#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
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The following is a conversation with ed barn heart, an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of south america, matther amErica and north america. And now a quick few second mentioned response or check out in the description is the best way to support this podcast. We got master class for learning shop fy for e commerce next week for business age.

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Do you think there are lots civilizations in the history of humans on earth, which we don't know anything about?

Yes, I do. And in fact, you know, we we have found some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime when we've got go bacally peppy, and we've got the stuff that's going on in the amazon, and there is some mother of less startling things that we had no I idea existed in, push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations we had no idea about. So yeah, it's happened, and I think it'll happen again.

Do you think there's a lost civilization in the amazon that the amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of?

Yes, I do. And I we're beginning to find that there are these huge, what we call geo glimpse, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like rome.

And I don't think where we're going to find anything that looks like rome in the amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet, you use your natural resources in the amazon. There's not a whole lot of stone. What's stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles.

but is possible that all that land is not covered by trees actually hiding stones, for example. Some architecture, some things, is just very difficult. Fine for archaeologists.

I think at the base of the andes, where the amazon connects to the andes, there's a lot of potential there because that's where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into the base, in stone is meters and meters under the ground, except for A A stray Cliff here. And there were the river room dug deep. And even then, only in the rises. And because that river rises like over a hundred feet every year.

that's one of the things. Having visited that area, just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water, I was a humble by the power of water to shape landscapes, and probably a raise history in the context that we're talking about our civilizations. Water can just make everything disappear over a period of century, on millennia. And so if there's something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago, that is very possible. We just eaten up by nature.

absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that's almost a certainty. And a lot of places know the grand canyon was dug by water.

There's this one, be little river in IT right now. And you can't possibly imagine that IT do that, but I did. The power of nature and geology is really kind of magical. And when IT comes to our ancient civilizations, that could be from a long time ago, there's probably a lot that are just under the ocean and just the way of action have destroyed them. And what they haven't destroyed, very deep .

under the ocean. So you think atlantis ever existed?

I don't think that idlis exist, that I do think IT was one of play tos, many parables talking about putting IT in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist a shadow of IT, my money would be on accuracy. Accreditation is what's left of a big city that was on the island of santurri.

And when their volcano blew up, IT blew up most of the city and shot chunks of IT so fast that seventy miles away and create, there are chunks of santerre ni in their Cliff. So IT blasted what was ever there. But what's left on the side of the crater accretionary is strAngely advanced for its age. And so if there is anything that's a model for atlantis, as plato explained, IT its accuracy to accurate .

the ancient greek city. So that says the settlement was destroyed in the thereon eruption sometime in the sixteen th century B. C, E. And buried in volcker ash, which preserve the remains of the fresh cos and many objects and artworks. So we all know how advances that civil ation was.

No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it's got streets, it's got lambing, it's got little sponges for for torches at night. IT was a viBrant city with with a lot of especially in terms of hydrology engineering. It's it's very advanced for being thirty five hundred years old.

So if you check out, here's an image of the excavation, what a project is .

an amazing place. And you can tell that it's just part of IT because IT, it's pretty close to where the cradle began. So the city itself was probably much larger .

on this case. There's a lot of evidence, but like we said, there could be there could be civilians that there is no, there is very little evidence of because of the natural environment to destroy all the evidence.

right? And I think criteria is actually a great example of that because here we have decide that did preserve that looks amazing, but we know there was more. The city that was completely obliterated, IT was shot.

Chunk s to that city are probably in the walls of create seventy miles way. And now plato says that its sunk. IT was on an island and its sunk. Well, that's exactly what happened to acquit.

Y, I think this is what platter .

was referring to you. If IT does exist, at least the model of IT, I think this is probably what he was talking about.

And there could be other civilizations of which plate to has never in right, that we have no record of. And it's humbling to think the entire civilizations, with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the the war, the conflicts, the the political tensions, all of that are the social interactions, the higher key, all that the art can be just destroy like that and forgotten, completely lost to ancient history.

I reflect upon that often as an archeologist. I think about the this great country that I live in, in love in all the things we ve achieved. But, you know, we're a baby.

Historically speaking, we've been around two hundred years. Heck, a lot of the city's eyes study in central and south america. They had a run of eight hundred and thousand years, and now their ruins. But we're barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations.

So humans, almost sapiens, evolved, but they didn't start civilizations right away. There was a long pair of time when they did not form these complex societies. So how do we, let's say, three hundred thousand years ago in africa, actually go from there to creating civilizations?

I think that a lot of human and evolution had to do with a the the pressures that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around twelve thousand years ago. And that's when our last ice sage really ended.

I think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them into especially finding new ways of subsistence here in the america's. A huge thing that happened was all the megatheria went away when the climate changed enough, the the mans died out and the bicton died out. And there was just a the head to come up with different ways of doing things.

We were hunters and gathering, and we had things we ve got from hunting, and we've got things we ve got from gathering. And in the america's, when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, there are the the gathering started to be a much more important thing. And I think that LED to figuring out, hey, we can actually grow certain things.

And gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops, and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area that didn't have to rome around anymore. And that's where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they they stayed in the same place all year along for the vast majority of human existence. We've been no matic, and we've done these kind of wider, tighter noma tic circles, depending on the geographic reach on where theyd know. Okay, you know, in the mountains and we will be in the summer in the mountains because there's berries and things, and then in the winter will be down here and will hunt, but they'd move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, I think there that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization.

What do you think is a lot of question that want to ask her.

What do you think is the motivation for societies is the character of the stick? So you said, like, is IT like when resources run out in the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to figure stuff? Or is IT more the kind of like there's always this kind of human spirit that wants to explore, that wants to maybe impressed the rest of the village or something like this with the new discovery they made in venturing out in, coming out with with different ideas, technological .

innovation was caught. Well, you know, I I have an explorer heart, so i'm kind of unbiased, right? You know, I do think that that we have an an eight desire to see what's on the horizon and and to impress other people with our achievements, things like that.

We're social beings. That's that's really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together. So I think that it's much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out, but usually the carrot does the job.

The really interesting story is how the first people came to the americas. I mean, to me, that's pretty gangster to go from asia all the way. Potentially during the ice age or may be at the end of the ice age are doing that whole period, not knowing what the world looks like going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process? How do the first people come to the americans?

Well, first off, I agree with you. That was pretty gangster. I mean, that's that's, that's a hard place to live. I listened some of your podcasts, that guy Jordan Jones, yeah, the mustard. But I wouldn't make IT crossing there.

What do you go like the fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan jonas exists, people that survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that that's an indication as possible. But yeah, so when when do you think and how did the first people come?

The traditional theories are still somewhat valid, or at least on the table, that when that lend bridge occurred, that no matter counters just followed the game, like they always had in the game, went to cross there because there was no barrier and they followed them across. The thing has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer, for we get all these a evolutionary tracks that we could never see before.

When I was a Young archaeologist, I had I would have never dreamed we'd have the information we have now. And that information, a lot of it's coming out of a texas a and m. We see the traditional like.

Twelve thousand, five hundred years ago that there was a migration, but now we're seeing one that almost certainly happening closer to thirty thousand years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness, but might be true, is that I could have been as early as sixty. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as sixty.

And when I was a Younger archaea gist, IT was herrick to go beyond this twelve thousand five hundred. You are a woof. You said that. But now it's really very clear that they came over at least by thirty thousand and the bridge opened and closed and open and closed.

That's doing ice, right? I mean, that's crazy, right? That that is crazy.

Yeah I mean, you know, they didn't roll in and immediately make new york, but there were people, and they were definitely not people here before that which is fascinating. The the the bridge closed DNA mutate. And so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the americas that don't exist otherwise.

And that same halo group game has been showing us more and more that people came across cyberia. It's not africa, it's not western europe. Those are still they've become kind of fringe theories, but they're not totally eradicated. I have DNA .

is developing .

science as well, and I think we all need to keep that in mind that it's not like they just cracked the code. Now we know all the answers and sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts a two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you know, we don't need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA. But they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from siberia that all native american people are of asiatic dissent. Do you .

think he was a gradual process, if it's like thirty to sixty thousand years ago, was a gradual movement of these, the matter tries, they follow the animals, or was IT like one, explore that, push the the tribe to just go, go, go, go, go across, maybe across one hundred years, travel all the way across, may be into north america, into north, north america, where canada is now. And then sort of like big leaps in movement versus gradual movement.

I think IT was big leaps. I know this is just go mostly guess, as I admit, but I think that is much in the way that a lot of art evolutionary models talk about punctuated equalitarian, that there are big moments of change and then IT settles out into a more slow and steady pattern and then something big will happen again.

I do think that um the early people went as far as they could go and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the america's are in south america. The ones that are, they got separated early and didn't mix their DNA like the people in the amazon.

Most of those guys have an old blood type. And their halo group d, which is the oldest one that entered the the us. And what are they doing down there? If I do believe they came across the bearing strait, I don't think it's very we have no real evidence to say they they came in mass across oceanica. So they made IT probably by boat along the coast all the way to south america.

So there is some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, IT happened like tens of thousands years ago. But in a very rapid pace.

There's these explores. They want all the way to south america, and they established their kind of more stable existence. And from there, south america, as amErica and north amErica was kind of gradually expanded into that area.

like the next waves came down and did north amErica and central america, and the very first wave made IT all the way down to south amErica and got isolated, isolated, then mixed in with the next groups that came.

Yes, fascinating.

Kind like there's there's an interesting corporate in in europe where today everybody feels like celtic people are from ireland. But actually celtic people started in eastern europe. And IT was the entire area when rome kinds swept everything.

And and rome was now the the ruler of the day. IT was only that far edge of the cell. C world, ireland, that they were like a we're not going to mess with those guys on that island will leave and be so. Now IT looks like that's the heart of celtic tradition, but actually it's the french.

So if if IT is sixty thousand years ago, these are really early humans.

Yeah and there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about, uh, very old carbon, fourteen dates in the amazon and in the andy area that everybody just dismissed this. Now he he didn't get a date of forty thousand years. But I think we're onna come back around to start by addressing some of these based on new evidence at hand.

And that's the interesting thing is, you know the early human spread throughout the world and then like he said, perhaps i've got ten isolated and that civilizations sprang from there and they all have similar elements even though they were isolated. That's really interesting. That's really interesting that there's multiple creators of civilization, not just one like one good idea. Those ideas naturally come up. Those structures naturally .

come up. And I I wonder whether the similarities that all those cradles have, IT could be A A shared, much deeper past that they all have or or IT could be a more kind of star trek thing where, you know, captain kk was always talking about the the theory of parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development. And that that could be the answer to IT.

Which which one do you lean on? Which which one doing toward.

I think it's a case by case thing. I think if we look globally, I lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I looked just to the america's and we have a shorter time period where the the things that become major civilizations now now i'll say you know up to thirty thousand years ago, which is still a blip in the time of of humans, um I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from asia and that as they ve got separated that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and a cultural customs that we can see. I i'm a big proponents that there are commonalty ties and all the cultures of the america's that lead back to and point to A A single distant origin.

You spoken about the loss, creative, social ation south america. So south amErica is not often talked about as one of the cradles civilization, south amErica as america. Can you explain?

Well, we have very early stuff in south america. You're right. I mean, especially as uh as an american, our country so big and out that we are so far removed from these places, we don't even think about IT.

But more and more or we're seeing things that that predate the early liest stuff that we like to talk about, like egypt in mess pattani a um there are things it's all on the peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday we might start talking about the amazon more and more. But right now, what we've got are things that date back into the three thousand B, C, E.

Along the coast of perou. And there are big stone built, pure mids and temples, and there they're amazingly isolated, even now that we ve found them. Some of them, like Carol, is one of the most famous ones, just north of lima.

We've known about IT for a couple decades now how old that is. But every time I visit there, it's like I visited the moon. There's absolutely nobody there, not for miles.

I ate a amazing how such in IT such a discovery was made and yet still nobody goes to see IT. It's not easy to get to see. You think .

there's a bunch of locations like that. Some may not been discovered in the peru area.

There are so many. Peru has tones that desert gets really ugly, quick and IT burries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched.

You know, when people hear the name pyrates, they think of egypt immediately. But egypt has got about one hundred and forty pyramid ds, and we have pretty much found them all. Perou has thousands, thousands of pyramids.

And now they weren't built of a lot. Not all of them were built of stone. Some of them were doby bricks, which have weather terribly.

So now they don't look. They're not exciting places to visit today. Do you know what's funny to you? You know, we started off talking about, you know, whether I think there's a lost civilization out there.

There are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are some things that we're discovered a hundred years ago. And archaeologists, or back then, they they call themselves antiquarians, just gonna passed over. Coral was one of these sites because the coast of peru has some of those pyrates that were made by the mochi are full of of gold and beautiful ceramics.

And I know things that you can sell for big money, but coral was found a long time ago, but the archaeologist was like, god, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about IT. This places no good.

We can say anything here. And then about the nineteen seventies, eighties, somebody said, hey, no ceramics. Is that older than the invention of ceramics? SHE had we Better go take .

another look at that place. So what's the .

dating on coral? Coral, I think, starts at about thirty two hundred B, C, E. And IT lasted as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around IT until about eighteen hundred B. C.

So what's the story behind? Like looking at some of these images, what's the story about constructions like that?

What was the idea that thing isn't that amazing? Yeah, I know that. Gosh, I mean, IT should be some sort of, no, i'll be a flake archaeology like, no, this is, this is a place where where rituals took place.

So many things we say are so just painfully vague. And that's about, you know, what we got and a place like this. I know the one we're looking at here.

I ve been here a couple of times in the pure mid behind IT that the rebels built in away, where the building won't rock apart, this a very a earthquake prone place. But the buildings haven't fAllen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wigged around and don't allow the building to fall down. And inside these, we've also found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there.

And I don't think there's a lot of people that see that and go look at that. They were sacrificing babies, these monsters. I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices corals, evidence being one of them.

I think it's more about the the tragic nature of infant mortality in the past. IT was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn't even really properly name their kid until they got to five, because chances where they, we're gonna die. And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in the ceremonial context that are interpreted as sacrifices, I think they're putting them in special places because they they more than the death of their kids. And I just happened a lot more frequently than one of .

the things you said that really surprised me is that payment ts were built in peru, possibly hundreds of years before they were built in egypt. That's true.

Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, they're crazy. There's one that's now pushing uh six thousand B C E, like that's thousands of years before the stuff in egypt and that once called walk up prieta and IT was not a IT was not an egyptian pyramid d but IT was appeared amid and IT was thousands of years before.

What you think is the motivation to build a permit, the fact that I can h withstand the elements structurally, that kind of thing is, is that, yeah, why do humans build pyramids and why do they build IT in all kinds of different .

locations in the world? Well, you know, my my root answer is, is, is, is pretty boring really. A lot of people ask me, why are their pyrates all over the planet? How is that? Is that a coincident?

I mean, who yeah, I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top and that turns into a pid. You know, any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers, and his brother knocked him down and he wants one that's gonna stay. And b all the ends up making something with a fat base in a in a tiny tap.

And I think that building something big and tall together is one of those, those human things like we built that, that will be here after we're gone. People remember who we are. We are if there is any human commonality, it's it's fear of our own deaths and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us.

I think that the first big monuments like that, we're probably a group of people say, and we're going to do something that people will remember forever now that me and said, I remember we were just talking about walk up preeti. And this one that's almost six thousand bc now is the first one that wants a funny case. Are we just talked about all these lofty goals, but actually i'm pretty sure that Walker, at his first peer mid, was about capping a smelly pile of trash.

I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town. Yes, and it's stunk. It's on the coast. It's stunk like fish. And somebody said, if we just bury this thing with dirt, IT won't smell anymore.

And then there was a big mound where people could get up and talk everybody and then said, well, it's wishy. They know if if we cap IT with clay, then IT will really not smell. I really think that the very first pyramids in perou were about trash management talk about playing, yeah. But then they .

probably sign they were impressed and humbled by the of the enormity of the construction, like we should. Maybe the next guy thought, maybe should keep building .

these kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not, not to jump ahead. But in north america, know where they also made pyramids.

There's this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells that was in the uc thing to collect to need. So these piles of shells would be near communities, and they probably became landMarks.

But eventually they started buried their dead inside. Those two probably again, about think and about, you know, well, we don't want the dog data. My maybe put him in the middle of shell pile.

But then that all of a sudden became this, like, that's where my grandfather's body is. That's where great grandfather's body is. In all of a sudden, people started being attached place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors.

So when the very first pyramid was built in, uh, ohio area by the ordinary people, IT was built out a dirt. But it's full of bodies. And I think it's an echo of a old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shall mounds.

So where and who were the first civilizations in south amErica as america?

Well, you know, I think we're still piece that together. I coming back to the first things we talked to that I think we're still missing a lot of stuff, specially in south america. IT just keeps getting older and older.

Part of the reason it's hard to answer that question is at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture we have in the america's this long period of time that we call the the the paleo indian time where they were hunting megaera. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called the archaic, where they're just hang and gathering. Sometime somebody's coming up with a cool, different kind of arrow head.

They go back and forth with different hunting tools. But really, nothing changes for thousands of years. And then finally, they start developing into these larger groups, which, for the most part, has to do with agriculture.

That IT used to be archaeology. That was just the end albius civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm, but that's been discounted.

Peru was a big part of that. That area of coral, it's connected to another city on the coast called aspire. And aspire starts about the same time, but they're all about fishing.

They have no farming. And a who's up river from them is farming but funny enough, they're not really farming food. They're farming cotton and they're making nets and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish.

Um so it's not as simple as as just agriculture anymore if but IT is, I think still rooted in how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we'll no longer scared about running out of food. So is this .

possible which is something you've argued that civilization started in the amazon in the jungle.

I do think I think religion in south amErica began in the amazon. I think there were people. They are very old. There's actually um the early liest pottery in all of the americas, all these places that we have civilizations to grow up. You know where the oldest pottery is, the middle of the amazon.

So there's interesting cultures developing in the amazon. So religion, you would say, proceeded civilization .

in south america, the that the coral and aspera that I was just talking about. It's weird what a death of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pure mids and things that we call temples, but we don't really know what went on in there.

And there is no hence of religious psychographs ceremonies. Nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends, about eighteen hundred bce, this culture called shaving starts up.

And they, their main temple is up in the andes, in this place of least path, least resistance between the amazon and the coast. It's about three days walk either way from this, this place where this temple is. That's where we started seeing the very first religious technos phy.

And it's all over the temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast, but the iconography are all jackers and snakes and crocodile, and those don't come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of the amazon.

I mean, religion is a really powerful idea. Religions, I want the most powerful ideas. There are the strongest myths that tie people together into you. Is possible that this powerful a idea in south amErica started in the amazon?

I do I do think IT did. Um and you're right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archaeology can see them at all. We can see sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they they create and lead to. But there's an interpretation problem or we write about what idea hated this that those of things that archaic logy just can't get at.

That's one of the chAllenges of archaeology, looking attention histories. You trying to not just understand what they were doing towards the architecture, but understand was going on inside their mind.

That's really what what i'm in IT for are trying to understand these people and its real detective work. And we know we're dealing with A A totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. You know, if we look around this room here, if if two thousand years of wetheral happened in this room, what would be left and what would we think happened here?

Right, right, right. But there's the not in this room. But if you look at thousands of rooms like IT, maybe you can start piece things together about the different ideologies that rule the world, the religions, the different ideas. Tell me about this thing. Dd, one of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the the religions, there's a thread that connects the difference of visions, the societies of the andean region and the religion of practice is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the ministry.

That is exactly what I think. I think it's all about this fan gdi, who somewhere thousands of years ago, crawled his way out of the amazon, up into the and and a religion, or called that could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast in the amazon. But he is the one creator DVD, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the amazon still talk about him there. His name is v ha, say in some groups, but they say that his a his emotion ies on earth of the jack wars, and that he is thee creator deity.

Why is the current ministering belief? Is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic?

Well, there are Bonnie ed pantheon. So know greece had one, egypt had one. Mp time I had one.

Lots of the early religions of the old world were painted on, and I think that was part of the problem. The earliest dark eulogists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have panthay on. And so they went to the art looking for them.

And they came up with things like the shark god and the moon god is and the sun god and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, texas, an art historian, you follow certain uh, diageo stic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at IT and use that method, gy, there's a single face with gogo lives and fans and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off his head and off of his belt.

He's got really identifiable traits. He also likes to several people's heads off and Carry them around, but he's the fanged daily, and he's there. He shows up in chavez day, antar, the capital of that chavez culture.

And he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the inker, the anka have a creative DVD they call very culture. But vera culture is the fan di. He is when we do see him, by the time we get to inker, they do this kind of like almost str.

Islamic thing where they say you you can't understand the face of vera coaches. So when they do put him in a cosmic gram, they'll make him just a blob like he's just unknowable, but he's at the very top. I think we're misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say, where deities as just supernatural beings.

If we flipped the mirror on Christianity and take a look at IT, which of course, Christianize monotheists c right IT would be perrache to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters? Who are all these Angels and demons and yeah jesus Christ and I mean, I don't even know who the holy spirit IT is, but he's some sort of supernatural being but it's that monotheistic c system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not god. That's where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient dd an artist.

So what what is the process of analyzing art through time to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture? You just see what shows up over over.

over over. Well, certainly without the um advent of writing, a depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them. And there are certain what we call diageo stic elements like what we can we can pull apart the same sort of thing in like in the greek panthay on you know you know by their dress and what they're holding, what the different gods are, you can tell hates from from zoo, by the different things that are holding.

The lightning bolts are tried, or whatever is. So they all have these elements to them. So that's how our history goes about analyzing art over time.

Once once we can put you in a chronic gal sequence, then we can say, okay, here's here's a dd here in shaving culture. Now we move forward five hundred years now, were in moti and nazca culture. You know who are who, where the d is here.

And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two trades, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures. He's god circular ze. He's got a fanged mouth.

He's got claws on his hands and feet. He's a humanoid, but he also has a snakes coming off of his head like hair, and snakes coming off of his built, and then not so much in shavin. But as he goes forward, he starts carting around a severed heads, human severed heads.

So they're like in the old literature, uh, the motive, call him in the decapitator or D A D, but then they have these other like, oh, here's the crab dd and here's the fox dd but if you look at them, the crab theory is just that guy's face coming off of a crab, and the fox theory is that guys face coming off of a fox. So I think on that particular instances, I explained IT, similar to what zoos did, you know, how zoos was able to like? And now turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted. And he showed up in all sorts of forms, what he was always zoos. I think that the uh the fan dei manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art, and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don't have any more.

And across hundreds of years, thousands of years, some service to mota, to inker, as you're saying, right?

Worry has them to to will not go at that famous place. Puma punk o he's all over there.

I wonder how those ideas, bread in moral of this thing daily.

I think people walked in prostatic and places like shavin, there's a later when in na times called patcha comic, that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they're sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So a chavanon was a place where people from the amazon and people from the coast were all coming together.

In fact, we saw in the archaeology there's these interesting lamer under the pym ds with the fancy all over them that have like one laboring, they'll have all pottery. The next laboring, we'll have a bunch of animal bones. The next one, i'll have a bunch of things made out of stones. So people are showing up and giving this trip bute, and they're learning, and then they're going back to their community. So I think IT dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pillon spot s do somebody goes back and they build a temple .

to the fangda do we know much about the relationship ahead with the fan di um and like their conception of the powers that thing is IT were they afraid of the thing that is and all knowing god, is that something that brings joy and harvest? There is something that you're supposed to be afraid of and sacrifice animals and humans to to keep, keep a bay.

I think he had two sides of the coin. A like a lot of the hindu gods are go, one aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. Um I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people's heads off and he is a jack war which you know itself implies a certain power in verocchio.

But then there are other funny things about him like key is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex sex when IT comes to the mocha, there's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women nor men um and some of them show their faces transforming into that fanti like he is acting through them. But the the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fancy. He has a little puppy. He has a puppy that's like just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on him. In various scenes, they see him again and again sometimes season these, these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracks that puppy from other context to these sex scenes where the where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and fang di, and there's a puppy just scratching at the door OK, you ve forgot me and then finally, one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the functionality I was like all he really is very involved in the what is this weird puppy? So he OK, yeah, he likes to take hands off, but he also has a puppy.

He adoors this, actually, this is awesome. Bly make sense. I saw the opening of the paper you wrote thirty years ago on chamonix and motor aliza. IT reads the motor of the major focus of this paper, sex puppies and head hunting will be shown to be related animoto shamanism. Um so now I understand I was like the puppies .

in the .

head hunting that's the decapitator and i've added .

rocks and roll that list sense actually, which a rock and roll arra music is also a big part of IT.

Interesting.

they call spirits down. There's this whole spirit world. There's the ancestors and the the people that drink and pay row catastrophe of.

They don't talk about the thing to eating anymore. I in Christianity in five hundred years, somewhat put him in the back. You know, IT was unpopular to have a peg.

And dad, so they don't talk about him much anymore that we still around there and like around to view. They call him iope c but music play in the amazon. They play fluid.

Sometimes a course of women sing, and that's supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There's a spirit that's hurting the person sick. And then the the priest or the shaman or the core.

And dera, whatever you want to call him, has his own power of spirits that are going to help him figure out what's going on. So when the music starts, that's bringing those spirits in, and people don't see them unless they've inspired the sand patch catch stuff, which is the silos. Gen, which is in the amazon side.

IT was, I awsk on the arms on the coast. IT was some Peter cactus. But that's what allows you to actually see that other world.

Yeah, I I went to the amazon recently, did I? Oscar, the hydro's of .

at both move.

Went in rome, how far bags that go?

Oh, I I think longer than anybody can remember. But I mean, it's a natural plant that's been there forever. I think that it's thousands and thousands of years.

That's another thing a shaving don tara was talking about. Where I think the things came. The religion came from the amazon. There's this wall on the back side that faces the amazon side. So if you're entering the city from the amazon path, you see this wall first.

And a bunch of faces that some of them were humans, some of them were total jaguar and some of them were trains forming in between. But there's a group of them that are midway through transformation, and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that's coming like down their face. And Peter doesn't do that to you, but I asked, does I awash, traditionally, they would take a blow gun and just shoot IT up your nose or up your eyes, but IT a lot of times up your nose. And when he shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just discussions not comes out of you. And there are stone, uh, depictions of people uncontrollably snotty on the back side of this temple from three thousand years ago.

so that you think could have been a big component of the development of religion. And chameleon.

I think that halloween gans opened the mind then, like they opened the mind now .

do you think that you know the stone name theory um do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of civilization in the americas?

Yes, I do though you know hysan agents are not part of every um ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strAngely, the majority of plants that that are actually psychologic, not just mood altering, are from here in the americans there there are very few drugs that will make you halcon ate outside of the americas. Of course now they're global and now there they can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were outside of the america. So they were part of the experienced in a way that they just couldn't be in other places.

I wanted to what degree there are just part of a ritual and the create force behind of art verses like literally, the method by which you come up with the ideas, the defined civilization, like the degree to which they had a role in the formation civilizations. It's kind of fun to think about psychology being critical role information aliza.

I think in terms of south america, they probably really were um in north amErica where we're in more northern climb here and there are less of them, not so much at least in terms of psychiatric ics. Things like about tobacco was always a big part of IT, but a lot of there's more than one way to meet, to reach a holus anatol state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation.

And for the the mia, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation. And then they've cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe, triggered hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs.

I was just prefer the drugs, right? Is there is it's the result, not the, the tools aren't the thing that creates insight。 It's the the .

result like getting to hellum or poisoning. They're killing us. You know, it's a it's a near death state. And people of the america's believes sleeping was entering that other world. Death, you entered the other world, and that when you took this mighty dose of poison, IT was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.

Yes, tom wade said in that one song, I like my town with a little drop of poison. So maybe that poison is a good, uh, catalyst for invention. So who were the early first sort of mother cultures, mother civilians in south america? They what is if if we look chronologically, is there a labor we can put on the first peoples that emerged?

That picture is evolving. I mean, forever IT was just the chavez people that we've been talking about. The ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture.

And they certainly did transmittal lot of stuff. But then all of a sudden we find at coral the next one that we've barely even begun looking at, but it's probably older than coral, is a chin culture. I was just poking around there last year.

And just just from the bus on the highway, I could see like that's a permit out there. There's another one. And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It's again three thousand bc. We're just barely beginning to understand them. Coral frustrates tes me to no end the lack of art there that's we've got out stones and bones and not even thermal ics to go on, and they didn't have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don't know what those people believed.

right? So one of those to understand what people believe is looking at the art, the stories told through the art and then hopefully deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing.

