan, and that's where I met my mentor Linda Shealy, who's the woman who broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. And I followed her to the University of Texas, and there I got into the archaeology side of it and signed up to do the deepest of the jungle surveys they allowed their students to do. And I found a city.

• 12:19Shawn Ryan?

  You found a city in college?

• 12:22Speaker 03

  I did. And when I was 25, I found Machna. Everybody told me that was impossible, that all the cities had been found, that a student, leading students couldn't do such a thing. But I used these topography maps, and I said, if I was a Maya, in this huge area, where would I find, where would I put my city? And I knew they put their pyramids in triads. And they symbolized the three hearthstones of civilization. I knew they're farmers. So I found this one spot. And also, their pyramids are called Tunwheat Stone Mountains. So they revere the mountains. And I looked, and I looked for the tallest peak in the area, found it. And there were two little peaks right next to it with three rivers running

• 13:07Speaker 03

  through on the topography map in the 1990s. That was before our phones and everything. And I just dumb luck, I guess, I said, if I was a Maya, that's where I'd go. And it took me two seasons to hike and cut out there with student groups, but it was there.

• 13:24Shawn Ryan?

  How many students?

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Uh, anywhere from four to eight.

• 13:29Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the other trick that I did is I bucked my professor's kind of demand that I just went in a straight western line through the hills, because up, down, up, down. Season one, I started finding these old overgrown logging roads that were from the British 100 years ago. And I was like, why am I doing this transect when these roads are the path of least resistance through these hills, the same one that the Maya would have taken? I'm following these roads out there. So I liberated the roads as I went out there and ended up where I wanted to be. And there was the city, actually on the first hill, not on the tallest hill.

• 14:14Shawn Ryan?

  So, hold on. So, so were you looking for anything in particular? I mean, you had mentioned that the professor, sorry, I forgot her name already.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Oh, Linda Shealy.

• 14:24Shawn Ryan?

  The Maya hieroglyphics. Is there something that you guys translated that said there was like a lost city or something? Or are you just going, hey, there's probably cities out there that we haven't discovered yet? You're looking at topography going, where would I build a city?

• 14:41Speaker 03

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

• 15:25Speaker 03

  meters tall and square. And I thought, that, that's not a village building. And soon after that, we found one that was 18 meters tall and 100 meters across. And it was part of a big plaza where we found a ball court and a palace and fallen stele and a big reservoir eventually.

• 15:44Shawn Ryan?

  What is a ball court? What's that?

• 15:47Speaker 03

  The Maya had a ball game. They had a ball game with a rubber ball, and the courts are very obvious. They have sloping walls and little stands above, and they have an open lane in the middle. And so they're easy to see, even ruined. The shape is very blatant, but it was a ball court. And only big cities had ball courts in their plazas.

• 16:12Shawn Ryan?

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• 18:49Shawn Ryan?

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• 19:05Shawn Ryan?

  So what timeframe did the Mayans exist? Is it Maya or Mayans?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Uh, that's a funny debate. And you know, one of the frustrating things about archaeology is there's no command structure, you know, in your world, you know, when the general says this is the way it is, that's it. Everybody does it. But in the Maya world, it's a competing thing. So some people like linguists want to say Mayan. But Linda Shealy, who broke the code, always want to say Maya, except for Mayan languages and Mayan architecture, which is also random. I tend to say Maya just out of homage to my mentor. But it's a, it's a debate that nobody has the authority to, to finalize. So either one's right, really. So we'll just give it the potato, potato thing.

• 19:54Shawn Ryan?

  How long ago did this civilization exist?

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Archaeology starts calling the people down there Maya. Maybe 2000 BCE is the earliest that we really will say those people are Maya.

• 20:10Shawn Ryan?

  2000 BCE, so it was.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Right. People down there, 10,000, 14,000. But you know, archaeology does this thing where they have to behave a certain way before that they're that cultural group. So they start behaving like Maya somewhere around 4,000 years ago. And then they reach their peak. We have a, we have a, a pre-classic, a classic and a post-classic Maya. The classic period where they made most of their pyramids and they really perfected their writing system and astronomy. That runs from about 250 AD to 800. And then there's this weird collapse, the famous like disappearance of the Maya.

• 20:56Speaker 03

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

• 21:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 21:08Speaker 03

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

• 21:30Shawn Ryan?

  And how, how far did their, at the, at the, at the height, how, how, how big was the empire? Where did it stretch from and to?

• 21:40Speaker 03

  All of Guatemala, half of Honduras into, in Mexico, all the way up into the Yucatan, all of Belize and about halfway through Chiapas, which is the Mexican state that's adjacent to Guatemala.

• 21:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  There, the line phrase, and there's a couple of weird, not really Maya cities, and then we're into Zapotec and before them Olmec territory.

• 22:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  And on the other side, when you get into Honduras, there's a, there's a site called Los Naranjos on a lake, Agoyahoa. That's half Maya and half the next culture over, the Lanka people. So we see the, the border of the Maya world blurring to the east and west. But to the north and south, it's from sea to sea. So a huge territory.

• 22:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  And as a result, not all Maya are the same. The ones that grew up in the highlands with cold and snow behaved differently than the ones that are down in the lowland jungles.

• 22:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. What, what kind of, what were they documenting in hieroglyphics? What kind of things did you learn?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Almost entirely, at least of the things that we have to our, to read left, which are all on stone.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  They're really broken records, all about the kings. The king was born this day. He married this person. He fought these people. He was crowned this day. He died. Kind of frustrating because the stuff like.

• 23:15Shawn Ryan?

  Biographies of one particular.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Now we get some texts out of ceramics and ceramics are much, they, they'll tell different topics. Like sometimes those will give us little stories of mythology. There are some that say this is the king's cup. He drank chocolate out of it. Uh, and then we have four surviving books and those are gold. Those talk about hunting rituals. They talk about astronomy. They talk about deep time.

• 23:46Shawn Ryan?

  Deep time. What is that?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Uh, well, they, they go back like

• 23:53Speaker 03

  in the codices specifically, I think the farthest they go back is 33,000 years. But that's a ridiculously long period of time to be talking about.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  There's these sections called the, the serpent pages in the Dresden Codex.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  And they have, uh, these, this serpent body that winds down the page. And there are dates that go further and further back in time to 33,000 years ago.

• 24:26Shawn Ryan?

  33,000 years ago.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  And why did they go back that way? For a long time? We don't know. The first guys that started really understanding that.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Uh, J. Eric Thompson was the big man in like the 1930s. He called the Maya esoteric time worshippers because we had nailed the calendar stuff and we could read things like that. They're going back 33,000 years. There's a stele in Tikal that goes back five million years.

• 24:58Shawn Ryan?

  Five million years.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Five million years, at least when we do the math, which is right there. It's goes back five million years. Thompson thought that was them saying that's the origin of the earth or the universe. But he generally said they're esoteric time worshippers. He also said that these hieroglyphs mean nothing. They're just about their esoteric time worship that they, that's why they're going so far back in time. Now recently, uh, one of my friends and colleagues, Mike Grof, has really, Michael Grof has really nailed an argument that they're going so far back in time to exhibit their understanding of the procession of the equinoxes.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Which is that tiny wobble that the stars do from our perspective. Every 25,000, 26,000 years, the stars will completely reset. Every 72 years, they're moving one degree. That's something, that's kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy. If a culture understood the procession of the equinoxes, that meant that they were really crack astronomers.

• 26:06Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how would they figure that out?

• 26:08Speaker 03

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

• 26:48Speaker 03

  And if you collect a couple of generations of information, you can see that and you can prove that.

• 26:55Shawn Ryan?

  What would they use as a landmark?

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 26:58Shawn Ryan?

  Then we have GPS and all this other shit today. How would they use? I mean, what, they can't use a tree, maybe a mountain peak?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Uh, you could use a mountain peak. And they measure that. Also use a flat constructed space. A lot of the Maya astronomy, we believe was done with one person in a stable viewer location with a stick. Another person with another stick tied to a rope. They pull it out. So it's always the same distance. And they mark, okay, like if you're going to look at the, uh, the, the simple one, the sun or the moon. Let's see where it rises. Today it's right here. Okay. Tomorrow it's right there. Next day it's right there. Next day it's right there. Oh, wait, look, it's hovering over here and it's coming back. And day after day, you'd mark it in an angular fashion and then you could orient a building to that.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Same concept can be used for stars, but it just takes a lot longer to collect enough data to realize they too, that, that seemingly static backdrop that the moon and the sun go through is actually moving itself.

• 28:06Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  And so that 33,000 years is talking about that the sun was in this constellation this year. And 33,000 years ago, it was also in that position on this date.

• 28:27Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  It's the sidereal versus the synoptic period of planets.

• 28:34Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  But they were, they were great astronomers. We're, we're jumping the gun here. We were, we were, we were actually talking about my beginnings and now I've got you smack dab in the middle of the Maya. But that's okay, wherever the conversation flows.

• 28:47Shawn Ryan?

  So yeah, so let's go back to you, you know, you you're studying topography. I mean,

• 28:54Shawn Ryan?

  talking about civilization, documenting time five million years ago, thirty three thousand years ago,

• 29:03Shawn Ryan?

  beginning of seems like existence, but I think we just four thousand years ago. I mean, his topography, I mean, how how much has topography changed in four thousand years? How do you know what you're looking at was the same?

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Four thousand, not much. Thirty three thousand. Yeah, a lot. But I mean, the mechanisms, I think, are not otherworldly. We are in such a world of technology. It feels like I, I don't know how the hell I ever survived without my cellphone, but I did. And so did my granddad. And there, you know, in some ways, you know, the less you have, the more ingenuity you become. You probably understand that, being a guy that's been in the field with not everything you need, you know, that I I am totally convinced that the average ancient person was a hell of a lot more resourceful than I am.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  And so there, you know, the the methods of astronomy could be as simple as, as you say, you know, a hill from a certain position. I think we, you know, we under credit farmers for a lot of their really smart stuff. The Maya were farmers, and I don't think, yeah, sometimes there's a narrative that paint that's painted that these these erudite Maya priests told an ignorant group of farmers when to plant and when to harvest based on the astronomical cycles. And I think it's exactly the opposite. I think every farmer knows some sort of trick like that. When the sun comes over that hill,

• 30:37Speaker 03

  it's about time to plant. When it rises in that little valley, it's time to to harvest. I think that the we have an opposite. I think that the Maya priests were actually honoring the knowledge that every Maya farmer knew and was so foundational to their survival as a society.

• 30:58Shawn Ryan?

  But how do you know that it didn't change much? I'm just, I mean, I used to live out in the woods and I had a creek. And I spent a lot of time down there. And I could I could see just I've only been, well, I've been here for eight years. And the creek has changed drastically. I mean, to me, I mean, I'm down there every day, but changed quite a bit.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  That's a that's a point well taken. Topography does change, especially, you know, the the coastal areas can change radically. One hurricane can move the entire coastline. I think it began with things, you know, not as ephemeral as those. I think it's, you know, mountain tops. A lot of our earliest of the Maya cities that we recognize there's some astronomy in there. The astronomy has to do with those mountains.

