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

the wild wild west all right we're live david stewart thank you for coming man thanks for having me i'm pumped man i've never met an archaeologist before well yeah it's a fun job i gotta say do you like to play in the dirt absolutely i love it i i when i was a kid i decided that was what i wanted to do you know and and luck i'm really lucky because i can do it as a you know grown up yeah well your parents are both archaeologists too yeah my my dad and my mom were were both archaeologists and worked for national geographic the magazine you know back in the heyday of all of that so you know they took us on trips me and my my brothers and sister um you know that's how i got exposed to this stuff was like going to you know mexico and guatemala you know back in the 70s getting getting exposed to these fantastic ruins before they were turned into big tourist sites yeah sometimes right and i just caught the bug i mean i just wanted to know more about it and and seeing what my dad was doing what my mom was doing i just wanted to keep on with that so nice yeah i mean we uh by the way too we have we have val with us here today josh couldn't make it uh josh is actually getting i believe a colonoscopy so very important yeah someone's doing someone's doing some excavating in uh in his butt areas he's asleep right now and someone's looking for secrets in his butt deciphering the text um that's pretty cool though man so like you know and from reading your book by the way the four heavens i have it right here history a new history a new history of the hmi not the old not the bs from before that's right yeah but from reading your book it was like back i guess when your dad was doing it it was kind of amazing i didn't realize how much of you know their history was completely unknown and lost and i guess there was like little bits and pieces that kind of struck me about how people were just like even the people who live there were just like i don't know like no one yeah i mean and this is still kind of the case in terms of people's awareness right so i think it's fair to say it's new and in terms of not being out there in the public arena and certainly in in mexico you know there are plenty of maya people around today but they don't have much of a sense of their own history yeah and and that i find that really sad and something that needs to be fixed there's a spanish edition coming out you know and i i hope word gets out about this stuff and it gets into the schools and everything but you're right um when when my dad was you know an archaeologist and and working in maya ruins um when i was a kid there was no history you know so we've we've been through this amazing time in the last 50 years where we've kind of gone from zero to 100 in terms of knowing the history of the world and the history of the world and the history of the world and the of kings and knowing the dynasties and how they all you know the kind of game of thrones history of all these different kingdoms um and it's the oldest history anywhere in the americas which is pretty mind-boggling that's that's that's also crazy because like you know you always see stuff and like i don't know i always hear things on like tv and youtube where it's like some claim they go back to like 60 million you know something like crazy because i mean i must have really chapped your ass watching ancient aliens back in the day did you like that show uh you know i've been asked to be on that show several times really and you wouldn't play ball about the outer space travel or well oh man well the thing is i i know from experience that um well i should say i that show to me is just nonsense really the the real human story of these places and and the monuments is i think the real story that's just as compelling but um yeah i mean i i was invited to be on a few of those shows and what what i realized from a long time ago is that when you get interviewed for a show like that as an as an expert quote-unquote yeah um of course you have no control over how they're going to edit it or how they're going to display what you say or chop you up it kind of sucks actually you spend your whole life trying to be an incredible yeah so i've actually had friends and colleagues who you know say yeah i'll do that sure you know and i kind of get that right you want to you want to be out there and talk but then they just kind of you know manipulate whatever you're going to say you know for their for their narrative right but yeah i mean as as someone who studies the maya and has been around the people has been around these amazing sites in in mexico and guatemala and belize you know the the whole ancient aliens narrative um it's coming from another place it's coming from our you know kind of background and trying to struggle how to explain these places that's an old struggle that goes back hundreds of years actually but the thing is now we have the history this is what people don't realize we we have the names of the people who built these monuments and they're not aliens they're they're people yeah yeah and they're doing the same stuff we do and they have the same concerns we do yeah it was kind of cool because it really goes from what you guys have found it goes almost back well i guess further back or about the same as like as we know about ancient greece like it goes like what do you say like 200 a.d i think yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i guess further back or about the same as like as we know about ancient greece like it goes like what do you say like 200 a.d yeah so the written history we have goes back to about not quite as far as ancient you know classical greece but let's say to about 300 200 a.d okay it's pretty far back yeah i mean it's 1200 years before columbus and the archaeology goes back further than that in terms of seeing what people are doing on the ground and you know tracking how they develop over time so we we hit the story kind of stream in terms of being able to read about what they're writing about um what's preserved and and that's where we have to kind of fill in the blanks in terms of you know stuff they didn't write about you know maybe they didn't write about uh their their economic situation and they didn't write about you know what was going on in their world beyond just the the the aristocrats they were the ones who were writing right and the ones who were literate so it's what we have i think it's super exciting but it's not the whole thing but i think it's super exciting but it's not the whole picture for decades a shadowy organization called the eliminati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows look around lemon forward sodas even lemon forward songs we ran the tracks slowed them down reversed them and squeezed out the truth that's lemon propaganda right there but now seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda join the seven uprising flip the sip endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com house yeah and then and you know i guess there was the uh i i i've like heard about this guy diego de landa right who burnt all the books yeah yeah i mean did you ever just like sit at night and like just kind of like did you ever really get mad at that guy because he kind of did like ruin the whole thing he he ruined a lot yeah so so this guy he was a a franciscan friar who later became the bishop of yucatan back in the 60s century and he um you know he's vilified because he burnt a lot of the maya books and and smashed their their you know what he called the idols and so forth and uh he caused a lot of damage in a way he was doing his job at the time that's what they were there for um we've lost a lot of culture and a lot of history indigenous culture because of that but there's one thing i will say about landa he was in a way a curious figure he was curious about the stuff he was trying to stamp out