That's our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas yeah.

And IT sucks when they don't have art. If we just go back to the amazon, you've mentioned that is possible that there's a loss civilization that exit in the amazon. So it's Carried a lot of named blow city of z or eldorado do think is possible. IT existed.

while city of the and alderdene are in pretty different places that alderton to the the ideas of where IT is kind of center around towards columbia. O and city of z is named after a region of brazil called the shining u and so those, those are A A in amErica worth of distance apart. Now the entire people don't really think about IT on the map, but the entire united states would fit inside the amazon.

That's how big that places yeah. And these two were on either end. But both of them have evidence of civilizations, these big it's it's low land and IT floods over time.

So what they did is they would make these big mounds, and then they'd make huge cod, cause ways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally the indicated. And a bunch of that stuff has been found in the shingo area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people. Again, you know, it's not stoned built and it's been under the forest forever, so it's very torn up, but it's there now.

Brazil is big on the cattle farming more than ever now. And I think that I think is completed now as brazil and bOlivia partnered together and build a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these, what we call like geometric earthworks. So there is more and more evidence of these civilizations. It's not a it's not that could be there is there for sure, by the way.

the people who are trying to protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of things I learned, if you build a road, a loggers will come, yeah, and they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archeology perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things.

But from a sort of protect a very precious rainforest perspective, it's obviously the opposite way. But IT IT is interesting. I've seen where loggers cut through the forest, and then they, in when they leave, the force heals itself very quickly.

So quickly.

And you know, you just think that across decades, you expand that centuries, and like you could see how our civilization could be completely swallow up by the reinforce and IT happened for sure.

in the amazon. You know there one of the ways that were trying to push the frontier of where people were in the amazon because, yes, the the trees and just the bio mass have eaten so much evidence, but they're finding more and more of these places that they call their preta, which is black earth and their huge swath of IT.

So because the anthropology determines anthropogenic landscapes, and what they're saying is that that really dark earth couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes, then sometime in the distant past, that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black. And it's much more enriched when I when I took a trip into the amazon, I took, I went from my house up the river, the black river, a couple of days and went to, met some different communities. And I asked them about this black earth.

And they were like, yeah, that's why we're here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra and that's what we're gona put our village because that's a place that all of our gardens work. The other places they don't.

One of the things you talk about literally just ask, you have to ask any question and the stories, all the all the secrets are Carried by the people.

And we'll tell you, yeah, that so many people know they. The thing that excites the world about archeology right now is quebec ly tappy. And this, you know, ten thousand. Now, kan tappy is eleven thousand. The whole areas called the toss tepper, we only founded a couple of decades ago.

But I was just know, archaeologist rowing through the area and ask a sheep hurter, hey, you know, you guys know where anything? Oh yeah, let me, let me show you this. And then all of a sudden we've got a lost civilization and and the shepherds always knew where I was.

Just nobody asked him. So speaking of gooda type I A what do you think about the work of gram hancock who also believes that um there's a loss civilization in the amazon?

Well um i've met gram and personally I like him. He's a nice guy and a nice sense of humor and I think he's smart um and and I also think he is A A very good researcher. He and I are working on the same side effects.

The differences are interpretations, I do not believe, grants a idea that a single now last ancient civilizations seeded the rest of them. I just don't see that on a number of levels are effect wise technology, wise art, historical analysis. So I think his research is great. Um I think that he's he's very well read, in fact Better read than a lot of my colleagues. But um his conclusions I disagree with and he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and Normal conversation about IT and agree to disagree without spitting anyone at any point in the conversation.

They'll be a fun argument to be a fun law for um so he he believes his proposal as possible that damon jungle is so a man made garden he was planted there by an advanced anticipation ation is there any degree to wish that could be possible?

Frankly, I agree with him. I mean, it's just like what I was just talking about. It's the conclusion part that we differ from, but the fact that he's basing that on.

That perata are the huge geometric earthworks are the ever increasing evidence of them. They are now um at the bottom of bOlivia to a Diana there everywhere every time we open up the jungle we find these big work. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is uh is a question and also, you know a perspective thing. Grand really focuses in on what we don't know and what could be what's the .

just to educate me, what was the key idea that he's proposing that you disagree with is IT was the level of advancement the civil ation was or how large and centralized that was?

My main point of disagreement is his and his ideas evolved like everybody is, you know, no, no scientist or researcher or anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds IT till the day they die. His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain. A core of them are that there was a very advanced, single, ancient civilization that was utter ly destroyed by climatic conditions.

And the Younger, drier, dry us. hypothesis. Part of that most recently he used than not say that now is into this media thing but he believes that that civilization was destroyed but that um members of IT escaped this category m and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world civilizations for the next revival.

There is where I disagree with them. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not needed by some more advanced civilization from the past, and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry other in his early books, he suggested IT the it's atlantis. I don't think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on to the single, advanced, now completely lost civilization.

And, you know, archaeologists. So we don't have know where all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we're not, you know, we could have the story wrong, but one thing were real good at is finding stuff. I mean, we find fish scales. So I find IT just too big a pitched to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced in that large that we can't even find a potshot from.

yeah. And of course, there is a compelling story that there is a single civilians from which all of this came from because the alternative is, you know, the idea that we came across the bering straight for measure when, although we got to south amErica and got isolated and created all these marvels, sophisticated civilizations in ideas, including religious ideas that looks similar, two other, you know that everybody has a flood myth. So like there's a lot of similarities, every building permits, yeah, but there could be a lot of other explanations. And for even if it's a simple compelling explanation that has to be evidence for the right.

what would that even the bottom line mean? Everything's theories. We were as responsible scientists.

We're trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That's that's one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps. We're supposed to be disproving what we think is happening, not proving IT.

Yeah, you don't want to lean in to the mystery too much in most of weir disciple you are Operating. They really, in the dark room, you feeling around the dog room is mostly mystery. I'll say a lot of science Operate with mostly, well, live room. There's a duck corner, and you kind of figure out a way to let IT. But in an archaic logic, most of IT is a mystery.

right? Yes, it's job security. I like that part, you know. But I I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans has have ever had began as heroic.

Y and luna acy, you know, that guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we've got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is gone to lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if in away for busy burning books of ideas that we don't like, that's where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.

I really love that, and I really appreciate that. You saying that one of the fascinating about just the amazon to me is that there is still a large name of uncontacted tribes as to a wide back into ancient history. You can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the amazon, they were isolated, very, are distinct from each other. Can you speak to this your understanding of these tribes in their history? They're still here today.

Well, a lot of them are these know by uncontacted, we mean, we don't know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are, but the places like eb have very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them. So we have a death of information if they walk out of jungle and talk to us, that's one thing.

But we don't go out. They are looking for him. But they do seem frozen in time.

And I don't think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that. But you know, we were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment. You know, it's a mother.

Necessity is often times how we invent things or why we change its pressure. And one thing the amazon is, once you now figure out how not to die in IT, it's a paradise of food, foods fAllen from the sky and all the time there. And if once you learn to adapt to that environment, you've got very little need. There's no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.

So for the modern humans that come across is on contact tribes. One of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these tribes for violence. So they get very aggressive in attacking whoever they come across.

and not just foreigners. They attacked each other. The ana ma are famous for just having never ending future with each other.

we think is the philosophy behind that.

I don't know. I am a relatively peaceful person, but i've got, you know, i've got the monster in me, like everybody does. And I think that these, you know, its cultural norms that become institutional zed for the anoma o they really part of the the right of passage to be a man is to go killer name somebody from an outer village and they go in there.

They often times the way they don't let um in breeding set in and ruin everybody. Not that they think of IT scientifically, but they they typically go in steal women from far off communities. And that starts a big fight.

Another thing that starts fight that when nobody even fight is illness. illness. And the amazon and all of the ancient americas wasn't seen as a biological thing. IT was a spiritual thing.

So if somebody in your village get sick, the question is asked, well, what spirit is menacing him? And who called IT out on him? And then the rumor starts, what happened? He was joe over there, and that other community still passed off for that time when we stole his daughter.

Yeah, and we ought to go over there and kill jill and then he'll get Better. And so this this this round of never ending violence like cat fields and mccoys had that thing in the the people of a new gini also do that. So it's not know there are certain areas, uh, mostly would ded areas now that I think about IT where people just tied out and they attack each other as a cultural uh, institution.

is this a tRicky thing to do to study an an uncontacted tribe without obviously contacting them to figure out the language, the philosophy of mind, how to communicate the higher key they Operate under?

And yeah, you know, there was a fascinating story in perou. I guess that was probably like eight years ago or something. But there was a ranger from one of the biology stations who, just in the buy and buy of protecting his area, met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone that the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods, not in their community.

And he started to learn their language over couple years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him with arrows and just killed him.

And then they went back in the woods. Like, that's the one guy who understands what we're saying. We we should kill him and move our village .

so those folks really lean into the as you said, the monster first is the ah the .

puppy you know everybody's got IT. I I think I think you we we need to listen .

to .

our Better Angels because if we don't, we we as a human species, can easily devolve into just using violence in against others to get what we want. We, it's a, it's a daily choice we make not to be savages.

He is a fascinating to remember what kind of think in civilized society will move past all that. But you can IT can be summoned, I can, uh, nineteen eighty four, the two minutes of hate would the right words, that primal thing can be summoned and directed, uh, and lead to allow destruction.

And our our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive for somebody who's not dead at the end of IT.

Yeah ah so at which point did what we not call the mor civilization arise?

That's a that's another complicated one. Another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the amazon and and what we're talking about now is the pen and the mountains there.

Those are places archaeologists want to live. They're horrible. I mean, i've been there.

I don't. Anna live in attempt and eat russians. I want to live in a nice town. So a lot of the places where the answers are, we still really haven't gotten there, because IT takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they are looking at and tough enough to want to be there. I've done my tour duty now in a nice little podcast studio.

But seriously, the ma, the first hint that we see people who are culturally ma very close to wear the time period for the chivy culture is about eighteen hundred B. C. E.

There is a culture that some called the ma, but they're on the pacific coast a where guatamo mexico connect. It's called the sock uco are those are the first people that are really gonna be culturally mie. And they are interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as mexico's mother culture, which is the old mic.

They are kind of the same thing as we were talking about south america, where the the maya, the original mayer are not. There's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion um but they all make have this religion they develop and they start exporting IT. And you see the maya become more and more involved in in the religion that's being created by the alec, who are to the north of them, in the swampers of what we call the isms of to want to pack.

I have a lot of questions to ask her about just a natural, stupid confusion. I have the first, they admire the all my come first. And are they distinct groups like Hardy maintain a distinct civilization when you so close together?

I I just finished filming a whole thing on the old max in their interaction with demi for the great courses. I'm thrilled for IT come out next spring um I think they co evolved archaeology in this regard is the worst enemy of them. We put these names on cultures.

We we talk about how they evolved from one to another. We draw these lines where there aren't Denny. We make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name where i'm pretty sure they didn't care about any of those names.

But the the maya and the alec are two parts of a larger interaction. Fear that happening in measle america. Very dynamic time.

The old maker are really bringing the religion part, but the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic c technology, making him metek mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other other stone types. So you've got the old mic in the middle where where mexico o gets skinny and IT gets swampy down there. That's called the east mist of tanto pec.

That's where the all my car, then you've got the mayor to the east of them. Then you have the valley of wahaha, where the people call the approtec. They're rising up.

And then you have the valley of mexico, which will eventually become the s tex. But not for her millen. A all those areas are interacting with each other.

Can we just also draw some more lines? So what is missing america? What is south america? And what you just said, the omni s the mayor like, can we just linger on the geography that we're talking about here in the what is this like .

a thousand bc um yeah the time period we're talking about where the the old maker there a thousand bc great midpoint of IT i'd say IT starts about eighteen hundred bc. And by five hundred bce the old macker gone and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happen.

In terms of mezzo america, looking at your map here, i'd say about halfway through the chaos desert up there in the top left, that's that's about the boundary of medal america. There's this big desert where almost nobody, once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral pleb, low people of what's now america. The four corners area, they're not measure american different lie.

Where's this modern mexico end?

Modern mexico ends, right? You see the name mia there with the White line around IT. That's guatamo a so automatic cuts off most of mexico from central america, but mezo amErica only goes about halfway through honduras.

And then it's really kind of a no man's land. Ua, nicaragua, coastal. Rk, panama.

They really a they're neither. They're not measure america. They're not south america. They're more south amErica because they've got some gold there. But then basically, you get on the other side of panama and you you're fully in south amErica with two distinct groups to you've got the eyes that are on the andes, on the the west coast, and then have the amazon.

So the west, the and the amazon are very distinct. So when you sit, when you refer to the andy and region, is that referring to the andes and .

the amazon, or just the andes, just the andes that the and the and the coast that to the pacific there, that that indian civilization .

to make IT to the? And is the indian region .

not that archaeology can prove, but it's almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it's just know it's bias to think that these people couldn't travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did. But there is all sorts of hints, like that first ceramics I was talking about, that the mia aid, they show up strAngely sophisticated, technologically already, and down in an ecuador, they had them for a thousand years before. So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of syria s actually came from south amErica to the mirror.

Did the mayer get seated by the second wave across the bearing strait? Or did that initial wave of people that came and a populated south america? Were they the answer? admire. Like, how did the migration happen here? Do you understand we're still .

piece IT together? I don't think i'd be blind if I told you I have the answers, but we do have evidence of mia state people. There are small people. Generally speaking, people to grow up in the forest are smaller, and people to grow up and the open planes are taller. Probably about, you know, just generations of people that hit their head on .

a branch or not joking. But you know, there could be .

some I think there's some truth to IT. I mean, the pig is are small and the people on the planes in africa big. The north american indians are tall in the mayor small.

Its there is there is definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway there's a cave in the ukraine called low tone cave that has uh hand prints in the cave. It's somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcol around their hand like a negative print.

We can date that charcoal and IT comes from ten thousand years ago, and the hands are all small. Its typical old nexo. I I walked right up to these things and could put my hand.

I didn't know mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands. And they're all smaller than my out northern european in hand. And so either IT was a bunch of kids who were in this cave ten thousand years ago, or IT was people of my, a stature, who did .