• 31:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  And it's from, you know, from this valley, the valley, the farther it is away, the more solid it is, too. If it's, if it's a pyramid a hundred feet from you, you know, three people will see the right alignment. Everybody, the right and left sees off. But if it's a mountain twenty miles away, an entire group of people in a plaza would see the exact same alignment. So it began with, at least my astronomy began with things like that, that were alignments from a distance. I I've wondered whether, you know, the Maya hieroglyphically say that their pyramids are called Tunwheat Stone Mountains.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  And I wonder whether the Maya origins in the highlands, when they went down into the lowland jungles with no mountains, I wonder whether they thought, well, crap, we can't do this without mountains. We should build some.

• 32:52Shawn Ryan?

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

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Nope, I did not. I ordered, uh, I ordered topography maps from Belize that took two months to get to my house in Texas. GPS was just starting, but it was crappy. It would not see through the trees. So I could, I had one, but I could only mark my position when there was a tree fall and I could stand in an open patch and go, ah, we got one, we got one point, guys. Now LiDAR will take, you know, millions a second. I'd be like, we have a point.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  But it actually also got got me in a tough situation in Belize where

• 33:45Speaker 03

  I, uh, I let an assistant who was pretty new to the area. We had cut trails everywhere, but their trails were all over the place. So you could get lost. Let him have the GPS to teach the students and they got, six of them got left behind and and lost us. And by the time we got to the site, I counted everybody like, oh, crap, we're missing six people. And me and my other assistant chased them through the jungle the whole day, and it was all about them getting lost from us because they were trying to use the GPS. It was much different back.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  So no, I had nothing but, you know, old school survey methods and and thoughts. And I guess luck. I mean, I will give it that. I was not some brilliant

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Sherlock Holmes discovery of mine. I I had some some logical thinking and probably a lot of luck.

• 34:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, jungle down there is pretty thick. I mean, I've humped through Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  I was wondering if you've been in the jungle, too.

• 34:52Shawn Ryan?

  I love hanging out in the, I mean, it's dangerous. There's a lot of shit in there that will kill you.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Beautiful, isn't it?

• 34:58Shawn Ryan?

  It's amazing. And you in in, yeah, and you can survive off nothing.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of resources in there.

• 35:07Shawn Ryan?

  But so, I mean, how would you, I mean, some of these things are so thick that, I mean, you'd be lucky to go a kilometer a day.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  There were times, there were some times, especially before I found the city, I was actually kind of the laughing stock of the camp that my students had just come back full of nettles and they'd be like, what'd you do today? Just uselessly hack the jungle and get stung by it? Like, yeah, I did. There's this, uh, there's this vines that are called uh, bial that are like, like a rubber band ball just glued together. And if you hack one part with the machete, the rest of it could come unwound unwound and just whack everybody in the whole group with these tiny black needles that would dig

• 35:59Shawn Ryan?

  Black palm.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  So deep into your skin and they're so thin, you try to pull it out and just snap. And then, okay, I guess that's got to fester for a couple of days before it comes out.

• 36:10Shawn Ryan?

  We had a guy, you know, insects will lay their larvae in that. And so we had a guy, yeah, that you're supposed to wear gloves when you're when you're in there. We had a guy grab one, got infected. If we're out there, we couldn't get back, you know, we're like, we're doing some sniper stuff or something. And he cut it open and the larva started coming out of his hand. And we were like, oh, shit, this is nasty.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  There was a girl in our camp who got sixteen botflies in her scalp. And those things, they they fester in there and then they eventually fly out as flies, but they're worms with like a tail that that latches into you. So you can't pull them out.

• 36:52Shawn Ryan?

  Well, yeah, there's one that'll you can't piss in the river down there because that thing will swim up your pee string, pee stream. And then these little, it like, yeah, these, these, these, these spikes come out of it. Now you got real issues.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  More than once, somebody's come like, come swim in the Amazon with me. No hard pass. I'm staying on the boat. None of that stuff.

• 37:16Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have any, did you have any interesting encounters with wildlife or or indigenous peoples?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Oh, a number, a number of them. I, you know, I have never seen a jaguar out there, but they've seen me. There was a time back there in Belize where uh, there was a rainstorm and then we came out the next day and followed our path up. But that day before, when it rained, our feet had gone deep in the mud. So we made deep footprints. Following those footprints back out, there were jaguar prints in our footprints. And I was just like, oh, shit, how long did that go on? How close was it to us? Was it like right behind us? And we didn't see it? Or did it just smell our trail later?

• 38:07Speaker 03

  So that was, that was a wake up call, like, be careful. The same when we lost those students and we went running for them, me and my assistant were yelling their names. And then there was something crashing in the woods just to the right of us and we stopped and it stopped. And then we ran again and we heard it and it stopped again. I was like, oh, that's big, Jim. I'd like to, so we use, you picked up some sticks and we were like,

• 38:35Speaker 03

  We started just whispering, but like, we were both like, if that's a jaguar, we're dead. And they were said there, I've got another three stories like that where I'm just absolutely sure it was right there in the woods. Because it happened to other people. There was someone in Belize who got chased all the way back to our camp. Uh, but Jaguars are cool. Jaguars don't attack humans all that often. They're curious and they're playful. Now, the one that you gotta look out for, especially in Belize and Guatemala, is the, the mountain lion version down there. Cougar, uh, they've got a number of different names for these things, but they're big and long,

• 39:16Speaker 03

  and those have no sense of humor. Maya have told me again and again, Jaguars, you might live. It could be a good story. If you see a puma out there, you're dead. If they see you, it's over.

• 39:30Shawn Ryan?

  Man, crocodiles, killer bees.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Big crocodiles. Oh, the bees, boy. I like, I had this one moment where I, my, I heard the bees coming again, and I just told my students, like, find a bush and lay down under it. Lay on the ground.

• 39:49Shawn Ryan?

  Those things will kill you.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  And they were like, why? Why? Just, just shut up. Don't, don't talk about it. Do it.

• 39:57Shawn Ryan?

  Those things will kill you.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Maybe go like right over us, but it's funny, out in the jungle, there's these low, the low lying bushes, they never go under there. So I learned, if you just lay totally flat on the ground, they will pass you.

• 40:11Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Now then, there's also the pigs who run in like forty, fifty groups. So in those cases, I'd be like, find a tree without thorns and climb it right now. Like, why? Do you smell that? They're, they're so stinky. You can smell them before you can hear them, even before you hear their hooves. The waft comes through if the, if the breeze is right, and you know it's the pigs coming. The first time it happened, I was totally flat foot. They just ran up on me. I was like, what's that smell? And one came right at me and turned, and then another thirty just turned right after him. And I just stood there, flat footed like an idiot, like, why aren't I dead?

• 40:56Speaker 03

  That was just blind luck. But, but from then on, I knew smell, climb.

• 41:01Shawn Ryan?

  So let's get back to traversing the jungle here. So you, so what do you got? A machete and a GPS and a map?

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Uh, really just the machete. The, the GPS did nothing for me back in the nineties. And the map, I mean, I had the map. Uh, sometimes I'd look at it and go like, wow, we could be here, we could be there. And I'd sometimes, like, season three, we had the GPS, so I put a couple GPS marks on there. But mostly I just had a compass and a machete and said, uh, my mantra was, we're going west, we're going west. We know we entered the forest here at mile marker eleven. And I can see some of these dashed lines that were where the old British logging roads would be.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Sometimes they were actually roads there, sometimes there won't, there weren't. But we just kinda pieced it together and followed that, those roads through the path of least resistance, which brought us into a number of valleys where little villages were. And eventually, we made it out to those three peaks.

• 42:13Shawn Ryan?

  Any active villages?

• 42:15Speaker 03

  No, nobody out there.

• 42:17Shawn Ryan?

  So I mean, what is it, how long ago did these villages exist?

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Um, uh, people have been doing, you know, this was nineteen ninety-five. So people have done archaeology out there since. This is, uh, Machna is a terminal classic city. So it lasted till about nine hundred or a thousand A.D.

• 42:39Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  And then nobody, nobody's out there at all. The, you know, the, where I lived was a place called Program for Belize, which was a big chunk of territory that was originally owned by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola wanted to chop the whole thing down and plant oranges for their orange drink, whatever it is, crush or, yeah, I think that's it. And then Belize got up in arms about it. So Coca-Cola didn't want the bad press and sold it to them for pennies on the dollar, and it became a big preserve, all the way out to the Guatemalan border.

• 43:15Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, how are you able to pick this up? I mean, just, I don't know what these structures are made of, but, I mean, you abandoned a house here in the mid-south, the mid-west, probably anywhere, you know, ten, twenty years, it's got a tree growing through the window seal, you know, and you're talking about things that are a thousand years old.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they are very destroyed.

• 43:37Shawn Ryan?

  In the jungle.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  They are very destroyed, but they are made of stone. And, uh, you know, some of the little villages, they'd have stone platforms that were probably like, you know, some of them were the size of the platform we're sitting on right now and not much higher. But you could still see the stone edges of it, see the little bit of stone walls, see, you know, irregular topography is one of the ways that I'd identify it. It is a trick, it's a skill, to understand what's a hill and what's a ruined pyramid. When it's eighteen meters tall and a hundred meters across, well, it's easier to, to understand. And those.

• 44:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but there's not any clearings down there, right?

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Bits of stone wall, bits of terraces, and up on the very top, where things tend to, you know, spire from the top to the bottom. The bottoms are full, kinda fan out with all the wreckage. Trees grow up and knock whole sections of it out. Trees, big trees, over the last thousand years, grow up and fall out. And take huge amounts of the building with them, with their roots. But up on top, often, like the first building we found at Machna, when we got up on top of it, there were holes in the roof, the, the corbel roof, so we could jump down inside and see there were walls around us and things. So we could definitely know that one was one.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  But in, when I was mapping Palenque, uh, there were places where I'd say, there's a hole. There, ten meters away, is a huge pile of, of rocks. A tree grew up into this house, and when it fell, its roots catapulted all of the bricks over there in the jungle. This building's gone, but there's the evidence that it was once here.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  It's, it's a trick, though. I really, more than once, I've brought people out to the jungle and go, see all these buildings? And they're like, what the hell are you talking about, Ed? There's nothing but dirt and trees here.

• 45:46Shawn Ryan?

  So you drop in through a roof, what's in there? Drop into a place where there's, there's been nobody for a thousand years plus?

• 45:54Speaker 03

  There'd be stone walls, the corbel roof above you, uh, you know, I never, I've never gotten lucky enough to find anything that had like murals or art inside of it.

• 46:03Shawn Ryan?

  No human remains, pottery?

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Mostly those ones would be, you know, there's, there's, there's dirt, there's bat guano, which is actually uncool, that's you can get histoplasmosis really easily from bat guano hanging out in tunnels. I did that. I have like a calcified scar in my lung. That's the size of a quarter. I just had some new tests and nobody had told, nobody had mentioned that to me in twenty-five years. Like, do you know you have a big calcified scar in your lung? Like, oh yeah, I do have that, don't I? That was from histoplasmosis, from screwing around in, in, in Maya buildings. But, uh, you know, there'd be the collapse where the roof fell in that would let us get the hole.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  So you kind of, uh, can climb down the talus of that, onto the floor, which would be, you know, grown up with moss and, you could, but you could see the stone walls, sometimes some of the old stucco coming off, sometimes not.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  But yeah, there's, I've done that a bunch. There, sometimes there are big platforms that have lower kind of basement buildings inside, and those are fun. You just find a little hole and all of a sudden you pop down and you're in the middle of a labyrinth. I, I, I love things like that, but it's the jungle. So you're also kind of butt puckered going, if there's a snake in this tiny little space, I really can't run, can I?