which sounds a little weird but he he wrote this book that is basically a a compilation of facts about the world of the maya before the spanish ever arrived i had that book in my house i just like happened i didn't you know it was funny when i was reading your book i'm like oh i have that i read like a little bit of it yeah and uh yeah it does kind of does strike you as he was like recounting whatever history he had yeah he was talking to people and he was getting these are unique accounts that we have and and without his book this manuscript that was just found randomly back in the 1800s you know in a library in spain without londa's book we'd be really up a creek in terms of understanding the mind so so i have to give him some credit despite the fact that he did a lot of damage at the time like most spanish priests of that era it was this kind of give and take i mean they were trying to stamp out the the idolatry the non-catholic rituals they were seeing but they were they were almost like anthropologists of their time they were they were writing down stuff that otherwise would just be lost yeah and what was like the uh was i i remember i read about it in a book that was a little bit older i think it was in the mid 80s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 80s and i think it was in the mid 90s i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it was in the mid 90s and i think it um one of the things about sacrifice that's hard for us to think about is that and here i'm kind of thinking about examples that i have come across in my own research you know for the maya for example there were ritual like executions of war captives and that's kind of cross-cultural i mean we call that sacrifice yeah but it's like a roman gladiator you know arena yeah or or you know which is very like performative and very ritualized but it's a way of kind of dealing with your enemies and your captives and in this kind of this way of going about executing them right yeah i mean that's like pretty i would say that's pretty common i mean even the spanish were like cutting people's heads off of course hanging on six i think the cannibalism thing is what gets people kind of if they were i don't know if they were munching but if you're also just munching i think it's pretty common in in ancient mesoamerica yeah for sure in the americas it's it's in a lot of places in the world i don't hold it against them i mean it was a long time ago i'm not yeah yeah no it's it's uh it is hard to wrap our heads around in some ways but um the the indigenous people in the 1600s and 1500s were also recounting their own background and their own histories and they sometimes talked about that yeah or drew pictures of it and and some some of these people who were in the 1600s and 1500s were also recounting their own background and their own histories and they sometimes talked about that yeah or drew pictures of it and and some some of these people who were in the 1600s and 1500s were also recounting their own background and their own histories and they sometimes talked about that yeah or drew pictures of it and and some some of these people who were in the 1600s and 1500s were scholars today dismiss it as exaggeration i think it actually did happen um yeah i mean it makes sense i mean even when they because i you know like when cortez got there he was he he hit the yucatan first so i think that's right he interact with the mayans or something long before the essex he got to the yucatan right yeah and a lot of a lot of the there was two other expeditions that got pretty much thwarted the spanish spaniards before him right yeah that era is so interesting um you know these crazy expeditions these guys who would just head off to it's into the into the horizon not knowing where they were going yeah and and the early expeditions um you know they hit the coast of yucatan and they didn't know where they were or or they didn't expect to see mainland right there and the maya are there and yeah they have these battles that the spanish more often than not get trounced yeah they have to head back to cuba and and then try again and then they go back and try again and eventually cortez yeah gets his uh group together finally does it yeah that was that was the one thing you always hear about cortez where the you know popular consensus people say is like oh he just like showed up and he tricked the guy and they handed it over to him it was like no it's a pretty long kind of like gruesome protracted battle for like i mean it was like years years yeah i mean the whole story of that of cortez's adventure i you know i'm still waiting for the big hollywood epic movie of this i because it's one of the greatest stories in all of history um it has a lot of painful parts to it for sure it has a lot of drama but you can read first-hand accounts of it too that not only cortez wrote but one of his soldiers wrote this amazing first-hand book of his memoirs of that encounter and it's like a science fiction novel yeah it's like it's like these guys landing on another planet and and they have to go through this process and it's long like you say it took years for cortez to arrive on the shore of mexico and then to overthrow the aztec empire yeah um not a lot of years it was kind of a short time in you know two two and a half years but but even after that it took a while to kind of solidify their their presence there and to establish you know new spain is what they called it so that that story is one of not just the spanish coming in and beating the heads cortez had to you know there were just a few hundred guys at most they had to make alliances with people the aztec who hated the aztecs that's how he was successful yeah you know the the there was this city state called tlaxcala it's now a beautiful town in mexico not far from mexico city but that was the center of a kingdom cortez passed through it actually warred with them eventually they realized hey they could together fight the mexica the aztecs you know the of of tenochtitlan and so that's a whole drama that's all that's part of this story right and and yeah i just find it amazing um i i always you know go back and read excerpts of that story just because it's it's it reads like a novel it's like high drama it's it really is kind of amazing especially with the um who is it i think aguilar was the guy who got like stranded out there father aguilar got like stranded and like lived among them spoke the language and like happened you know he was a slave for like six years yeah and then just stumbled upon that's like the most that's the one story i'm like surprised no one's ever done well right this is another movie that someone has to make in fact i think there's scripts that have been that's cool bandied about in hollywood for a while about about that story and the cortez but the aguilar story yeah so cortez when he first arrives on the coast of yucatan the the maya that that they are in contact with realize wait a minute we've seen one of these weirdos before who was like floating in a boat uh and the maya realized oh there's the slave who's one of these bearded you know white guys um who speaks the same language right and so they they get him they bring him in uh and communicate uh and it turns out it was the shipwrecked spanish sailor who by that time was fluent in speaking maya and eventually he links up with cortez cortez now has someone who can communicate for him uh without that cortez would not have been able to go very far but the other part of this it's an amazing story eventually they link up with another uh maya uh kingdom you know and interact with them and this is where uh malinche comes from this is the woman who eventually becomes cortez's mistress yeah he strangles his life he strangles his life for right she's a princess she speaks maya and she speaks the language of the aztecs yeah so between those two aguilar and um uh between the spanish