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

♪ Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly ♪ - Check engine, ABS, or maintenance light on? Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly VeriScan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE-certified master technicians. And if you need help, we can recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly VeriScan today. ♪ Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly ♪ ♪ Auto Parts ♪ - Today, I'm talking with Dr. Ed Barnhart. In 1995, he was a grad student in the jungles of Belize with a mail order map, a machete, and a camp full of colleagues who thought he was chasing nothing. Then his students started screaming his name at the top of the pyramid. He found a lost Maya city. He was 26. - When I was 26, I found a lost city too, Atlantic City. I lost it right back at the craps table. - Everybody asks Ed about that day. Today, we're covering the parts nobody asks about. What happened when the city got handed to someone else? How around a tequila he wasn't there for got him the job of mapping Palenque and the beams of light he chased into the temples of Cambodia. And then he told me how he thinks the Inca got those Kusco walls to fit like that. Not aliens, acid. - Not an Inca with tripping balls. Kusco is just a Lucy in the sky with diamonds, but with boulders. - Not that kind. - Ah, buh-bye. - That one, I'm still turning over. After our conversation, I'll come back and break it all down. Let's go down to the basement. Dr. Ed Barnhart is here. Thank you for coming in today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Luke Caverns, Luke Reagan turned me on to your work, and I've been obsessed ever since. I really, really enjoy it. I love Luke. Luke has grown so much as an explorer, too. He was just kind of a young guy with stars in his eyes when I first met him, but now he is my colleague. He's legit. He texted me a photo a couple of days ago of him in front of a tiger or something. Oh, my gosh. Maybe I got – I saw one of a flashlight on a lion at night. That's the picture. What in the world? What are you doing? That's unadvisable. Get out of there. It's unadvisable. It's unadvisable. I want to start with 1994. So you're a grad student, and before you go down, everyone knows your story about finding the lost city, and we'll get to that. Did you order the map mail order? I did. I did. Tell me about that. Where did you find that? It was a place that mostly sold USGS maps, but then it had all over the world. Every country, you could get their version of USGS maps, so I went to the Belize section and got a bunch of quads that were generally in the area I wanted to be. I actually bought like 10 wrong ones and then finally got the right one. You got 10 wrong ones? Yeah. I misunderstood where I was looking. It said program for Belize, but then it didn't include the southern part that I was in. I donated them to the project. The project used them. So they assigned you that area? Yes, my professor basically said, I don't know how he picked it. I guess he picked it because there's just one dirt road running through this huge area of hundreds of thousands of acres. And near mile marker 10 going east, they had found a site called Dos Hombres, and it was only like a kilometer off the road. But he figured this west part is the one heading into Guatemala. Nobody's been out there. So he dropped us off at mile marker 11. And I mean, the first day it was just me and this guy, Charles Hargrove, both grad students. That was before the city. But he dropped us off at mile marker 11 and just said, watch your compasses, cut straight west, I'll pick you up at three. And that went on for a month. Okay. So this is a bunch of land. This is cleared by Coca-Cola, right? And they donated it back. Well, they wanted to clear it, but they didn't. They didn't. Because Coca-Cola got bad PR out of it. Sure. And so before they chopped the forest down, they sold it to Belize for something like five cents an acre. Right. And so it became programmed for Belize. So the country saved it from Coca-Cola, which is nice. Yeah. So the protocol traditionally is straight lines, directional to just straight line. And you said, no, I'm going to follow old logger roads. I mean, it does make sense in most contexts. When you're doing an initial survey, you want to work the ground like it's a piece of graph paper. You want to be on cardinal directions so you can map out better what you found. So a transect going west in most environments makes sense. I did that all the time in Texas. But this one, poor Charles and I, you know, we went west, like he said, and we went up one hill, and down another one, up one hill, down another one. It was just ravine after ravine, like seven hills before we finally hit that British logging road. And once we hit the British logging road, I was like, hold on, let's follow this. And going north on it, we started running into Maya buildings. Going south on it, pretty soon we hit the road again. And it was all 100 years overgrown, but it would have been, I did cut it out. Eventually, we had a. A truck that could go five kilometers in. It makes so much sense that to follow those roads, because the loggers probably did the same thing, right? They were through the jungle, and I said, someone cleared roads here. Let's just work these, right? Path of least resistance. I mean, you know, the Corps of Engineers always, you know, you do the topography map, and you say, well, we're not going to put the road right over this. That would be terrible. We'll go around it. We'll follow the river paths, and the river paths are the way, the good places for old villages to be. So. So once we started doing the road instead of the transect, and I did, my boss was not very happy that I abandoned the transect. I was going to ask you. My compromise was, great, I'll do both. So you did both. I will cut the, we will keep cutting the transect. I did both for two seasons. And by the time I really had a map of it, I was like, look, Fred, you know, here's the western transect. It hit one site. Here's my map of the. I hit five sites. Right. I need to keep following this road. This is, this is doing the homework for me. Did, um, were people skeptical of your decision? Oh, so skeptical. I was a relatively new grad student there. They were already established folks that had been in the project for years. And before I found the city, I was like, open camp joke that I was just bringing. I was just bringing students every day to just hack in the jungle uselessly that they were doing no archeology. I was just torturing students out in the jungle. Wow. Who was in your corner though? Was it? So Charles, is that doc Charles that you're talking about? Oh, well, no. Charles Hargrove was the first grad student, but then doc Charles, you do know this story. Doc Charles was wonderful. My, my students were into it. They were into the adventure and we, we did find buildings. Sure. And, uh, I, I think I treated people. With a general respect, I have this, you know, chip on my shoulder about all of us are equal and I really bothers me when people act superior when they're not in the camp dynamic without naming any names, you know, that there was a group of grad students who called themselves the super elite. They called themselves that they called themselves the super elite. They kind of named it after like my, uh, concepts, but they were the, they were the royalty of the camp. And the students were scum. And, uh, I mean, in a good natured, you know, prodding kind of way, but, uh, they had their own cups in the, in the camp. Nobody could touch their cups. Everybody else had random cups that we all shared, but then their cups were special and they got in line first for whatever the meal was. And they had the access to the trucks. So like if anybody wanted a beer or anything else from town, you had to go through the super elite. And, uh, those guys were, it was a difficult time. So there was actually much more opposition and, uh, uh, just laughter at what I was trying to do. If you, if you call yourself super elite, you're not. Exactly. So I really, I, I vote up against that. I made an entire crazy like bar out in the road. I had access to the truck, so I would go and buy a bunch of beer and sell it to everybody for just the price I bought it. And I had a, I had a, uh, bar out. It was on the road after nine o'clock when the lights went out, I called it the Cinnabar and eventually it got just crazy. There'd be like 30 people a night out on the road and beer and rum. And I had like a band on the weekends. It was, it was crazy, but, and the super elite would come out there sometimes. Eventually I, I lured some of them into the fold. Sure. But I was just kind of this like rebel in the camp and I mean, up until I found the city, they were right. I was, did not know where the hell I was going. I had a plan. I didn't know it would be there. You've always been the clear-headed heretic. I mean, I've watched you. It might have been the Doha debates where you talked to other archaeologists about Graham and all of that, and you were the cool head in the room saying, look, if we're going to win hearts and minds, you can't insult people. We just need to make the case. I thought it was lovely. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. A few of them didn't agree with you. No, no. You know, they really wanted somebody. They wanted Graham, of course, on that thing, or anybody that would even defend his point. And nobody from those circles would show up. No. And so I kind of, by default, was the closest to that camp. And they had to stir it up. You know, they wanted, I mean, it's entertainment. They want a good debate. But that one guy going, I've got a secret. Ed says that archaeology isn't science. Like, oh, shit, here we go. Here we go. Here it goes. But, yeah, I. I am who I am. And I'm not scared to be that person in any context. You're not. So take us to Discovery Day. We sit. We need. It was. What's the right way to pronounce it? Because I know the media gets it wrong. Game day reveals the truth about your cookware, and it's not pretty. You're making wings for the guys, someone's bringing the cheese dip, and you're searing everything on high heat because kickoff is in 20 minutes. Then it happens. Wings stick to the pan, the dip gets burnt on the bottom, and you end up scrubbing a scorched pan the night before the next conspiracy episode drops. That's not cooking. That's punishment. Here's the thing. 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Support our show and check them out at hexclad.com forward slash basement. Make sure you let them know we sent you. The city? Yeah. Mosh-nah. It's actually, I'm saying it wrong. Mosh-nah. A glottal stop. A glottal stop. Otherwise it becomes spider monkey, which they got wrong, right? I think, you know, there's so many Maya languages too. This is, I picked Yucatec. Mosh is howler monkey. And I think that bots, bots is spider monkey. Oh, okay. So what I thought was interesting about your story is when you were down there, you sent your students in the more promising direction. Yeah. Why? Well, because they were giving their heart and soul to the project. And, you know, they may, these students might, this might be their only experience in archaeology their whole life. I was already committed. I know I'm going to keep doing this. I'll keep doing adventures. Why don't I give them a chance? To have a life-changing experience. So when you heard screaming in the jungle, was that before the discovery? Well, I heard daily screaming in the jungle. So the students would be shocked by so many things. Those howler monkeys, they yell so loud. The first time that a student would find that, that would make at least a girl scream. They'd like run off to go pee somewhere under a tree. And then all of a sudden there's a huge scream above. You don't think about that. Peeing in the jungle is not going to be great. No, it's not good. It's not good. You never want to take your pants off. It's terrible. You don't. I meant screaming when you thought someone was bitten by a snake. Oh, it was two guys up on top of that pyramid. So you found it first? No, they found it. They found it. They were up on top. I was with you. You mentioned Dr. Charles. So like, we're just doing our survey. We're cutting out the road, but we are finally, going uphill to the three hills that I wanted to get to. So we get up to the first one on the west and I would stop along the road and say like, okay, one crew go north, one crew go south, depending on how the road was going. Let's see if there's anything out here. And if there's not, we'll keep going. If there is, we'll investigate that. So to the south of the road, we find this building that's like five meters tall. It's like 15 feet tall, which, you know, is not huge, but it's not a house. Right. Like, okay, that's weird. We've never found something this big. This is exciting. We're going to put this right in the center of our graph paper and we're going to. Back then I called it leapfrog mapping. Now I have a more technical term. I call it relational mapping. But we're hot, we're tired. Let's just work the jungle like a piece of graph paper. And north is north. So you guys go straight north. You guys will go south. We came from the east, so we don't need to go there. And one more to the west. So I had six people there. And one of them was Doc Charles. And I promised Fred I would take care of Doc Charles because he was this, like, 70-something retired doctor from Palestine, Texas. What was he doing there? He just was, you know, so many people, dream of doing archaeology and they're more practical than me. So they go and they're a doctor and they have their family and their comfortable life. And once they retire, they're like, my dream was always archaeology. I'm doing it now. Good for him. Doc Charles was one of these guys. He was great. I loved him. And he's on the expedition that finds all this stuff. Good for him. Yeah, he was great. But my job was really hard. We would just sweat gallons of water out, hurt ourselves with machetes. And Doc Charles, days before, had gotten overheated and fell over in the jungle and passed out. And it was scary. Yeah. And he was dehydrated and he was usually pretty good about that stuff. But he just wore himself out. So when we came back, my project director chewed me out about it and said, Charles is not doing this anymore. He's going, he's going to go to one of the excavations where he's just going to dig in a pit. He can't do that anymore. And then Charles came to me like a night later and he said, if I can't do this with you, I'm leaving. I don't want to do this other stupid stuff. It was your survey. I believe what you're doing. I got to go. And so I went to bat for him. I went to Fred and said, I will be Charles's partner. I will be next to him the entire time. Anything that happens to him is my responsibility. I will make sure that Charles is safe. So he agreed to that. So this day, was day two or maybe even one of Charles coming back. So me and Charles took the south side and then there was north and then there was west. West was the one. But as Charles and I were walking south and finding buildings, I heard that yell like, Ed, Ed, come, come here, come here. And I thought it was the snakes. And I had the only anti-venom kit in my backpack, that and an EpiPen. And so I actually did what I told Fred I would not do. And I, bolted away from Charles. I was like, I gotta go. Just stay here. Stay here. And I bolted through the jungle to go find them. And when I got there, they kept yelling, where are you? Where are you? I'm here. I'm here. When I got up there, they were way up there. It was at 18 meters tall. 50 feet? Yeah. I don't speak. 60 feet. I don't speak metric. Six story building. Yeah. I mean, just little guys up there. And they, they were standing on a pyramid. I thought they would get, it was, we have this spooky thing that on the last days of projects are when things go terribly wrong. Like the worst things will happen in the last couple of days. So we had that kind of superstition working and I had it in my head the whole time. Damn it. I hear it a lot. I was so close. And now I'm going to walk out with just, you know, some, some students bitten by snakes and the, the super elite are just going to roast me. But no, they were on top of a pyramid and we did it. Did you call for doc? I did. I went back and got doc and got him up there. And then I went and found the guys that went North. I think it was Jim Eckhart and Brent. Brent. I forget Brent's last name, but anyway, I was so excited to bring them back to the pyramid that I was not cutting in front of myself. I was just kind of dipping and weaving and I put my head under a big palm frond that had a wasp's nest. - Oh, no. - Right here. And I put my head directly into it and they dug into my hair and they just bit, I mean, more than a dozen stings on the top of my head. Jim Eckhart still makes fun of me. He said that I, that I just, I stood up, I threw my machete in front of me and then I said, "Ow, hurt, don't." Those, those are the three words that came out of my mouth. - I've seen your pictures and listened to your podcast and I just go, nope, nope, nope, nope. There's a picture of you covered in like army ants. It's like-- - Yeah, we, It happens to you all the time. You really just got to have a literal thick skin to survive it. So we get up there to the top of the pyramid. Everybody's there. We're going to have lunch there. Now the whole group's up on top of it. And I asked Doc Charles, who I love, I said, Doc, I just got stung like a dozen times in my head. You think I'm going to be okay? And he just goes, well, anaphylactic shock sets in within a minute. So if you're not dead, you're probably fine. And it's reassuring. What a cool little Texas doctor thing to say. He's one of my favorite characters in your stories. So you guys had lunch. What's for lunch up there? What did you talk about? Lunch was the same thing it always was. Ham wrapped in tortillas, like a little roll, and Vienna sausage. Fred would buy these cans of Vienna sausage. Nobody wanted them, but they were easy to store. I mean, they wouldn't spill in your bag. And so you have Vienna sausages and ham wraps. And what's the conversation like? Gosh. I mean, just thrilled. We were sitting right next to a cave-in to the roof of the structure. So we knew that we weren't just sitting like on the top of the base. We were up there. Then there was a temple on top. With a. Corbel Arch. We were up here. Oh, wow. And there was a hole that probably a tree had fallen out and ripped the roof off there. So we could see in there. And we fooled around. I think Jim was the one that crawled down in there to see how deep it goes. And like found still stucco on the walls and where the doorways are. That was an interesting thing. We knew we came from the east, but we did not know it was west. And so when Jim crawled in there, he was like, all the doors face that way. That's where we got to go. So we talked about where we would go. And just then, when we were having lunch, is when the howler monkeys just descended on us. There were a bunch of them. And they yelled and screamed at us so much. I mean, part of our conversation was drowned out by just screaming monkeys. That's why I gave it the name Mashnah. Because it was their house. Monkey house. Why were they so upset? Are they territorial? They are. They are. They're territorial with each other and with us weird tailless things. They don't like it when you're around. No. So how deep was it when he went down there? I mean, because that's an Indiana Jones moment. Into the building? Yes. Well, we were on the superstructure. And then there was a whole, there was like a talus of collapse that Jim could shuffle down. But from the top to where he was standing. Into the building. Inside the building was probably 12 feet, 15 feet. Okay. Something like that. But there was a nice little talus so he could get in and out of there. What did it look like in there? Vines growing through the front doors. When you were inside, you could see that there were more than three doors. There were collapses on either side. But we could see three doors. And they're totally covered up by. Just 1,000 years of mulch roots growing through. You're always on the lookout in an environment like that for snakes or spiders. Of course. It's easy to jump away from them in the jungle. But when you're in a little building like that. Right. If you can encounter one, you're pinned. No artwork, no frescoes, nothing? Nothing. No artwork in there. Gosh, I wish. But most of that's gone. That's very rare. I've actually never found a really great work of art out there surveying. I've always wished I could find a Stela. At Mashnah, I know now that there's been more work that they did find a carved Stela. And I walked right by it, you know, 30 times. But that's the nature of the jungle. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, from me to you, there could be the base of a building. And if there's a big wall of, like, brambles, you just don't see it. Right. So, things, big things can be hidden very close to you there. We're going to get back to some of that. exploration in a minute but i wanted to ask you about something i found imdb has you listed as playing han solo the empire strikes back uncut in 2014 i love that is that you and what 15 seconds of empire did it is not me oh that's too bad but you know i i am i'm never asking them to take it down no you should never do that like yeah i am han solo that's right you are but but people were getting upset with me people would find that and go like this guy isn't even really an archaeologist he's some actor look he plays han solo like i know i am really am an archaeologist i swear so i finally got curious enough to look it up it's actually uh a empire strikes back fan cut movie yes so the entire thing is nothing but clips of fans playing out various scenes and at like minute 17 there's my ex-wife and her husband with my son and daughter and they're playing the scene where luke's being put back together in hoth and like a fuzzy nerf herder that scene and luke she kisses him and luke's like this uh my son edwin barnhart is playing han solo oh so he's han solo it's it's like a nine-year-old boy playing han solo that's amazing for some reason it's the number it's not only on my imdb thing it's the first entry everybody sees if they see nothing else they see that i am han solo and you you guys star wars fans to go check out the uncuts they're one of the only fan films that that star wars endorses they put it on oh you know about them sure it's so for those who don't know they're 15 second clips of just families acting out scenes but it could be paper art muppets just costumes i mean what did your son was he was he in a costume what did he do i think they had a they had a little vest on him sure but it was really uh you know my ex-wife's husband who was such a super fan i'm a super fan too i love it and i mean i as a child you know when we played the star wars games i'm han solo that was the first thing that's the first thing i'd say i'm han solo let's all be clear about that and so when imdb named me han solo i'm never taking that down i am never taking that down good for you uh yeah sci-fi shows up in in everything i read about you um 2009 for variety you covered battlestar galactica ah yeah remember that i did love that and you said you were struggling with your attraction to starbucks did you ever yeah did you ever get and and my disappointment that there was no robot dog right that's how that because that's gen x that's us where we watched the new bsg which was amazing and then you go that's starbuck oh that's probably gonna be fine that's katie sackhoff that's that works for us why did she she killed it she killed it i love that i love that series um why did they ask you to write about that that funny coincidence that happened um i you know i i lead tours around the maya world and other places because archaeology you just spend money in archaeology so i lead tours and whoever shows up to the tours those are the people i lead and it just so happened that one of the writers for battlestar galactica season one was in my group and so we're driving to palenque in a van and we're just getting to know each other and you know what do you do what do you do and he said well i write this little show you know his name is uh bradley thompson uh-huh and bradley's one of the writers for battlestar galactica and i immediately like oh my god i love that show yep and we've maintained a friendship all this time him and his group of friends have come on multiple adventures with me now but uh that's how i was connected to it in fact i went to bradley and peggy sue's wedding in the old hall that was uh the dirty that where dirty dancing was filmed this this like log cabin thing up above uh uh la somewhere it's actually a little little town over there but anyway they were actually having they tricked everybody on the battlestar galactica crew that it was just going to be like a party to announce their wedding but what they didn't know is that they were actually going to get married right there and uh edward james almost commander adama was going to marry them and i loved that and i was i was actually there to see this thing i was the backup because i have one of those universal life church uh things i marry people all the time oh you do yeah it's fun i mostly my nieces and nephews but you know other people ask too but i was the backup there for some reason he couldn't do it i was gonna do it but it was so much better that he did it it was this surprise that everybody got and after he after he married them then he went so sorry i'm gonna marry you and i'm gonna marry you and i'm gonna we all. And it was the best. thing ever nuts but i told my brother because i was uh in between i was divorced now i i'm married to my wonderful wife 17 years now uh but i was a free man then and i was like fred who my brother's name is fred i'm gonna hit on starbuck no did you she wasn't there oh she wasn't there sorry katie if you're listening to that but uh she she wasn't there but i was prepared and actually i was dating cassandra my wife at the time or we weren't even dating we were talking on the phone okay and so like i catfished her so hard i went to a hollywood wedding that week i was also talking to disney imagineering guys about making a disney thing which they just finally made they finally made this big maya temple but way back then but i was uh i was doing a 2012 lecture and then i went to a battle star galactica hollywood wedding and then i went to disney imagineering i have never been that cool ever again in my life but it was like for my for my now wife she was like god this guy's cool he does all that in just one week like never again it's good timing it is i mean speaking of bsg i i always had a dinner with with a with a friend and there's tons of celebrities around and i'm not gonna bother anybody but then i see a guy in a beard and i'm like i i gotta go so i go and i interrupt this gentleman in the middle of the meal and i go ronald moore i'm a huge fan i'm sorry to do this i just want to let you know he's like i never get recognized and then i go back to the table my friends are like only you would bother a sci-fi writer like that's what i'll be more amazing it is amazing people like him are are the actual you know indispensable elements of those shows the the movie stars are the people we know yes and see but ron moore oh yeah that's a celeb to me me too i'm a huge deep space nine fan too um so you quote this is so refreshing let's just talk about nerd sci-fi stuff go no no yeah i'm kidding no i know we're star trek star wars oh star trek star trek that's i am a trekkie okay i'm a trekkie no i love both i mean i wouldn't reject that but it's just such an uplifting message isn't it and you know you know captain picard's uh hobby he's an archaeologist i love that the thought that we could scan an entire planet and know where all the civilizations are and all the knowledge that they're able to collect just from space just thrills me i you know i have a very unpopular opinion about archaeology that it is destructive and we should stop stop digging i mean not period but we should always make that the last resort of what we're doing because we destroy things when we dig them and all the new remote uh sensing capabilities we have like lidar of course so thrilling so like reaching towards that star trek moment what i feel like you have to dig don't you don't you have to excavate somewhat i mean we do we do but we but i think we should soberly recognize that we are destroying things uh when we dig them and then the rest of humanity's time only has that person's opinion about what happened maybe some photos some drawings maybe a couple artifacts but the context is gone uh and that's so important i mean think about nowadays we can take soil samples and get phytoliths out of things and know exactly what plants were in that trash pit we love to dig trash pits we've drugged so many trash pits seem safe too like it was already trash i mean we're not ruining anything it was a trash pit to begin with but trash pits are a goldmine of information and how many thousands have we already dug and destroyed the evidence that if we did that today we'd have so much more information out of it that that's the caution i'm talking about that we just don't know what the archaeologists of tomorrow could glean from things that we think are are worthless it's a great example i had a guest in here recently talking about the the scrolls found at herculaneum that have basically turned into charcoal and they can read them now through 3d software but most of them were destroyed by archaeologists trying to unroll them they're just crumbling until finally the government was like enough with the archaeologists you guys are you're just you're just hacking and slashing enough here's something most people don't realize when you drink caffeine your body doesn't actually use caffeine it breaks down into a compound called caffeine and it's a compound called caffeine it breaks down into a compound called parazanthine that's a compound that actually gives you the lift the focus the energy caffeine is basically the middleman and your body has to do all the work to convert it but what if you can skip that conversion what if you just put parazanthine straight into your system that's exactly what ultra pouches do they contain parazanthine the active compound your body was trying to extract from caffeine anyway but here's the difference you get a cleaner metabolic profile same lift same focus zero jitters no crash after testing these it's 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conservators that come in and protect things like that they think that archaeologists are just like a pack of apes yeah well sometimes they are sometimes they are and oftentimes you know archaeology like i said earlier it doesn't it doesn't make guns or butter it doesn't get much money you end up getting uh crews of maybe one person who knows what they're doing and a bunch of people that are volunteers or students who are doing it for the first time and that's just why isn't there funding for this the public loves well i mean it's you know in economics terms it makes neither guns nor butter people are excited about it but it does not turn a profit that's a shame um before i ask you this next question what's your non-profit what's the website again maya exploration center thanks for asking and it's a maya exploration.org and we're non-profit 501c3 everyone go donate today um the show donated as well so you quote linda sheely all the time in every interview think like a maya but i've never seen a maya ever heard you talk about what she was like as a person like what got well what was she like when she got excited because she's a rock star she's a rock star thanks for asking that question she was i mean just uh like a force of nature she was actually very uh abrasive and and rough and physical because she was an artist wasn't she she was uh but she was also you know a alabama raised girl who was uh big i don't know if you've ever heard of her but she was a rock star and she was i think she's probably six foot tall wow and uh she eventually got cancer and got skinny but at at her heyday she was also just large in fact you can bleep out things right i'll tell you what the maya called her yeah the maya up in the highlands had a nickname for and in maya it translated big fucker woman she probably liked that she did love it she she told us like they had a name that's amazing she thought it was great she she cursed like a sailor she was very physical like if you were having a joking conversation with her she would physically push you she would yeah uh she was she was like that and uh i mean smart so enthusiastic so passionate that was the infectious thing about her she was just so passionate about what she did and even like her you know arch enemies who were conservative archaeologists who thought that hieroglyphs were just nonsense she would just uh just revel in riling them up and laughing at them i mean she got the last laugh there didn't she well she did in terms of hieroglyphs yeah i mean a lot of archaeologists some to this day think that they're either uh back then they thought they were just esoteric symbols that had to do with the calendar or even when she started to translate the stuff there was a crowd that said this is just propaganda this is just propaganda from these kings there's no way that that even happened these are not real histories these are just people telling lies to aggrandize themselves but archaeology has proven that false too on a number of occasions all the wars that she was translating we now have the archaeological proof that they did happen there but there had to be some propaganda from the kings anyway right yeah but i think there's even that's a illogical argument i mean i'm actually more excited about propaganda than i am straight history yes like that gives us insight into their personalities absolutely their aspirations and and their They're methods of deceit. I mean, there's so much culturally packed into propaganda. There really is. I love that. But Linda was a character, and she, on the one hand, was a loving protector of all of her students, champion to all of us. But inside the classroom, she was brutal. She, like nowadays, is totally politically incorrect, but on more than one occasion in my class with Linda, she asked me publicly if I was retarded. Like, you can't say that. Like, no, I'm not retarded. I'm trying to learn Linda. It was the 80s and 90s. You said that. Yeah, you said that all the time, all those things, the Gen X sort of stuff. So she would teach the classroom and go out in the field, like Indy? Yeah. Well, she was not an archaeologist, and she was not particularly. She was not particularly, you know, athletic, or she didn't do any digging, but she'd come in and just, to great artists, she could come into a tunnel and just there sketch a very good picture of what the glyphs are and then come out and think about them. Yeah. She was dynamic. She, like, you just wanted to be around her. She created this community. Nowadays, you know, we lump so much onto the name Linda Sheely. That she broke the code of hieroglyphics. Linda would be the first to say, don't say that about me. I assembled a team of people that I learned from, and they learned from me, and we together did something. She was a big team builder. The first time I went into her office when I was a student of hers, she gave me this speech about, like, I'm not the person you're learning from. I was being, like, obsequious. I look so forward to learning from you, Dr. Sheely. She'd be like, you're not going to learn from me. If you're going to make it in this field, it's the students you're with that you'll learn from. You guys are the team. Those are the people. Go meet them. Look, there's one sitting right outside waiting for me, Matt Looper. Go say hi to Matt. You're in a team or you're nothing. And you applied that through your whole career. I've tried. I've tried. I'm a bit, you know, I am a bit of a rebel. You are. And my wife, who's my biggest fan and biggest critic, says, you know, number one, you're a control freak. And number two, she's a elementary school teacher, so she pins me with this label. You're oppositionally defiant. Okay. Like, I love working with teams. I hate bosses. Same. Same. I'm not good with authority. So Linda passed away in 98, right? Mm-hmm. Just before you were going to, Palenque. That's right. Did she know what you were going to do? Oh, she did. She did? And she was instrumental in me getting the grant. And I was so buckless. I did not, this is 98, so not everybody has a computer. Right. But I needed a computer to do this. And I did not have the money, and the grant that I got could not buy equipment. So Linda and her husband, David, bought me the computer. They bought it. My brother, Fred, built it. And back in those days, you know, do you remember the days when you had to build your own computer? Didn't you thank Fred in your dissertation? I believe I did. I think you did. I owe Fred a lot. For IT support. But anyway, Fred built the computer, and David and Linda paid for it. I think it was like $2,000. Sure. And then they rented it to me for a penny a month into perpetuity, which was funny. I don't know why. They wanted to do that, but I was actually renting it from the Sheelys for a penny a month. And you ended up naming something after it, didn't you? I did. A big part of Palenque. You know, I can brag that I know Palenque's unknown parts like nobody else does. And I was hunting. I mean, it was very emotional when Linda passed. A big group of us in Palenque heard her, and we were like, "Oh, we're going to Palenque." And I was like, "Oh, we're going to Palenque." And I was like, "Oh, we're going to Palenque." And I was like, "Oh, we're going to Palenque." So everybody, fix your story back up at Palenque. I want to take a quick break and come back with some stuff that nobody really asked you about. And that's the stretch the two years after. Awesome. I'm really enjoying this interview. Thanks for asking questions that aren't regular questions. So for everyone who's screaming about not getting the story of the discovery, all of that, its money add in politics uh difficult and is it that