• 47:26Shawn Ryan?

  So, what's the name of the city that's the big one that you found?

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Machna. I got to name it. It's, uh, it's called Monkey House.

• 47:35Shawn Ryan?

  Monkey House. What is the estimated population?

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Oh gosh, I don't think we've even gotten that far yet. Uh, I think I mapped.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Four hundred buildings?

• 47:50Shawn Ryan?

  Four hundred buildings?

• 47:51Speaker 03

  But I know there were more. Every Friday, I'd say, we're doing Adventure Day, and we'd go somewhere without mapping and just see how many buildings we could find. And there were whole neighborhoods that I never got to map.

• 48:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  But I left.

• 48:04Shawn Ryan?

  In the villages? What would a village be?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  The villages that have like twenty to thirty buildings. So, you know, if we

• 48:11Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  If we very ploddingly estimate five people per building, there'd be, you know, a hundred and fifty people or something.

• 48:20Shawn Ryan?

  So how far away would these villages be from the hub, from the city?

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Uh, in, in that limited context, they were about, I'll say, a kilometer apart from each other. I found seven of them, and from the road to the actual city was five and a half kilometers.

• 48:40Shawn Ryan?

  So do we know how their civilization was actually broken up? What would take part? What would be happening in the city versus the villages? Would they commute?

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Uh, it's

• 48:50Shawn Ryan?

  What was industry?

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Not terribly different than how we live today. You know, we, we're outside of Nashville. That's a big city. And then there are some mid-sized cities like Franklin. And then there's some people who prefer to live in the countryside. And, you know, on big events, everybody goes into the big city. On the average day, you hang out in your own place. They'd have market days where, you know, the, the city would have the huge market, and a lot of people from the surrounding area would go in there to peddle their goods. That still happens in the Maya world today. But it was very much a, it was an independent city-state model like the Greeks, where there was not a capital of the Maya

• 49:33Speaker 03

  world. There were capitols run by, at least in the Classic period, a ruling dynastic set of elite people who would be the, the families of each one of those cities. And because of hieroglyphs, we know what their names are. We know the dynasties of these kings. And then they'd have sub-cities that would have sub-lords called Sahals. The guy at the main cities, the Ahau. The ones that are little cities, they're Sahals. And then those Sahals would have farmland around them. So not terribly unlike how we live today.

• 50:12Shawn Ryan?

  So how would you become a leader, or, or a king, or a lord? Is that, how do you?

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Uh, it was a dynastic thing. You were, you, it was a blood right that you had the magical power, because it wasn't just a political position. It was also a warlord position, but it was also a, a religious position. The, uh, the, the right, the, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Your, your, uh, validation of your rulership was about your sacred blood. Uh, the Maya have a religion that has a pantheon of gods up there, but nobody interacts with the gods on earth.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  They are aloof from us. But when the royal people's family died, they go up into the heavens, and living ancestors of those people can talk to the gods. They can act as a liaison up there. Their, their dead ancestors that went up to heaven, or up to the upper world, instead of the lower world, where everybody else's souls go, that was their right to rulership, or at least their story that they told everybody.

• 51:25Shawn Ryan?

  So, so these, they believed that the lords and the kings went to, went to an upper world, and all of the peasants, per se, went to a lower world?

• 51:35Speaker 03

  That's what the hieroglyphs are telling us, yes. They would, they would all start in the lower world, the underworld. But then the spirits of the royal family's bloodline would ascend up into the heavens where the gods were, the nice gods. There were less nice gods in the underworld.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:57Shawn Ryan?

  What do they do?

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Uh, they were the lords of death, and they'd have ugly names like pestilence and starvation and, uh, pus. Uh, at least that's what, the Maya have the equivalent of the Christian Bible. They have their own creation story called the Popol Vuh, a very different story.

• 52:17Shawn Ryan?

  What is that story?

• 52:19Speaker 03

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

• 53:01Speaker 03

  corn god. Corn is created. We are made of corn and drops of the blood of the gods. And that's how the world started. But a lot of the story is this really fun story of the hero twins and their fights against the lords of death and their early days. Their grandmother raises them, and she tries to tell them they're not ballplayers and hide that, because that's how their fathers died. And then they, the story goes on where they eventually beat these terrible lords of death. But we're, we're quite clear in that underworld, Shibalba, where the dead reside. The

• 53:41Speaker 03

  dead are doing fine down there. In a Maya sense, our grandparents, everybody, lived down in the underworld in a village that looks just like the village that they grew up in. And they're down there farming, and they're having a nice life, and they're living in a house. They're just dead. And when the sun sets on us, it rises on them. And when it sets on them, it rises on us.

• 54:06Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 54:06Speaker 03

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

• 54:49Speaker 03

  us in the battle we're about to do against this other city?

• 54:54Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  So that's how it worked.

• 55:00Speaker 03

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

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  What is, you know, what really got my fascination with this was Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I believe that was, that was about the Mayans, correct?

• 55:43Speaker 03

  It was.

• 55:44Shawn Ryan?

  What do you, what do you think about that movie?

• 55:47Speaker 03

  You know, uh, I thought it was a great action movie. The bad guys were bad. The good guys were good. I was cheering for it. I don't think it was a Maya documentary. I don't think it made a very complimentary or true picture of who the Maya were. And, you know, my colleagues, there's, there's a mountain of bile been spit about that, that movie.

• 56:13Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Um, I don't take it that hard. I don't think that, you know, Mel Gibson is not a Maya academic, nor did he pretend to be. I think it's, I think it's Mel Gibson's story

• 56:25Shawn Ryan?

  It's a movie.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Put into another cultural context. It was the, you know, the passion of the Braveheart Patriot. It was the same story. The good family man in, is threatened by the machine of society and fights it to save his family.

• 56:47Shawn Ryan?

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• 57:31Shawn Ryan?

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• 58:14Shawn Ryan?

  That's R-O-K-A dot com, code SRS.

• 58:21Shawn Ryan?

  So how did they live that? What was daily life for your typical Maya family?

• 58:27Speaker 03

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

• 59:11Speaker 03

  but it's also abundant. I mean, food's falling from the sky there. And if you manage it right, I don't think people were going hungry. I think people were feeling just fine, and I think that how all too often in humanity, when things are too good, we ruin them by gangpiling them. So part of the problem with Maya classic society, it was such a successful model that all of the cities swelled in population until they actually managed to crest their carrying capacity.

• 59:48Shawn Ryan?

  How did they, did they have currency?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  No, more of a barter system.

• 59:54Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Now, it's, it's kind of, you know, we're still piecing together classic Maya times. The Maya were still here when the Spanish got here, so we've got those answers. But is that how Maya behaved 500 years earlier? That's a, that's, that's hard to say with certainty. By the time we get to the Aztecs, they're still barter system, but even in a barter system, you need some sort of practical, you know, what's this versus this worth? And for them, it was chocolate. It was chocolate beans.

• 1:00:26Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  And so the, the cacao beans were, no, not exactly currency. Nobody walked into the market with 30 beans in their hand, in their pocket and walked out, but you could say, you know, how much is that corn worth? Three, three cacao beans.

• 1:00:42Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  So much so that actually there were counterfeit beans. One of the things Cortez's men saw in the Aztec market before the real siege happened, uh, was that there were police in the Aztec market that was, you know, 60,000 people a day, they said. They said it was the biggest one in the world they had ever seen. But there were police running around busting people with counterfeit cacao beans. They'd make them out of, uh, ceramic. And they'd try to peddle them off in the market and, and they'd get caught by the, by the Aztec police for counterfeit chocolate.

• 1:01:22Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow.

• 1:01:26Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about,

• 1:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's human sacrifice. Was that a big part of the Maya religious culture?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  At the end, in the post-classic period, it was. In the classic period, not as much. They ex, they, they sacrificed people that were warriors that they'd capture in battles near the end of the classic period. But in the classic period, the most common and austere kind of sacrifice was the auto-sacrifice that the king and his family did. They would cut themselves and bleed the blood and then burn it to contact their ancestors through the smoke. The smoke would become this snake called the Boots Chan, the smoke serpent. And it would go up into heaven and become a conduit for their ancestors to come back down and talk to them.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  There's actual images of that happening. At a site called Yaxilan, there's this great thing with a, a queen pulling a rope with thorns on it through her tongue. And the blood is dripping down her chin onto a bowl with paper. And the paper's burning and the smoke starts, but then it turns into this snake that has a head that comes down over her and it opens up its mouth. And it burps out the dynastic founder of the Yaxilan lineage, who's coming out with a shield and a spear. And the hieroglyphs tell us she's asking him to protect her husband in the battle he's about to go to. That's fascinating, but that's,

• 1:03:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  that's how they did it. And so that was the sacrifice. It was auto-sacrifice.

• 1:03:08Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  In the classic period. Western or central Mexico was much more violent. They had a much, uh, a much bigger penchant for sacrifice, especially the Aztecs. And in the post-classic period of the Maya, they start getting really, they're interacting with and emulating the people from central Mexico. That's when we see, like a chichen itza. Have you ever been to Yucatan? You ever seen the chichen itza?

• 1:03:37Shawn Ryan?

  I haven't.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  It's beautiful tourist place, easy to get to. But right next to its ball court is a skull rack. And the whole thing, the base of it is full of images of skulls on spikes. And it's almost undeniable that on top of that platform was an actual skull rack that had the skulls of thousands of sacrificed people.

• 1:04:04Shawn Ryan?

  How would they sacrifice them?

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  Uh, generally heart extraction, cutting the head off or heart extraction. The Maya loved heart, uh, they loved the head thing. They loved to chop somebody's head off on the top of a pyramid and then have it dramatically roll down the stairs like a ball. They, they, they show that in imagery in multiple places. But heart extraction's the other way, where you lean them over a rock. That's the central Mexican way, where their chest was kind of poked out. And then they take an obsidian knife and whack, break a couple of the ribs, and then push down on one section, pull up on another, and just pull the heart out, still beating.

• 1:04:47Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Pretty brutal, pretty brutal.

• 1:04:50Shawn Ryan?

  What would the point of that be?

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  I don't know, but certainly the, the end result would be fear. Like, I don't want to be that guy. The Aztecs used it brilliantly. They would bring, you know, the mayor of a new town that they were trying to just get into the empire through just coercion. They'd bring him to Tenochtitlan and show him one of these heart extraction things and be like, would you like your people to do that? Or would you like to send us 3,000 rubber patties a month? I'll pick the rubber patties. Please don't do that to me. But you know, the Aztecs are a different people than the Maya.

• 1:05:32Shawn Ryan?

  So this was, this wasn't necessarily a religious sacrifice to the gods. This was more of an intimidation factor to people that they want to conquer.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  I think it was both. And in the case of the Aztecs, which is the example I was just giving you, they had a different religion than the Maya. They were associated, there were sometimes, you know, crossovers between the gods that they recognized. But the Aztec story, the Mashika people, they believed that they were first and foremost following the god of war. Uh, we'd see Leposhli. And their priest said that their, their creation story said that the sun only rose and set because the gods had had the bravery to sacrifice themselves.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  And that going forward into humanity, only sacrifices would make the sun keep coming up. And especially this war god, we see Leposhli, said, I need sacrifices in order to help the sun keep coming up. And so the Aztecs, more than everybody else around them, started sacrificing people like crazy.