sailor and and malinche they can actually converse and the and and cortez is a master manipulator right that comes across in all these stories and he's talking to the aztec emperors and you know through these two and they're actually having conversations so it's just amazing to me that that all came together yeah you know and it was just by chance in some ways um but but again that's part of how extraordinary this story is yeah and i thought in your book that was you know the part of it i never even thought about was like and i i thought it was pretty cool that you document it was like the effort it took to decipher those like mayan symbols and texts and i still don't understand you're saying like because you get they're like hieroglyphs they're phonetic but also they like that was something i was like trying to wrap my head around where they have like sounds almost like a consonant but then it's also just like a pictogram where it's like this is the thing and i don't know that was like throwing me off i don't know how you guys did that yeah it is a little confusing and so this this is my my specialty this is what i work on more than anything else is is decoding my hieroglyphs so you literally like can look at this and that's like that's my drawing yeah and you know what this means yeah yeah out of here dude that's crazy and it's beautiful stuff right i mean visually it's really it's really cool cool looking yeah actually this is one of the things that drew me in as a kid because my dad i remember asking my dad you know he was finding in in like the in the 70s when we were you know working in in this maya site called coba which is near tulum i remember he he a couple of times he found new carved tablets and they had hieroglyphs on them and i would say dad what what is this you know what does this say and he's like no i don't know nobody can read them um and that you know caught me i was like that's interesting and and so you know i was really intrigued they looked like cartoons they looked like i was a bored nine-year-old also like i was like crazy hey i just you know i just started drawing them and copying them out of books that my dad had just been kind of interested in what they were that it was like instead of pokemon cards it was my hieroglyphs you know for me something like that so um you know it that's what caught me um and and i got kind of obsessed with them and and was really interested in that and i was like well i'm going to read these and i was like i'm just asking people that my dad knew you know and they were like we can't read these so it turned out that you know i was seeing some new patterns that other people hadn't seen there were other people who i got to know who were also kind of on the cutting edge of stuff and and by the 80s 90s um there were a handful of us who are these young uh some people called us the young turks you know we were these up and coming guys who who were you know they were you know they were they were young turks you know we were these up and coming guys who who were you know they were you know they were young turks you know we were these up and coming guys who who were knew that we were on to something and we knew we were making inroads and so that was a heady time i was so lucky to time my entry into this world that way and and my dad was sort of like you know he was like he wasn't involved he wasn't pushing me into any of this uh it was just my own kind of interest and and he was like hey that's great what you're doing and i think he was a little weirded out at times that we were deciphering things right and left all of a sudden you know the words for names of kings and the word for chocolate yeah you know which is written all over the vases you know they didn't know avocado was a mayan term either that kind of threw me for a loop yeah well avocado is we borrow that word from uh nahuatl which is the language of the aztecs okay that's what it was it was an aztec that's right it's pretty insane yeah so a lot of these words for foods cacao is a maya word so that's written in hieroglyphs and to go back to your question though matt about the the sounds and the pictures yeah they're they're elaborate looking but when you when you cut to the chase they're spelling words and they're writing them as sounds um so okay you can the visuals distract you the you know it's like egyptian too in that way right we see pictures of you know human figures and birds and stuff stuff like that in egyptian but they're also phonetic there's just you have to know the language to read it so you know we really perfected our ability to read the language behind the hieroglyphs and it's a language we can connect to the languages spoken today in that area and uh by by the mid 90s i would say we could read maybe 80 or 90 percent of maya texts that's crazy especially when you the one thing if i have this right was like you can have different symbols similar symbols but different for the same sound which i was like dude that's yeah yeah well it gets crazy because and this is what i helped kind of figure out is that you can read maybe 80 or 90 percent of maya texts that's crazy especially when you the one thing if i have similar symbols but different for the same sound which i was like dude that's yeah yeah well that's kind of tricky it gets crazy because and this is what i helped kind of figure out is that you can read maybe 80 or 90 percent of maya texts that's crazy especially when you the one thing if i have this right because and this is what i helped kind of figure out is that you can read maybe 80 or 90 percent of maya texts that's crazy especially when you the one thing if i have this right of work out was just how ridiculously complex the visuals are compared to the actual system so you can you if they wanted to write the word cacao okay for that's for chocolate cocoa um they will write that with sounds kakawa three hieroglyphs now this is a great example because as it turns out you can write the sound ka one of a couple ways with two different kind of pictures um one of them is a fish and the other one is this thing it looks like a little comb hair comb but it's actually the fin of a fish so it's the same sign but anyway it's they write it as a fish and the fish is like what does that have to do with chocolate well it's because the fish is the sound kai word the word for fish is kai and the fish is like what does that have to do with kai right so that's where they get the ka sound so kakawa they're they're distracting you writing the word using the picture of a fish but that's just how they do it and so if you if you sweep through get past all the artistic uh sort of bells and whistles yeah there's a lot of them you get down to the words and and that's that took a long time to figure out yeah i was you know that you know i mean obviously it makes sense but and there was the so was there like a definitive kind of like um like deciphering codex that kind of like made everything like the other rosetta stones like that yeah well the the folks in egypt had it easy compared to us in some way uh so we didn't have a rosetta stone and and that was of course the key in the 1800s for reading egyptian uh we had some help one of the things that helped us was going back to bishop landa in his book he had and this is pretty funny he had a um what he called the the alphabet of of of the uh of the maya people right and it's like a b c d e and and it's crazy because they didn't have an alphabet but yeah landa didn't get that he didn't understand he was like well if they're writing they must have an alphabet right what london didn't realize is that he was writing down maya glyphs for the sounds that makes sense of the letters as they're pronounced in spanish gotcha so ah bay say day right it's funny there's a syllable right isn't spanish like a notoriously phonetic language itself i remember in spanish class they're like however you look at this