Megalithic Marvels - Confessions of an Archaeologist / Jenn Deyo

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

In this exclusive interview I am joined by archaeologist Jenn Deyo, who is also part of the Earth Ancients podcast team with Cliff Dunning. Jenn has spent decades out in the field unearthing artifacts and researching ancient history. In this episode Jenn and I cover the following topics: - how does she cope as a critical thinking archaeologist in a profession that seems stuck in their mainstream views? - how far back does the ancient history timeline really go? - physical evidence she has seen for Younger Dryas Impact event- the Mayan Observatory at Chichen Itza and it's missing technological components - ancient stone structures of New England - the earliest documented eclipse accounts on record - ancient paleolithic star mapping Make sure to listen through to the end when I ask Jenn her opinion on the age and purpose of the Giza pyramids... Follow Jenn on Instagram HERE JOIN US FOR ONE OF OUR 2024 ADVENTURE TOURS HERE

Stargate Voyager. So in this episode, I am joined by archaeologist Jen Deo, and we are going to dive into many interesting topics, such as the earliest documented eclipse accounts on record. Jen's going to talk to us about ancient paleolithic star mapping. I'm going to try to get her perspective on the ancient history timeline that seems to be getting much older than conventional archaeology. wants to admit. I want to ask Jen about evidence she's seen for the Younger Dries impact and worldwide flooding. We're going to talk about carbon dating and is it accurate. And then if we have time, I want to ask you about several sites around the world, such as America's Stonehenge in New England, kind of near where Jen lives.

So this is going to be an action-packed episode. And Jen, thank you so much for making the time to join me today. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And you are also part of the Earth Ancients podcast team with Cliff Dunning, one of my favorite podcasts. And I've always enjoyed the perspective you bring, Jen, as an archaeologist. So again, it's just an honor to have you today and get to ask you all these questions. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. How long have you been with the Earth Ancients podcast team in Cliff? Since 2017, I met Cliff on a trip, strangely.

I actually went on his Mexico tour of the Mayan ruins. And it was a really great experience. And we had a lot of fun and we clicked. And so I decided to be part of his podcast. Yeah. For everybody listening or watching, make sure to do a search for the Earth Ancients podcast with Cliff Dunning. And one of my go-to podcast regarding especially the ancient history content.

and Jen's often on there giving her perspective. And so it's exciting to have an actual archaeologist here on my show. And, you know, it seems, Jen, like more and more people I meet, like me as a kid, they dreamed of one day being an archaeologist. And for whatever reason, life happened, and we all got distracted. And none of us became archaeologists except people like you. So I wanted to ask, did you dream yourself of being an archaeologist when you were young and tell us a little bit about your journey of becoming an archaeologist.

I did. I dreamt of being an archaeologist. I wanted to be an interplanetary archaeologist. I wanted to be in space, too. But I have really bad motion sickness, so I just became an earthly archaeologist. It's an interesting thing how people get to these different conclusions. how they decide to go into certain lines of work.

And I was really fortunate. I grew up in the Great Basin. I grew up in rural Idaho. And there's a lot of contract archaeology that happens out there because it's not like where I live now in New England, where it's the oldest part of the United States. The majority of what you see out west is, you know, old mining, sites and Oregon Trail sites, those kinds of things that are a little bit more kind of, of course,

Western feeling because they are out west, but they have a totally different archaeological component versus where I live now. And I grew up picking up arrowheads and talking to indigenous people where I lived and it really sparked my interest. And I, um, I talked my interest. And I, um, I took a semester off before I decided to go to college and I worked in a retirement community, which propelled me forward to get my education because I knew that I needed to not be doing that. So I got into an undergraduate program at Boise State University. I worked under some really amazing professors and I started doing contract archaeology, which isn't often talked about. So it's good we're talking about it now.

That's amazing. So you dreamt of being an interplanetary archaeologist. I did. Because of the motion sickness, you settled to just be an earthling archaeologist. I love it. Before we jump into talking about these ancient earliest documented eclipse accounts, I wanted to ask you, you know, archaeology as a whole seems to be this very rigid organization that lives in their ivory tower. and doesn't really want to bend or change much to change their thinking regarding what seems to be all this new evidence emerging in this new age of discovery and information with LiDAR and the internet and technology.