• 1:06:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Well, before we get into it, let's stick with the Mayans right now.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:51Shawn Ryan?

  And so, and the other sacrifice would be behead people on top of a pyramid. And let the head roll down like a ball. So.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  That's what we see mostly with the Maya, though they did the hard extraction in the post classic too. And they didn't do, in the classic period, they didn't do it too much. It was, and it was mostly, it wasn't like everybody, it wasn't like women and children. It was warriors and elite folks that that had been captured in battle.

• 1:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  So would they do this by the tens, by the hundreds, by the thousands?

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  You know, by the art and by the archaeology, you know, you can, you can find piles of bodies when people are killing people. Archaeology can find huge piles of bodies and see the pathology of them. We do see that in the post classic and especially the Aztec area. We don't see it so much in the Maya area. So I don't think it was a huge volume. But their art shows it happening again and again. One of the neat things, you know, you're, you're a soldier and you, you know, our Western society is a lot about, you know, killing the enemy and acquiring their land. That's not what the Maya were doing. When we see like a mural of Maya battles,

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  it's so interesting when you look at it, nobody's taking a kill shot. If you were to make a battle of a, a mural of a battle, you'd have a lot of people getting killed. But that's not what they do. Every time, like there's a really famous one, the, the most famous one is from Bonaparte. Big, huge room full of just a battle all around you. But all the spears are pointed down. They're stabbing each other in the legs or in the back. Then one will mobilize them so they can haul them back to their, their city and sacrifice them. And you could see it in the mural. Nobody, like there's this, Bonaparte has maybe,

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  maybe 60 people in this big pitched battle. Not a single person is dead or getting a kill shot in that mural. They're all getting stabbed in the legs.

• 1:09:01Shawn Ryan?

  So they're actually going to combat to capture humans to sacrifice to their gods. But we don't know what they were sacrificing them for.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Um, I think it was to honor the gods. Uh, in that limited context, in, in the Maya, in the classic Maya period, it was, uh, brave warriors meeting each other, winning or losing, and then the ceremony of taking their life back in their city, in their ceremonial context, instead of killing them on the battlefield. I think that the interesting thing to me, and you know, let me not overstate that I know what the hell these people were thinking. I'm guessing too. I just have been guessing for 30 years and,

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  and perhaps I have insight that other folks do, but I would not pretend I really know the Maya mindset. I think that, uh, with that caveat, I'll continue, that, uh, bringing them back to this ceremonial place where they, they are sacrificed with the proper words and ceremony was the goal. But it's interesting, like when they attacked each other, it was not about acquiring resources or killing people. It was about, uh, the favor of the gods. I think the Maya were always very

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  cognizant that they're just kind of puppets on strings. That everything we're doing is to gain the favor of the gods. And to protect our relationship to them through the kings and their bloodletting. It's so, Maya battles get fought and cities win and lose, but they don't just take over that city and put their flag up. What they want is that king to use his bloodletting ability to gain the favor of the gods. So they, these battles are on a practical level about

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  uh, acquiring that city's ability to influence the gods, not their crops, not their buildings. They still allow them to fly their same flag. What they want them to do is use their uh, magical influence through their blood for the team that just defeated them.

• 1:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  And that's why they take the, the, the elite crowd.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Right. Oftentimes wiping out the bloodline is a way to totally defeat that, that city's real power, which is their access to the gods. Or you either kill them or you coerce them to use it for you.

• 1:11:56Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  So who would, it sounds like the Highlander when you talk about it like that.

• 1:12:10Shawn Ryan?

  Who would rule the city that has been conquered then, would it?

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  Um, sometimes they'd put their own person in. Sometimes they'd install their own person from their bloodline. Or sometimes that city would just die out. Or they'd take like the princesses from that city and marry their bloodline into them. And then they were both. A huge Maya strategy was intermarriage. There was, there's this whole huge Maya civil war that we learned about maybe 20 years ago. And now we're really just putting together this magnificent uh, picture of the two sides of this war. We know the two big players, they're Tikal and Kalakmul.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  But the entire Maya world was either Team Tikal or Team Kalakmul. And for a long time, Kalakmul had the better of them. Tikal was the big one in Guatemala. And it had all sorts of allies all around it. And it intermarried its daughters into their lineages. They were all very intermarried. There's a new book out by a great colleague of mine, David Stewart, who shows more and more how the Maya elites were intermarrying nonstop, kind of like you're, you know how Europe became so crazy incestuous? I know near the end of their dynastic periods where everybody, you know,

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  England's royalty is actually a bunch of Germans, is actually a bunch of Austrians and that, that intermarriage, that same thing happened with the Maya. So the Tikal thought they had everything worked out. They were like the Rome of the Maya world. They would oversee all the other cities. Dynastic changes, they were the rulers, but unbeknownst to them, Kalakmul to the north of them was intermarrying their daughters into all these cities. And then all of a sudden, attack from every angle and Tikal was defeated, but not totally taken out. They still had kings. Those kings just had to work for Kalakmul. And they sat there for 80 years without any

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  attempt to, uh, break Kalakmul's yoke. But then Kalakmul does something unforgivable. They convince the brother of the Tikal king, like 80 years into this, into establishing a new city with the same Tikal emblem glyph, but it's called, we call it Dos Pelas. And that brother of the same bloodline starts contacting the gods with the same power that Tikal does. Tikal can't take it. That king immediately attacks the brother. And they fight back and forth. Tikal's king puts him on the run.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  And eventually Kalakmul helps that brother to get back and kills the Tikal king. The next Tikal king actually breaks the yoke, but I always think to myself, how was that the moment that broke Tikal? Why was that the moment that broke Tikal? It was his brother betraying him and using his same power to contact the gods. That's what snapped him.

• 1:15:25Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. So, I mean, at the beginning, you said that the, the Mayans are, it's not really a, a nation with one capital. There's several capitals. And so I would think there would be, you know, I would, that to me sounds like they're not communicating with each other. It's not, it's not one, one nation per se. So I would imagine there was a lot of civil war.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  It got crazy. And that's, uh, this kind of precipitates the end of the classic period. I mean, just like, you know, if in Europe, just because you know, France and Germany were fighting each other, that doesn't mean there weren't like undercurrents of communication between, you know, families and spies and things. So there wasn't totally no communication, but there was definitely a, you're on my side or you're not.

• 1:16:10Shawn Ryan?

  So the all these, all these capitals per se within the Mayan, what the, the Mayan race?

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Civilization, uh, region. Yeah, sure.

• 1:16:22Shawn Ryan?

  They would all be competing for.

• 1:16:26Shawn Ryan?

  The grace of the gods, correct?

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Right. And there'd be tiers of them. There'd be, you know, some, uh, and, and allies and enemies that we have this fantastic chart that's been made of all the allies and the enemies, you know, in red and green. And then there's, there's lots of intrigue and backstabbing. There's a, there's a city called Naranjo that flip flops back and forth from team Tikal to team Kalakmul again and again. In fact, the, a daughter of the brother who betrays Tikal and goes to, to Dos Pelas, uh, Tikal totally wipes out Naranjo's bloodline. No more kings

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  that can conjure the gods. But then behind their back with Kalakmul's backing, they take a, a princess, a young woman from Dos Pelas, marry her into Naranjo's line and her son becomes the next great king there. But while he's a boy, she's a, a female warrior and she's shown on steel after steel, uh, using her power to contact the gods as their queen and fighting. We see her with weapons. She's like the Joan of Arc of the Maya world. She takes over, I think it's six different cities, all while he's growing up. And as

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  soon as he's 12, he becomes the king and she steps in a consort position.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  But it's fascinating, all the things we know. I mean, isn't it shocking that I can talk about Maya history like it's European history? That's, that's the power of these hieroglyphs in this art. This is the, really the first American side of the world culture that we can talk about like this.

• 1:18:20Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:18:24Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:19:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:20:36Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned, uh, hunting rituals. What were they hunting?

• 1:20:43Shawn Ryan?

  Do we know?

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were hunting all sorts of stuff. In those particular ones, uh, the, the Madrid Codex, the one that's, uh, that's in Madrid now, it shows, it's got like 10 pages full of deer hunting. They were hunting a lot of deer. They were domesticating turkeys. And they're in the same kind of pages too, about like when to best slaughter turkeys, I think. But the deer ones, uh, talk about its connection to the calendar. They, they're all about the timing of the calendar. And so those pages are not so much about like how to kill a deer. They're more about this is the appropriate time to go hunting and this is the appropriate

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  time to eat deer. And these are inappropriate times to do that. There's a god of hunting called, uh, Ek Chua. He's a weird black striped faced guy, but he's the guy who, who says, you'll have good luck hunting, you'll have bad luck hunting.

• 1:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  But they're very They know if he's saying good luck or bad luck. Do they, is it, do they?

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  Uh,

• 1:21:51Shawn Ryan?

  Just whatever the king says?

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  No, I mean, in this context, I'm talking about hieroglyphs that actually say, uh, it's good, it's bad. These are the dates that you're supposed to be doing this on.

• 1:22:04Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  Not in a, in a like annual hunting season kind of way, because it's

• 1:22:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I guess what I'm asking is, who, who would get the dates? I mean, you're talking, I, I guess it would be the king who's doing the blood sacrifice, right? With the smoke?

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  And his priestly class.

• 1:22:19Shawn Ryan?

  And so how would he, how would that message get to him and get deciphered to everybody else's?

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

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

• 1:22:36Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  And probably the, they believed that their original inspiration for the calendar was the gods and their statements. But Maya priests would use this calendar to, uh, kind of in a, in a horoscope kind of way, uh, tell you when a good day or a bad day was for things. The first 23 pages of the Dresden Codex, which was my, translating it was my master's degree, is nothing, we call them the prognostication pages. And they use the, the Maya calendar, the simplest Maya calendar, the 260-day calendar, to say, these are good days to get married.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  These are bad days to get married. These are good days to beekeep. These are bad days to beekeep. This is a good day to, uh, to build a house. There, each one of the almanacs are telling us something different about it's a good day or it's a bad day. And there are little glyph blocks, four to six glyph blocks that are saying, this guy is beekeeping. It is bad. Or they use a euphemism like, and it was tortillas. And the other one, a bad one, there were, there were five or six different little euphemisms they'd use for good or bad. Like it was burial, or it was famine. That would be the bad things. Or it

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  was, it was an abundance of tortillas, or it was, uh, happy. Things like that. But they're, they use those prognostications. So the, the deer hunting pages that I was talking about have much the same system where it's saying, on days like, you know, that, I'm just making this up, but you know, on, on a how dog and rabbit days, those are good hunting days. Don't ever hunt on a flint day. That's a bad day to hunt.

• 1:24:29Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. How did the calendar get developed? I mean, a lot of people, was it 2012 the calendar ended?

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  Well, we're still here.

• 1:24:40Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people thought the, the world was gonna end?

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  A whole bunch of people did. 2012 was

• 1:24:47Shawn Ryan?

  Did you?