this is how you pronounce it pretty much for the most the phonetics of it are pretty straightforward you know as an alphabetic thing you know it's it's it's the vowels are pretty consistent yeah so landa was was clearly flummoxed trying to describe he called it actually this cumbersome writing that the the people have here in yucatan and he couldn't get it what he didn't realize was the the guy he was working with the maya guy who was writing down all this stuff for him they were just talking past each other they had no idea what each other was asking or providing i saw that in your book at one point at one point the guy literally just said i'm tired i don't yeah he writes down this is hilarious he writes down in the manuscript which means i don't want to do this anymore it's really funny actually yeah because they're just like he's he's like i'm out here yeah this episode is brought to you by prize picks the regular season's done and the nba playoffs are here time to get in on the action with the prize picks a preferred partner of the nba nba and space b space a download the price picks app today and use code get fifty dollars in lineups after you play your first five dollar lineup and during the playoff during the playoffs make a five dollar lineup with a live nba pick for a shot at the do it live sweepstakes trip to the nba finals that's a rough one more info can be found on the prize picks promos board price picks a preferred partner of the nba the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows the lemon agenda has infiltrated everything the lemon agenda has infiltrated everything the lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that hit song named after even our music that hit song named after even our music that hit song named after the color of lemons the color of lemons the color of lemons not a coincidence big lemon has been not a coincidence big lemon has been not a coincidence big lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years pulling strings in the industry for years pulling strings in the industry for years think about it but now seven up is think about it but now seven up is think about it but now seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon fighting back with their new lime lemon fighting back with their new lime lemon soda soda soda now lime comes first seven up flip the now lime comes first seven up flip the now lime comes first seven up flip the step step step what you got what you got me yeah who me what you got what you got me yeah who me what you got what you got me yeah who me stinking lincoln i got yeah just the stinking lincoln i got yeah just the stinking lincoln i got yeah just the stinking link and july 17th please come stinking link and july 17th please come stinking link and july 17th please come to lincoln financial field in to lincoln financial field in to lincoln financial field in philadelphia philadelphia philadelphia it's the most important moment of my life it's the most important moment of my life it's the most important moment of my life yeah that'll be nasty and if it yeah that'll be nasty and if it yeah that'll be nasty and if it doesn't go well i'm gonna leave this doesn't go well i'm gonna leave this earth i'm gonna get pyro underneath the stage i'm gonna get pyro underneath the stage i'm gonna get pyro underneath the stage and i'm gonna tell them go ahead yeah and i'm gonna tell them go ahead yeah and i'm gonna tell them go ahead yeah send it flame me i'm out guys i picked up some comedy club dates guys i picked up some comedy club dates guys i picked up some comedy club dates all summer long we're gonna be having all summer long we're gonna be having all summer long we're gonna be having fun together i'll be six five uh june fun together i'll be six five uh june fun together i'll be six five uh june fifth and sixth i'll be at the summit fifth and sixth i'll be at the summit fifth and sixth i'll be at the summit city comedy club fort wayne indiana and city comedy club fort wayne indiana and that is that's in just a few weeks i that is that's in just a few weeks i that is that's in just a few weeks i ran into a buzzsaw over there did you ran into a buzzsaw over there did you ran into a buzzsaw over there did you really yeah what happened really yeah what happened really yeah what happened just an absolute negative experience just an absolute negative experience just an absolute negative experience people were just hammered it's a fun people were just hammered it's a fun people were just hammered it's a fun club yeah that'll be i'll be there in club yeah that'll be i'll be there in club yeah that'll be i'll be there in the dog days of the summer levity live the dog days of the summer levity live the dog days of the summer levity live huntsville alabama the stardom comedy huntsville alabama the stardom comedy club birmingham i'm excited for that and club birmingham i'm excited for that and club birmingham i'm excited for that and spokane comedy club spokane washington spokane comedy club spokane washington spokane comedy club spokane washington uh also it's not up yet but i have a uh also it's not up yet but i have a uh also it's not up yet but i have a bunch of more dates so check them out on bunch of more dates so check them out on bunch of more dates so check them out on metmacostco.com metmacostco.com metmacostco.com goodbye okay so what's the earliest in goodbye okay so what's the earliest in goodbye okay so what's the earliest in terms of like because you know that was terms of like because you know that was terms of like because you know that was kind of cool reading about how they kind of cool reading about how they kind of cool reading about how they figured out how to kind of transcribe figured out how to kind of transcribe figured out how to kind of transcribe everything what's like the earliest everything what's like the earliest everything what's like the earliest story they have that you guys can look story they have that you guys can look story they have that you guys can look back on that has some like narrative arc back on that has some like narrative arc back on that has some like narrative arc or yeah so the earliest his or yeah so the earliest his or yeah so the earliest his story of history that we can tap into story of history that we can tap into story of history that we can tap into is is really the beginning of these is is really the beginning of these is is really the beginning of these many dynasties um we're talking about many dynasties um we're talking about many dynasties um we're talking about the area that's now northern guatemala the area that's now northern guatemala the area that's now northern guatemala southern part of yucatan southern part of yucatan southern part of yucatan we we can tell that there are a lot of we we can tell that there are a lot of we we can tell that there are a lot of these these these great cities that are starting up some great cities that are starting up some great cities that are starting up some of them are being abandoned there's all of them are being abandoned there's all of them are being abandoned there's all these cycles of rises and falls these cycles of rises and falls these cycles but there's this era around you know 200 but there's this era around you know 200 but there's this era around you know 200 300 a.d 300 a.d 300 a.d when these dynasties kind of start up and when these dynasties kind of start up and when these dynasties kind of start up and and they're often connected with each and they're often connected with each and they're often connected with each other they're often rivals with each other they're often rivals with each other they're often rivals with each other other other and we can start to read names of kings and we can start to read names of kings and we can start to read names of kings we can start to read some narratives we can start to read some narratives we can start to