expensive to put a team there well it depends on what you want to do if you want to dig uh like if we wanted to unearth one of those pyramids yeah it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars this government wastes so much money that's nothing guns are butter right now the congress is continuing to talk about that they want government oversight on the national science foundation and their mandate is if this research does not look like it will reasonably produce a profit in the future we're canceling it that's all of archaeology archaeology will never get a profit yeah we set up you know eventually it'll become a park and you get uh you know tickets as people come in but those don't even pay all the bills for the guards and the conservators and not even the archaeologists and the administrators ina which is the institution that takes care of all the mexican uh archaeological sites one in seven people in ina is an archaeologist most of them are administrators and maintenance folks could pressure be put on the government do you think it would work like if we called our congressmen and our senators would that work maybe i mean it has in the past we've gotten you know we've gotten things protected but in terms of the actual money probably not probably not i mean it's just human nature it's and government nature like who gets more funding do you think the nsf or darpa and and and and the pentagon's black budget which is bigger you you know the answer to that i do indeed you yeah it's sad but and i'm you know a big fan of the humanities and there's a lot of us obviously you are too i think that you know especially when it comes to archaeology we don't know who we are unless we know our past we don't know what we're capable of until we know what we've really done but that's not everybody's opinion and that's not people that think in a very straightforward capitalist way just see no profit in what we're doing the public really wants it uh but we don't always get what we want that's why a lot of us do it for free you know i i've been in this for 30 years now i tell students that want to get into it i say you know honestly i spent a decade paying for it yeah i spent a decade breaking even and finally in like my third decade of archaeology i can pay the rent yeah that's that's that really bothers me maybe we'll get some donations from today i hope everybody does i told my wife before we married i said you know just check i'm in an arrested state of adolescence and i have very low earning potential that would that wasn't on your dating profile when you catfished her let's just be clear about this i also was not at my best when i met my wife um so after 1998 you got a call from mexico right yeah right just somewhere right around there it was when it dovetails right into what you were saying when that when when the project at pfb gave my site away i was actually in honduras and somebody saw a uh advertisement for a for a field school run by these folks at mashnah because i was there digging the tombs of the founders in copan with a crew from the ivy league and one of them says like didn't you say the site you saw you found was called mashnah look there's a field school there and i was just gobsmacked what the heck uh and i went back to my project there that year i spent like eight or nine months in in latin america and sure enough he had given it away and i was allowed to do my survey one more time and then they were all just kind of well you've done such good work there ed shouldn't you go further west you can just do the west and then they were all just kind of well you've done the west stuff and we'll take care of this for you i was upset about that yeah i was rude about it and then i went off to uh palenque to the palenque round table which was an annual conference where all of the big guys went and i had a target i was going to find richard hansen because richard hansen was running the el mirador project and that was the most exciting project going at the time huge pre-classic city bigger pyramids than even the classic period and he's out in the middle of nowhere there's so much more to find there i was like i'm just going to do this again i'm going to go find richard and i'll tell him that i will be his surveyor for free if i can just use his camp as a base camp to go farther out that was my plan okay and i did meet richard there and uh and he kept saying well if you think you have the cojones to deal with five meter crocodile or alligators then then yeah you can do it and i responded you know well i may not have that but i'm sure i can hire you know somebody named manuel with a gun who can sure i'll hire i'll hire alligator killers we'll we'll be all right but so we were talking about that but then unbeknownst to me the project of palenque was talking that it was it was a big conference so the heads from mexico city were there and i don't know how much of it is today in mexico but back then the way you got business done is you you you drank with people all night and then there was kind of a plausible deniability if you didn't like what you said last night right you could say i was drunk right that that deals off but in one of these weird deals that i was not there at all uh the head of mexico's archaeology in mexico city was giving arnaldo gonzalez cruz the business like you've been here as the project archaeologist for a decade and you've never even made a map you've never even made a map of this place we don't even know what this place looks like besides the city center and my friend chris pal who's there drinking with them stood spoke up he said well my my friend ed's coming and he just found maya city he's really a good mapper and the head of ina archaeology drunk on tequila goes well arnaldo hire that guy and arnaldo said okay and that's how it happened i like i came in uh and chris and alfonso morales told me they would like to offer you uh the job to map palenque i was like well that's more like it finally some respect around here no i didn't think that at all i was gobsmacked like yet palenque is the best site in all of all of mexico and i'm invited that's ridiculous but that's what happened so that took some of the sting out of machinar it did i immediately had a new plan and a new dissertation i was about to finish my dissertation on machinar but that went to the wayside and i started again in palenque three years in retrospect how did that team do down there in machinar did they do okay where you or do they miss them they've done okay um they've done okay i mean they found some cool pottery okay all right one of the frustrations and again i'm you know i feel bad about being a so i'm trying not to be a jerk about it anymore but uh we don't have to name anybody they spent they spent the first oh i just i just moved a little knob here that's just for headphones i've knocked this wire off i've knocked the mic cable out and just like fidgety i just turned a knob by accident sorry um so what was i saying they spent the first two or three seasons mapping mashnah uh imaidamap that was just tape and compass and pacing of mashnah in two weeks and at the end of the three years they were like wow your map was really good it's like well get on with some other shit would you yeah don't don't waste your time redoing i could have told you that my map was good so i was proud that that professional survey equipment came in and like you know not even a meter of difference between what my map was to their map did they find anything that surprised you uh well they found a carved stela which upset me it did what's a stela golly uh a stela is a monolithic stone with a carving of a king or somebody on it so they found one of those i found one during the project and eight of us spent like four hours with wedged uh sticks and things slowly anchoring it up and finally flipping it over to find there was nothing on it yep but that one that one really taught me something like it took eight guys four hours to flip this stone over how the heck did the maya get it here like that was an effort it was a real life thing of just how hard that is i've seen some some drawings of what my uh maya cities might have looked like do you think they did a lot of jungle clearing i mean i've like cities that's just lawn right uh i think a lot of those reconstruction drawings are overblown i do think that they're people we love ornamental plants we love you know we we decorate everything we do with these plants and they live in the jungle right so why would they why would they take it all away here's a question that should freak you out a little how old are you actually not the number on your license the number your cells are running on because those are two completely different ages and your regular doctor has zero interest in telling you the real one i started wondering about this after my last annual physical 12 minutes later the verdict everything's normal cool but normal compared to what nobody ever tells you your actual biological age whether it's aging faster or slower than the year on your birth certificate so i did what i always do i went looking for answers super power runs 150 plus biomarkers twice a year a baseline test and then a retest so you can literally watch your biological age move over time it maps your heart liver heart and liver so you can literally watch your biological age move over time and that's your heart liver and then a retest so you can literally watch your biological age move over time it maps your heart liver thyroid hormones metabolism vitamin and mineral levels even your gut microbiome the place where environmental toxins quietly build up without you knowing it the results are no joke 85 percent of members uncover early risk factors for disease 79 uncover heart disease risk 49 actually slow their pace of aging that's not a doctor's guess that's data go beyond your annual checkup and finally understand what's really happening inside your body for limited time our listeners get 50 dollars off to unlock their health membership head over to superpower.com basement for fifty dollars off your superpower membership and after you sign up they'll ask you how you heard about them tell them we sent you uh there are some studies not many of them i wish there were more that actually have investigated that question there's uh there's a paper called garden cities of the maya that was uh they they scraped the plazas just like like three centimeters worth on the top of the plazas and took samples everywhere specifically for nitrates in the soil and found there were patches in front of temples just like you'd have you know landscaping sure there was landscaping and so these these studies in uh the the chennai's region no the puke region uh proved that up that there were they were using trees and i know from from my surveys and also from a lot of other people that i've been working with i've been working with old things in tikal there's a weird uh concentration of fruiting trees that are in association with residential areas in in palenque uh there were a lot of like cacao groves that were there associated with them and other there were other trees just growing there were some that were lemons which don't come from this side of the world i don't know who the hell planted those lemons but it was fun to find a lemon grove in the middle of the corner okay but that might didn't plant those lemons no no no but it did show that there was you know yeah agriculturally rich soil there that kind of you know anthropogenic soil that we use so effectively investigating the amazon do you think they they did like uh burning to to clear yeah i think they they did slash and burn just like they do now they are so like it is so ingrained in the mind of a maya that you must burn your field there was a moment when we were in tikal where uh back i guess it was 1998 or 1999 you remember those incredible fires that happened in mexico that had so much smoke that the smoke made it to new york city yep i was at the epicenter of that wow that was there was a lot of smoke a lot of fire it was crazy i remember that wow yeah we were it's funny i had just given my group a speech we were just really starting the the survey and i was like been a hundred years no one's ever made a map somebody's always stopped for some reason and i swear to you there will be no reason we will ever stop we will not stop and the next day we went out and the ruins were on fire and i was like we're not stopping and they were like you're a psycho stop it and we couldn't even like we couldn't the laser goes from the machine bounces off the prism and comes back we couldn't make the laser the laser go any more the prism go any more than like 30 feet away or the smoke was too thick and it wouldn't bounce back to the machine in retrospect again i was a young psychotic man i should have just gone home but i had just given a speech that nothing would stop me and i was like i don't care if it's on fire keep mapping but anyway what was i getting with that the the united states was pissed off at mexico because we they were sending all this fire their way and they blamed it for some stupid reason on the agricultural practice of slash and burn and so the the law came down to chiapas that the maya couldn't burn anymore that they would give them some money to hire extra guys to do cutting but that the law was nobody could burn their fields anymore and the guys that were on the crew they were like honestly scared the the head guy pedro he looked gray he was just like if i can't burn we are dead we are all dead this is the end of maya civilization we'd burn that's what we do was that big fire caused by by burning no of course not climate change stuff early on you know it no it was not their fault at all but you know that the default in mexico sorry mexico is is to uh blame the indians or anything environmental right blame the indians those those weird indigenous people are the ones burning down all our forests i'm glad that you mentioned that the maya farmer because when people think think of the maya people we conjure up this image of an extinct civilization but there's millions of maya people around now speaking 30 languages yeah i i'd say in guatemala alone there's over 10 million maya still living there wow um even in the united states i mean i don't know exactly what the numbers are but there's more than a million maya people living here i always tell people you know if if that nice guy at the 7 11 is five foot two yeah he's probably right um i want to hear about plaza a is that that seems to show up all the time and i want to know what's a plaza oh i don't think i ever named the plazas you might not have it just it showed up in a couple of papers i guess that's funny i i probably uh leslie shaw and eleanor king and their team named the main plaza i actually the other ones are small so that must be the first plaza with shocking howard and valdez well i did not know that that was part of that must have happened after i gone i was gone but that was the 18 meter pyramid that we found first day that was the south end of what's probably now plaza a and so that after we finished lunch i said okay doing the same thing we're gonna go climb down here somebody's going north somebody's going south and let's just see what we find and everybody spread out and within minutes we knew that it was about 100 meters across huge plaza and i think it was jim who yelled ball court found a ball court there and another person yelled pyramid and another person yelled pyramid wow how did you date it um i never did i never did i mean well yes i did uh to a certain extent i i guessed right yes was not an excavation project it was a survey project so i didn't put a shovel in the ground nevertheless the nature of the pyramid that we found first and the second biggest one and there was a little guy they were long range buildings which uh in the classic period most of the pyramids are fairly square or just off square at their base and when you get up to the top there's a temple with three to max five doors so the classic period is like what seven hundred to a thousand a.d no it's more like 400 to 800 okay and then we get into this terminal classic period that goes from like 800 to a thousand that's a period where all of a sudden the maya when they when they abandon those cities in that classic or that uh disappearance of the maya yeah when they reassemble themselves especially up in yucatan they start making these buildings that are much longer they're still up on uh pyramidal bases but the building on top now is long and it has more like 7 to 14 doors and we think it's it's indicating a much more uh communal way of governing rather than like the the age of despotic kings is done now we're going to get back to our more maya communal roots and that these buildings that we call range buildings demonstrate that shared leadership new formation and so the buildings in mashnah i could already see like as long as it is and all these doors this is probably terminal classic i read one of your papers on it and it and maybe you can talk about it a little bit is the period where we think maybe they abandoned the kings in favor of the councils and i think your paper argued that the councils were there all the time anyway and yeah and uh the cargo theory i'd love to hear about that - Oh, those are from my dissertation. thing from palenque yes thank you for reading that you're welcome you're probably number 83 161 pages of it that's very nice of you um yeah i do think uh it's reflected in maya archaeology it's reflected in the pantheon of the maya gods and it's reflected today in the nature of the maya that they are a very council kind of people they like a group of people to work out what the community is going to do they've always had councils the uh the cargo system in uh in the highlands of chiapas is a system today that the maya indigenous communities use where wealthy members of the community will take on a position within the government or a leadership but they will pay their own money they will pay for the festivals they will open up their homes they will be there for all of the emergency meetings they will do their part and it's cargo because it's a burden and so they take on that position for whatever the community it'll be like one to three years will be that position during that time they lose a lot of wealth but what they gain is prestige the community now sees them not as some rich guy out of touch with who we are he's a person who was successful in our community and gave back to our community and now that person can go on their own time and they have prestige well at the same time in rome we've got senators and councils and pre-councils who are using the position to make money and gather power the maya are not like that yeah it happens to all of them all it does and it's gonna happen to us too so but why were the maya different why were they so magnanimous oh because this is you know it's human nature we're sure of when their pantheon when their religion started but it is interesting to note that it is a pantheon of deities who have various roles and sometimes like they'll have one role in one season and one role in another but there's no clear head of the gods there's no zeus now pseudo sources will tell you that it's uh