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  Was very, very good to me. No, I did not. I was, uh, I got to do a whole lecture circuit about exactly why I thought that was bullshit. That was, that was great. Um, no, I think that was a misunderstanding of our, our understanding of the calendar and its cyclical nature. We Westerners, you know, if I, if I asked the average Westerner to draw me a picture of time, they would probably draw a dot in the present. They would have a line going to the future. They would align going into the past. That question asked of Amaya would be a circle and not a clock with hands going that way. That could be, somebody might draw that one for me too. But very cyclical in nature. So the Maya feel

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  like everything that's happened will happen again in one fashion or another. There's a cyclical nature of time. They would never predict an end. That's just not how their conception of time works.

• 1:25:44Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  When they created the calendar, gosh, uh, you know, the, the earliest, the very first calendar glyph we have is tied to about 600 B.C. And it's not Maya. It's Zapotec. It's in the Valley of Oaxaca. All of those cultures were kind of coming up with these ideas and bantering them back and forth about calendars and time and just simply how to express math, uh, around that last centuries of the B.C. period. But it's tricky to say when they did it, because I've always said, you know, by the time somebody carves it in stone, they've been thinking about it for a while. By the time we archaeologists

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  find it carved in stone, gosh, they must have, you know, perfected this system, you know, a long time earlier.

• 1:26:34Shawn Ryan?

  That's interesting. So they thought time was a circle?

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  A cycle. Actually, we in the Western world are aberrant. If we look at most of the cultures of the world, they are much more cyclically oriented than we are. Our timeline thing is the aberration, not the, not the cycle.

• 1:26:57Shawn Ryan?

  What would they think about eclipses and

• 1:27:04Shawn Ryan?

  is there any documentation on that? What would they think? Want to know?

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  Generally speaking, they were freaked out by them. They did not like them. They still don't like them. I've been in Maya villages where eclipses are answered by getting outside of your house and banging pots and pans and the dogs bark and they they want to chase it off, especially like when the moon goes away. They were capable of predicting them. Not, not perfectly, kind of a shotgun approach, but they, there's a page again out of the golden, we only have, if we only had a hundred Maya books. God, we'd know so much from the four we have. We see so much insight. I wish, you know, where's the recipe book? Where's the history book?

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  We got, we got an astronomy book. We got a hunting book. But in the Dresden Codex, again, there are a couple of pages that talk about eclipses. And they figured out that it was every five or six lunations of the moon. They figured out the concept of nodes. That they didn't, they did not know that it was the sun and the moon and the earth lining up. But they did realize that every five or six moons cycles was the only time it could happen. So there are charts that show. They say 148 days, 148 days, 148 days, 148 days. And then every once in a while it'll go 177 days, 148, 148.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  And that's five or six lunations of the moon. So we can tell they're making these shotgun approaches to try to figure out when an eclipse would happen. And, and pictures right next to it show like a sky band with the, with the moon goddess hanging dead off of it. And another symbol that has the sun, half black, half sun. It's the, even without the numbers, it's pretty blatant that they were talking about eclipses. But the numbers themselves show us that they, they weren't quite as good as the Greeks got at it.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  But they did have the concept down. They understood that there were certain nodes that it could happen on. They couldn't say like, this time it won't, this time it will. But they knew, they knew the cycle.

• 1:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  Got you. How advanced were their mathematics?

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Pretty darn advanced, really. I mean, they could do anything with their math system that we can do. Which I think just alone on a base level, that's impressive. It was their number system. Now, we have a, a system that's better than what the Romans and the Greeks were using. The Romans and the Greeks, like you know, Roman numerals, it's one, two, three, but then the next one is IV. And then it's V, and then it's VI, and then you get to 10 and it's X, and then it's, you know, you know what I'm talking about? That, that is not a positional system of numeration. That's why, you know, did you ever get a, like a

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  a movie in the 1980s and they put the name, the, the year in Roman numerals instead? And it was like 20 Roman numerals, like, God, what a terrible system, just to say 1983, that's all this mess. We have a positional system of numeration. We go one through nine. And, or, and then the next one is 10. And what we do is we put a zero in the ones column and a one in the tens column. Then when we get to 99, we have another position that comes up. We have a zero in the ones, a zero in the tens and a one in the hundreds, right? That's how our system works. That's positional. Look, that's the same thing my students do, like, huh? Are you talking about math again? Please go away.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  But you asked, uh, the Maya have a base 20 system. So they work just like we do. We're base 10. But theirs goes up one through 19. When you hit 20, you have a zero in the ones and a one in the twenties.

• 1:31:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

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

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  We have to use 10.

• 1:32:05Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and they did. They used, you know, like I told you earlier, there's one calculation. We can see they said five million years. The frustrating thing about the Maya math is that they're always talking about time.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  But the years, it's only 360 days. That's, there's, it's double weird because one, a year is 365 days. Why would they be five days off and just keep doing it and never correct it, which is what happened? That's, the long count is weird like that. But the other one is mathematically, if you're in a base 20 system of, the decimal system of numeration, you should go 1, 20, 400, 8,000, 160,000. But the Maya long count goes 1, 20, 360,

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  7,600 and on up. So they augment that third position to 360, not 400. So a straight counting of things. Are they using their system properly or are they augmenting it like they do the count of days in the long count? We have thousands of examples of them using this log count augmented system, but nothing, oh, God dang it. Can somebody tell me there's 400 captives? So I can read how you do your math system with things instead of days?

• 1:34:30Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  Uh, it, it hasn't happened yet, but it's, it's one of these confusions. I am, I'm a Maya math nerd. I've been studying this thing for my whole life. And I've been dying to see some, but some Maya count something that's not days. To see if they actually adhere to a 20 base system or do they not? I mean, they have to, but I don't have the proof.

• 1:34:57Shawn Ryan?

  What would they do with their dead?

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  They'd bury them under their houses.

• 1:35:01Shawn Ryan?

  They would bury them under their houses?

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  Yep. Which I think is, is wonderful in a way. I guess I've been, uh, infected by the Maya. But, uh, to our society, that's kind of macabre. You put them in the cemetery where you're supposed to put them. But they felt this connection, like we have these ghost stories. The Maya have no ghost stories. They are absolutely convinced that the spirits of their ancestors are here and they mean to help us. And so having grandma under your bed as you sleep is nice to them. It would be weird to us. And we have all sorts of, you know, European baggage about ghosts and remnants, vampires, zombies and all this crap.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:36:03Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. What was the, what kind of ended the Maya empire?

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  Infectious disease honestly was the number one killer of the Mayan empire. Uh, in the 1500s, the, the Spanish came in, of course, you know, conquest and the sword didn't help either, but really it was infectious disease that, that ruined everyone. Uh, I mean, and it's proof that there was not that much contact before. Because once contact really happened, 90% of people were dead in the first 50 years.

• 1:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:36:59Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  Across the Americas, that's North America to South America, but there were millions of people that got hit with 13 infectious pandemic diseases. Europe had gained herd immunity. You know how we talk about, you know, COVID's not gone. We just got to, you know, a herd immunity and of course we have vaccines too, but Europe didn't have these vaccines, but they did get a herd immunity after the black plague and all of that, but it was still dormant in their population. So when the population hit the Americas who had never been exposed to this stuff, the diseases just rolled in. And then sadly, you know, one of the real ironies of that is they, they did come to conquest

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  and they did enslave the Indians and the Indians died off to such a great extent that they stole Africans and hauled them over to be slaves. But Africa brought its own infectious diseases that they had had herd immunity in. That's when like yellow fever and malaria showed up. But, uh, from this moment, the first European stepped on the continent, they were dead. Uh, you know, there, there were ones that died by the sword, but if not for the infectious diseases, we'd be living in a different world right now.

• 1:38:22Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. And who, who documented those infectious diseases? Was that the Europeans or was?

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, the Europeans, uh, you know, the, it's, God, the most tragic cases are the first contact in the Caribbean, just how fast it happened. They, you know, they, they landed in Hispaniola and, uh, you know, Jamaica area, Cuba and, and what's now half Dominican Republic, half Haiti. And those people, like, almost everybody was dead in the first 10 years. Just that's, and that's, they started importing slaves first there. But that was this terrible crucible where nobody could get away. They were isolated on islands and just wiped out like there was no one left to enslave.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  One of the things, you know, during COVID, I, uh, everybody had their own different way of soothing themselves. I intensively studied the history of pandemics for the entire time. And one of the fascinating things I saw, reading all of the documents of the Caribbean is that about 10 years into it, the Spanish started suffering these diseases too. They started dying out on the islands there too. And I wondered to myself, is this, was, is this the undocumented mutation of these diseases?

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  It swept through the Caribbean people, the Taino, uh, to the point where it mutated enough to boomerang back onto the Spanish. I think in that limited context it did. But once it hit the mainland, it's, it was like a wildfire. And the poor Maya and people of Mesoamerica, nobody, the Europeans either, did not know what an infectious disease was. Europe was still believing we're made of the four humors, we're made of yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. That was, you know, they, they were, they were putting leeches on people. That's where

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  they were at. The Maya were a much cleaner people, but they, they believed that all of, uh, diseases were a spiritual attack, uh, disfavor of the gods or an attack by spirits. So they would bathe themselves together to try to, oh, maybe it's, you know, but they would get the disease like that. And the priests would come in and try to baptize everybody because they thought God was punishing them because they were pagans. But they'd take the same bowl of holy water, line them up and just splash disease on everybody's face. So they were accelerating it in that way.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  By the time, uh, Pizarro got to South America and no Europeans had been there yet, the king himself of the Inca had died of smallpox. And the empire was in disarray because two brothers were fighting for the kingship because their father had died of smallpox. It hit, it hit the king in the Andes, running like a wildfire ahead of the Spanish.

• 1:41:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Did the Mayans, I mean, did they have any medicine?

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  They did have medicines. They had good medicines, but they, but their mentality was that it was all spirits. It's interesting how they got to the same conclusions that we do. In some ways they have, you know, medicines, we're still trying to get from them because they're so effective. Things like they can, they can make, uh, kidney stones turned mud with these interesting things. Yeah. I, I, I got that stuff from some Maya guys for a friend of mine who had, who had kidney stones, but they, I had to like talk to a group of shamans and they were like, what are you here for? Who are you? Archaeologist, huh? You sure you're not a medicine? Sure you're not from the pharmacology world? You're going to sell this shit? Why do you want it?

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  Like, I just want it because my friend's suffering. Like, they were like, all right, you can have it. You, little boy, go out in the woods with him and get him some. And some little kid brought me out to the woods and got me this stuff. But that side, side example here, they, they did have medicine, but they felt like it was all spiritual. Like I, I've got a spiritual attack happening. I need a spiritual solution. Uh, what kind of plant spirits can help me? And they divide them into hot plants and cold plants. And most of them, they would put in a brew. They would like to, uh, they, they boil them and there'd be things that were hot spirits

• 1:43:16Speaker 03

  that you'd drink hot or cold spirits that you'd drink cold. Some of them, they'd be plants that you'd just ingest mostly, but they, they like to make brews, but their mentality was that sickness was a spiritual attack, not a physical like germs thing. No, nobody on the planet understood what a germ was in the 1500s.

• 1:43:39Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  But they, but that was also their damning because they felt like everybody getting sick was proof positive that their gods had abandoned them. And the perfect timing of the conquistadors showing up with a bunch of priests who said, you know why you're all sick? Because you're pagans. And if you just follow God instead, you'll be okay. And they were like, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Your God's more powerful than our God. We're sick because your God is more powerful than our God. And if we just pray to your God, we'll be okay.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  That really accelerated the conversion into Christianity. Every, every Maya person today is a Christian.