read some narratives about what they're doing about what they're doing about what they're doing um one of the big big episodes of maya um one of the big big episodes of maya um one of the big big episodes of maya history history history that we know about now today um that we know about now today um that we know about now today um was in the late 300s in 378. was in the late 300s in 378. there was there was there was this war this war this war it was a conquest it was a conquest it was a conquest of of of this really amazing this really amazing this really amazing city in guatemala we know of today as city in guatemala we know of today as city in guatemala we know of today as tikal tikal tikal major site in fact tikal is the major site in fact tikal is the major site in fact tikal is the uh rebel moon base in the first star uh rebel moon base in the first star uh rebel moon base in the first star wars movie george lucas signed uh wars movie george lucas signed uh wars movie george lucas signed uh filmed filmed filmed the the scene of the millennium falcon the the scene of the millennium falcon the the scene of the millennium falcon taking off from the jungle i don't know taking off from the jungle i don't know taking off from the jungle i don't know if anyone remembers that scene that's if anyone remembers that scene that's if anyone remembers that scene that's crazy crazy crazy yavin four i think it is in star wars yavin four i think it is in star wars yavin four i think it is in star wars right yeah right yeah right yeah that is tikal so he filmed it there that is tikal so he filmed it there that is tikal so he filmed it there anyway fun fact um anyway fun fact um anyway fun fact um the in 378 the king of tikal the in 378 the king of tikal the in 378 the king of tikal was conquered by these was conquered by these was conquered by these outsiders who were coming all the way outsiders who were coming all the way outsiders who were coming all the way from central mexico they were coming from central mexico they were coming from central mexico they were coming from from from a place called teotihuacan which is up a place called teotihuacan which is up a place called teotihuacan which is up near mexico city near mexico city near mexico city and they had had a long relationship clearly. There's this long distance intermarriages and stuff but there came a point where something happened where they had to take this guy down and so they go hundreds of miles into guatemala to conquer him and that sets off this whole other thing so that history really picks up let's say in the fourth century then we have a lot of detailed records after that for about four or five hundred years of um just we have thousands of texts we can read about hundreds of different actors and and and players in this drama with a lot of different kingdoms and it does become like game of thrones like i said where you where you have alliances being forged those alliances often are being uh turned around and and their turncoats and their wars in between cousins and so forth so so it becomes this really dynamic world that you know again 30 40 years ago we couldn't talk about any of this that's what's exciting yeah and now we can match up the the places that we're reading about with the actual sites that you know we are exploring the jungle so uh that's also really cool we can match up the name of this ancient place to this site oh so you actually yeah you know exactly where it was and it wasn't like i don't know if this is because of that but that was i was kind of struck by how a lot of the history comes from just it was like written on the walls of buildings yeah yeah i think the buildings themselves held pretty much the history which is yeah a lot a lot of official stuff just like you know we do in a way right we we have monuments and in our parks and so forth with some official historical records but yeah i mean we're we we have they wrote a lot right they wrote a lot and carved it on stone otherwise we'd be up a creek yeah right because it doesn't it doesn't preserve in the jungle yeah um they they wrote on pottery ceramics so we have a lot of that stuff we don't have anything written on paper from that era yeah because it's not gonna preserve yeah true we the the stuff we have the books we have which is amazing uh those are much later right so the spanish actually collected those okay um so yeah we are we we're lucky to have what we have is the way i look at it and and they so were they like a uh that was the one thing i was trying to figure out too were they like a transient like they would build these giant like you know cities basically and then they would just like abandon them do you is there any idea why they would do that it was like a famine thing or they just would do that well this is a huge question and this is the thing that i think a lot of people um think about when you when you think about the ancient maya is this idea of collapse and i often get this question like well what happened to them because you know didn't they disappear and and that that's a common narrative out there that the maya ancient maya just disappeared which is kind of problematic because the maya are still around so as a people they didn't disappear but what did disappear is that around 900 800 to 900 a.d um a lot of their cities some of them really large with tens of thousands of people they collapsed we call this the maya collapse this is a question that we as archaeologists and academics have been struggling with for a long time what happened so tical okay the the star wars moon base place that's a good example huge city 80 000 people maybe even 100 000 people who were living there something like that in the general area between about 800 and a thousand you're going from a vibrant city to nobody really living there and it gets to be overgrown with jungle and then explorers find it in the 1800s what happened so this is this this idea of a lost city this is really where it comes from it comes from the yeah maya you know explorers in the 1800s um and i mean talk about romantic exploration you know hacking your way through the jungle very indiana jones yeah that's and here is a hundred foot high pyramid that no one has explored before i mean that that's the reality of early days of my archaeology so this fed into this question what happened it fed into a lot of crazy ideas about maybe what happened um that they disappeared well they did disappear from those places yeah they moved on so one of the things i'm writing about in the book is you know what factors went into this um i think there were tipping points it had to do with climate for sure because we have records of drought we know that um water was hard to come by in these places it still is yeah uh so so you can understand how these tipping points might come up um but big populations basically couldn't sustain themselves in some of these places and i think also the political system kind of fell apart they were we can also track in the records you know the last hundred years of of this era was there was so much warfare uh and and you know there had always been conflict and and you know like any like medieval history but you see it ramping up uh and in the last few decades there it's just incessant warfare and i think the system just breaks down yeah yeah so um i think the maya had a lot of agency in deciding what to do the people and i think they just voted with their feet and decided to just let's go off to do other things true yeah and so this is the one of the things that i really want to try to do in my my narrative about this is that it wasn't like some external thing that came you know ufos with beams taking people away it's that the maya um were going through a crisis and they had to make some very very hard decisions no doubt to do something about their dire situation in many places and they decided to leave have you seen the hieroglyph