hanabku or something like that but they and there's some basis for that right at contact but in the classic period the gods are a council the gods are a council and so if the gods are a council with no leader should be a council no leader there is no chief maya god that's interesting um does monotheism come in to their culture at some point or at least a more senior deity 1519 ah that's that's not the deity i was asking about um no i don't i don't think so i think there was uh there there's a there's a god called samna in the classic period and he's probably kawil i mean post-classic and he's kawil in the classic period who's a god of like royal magic and uh the the connection to their ancestors so oftentimes he's featured more than the other gods but that's because all the texts are written by kings who were uh identifying with that guy sure and he's validating their right to ruler but they never say he's the he's the zeus um are you didn't linda find some some texts that were just documentation of administration things like that i just want to actually what i'm getting at is i just want to know what a tuesday is like at if you're a maya at the height of the civilization you wake up in the morning what take us through the day i think that before the wars really took that people were living a very safe secure and abundant life and like if we take palenque as the example you know i i mapped 2 000 buildings there a lot a lot of them are houses i think that those people they're in these little uh courtyard groups so i think like an extended family lived in a courtyard group and they got up and they cooked together i've lived with maya families before in modern times that work much the same way a little compound and everybody at night and in the morning meets in the kitchen area and talks about things but then they would probably uh some of them would have craft industries like right there so you know mom and the daughters get to be weaving and the boys would be making pottery that they would then once a week they would go to palenque's market on a on a typical tuesday they might say you know even if they're not going to sell stuff there they might go over there they might you know go get some some food from their favorite restaurant or go get a haircut i mean there were there were public places that where the where palenque's parking lot is right now it's there because it's the closest place next to the ruins next to the the temples in the middle that had no buildings palenque is very very dense and yet there was a parking lot size place right next to maybe a hundred meters from the the palace that had to be the market so i think a lot of people gathered in there and i think they felt very safe because they had the you know the religious authority of their king who had the favor of the gods but they were also just a big huge area producing huge amounts of food in the case of palenque it was up on a uh uh terrace so they were some hundred meters uh above the palace and they had a lot of food and they had a lot of planes so they could see people coming they had the mountain at their back i think they felt great about things until powerful people screwed up started fighting each other i think i think it was um the maya were the first to have pressurized water there wasn't that discovered i doubt we could boast they were the first i mean i imagine somebody over there in the you know the indus valley or something or i just mean and on on this side they certainly did have pressurized water uh palenque was incredible like that they had six rivers running through the the city that came from the mountain springs and down to the plains to to the big river so they had moving water already which was essential uh but then they would put these pipes into the river especially the ones going up into the palace and we found some of those pipes and we can see that as they go up to toilets in the palace they constrict in size so it's big and then it gets it constricts and that's just a simple way to use gravity and pressure to push it up yes a simple i mean you know a lot of our most profound engineering is based on very simple things sure it's that's the foundation and this is one of those things how to make water pressure but the maya figured it out how did the cities interact with each other did each one have a king or was there a hierarchy there was a hierarchy there was a kind of tiered system probably not unlike the feudal system in europe where there were major cities that had kings and then they would have a kingdom like palenque for example the city center where the kings lived that was actually named lakam ha big water water gift and then the kingdom of palenque was called baknal skull place or bone place of bones which probably meant ancestors not creepy stuff like i think it does but within the city within the kingdom of baknal we know of at least five cities that were smaller and had kings or or let me say mayors they they a king is in a how a mayor of a littler town is a sahal and so they'd name themselves sahals they would have hieroglyphic panels and temples but the temples would instead name instead of naming that sahal or showing him they'd show the king of palenque so we could really see that there was a kingdom with subsidiary lords and then those kingdoms would abut each other some of them would intermarry and become an even bigger nice kingdom right some of them would be the king of palenque and they would fight and so there was they were like the greeks independent uh city states who had alliances and uh enemies it's a shame we don't know more about that because you know i i will plug a colleague of mine's book that just came out uh david stewart's book the four heavens that just came out dave's done an amazing job of really cross analyzing the texts and the genealogies of cities and he's finding some amazing stuff that they they're really you know how europe got to that point where every king was related to every other king like really got to be weird incestuous the the maya were doing the same thing they were they were intermarrying to each other and you could see where as time went on there was really just one or two families that were the royals for all of the cities and it you know it sounds creepy to us and incestuous but they were really just trying to form alliances I'd love to read the Peloponnesian War version of what was going on down there. Ah, you know, me too. And I think it's amazing that we're coming up with it. It is so beautiful to me that it was only the 1970s that we broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. But now, every day, their stories and their words are coming back to us, just like the Greeks. It's a day that probably Edward Thompson thought would never come. But here we are, and every time we come up with a new text, we now have a team of experts. I mean, within two days, we've got the translation, and we know what's happening. And like, oh, this guy is the brother-in-law of that guy. And it's all coming forward, and it's a beautiful thing to see. But it's not fully compiled yet, right? Not compiled yet, and we have so many barriers. We have the propaganda thing. They're spread out. They're spread out across five countries. We've got the money thing. We do. That's always trouble. You know, you find a beautiful panel full of hieroglyphs and carvings of a king, but that sucker's two tons. And it's out in the middle of the jungle. Right. What are you going to do about that? That's true. And if you don't protect it, looters will come with chainsaws and destroy it. That's right. So, like, there's a scary thing about finding a beautiful piece. It's a piece of art. Right. So you can't just grab a couple of photos and call it done. You've got to protect that. Yeah. Years ago, when I was a student in Copan, before I went back to Mashnah, I went into Guatemala. And I had a friend who told me where Steve Houston's project house was. But they hide those things because they have the ceramics and all that stuff in the house. And looters will come and beat you up. Yeah. Yeah. In Antigua, Guatemala, I'm walking down the street. There's a white guy walking with a box. Uh-oh. And I just, you know, took a chance. Like, what are the chances? I mean, everybody else is a mire around here. I bet you that's Steve Houston. So I went up and I was like, are you Steve Houston? And he looked scared. He was like, because he had a box with a beautiful painted ceramic in it. And he was trying to sneak his ass from his house to the lab without getting known. And here's this guy. I'm eating him in the street. It freaked him out. And that's, I mean, he was right. I mean, gosh. Did it, did, am I a looter? Is the next thing going to be a punch in your face and take that box out of your hand? I didn't consider looters. When we talk about those temples being empty, maybe they weren't. You know, how you find empty pyramids in Egypt, but they weren't empty. They were just robbed. There's a lot of things that got robbed in antiquity for sure. And destroyed. I mean, after the days. Of any classic culture. Then, you know, the roughnecks move in. Yep. We, every Maya city has clear evidence of squatters. Like the, the plazas will have crappy little, uh, just post holes where we know somebody just put a, uh, a thatch and pole house up, but they, they were living in there and they were taking stuff. They're people just like us. They were probably looking for antiques. Um, your, your podcast is super fun. What, what's the name of it? So people could find your podcast, uh, Archeo Ed, Archeo Ed. That's, uh, I always come up with these names that nobody can spell. Nobody can find it. Cause I like, how do you spell Archeo? I do this to myself all the time. I thought it was clever, but well, it's fun because if you want to learn more about specific, like you'll be on a, go on a podcast and tell a four minute story. But if we go to your podcast, it could be 10. You could do 10 episodes on certain things. I do that. And I, I like to think of the podcast as, uh, my most casual thing. I am really just talking off the cuff, honestly, like you and I are doing right now. My YouTube channel is where I put in, you know, some more professionally and polished things, history information that people could use. But the podcast is me just talking crap about my adventures. Um, I love this. The descriptions sound like a, like a pulp novel. Um, Forest fires, mangoes, and skinny dipping, more snakes, more temples, and a robbery at gunpoint. I got by with a little help from my friends. What happened at gunpoint? Yeah. In Palenque, there were, there were two like 20 something boys who were just walking. There's a, there's a myriad of trails out in the woods around Palenque. So you can get to it from any direction. And the local folks really know those trails. I got to know them, but there were two boys. It was me and this, this English traveler. A traveler named Elizabeth Koren, who really just, uh, like, she was just a traveler and I needed somebody for my project. People had fallen through and for, I bought her a pair of boots and she worked with me for a month, but we were, we were in some little group drawing and I had my machete boys and the expensive machine, thank goodness, closer to the parking lot. I was having them cut some things we do tomorrow, but Elizabeth and I are drawing and measuring things and I see these two boys moving fast through the woods. And I was like, Oh, Elizabeth, get up. Those guys looked like they were trouble. And they sure enough were, I mean, I didn't even move three steps before they turned back around, came into the little group we were in and one of them pulled out a 45 and just walked right up. He had it pointed at me until it was on my forehead. And I was like, Oh, what did he want? Money, money. It was a funny exchange. They, uh, they, they were boys. They were trying, they were playing good cop, bad cop. The one with the gun was obviously bad cop. I, he yelled some things at me. I said, I don't speak Spanish. He hit me in the head with the gun. He, he like pistol whipped me a couple of times. And I was like, listen, you got to talk slow, be calm. And then I'll understand what you want in my bad Spanish at the time. And it turned out that, you know, they wanted our money. Like, sure. Like, here's, here's my money. Here's things in my bag. They, at one point he tried to take. Uh, Elizabeth's ring off. Oh no. And Elizabeth said in her broken Spanish, no, it's a gift from my mother. Don't take my ring. And, and good cop was like, Hey, it's from her mom. Put it back. And that's when I knew we weren't going to die. Like, yeah, this guy's caring about Elizabeth's mom. We're, we're okay. And so in the end of it, they, uh, they, they took my money, which was, uh, I was a Friday. So I had my huge amount of money in my pocket to pay. My boys, which was both of them got $35 a week. I was going to ask why they disappointed. He got like 70 bucks off me. And, and not only that, he took it all. And then good cop counts it. And he, he gets a 50 peso bill and he hands it back to me. It's like, he said, yeah, that's for your patients. Like, Oh, well, this has been nice. Thanks guys. Come rob me again sometime. So it wasn't quite as dangerous. As you'd think it was, it wasn't like gorillas getting me in the woods. It was boys with a gun that they should not have. Yeah. I mean, uh, you said I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow. Yeah. So besides gunpoint, what else? Oh yeah. What other danger? Certainly the gunpoint was unexpected. Yes. Yes. That was not, that was not one of the dangers. The dangers are just like, you know, twisting your ankle and rocks or, uh, bugs or snakes or, uh, lots of everything in the jungle has thorns on it. So, and a lot of it is like trigger loaded. So you could cut with a machete here on a vine and it unravels one over here, which comes hits you in the neck. And now you've got a bunch of spines in your neck. And that was the sort of thing every day we would get hurt just going through the jungle. That's just how it was. You would come out bloody. It's funny. People think, Oh, it's so hot there. You should dress in shorts and a t-shirt. No way. Me and the Maya had full clothes on and those clothes would get ripped. I mean, my, my jeans got ripped and you just get hurt all the time. Uh, there was one that the boys, the Maya just laughed at me forever about where, uh, again, it was wasps and we, we stirred up some wasps. We all spread out, but one of them got in my ear. Oh no. And then I tried to pull it out of my ear. But I just dug it way in my ear and it was like, ah, I was just like dancing around the jungle, freaking out, like, ah, ah, ah, ah, trying to get it out. And I like, I get a stick and put it in my ear. Like they were just rolling on the ground going, look at that idiot Gringo. He's really dying over there. How did you get it out? Just smashed it in your ear? Uh, I eventually just smashed it until it stopped buzzing. And then back at, at home, I showered and just got a bunch of water in my ear. Just like dumped it until I saw that. The wasp on the shower floor, like, ah, that's done and just bugs everywhere. My, uh, uh, but I had my first wife at the time was there sometimes to visit, but she didn't like it at all. To a point, like when I'd come home, she'd say like, you've got, I, I, I got ticks and I gave them to my dog. You gave your dog ticks. I gave my dog ticks. and she would be like, that's it, go into the bathroom and strip. I'm not letting you in the house until I know that you're not covered in ticks, which I might have been. Didn't you have a student that had a bunch of botflies in her hair? Oh, yeah, in Program for Belize. I've covered botflies. Can you tell us about how those work? Oh, God, they're so gross. Oh, yeah, and painful. Some other, like, mosquitoes carry their eggs, and they just find animals mostly, you know, but humans if they want them, and they insert the egg into a person, and then that grows into a worm. Yeah. And the worm has got, like, pinchers in the front where it just hangs on, so you don't. As it grows, it'll grow for about six weeks, and then. Spikes around its body. Yeah, and then it flies out of you. Right. If it goes to term, you know, for the normal, like, you know, peccary it's on six weeks, it's on its way. But humans, you know, we'd squeeze them. Once they get big enough, you can squeeze where they are because they've always got a little air hole right there. And the tail will come out and flash. Ugh. We did, we had a, again, Jim Eckhart had one in his arm, and there was a reporter from Toledo with us who came out to my weird little bar in the. Your bar. In the street, on the dirt road. And we were doing this thing, not for their sake, it was just something we did occasionally that we referred to as juicing Jim. We would take a, like, snakebite extractor kit and put it over his bot fly and then pump so that it would pull it up and the tail would come out and flash and everybody would go, ah, how gross. And then it would, we'd stop, and it'd suck back in and, you know, Jim, just go to sleep. That's the way it was. But this one girl, I think that nice shampoo attracts them because the girl's got it in their hair more than anybody. And I was a dirty person. I never got one. You were too gross? I was too gross for even bot flies. That's a statement, isn't it? What did she do? Did she let them grow for six weeks? Well, I mean, you couldn't even get to them. Right. Unless you. Right. Unless you shaved her head and she had this beautiful long hair. So, I mean, she never came back to the field. No. But I would see her at night sitting alone in the cafeteria just drinking vodka. Yes. She's like, oh, she's soured on it so badly. And there was a girl that had one in her hair and didn't know it. And we went back to UT, Austin, and in the middle of class, in the middle of anthropology class, a bot fly flew out of her hair. It's like, oh, God, was that a bot fly? It was. Oh, God. She didn't know it. She didn't know it was there the whole time. Nope. Gross. You know, I did get a bot fly. I got one in my arm. And unlike the other guys I asked, I like to ask the Maya things. They always know what to do. Sure. And some uncle of one of the rangers told me, he said, it's a simple solution. All you got to do, take some tobacco from a cigarette, get it wet on your tongue, and then rub it into the air hole. That makes it drunk. And then you can pull it out. And I did it. I rubbed the tobacco on it, and I squeezed. And when the tail came out, I pulled it all the way out without it. If you try to pull it out, it'll break off. Yeah. And then you're infected for sure. Right. But I was able to pull one out with tobacco. With tobacco. It gets drunk. Yeah. Some old Maya uncle told me, it'll make him drunk, and he'll release. And you can pull it out. And he was right. I got to ask the locals. Always ask the locals. They know. And they know where all the ruins are, too. Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. You say that whenever you discover ruins, there's a good chance the local people kind of already knew they were there. Is that true, Dimash? No. So look. Something quiet happened this week that most people missed. A former CFTC chair, the guy who used to regulate derivatives, went on record. And what he said should stop you cold. Congress banned a central bank digital currency. The Fed swore it wasn't building one. This guy said, quote, Project Agora. Look it up. Meaning, soon every account you own becomes a switch somebody else controls. And they've been telling you why they're going to want to flip it. National debt just crossed 40%. It's going to take a trillion dollars. Interest alone, over a trillion a year. Bigger than Medicare and Medicaid combined. There's one way out of that math, and you already know what it is. China's central bank has bought gold 21 months in a row. JP Morgan is telling clients gold hits $6,000 by year end. This isn't a prediction anymore. It's already happening. That's why I trust golden crest metals. Physical gold and silver you hold in your hand. It can't be hacked, can't be printed, can't be turned off. Go to Y-Files. Loves gold. Dot com and get the free 2026 info kit or text files to 6, 3, 8, 2, 5, 7. Why files loves gold.com or text files to 6, 3, 8, 2, 5, 7. Because when they clicked switch, I was gonna, well, cut it. Uh, no, that was a strange one. And the, the Rangers were very surprised because the other sites in program for Belize have a lot of looters trenches and they had some idea of them. But the, when I brought the Rangers to. Moshnah, they were all like, nice job of exploring kid. Yeah. None of us knew this was here at all. And as proof, there are no looters trenches at Moshnah. I really did find one that not even the looters got to. Have they gotten to it yet? I'm unaware. Hopefully not. It's so far away from any community that you'd really, it's unlikely because there's ruins right in their backyard. Right. Why would they go five kilometers into the jungle off of the nearest dirt road? It's gonna take them a while to get to that one. How many cities could be there? Do you think in the Maya area? Gosh, I mean, conservatively hundreds conservatively, I mean, it, you know, somewhat the answer to that question depends on your definition of city, which is the struggle and, uh, you know, archeology doesn't have a grand poobah that tells us what the numbers are. True. No, I, I, I just recently in, uh, on my YouTube kind of threw out there, like, you know, a hundred people is a village, a thousand people is a city or a town, you know, over a thousand people, you're getting into city range. Yeah. And so if we, if that totally arbitrary out of my mouth, uh, uh, assessment is right, then the number is thousands. Wow. That would be amazing. If we're talking about a city, you know, if we, we, we benchmark it of, you know, it's gotta have at least 5,000 people, then I'd put it down into the hundreds, but still huge area. About a year ago, you said, um, LIDAR, not much was happening. It was mostly just for clicks, I think was how you phrased it. But recently you said there has been some developments. And I know there really have been. And Luke, Luke was here talking about some cool stuff with the LIDAR. You know, Luke is, uh, has, has charmed us. He's on his way into, uh, having some friends that have a lot of this LIDAR data and they've shared it with Luke and Luke with his eyes and experience has been using it to find pyramids here in the United States. And a lot of them, he's not the first guy to do it, but Luke's been finding some amazing stuff and I'm actually looking forward to one of these days. Luke is going to invite me to, to go take a look at some of these things. A lot of them are on private. Private land. It's a trick. You know, uh, you don't just row up to them. Some you'll get shot in the middle of Alabama. So we gotta, we gotta do some, uh, some politicking, which that's where Luke needs me. Cause I'm, I'm good at talking. Good old boy. If, if you had one, one LIDAR plane, it was funded. Where would you send it? Yeah. Just get one. Just one. Just one. Like, I gotta know what's there. Hmm. I'll give you a random new answer to that. Okay. I love it. Cambodia. Cambodia. Cambodia. Uh, there are, you know, you know, Angkor Wat. I do. Everybody knows, you know, the city of Angkor, but there are huge cities out there. That was the capital of an empire of millions of people. I mean, heck, just Angkor had almost a million people. And so there are cities out there all over the place. I've been told about them multiple times, and I would love to know where they are. I think Cambodia, especially Cambodia is such a poor country. There's besides again and again, LIDAR-ing Angkor, we need to go out into the jungle there. And, uh, years and years ago when I was being, doing the survey in, in the Maya area, a, uh, grand old man of archeology, Michael Coe, uh, uh, he was from Yale, uh, very, very decorated. career but ko calls me for some reason he was also over in cambodia doing things uh and he had returned there late in life and he said ed you've got to get over there and do the surveys that you're doing in the maya world because the field over there is dominated by just french people and australian people and we need an american presence up there he was very you know patriotic in that regard but i was like mike i mean aren't all of those places full of landmines still which they are they are that's right poor cambodia is just full of landmines and people you know children with one leg it just sucks yeah and it's such a process there they are they estimate they have taken like 30 percent of the landmines out and there's 70 percent of them still out there waiting to kill a child don't get me started so terrible don't get me started terrible but i was like mike what about all the landmines he was like don't worry about it they've trained chickens who go ahead of you and they peck the landmines it's like i'm not gonna just have a murder chickens at the end of me i was like well my my wife doesn't even want me to be in central america i think cambodia is gonna be hard sell mike you won't kill a fear to land snake unless you have to you're not gonna harm a chicken oh god wouldn't that be just bizarre if it's weird like i need more chicken more had a good day we blew up 20 chickens how bizarre but but the point that i was long-windedly getting to was that oh we have known for a long time that there are a hell of a lot more anchors out there in cambodia could it be as dense as as as maya i think it could i think it could i mean just the ones we know and they've cleared the landmines sure it's insane how many uh i bring people out there to cambodia which is lovely the buddhists are there i mean anybody who's who's worried about going over there don't be the people there are so sweet i tell my people like please don't get angry you're gonna freak people out these are like the most passive nice people you'll ever meet in your life and anchor rod i think has been active and still active for a thousand years it's a living temple yes it's so neat unlike the maya area the people walk into those temples and it's their same religion still in fact every one of the temples in anchor have monks that are attending each one of them with their incense and they sit in there all day long there's a there's a staff of you know there must be three four hundred monks and and nuns who are just out there maintenancing the temples of their current religion which i think is beautiful i do too continuity yeah is there a library there uh you mean like modern library no no i mean like how far back in history were monks scribbling the history like are the scrolls stashed somewhere there i don't know it's a jungle environment so i think a lot of the scrolls have gone away but they were scrolls and they do know uh like every one of those big complexes like anchor watt for example you if you picture it in your mind you've got that long causeway yeah that goes to the big temples right beehives midway along that causeway are two big buildings that they refer to as libraries and that is a standard formation there must be you know a dozen different things with within the city of anchor that have the moat the causeway the big temples and all along the causeway midway are the uh are the libraries that held all the scrolls and they have carvings on the walls still and they say i'm fascinated because they have a astronomical component that i haven't figured out yet maybe it doesn't maybe i'm not going to but they say that they are the they're a pair of libraries because one is to the waning moon and one is to the waxing moon very interesting so i have spent hours standing on those causeways like if it's here does it work what did my compass say here but maybe here i'll stand next to the naga no not that one i don't know i'm still trying to figure out why the heck they're called the temple the libraries of the waning and the waxing moon but it must be astronomy it must be and we're going to talk we're going to talk astronomy and math a little bit later if you don't mind because i'm fascinated by it my favorite subjects thanks for asking really archaeoastronomy archaeoastronomy i love that me too it's kind of off topic but it just got me thinking about namadal and how nobody really knows what that was do you have any thoughts on that i i don't have a whole lot of uh study of that particular area i've been asked for i think one time i think that that show the proof is out there yeah they love to give me things that i don't know about to study and and give my opinion so namadal is is very cool i i don't find it particularly mysterious though i mean they're in a regular time period i i think the most mysterious thing is their lack of contact with the other major civilizations around them when huge temples are being built in java and in cambodia and vietnam why are they so isolated they they are major uh constructions but not much evidence of them contacting or being dominated by those guys or china that was coming through at the same time yeah it's strange because they have irrigation they have plumbing all that they had to get that knowledge somewhere so they must have communicated they must have but they i mean they seem isolationist yes they seem like intentionally isolationist they're they're uh i hope i'm not thinking of the wrong site but the the way they build their their buildings out of that columnar basalt that that's the place look like a log log cabin out of yeah igneous rock so fascinating and i think that its island is one of these weird places where uh volcanic lava went through water and cooled super fast into those uh hexagonal shaped columns yep and so i i've never actually seen have you seen where the quarry is on that island nope it must be a huge quarry full of those because you can see it in they're not just columns like the olmec ones are are columns right they're just like cylinders yes but you can see the hexagonal patterns on the the logs in non-medal so somewhere on that island is a quarry that that has those hexagonal things they uh they know there's one in there's one in northern ireland there's uh there's a couple of them around the world where this geologically it's kind of interesting to see what's going on and i think that's one of the things that we're going to look at in the next couple of weeks is uh the geological data that we're going to look at is the geological data that we're going to look at is that the geological data that we're going to look at is that the geological data that we're going to look at is that the geological data that we're going to look at is that the geological data that we're going to look at is that the geological data that we're going to look at is that the geological data that we're going to look at is that was kind of funny is in nine days you got you covered more area than you'd spent like 25 years with a machete yeah it's true gosh it's so you know they they just did lidar of palenque my map held up thank god they did find some pyramid they found a pyramid that i didn't see your maps always seem to hold up i you know i'm i'm anal i'm an anal retentive person i i uh if i'm gonna do something i'm gonna do it right and to the best of my ability and uh you know sort of is not good enough for me well easter island was i think you were talking about how some some families didn't even know what land they had anymore like what was the problem there it's a trick it's i mean it's a crisis for the entire community of the you know the remaining rapanui people which i think maybe this year they're climbing to 6 000 people which is a ridiculously small amount yeah for the descendants that may be in the future yeah i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area so i think that's a big problem for the people that live in the area 20, 30,000. And the island is tiny. I mean, its longest distance is 12 miles. You can't find it. Good luck finding it on Google Earth. You need to know exactly where it is. It's nowhere. Such a speck. Yeah. And it's such an interesting thing. But we do know that they had, I think it's like 9 to 12 clans. And that those clans each had their own territory. And we can see it from the Ahus and the Moai where the centers of those territories are. What we don't know is where their borders are. And neither do the Rapa Nui. And they're not very, they fight each other about it. There's a few families of those 6,000. They have names that are connected to those clans. And they want to know where their ancestral land is. A lot of them have their own opinions. Sure. About where that land is. But they don't know. And that's my goal in the mapping project. Or one of my goals. I may fail in it. I mean, I'm trying to find a way to see if we do a settlement pattern survey map, can we find things that mark the borders from one clan to another? Now, geez, I hope I don't start like some crazy clan war. If that happens. But it's funny, the island works just like it used to. In the ancient past, we know there was a head clan, the Miru clan, and they had the best land and the biggest land. And then there were a number of scrappy clans. Same thing's happening on Rapa Nui today. The rich family are the Rappus. Okay. And families like the Pakarotis, they don't. They have their own popularity, but they're not as rich as the Rappus. And the people get pissed at the Rappus. Did you find, like, borders? Did you help solve any of that? No. No? No, in fact, I've got to get back there because the thing that really tripped me up is that I couldn't find the houses. I found the rich houses near the plazas. They're called Haripanangas. And they look like boats. And they're built of stone. But where are all the houses that everybody else was living in? I find the stone chicken coops. And I find the stone garden areas called mannavais, or sometimes they're spread out gardens. Where are the houses? I don't. I did not know how to find them then. I think now I do. I looked back into the oldest records. I read everything I could read. And there was one smart guy that was a surveyor. He was surveying the land where the airport is now in the 1970s. And he figured out a connection between those Haripanangas that are the boat ones. They have these patios of rounded stones called poro. And poro are like good luck, good manna for your house. Every house should have one. What he was finding was that they were building perishable houses but still had the circular stone. And that's why they're called Haripanangas. And those are like under the grass. So now I got to go back and walk that land, find a couple of these, and then use my photogrammetry to say, okay, that's where it is. Let's zoom in. Let's look at it. What are the signatures? Once I know that, then I can go to the rest of the photogrammetry and find them. LiDAR can't find these, huh? I don't know. I don't think so. Because it's weird. It's volcanic rock on volcanic rock. And they're so low. I mean, LiDAR is incredible. It can find things that are like less than a meter. But these are boulders about like river cobbles or stone, the beach cobbles, like this big. And they've dug into the earth. Rains have just pushed them into the earth. So they're like only this much out of the earth if they are. So LiDAR is not going to find them for us. Got to do it on the ground. Luckily, it's a tiny little patch of thing. I swear if they just, I'm waiting to be invited back. I am doing it for the Rapa Nui. They are very distrusting of archaeologists from the mainland. And there's been a couple of archaeologists from the United States who have rubbed them the wrong way. I went out with the director of Malhanua, which is their cultural association that now protects the ruins. Or, you know, the places of their ancestors. And we had some beers and he talked pretty openly about a couple of people who he does not want to invite back on the island anymore. Well, you were generous and you gave them the data, didn't you? No charge? I gave him all the data. He was funny in that conversation because we did that in July of 2019. Okay. And then COVID hit. Oh, that's right. And the island went into lockdown for four years. Nobody got on that island. And in the interim, that crazy politics I was talking about that are modern, a bunch of people just whooped some Rapa Nui people. And the chief archaeologist was a Rapa Nui. And a lot of his staff were Rapa Nui. And so when this all went down, they ransacked the archaeological office. And all of the computers that had. All of the GIS data and everything that I had given them was taken. Why? Why? Well, because screw the Rapoos. That's why. That's it? Just vandalism? Like you guys were misrunning it. We're taking over. None of your stuff. You don't get it back. But then he did recover one of the computers. Okay. I mean, it's a tiny island. I don't know where they were hiding. We know where it is. Somebody's chicken coop or something. But he said. He said, we found one of the computers and we fired it up and it had your map on it. But it didn't have your name or anything. And we were like, who the heck made this map? This is a map of all of the settlement stuff that nobody's ever done. He said, and then the computer crashed and we lost it. And that was like six months ago. No. Now I realize that was you. And at the time I was like, well, I'm in. This is great. But something else played. Something political has happened. And I'm just waiting. I'm relentlessly sending them requests and various things. But I don't want to be too much of a pushy American. Yeah. My guys who are really the guys who make the map, Jeff Kreshek is my guy. And he is ready to go and ready to volunteer and use his stuff and his skills. He's frustrated with me. He really wishes I would win the day. Me too. Well, yeah. You know, you've got to approach these things with respect, though. I can't just, like, demand, do you know who I am? I'm an important archaeologist. You little rapu people should let me in here. That's not how I roll. No, it's not. So, I mean, I've got to be invited. This has got to be the Rapa Nui trusting me and inviting me. And trust in these communities is a long road. And you never get that way being pushy. No. No. No. It feels like there's got to be so much. There's got to be so much more there than Moai heads, right? There's got to be more stuff there. Oh, I mean, there's the communities. There's the people. There's caves full of petroglyphs. There's so much beautiful to focus on. There's their astronomy. They have astronomy towers. There's their prowess as sailors. I mean, how the heck did they get there? Right. That's, you know, the catamarans that they made were technologically amazing as well. As humans progressed out into the Pacific and the South Pacific, there was a technology point that they could not cross with their boats. You know, for a thousand years, they were at one point and they couldn't go any farther. And then an invention and an improvement on the size and functioning of catamarans allowed them to get to Hawaii and to Easter Island. Right. So, I mean, just that alone, just their prowess as sailors. Yeah, you look at the map and it's just like, how did anyone even do this? My phone rang last week and the caller ID said it was my bank. The area code matched, everything looked right. A calm voice said there was suspicious activity on my account and needed to verify my card number. Classic move. Ten years ago, I might have fallen for it. 