• 1:44:28Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding. So that, that is what created Christianity in, in Central, South America.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  It certainly helped sell it. It helped sell it. That whole like Jesus got sacrificed thing too. They were like, yeah, I get that too. That's good stuff. Okay. I understand where you're coming from. Though ironically, you know, okay, I, I will become a Christian. What do I gotta do? Well, I'm just going to take this bowl of water and I'm going to splash it on your face like I did the, the last hundred guys in the line, accidentally giving them the disease. There was a, a priest in the, in the Amazon in Brazil who wrote this heartbreaking, uh, uh, chronicle where he said, I've done everything God's asked. I've,

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  I've made these utopian communities and I am baptizing people, thousands of people a day, and yet God still takes them. What am I doing wrong? Please send me a sign. Uh, no idea that probably the bowl of holy water was what was accelerating it.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  You know, that's no dispersion on Christianity. I'm just saying, what a, what a, what a terrible coincidence clash of events that accelerated not, uh, that his goal was to stop it, but his actions were accelerating it.

• 1:45:59Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. We'll take a quick break.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  Sounds good.

• 1:46:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:46:51Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:47:36Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:47:53Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  Sweet.

• 1:47:57Shawn Ryan?

  You ready? Ed, we're still discovering entire human landscapes underneath the Amazon. A new nature study estimates there could be 24 to 30,000 ancient earthworks in just one region, and potentially millions of people living there at its peak. From an archaeologist's perspective, how badly have we underestimated what the Amazon looked like before Europeans arrived? And what do you think is still hidden underneath that canopy?

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  Love that question. Yep, we did not see that coming at all. I will brag and say, I saw that coming. I saw the beginnings of that on my great courses about South America that I did in, you know, before 2012. I think I did that in 2009. I said, "This stuff is beginning in the Amazon, and get back to me in a decade, because what we're going to find is going to freak us out." And it has. There are thousands of these geoglyphs, and we call them geoglyphs, but they're actually enclosures around big communities. And different places had different ways that they handled that wetland environment. Some of them

• 1:49:11Speaker 03

  built big mounds up and causeways in between. In Bolivia, there are these magnificent, huge communities that have big mounds with raised causeways going out to littler mounds and littler people's houses. And they basically built raised roads over the wetlands, and then figured out how to farm those wetlands and just turned it into an agricultural paradise. And it's not, it was still there when the Spanish arrived. There's 100 years after the Spanish arrived, some priests went down there and tried to civilize them. And in those journals, one of

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  the priests said, expressed his frustration. He said, "They've built this magnificent, magnificent system of causeways, and all they use them for is to go from party to party. These people are always having celebrations. They're not using these for commerce, or education, or anything. They just use them to party," which I thought was hilarious. Like, these people were having a grand old time. And there's so much down there in the Amazon that, yeah, I'm no longer surprised. It's just a question of time before we see just how much is there.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

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

• 1:50:39Shawn Ryan?

  Really? There's that much?

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think in the heart of the Amazon is probably where the bald patch is, where the Amazon, you've been down there, you know, in an average year, the water level around like Manaus raises 100 feet. And the trees all have adapted to that, and the wildlife has. They all just go up into the trees, and half the year they see the water, or see the ground. In those environments, probably, you know, a raised causeway was not enough. But in the, it's really, at the moment, the evidence kind of rings the heart of the Amazon. And maybe that's just how deeply archaeologists

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  have been able to go from the known to the unknown. Or maybe the heart of the Amazon is so deep that even their adaptations wouldn't work there. That's yet to be seen.

• 1:51:38Shawn Ryan?

  You see a lot of people, how many times have you been down there?

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  To the Amazon?

• 1:51:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  Just once.

• 1:51:45Shawn Ryan?

  Just once?

• 1:51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I spent a week down there going from Manaus. I picked the Black River instead of the Amazon to go up, but I spent on a boat going up there. And mostly, my mission that time was to talk to modern native groups and ask them why they picked where they picked to put their village.

• 1:52:07Shawn Ryan?

  What do they say?

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  The answer was the same every time, that there's this black soil here that's very agriculturally productive. They call it a terra preta. And that, in archaeology, we've begun talking about that as an anthropogenic landscape. And it's the evidence that thousands, well, at least hundreds of years ago, maybe thousands of years ago, humans had churned up the land there so much to farm that it's this rich soil. The people that live there now, the natives, they don't necessarily know that that's where our ancestors were thousands of years ago. They

• 1:52:49Speaker 03

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

• 1:52:59Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  And it's huge areas. We call it a anthropogenic landscape. It's, you know, the Amazon destroys everything. Like, there's the evidence of earthen mounds and things just get churned up there so much that it's hard to detect human past habitation. So this anthropogenic landscape is a relatively new concept where we're analyzing the soils to see, did that happen naturally, or did humans do that?

• 1:53:33Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Well, those native guys, yeah. But even those guys know what Manaus is. You mean, like, actual native folks living off the grid?

• 1:53:46Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't even have to be native. I was just, I was surfing around YouTube the other day. I just actually sent this channel to, I think it's called Yes Theory. Is it? Yes Theory? I found this channel called Yes Theory. I think, I don't know much about it because I just found it, but they found this guy who's been living off-grid up the Amazon River, I think somewhere in Brazil, for like 39 years or something.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  It's not the crazy guy that's accused of killing tourists, is it?

• 1:54:18Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, I don't think so. Well, these guys are still living.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  He lives out there, but you don't want to find him.

• 1:54:25Shawn Ryan?

  One dude out in the middle of nowhere, just, he's got a river house on the side of the Amazon somewhere, and he's been out there for 39 years.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  Well, my hat's off to that guy, because he should be dead by now.

• 1:54:39Shawn Ryan?

  It's fascinating.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  I

• 1:54:41Shawn Ryan?

  Try to reach out and get these guys on.

• 1:54:43Speaker 03

  My work is in, mostly in the rainforests of Guatemala and Mexico and those areas. And those are inhospitable forests. But I got to say, the Amazon's next level. The Amazon had, like, way more snakes, way more deadly plants, way more environmental changes that could kill you. About day three going up the, the Black River, we stopped in a ruined city that had, like, European brick-built houses and things, but they had trees coming out of them. And we walked down the street, and the riverboat captain said, "Yeah, this, this was gonna be

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  Manaus." And this was where the rubber industry started. But then, the jungle just swallowed this place, and they decided to move down river to Manaus. And I was like, what, what ended it? And he said something strange about, like, "They say it was ants." Like, ants? Jesus Christ. Ants took over a city? That's what he said to me. And I, the ants there are huge, and the army ants just swarm. That environment scared me, and I like the jungle.

• 1:56:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:06Shawn Ryan?

  Well, here's a follow-up. If somebody gave you unlimited LIDAR tomorrow and said you can scan one unexplored region anywhere in the Americas, where are you going?

• 1:56:18Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. That's a good one.

• 1:56:22Speaker 03

  I mean, it's funny, I it's a race right now. People are lidaring the crap out of things. If I went to, I, you know, my, my, my gut reaction is to say the Amazon. But stand in line, Ed. There's, you know, 50 guys out there lidaring the Amazon. Where would I go that everybody doesn't think they should look? I would probably do what my friend and colleague, uh, Luke Caverns, Luke Reagan is doing. Uh, I would scan up and down all the rivers of North America of the United States, because the Mississippi and all the way out to the East Coast, there are pyramids here, but they're trapped in the woods there.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  They're on private properties. And, uh, you could find so much. People are doing it. I'm still, I would be behind the curve there because Luke has found almost 80 pyramid sites.

• 1:57:20Shawn Ryan?

  Eighty pyramids.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  Yep. And there's another one. I've just become obsessed with somebody's, uh, Facebook page. It's Lidar America. This guy every day is pumping out another Lidar image of a pyramid sitting on somebody's ranch. And you don't, he, he shows the, just the aerial shot of just the woods. Nothing. Lidar, holy crap, there's three pyramids in those woods. It's just the, the pace of discovery.

• 1:57:49Shawn Ryan?

  Right here in the U.S.

• 1:57:50Speaker 03

  Right here in the U.S.

• 1:57:51Shawn Ryan?

  And it's not underground.

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:57:53Shawn Ryan?

  Lidar can't punch underground.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  I mean, we have, you know, half a dozen major sites that are, uh, archaeological parks you could visit. But Lidar is showing, oh, a year ago, I said, ah, Lidar's not finding anything new. That's not true anymore. Lidar has especially here, right in North America, been finding dozens and dozens of big earthen pyramids that are all, they, they, they peg, they peg on the big rivers. Mississippian civilization starts about 900 when they really get corn from Mesopotamia. Once they figure out how to grow big crops of corn, they start making huge communities along our major rivers.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  And a lot of that area is in national parks, or it's just wilderness, or it's somebody's mega ranch of 3,000 acres. And it's out there, but we, we've never seen it before. This Lidar has been showing us just how much I, I'm so happy to see it because I knew it was there and I know how many pyramids were destroyed from like the 1700s and 1800s as we moved out into the cropland. I was worried they were all gone, but Lidar's been showing me, nope. There's still probably hundreds of them.

• 1:59:16Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. I would love to stumble across one of those.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  You know, is this, this, this, uh, property's like 30 acres? I would bet you my bottom dollar, you have Mississippian civilization right here on this property.

• 1:59:34Shawn Ryan?

  That would be cool. How will we find that out?

• 1:59:37Speaker 03

  You know, uh, survey out in, out, out in these woods. You could go to Nashville. There are, uh, contract archaeology firms for not very much. They would survey your entire land, phase one, and, and tell you where the archaeology is. And I guarantee you, there's a lot of stuff here, Sean.

• 1:59:58Shawn Ryan?

  I'm going to do that.

• 2:00:00Speaker 03

  Do it. Tell me how it goes.

• 2:00:03Shawn Ryan?

  All right, here's a bonus because we're getting into this anyways. Graham Hancock believes there have been any, excuse me. Grand Hancock believes there may have been an advanced lost civilization that influenced later cultures. You know his work, but you disagree with that conclusion. Where exactly do you think he gets it wrong?

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  I think that Graham has oversimplified the situation. His, you know, like any person who studies something for their lifetime, his ideas have evolved over the years. But he still sticks with this idea that there was a single advanced civilization, and that's a buzzword advanced, that was epically destroyed by some kind of cataclysm about 12,000 years ago. But that it provided the seeds for every other major civilization around the planet.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  Where I, and I think the majority of my colleagues believe that civilizations began independently of one another, grew up and then met. Where he believes they started at a single place, spread out, grew up, met again, never remembering their common origin. That's an overly simplistic thing. Uh, I can't prove it. He can't prove it right. I can't prove it wrong. There's not enough evidence to say, but it doesn't make. I think I can make a better argument than him that civilizations developed independent of each other.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  Human civilizations, a kind of, you know, human commonality, finding things like math and science that are the same in every culture, or at least the products of them are two plus two is four, whether we're here or on the moon.

• 2:02:05Shawn Ryan?

  And do you think they interacted with each other?