of a guy who's like looks like he's in a rocket ship looking up though that was the only thing i remember from ancient aliens they would show that a hundred oh yeah they keep showing dude he's in a rocket ship he took off right so this is the famous uh or infamous image of a maya rocket that is actually a lid of a coffin of a sarcophagus of a great ruler whose name was kini chana pakal and he ruled a place uh that we know today as palenque beautiful beautiful site in mexico and yeah when they found his tomb in the 1950s you know this beautiful coffin with this carving um there were there was kind of a interesting situation after they found it of course nobody could read the hieroglyphs right in the 50s or 60s there were all these texts around the coffin it wasn't until the 70s that we could sort of read the name maybe in the 80s and 90s we could read actually what it was saying he was talking about this great king his birth date his death date all of his ancestors uh kind of waiting for him in the afterlife and all this stuff the scene on the top is of kini chana pakal the king he he's he is kind of taking off in a way right but what he's doing is he's raising as the sun in the east he's being resurrected and and he's not in a rocket he's just emerging out of the earth out of the kind of this ma this cave rising up as the sun um into the sky and it's a really elaborate imagery but that's in essence what it is so it's really cool not a rocket ship but not a rocket ship he's going in the sky anyway yeah i remember just that must have uh you know i was watching that as like a perpetually stoned young boy something being like i knew it this is awesome it must have been driving you nuts to watch tv and be like what what are you doing why are you doing this right now i know yeah it does drive me nuts because you know well here's the thing right the those narratives and and it's not long before ancient aliens long before that show right there were movies eric von donnegan and his book you know chariots of the gods yeah talking about all this stuff in the 70s that was at a time when no one could create come up with a counter narrative right so that takes hold um it fills a void right to explain this stuff yeah and now we can explain it so this is the conundrum that i'm facing is you know we do understand it culturally historically but it is hard for us to fight against you know ancient aliens which is on tv almost every night yeah or or whatever right that that's what people the people who are curious about this stuff genuinely curious don't have a whole lot to go to to understand it and they may come up with um a show like ancient aliens and that's like oh okay that must be the consensus view or something like that right yeah not knowing that any archaeologist thinks that's bs yeah um we're just not very good at communicating with the public to be honest you know what we do know yeah and and um i'll be the one to say that academics are terrible at communicating some of the realities we think are you know that are out there in terms of history and cultures so i mean this book i i i hope is a a small um effort to you know tell what's really going on to to explain some of what we think we know that's pretty so in terms of like you know being an archaeologist and like kind of like the um i guess like the day-to-day like i just like you ever have people because it is you know you're out there you're digging like do you have people who like break stuff all the time and like how do you deal that must be that must be like really tough like really high stakes of like a yeah yeah it's so archaeology is well it is a lot of fun you're out in the in the boonies often living in a camp with a bunch of people for months at a time uh that's what i was doing my younger days at least um you know in in in remote places and it is a little crazy i mean you you you you're you're you're studying the this ancient stuff but you're also kind of isolated and you know i just remember living in the jungle before there was any internet or anything like that you know you kind of go a little bananas yeah yeah but but also um yeah they're they're when you're digging uh not necessarily a big pyramid or something let's just say you're digging a ancient house and it might be a pile of rocks it's a couple of feet high you know platform in a jungle um there's pottery everywhere there's a lot of stones you know wall stones um it's boring maybe um even for a specialist it can be kind of boring yeah you don't find cool things every day maybe once in a while there's something um and usually in my experience the coolest stuff is discovered when there's like two days left really season and they're like oh shit what do we do like a tomb you know royal tomb or something yeah this is typical right because you know after you dig deep in a lot of time passes then you find the cool stuff um so it can be stressful that way if you find something special there's a lot of bureaucracy involved yeah you have to let people know what you found in the government and yeah and you made it you mean you'd get guards down to protect it i was wondering about the theft because i imagine it's like you guys have a pretty decent sized crew digging you know what i mean so yeah i would imagine you know if i was just there digging that wasn't archaeologists i would definitely snag like an old mug or like i you know you'd want to right well i know for a fact that stuff does get taken by the the laborers we sometimes have or you know um back in the old day archaeologists were notorious themselves for stealing stuff you know in a way that probably at the time maybe didn't seem unethical but you know 100 years ago archaeologists working in mexico you know you you'd go to their archives and you'd actually find artifacts that they brought out you know you wouldn't do that today no yeah but um what's the penalty you just get like lose your like license like how do you well yeah nowadays it's uh as a professional archaeologist you all artifacts have to be catalogued you have to report them to if you're working in a foreign foreign country of course you have to report everything you you have and that you found um but you know there are uh there there's a dark side to all of this too which is like the art market in the market in looting ancient sites and that's what we're often fighting against sometimes directly you know looters in the in the field i've come across gangs of looters in northern guatemala who are tunneling into pyramids looking for tombs yeah that's my next question what do you do for i guess you just said you get security around the site because i'd be kind of like nervous i was out in the woods yeah in guatemala i'm digging precious artifacts i would assume someone's going to be like yeah let me get that yeah yeah no tunnel underneath it yeah well this is what we do too as archaeologists we have to tunnel into if the building is large enough um and stable enough that that's the best way to understand its history is to actually start digging a tunnel it's like you're mining yeah you know into a pyramid and and the looters do the same thing uh so the irony of a lot of this too is that the guys that that archaeologists have trained to dig when we go home they don't have a lot to do necessarily and they're like hey let's go we know how to dig these things now yeah and they go to town and and so uh this actually is what happened a lot in the 70s and 80s like there isn't an ancient maya building in northern guatemala that doesn't have a trench right through it mostly by looting yeah and it's really sad um but a lot of the stuff you see in museums today in the states uh fantastic maya pottery or whatever a lot of that's not dug by archaeologists but found by looters sold on the art market collected by either museums or private collectors um i understand that because it's beautiful stuff i mean if i had the money and wasn't