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The first 100 users get 20 percent off with code the Y files at CoverOn dot com slash the Y files. That's CoverOn dot com slash the Y files link in the description. And they have their whole oral tradition. You know, they know they they will tell you exactly how it happened to you. It was what's his name? They're their first king. Hotu Matua is the first king whose whose priests had a vision that there was a new land that they could get to, and he believed them enough to send a crew in these new boats out. And it took them 30 days to get there. They came back. They brought people. They landed on a beach that everybody knows. On a kind of beach is where Hotu Matua landed. And he had nine sons who established the clans. And they have so much oral tradition that they're very humble about. They always they always qualify like according to oral tradition. But I mean, like, who's who are these Moai? We know who the Moai is, the Rapa Nui can say in certain Moai. That's Ancestor Such-and-Such. he was famous for this he protected this clan and and we made him a moai that's i never considered that that every one of those statues has a story they're a person and when you put the eyes in their spirit can come through but when the eyes come out they're just a rock again okay that's what they tell me i mean you know i i spend a lot of time listening to indigenous people not just because it's fascinating but you know i believe yeah that they know better than me they do they do um let's take a quick break and come back and talk about math and the stars all right before we get into math and stuff the last page of your dissertation page 161 you mentioned um and you thank your dog loki and your cat vlad did is that vlad the impaler it was vlad the impaler he was a black cat whose whose fangs were so long even when his mouth was closed you could see them hanging out of him so so he earned it vlad yeah i thought it was funny it came out of nowhere oh that's i totally forgot that so me to thank my dog it was you did um so when you were talking to sean you said you could spend an hour on khmer on the khmer temples yeah i i don't know if we need to do an hour but i don't know if we need to do an hour but i don't know if we need to do an hour but i don't know like to to hear more about them like starting with the hole in the roof the the oculus i think they're called yeah i hadn't heard that term but yes there it is a viewing point at the top of it yeah i went there looking for archaeoastronomy because we had found so much evidence in the maya area of this one particular phenomena called zenith passage that we don't get up here in the topics zenith passage does not occur so zenith path passage is so that it's simply it's the day that the sun goes directly over your head and at noon you cast no shadow noticeable and then absolutely yep only happens around 15 degrees or so latitude uh well it happens between 23 and a half north and 23 and a half south it is what defines the tropics you know the the concept of the tropics was around in the antarctica and the antarctica was around the antarctica and the antiquity yeah india knew it very well they put their astronomical capital right at 23 and a half degrees and my fairly solid i think theory is that they were judging it by zenith passage but what's fascinating about zenith passage is that it's latitude dependent it happens at different days depending on your latitude summer solstice june 21st everywhere on the planet even in the southern hemisphere it's it's winter solstice but it's still june 21st zenith passage changes by your latitude at 23 and a half degrees it is summer solstice right it's just one day right and you go farther north you'll always have a shadow all year long but south of 23 and a half degrees then you start the days start dividing you get two zeniths a year you go down like 20 miles all year long and then you start dividing you get two zeniths a year you go down like 20 miles all of a sudden your zenith passages are five days apart you go further they're 10 20 and it gets to be months until the uh until the zero line until the equator and then it reverses towards 23 and a half but this gives you a fascinating insight into the communications between astronomers because you know in the maya world we could clearly see the guys at chichen itza knew that their zenith was different than the guys in copan honduras yep and they would talk about it and they would sometimes align their buildings to not their zenith passage but somebody else's zenith passage why would they do that honoring geographically important places especially copan there's a weird thing that happens at that latitude and across the maya world at that latitude it's like uh 15.5 degrees i think that's what you were saying mm-hmm where the the year is divided by the zenith passages into 260 days and 105 days 365 total yeah but the maya have this sacred calendar of 260 days so they all recognized that at that latitude their sacred calendar was defined by the two zenith passages north and south it was not so we see places perhaps even teotihuacan and their weird orientation of all the buildings it's just a fact that they're actually that orientation sees the setting sun rising and setting sun at the zenith passage day of copan it's a theory that's interesting but so does edsna there's a number of places i i found one in chichen itza in the uh observatory there there's a window that points out it doesn't point at their zenith it points at the one down there at 15.5 so all this information we kind of ran out of ways to understand zenith passage so i kind of innocently asked the question well let's look at what other ancient civilizations thought about zenith passage and i quickly discovered that most of the ancient civilizations that we consider the big ones are outside of the tropics so they never did that it was not a question it wasn't a tool in the astronomer's kit right but they never did that it was not a question it was not a tool in the astronomer's kit right but they but cambodia is at the same latitude as the maya so i went over there thinking well let's see if we can find something not knowing anything and those holes in the roof yep are zenith tubes and they that that one hole on zenith day a beam of light like indiana jones just comes down and illuminates the central temple have you seen inside oh i've seen i've documented it so many times now and the trick was that the first couple of times we went there i clearly showed that it would function like that that's not good enough to say that's why they did it they could have had a hole in a roof for all sorts of reasons sure maybe they want the rain to come right i don't know you know there's a lot of reasons and all the khmer temples are very cardinal direction oriented they're north south east west maybe a degree off in certain places but they're cardinal direction people so my trick of finding orientations in the maya world was not working it was not working okay in the cambodian world but i found a site called cocare yes which somebody else said a guy named uh uh giglio i think is his name i i totally slaughtered that name sorry buddy um but he's a an italian astronomer who saw it before me but he saw it on paper that the orientation of cocare looks like it's totally looking at the day that the sun rises in zenith passage this is a little counterintuitive like if you're looking at the day that it's straight up it's not it's not but all these ancient cultures are horizon-based astronomers they make everything fit in by looking at the rising and settings so even though the day was the day with no shadow they would fit it into their astronomy by looking at when the sun where the sun rose that day and this complex only one complex in cocare is oriented to their day of zenith passage the rest of its cardinal directions but there's this weird place in the middle that they on purpose tweet and so i went down there and there's a huge pyramid there looking over a complex and i was able to record that the sun is indeed on zenith passage going right there it goes right over a temple but at noon the the beam comes down wow so what is it about cocare that was it a temple in that community uh it's a big complex within that larger community and it's a it's a strange place it's the temporary capital of the fourth king of the khmer civilization the first three kings are at ancor the fifth king returns to ancor but for some reason this king went out and made his own capital and he oriented one of the sections to look at zenith passage and i think that is the smoking gun that it is intentional i can link this to the book of zenith passage and i think that is the smoking gun that is intentional the holes in the roofs which they used to have a capstone when the capstone was on there and the hole went through it the hole was only like you know six inches tops and that would concentrate the light in to make such a tight beam and it would only happen on those days of zenith even a day off it wouldn't happen nothing so but they although capstones have been knocked off because there was a jewel box up in the roof with a hole in it there's a there's a square box with a hole in it so the light can still come through there's also ones jewel boxes underneath the altars inside the pyramid actual jewels actual jewels so that could have done magic with the light then through i wonder about that like how would that function did that i mean if it shot a rainbow of light in there that would be fantastic that would be fantastic i don't i've tried to piece out how that would actually happen at the moment i don't i don't see that happening but you know Gosh, what a missed opportunity. - Yeah. - Hindu temples today, And they do, they bury different kinds of precious gems in the foundations of the buildings. It's just part of their establishment of a holy place. So it's still happening today. But the, so there's jewel boxes underneath the altars inside those beehive looking temples. There's a hole in the top jewel box with a hole in it. And then it comes down and it hits exactly on the top of the linga, which acts like a little gnomon inside the temple. Because it has no shadow when the light comes down. And then underneath the altar is another jewel box. But those jewel boxes don't have the hole. The hole is very intentional. Yes. And unfortunately, the looters knew that these things were here. So they climb up on the top, they knock the capstone off, and they get the jewel box. And now they're littered around the temples. I always find the knocked off cap. And sometimes the jewel box. What kind of jewels do they use? It sounds like emeralds and rubies, the stuff that you'd find in India, typically. But different color ones, sapphire. Sapphire is a big one in Cambodia. They have a lot of sapphire. So blue, green, red, like rainbow stuff. Yeah, it would be neat stuff. Even if it's just quartz, it would be beautiful. So now when they've knocked the capstones off, now the hole in the top of the roof is like this big. Right. So the things I'm recording happen a couple of days. And like the light will come in this way one day and that way the other day. But on the actual day, it still comes directly down onto the Lingayani complex. And the Linga is a phallus. It's a phallic symbol. But it points straight up. So it's like a little gnomon inside the temple. When the light comes down at noon, it casts no shadow. And the French were so. So interested in the architecture that they never really thought about the astronomy. Right. And so this astronomy is there and clear. When I first came in, there were priests and nuns who would attend these shrines deep inside. Like the Bayon is this huge one with 52 towers like that. So the light show inside is incredible. But I go deep inside and talk to a nun. Be like, are you ever sitting in here? In this dark place. And all of a sudden, the whole chamber lights up. It's like, yeah, that happens sometimes. Do you know what's going to happen in 15 minutes? Did you do that? What? And I say, yeah, I'll come back. We'll talk about it. And I was running around there and I came back into this nun who's lived her whole life in there. And she's standing there looking like just standing there in the light going, who the hell are you? Right. Why did you know that? Like a time traveler. One of the last times I saw her. One of the last times I went over there. It was so cute. I love, I mean, I'm so honored that I've affected the way people are seeing these things. I came into that same temple complex with the 52 different ones to bay on in Angkor Thom. And it's about to happen again. I've got a little group where, you know, it's so funny. I've got 10 minutes twice a year to record this. That's right. And I don't know which one's going to work and which one's not. So every time I go, I say, spread out everybody. You take that tower. You take that tower. You take that tower. You take that tower. Let's see what happens. Because we've only got 10 minutes. I can't run to all of them. So I'm running around, placing people in places. And this little kid comes up. And he's like, do you want to see the coolest thing that could happen here? It happens every day. But at noon, I can take a special picture of you with a beam of light coming down inside the temple. And I did not tell this kid who I was at all. I was like, all right, kid, I'm in. Show me. And he had a cool little thing that he could do. He took my eye. And he had just the right angle where somebody could stand there with the beam of light coming down. And I was like, how did you know this would happen? He was like, oh, it happens every day, which was wrong. But he was definitely, I paid him my five bucks. I was like, nice job, kid. Thanks for the picture. But it's like, that's so beautiful. It is. I just made this little kid money. This little kid's making money for his family on this funny little thing I found. Worth it. Totally worth it. Just beautiful. I felt like, oh, my gosh, did what I do just help modern? Modern Khmer people? I would love that. And they're starting to do things. There's guides that know. And so I've come into the center temple of the Bayon where guides are talking about it. And they're all witnessing it together. And they're bringing their tourists in to see it. And I'm just standing there like a fly on the wall like, yeah, I did this. That's cool. The second time I went into the, the second time I did it, I went back into the central temple of the Bayon where I had explained to the nuns. And priests that it's going to happen. And then they were excited about it. It seemed. I came back in with my wife and my baby. I had my little baby. Alice was like a year and a half. I just brought her with me to Cambodia. That's normal, right? It's normal. But I came into the central temple and one of them was like, it's him. And I was like, oh, you remember me? And one of them said, get the guards. I was like, oh, shit. I'm in trouble. But when the guards came in, I was like, oh, shit. When the guards came in, because I was like, I'm not running. I'm not doing anything wrong. When the guards came in, the nuns and priests asked them, can we please take down this parasol? Because this is about to happen. He's here again. And if we take down the parasol, it'll actually hit the statue. It's blocking it. And so the guards allowed them to take the parasol down so that the effect was even better. Wow. And I was so happy. I had a moment like, oh, my God, I'm an intruder. I'm going to get arrested. But then they just wanted to see me. They wanted to see it better. They totally understood what I was talking about. And the psychological effect it has on them makes me feel like I am onto something. You are. This is hitting a chord with these folks in a real way. Let's go to a different part of the world. When everybody looks at the Cusco Wall, has the same thought, that that's not possible with hammers. And you have a theory that sounds crazy, and it's not alien. act you're an idiot there's no way there's no natural there's no natural uh acids i've looked into it there's a lot of acids that get created like the atacama desert is full of the acids that we make nitroglycerin glycerin out of that's why chili stole it from bolivia bolivia's got no coast because chili wanted to make dynamite right um and all those acids right south of cusco there's an evaporated lake that has very high concentrations of acid in fact that little valley blew up about 30 40 years ago a lightning strike hit it and ignited something and the acid caught on fire and the whole thing blew up it was you know big news in peru so there these acids are here but no naturally occurring acid could do it so i've been working with uh a chemist in uh new england named uh charlie winn who's been great in fact charlie's been the driving force i'm not you know i try not to get too far out of my lane so i have chemists who are who i'm consulting with just the other day he was having some some conversation with claude that excited him well is there is there fluoride there and have it as their mining there there's my the the gold and silver mining all over the place right they're famous for it the inca and cultures before them a byproduct that's coming out of the mines today that's an environmental disaster is hydrochloric acid yes it's a byproduct of the mining it's pouring out of all the mines it's actually an environmental disaster today fluorite is in huge quantity in peru in fact the inca were making lots of jewelry out of fluorite and charlie and i have been going back and forth and uh he we're we're we're sure that hydrochloric acid and fluorite with hydrochloric acid are going to be a big part of our industry uh yeah there's a little it's more a little more complicated than that it's not just peanut butter and jelly but you could make small targeted places of hf yep with these two things it could be done it is it is possible now we got to prove it now charlie i i've been arguing with him not arguing but begging him and his chemist friends like let's just do it let's just get some andesite and get it into the lab and burn it let's let's burn it up and and record it and their their opinion is