IT so cool, if you can date to charcoal, and so cool at ten thousand years ago.

There people live in. And actually we have one that I think two thousand years older now, just a couple years ago, again, in ukraine, and a cave, they found a woman they named name now, and she's like twelve thousand years old.

So the best guess maybe that you have is IT goes across the bearing street to south america, possible the amazon, develop logical ideas in the amazon, and start drifting back up into, as amErica .

was kind of a coevolution. The technology of ceramics, I think, got there. Few in invitation.

See, the interesting thing is that the, my, I didn't really have religion, didn't have, as a viBrant religious set of ideas. And they bordered IT from the all my.

i've been doing a deep dive on this for this all my course that I just did and I really does seem like um these other cultures that have jae in hematite in a city in that the all I had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp and building things out of dirt, but they were importing those materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts of religious syco graphics and then exporting them back to them.

And still the fund show up.

No, the fan did is nowhere in a in central amErica and measle america. That's why there there's jg AR, there's jaguar iconography. But it's not the same thing. This this whole jack bar transformer DVD does not exist there. They do have a panthay on.

So the mind all act of interesting peoples of the regions. What was there? I'd love to ask questions about who are they? So what one question i'm curious about what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the Cosmos?

Oh, that's a question i've spent my entire career trying to answer. I I think that takes as proof of the signal nature of life. And certainly they saw, like every ancient group did, like, are those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the mayer especially looked at IT in a with a much more mathematical mind than most dead.

And so they watched these things move every night. And if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They're just this blanket.

They are like, they're like this curtain behind me. They're the stage upon which some very important players were dancing. And that's the moon, the sun and the planets.

There's five planets we can see visibly. So they started watching like, why are just those seven moving differently than the rest? And those are the things that they keep on mathematically. The sun, of course, was also involved in the cultural cycle.

So that was important in and of itself, but the the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math and seeing that there is a repeated cycle, and then coming up with mythology around them, like Venus for them, was associated with war. And they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus. Sometimes in the classic period, maya IT was the first appearance of Venus as the morning star.

That was a good time to go to to battle with your neighbors. And when IT became the post classic with, like, teaching needs are being the capital of the U. K. I then IT looks like if you watched Venus day after day and go slowly up every day.

And then when IT hits its highest point as morning star in the in the morning, IT goes down to the earth, like three times as fast, all of a sudden, IT IT just shoots down and hits the earth. And so the people who post classic ma civilization saw that as the god's shooting a spear into the earth. And that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was like war time when the spear is going to hit the earth.

right? So fascine, they just had at the foundation a sense that life existence at the various time scales is local. Yeah, that's a starting point. And then you just look out there and if you are extremely precise, which is fascinating, and how precise that you can just measure the the cycles. Yeah.

and they did IT really well. Now, of course, they they are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated writing system in all of the americas. The south amErica had the key too, but it's so different than our writing were still trying to figure out what the heck he is.

We know there's math there too, but they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand IT to the next generation who would then do IT more and do IT more. That's how they figured out kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy. How good were they was? Whether they can see the procession of the equal axis.

The fact that we're just barely wowing and there's a twenty six thousand year period where the stars as that backdrop will spend all the way around and come back. It's twenty six thousand years, but the my I were able to figure out weight. It's moving one degree every seventy two years and did a calculation based on on on where IT should be in the ancient past. And they're using conStellations. They're showing us, they know by saying like this planets in this conStellation right now and thirty three thousand years ago, IT would be in this conStellation.

It's just fascinating that they were able to figure this out. I would love to understand the details of the scientific community, uh, if you can call IT that .

I think we absolutely could. And that's actually one of the things that i'm i'm hoping to move the needle on in my generation with my career, is to give these cultures the the respect they deserve, a standing TOTO toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect. There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment.

There, you know, their math is incredible there, their hydration engineering is incredible. Their chemistry is incredible. And so I hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way.

Yeah, I mean, unquestionable, incredible, difficult. K in in the astronomy sense, uh, especially here. Can you speak to the all the sophisticated aspects of the mine calendar, uh, that they've developed?

But I know you got another five hours cup.

I I know i'm kidding. I should say that you also gave me a twenty twenty four my calendar.

Yeah, I do this justice, you know, show the world that that calendar system is ever Green IT can go into the future or the past for billions years in the system they made, just like our system is.

So can you speak to the three components here? I'm reading the tolkin, the hub and the long count. What are these fashion in components account?

It's meet how obsessed they were really math nerds. IT wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that that interlocked into each other like, like dogs in the machine, though they never thought of IT like that.

But the so teams, their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of mia people that are living their lives based on a two hundred and sixty day count, no weeks, no months. It's just thirteen numbers combined with twenty day names for a total of two hundred and sixty days.

And then IT goes again. Everybody in the islands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what that means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they're supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit and what supposed to happen in those days.

The maya collectively call them the mom, the grandmother, grandfather, spirits, and, and, and they talk to each one of those dates, and they pray with them. They have there's now an association of some eight thousand people that are called a key that are daylight ebers who are keeping the days. And they're also like community psychologists.

Almost people come to them and say, you know, my life is mixed up. What's wrong here? Well, let's ask the mom like OK, well, looks like you're not doing this with that or you know what, you're an accountant.

You're not supposed to be in accountant. You're supposed to be you a midwife. What are you doing? Your you're living your life wrong. You you are keep you need to start being a key to .

take extremely ly seriously the day and which you're born what that means like the spirit boys that day.

right? Like i'm i'm key. I'm thirteen keep and IT says my it's funny how accurate a lot of the my mind is basically is i'm i'm an irresponsible husband in parent but people like me so my family still prosperous like going a god that's that's horrible. That's horribly hackit.

I mean, some of IT is also the chicken at the eg, if you truly believe. If so, if you structured society where this calendar is truly sacred, then I kind like you manifest a lot of the the spirit doesn't ifeanyi self in the life of the people that was born on that spirit day.

absolutely. And and the way I really feel this in this system, so that's the core system, this two hundred and sixty day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago, and it's the one that's most important today.

why? Two sixty days, by the way, is the reasoning .

behind from most my, I agree with this today. And you know who knows what the original architect thousands of years ago we're thinking. But it's nine months.

It's the human gestation period. So if you if you conceived on the day thirteen monkey, chances are your kids coming out on or near thirteen monkey. And I think it's beautiful.

I mean, if if that's right that means the mayor and the people in misal america, we all share IT together um when they thought about we need we need a count of time, that's for us. They didn't look up into the heavens they looked like into their bodies. What's the first cycle that we actually go through with humans and they pick this nine months? S thing is IT really is our cycle. And no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.

Uh, so that's the oldest one in the sacred one is still Carry to to today. What's the second on the hub?

The hub is the solar calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know its second though, because when they start talking about IT, they use all the symbols in the numbers from the two hundred and sixty one. They say, well, we need a solar one two, let's just keep counting this. Another hundred and five days we'll get to three hundred and sixty five.

Oh, interesting. They kind of Carry the same. Got to, got to. And that's useful because for all the sort of agriculture, all this kind of reasons.

right, though interestingly, they never put a lip ya in the hub is also called the vague because it's just three hundred in the sixty five, which means every year they're off a quarter of a day and eventually IT starts really adding up yeah in fact, it's even caused modern, modern problems in this calendar. Here I just do the straight math from a thousand years ago.

And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently than some mia groups do, especially the guys in the islands of eastern guaTamara. They write me naked, the email saying, and I don't know what time the year is, but their relatives changed in the nineteen fifties because their agricultural cycle was so far off, they moved IT sixty days back to make IT in the spring again. But IT drifts, which is strange because it's not a very good thing for the the agricultural cycle. It's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for.

Ah so that's the hub. And then what's the long count?

The long count? They really mysterious cool one because it's a lenie account of days which are not like them. It's it's a bunch of cycles like hours you know our weeks or recycle our months or recycle um but it's weird in that its estimation of the year in the in the long count system is only three hundred and sixty days so it's miserably of A A solar year.

They count in base twenty so they can't like we can't in tens were they count based twenty vegetable? And so IT should be out. There's once there's twenty, there's four hundreds, there's eight thousands, there's one hundred and sixty thousands up IT goes just like our ten hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, but it's times twenty.

So that third so they have days, months of twenty days and then they have these years that are should be by their math, four hundred, but it's only three sixty and that throws the whole thing out of wax going further up. Then they have a twenty year period and a four hundred year period, four hundred years to their calendar. But it's only by that time, it's only three hundred and ninety six years in our period and our reckoning. So it's it's mysterious that is why did they tweet IT at the year to be only three hundred and sixty days that that doesn't follow any astronomy that doesn't as not the human cycle yeah but .

there and an interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long party time like back tones is one hundred and forty four thousand days.

right? Or uh about two is four hundred of the long counts years. So it's kind of like our millennium.

We think it's a big deal when we hit a millennium or or over century that they have a twenty year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called the cartoon. And then they have the four hundred back tune, which is the big one that's like their millennium. And thirteen of those back tunes occurred in the creation before us.

They also think that we were in that the world has had multiple creations. They're not alone in that. There's lots of ancient civilizations who say that, but we're technically in the fourth creation.

And there they have a creation story called the puple zoo. And the pope, who is clearest day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes, called the hero twins. And the fourth creation begins.

And so on the mia monuments, we see them doing the math through the long count, and we can calculate IT back very exactly what happened. The fourth creation started on August eleven, three thousand, one hundred and fourteen B, C, and IT says he doesn't say it's day one. IT says it's the last day of the thirteen fortune of the third creation which leads us to believe that the creation is only thirteen back tms long.

right? So and this would be the fourth creation. The country starts .

fourth creation, but if you do the math going from three thousand, one hundred and fourteen B C, and count thirteen back tunes forward, you get to twenty twelve.

Enhance the the very popular notion that twenty twelve, whenever that .

was december.

the end of the world. So can you explain this?

Those were very fruitful years for me. I had so many lectures around the country that was it's like like garet t Morris and satay. I lived the the the apocalypse was very bitty good to me um I mean but that .

that is pretty interesting so that that that would be so technical will be what in the fifth yes.

technology that we'd be in the fifth though my argument was that actually if you look through all the corpus of bio, mathematics and calendars, they never say anything like that. In fact, there's a hand full of dates that tell us that that the fourth creation does continue further on that that back tune place should have twenty twenty back tunes in IT like their counting system would dictate, not thirteen.

And there's there's a place in in poland, gay, there's a place in the dressed in codex. And one of the place i'm forgetting that a that i'll talk about time after twenty twelve. So how does that happen? It's a conflict.

Is this supposed an overlap of the of the of the thirty? So like thirteen is the core of IT and is twenty long.

They love the number thirteen. It's all over the place. It's a magic number to them. My explanation which I admit is is not very solid but um I think that the magical deeds of the hero wins in their creation story at the end of the third.

The third creation hit the magical reset button and that IT just restarted time right there because of their magic. But that was not to say that the natural cartoon cycle should be thirteen. And there are certain texts that uh that go way forward in time or way backward in time.

And whenever they want to do that, there are higher increments than just the back tune above that. There's the pic tune and there's the caliber tune, then there's olawa tune and IT goes on and on. And these are like, you know one hundred and sixty thousand years, huge generations at time whenever they want to do that, and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting thirteen years in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they're saying is they're making an esoteric statement about the never ending nature of time. That's that's what I think there they're telling us in those texts that time goes on forever, magically.

But there they still had a conception that didn't go on forever before, right? There was other civilizations that came before in there and there. This is the fourth creation.

the fourth creation. And the gods made everybody that the first ones were made of d and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals.

The the third ones were like us, but but flawed in some other way. And then we're finally made of of the blood of the gods and corn. We're made out of corn.

So we're were perfect. And as the as IT explains to us, the the pope vu does weve got IT right this time there. There is there is no reason believe that this creation has a set duration.

What one of the weird things is that the s text, who we talk to a lot at contact, they also had the concept of multiple creations before us. But they were real clear to the spanish that they weren't all the same time element. Some of them were in the three hundreds of years, some of them were in the seven hundreds of years, but they were not the same time period.

So are our mathematical logic that if the third creation was thirteen, this one must be third creation. Also be thirteen, is in direct opposition to what the aspect told us about the nature of creations. There are different time periods.

What do you think there was the method of the previous creations? Do they have some kind of long multi generation memory of prior civilizations?

IT may have had some echo in the the flood myths as the saying.

is the same kind of major maths Carried the long periods of time.

There's a lot of different opinions about IT and there are like if they were all thirteen, if we have five creations like the as texts and they were thirteen, they would come up to roughly twenty five thousand something years, which is very close to processional cycle. So some people are like they designed all to be one completion of the procession of the equal axis.

And I mean that I .

don't believe that one, but that once sure sounds good, doesn't that's gna get a lot of internet hits?

And one of the things I do obviously wonder about as why the flood myths is part of, like most societies and most religions.

I think that once pretty easy, it's the end of the ice age when the bath tub filled back up.

Ha, so it's just the .

ice age back up with seas filling back up.

And they without really understanding what happened, they just Carry that that story.

Everybody knows that everybody's nice coastal village went under water. yeah. And they had they had to seek higher ground.

And then just like people like talking about the weather, everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level is going up, and then that that was Carried.

Why do we live here? grandpa? Well, we used to live over there, but then the water came.

And then many grandpas later is just kind of permits every idea IT becomes mythology.

but global mythology so that one know there's a lot of things I don't have a reasonable explanation for, but the but the flood myth is almost certainly the the rise in sea level.

So the this idea that every day represents cares a spirit ah you know there's modern day of logy. You know most people kind of consider strategy this um maybe a bit unscientific woo type of a such beliefs, but do you think there is some wisdom that strategy Carries from your scholarship of the my calendar? You think if you Carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, you think there's some wisdom there?

I don't know, you know that that I I have a will part of me. I, I, I would like to believe that stuff. But I don't think as a scientist, that makes I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true.

And when you look at IT objectively, I mean really is everybody born with the sign scorpio a moody person that's just that's just objectively not true um but IT is funny how often times these these ma a hora scopes, for lack of a Better word, do hit the mark. There were some student to surveyed like three hundred people with the APP I made and asked them about their greek sign in their mia sign. And his conclusion for his term paper was that the mie one was working way Better, which that's that's fascinating at least that's that's fun. But no, i'm I think i'm too much of a scientist to believe that I just don't have any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality in destiny.

agree. And yet there's so much mystery all around us that, uh, what I do like is the inbuilt humility to that world view that there's this whole you can call a spiritual world, but a world that we don't quite understand and then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world Carries and the construct or consumed stems to try to interpret that. And then there is where the human hubris can come and and know. But it's good to be humbled by how little we know.