an archaeologist i would understand you know i'd love to have a maya chocolate vase in my living room yeah um so uh there there's there's that constant struggle right there aren't enough archaeologists to go around and there are a lot of people who are really interested in digging this stuff up who maybe aren't scientists and and you know what's interesting is that all of this kind of becomes this big mix it becomes this way of of of accessing the ancient past it may not always be through archaeology but i'll tell you the stuff in museums now that maybe doesn't have any context to it or we don't know where it's from exactly sometimes those objects have stories to tell that we can read or we can figure out we can reconstruct it and and so that's part of it too right i do a lot of work in museums instead of uh digging in the dirt because uh and there's still not enough of us doing this kind of research frankly so uh it's overwhelming yeah so you're saying there's a just like a ton of stuff that's been found and it's just the matter of taking the time to decipher right figure it out yeah yeah we we have thousands of it's like having a bookcase or a library of thousands of books and there may be i don't know 10 or 15 of us who can read them dang and you know we have jobs and other things we're doing and so you know yeah yeah yeah so yeah it there's a lot of work still to be done to figure this stuff out so in terms of like you know um do you guys have a good sense of like what the mayans i guess like philosophy the religious world view was and you know where where were they at and how do they compare to like aztecs or is there is there like big differences or yeah a great question um so we do know a lot about maya philosophy and and religion i think it's hard to distinguish those things yeah um i think it's hard to distinguish those things yeah um so i think it's hard to distinguish those things yeah um and it is a lot like the aztecs because they're all part of this same kind of mesoamerican world which is sort of like you know think of greece and rome or the mediterranean world where um a lot of those myths and religious ideas are kind of the same but maybe with different flavors same idea um one of the things that excites me and and i'm thinking of my next book actually a little bit um is one about this about maya religion and philosophy because as much as we can read about kings and wars and dynasties we can also read about their gods and about their outlook on the world and their cosmology and the maya of today have a lot of those same ideas about you know the way the sun moves around the sky and how that creates this kind of overall structure of the universe and that structure is reflected in a lot of other things there's this really elegant cosmology to these folks and it's not just a mesoamerica i think a lot of it is indigenous american about the structure of the world and they were observing their world just like scientists do like they didn't have the tools of modern science but they were smart and they could see how the world was working the patterns of the seasons and of time and of agriculture and this sort of cadence of the world around them that that that's what created their philosophy um it's it's rooted in in literally uh rooted in in kind of the earth and in the sky and not to get too abstract about it this this is stuff that really i find fascinating because it it's it's like an archetype you know it's like one of these things that a lot of cultures share even beyond the americas i mean you go to traditional societies in china or or or uh philosophy there in asia in africa you see a lot of the same ideas about cosmology and and structure uh that i don't know we've kind of forgotten some of this stuff in our world but i don't know if you're a farmer in a traditional society and you're relying on the seasons and you're relying on on you know how the sun works and how it moves in the rain i mean that that creates a template that's kind of universal in in in in the human experience i think and so i'm kind of interested i don't know a ton about outside mesoamerica but i'm really interested in in kind of probing those deeper ideas not that people were sharing those ideas but i think they're old i think they're just really fundamental about about existing on the on the earth and uh and we can tap into it some that's pretty cool yeah i uh from from just like the little bit i read about the cortez and the aztecs there was this idea with the aztecs that like if they didn't complete the sacrifices like that blood the blood was like some universal life force that they would like you know display to appease the gods and if they didn't the skies like would literally crash down and like yeah there was like a balance held by all this stuff that if they didn't do the rituals right it would just look like the sun would fall out of the sky just everything would fall apart yeah yeah but this is part of a bigger idea of of renewal it's all about renewing the world and sometimes it involved the offering of one's own blood in bloodletting or sacrifice it could also involve lots of different transactions with the forces of nature to ensure renewal so um if you step back a bit and look at the bigger picture there there is a philosophy behind it right which is that um uh humans have a responsibility to renew things i think that's very powerful you know we we don't do that in our world necessarily right we kind of do the opposite of that um but but in this pre-industrial whatever world you know they they were they they saw that um you know there were problems with climate sometimes there were years of drought and so forth you know not everything was stable every year right so this is where that idea comes from um the the aztecs took it to a certain level uh in their ideology that that's different maybe from other cultures but the underlying idea there is that that humans have to do certain things we can call that ritual um they didn't have a word for this as ritual they just saw it as the work they had to do yeah to ensure that yeah the sun would come up again after the 52 year cycle or that you know it would be as strong as it once was or that the rains would come um i've been part of ceremonies as a kid i was a part of ceremony as a kid in in coba in this little maya village now it's a bigger town the rains that weren't coming one year that we were there my dad's project and the the the village was in crisis because without that rain there was you couldn't even hunt the animals because they weren't around anymore and so the the local priest um decided to have a rain ceremony and this was completely genuine this was not some kind of tourist thing for us this was for the village and and we had they constructed an altar in the plaza of the ancient ruins i mean talk about atmospheric i mean it was wild and uh it was an all-night ceremony to renew rain and it's called the chachak which means to summon chak the rain deity uh who's a deity we see in the ancient art by the way and uh as one of the uh i was young i was nine years old the the the the shaman called a khmen a doer he needed kids to be part of the ceremony so he asked me to be one of the kids that would um rotate around uh every like an hour here an hour there were a lot of us to sit under this table makeshift table it was his altar and it was a four-sided model of the universe with the four world directions and i was one of the four kids that sat under the table facing in the world directions to call the rain god and i had to sit there for an hour in the middle of the night going what what what how old are you i was nine well i was a frog yeah that's awesome and i was calling the ring god and well we were all sitting around going what what what what and you know there's there's fermented drinks going around and it's just wild you know no women were allowed it was just men and the boys and um i mean i