listen ed we all know we can do that it's not a it's not an experiment that's a known what you've got to prove is that the residues of these acids are still in the seams of the walls in between if this is this really happened you can get a sample and we can do neutron activation and we can see exactly what chemicals and things are in between those cracks and if it was an acid we'll be able to see it because it'll seep into the stone so have we seen it yet because no i haven't gotten that far i i know i at one point charlie hooked me up with a guy in washington who said i'll send a student down with you we've got this machine that looks like a drill we drill in we get a sample of about the size of a wine cork and we can analyze it and we will do all this for you so i wrote to the heads of conservation in cusco and they hated it they were like well you know they said it was kind of rude really i that and it that's not peru saying this is one guy in a chair and in cusco who said you're ignorant this is stupid you can't touch the walls and it's clear that you have no understanding of you you've never read anything about peruvian archaeology is patently unfair i've read a lot about peruvian archaeology as you know so the guy just said i'm ignorant i have no idea what even studies i wrote back saying like well if there are studies about this could you please share them no response so i kind of got dead ended there there's always and then i got into you know life happens so you know i'm in i'm in cambodia i'm doing all these other things i it's a it's a project i need to get back to what i really need to do which i screwed up to the beginning is all of these things are teams and partnerships i'm trying to be important gringo just writing a letter i guess i you know just i'm going to come in and and take some cores out of your walls that was not the right approach but when i get back to it what i need is a peruvian archaeologist partner yeah and i need to let them take the lead and i just provide resources i'm not you know i'm not interested in being the guy that solved it i'm just interested in solving it so next time around i'm gonna be in the background and i'm gonna support somebody from that country and maybe it'll happen i think the people in oleon titamba would be a lot cooler so i might just skip kusco altogether and go out to a more purely quechua community that's a good idea that's a big discovery it's all just uh harebrained scheme at the moment but you know this is this is what shealy taught me shealy shealy i i what i loved about her she shot from the hip people would argue but she would come up with out of the box challenge people to prove her wrong and when she was wrong she would never be mad about it she would laugh and say now we've advanced the field together how else can i piss you off and motivate you to figure this stuff out that's the value of graham hancock who i don't agree with a lot of his work but he he makes people talk you're absolutely right he is challenging us to prove him wrong and i like that and he's okay with that i think oh he's totally cool with that you know they're they're pretty cool with that i think he's totally cool with that i think he's totally cool with that you know they're pretty cool with that i think he's totally cool with that i think he's totally cool with that some of the conservative people in my community of archaeologists are they don't like pissed off about him but you know personally i've said it on a number of shows i'll say it again i like graham i think he's smart he has a good sense of humor he is very well researched that's the one that really pisses off my colleagues that got you in trouble when you said that researcher oh you got in trouble well i stand by it i mean i saw you know graham and i uh when we first met in palenque for his ancient apocalypse thing we sat for three hours and i was like oh my god i'm gonna go to the kind of having a intellectual tit for tat and he'd bring up some research i'd bring up some research i'd bring he'd bring up my research i'd bring up his research i like you know i did i actually do read all your books i don't find i don't find it fair to criticize someone unless you've heard them out and uh and we were very clear i do not believe his primary theory that's okay it's okay we can still be friends and disagree that's isn't that what academia is supposed to do it is so i mean speaking of graham what's your theory on the on the fang deity oh well did is is graham on board with my fang deity theory that'd be super probably not probably not but i thought it was cool um i think all too often we project our own ideas about religion uh as archaeologists we we paint a model on things and we come up with false truths in the case of peru talking about this loose pantheon of gods but it's never smacked right to me and when you really look into what's religious art you see a face again and again and again it's a humanoid guy with goggle eyes fangs claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming out of his belt they come out like this and out of his head and so diagnostic i mean this is a very specific character i thought the all the people in the pantheon i don't think there's a pantheon at all i think that there is i think that peru is monotheistic and that there's a single god the fang deity you can also call him uh veracocha you could also call him pachacamac you could also call him aiapec it goes through time but if you look at you know the art historical analysis and the way that linda sheely taught me to do it and it was in linda sheely's class long time ago that i first came up with this theory and she gave me an a plus plus and sent me to talk to the people in peru who thought i was full of and i was you know 22. yeah why why why wouldn't i be full of um but i've continued with this theory and i've found nothing but strength in it uh you know lucas it busts me every week to like when are you gonna write that book ed you've been talking about that book for a couple years i know i'm such a flake you know this this is my genre i like to talk to talk to people i'm actually a terrible writer so we can see that that fang deity now can't we oh he's everywhere i mean you mean in modern times i mean the milky way oh gosh do tell i i wish i could find him in the milky way milky way there's the milky way has constellations in it but i don't know of any of them called vera cocho or a god there's a fox there's a a bag of coal for some reason there's a llama and her mama i mean all the cultures that see the milky way the actual planet the ecliptic does the road to the afterlife oh that is very true and that's across the americas too that's another paper i did way back oh when in chili days uh the milky way is the path to the other world from the tip of chili to alaska every group that's gonna talk to you about the milky way even today know that it is the path to the other world for the maya it's the world tree it's the primordial as it as it moves through the night sky it turns into different things it starts as the primordial sea as it's laying down on the horizon and then as it tilts up it's the canoe that brings the hero twins father up into the sky to become the uh corn god and then as it finally erects it north south just at dawn on august 5th august 13th i'm sorry uh it becomes the world tree and the story plays out sheely's great book uh maya cosmos talks about it from the hieroglyphs position and modern day people modern day people in the maya world totally see it as that and everybody in this country all the indigenous people here see the milky way as the path of soul or the path to the other world and what's really fascinating is you know the the milky way squirrelly it goes it moves like the stars the planets are always you know they're they're gonna they're in our solar system yeah the stars move but it's that northwest position it locks in like one of those wheelhouses of a train it's you can't cross the milky way to the other world in every position it's when it locks in north south that's the opening of the road oh so if you die and it's not locked in what happens i think you have to wait in fact i i think that you know we haven't even talked about mississippian civilization right here in north america that were pyramid builders cities of tens of thousands of people they have this interesting pattern in their burials where they have a charnel house they prepare the bodies but then they put them in the mounds in groups they they will hold them for an unknown time and they will hold them for an unknown period of time but when we see these like groups of people that are buried in the mounds they don't have any like uh pathology in their skeletons that say that they were wounded you know they were people killed in a battle killed all at once they were obvious obviously died at different times but they're all interred at once i think they might be waiting for the milky way i think that they were grouping them together and doing the final ceremony that would send them on their way when the road opens up there's no way to prove that is there that's a great theory no there's uh my my colleague uh bill romaine has been doing some super work about orientations of things within mississippian cities he's noticing even in big cahokia that there are just off north south alignments that are happening between major buildings and that's just what the milky way does and bill was the first one to enlighten me about this i hadn't really thought this in depth about it but since the milky way kind of curves you're never going to get a moment where it's pegged to the south and the north if it's pegged on the north it's off a few degrees on the south if it's pegged to the south it's off a few degrees on the north and he's been finding example after example of after example of things oriented just off north south and that's just what the olmec huge platforms do they do it also they do it just off north south and they're these long kilometer long things that would you know i think they're mirroring the road this is again you know shealy taught me to be part of the lunatic fringe and publicly say things like this that no i can't substantiate them but it gets us thinking it does and it's one of the things i like about you is how you talk about if you have enough post holes you can make them line up with anything yeah it doesn't mean anything you know i'm jealously protective of the reputation of archaeo astronomy it was you know at the start of my career archaeo astronomers were crackpots oh yeah you're still a little wacky we're still a little kind of crackpots but now we have enough legitimacy where i get upset when i see a published article that's really just shooting blanks like that you know like well you can't i mean there's there were 50 other options here don't don't don't shoot us down by publishing your responsible stuff well let's be solid about this agreed so so speaking of i can talk all the shit i want but i'm not you know i'm not publishing this conversation what's what's the puzzle with 360 day calendar that's that's bothering you what's that puzzle you're trying to solve 360 day you mean the 260 day one or no don't don't the maya have a 360 day year um oh okay i know i understand what you're talking about you're talking about the year within the long count yes yes uh yeah that is a weird one uh the maya are very cyclical they have many different calendars uh you know we we oftentimes misstate that they had the most accurate calendar in the ancient world a better statement would be they have the most elaborate calendar in the ancient world because so many different cycles on a typical maya stela you'll have at least five independent calendar cycles that are very cyclical that just were carved to tell you what day it is what and what are those five counting the oldest one is the 260 day calendar that's their sacred calendar still the most important today the second one we call the hob that's the solar calendar it's 365 days no leap year it it drifts it drifts um then they have uh the the lunar count and that's six uh it's grouped in six lunations six from new to full and then within that it's either 29 or 30 days and so there are five or six glyphs that tell us uh which moon is it of the six how many days are we into it what's that moon's name and and another glyph we don't really understand um so there's there's three of them then they have a weird uh nine day cycle that's like a week we call it the nine lords of the night but that just revolves through two we have very little understanding of why the hell do we have to heck they're doing that nine cycle venus venus is a nine day cycle is it i think so and what i don't know what's the and what's the last one that we can't figure um the long count the long count is the neatest one because it's if anything was linear counts of days for the it was the long count so this is how the apocalypse was very good for you yeah 2012 2012 you you were the biggest voice of the apocalypse for i don't know about the biggest but you know like garrett morris said the 2012 was very very good to me right you're selling calendars which i think is cool um but i think mathematically they did not say that it was 2012 well that's why you were kind of a drag to a lot of people because you're like it's going to be fine you know it continues who knows what's going to happen in the future but i can clearly tell you that the maya did not say that in fact we know how this started it was my old friend mike ko the same one that wanted me to go out and kill chickens in cambodia right okay and i and i asked ko about it uh at some dinner party he wrote in the textbook that he had inherited from professors before him just simply called the maya he wrote in like the 1960s well if you do the math if it's if it reset at the 13th baktun which is part of the 12 and 14 bce then if we go 13 400 year periods into the future we get to 2012 and so you know if if it reset at 13 and that's 13 400 year periods as well well maybe we should brace ourselves for an apocalypse and mike told me clearly he was like i was just trying to be funny like if i knew all this stuff was going to happen it goes back to that one guy said that goes back to ko saying that and then it goes on a very you know wormhole kind of thing where uh jose arguelles of the dream spell system gets involved there's a guy named like tony sheer i think his name is a a reporter from denver who's very into aztec stuff and he somehow mixes up the aztec stuff with uh with the maya stuff and predicts that the aztecs predicted that from the approach of cortez going forward that will hit 2012 as well so the two combined to some kind of mesoamerican thing and then jose arguelles is a huge figure he's the one who creates the harmonic convergence you remember that time when hippies all around the planet gathered into archaeological sites to try to uh uh do the harmonic convergence that was linked into all of this as well so what is the 360 puzzle that that you're working on so the long count has five basic positions of it it's got days months years 20 years 400 years that's a bach tunes 400 years so days one day sun they even call it keen they call it sun uh months they decided 20 days okay all pretty normal so far i mean i i we do 30 days because that's a lunar cycle But they pick 20 because their counting system is a vegecimal system. It's base 20. We're base 10, decimal. The Maya were vegecimal, base 20. So 20 days, that's just their counting system. That's like us favoring 10. But then it's the next one up. If you're in a 20-base system, you should go 1, 20, 400, 8,000, 160,000. That should be your progression up in the positional system of numeration. So the long count goes 1, 20, 360, and then 7,200, and 144,000. So it augments at the year called the tune. And obviously they're such good astronomers, they weren't off by five days. But why didn't they pick the 400 that is their mathematical system? The easy answer. The easy answer is, well, they were just picking a 20-base number that was closest to the year. Right. But for a primarily agrarian society that lives and dies on the changes of the seasons and the passage of the year, that's a stinky system. Five days off every year? I mean, a farmer, that's useless to them. It's useless. Could it have anything to do with procession? It's possible. The best theories that I know of are from my friend and colleague, Christopher Powell, who made a ridiculously long chart. It wouldn't even fit on this table. But he just went through it. Chris is great about thinking like a Maya. So he just said, they're all about synchronicities. They're mathematically, they're about highest common divisor, lowest common multiple. Did I say that right? So he just started going through with the long count. And the 584 days that's Venus, the 780, that's Mars, the 117, that's Mercury, and the 260 day sacred calendar, and the 365. He just started playing out the days. And he said, as you go forward, all of a sudden, all of these synchronicities start lining up with the long count. Where? None of that would happen if they picked 365 or 400. This system makes synchronicities between cycles happen like fireworks. Wow. This is a good job for machine learning. Yeah. Actually, Chris could be out there asking Claude about his chart right now, as far as I know. He's quit archaeology years ago. He's a Spanish professor in a low-income place in San Francisco. These guys, they don't know what the heck this guy with all these adventures are doing there. How cool would it be that the planets figured into the long count? I love that idea. It really did. Chris has infected my mind with. He saw something that actually we learned was found in the 1930s as well. But it's this number, 949. It is a magic number in the Maya. It is the foundation of the long count. 949 days. Wow. 949 days. As you plug that into math, it starts popping out even increments of all the long count. Chris has shown it. I can't talk math here too much or your people will turn your podcast off. Not these people. But the freaky thing is about 949, is not only is it the mathematical foundation of the long count, as Chris has clearly shown in his dissertation, which is on mayaexploration.org, his whole dissertation, or masters actually for that one, is there. You can see this chart, see what I'm talking about. 949 is 365 plus 584, which is the sun and Venus. And so that number is actually rooted in the sun and Venus, but it does all these magical divisions within the long count. And then Chris went further because there's another count. There's another one. There's another one. There's another one. And there's another one. system and the 819 system mirror each other, that they use the structure of the long count system with 949 as its base to create the 819 system. And they all meet just like the Maya would do in a single number that is like 1,193,000 and something. And back in the 90s, me and Chris are in his little apartment out spilling wine late at night. And Chris shows me this whole thing and says, and it all culminates in this number. And I was like, you're crazy. He's like, the Maya must have known this number. I was like, well, we can never prove that. That's crazy. I mean, I see how it all works. 