I suppose I do love the mysteries of the world, and I I I would love to find an ancient civilization, but I don't I don't want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they're one of the things that make world life force live in.

That's true. That's true. Um you mentioned the ma writing system. What are some interesting aspects of their language that you've used in the written language that they used?

Well, you know one of the things that can found me as a guy who spent have a Better portion of my life studying and I had the honor of being the student of Linda Shelly, right here at the university of texas at Austin. SHE got the group together, who broke the mia code of higher Cliffs in the nineteen seventy seven I learned from the best, and I loved every minute of IT. I miss Linda.

Can you speak to that code actually, to have with the code and takes to break IT?

Oh boy, I mean, what a, what a thing. We had kind of a rose, that stone. We had a page out of the ago, the land's book, a priest to a converting the maya in mukton, asked his informed about their writing system and what every sound meant, and he was convinced they had a alphabet like we do.

So he got this, my, a guy SAT down in spanish, and he said, okay, you're onna, write all the symbols right here in my book, right? Write and are here. Write a bay here, write a say here.

And that I just wrote all of the sounds that the priest told him to, right? They were actually silly balls. They were val constant combinations.

They weren't in alphabet, but that turned into our rosette stone of sorts. The big key is that the maya still speak the same language. There are millions of my people who are speaking a version of maya.

Now there's there's where I get confused that we've got a single writing system that is intelligible. We've broke in the code, so we know that it's basically the same writing system from the top of the u can into guatamo and else l vore. But we have thirty three mile languages today that are mutually unintelligible.

And we we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then at the gliff erin, to something called children, which is a combination of chord and chill, two of those languages. But IT doesn't work for me at all. How did if there was one language, maybe too, back then? How did IT flower into thirty three mutually unintelligible languages in just five hundred years during culture, a cultural and horrible infection, diseases that killed ninety percent of the population? How did that happen? So we're missing something huge here. I think it's more like chinese, where chinese letters writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood. I don't know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but IT just seems impossible that there are more languages, not less languages, in the my area after the last five hundred years that they've been through.

So you think that there is some kind of process of rather rapidly generating dialects, or there always husband dialogues, or should say they are distinct languages, even though there is a common writing system?

There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like like latten. You know how there was a period in europe where, like most people were illiterate, and there was this, this priest hood who all understood latin, and they wrote in later, yes, maybe the the higher glimpse represent the kind of later in the ancient mia war.

But we don't really know, and there's not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how is possible to have the right.

But we did realize that was actually a russian scholar named jury corn roseae who broke the coat. The americans and the europeans were absolutely sure that the language was a, that the written language was a dead language. But you're not knowing any of that, not being filled with all of those thoughts from amErica and europe.

Went about IT in the way that he was taught in his in his grad school in moscow, and just went to the dictionaries, and he looked at, you can tech language that they're speaking today. And he applied IT to the system, system. And he knew that there were certain sounds used land as alphabet.

And he found there was the his two key examples were a picture of a dog with a symbol over IT and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over IT. And the dog, uh, a dog in UK tea, cool. So he saw two symbols, and he said, this ones probably soul, and this one's all.

And then the turkey was cooked, so we'd be cool, ending in soul. And he showed how, look here, this is suits, this is cool. Those two things that that should be so are the same symbol. And that begin this process of unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today.

That's fazzi. Just that decoding process is fazing. Like, how do even figure that out? And this probably still is there still a you aware of any written languages that haven't been decoded yet?

Yeah, yes, there's a number of them. There's a easter island script. I was just talking to a we've apparently made a few advances there.

Now it's called wrong go, wrong go. And we only have about maybe twenty five examples of texts, but we're beginning to break that. There's also the big one is herbin harrap on for a long time.

We used to say there were there were five independent scripts on the planet and those were chinese Q A A M wishes mess, pattani, an egyptian maya and then herbin wishes from northern india. That's the only one that we've never cracked. And now all the epigraph, the people at the term epigraph, is translating these languages.

They're all ganging up on her rop and want to kick IT off the list because we can't break IT. IT had a big enough sibel set but no one's been able to crack IT. And now they're saying it's just an elaborate sybel set and doesn't reflect the the spoken word.

That's a hypotheses but which is would explain what I thought.

But you know, we could just be faced with a quitter generation. Maybe somebody i'll pick up the but on next generation with the other one that fascinates me is from the amErica is the key poo, the the inc. Ahead, the keeper, this noted string records, but IT was definitely encoding more than just math.

We know the math. I know lots. I can do the math keepers and figure out what they're totally and seeks yeah there's a keeper, right? Or recording .

devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of indian south america. I keep a, usually consist of cotton, or come in a fibre string, a set of strings, and they supposed to what .

to be saying something. There's one long string that the little one's dangle ofa in. Each one of the the dangling strings have sets of nuts on them and the nuts, some of them are mathematical keepers and those we can just do the math.

We can prove that it's math. Um they also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries and cusk a where spanish conkey stars were brought through. And the caretakers that the libraries would just, they'll pull that one down, read that one to me, and he'd pull IT out and just read a history of something that happened two hundred years earlier. So IT was definitely writing. But in the fifteen and seventies, one one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called keep comeaux gathered up, had them read all of their capos and transcribe them into spanish books, and then had the keep poos burned and those .

people murdered go.

And so we can't break the code still today, but we know IT was absolutely a written language that IT wasn't written IT was weaved or not IT.

And there is still some keeps available that .

there's I think now we've just crossed the one thousand mark. So we have a thousand key POS. There's enough to break the code and and I think this generation might be the one .

that does IT. It's sad. So you are have survived you in a thousand is good, but it's.

But see, there's peru has barely scratched the surface with archaic logy. There's so much out there. There was a priest I read about named that the ago deports, who was one of the early people in peru converting communities in his chronic, is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of three thousand people, all the spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into Christianity.

And he had the communities, people comeaux not keep POS for each person that told them that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their key pool in town, they were flagged. So he had three thousand of the same keyboard and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find its there is a rose stone.

you know, this is probably the case. There is somebody improve and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands and like you just have to show up and ask them and it's it's like they're like I yeah they there .

are some communities that are using. There's a couple of them that we had high hopes for. And then IT was apparent that they were just they can shed up.

They didn't actually know how to read IT. They just knew IT used to be read. So they like meta bunch of stuff about what IT is.

And they bring IT out and they act like they can read IT. But then when you ask him the details, they don't know. Yeah but then on a much simpler level there.

So lama hodges, who keep a string in their pocket and they've they've got a the knots equating how many lamas they have and then they have sub categories of information, like this one sick, uh, we've lost these ones. This one's pregnant. So they have these more simple and more mathematical keepers, but they're using them to affect as as a record .

is IT possible through archeology to know what, you know, the social organization of the mile was like, what um maybe if there is a higher key, maybe what the political structure was, if there is a leader, different roles, you please, sir, like who had the power, who was powerless, who has certain kinds of roles as possible, to know that actually .

because of hybrid lifts, yeah, we know a whole lot. There's, you know, basic things that archaeology, which is very blunt tool, can figure out, like this guy lives in the richness, this guy lives in a poor house.

But the hyo glimpse tell us specific stuff about who can rule that IT was hereditarily that that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned, and a connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that lived in the underworld. IT also told these things about higher archy like that there were councils of lords underneath the king, who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods, and that there were revolving positions of authority. There was the site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there.

Planche had lords title named fire lord. That was one of the like generals of their army. And we could tell that position changed over time.

So there was one guy named suits who was the fire lord for the early part of a rain of a king called the calm ob. And then by the time he carves the other panel, there's another guy in the position of cock a hl, which was the fire lord. And so he had proved that was, well, he could have been killed.

I mean, case that, but then we have the interesting case of in the post classic, they shed the idea of kings. They don't like kings anymore. That's probably a big part of why the classic disappearance in the abandonment of all those cities happened.

People just get sick of kings. And so they turn into this more council system at chinese. But then when cheese ea falls, there's a new city that architecture looks a lot like teaching is it's called my upon, but IT has what is called the league of my upon.

And IT has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the UK tan and IT is basically a democracy. It's a IT is a mia democracy that happens that individuals from all around the ukraine are there, that each each family has their own council house at my upon that they live back at their place. It's kind of like, am I A congress?

And the presentative .

democracy IT really was, I mean, and this happens in, I guess, twelve, fifty A D, that this, this mia democracy happens. And we know the names of them, and we know their families. And of course they were human. So eventually they scooted all up. Ones family murdered another family in the whole, the whole city burned.

And of course, it's probably some facilities corruption, which is hard to discover through .

part of IT was the s tex screw. And things up, the s text came down with all sorts of like, we will buy everything you're making. And then eventually they were like, could we maybe buy some humans?

Yeah and then one family was like, no. And the other family was like, how to know they're in A A lot of money. So then you they murdered each other in the water supply that polluted in the city, burned.

seems like slavery. Murdering disease is A A large component. The story of humans, as you mention, different periods in the mire at the classic, the post classic, the preclinical c the ark. You just speak to that. So ark is before the relevant.

when everybody y's hunter gathers.

So the classic period was the golden age. And then the preclinical c is the interesting time that we were talking about. And the post classic is when the democracy came about.

well, midway through IT, yes, yeah, reverted back to council systems. The mine love to be part of councils, say, yeah, we have free. Classic is like the origins of civilization.

They're starting to build cities. They're starting to create their calendar. They're starting to create these wonderful works of art. And the classic period, if you look at at ten different textbooks for the mayor, you'll get ten different dates that wigged around him there. But basically that's the that's the age of kings to me.

That's when the cities decide that they're going to organize themselves around a elite ite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors, that are directly in contact with the god's. The maya never contact their god's directly. They contact their ancestors who are there, who act likely is ones to the gods.

And so the mayor, age of kings, has these dynasty sprouting up where these people have basically snows, the rest of the people that they've got a special quality of their blood, and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the god's, where everybody, every joe ma, can let their blood and burn IT and contact their ancestor. But joe is, dad is just a corn former who lives down below when he's got no influenced over the cards. But the rulers, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are in connectives sly sons.

So that's the validation for this king ship that happens for about four hundred years. I know we say two fifty and nine hundred, which is kind of the the encompassing edges of IT, but it's interesting that it's actually specifically the nights back tune of their history. The nights tune begins in like four twenty six and IT ends in like eight twenty nine.

So it's four hundred year period of time and before that there were no kings and after that they're really aren't kings, their heads of councils. So it's I call IT the age of kinks where everybody's following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while that's great means cities built up, populations happening.

That's I see that is kind of a cute personality moment to strong, charismatic leaders, inspire people to do great things together. But eventually, like happens all the time with power, too much power corrupts soul. Of sudden there's this unreal, the huge a lite class that has to be treated special by everybody else and and they started saying, and well, I think we should fight with those guys, and you guys should go take these things and people eventually get sick of IT and they walk away from cities. And that's how we get the mysterious ma collapse, where all the cities are just gone.

That's one of the great mysteries of the mystification ation. That over a very short pater time, but like a hundred years, IT seems to have declined very rapidly. IT collapse. What do you think explains that? What happened?

I think it's a fAiling of archaeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved here no more than twenty to forty kilometers out and started their own farm. And they lived in paris, hable houses and all archeology signature seas is that nobody lives in the city center anymore.

We don't see a bunch of mass bodies. There was no, there's no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end.

And we see that signature plane this day. We see, we know when the city was attacked and burned, mostly that didn't happen. People moved in, migrated and IT seems like right there around like between eight hundred and nine hundred.

A lot of the elites that were on top in the most of IT was in the rain forests of northern bottom. a. They move, they move in two directions.

Some of them move into the highland of watermelon and some of them move up into the u. kine. The city of chic.

Eta becomes the next big capital in ugine. But the word issa is actually a word describing the people who lived around lake p. Ten eats in northern. And all of the mine are super clear about that, that the eats came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created teaching etes so that the elites who were no longer welcome in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.

So why was their decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was their specific kind of events that started this? Was this an idea that kind of form the society?

We are still debating that. We I don't think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated.

I think a lot of things LED to this. One thing we can see archaic, logically, is that every one of the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular.

And we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people. We see IT in lots of the cities at the end of the classic period that people are seasonally starving. I remember a really stark evidence in copan hon.

Terris copan was this beautiful city liniers of seventeen kings. But the last king in the last delete burials that we dig from the city centre, the teeth are the telling part. They get this thing when when you're growing up and you're not getting enough food seasonally, IT shows up in the anamal of your teeth.

That's called a dental hypothesis. And if somebody y's seasonally starving, IT gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of mia, before they left coupon, even the rich people are seasonally starving.

So there is a problem there for sure. But I also think its it's a weird thing that was not an empire. IT was a group of independent city states like greece.

Some of them were already, some of them were enemies. There was a huge civil war that settled out about the end of the classic period. So if IT was europe, you know, the Victors would have taken over.

The losers would have beat. IT gone wherever they went, but when they abandoned these cities that were independent, still, they all left both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So IT couldn't be just as simple as spoils.

Go to the Victor. Um it's such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the copy valley. So I personally think IT was Colin dick timed IT is interesting to note that that night's period, that nights four hundred year period ends right then.

And I think a lot of people, I I can't prove IT archaeologically, but I think a lot of people said we're coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we're doing. When you talk to the mayor today, like at the end of this twenty twelve thing, if you actually talk to mayer, know what happens at the end of a big cycle here, they say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation.

That IT is all of our obligation to change our lives. At the end of cycles that changes coming, we can either read part of IT or we can get steam rolled by IT. The etext did this need thing called the new fire ceremony every fifty two years, which was the biggest, their calendar would.

They'd burn down perfectly good temples, and they burn down their houses sometimes. And they would, just, everybody in in society would perform this, what they call the new fire ceremony, and they would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the maya decided at the end of the nights tune that IT was time to renew the world.

I think this story makes sense because they really internalize the calendar. I mean, there was a really big part of their culture, the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization.

That's what I think. I think that, that they created the calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with IT.