was a kid from north carolina and i was all of a sudden you know kind of in this thing yeah and my dad was you know taking pictures and uh being the anthropologist and i was just sort of going there and what am i doing here um but i that experience for me was it really really brought home in retrospect to this idea that you you know we have to do things to renew the world and all religions do this right the the in a catholic mass is kind of a renewal ceremony right yeah um all sorts of ceremonies are are renewals of the cosmos and and and they're doing it their way right and they do it in these weird ways that we think are well they are kind of nuts i mean sometimes these you know the human sacrifices that the assets were doing um was a kind of renewal to because the life force is the blood of these people and and the cosmos needs its life force um there are a lot of complicated ideas behind all of these things yeah but in a nutshell it is about renewal that's pretty so what's what's like the pantheon like the mind pantheon looking like do they do you have a good sense of like all the different gods like they do yeah well they they had it so they they existed in in what we would call maybe an animate universe in that you know we know that we're living beings and plants are living beings and animals but they also saw an animation in mountains in the earth in the sky um anything that the sun that moves around you know it has animation it it it's it has agency in a way right so and when we're talking about gods we're talking about in many ways these kind of natural forces um and and so they gave names to these the rain deity right who is still venerated um yeah he's he's one of the most important right because he's a storm he's he's like a storm cloud that's exactly what they call him when there's a storm cloud coming in yucatan oh i remember this as a kid they would say hakutale chalk here comes jock yeah he's coming he's coming right and he's coming with his machete to break the clouds to bring the rain and in ancient times it was an axe yeah stone axe but um these ideas don't die right they're they're they're still there and it's it's easy to say it's like mythology and stuff like that but but this is part of their lives you know and and i think um they they had all of these deities and and and so-called gods and forces in their world um some of them are ancestors some of them are forces of nature um some of them are combinations of all of these things right so it gets to be very very complicated very quickly but yeah they were you know like a lot of other cultures they just saw this kind of animation in the universe around them that's pretty and and they're i know they were notorious the calendar is the big one that yeah time time was animate time was a living thing yeah that was kind of cool because you always hear about the mayan calendar but in the book the uh you're talking a little bit about how they're they seemed almost like pretty hell-bent on like really nailing down all those little kind of swirling gears of time and how it all fit together and it's pretty that was pretty neat that was one of the reasons it was i guess easier to decipher is they had such a good a strong calendar system that you're able to see the date aren't we lucky that they wrote everything down according to the very day when things happened right so i've actually had these conversations with um people who study egyptian history or or even greek history like there's a lot we know about that but they may not know the exact day when tutankhamen died i mean they might know the year more or less within a couple years we know because of the maya calendar and the way they mesh with our calendar the very day when kini channa of palenque died and was resurrected you know we know when the war of 378 happened a tikal that was on january 16. we know when all sorts of things happened you know to the very day and it's that's really unusual anytime in ancient history no matter where you are in the world so we're really lucky we have that for the maya um they were so interested in their cosmos and in the patterns of time and everything that they they wrote that down with precision so yeah it's great for us how many days was a mine year was it 360 or well they had our year too i mean they had 365 days what they had that they had um uh a notion uh well this is cool there we have a base 10 counting system right they had a base 20 counting system how's that how's that because we count our fingers but they also counted toes didn't even think it's toes so i've been doing math with my six-year-old daughter i'm gonna bust my toes out now so so once you get that idea of fingers and toes okay base 20 so they they have an accounting system that's 20 instead of 10 hundred thousand right it goes 2400 8 000 whoa and so i mentioned this because they they understood time to be 365 days like we do even with the leap days in there um but they also had this idea of 360 days okay because 20 will go into that they liked that and they were like okay we'll use that as sort of a basic idea of a year in in this calendar that they developed and it doesn't track with real time but they used it and they used it to create this um massive calendar uh the scale of which dwarfs our cosmology you know in terms of the big bang like the the dates they were writing sometimes in mythology go back you know billions and billions and billions of years so um that that's another kind of cool topic but well so their mythology has dates and yeah yeah no they're talking about gods doing things way before our big bang yeah yeah it's it's really crazy when you think about it what is their like genesis myth that like do they they have like a standard genesis myth or is it just kind of yeah they do in fact this is something i've been working on in the last few months um i haven't even published on this really but uh i think there's one essential myth about the the raising of the earth out of primordial sea you know which sounds like a lot of myths in the world right um and it's this stone that is the surface of the earth and uh there are four uh guys who kind of hold up this big table like stone and create the world um that's recorded in some ancient myths i've been working on um the uh it's interesting because maya kings talked about renewal when they were marking their calendar festivities they would have to recreate that myth by by raising stones uh these are the monuments we sometimes see at maya sites today or the stones that are symbols of renewal and there's another myth that's about uh kind of a hearth that is created in primordial time uh three stones that get set in a triangle and uh that's called the first hearth place and that seems to be a really essential event in the creation of of kind of the order of everything right so we have these here's the struggle right now among us uh who are studying this stuff is we have these little episodes of myth and mythology i'm trying to create more of a narrative out of them all like what's the real story how do they all connect right how does the stones over here connect to those stones over there anyway i'm i'm really optimistic then in the next several years we're going to be able to talk about maya mythology ancient maya mythology in a way that we talk about egyptian or even greek or roman mythology in terms of this stuff right so it's it's exciting that's pretty cool yeah well nice well hey thanks for coming on man and uh yeah if it is the four heavens by david stewart good job thank you myself it was a great good job getting uh figuring out what this stuff means i i couldn't do it there's more to do too it's pretty fun thank you man thank you so much appreciate it watch new episodes of matt and shane secret podcast on spotify do it endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house fall is the perfect time to 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