25 years later, somebody digs up a house in the ruins of Chultun in northern Guatemala. It's an astronomer's house. He's written calculations all over the walls. There's Chris's number. No shit. Mm-hmm. Gives me chills talking about it. I was like, holy shit, is that true? I had to go back and get his masters and go, yeah, the Ivy League guys who posted it didn't read Chris's dissertation, so they didn't see it. But I called Chris up and I was like, Chris, your number. And he was like, huh, that's neat. He knew. Chris is amazing. He kind of just gave up on this stuff. His thing is ancient geometry. And all this cool stuff I'm talking about, about the astronomy, that was actually side studies that he was doing as geometry is his main stuff. His stuff about Maya geometry is absolutely groundsbreaking. It's paradigm shifting. It's amazing. I wish there was more out there. I'm kind of his acolyte in this. But now, Chris, last time I talked to him, he's like, he's got another paper, stack of papers that's two foot tall on his desk. And he's figured out geometry things we don't know about the Egyptians, about Renaissance art, about, I mean, so many things. We've got to get him in here. Chris is amazing. I mean, I would love to see that. You should bring Chris Powell in. He will blow your mind. He is such, Chris, Chris has this way about him. I used to always say like, Chris could look you in the eyes and go, the moon is made of cheese. And you'd be like, God, is it? He's just like, he's so like, convincing, but he's not full of shit. He actually knows. I mean, he predicted a number like 1,193,460 or something. 25 years before we found it on a Maya 1,000,000 feet away from us. I really thought that would never happen, but there it is. That's kind of the thing that keeps me in archeology, just the what ifs out there. And the craziest things when they, this moment, you know, that's it. I'm going to be a lunatic for the rest of my life. Yep. Tell me about the textbook before America, or is it before the Americas? Before the Americas. Thanks for asking. You know, right now it's conceptual, but I think we have enough data now. Not just about South America and Mesoamerica, but North America as well, where we can tell the story of the history of civilizations before European contact. And it's so important. The part that I'm really thrilled about is North America. Nobody here in this country realizes the great civilizations that were on this land before us. Nobody's heard of Cahokia here. Nobody's heard of Cahokia. Nobody knows how, you know, I've been on a rant these days on my YouTube channel. I've just been doing pyramids of Alabama, pyramids of Georgia. Next week is pyramids of Oklahoma. I'm going to do pyramids of Wisconsin and just go through state by state and go, here it is. It's actually a public park. Go visit. But we have, we've swept it under the rug, but there are civilizations here. And benefit and our society would benefit if they just had some understanding that america wasn't some blank slate that was just waiting for europeans just like everywhere else on the planet there were major civilizations that rose and fell here yeah we're not we're taught about american indians but it always goes to buffalo and teepees and stuff and maybe you get advanced to talk about air coordination a little bit you know it's a product somewhat that's a product of scholarship right by the time we as you know western civilization got interested in doing things like ethnologies we were two three hundred years into the conquest and so those guys on their horses you know out there with their feather headdresses there they're living in a post-apocalyptic world those are the people that have survived the downfall of a civilization this is you know those guys that that buffalo bill met that was like mad max yeah it was over but before that there were civilized cities independent city-states that fought against each other and made alliances but with you know with engineering with houses that were like subdivision complexes and social hierarchies are there advanced yeah advanced is there a julius caesar and alexander the great are those people in our history do you think not yet in well let me let me correct myself for a minute not really in north america yet because we don't have a written language that's a tough one but at contact we have the names of some people who i think you know maybe not a julius caesar but we have we have important and noble leaders of entire kingdoms we have you know for one the big one that i just talked about was uh tuscaloosa you know almost everybody on that's listening to this tuscaloosa i know that it's a town in alabama right no it's a mississippian king who beat the crap out of de soto on his way through that's right tricked him now tuscaloosa lost and he probably died burned in a town called mobila but uh he was a great king and before that he demolished the de soto demolished the civilization of a of another one in south carolina a beautiful queen called kofi takachi who welcomed him in saved him and his guys from the wilderness they were about to starve to death and she and an entourage show up with all sorts of food guide them into a place where they can eat and they can eat and they can go to her city and he responds by uh taking her hostage putting a big ring around her neck and walking her towards tuscaloosa yeah some of her loyal people uh save her and that's an interesting story it is an interesting story there's a i mean that's one you know for your for your curious audience just start looking into the de soto expedition of the 15 15 30 to 15 41 when he dies at the mississippi but he goes through kingdom after kingdom after kingdom that's what i want my textbook to be i have it already i've got a i've got an outline it would cover north america part one mesoamerica part two south america part three and the trick would be with this the reason we can't do this yet is because we have you know for lack of a better word guilt societal guilt we all are pretty aware that they're the infectious diseases killed millions of people yeah upon contact that's a that's a horrible tragedy on our hands not our fault certainly not us modern people's fault nope but we have a hard time getting to the real conversation because that's a stumbling block what my textbook will do is never touch that i'll leave that to other people we'll just talk about like my textbook will end at like 1500 well what's chapter one a couple of decades before uh i start off i start off with south america and then end with north america but that's the one i really want to get by i'm making them like volumes so that uh a teacher could choose just north america but i'd love to see you know a a pre-american history course just to give people an appreciation that there was a continuation on the land we now live in and i think that's a good thing i think that's a good thing that's a good thing that's a good thing that's a good thing that's a good thing that's a good thing that we now sit and it wasn't the tribes that everybody thinks it was there's a deeper more beautiful more civilization-wide thing there's the mississippians there's also the people of the american southwest the people that built chaco canyon the ancestral pueblo and their people are still here we can talk to them the hoho com of arizona nobody knows about these guys but they built the largest aqueduct system ancient aqueduct system on the planet over 700 miles of very sophisticated irrigation systems there in arizona i mean we're close by here you know you you know about the monsoons and you know it's like two weeks a year that you get a lot of rain yep and then it's dry as a bone yes the hoho com made a system 700 miles worth of these aqueducts or the uh what do you call them irrigation canal systems that would take that water and spray it on the planet and it would be a very sophisticated irrigation system and then it would be a very sophisticated irrigation system that's more than rome it's huge it's absolutely huge and and actually a lot of the systems that arizona uses today are on the foundations of the hoho com's superior hydraulic engineering why not it's still gravity and water and it's still a very sophisticated irrigation system it's still gravity and water and shouldn't we know about that we should shouldn't shouldn't our kids have an appreciation that there was this magnificent civilization here before us that did these great things and that they were you know on par with the greeks we're so like you know we come from the greeks and they came from the egyptians and the romans and you know we got this line and we tend to ignore that the beauty that these inventions have happened independently around the planet which to me means that we humans are more the same than we are alike on a very genetic level whether our skin is black or red or yellow or whatever color we want to call it we're kind of pink actually we have a lot more in common but we're there there's a human independent spirit that has been replicated independently around the world and i think that's wonderful that's a reason that a deeper connection that we should all see each other as brothers i agree um i've heard this number and i want to know if it's correct that 90 percent of the people died in a 50-year period here yeah is that true uh that's the conservative number conservative some people say more like 95 but uh the infectious diseases say 13 different infectious diseases hit the americas in the first 50 years what do you think it's kind of proof that there was nothing that we could do about it but i think it's kind of proof that there was nothing that we could do about it not substantial contact before right what did we lose uh millions of people i mean knowledge what went into the ground oh well i wish i knew that's my whole that's my whole career trying to dig this stuff back out but uh i think some things are just gonna be gone if you really think about the moment that you know these multiple infectious diseases come to the americas a people who believe that illness is a uh a supernatural disease supernatural thing that it's a spiritual thing that your spirit is sick and spirit plants can help you not be sick but they don't know what an infectious disease is so they're using their spiritual methods that are not working at all and you get entire communities where you know a disease an epidemic disease comes in multiple come in who are the first people to get wiped out the old and the young yeah so you got no children the next generation the ones you're teaching and you got no old people and in a in a oral tradition society that doesn't hasn't developed writing yet that's the transmission and the transmission gets broken yeah the old people aren't there to tell you the young people aren't there to learn it the middle people are struggling to bury the dead and they're terrified to raise a family yes what who would bring a baby into this world right and and then all of a sudden All of their stuff that is, you know, we divide church and state, supposedly. That seems to be going badly these days. It's going badly. But they did not. Church, state, science, religion, they were all one thing. So the disheartening thought, when a couple people get sick, it's an evil spirit. Or, you know, maybe a witch doing something, sicking spirits on them. When everybody gets sick, that's the gods. That's the gods. That's the gods. And then terrible timing for these guys in brown robes to show up and go, you know what your problem is, that there's only one true God. And you need more of this. And you've got to convert or you will all die. I mean, from a people who already had a perspective that gods make you sick, this was proof positive that Christianity's God existed. And they converted. And they were, you know, willingly converted. And they were willingly rejected their old ways. And at that moment, the loss of knowledge, unfathomable. I thought I heard you say, it might have been on Sean's show, that these missionaries were baptizing people with infected water, making it worse. I mean, of course, innocent, innocent. They thought they were doing the right thing. But now we understand how infectious diseases communicate. And that was exactly. The wrong thing to do. Speaking of generations, your family celebrates Day of the Dead. You have an altar. We do. Who's on there? Well, you know, as they grow, a growing amount of people. There's, I like it to be people that we know. I mean, Sheely's on there. A lot of Americans don't even really know what the dead is. Can you explain it? Because it's kind of important. I think it's beautiful. I think it's, you know, we, the same time of year we celebrate Halloween, ghouls and ghosts and vampires. It's all very connected to the world of the dead. Our Halloween stuff, it's based on All Saints Day, which was in Europe, but there's also a tradition in Mesoamerica. Essentially what it is, is just venerating our ancestors, a holiday specifically to remember and love our past ancestors. And you make this altar full of beautiful flowers and food. You try to put out things like my sister Cheryl's up there and I put a little thing of raspberry absolute vodka there, which was terrible. I hated that she drank that. It's terrible, but she liked it. That was a Cheryl thing. So, you know, there you go, Cheryl. That's what you do. You give them, you put things that they loved in their life near them and you put kind of a little pyramid of pictures up in frames. Everybody does them different. They're very much like, you know, your family tradition. I like to, I'm very orderly. So the oldest guys are on the top and the youngest ones are on the bottom. How far back does your pyramid go? Back to my great, great grandfather. I am, I am Edwin Lawrence. My dad was Edwin Lewis. My grandfather was Edwin Leroy and his father was Edwin Lawrence again. And my son is Edwin Lloyd. That's beautiful. But, but so I've got, I've got one from the 1800s up there, but I've got my mom, my dad, I've got my wife's deceased folks as well. She still has both of her parents. Thank goodness. But that's what you do. And it's just a beautiful way. I, I love that instead of talking about monsters and ghouls and candy with my kids, we talk about stories of who these people were. When we put up the altar, it's a very, you know, it goes up on Halloween night and then it stays through the first and the second and then we'll take it down. But when you light the incense and the smell of the flowers, it's got to be marigolds. It's got to be marigolds. And smoke make a road like Milky Way for the dead to come back and to commune with you. And, and that's what we do. We talk about, uh, you know, my, my dad passed away a year and a half ago. Now he's the newest member on our altar and I will spend the day talking about stories of my dad. So my kids know who he is. What, what little object do you have up there for dad? Oh, I haven't even thought yet. It's kind of, I, geez, I don't know. That's a great question. I do have a couple of like artifacts from him that, that I got from his house. So maybe I'll, maybe I'll put like a, he was a scientist, chemist. Maybe I'll put his slide rule right in front of him. That would be cool. He loved that slide rule. Nobody even knows what a slide rule is now, but when you were like a chemist, your slide rule was everything. But if he's, if he's coming down, he would, he would really, he'd like to see it there. I think so. So it's something that just said, you know, we know, we remember who you are. Have you seen the movie Coco? Of course. That's the one that got it for my kids. I mean, what a beautiful thing that was. It's a really beautiful tradition. I wish we had more of it. Last question for you. What do you want on the altar for you? Wow. That's a good one. Hmm. You know, nothing that would aggrandize me. I mean, I wouldn't want something that was like a, like an accolade of mine because I don't think, I think those things are worthless. I think that, uh, that, that moment when you die and you see the flash before your eyes, you don't see your trophies or bank account. You see the people you loved and who loved you. So I would try to make it something that my kids would remember that I loved them. Dr. Ed Barnhart was here. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you. Bye everybody. That was Dr. Ed Barnhart. Genuinely a great person. We had a blast, but let's break down our conversation. Starting with the city. I pulled the published report on Moshnah from the team that followed him. The discovery paragraph credits a reconnaissance team. Ed's paper gets one citation filed under Edward. His name is Edwin. He left them a treasure map anyway and apologized to them on this show. Now the number in the nineties, Ed's friend, Chris Powell, wrote the number where the Maya calendar cycles line up. I found the thesis. It's right there. 1,195,740 in 2012, a Boston university team published an astronomer's painted workshop at Jultun, Guatemala in science on the North wall. 1,195,740. Chris wrote it down more than a decade before anyone found the wall. How does that not give you goosebumps? Then the acid Ed thinks the Inca fused the Cusco stone, stones with hydrofluoric acid. He has no proof and says, so no one has tested a scene. The man in Cusco whose desk it landed on said, no, it's a hypothesis with a chemist attached one chemist ahead of the alien theory. Ed calls his guesses guesses, and that's rarer than a lost city. Ed's on YouTube at the ArcheoEd podcast, A-R-C-H-A-E-O and Maya exploration.org. Everything I mentioned is linked below until next time. Be safe, be kind, and know that you are Bushida. Kid. I played Philippians in area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun. As well, there's music. So I'm singing the like I should, but then another conspiracy theory becomes the true with my friends and it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crab cat and got stuck inside males home with MKL truck being on. Only to aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set with the shadow people. There the Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold. I can't believe I'm dancing with a fish head. No fish on Thursday night. Wednesday, J. J. J. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the world falls on my feet all through the night The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come To regard the secret city underground Mysterious number stations, planets are both two Project Stargate and what the Dark Watchers found In a simulation, don't you worry though The Black Knight said a lie, he told me so I can't believe I'm dead So where's the fish? Heck, a fish on Thursday night, sweet day, day two And the Wabos on the beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the Wabos on the beat all through the night Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor Because she is a camel And camels love to dance When the feeling is right on wasting time Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance At Harmony Bank, we believe that better happens together. We're a locally owned bank built on relationships and personally committed to your success. 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