And you're one of the very few critically thinking archaeologists, at least that I know of, that exists. So how do you deal with this and do you feel like a black sheep? Do you feel like you get censored? How does that work for you? that's such a good question um i do feel a little pigeonhole because i don't share a lot of or a number of beliefs that mainstream archaeologists believe just because i think everyone has access to this information and everyone can be a researcher if they have the interest um i it really resonates with me that people um that they have

have an interest in the past and they have an interest in other cultures and you know what what came before them because ultimately we're all human beings and we have a shared humanity and a shared history and I think that people are coming closer to that identification and that idea of shared humanity and history I mean think back to when ISIS destroyed you know the the temple in um Uruk and you know they showed it on television and it was such a pain point because we all felt it intrinsically That was you know the the Fertile Crescent the Levant the the cradle of civilization and Just wiped out in a matter of minutes so I think I come to it with a different perspective I don't feel like I know everything because the true nature of science is that we're constantly re-evaluating what we know

and new information comes to pass, now we know something different, and we have to add that to our pie of knowledge, essentially. So we're just coming off this crazy eclipse as we record this from yesterday literally. I mean, everybody in the world seems we've been talking about it, posting their photos and videos and graphics. So give us your take on this eclipse. Did you see it from where you were at and then how does this dovetail to the earliest documented eclipse accounts that you have discovered. So I was there and I was out in the middle of the woods, of the green mountains at my friend's fungus farm as one does in Vermont and experienced it. And it was very moving and primal and, you know, a little terrifying. And, you know, a little terrifying. And,

And also really like accentuating being alive and being a human being and, you know, paying attention to what's going on around us, really tuning into it. We had an astronomical number of people here as well in Vermont, which always just blows my mind. But we were in the line of totality for almost four minutes. So that's significant. So people really, they took it in and they wanted to experience it in a way that was not only meaningful to them, but also this is my second total solar eclipse. So I don't know, that feels like an accomplishment in my book. Yeah, I'm jealous hearing that because I'm up here in the rainy Pacific Northwest and we didn't see a thing. In fact, it was hailing about the time it would have passed over.

Oh, that's a shame. I did hear that. You got some very bad weather yesterday. So, yeah. My whole interest in this stems from, I mean, if we go all the way back and we start at the Paleolithic and just the ancient's knowledge of astronomy and what that looks like and how we interpret that as archaeologists and, you know, how we even talk about it. So, you know how I just said, we acquire new knowledge and we put it back into the sandwich in which we talk about history or prehistory. And the way we understand paleolithic astronomy is totally different than how we used to interpret it or think about it. So I think the main things that you need to think about is when you think of astronomy is, was it a religious practice or was it practical?

And really, it can be both of those things because we don't often equate those things with the ancients. Like, were they thinking practically? I would think they would think practically. But almost everyone always wants to say, it's shamanic, it's, you know, it's religious. And the truth of the matter is, it's not. Because it doesn't necessarily need to be. The earliest astronomy that we're talking about, though, is 40,000 years ago. So let's contextualize that.

That's 40,000 years ago, and you have a lot of activity in Western Europe, like Lascaux, and just in general countries, France, Germany, places where we know that a lot of early humans were inhabiting, and they were using caves. And unfortunately, the structures that they were living in don't necessarily survive because of antiquity. They weren't living in caves. might have been living in rock shelters or using them as you know some sort of a um seasonal habitation site but they weren't living in caves i often have to tell people that because they're like what were they doing back there you know and it's it's not like that they weren't bears were

living in caves so this is how we're kind of understanding it um we know that it's been confirmed that with the use of comparing the age of many examples of cave art from known chemical dating, not carbon-14, they were chemically dating the pigments that were used in rock art. So think of those reds, blacks, not a lot of whites or yellows are used during that period of time. And they were basically using these pigments to show the positions of stars. So they're your earliest star maps, your earliest star maps around 40,000 years ago. And we see that like in dots, various different, I'm trying to think of, I think it's actually at

Lesko, and it is around this time you see, it's in the shaft scene, I believe, and there's a dying man and animals. And it's basically showing some catastrophic event that happened during that time that killed this man and these animals. And it's basically aligned with some different stars. I believe one is serious and I think another one is a pole star of some sort. And the pole stars change. That's another thing too. So they use this complex software to find out where the pole stars would have been during that period of time and then corroborate it with this chemical testing of the pigments. So that kind of blows my mind that we can do that now because we

were so heavily reliant on carbon 14 dating of organic materials that they would have found in the soil at those sites. Right. Now we're not as beholden to that. And maybe we should talk a little bit about carbon 14 really quick and why it's a little problematic. So what is carbon 14 dating? Basically, I'm just going to read you a description. Radial carbon dating or carbon 14 dating as a scientific method that can accurately, in quotes, determine the age of organic materials as old as approximately 60,000 years. And it was developed in the 1940s at the University of Chicago by William Libby. There's that.