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  I think they eventually interacted with each other, but I think they grew up independently. Like, for example, you know, Egypt and China, you know, they developed on their own track and they ended up making, you know, sedentary life, crops, houses, you know, then eventually cities. The same thing happened in Peru. But there's no way, there's the times and space are wrong for China to have taught Peru how to do this. Or, you know, in, in Hancock's vision, it's somewhere around, uh, the Mediterranean.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  Kind of, you know, in the old days, he used to try to say it was something akin or actually Atlantis. He no longer says that.

• 2:02:59Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

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

• 2:03:28Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I can't remember where I, I mean, let's go back to the Byans, for example. I should have asked this. I mean, what, how big were their structures? Were they, I mean, did they, are they comparable to Egyptian architecture?

• 2:03:41Speaker 03

  Well, nothing compares to the pyramid in Giza in terms of height. It's 150 meters tall. The tallest Maya building is 70 meters tall. So half the height. But volume wise, Giza's not the biggest. The biggest is actually in Mexico. It's the Cholula Pyramid. It's not as tall, but its area is much, much wider. Like the pyramid in the Giza is pretty steep. But the one in, in Cholula is very wide. So volumetrically, it's bigger.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  And the third one is the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan, just north of Mexico City. So two of the three largest pyramids in the world are in Mexico. Neither one of those are Maya. But like number five, I think, is the complex in El Mirador, which is a, a B.C. period Maya site. So that's, that's exciting.

• 2:04:50Shawn Ryan?

  So I mean, how would they have built it?

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  Do we know? Manual labor, brick by brick. One of the things that.

• 2:04:58Shawn Ryan?

  They weren't like, they weren't, they weren't huge blocks like.

• 2:05:02Speaker 03

  In some cases, like Mirador, the early days, they made, they used some bigger blocks. But generally speaking, most of the Maya, most of the Mesopotamian pyramids are made of blocks that a single block could be carried by a person, by a single person. So that's different. Like, in the case of Egypt, they're massive blocks. There's not a stone source anywhere near they built them. So they had to bring them down a river and then they had to drag them across the desert. And then they had to drag them up there. The scale of Egypt, you know, in my opinion, as an archaeologist, it is unfair to compare any other civilization's architecture to Egypt.

• 2:05:45Speaker 03

  Egypt blows them out of the water. Even, you know, the, the second one that I would say is in second place is not the Maya or any of these things in America. It's the Khmer in Cambodia. The Angkor and the Khmer civilization. The scale of their architecture is also mind blowing.

• 2:06:09Shawn Ryan?

  I've never even heard of this. So I'll have to go look it up.

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  You, you haven't heard of Angkor Wat?

• 2:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think so.

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  Holy moly, you're in for a ride. If you like archaeology, that the scale of things there, the, the city's called Angkor. I've done a lot of work over there. I love the astronomy there. I've got some cool stuff going and they're all such nice Buddhists there. I mean, everybody's so freaking kind. I have to, like, when I bring groups of tourists there, I have to tell them, don't get mad because you're just going to freak some people out. These people don't work like that. If your, if your meal comes late, please don't be angry. You'll make somebody cry. It'll freak them out. But anyway, Angkor is in the middle of Cambodia and there's a single compound there called Angkor Tom that the entire city of Tikal would fit inside.

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  And it's just, it's just one section. The, uh, at, let's say at like 1,200 A.D., Angkor had a population of just shy of a million people. It's crazy. So, but, but Egypt is still on a tier above them.

• 2:07:16Shawn Ryan?

  So I, you know, I've, I can't remember if I saw this from Graham Hancock's work or is it true? Is it true that a lot of these ancient wonders like Giza? I think Stonehenge, Easter Island. Were these all built on top of major fault lines?

• 2:07:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  It's not true.

• 2:07:39Speaker 03

  No, that's not true. I, uh, I mean, I said that very flippantly. I mean, I could take a moment to think about that, but I mean, fault lines mean earthquakes.

• 2:07:48Shawn Ryan?

  Cause if I remember right, they were saying that they were all built on these.

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  The plains of Salisbury are very earthquake prone.

• 2:07:54Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:07:54Speaker 03

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

• 2:08:05Shawn Ryan?

  That could be off. I could be off, you know, that maybe Easter Island.

• 2:08:08Speaker 03

  One weird thing that I've seen, and this is.

• 2:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  Like Machu Picchu, I think they were saying.

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  Uh. Peru's got a ton of earthquakes, that's for sure, but, uh, England, not that many.

• 2:08:21Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 2:08:22Speaker 03

  One thing I did see that this is, now I'm, I'm bridging on crackpot here, but, uh,

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  uh, it's interesting to me how the cradles of civilization hover along the places in the world where magnetic interference is zero. You know how like when you use your compass, it always points magnetic north, but that's not really true north. It could be off to a certain time, like the Boy Scouts are all about, they, they make, they post this, uh, map of the world every year where the magnetic declination is. So like up in New England, you have to, uh, set your compass to like 15 degrees off to be true north. The magnetic and true north are pretty off there, but there's a, there's a sine wave that goes through

• 2:09:14Speaker 03

  the earth where it's zero. And it fluctuates a little by year by year. It doesn't go way off, but it's a, it's a yearly thing that it moves. But I was tracking that one time just using my compass and things back. And I noticed that in the top of Yucatan, it's zero. In Egypt, it's zero. Where Harappa, it's zero. In Southeast Asia, it's zero. The one, the line like tags the cradles of civilization. And that's, that's totally crackpot of me to say, because there's no evidence that magnetic declination means anything to the ancient people. I just, it's an interesting observation that in all of the places where

• 2:09:57Speaker 03

  the cradle of civilization has, we're not suffering any magnetic disturbance. And we know we're electromagnetic people. Is there something about, you know, having no magnetic interference that does something different to the human mind? There are certainly big businesses that have fallen and risen about rubbing magnets on your body to have special healing powers. I just, you know, I probably shouldn't have even said that, but it's an observation I've made that it's weird that it's zero in all the cradles of civilization.

• 2:10:37Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:11:18Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:12:03Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:12:16Shawn Ryan?

  How would you even begin to look into that?

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  Well, how would I prove it is the thing? There's a thousand great ideas about archaeology, but how would I archeologically prove that? I mean, the, the truth of the magnetic zero, it's just there on the Boy Scout map. You, you can just see it. You can Google right now, magnetic declination of the earth, and it'll show you where it's zero and where it, it goes off of zero up to like 25 degrees off. But how I would prove that it had any effect on the birth of civilization? Well, I can't. And that's what makes it a crummy archaeological theory and something that probably shouldn't have come out of my mouth in this interview.

• 2:12:56Shawn Ryan?

  What, what were you saying about, um, we were talking about, I think we were talking about the cataclysm potentially of, of advanced civilizations. And you said something had, oh, we were talking about Atlantis, I think. And you said there was something that, that turned it on its head.

• 2:13:12Speaker 03

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

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  ancient apocalypse thing, and we spent three days in, uh, in Palenque together and.

• 2:14:01Shawn Ryan?

  I love that series.

• 2:14:02Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, thanks. That was fun. That was fun to be a part, but I, you know, I really got to know him. And, uh, I've met a lot of people that are, you know, in the pseudo archaeology sphere, and some of them are charlatans, and I don't like those guys.

• 2:14:16Shawn Ryan?

  I would imagine.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Uh, Graham's not a charlatan. He's just wrong. And, uh, and I've said it to him and he said it to me. I've seen him actually publicly say, Ed and I are friends. He doesn't believe what I have to say, and that's okay, which I think is nice. We should all be like that. There's a, you know, Graham has brought millions of people to get excited about archaeology, and I don't think my colleagues should be spitting on him. You know, if he's wrong, you know, the truth, the truth is immutable. The truth always comes out. People spout bullshit every day, but you don't have to get upset about it. If you, if the, the truth will come out regardless of what anybody says. So why spend time fighting about it when

• 2:15:00Speaker 03

  this guy has actually garnered the audience that we've always wanted?

• 2:15:05Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, what do you think about, uh, Atlantis? You think that's a possibility?

• 2:15:09Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, personally, I think that it was a parable that Plato told to talk about the, uh, potential downfall of society and how things happen. I do not think there's an Atlantis out there. I'm sad to say. I wish there was. I think there may be a story that he you used as the foundation to talk about Atlantis. And if in that scenario, the best candidate, if I do say, you know, is there something even like Atlantis? I think it would be Akrotiri, uh, on the island of, what's that, what's that island that

• 2:15:53Speaker 03

  everybody loves to go to in the Mediterranean outside of, uh, Greece? I'm blanking on its name, but everybody goes to it. It's got the volcano in the middle. I don't know why I'm blanking on it. It's like the most famous with the, with the white places with the blue, uh, roofs. Anyway, that's an island out there in the, uh, in the Aegean that a huge volcano blew up and blew the whole island to pieces. So much so that 70 miles away in Crete, there are chunks of Santorini. Santorini is the island, but there's a section

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  of a city that's still there called Akrotiri. It's only a section of it because the crater blew up most of the city. But it's from like, I think, I want to say 1,200 B.C. And it's very advanced. It has like streets and street lamps and all sorts of things that were very advanced, but the volcano blew up, destroyed Akrotiri, put chunks of it into Crete's cliffs.

• 2:17:06Speaker 03

  From the description of a city that was out in the water and then exploded and sunk, Santorini and Accretieri, if there's, if there's anything that does match the description of Atlantis, it's that. But that's just my opinion. And when it comes to Atlantis, boy, there are a lot of opinions out there.

• 2:17:30Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that it's an impossibility that there is, there potentially was a, a, super technologically advanced civilization? You're talking about the Mayan calendar that, you know, goes back 15 million years. A lot could happen in 15 million years.

• 2:17:53Speaker 03

  Well, just because we talk about 15 million years doesn't mean there was somebody back there. You know, we, we talk about the dinosaurs. We're not, most of us don't believe we were there with them. But, you know, I'd like to say, I'd start out with, uh, one of my mantras is we don't know what we don't know. We, you know, we can be very sure about what we know, but we don't know what we don't know. So part of me hopes that we're totally wrong. But when it comes to, you know, super advanced type civilizations, or even just a major civilization, let's not even give it, you know, all the bluster of some advanced technology. I really feel like archaeology would see at least the evidence of it.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  We're not great at interpreting things, but damn, we're good at finding things. I mean, we find fish scales. I just feel it's, it's very improbable that there was a civilization massive enough to have trade relations with the rest of the planet that we don't even have a brick from it anymore. Now, part of what Graham says, which is legit, is that back at 12,000 years ago, the sea levels were different. The sea has risen 300 feet. Uh, that might be more, uh, 600 feet. And so a ton of archaeology must be under the ocean right now.

• 2:19:21Speaker 03

  And it could have been just buried, churned up by the ocean waves. It could be miles out on, out under the water. So I agree with him on that point. There is probably all sorts of archaeological evidence under the ocean that our current technology isn't allowing us to see. Maybe LiDAR had changed that. I've been hearing that people are developing LiDAR, not to just go through the air, but go through the water. If we can map out with LiDAR the whole ocean floor, maybe we'll find some of that stuff. But it could get buried very deep. You know, one hurricane puts, you know, a whole beach onto the land. What's it doing to the bottom of the ocean?

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  So I totally agree that there's a lot of stuff under the ocean. There, there has to be. But how do we get to it? Until we find it, it doesn't exist. It's what we don't know.