Yeah you mention asked what was the origin of the asset? What these, where do these people come from? At what time? And how.

you know, almost every one of the cultures were talking about. Now we have two different versions of the answer to that question. We have the archaeology version, and we have the s text themselves.

The s text have this wonderful migration story, where they say that they came from a place well to the north called as on, and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero's journey, where they go to the snake mountain place and they encounter the birth of the war, god that theyll worship after this, and how they stepped into the valley of mexico as the last, the lost brothers of everyone in the valley of mexico. They said that they all came from the north. Near alison is a place, a cave with seven different passages called a chicken more stock.

And that all the people who spoke the language now, wattle came from the cave, and most of them went early to the valley of mexico. And in the ethics story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to come in, and but then they show up late game, and they become mercy aries.

They just start working for communities in the valley of mexico. And this takes place in the thirteen hundreds. So about two hundred years before cortez shows up the s tech show up to the valley of mexico, and they make themselves this in dispensable group of mercy aries.

They do the dirty work, the all, the, all the civilized communities around lake tech coca, which is in the middle of that, which is now mexico s city, it's all tried up, but those guys were too civilized to fight with each other. But they could hire the s text to do their dirty stuff. So the s text did that and really change the politics in the game of the valley of mexico.

The dirty stuff. There's deliver the muscle.

yeah, the'd go in and and they kill whoever you wanted killed. And you now go the king of this area. So one of these kings that they are working for really like them and decided i'm going to make the s tex. Part of our ancestry. I'm going to give them my daughter to marry the head of the .

as .

text and the as text sacrificer. And that really pissed that I off. So he took, like his whole army and ran the eyes text out for a while. They say they live in this horrible desert section eating lizard.

But then one of their priests say, we're going to walk around the lake and my vision say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital. And they see that, but it's out on an island in the lake. And he said, well, I don't know that that's the place.

So they build up an island, they go to that island, and then they just start piling up lake mug until they make a whole city there in the middle, the island they make, or the lake they make, an island city. And all of this occurs in about one hundred years. So they show up about thirteen hundred.

The capital of tinos at law, as they called IT, is really established. And from there they quickly take over the entire valley. They make, uh, what they call the triple alliance, which is the two other big communities to the lake are now their allies.

But they're not really allies. The as text for brutal, they were just those guys agreed, shut up and let the s tax run the shell and then he has to spread like a wild fire all the way down into the maya area. Everywhere they go, they remain everybody's towns and make them pay tribute.

Pretty short. Last thing, civil ation. A spread extremely quickly. A famous what? What are some defining qualities that explain that?

I think they were very much like they they had an attitude like a till the hunt. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized.

And the as text were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know, we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us. And if you work for us, you'll be just time they go to.

Every time they go to, the first thing they do is they show up with a bunch of a merchants. There was a merchant class who are also military. They were really the the people who assessed where they were going to attack.

Next they go in with a bunch of us tech products and say, we'd like to trade with you. But all the time they were assessing their military process, what what products they had that they could take. And then soon after the poach teco, where there would come the military with the reconnoisance.

So they ask, they had a huge war class, as you're saying. So what was there? Just keys linger on their whole relationship with war and violence.

They they worship a war dd, their main temple was, uh, the temple mayr IT had two temples up on top. One was to lock the rain god who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was, we see a poshy.

He was that translates the hummingbird on the left. But he's the war god. I love that he's a humming bird, maybe now fast, and he comes from the magical side or something.

But then, then right next to the temple on either side, where the two temples of the warriors, one was the eagle warrior clan, the other one was the jaggar warrior clan, and they, they were symbolic in competition with each other, though, a unified force, I guess, you know, probably an analogy. Gy, between, like the navy and the air force, you know, there had a good natured competition of who was Better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic barriers dressed up in all of their finery.

And they would they they would come at people, uh, with these two forces. And IT was very unlike anything that had happened before in measel america. Again, I think I could draw parallel to what happened in europe.

You know, the famous Henry the fifth moment in asian core, where his kind of a rag tag army wipes out half of Francis area stock or sea with the long bow. I, up until that moment, europe. Pt, a very war is for the elite classes, kind of attitude.

And then after france lost half their aristocracy, then like maybe we should be hiring from the villages. The same sort of thing happened with the ad tech that there was. Miss amErica really didn't have huge standing armies, but the s.

Tech put this army together, and they intimidated people. They didn't actually have to use that a lot. IT was very IT was used to great effect in the in the valley of x and for the rest of medal amErica was mostly the .

fear factor but there also seems to be um you know a celebration of the violence I think you said uh that a beauty and blood went hand in hand for the attack maybe like the roman an empire was the digits head of may be a different relationship with what violence where that stood in a the purpose of life purpose of is that fair to say I would .

hypothesize. So I mean that I think it's one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures. So, you know, knowing what our human capacity is in the s text, when I when I said that statement tie what I what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and got ripped people's hearts out.

They had this just protest, violent, bent, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance, the same as tech king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted, also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry, or the poetry of famous statement that have come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. there.

All of the cause, ways leading to the ETC capital had beautiful flower gardens, and they had a museum, and they had an aquarium and a zoo, and they had an Opera, and they had a ballet. yeah. And and these things existed together. There was not in the as tech mind any conflict between witnessing someone's heart getting ripped out one moment in the evening we'd go to the ballet.

How does that contrast the relationship of war in violence with the, with the other civilizations of miss amErica and south america? Maybe the mayer, what was their relationship like the war?

The mayer were certainly influenced by the s tack at the end. So we get a, we get secured perspective from the contact period accounts because the maya were much more violent and sacrifice oriented in their classic rendition.

But in the classic period, IT was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves, that we know that the mayor kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper, and the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they theyd common with their ancestors. But the'd actually tie this paper onto their penis, cut IT and then dance, so the blood splattered. But that was then cutting themselves.

IT was different than killing a bunch of other people. For IT, IT was auto sacrifice. We call IT still very macao, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other people should die. IT was a self sacrifice thing.

Can you speak to sacrifice a bit more? Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. what? What rolled at that play in? But my, they asked for the different culture here was a religious in .

nature IT was absolutely religious in nature and the s tex war of the opinion that um that the war got demanded, people were captured and sacrificed and IT had to be valuable people. There was a lot of before they made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles that they would have, and they take captives. In fact, all around made america.

They wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the god and the s. Text, deciding to specifically follow the war guard did this more than anybody. They did that so much and so successfully that they didn't have any enemies nearby.

So they decided this one poor soccer group, uh, not that far away, called the flash Collins, that they were never going to, uh, make peace with them so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the slash Collins and hAllen back for sacrifice. Cortez met those guys and he was like, here are people who hate their guts. I'll just use these guides. So, you know, we say, oh, cortez took over the s tech world IT was IT was cortez in twenty thousand superpests off flash Collins .

and the extra sacrifice what so there would be kind of these rural battles or IT chopping off people's heads like there is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice?

It's mostly hard extraction, sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see IT. And they had a specific stone where they would bend them over, so their rib cage would come out. And they've used a like, a thick of city and knife, and they had a really just like tried and true way to do IT.

They'd stb IT in in a certain place close and they push down on the stern as they ripped up on the rib cage. And they just said they just make a place where they could just ripped right out with their, and yeah, with their hand. But they were really just surgical about that. They use a thick of city and knife where they could just break the ribs right along the stern m and then push the sterny down, pull up and just while .

the person was alive.

Yep, while the person was alive. And the antec had this idea, like there was, there was a horrible drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley. And they came to this conclusion that it's because we haven't been killing enough people, right? We've got to bump this up.

And then when they did and they decided they they really took him out on the flash, Collins IT rained again. So IT was proof positive that they should just keep doing that. And they eight people as well, they really .

did as part of the Christians.

Or after the sacrifice, then they would eat them. And this was part of the drive in the famine thing that started. But then IT was just kind of the thing to do when when cortez got there, they were still having certain special fests that involved humans and and IT really upset the spanish, that they would be like a tricked into eating human, like a like in dinner that was a human.

So the idea was that actually. Having having a taste for human flesh, is that just, you know, these kinds of ideas of, like, if you eat a person's hard, that you can get their spirit and .

their strength? In the case of the s text, IT seemed like they just liked IT, this guy sahagun, who was a very responsible, uh, chronicle that was pretty that like there was a distribution thing yeah like the the elites got buts. The butts were the best part so that the but cheeks, those are the best parts to eat and then like IT went down the chain until some people just .

got like fingers and toes literally bought taste for the last.

Yeah boy, they they really did. They really did. In fact, that's what caused the, have you heard that no check tree today? The sad night, the night that the as tex really go nuts on the spanish and and kicked them out.

It's all trigger by this this one guy, pedro die vora o whose left in charge by cortez, as cortez goes to the coast and tries to talk to the new force, talk about to being for him what he does, the petrol elva dos, left back in town in charge, and they're doing another one of these huge zz tech buffets and parties to honour them. And IT happens. The guy says, you know, hey, you like dinner, like it's a nice dinner.

Well, it's humans. You eat, humans see, I told you they were good and alverado just freaks out and he has the the guards closed the doors and he murder everyone in the in the party, women, children, nobody has weapons. He just murdered everyone. And that's what passes the the as text out to eventually murder montage ma, who was their captive, and then try to murder all of them. And I was all IT, was all petrol alverado s fault for freaking out about .

eating humans. Just a little practical joke.

Just I thought I was funny. He did not.

didn't realize. So I kind of assume that some level capabilities would have to do with, you know, eating the heart to to gain a spare to the person. Or something .

like this was in certain, like a deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the s tex. Know they just like eat humans. IT was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like you guys could either send us, you know, a number of cats of feathers every month or we can eat you .

so that psychological warfare and actual warfare, they work, and that's how they spread.

And they were just about to take over the mayor when the spanish came and mess everything up. They were they had the miss surrounded, and they were about to take over the whole ugine.

So you think without the spanish, they'll be this asset camie that would last for a very long time.

I think they would have been an asset campaign. I think they would have finish dominating everybody. But they did IT through hate, and everybody hated the as tex.

So I wouldn't have lasted forever. They did not. They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force, and that that can only go on so long before revolution happens.

The anka empire, I think that would have gone on forever because they were really community oriented. Once the anka took over, like no one in the inca empire starved, they built architecture. Everyone was safe. IT was the society that could have last at a long time.

What was the origin of the well? IT was .

bloody at first, like most of them are. But once, once they started taking over, that what they did is the empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get the resources.

But everybody they raided, they turned them into the ancha empire. And they created this incredible meta system where you took turns working. And they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back in fourth. So a town of, let's say, five thousand people, the inker would roll up with an army of hundred, two hundred thousand people in saying, you know, would you guys like to be part of the empire, or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire and if your mayor here agrees, then he can have a town, he can have a house in cusco.

But then the very next month a big work crew would show up and they'd start building agricultural terraces in storage units and every month with the agricultural ah access, they would have big parties and everybody would eat. So people lived well in the inca empire was a rough beginning. But everybody who agreed to be part of IT immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.

So they started in south amErica and perou and cusco. Cusco was like the .

center o in their language, catch a IT means naval or belly button. And it's up in the the mountains. But there's four quarters that they called their empire t 1t seo u the land of four quarters。 And the center of those four quarters was costco.

It's pronk to life while in like twelve twelve hundred .

A A D yeah we backwards project what IT was. But IT was probably mid twelve hundreds when the first stopper ancha, the first ruler came in. But I was the because the ninth th one is patch, a cute day, who really started being an empire builder.

And part of that, and he went, really define the empire. As he said, roads. They build a massive road network.

roads. And in the same way that the roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure, and then every place they took over, they create certain key pieces of roman architecture that kind of made that city roman. They'd been named IT something the inc.

Did the same thing. They had certain signature ink architecture that they would build in as the administrative part the'd send. They'd the keeper, the guys who would weave or not the keeper s as accountants.

And though they would go through and say what everybody he did, okay, you know, you a good farmer, you're gonna farm. You are a good weather. You're gna weave.

All the men here are gonna a turn at being part of the army, and and they then they send independent people comeaux to that. Every community had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other. And they all had independently send their keepers back to coosa. And if there were accounting discrepancies, they were called the goose code to figure out who was lying about what.

So there's like a super sophisticated or record .

keeping system yeah and that was the keeper and the spanish recorded but they could and then burn them all.

But that's an issuing development for for an empire because that allows you to really expand and have some kind of management with some, some level of control.

Yeah, they couldn't at the end. They were at least ten million people. And there is just no way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system.

Had to face asa .

akka anka, I mean, the ice takes for psychotics, but the anka had just reserves for miles, and they had that essential hearts and minds. There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the anka empire. For some reason everything was owned communally, except the lamas.

The lamas were the kings. And so that was one thing that, like, some of them would stay in town just to be work lamas. But you know, you don't know your lama anymore.

And and people are really attached there of us to this day. Yeah, they are like family members. So I would be like, everybody walked in and said, everybody's family dog is now mine. It's like really upset people on an emotional level.

What that I mean to lama's got domesticated at some point, probably really I mean what I even no one but early .

on we have rock art that progresses to make IT seeing like a progression from people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones yeah so IT was still in that archaic period at least that they became friends .

um yeah but if you roll in in your own name.

that's a yet that pissed everybody off for some reason. The inc. Owned everybody's lama instantly and he would take anything he wanted.

A lot of them would just get carded away that day, just sent to coos go. And they'd also take their mummy. That was a weird thing.

Everybody morns their dead. But the enka just like ceased to accepted. They were just, the moments were still there.

Okay, he's dead. But lucky still got close hee's at the party. Let's put a beer in front of him.

They just like they just kept people as mummy. And so the ancestral mummy of every town part of the being absorbed into the the empire was okay. Your most important movies are now gonna their beautiful house in costco. But they would physically bring those mummy to crustal, to make now costco the spiritual heart of their their belief system. I mean.

I can see how that would pass people off, but it's also pretty powerful way to say, like the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect are now in the capital.

They've been elevated. We didn't steal them. We have given them a new place of water, and you're welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the ankle world would come to cool co.

And which of the civilizations mummified people is IT? Is IT the .

ankles for sure? Mom, I fied people. And even did some of that kind of like egyptian ask taking out of organs and preparing the body. They put like straw inside the cavity and modify them. But the mayor didn't do IT at all.

The mayer, in fact, on purpose, would flood tomes with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster, and then they get back in there. IT was jungle, so I think the bugs probably had part of IT too. But then they would get back in there to get the bones.

I'd open a back up and take the bones out and paint them with red cinnabar, the one that I was in. In copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different times, and the last couple times they only took the skull out and repainted IT and then put IT back in, articulated in the on the skeleton. But they they didn't modify they on purpose, would like grossly float the bodies so so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones.

But would they keep the bones? Yeah, keep the bones. And they pulled the bones out occasionally, and do rituals to them, are common with them, and then put them back in.

So there is still a deep connection to the ancestors, to the physical manifestation of the ancestors. Then you will the mamady ed.

or bone. And to this day, like if if you do an excavation here in the united states, native american people don't like IT. They don't like their graves, which is fine enough.

I wouldn't want somebody tagged up my granda either. But the maya they love IT I love every ma person. If we find the a grave, they're like, yeah that bones coal can I touch? Yeah they are not booked to Better all.

They think it's exciting. I want time as that helped out a physical anatha pologies in town in copan, to get a ideology collection together of various animals. Sofa gets bones from a in excavation, we could see what kind of animal IT was based on the collection. And this family said, well, we our family dog died last year and buried him like, arg, go dig them up and we were like, okay, yeah, well, I mean, we didn't need a dog.

We will go tag up your dog and and they were like, but the kids really want to help you so their kids came out and this was like, they're puppy and I died no less than a year ago when we got to IT that like that. One of them, just like, grabbed a bone and he was like, V, C, C, T. Dogs like little booty bones. Yeah, you like, what a weird attitude. That's your dead dog there but they just they have a different relationship with the dead .

is some sense of beautiful attitude, right? Yeah why pretend like we're not more there's not this is just the process of in kind of as you say now I can be cool.

That's what day of the dead is all about. And I love day of the dead. You know, halloween is this creepy thing. Where are all monsters? But day of the dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors convinced my kids after the movie, coco came out.

Now we have an alter with all of our great grandparents on the alter, and we talk about who they were and how they lived. And we put things on the altar that mattered in their life, and we remember them on that day. And it's certain something that was a weird, eat too much Candy and where a monster mask thing into something beautiful, where we discuss, where we came from.

I have to ask about the giant stones. The anger has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly. Do you understand? Is that understood how they were able to do that so well?

No, no. The moving of IT, I think that we have reasonable theories there. There are ways to vivid large weights.

There's there's a great guy named willie wallington, retired contractor here in the us. Who built stone hand in his backyard in minnesota single handily, showing how you can move big stones. So I know, I think walley's already figured out how to move them.

It's the, it's the perfectly fit, so carefully fit together that you couldn't even put a diamond between the the stones. That's the one that I think still has. People baffled.

The the common archaeological wisdom that you'd find out of textbook is that they just kept packing away at IT with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be all shit. That is, there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody's got a hamer stone.

I personally think its assets, I think they melted them um together. And there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones, which I ve done a number times, i'm going back next month to much picture and especially crucial. I walk around in the allies where these five hundred two one thousand year old walls are still there.

And a, you see, I see things like the the Crystals in the underside are on a stitched together along the seems like there's that the underside around IT is melted in the Crystals heaven. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall like it's just melted like somebody like took a rag and wiped IT while IT was soft. Lots to talk about soft stones turning hard too.

I I haven't been able to prove that this is one of the no end of my archaeological career. Chapter some, they're gona prove myself wrong or prove IT, but I think they use assets. My dad are chemist and he told me a long time ago that there's no way there's no naturally occurring assets. But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show breaking bad.

I don't know if you were saw that show, but there is a point in which they're trying to dissolve the body and they're using hydrogen lorc acid goes right through the ceiling that hydrogen lor casa is so fascinating that you know IT won't go through plastic and you can also bring IT in in art parts and then combine IT um the the incoming tons of jewelry at a flow right flu right is big in the andes and they also mind a lot of things for golden silver in the by product of that mining is Sophia c. He put sylph erased and fall right together and it's hydrofluoric acid and that will burn through and decide or anything. And if you learn how to do IT judiciously and then you didn't care whether, you know, servants lost a and armor to, then you could actually use them to fuse these together.

And I I think they refuse together. I I asked the city of coos, go, if I could take some core samples, and they said, go away, gringo. Don't touch our walls so this actually this next this next time i'm going to go try to talk to the more catch well authorities in a place called only untitled o and maybe I can convince them but right now they just think i'm i'm a weird ask gringo who wants .

to put holes in their was I is a factor theory and so how could you get to the the bottom of that? So getting a chord sample, see if there's .

some kind of trace. Can us some working with say that if there was hydro loria in between these, that a core sample right along the seam, they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually of hydrophilic said, I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, now that mean, we already know that's true. I mean, now we can burn some rocks, but IT would happen.

And that's just chemistry. We got a, we got to prove that I would happen in the wall. So go get us samples that was before covin in the sources. You know you know a how IT is. You have probably are the same guy where you've got A A thousand ideas, and you know the ones that that are fruitful, fully you run with, and the other ones you get back to you.

That will be fascinating. true. I hope, I hope you do. So that's to overflow the .

either one i'll try .

to prove IT for. I wonder if we discount how, uh, much amazing stuff for collection of humans can do IT just feels like if a large number of humans are are just working a little bit, chipping away as stuff at scale that can do macos thing. So the question is, how can a large number of humans be motivated to do? I think um I just when we think about like one hundred ds some very chAllenging architectural construction, we don't think about a large number of humans working together .

when you know that large number of humans uh are motivated work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another. One of my favorite quotes is and i'm probably gna misquoted here bit I think it's Margaret me who said never underestimate the power of small groups working together.

And the truth is that those are the only people that have ever changed the world, that small, dedicated groups of people are what changed the world. yeah. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace .

their vision yeah, yeah. I think that was sometimes understand, ate and what humans can do a lot and .

we are way less capable than we used. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills that at least I personally do not. You know, like i'm wearing a shirt, but I I can't make a shirt that's for somebody else to do.

You've also lectured about uh which I really enjoyed about north amErica and also helped teach me that there is a lot more complex societies going on here um for a long period of time so maybe can we start at the beginning, who are the early humans in north america?

Well, we go through that palo in indian in archaic period for thousands of years as we started this conversation, probably thirty thousand years as a conservative. Now humans first enter the americas, but the first cultures we get here are mound builders around the mississippi into the east, and then also a totally separate group in the, what we call the american southwest.

Now, the four corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the poem below, people who are still there today, like zones and hope by people. So we've got these two clusters that the very first major community in north amErica is in the most unlikely place. It's in northern lousie.

People think i'm crazy when I say this, but there is a paid in northern lizana, a big one at a cycled poverty point that is uh thirty five hundred years old. So it's the same age as the pyramids in egypt. And IT is a giant thing just poking out of the bias of lousianner. And the people don't believe me when I say IT, but it's there.

the mound builders. What was that society like in comparison, everything else we've talking about this america.

they evolved over thousands of years. We call a man builders. This is something I object to.

I think we should have a Better. We do that. The last version of them, we call the mississippi now.

But generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders, but what they built were prams. They look like mounds now and they didn't build the matt of stone. That's that's kind of our just inherent western bias.

Something that built out a stone is is sophisticated, and something that built out a dirt is rudiment entree. But in their full living form, they didn't have course of dirt. But then they also had kind of clay caps.

So they had terraces, they had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. There's the biggest of the miscible.

An cities is called kaoha, and it's right outside of a saint Lewis. And IT was huge. IT had a population of twenty thousand people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palace ID wall around IT.

IT was absolutely giant tic. I thriving metropolis. And we in amErica have kind of a collective anemia like we never hear about these massive civilizations.

Cahokia was the the big first city. But then I spread from the mississippi all the way to the atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had been five to ten thousand people.

each with a their own thing over there, some kind of thread connecting all of them.

They had a unified religion and culture. They were, again, not an empire. So they were worrying city states that were kind of territories that were owned. By big kings and then the cities around them, we're kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. And then one one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight.

So they were there were kind of countries, I think, for yeah we could safely say there were different countries within this patchwork that was eater united states in it's so weird that we don't know this because I was clearly documented by the by the spanish. If this i'm not talking about just archie's gy. We find him in archaeology now.

But hernando to soda landed in florida and went for three years from he went up into the CarOlinas and over down into alabama and lousianner. And he's the first one to see the mississippi up there. But for three years he went through city after city after city, unfortunately, deciding them, eating all their corn and giving them diseases. But in the documentations, clearly there he met, collectively, millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization.

those disease and a stealing of resources. But we are like explicit murdering going on.

unfortunately. Yes, he was a murderer at a psycho, at a liar. He, he, he snowed them that he was some kind of DVD actually learned a trick from the inky who he was with pizarro's.

His first run and got went back to spain, was rich, had a wife for castle. Then he got bored. He decided to have a rain of terror on northern amErica for three years, but he had people burned at the stake.

He had his dogs ripped them apart. He was very, very brutal. He, he ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody. He made promises and broke them all the time. IT was really, he was a brutal man.

So this whole period when Christopher columbus came, how did that change everything?

Well, you know there's there's a great anthropological body of literature. It's it's called the columbian exchange based on but you all this trade back and forth between the new world in the old world and the the old world got just wonderful stuff. All of sudden their diet didn't suck.

All these vegetables came in. The new world got, uh, hurt animals that got pigs and cows and goats that I didn't have, but I also got thirteen infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had heard community on a lot of, but IT didn't actually go away.

I just couldn't spread like a wild fire through the community. So when they arrived to the america's, all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first twenty thirty years there were people who like had contracted multiple deadly diseases that once and died of them.

But the numbers, you know, it's it's a shameful part of history. And IT wasn't something that europe perpetrated on them. The medical science at that time was still the four humor theory that people were made of, yellow bile, black bile, blood and flame.

And we did things like what you've got ta bleed him, he'll feel Better than so. We had no idea what an infectious disease was, but the reality was that this heart of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now saying in the first fifty years that at ninety percent of everybody was dead and that the the number of people has increased as well.

As far as the are estimates, we're thinking it's somewhere around one hundred and fifty million people and ninety percent of them died and with them all their knowledge. Just I mean, imagine in the moment where you know who dies when things get bad, it's the Young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers die suddenly the children die.

This next generation that's half taught and now completely demoralized, thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their god say them, that the only way out of IT is to to accept this new Christianity. But they know they don't have bring kids into this world where everybody he's dying. And even if they do, they can't teach them.

But the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmissions. So when a in a single terrible moment in human history, the generation loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things these people knew just blipped out.

But with that also just the the wisdom of the entire civilizations.

so much what they knew was just lost. At that moment we have the mayor who had those higher clifts in that we've learned .

a lot from that yeah but not a significant integration of that wisdom and do so IT wasn't a when the europeans game IT wasn't like the cultures were integrated. IT was a story of domination in the in the.

in north america. There's A A new term in the literature that I like we call IT the the mississippi shatter zone, dead miscible. An civilization was millions of people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries.

And now we have this shatter zone where we have ruins, and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away. And that i'm just about to talk to A A Cherry ky man who listened to some of the things I had to say and says all those whole chunk things you were saying from that whole chunk culture. My grandparents talk about this sort of thing too.

I can I talk to you by phone and tell you about these things. So we've got the shatter zone where, you know, we're gone to try to put the piece, the puzzle back together, especially in terms of mississippi religion. I really think we're making headway in this generation and is exciting to part of peeing this old religion and mythology back together.

Just since a lot of people can referred to Christopher columbus as the person who discovered america, um I read that the vikings reach north amErica material in one thousand c 1。 And what do you think they didn't expand the cons cause .

they got their ask kicked.

But it's the .

truth yeah but IT is absolutely true that the vikings were here. There's there's a great site in nova otia called land sol medals, which definitely has what's left of a viking colony. IT was left.

Eric and his father, eric, the read, who they got kind of kicked out of europe because they apparently couldn't stop murdering people. And so they went Greenland and then kind of island hop over to canada. But I think the culture that was in that area was named the dorset, but they would have nothing to do with the vikings.

They they attacked the viking settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided IT was just worthless. And they left IT know the vikings attacked ireland, and they just found a bunch of now monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going where men of god, we don't fight the likings were like, this is great. That's great.

This will be easy. Then we'll just lude all these esteros. Gs, but the native americans in canada were like not having IT, they kick their ass.

In fact, leaf ericson's brother thr died there. The natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but they, they just killed him.

So a lot of the native american cultures were also, I mean, there sophistic ted.

worrying cultures also. Yes, they thought, especially the the mississippi boy, they were tough. And so were, you know that the five nations, the moo hawk, the huron, the ones that that kicked the vikings as up there, they were probably algonquin speakers, but they were connected like just above the the great lakes, but they were all of very tough people.

When you think about the spanner in the the portuguese and the over hundred million people they were killed. Do you see there's a tragedy of history, or is just the way of history?

I think that the epidemics, I considered a tragedy that did not have to happen. And that was not, that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about IT. That was just a tragic, perfect storm of events.

IT was, you know that I think that the spanish in the portuguese is get unfairly malie in what's been called the black legend, that they just barchon into america, murdered everyone. That's not the fact. IT was the diseases that murdered everyone.

In fact, there was a really pointing ant story. I read of A A spanish priest in the amazon, in the, in the brazilian northern part of the amazon, where he made this utopian community and he was bringing people in that we're getting sick. He, he wrote, i'm baptising everyone now, I betise ten thousand people a day and get god still killing them.

why? Why is he doing this to them? They're doing everything that I asked them to do. They are submitting to the bill of god.

But this guy doesn't realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptising them in, he's just wiping the disease on everybody's faces. He's accelerating IT when he doesn't even realized he thinks he's saving them, but he's actually killing them. Yeah that's a that's a tragedy you know that's not just like spoils go to the Victor stuff that's just straight .

up tragedy yeah yeah but that one is you hard to know to do with like black death. It's I mean infections. They don't Operate on Normal human terms, right? They they go through entire populations back to wild ideas.

all right. Just my.

I mean, wouldn't really talk about how life originated on earth or how how humans have evolved. And we did talk about that there could be just a lot of self in ancient history. We haven't even uncovered yet. A duty is possible that other intelligence conversations from outside of earth aliens ever visited.