• 2:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do you explain, or maybe you don't, but I mean, you gotta be stumped on it. I mean, things like Stonehenge or the pyramids, or the, I think there's those caves in Turkey that are like entire cities that are

• 2:20:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:31Shawn Ryan?

  Underground. Or

• 2:20:33Speaker 03

  Cappadocia.

• 2:20:34Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:20:52Speaker 03

  I don't know about those ones. Uh,

• 2:20:57Shawn Ryan?

  And they're saying, they're, they're saying these caves are, you know, ancient and, and that it would have been, you know, to light it up down there, you would have been, it would have been fire and the people would have died because of smoke, because it's just a little hole that goes into this cave and, and it would have been, you know, hammer chiseled.

• 2:21:14Speaker 03

  Are they certain humans made it? Or they just suspect they are?

• 2:21:18Shawn Ryan?

  No, I don't think they are.

• 2:21:19Speaker 03

  That's another one, like, uh, you know, some of Graham's research or, uh, evidence is actually geology. And it's not human and it very much looks human. And if you're not, you know, somebody who intensively studied geology, totally understandable that you'd look at something like that huge wall in Montana and say like, there's no way humans didn't make that. But, you know, what, what I lamely say is, you know, what's magical is geology, which is a total nerd ass thing to say, but it's true. I mean, geology makes some amazing stuff there, you know?

• 2:22:00Speaker 03

  Like I was one time on the salt flats of Uyuni in Bolivia. And it's just as far as you can see this, these flats with perfect hexagons connected to hexagons, connected to hexagons, 70 miles of them. And it's just like, it's so perfectly geometrical. Be like, how did nature make this? How did this not, how was this not drawn? And yet

• 2:22:28Shawn Ryan?

  Like the Luminati sequel.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

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

• 2:22:44Shawn Ryan?

  So what are you working on today?

• 2:22:47Speaker 03

  Well, lately I've been trying to be a talking head on the internet, but, uh, but, uh, you know, I'm, I'm kind of in the, uh, in the sunset of my career. I'm 57 now. I still feel good. My kids are raised. I might go out and have another adventure, but I, I do soberly realize that I could break a hip on a pyramid any day and I better have another income source. So a lot of the things that I'm wrapping up are kind of passion projects. I've got, I guess really three that I'm passionate about. One is the archaeology in Southeast Asia.

• 2:23:30Speaker 03

  I've found some, you know, the, the French have mostly done all the work in, in Cambodia, but they haven't focused on their astronomy at all. And I have found some really cool stuff there. Stuff that's like Indiana Jones, tricks of light and shadow, you know, like when the, when the beam of light comes in and he knows where the Ark of the Covenant is, like that kind of stuff.

• 2:23:54Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  In Cambodia. That's, I, I could spend an hour telling you about that, but I'm, I'm thrilled about that stuff because I'm really, I'm really doing something for the people of Cambodia and that too. It's getting exciting. They're starting to like make events around the astronomy stuff I've, I've figured out.

• 2:24:12Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that sounds fascinating.

• 2:24:13Speaker 03

  I love it. I wish it wasn't so freaking far away.

• 2:24:16Shawn Ryan?

  Give me one.

• 2:24:17Speaker 03

  It's like actually the other side of the planet.

• 2:24:19Shawn Ryan?

  Let me hear one thing that you're over there. This, this is

• 2:24:22Speaker 03

  Most of my stuff is about, uh, phenomena called zenith passage, something that only happens in the tropics. The day that the sun goes directly over our head, here in the United States, it will never go directly over our head. That only happens in the tropics. That's why the tropics are defined as they are. The, uh, the zenith passage is within them and it changes from latitude to latitude day to day. It's not like, like we all see, uh, summer solstice on June 21st. It's not that way with zenith. It changes from latitude to latitude. So they can be discussing this astronomical phenomena like it happened for us on August 17th. When did it happen for you to the south?

• 2:25:05Speaker 03

  Oh, it didn't happen for us until September 5th. How strange. So it's already very foreign to us as far as a sun phenomena. But all of those, you know, those bee shaped, uh, in Hindu temples, be like beehive shaped? They have a hole in the roof and a, and a altar on the bottom and the roof goes, the hole goes all the way through the roof. And only on the day of zenith passage, this really bright beam of light comes down and lights up the whole temple on the inside. And that's why their temples are designed like that.

• 2:25:44Speaker 03

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

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  And then when it comes up, it shoots beams of light through all their temples. And it's, it's so cool. And I just kind of stumbled into it. I had been studying archaeology in the Maya world for so long, and we had really documented that the Maya are paying attention to zenith passage and talking to each other about it. And we ran out of ways to figure it out. So I was like, well, Cambodia is in the tropics too. Why don't we go over there and see what they're doing? And I found more than I could possibly imagine.

• 2:27:02Shawn Ryan?

  That sounds fascinating.

• 2:27:04Speaker 03

  It was great. I love it. And I love the people there. I love the environment, the jungle. It's beautiful. So that's one of my things. Another one is, uh, I have made one third of a map of Easter Island for the people of Rapanui. And I would like to continue. But I did it just before COVID and then the entire island went into lockdown for three years. And now the administration's different and Chile doesn't really want me doing it because I'll make a better map than they've ever made and give it to the Rapanui who, uh, will then have control of their own patrimony and that's inconvenient. I probably shouldn't be saying all this shit, but that's inconvenient for the government and universities of Chile.

• 2:27:49Speaker 03

  I've got good friends on the island. What I want to do, I went in there with my heart on my sleeve and said, you guys have now finally gotten control of your patrimony. But you don't know where any of your stuff is. Every archaeologist has just come in, mapped the Moai, asked you if aliens did it and left. I will map all of your villages. I will figure out where all your crops are, where all your houses are, where all your chicken coops are, and I will put back together where, hopefully, where your clan, there are 13 clans there, but they don't know where their land is anymore. And I said, as you move out, you don't want to destroy your ancestor's stuff. I'll make you the first map of your actual settlement map. And I made one third of it.

• 2:28:33Speaker 03

  And then, then the world blew apart. And I've been trying to get back ever since. I was almost there. I bought the, uh, head of Maualhunua a dinner when I was out there the last time. And we were agreed. Something weird has happened. I think that, I think that archaeologists that don't want me there are thwarting me. But I'm, I'm very stubborn. I will get there. I'm flying back there again. I'm going to buy him dinner again. And I will finish a map of Rapanui that I will give to them. That's part of the thing. They're like, they think I'm weird. Like, you don't want me money? You don't, you're just gonna give it to us? It's like, yeah, I'm just gonna give it to you.

• 2:29:13Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I would love to go there. I actually love to go on there.

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  It's beautiful. It's, you know, it's so easy to, Sean, you don't, you know, you don't need a guy like me to go there. You know, you fly from Santiago, five hours out to Rapanui. But once you get there, the town of Hangeroa is lovely. It's got hotels. They're foodies. The food there is wonderful. And there's only like 6,000 Rapanui people left sadly, but they are some of the nicest people I've ever met.

• 2:29:41Shawn Ryan?

  And those heads, they have full bodies under the ground.

• 2:29:45Speaker 03

  They all have full bodies. The heads were just a misunderstanding. Those are the ones that are standing in the quarry and the erosion has buried their bodies. But every one of, there's not a single actual head on Easter Island. They're all bodies. And you know how many we've recorded now?

• 2:30:04Speaker 03

  Over a thousand. There's over a thousand on Easter Island. When you see the pictures, you're like, oh God, are there 50 of them? That's a lot of stuff. No, there's a thousand.

• 2:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  Oh man, I would love to chat with you about that. We're gonna have to bring it back on. We've got a lot more to talk about.

• 2:30:20Speaker 03

  Sounds good. That's, yeah. So I, I'd love to do something for the Rapanui people. I like the stuff in, in, uh, Southeast Asia. And I want to prove that the Inca fused their walls together with acid. I think they did. I think they melted those walls together. I don't think they carved them so neat that they fit together like perfect blocks. I think they melted them together.

• 2:30:44Shawn Ryan?

  With what?

• 2:30:46Speaker 03

  Hydrofluoric acid is my guess.

• 2:30:50Speaker 03

  They definitely had a lot of acid. They had a lot of, uh,

• 2:30:55Speaker 03

  hydrochloric acid that comes out of their mines. When you mine gold and silver, one of the byproducts is, uh, hydrochloric acid and they have a lot of fluoride. See, it's andesite. So no natural acid alone would, would melt them. But there are places where I see like wipe marks in Cusco. There are places where like, there's something where, like somebody took a rag and wiped, uh, a muddy part off of a piece of granite, which is impossible. And I see places where, uh,

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  uh, where crystals are scissored across the seam between two rocks, two, two bricks. That's impossible. So again, kind of a harebrained theory, but that's what I got from my mentor. Linda Shealy used to tell us all, we're the lunatic fringe. We come up with the weird ideas that are impossible, but those are the ones that change the way we think about things. So I'm always trying to be honoring her by being on the lunatic fringe. This definitely classifies. But there's a ton of fluoride in the Andes Mountains. The Inca

• 2:32:10Speaker 03

  were making jewelry out of fluoride. And if you combine hydrochloric acid and fluoride, you get HF. That's hydrofluoric acid. Did you, did you watch Breaking Bad? You know that scene where they're trying to dissolve the body in the, in the tub and it comes through from the upstairs to the downstairs? What they're pouring on him is hydrofluoric acid. And it burns right through rocks, ceramic things, but it won't burn through plastic. And it won't actually burn through, uh, certain other substances too. But if you brought fluoride and hydrochloric acid and

• 2:32:53Speaker 03

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

• 2:33:26Shawn Ryan?

  That's a fascinating theory.

• 2:33:28Speaker 03

  Lots of people think that it was acid and weird people say things like, oh, it was urine. Or, uh, there's a weird bird in the Amazon that, that eats certain plants that are acidic and then goes to a cliff and spits it onto the cliff and it, it melts the rock and makes it soft so they can peck a little nest into there. They think maybe it's that. There's weird stories from the, uh, from Spanish conquistadors, talking about people around Lake Titicaca could make, uh, stone soft and turn it into statues. There's a weird story about, uh, near a mine where, uh,

• 2:34:15Speaker 03

  where some Spanish were trying to make, uh, an Inca slave,

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  drink something out of a weird jar. And he was like, no, no, no. And then it spilled on the ground and the Spanish reporter in the Chronicle said, and the granite beneath it got all soft and muddy after it dumped out of there. I don't know whether that's just bullshit or what, but there's lots of little stories like that. I'm not, I'm certainly not the first person to say it, it might've been acids. I might be the first person to try to suggest it's hydrofluoric acid. So I went to Cusco with this. I wrote him a letter in Spanish and said, you know, if I could just take some samples out of the walls,

• 2:35:02Speaker 03

  I can have them, uh, studied through neutron activation and I can figure out whether there's any traces of acids in there. And they were like, don't touch our walls, you weird ass gringo. So I'm waiting, I'm waiting for that guy's position to change. I'll send the next guy the letter again. See what happens.

• 2:35:22Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Well, Ed, I'd love to see you again. And, and, um, thank you for making the trip out. This was a fascinating interview.

• 2:35:32Speaker 03

  Thanks. I, I loved it. I hope I didn't talk too long, but I'd be happy to come back.

• 2:35:36Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Perfect. Well, we'll see you soon.

• 2:35:40Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you.

• 2:35:53Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.