You had me right until you ever visited thing. That one i'm not entirely sure about. I'm not sure whether we have any. We certainly have no archaeological proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such but you know you the guys that the discovered D N A Watson and quick a Watson who actually habitually used to lose imagine to to uh invigorate his thinking.

He said that he thought that D N A on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period that IT had its disposal in that his guess was that r DNA was somehow seated from outside of our planet then, you know, take that for what IT is. But the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that, ad, so that's interesting. But in terms of, you know, aliens visiting us, I don't know.

I IT does lack of a kind of human hubris that we think we're important enough for some advanced species to give a shit about us. That is, statistically speaking, the universe's way too big. We can't be the only sentient beings, just got to be somebody else out there, whether they care about us.

That's a question. I've been on animalia number of times. I show up. I am an educator. I mean, refusing to be part of the conversations in immediate fell in my book.

But there is one time where they asked me at the end, you know, do you have anything else do you want to say? And I said, well, you know, the premises that aliens came down a long time ago, and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts, if you know, science and medicine, engineering all these things today, we also have a lot of stories of the aliens coming down. But now all there doing is mulling cows and satirizing red necks, like whatever we did, we superposed them off.

Apparently the quality, the guess, has decreased rapidly. What is ensuring? Thought you've mentioned, what archaic, logically, would you have to see to be like this might be in alien.

a technology that doesn't belong there, first and foremost. I mean, you know, we got a, if we just run with the premise that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away, to hear that was almost certainly mechanical. I know I love the aliens thing where no biomechanical is something that that certainly could be, and that would know that, that would disintegrate.

We wouldn't see that at all, but I would expect some kind of technology that that showed up out of the blue and change things. That would be something. But but I would think in all mechanical or you know a substance that's not from here.

But of course, we would only see the the results of that. We can go you mean like literally a mechanical think.

right? Some sort of thing like that. The typical thing people say is like, you know, how did they move these giant stones, right? But you know just look at that on the face for a second. Aliens come from across the universe to meet humans, and the thing they tell them is how to move rocks.

Are you fucking in getting me? I mean, you know, like give him, give me a biotics or a combust an engine or something, you're going to they they came across the universe and they showed him how to move big rocks. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. That just doesn't .

make any sense what you think earth will look like ten thousand years from now. What's a .

interesting question? I think IT will be a lot more automated or at IT, it'll be a smoldering pile. Mean, there is a possibility we could end ourselves.

There's always that possibility. We've really open panto horis box in summer. Regards, I did listen to one of your podcasts guests with what would happen in the case of nuclear war.

Yeah, that was killing. Her opinion was, certainly we would burn everything to a crist within minutes, apparently. So we have that capacity.

That's scary. That's a possible future for us. But i'm an optimist. I know i'd like to think that guys like you, we're going to make friendly robots to make my job Better.

But a thousand, ten thousand years is a long time, and technology is improving, becoming more advanced rapidly, and the the rate of that improvement is increasing even more.

So that's the part of frightened me, actually, I know. Does that frightened you?

Yes, terrifying.

You know, I I heard somebody say I forget who I was. But you know, systems of any kind, human systems, biological systems, can be put on a graph that's change over time. And any graph that the change is way faster than the time and and the the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis in almost any biological system that has that fast to change over that little a time. You any any other thing you'd describe IT as a crisis when you apply that chart to technology change, it's a crisis from .

that perspective. absolutely. But I also have a faith in a human genuine that we humans like to create a really difficult situation and then come up with the ways to a get out of that difficult situation, and in so doing, innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering, but on the whole and average a make a Better world. But yeah, if if you know, like with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might actually lead the death of everybody.

I guess there's always that that channel. But I am an optimist. I in I think you're an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said.

I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate, and we are never more innovative than when we are under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about, we didn't. We didn't change the world when we were comfortable IT was when we were in crisis.

Mother necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we will be alright. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I am going to answer a question that you didn't even ask me.

Um I think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this where a delusions i'm all for electric cars and you know being good stewards of the environment. But we are wasting our time, not technologically adapting to what's about to happen. We're spending too much time pretending the average american thinks if we all just drive electric cars will be OK.

That's bullshit. That's not going to happen. We need to start making technologies, the desalinization, that a host of things that are that we need to use our technological capacity to accept IT and adapt instead of polyana think. And we can make IT go away yeah yeah.

kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big problems arise and just developed technology that addresses them.

I think you have some guys to have their finger on the post there. We need to start thinking about how we're going to survive this, not we're going to make IT go away.

And I just arrive thrive again. We're pretty innovative in that regard. But if some cats traffic thing happens, or we just leave this planet, what what do you think would be found by a four mentioned aliens, civilizations, when they visit the anthropology, the grass student anthropologists that visit earth and study how much of what we now have in love and think of us, human civilization will be lost. Do you think?

Well, you know, time moves on, and things that are perishable perish. So, you know, you didn't put a time element in there, but I would say that everything that can, parish will, and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn't perish. So will have, you know, buildings plax, but they won't have any books, they won't have any, you know, billboards there.

They'll have the incomplete record. I have I I want time did he did a talk in sue falls and I said, you know, I I drove in here, and there was a big oblique in front of the town. And everywhere I go I see the names Lewis and Clark.

And a thousand years from now, if I was an archaeologist investigating this place, I would think that IT was founded by the egyptians, and their king were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know, Lewis and Clark stayed one night here, but it's just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought about your town, based on what preserved .

as so beautiful as a thought experiment. Like, what would archaic logic be really wrong about? And what would they actually be right about?

Washington, D. C. Was clearly made by a combination of the egyptians and the greeks and the romance, because that's what all the architecture is.

Yeah, would they be able to reconstruct the important empires, the powerful empires in the the warring empires.

for that matter? Helps me in. My colleagues done that at all. I am almost certain that the mayor would just got laugh at what I think I know what they were.

I wanted to do you ever think about like what we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most like mainstream ideology, just like a suspicion. What what could we get completely wrong? Um well one way to get something wrong is totally like a law civil, like an obviously jacking antic civilization that was there along with a mi or something like this in the ten thousand years ago.

They're certainly that there could be things that were either wide away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things.

And everybody knew that exist and everybody interact.

And that was, I think, I think, I think of our estimation of their motivations that were probably most wrong on my teacher. Shi, a long time ago, said I would come up with all sorts theories. I was, I was inking about stuff, and SHE looked at me.

SHE said, if you don't stop thinking like a western european and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of IT. But I ve always taken the hard, I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I tried to step out of my cultural assumptions, trying to think like they would think is the best I could.

And it's very different. I mean, this whole, you know, the mayor, our si, now this, the whole sacrifice were so you obsessed with that. But now that was in A A steer actual sacrifice on their part.

They weren't just, you know, hey, let's i'll get together and kill that guy that pissing us off. I mean, they were like, you know, giving the best of them. There was, there was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bonefish sacrifice on their part, a loss.

plus the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts .

having sex with a that one of these days.

what this is now, this, that puppy appear on on pottery, all over pottery.

He's everywhere. I gotta write this book this next year, the year i'm going to write my fan deity book in, I will have a whole chapter dedit. Thank you to the puppy.

The mystery of I may could just be the birth of means of humor. I don't know. I mean, again, humor, you don't know what the nature of their humor, of what their jokes are.

H, that's a neat one. Two, and that's so human they, i'll tell you a little like side story here that when I worked with the maya people in plank, I spent three years making this map of the city. And I can feel the jungle every day, and they would talk to each other in their own language.

Was cell tall, was the group I was working with. But I noticed after a while they were, they were big jokers. They love to make jokes, and they would laughed at jokes, but then they would also, one of them would say something, and the other ones would go hoho.

And I eventually asked, you know, what is that? What are you guys always make that hoho noise? I said, that's because he made a really smart pon IT was like, he said three different things at once. He was a turn of phrase that was smart and they didn't make laughs at that. I was they had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever so there's also that like clever turn of speech yeah wit. And I think about that when I higher gliff c translator or like, here is a beautiful thing that's gonna like a poe or a political statement like and i'm just plodding ly looking in a dictionary of what that word means. There's probably double, triple on hundreds all through this text in the real meaning is the subtext and i'm you know i'm thinking they're talking about core and they're talking about the .

nature life yeah I could be satire. IT could be you know as IT wasn't the soviet union where there's a dictator maybe there's a overpowering king. You're not allowed actually speak um you have to hide the thing you're actually trying to say in the subject so and all of that there .

was a funny masseran mic that had the ceramics or need because they don't the the the monuments can be kind of broken records on the king. I was born this time. I beat these people up.

I married this woman. I died. But the ceramic ics will tell us like things out of mythology, gy stories. And there was this one, a with a rabbit looking at the merchant god. And nobody could translate the text.

And finally, this eastern european, actually, a ukrainian guy translated IT and the rabbit saying to, uh, to the merchant god, bend over and smell my eyes. And like a man, we were expecting this wonderful piece of metal logy. But no IT translates spend over and smell my eyes. That's great. That's human.

As we mentioned previously, human nature does not change you. You mentioned plan can mapping IT at a curiosity. What is that process like? This seems fascinating.

Oh, IT was IT was a great adventure. I loved IT, but I was, I was difficult. I woke up every morning thinking, I will be hurt today somehow. I don't know how I don't have badly, where on my body will occur, but it's going to happen because he was the jungle.

So in the jungle, what's what's the process like? What what you have to do to the market?

Well, IT was tRicky too, because I was also a, uh, national forest. So the forest street department didn't want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through the foliage and I would we'd map everything twice.

The first thing we do is i'd go in, find a building, draw IT on a piece of graph paper. And i'd say, like, you know, you guys go north, you guys go east west, find other buildings, and when you find them, pace back to this one. And so i'd start making a map, and i'd make the whole one piece of graph paper was enough to then we bring the machine in, and we bring the laser, the old light, and get really accurate information. But on that piece. Paper I would write like, don't bring the machine this way, there's a tree fall or stand on top of this building, and you'll see four different buildings at once from this one.

I and all of this is an dense jungle.

right? And the deeper we got off the road, the deeper IT was. Sometimes IT would clear out at certain places. If IT was low, IT would be such thick vegetation in IT would grow back so fast. Sometimes we would cut just, uh, a tunnels through tall grass. And we come back like five days later, and they were gone, and like, we couldn't find where our trails were, they would go back that fast.

But you see the buildings so you could see.

right? And that was the fun part. I mean, sometimes I would just be like a little neighborhood with little low building, so bigger than this table, but sometimes just five more meters.

And then i'm standing under repair remit that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, i've just found another one in some days. In one good days, we'd find three pyramids. And I I felt that that such a more exciting job than the typical excavations, say, although my buddies were all just, you know, and a whole for the whole week in the middle, the city and where i'm dancing around through the jungle, I could find to, you know, ten buildings today. I might find a parent today who knows .

what they feel like to find, like a parameter buildings that you want to the only humans that are not from that civilians to ever see this thing. I feel .

it's it's great. I love that feeling. I am you. I'm an explorer at heart um so finding something like that you know when I was when I was twenty five years old, I found a whole ma city got to name and its name is marsha.

It's often the billions an jungle and that was just just outrages. I mean, I almost said that when almost depressed me, I was my, my entire, like, I had this great life, an ambition that I would find a lost city. And then I did IT at twenty five, and I was like, god, now what do what I do?

I know that was superb, taking me my whole life. I actually, I wrote a bunch of letters to asa trying to get them to let me be the first archaeologist on mars. I never got a single reply back. Come sure. On on nest list is some weird.

Um how do you find in mind city?

Ah I used the topography map of the area, and I played the game. If I was a ma, where would my favorite place to live in this big area be? I I looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of their permits, tune wheat stones, mountains.

I knew they love mountains. And when I found that mountains, there were two others right next to IT that made a triangle. And they love those triads.

And they were rivers in between them. And I thought, that's IT. That's where I would build the city.

And I hiked out there over two seasons with students. The other great students were like, he just having his students just wandering the jungle all day. But I came .

back with the city. So given that you've looked into the depth of a humanity, what gives you hope about our future, maybe our deep future of this human civilization?

That's a good one. And I do have hope. I do have hope. I I believe in the spirit of human kind.

I, I, as a person who have studied history, I kind of feel like history does kind of a sign wave. There's hides and there's lows. But no matter how low we go, we get up again and and we climb.

And I think that humanity will continue, that we will rise to the chAllenges. Now some of the chAllenges may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome. That's that's what we do.

Yeah, humans find a way, right? That's that's like the thing you see with with history. You want the empire collapse. They are the humans that come out that they pick themselves up by another way.

They building in the people I study believe in the cyclical nature of life that you really can't. Life can continue without death being part of the cycle. We get their lows. We get our highs, but the cycle continues forever.

I should mention that you have a lot of great lecture uh, on the great courses, but you have also an amazing pakistan co. ed. If people, anna, listen to IT, this is a tough question. But what would you recommend? What episodes should they listen to?

What's the that is a tough question.

What is the sound plane? You know, like asking a chef, like, was the best of on the menu?

Well, different strokes for different folks. I do two different things on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you've never heard about her.

I I love. I start off by saying it's my podcast, and i'll talk about whatever the heck I wanted talk about. Sometimes I talk about really specific things like a tool type or an animal type.

But my favorite ones have become when I just tell my stories of my adventures, i've got a lot of weird adventure stories, and it's been fun, and they've been very well received. I've got, I can put my humor in there, and I can talk about the things that went right, the things that went wrong. The adventures that I had are all part of part of this archeo ID thing.

It's an archie s kind of a double londoner. It's me, i'm just said, but it's also education, you know. What i'm really trying to do with this, too, is specifically the america's, I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here, especially north america.

I I think that we have a group of amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before europe showed up. That's simply not true. I think I should be part of our history books.

In fact, I have A A program called before the america's that, uh would introduce as part of american history the part before european in contact. And I think that kids in the key through twelve levels should grow up not being told. This fallacy that no one was here before showed up in fourteen ninety two.

And one of these days, i'm going to find a funder to help us put together before the america's, and we're going to make IT part of the curriculum for every kid in the U. S. To know the full history of this country.

It's a great project. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all the fascinating I dis that you put on to the world. And I can't wait to hear your new course.

Thank you so much. Lex IT was a real pleasure.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with the at barn heart. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me believe you some words from josef cambell. Life is but a mask, warn on the face of death, and is death then, but another mask, how many can say, asks the asked poet that there is or is not a truth beyond. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.