Okay, so why is it problematic? Because I get this question a lot. You're not alone. How accurate is it? So because of the short length of a carbon-14 life, Carbon dating is only as accurate for the items that they, okay, is only as accurate for items that are thousands to 10,000 years, to tens of thousands of years old. Really up to 60,000 years old is the terminal date line for that. Anything older, it starts getting wonky because that that date or that carbon 14 half life changes and expose. to that carbon 14 half-life is what is really problematic.

We don't know what the exposures are, whether it's, you know, your field person cigarette or the fact that, you know, there had been a fire around 40,000 years ago, and now it's everything's dated at 40,000 years. So that's where it becomes problematic. And not often talked about. And so chemical dating sounds like you're saying is the much more accurate formula. I would take that over just about anything. They have new dating techniques where they're looking at DNA in the soil and things where they can actually replicate, you know,

flora, fauna because of DNA components left in the soil, those bio, those bio, residuals, so to say. And tell us a little bit about when was the chemical dating process created, and what's that, what's that look like a little bit? Well, there are a number of different chemical dating. So there's like thermoluminescence. This one in particular where they dated the, the pigments, they actually, I believe they date like the, when the pigment was processed, because it actually,

modifies the structure of the pigment. So they can say, oh, this had been mixed with, you know, bare grease and water and some sort of other organic material, oftentimes blood, urine, various different components, probably that made it a little sticky, tacky, and easier to paint with. So in my opinion, I think that the new technologies coming out for dating are far more. reliable than the carbon 14 dating because of just you know sample interaction with other elements interesting and it sounds like the chemical dating you're saying can prove that something is actually far older than carbon dating can absolutely absolutely and it's you know you have you have the

the fewer plus or minus you know what i mean there's there's not your your uh your rate of plus or minus, whether or not it's accurate or not. You don't have a percentage. So in my opinion, I would go for, there are a number of different things you can use. You can use a chronological sequencing for your dating as well. It's just going to depend on what you're looking at and, you know, how accurate you need to be or want to be. It's also very expensive. Yeah. And it also, it speaks to the fact where, you know, we have megaliths, megalithic structures, and things that can't necessarily be dated now based on what we know to be true. We can't date stones.

Not yet. We're not there yet. But I think we're getting closer. I think it speaks to the fact of we have a number of megalithic structures that you could call call cylindrical structures. whether you're talking about the oldest one, Adams calendar in South Africa, you've got a number of geoglyphs, like think of the NASCAR lines and stuff like that,

that have also been called calendrical. Not all of them, but some of them have been called calendrical symbols. I think we don't think in terms of calendars like that because we're not as tuned in to the seasons or the outdoors or nature. as much as our predecessors were. And it really, it resonates with me,

their fascination with the seasons, because you need to know when the monsoons are coming in if you live on the Tigris and Euphrates or the Nile. Because if you don't, then you do have a catastrophic event. We're talking about people who were highly tuned in to the seasons because That's how they stayed alive. They needed to know when the animals were going to be migrating.

So it all feels very common sense. Now, when you're talking about the megalithic structures, that's a time investment. And of course, I'm going to go to Go Becli-Tepe, because everyone wants to talk about the tepe's. Karin-Tepe-Go-Bakley-Tepe. And for good reason, because they are on the precipice between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. And remember, the Neolithic in Europe didn't happen at the same time as the Neolithic in the Middle East or Turkey in this instance, Armenia, that kind of a region. It happened much later. Even if you think of the Samarians, Samarians didn't start the Neolithic, their Neolithic revolution until about 6,000, 6,500 years ago.

So there's a little bit of a space in there, especially if we're saying that the Gebecki, Tepe folks initiated the Neolithic Revolution, as we know it today. I don't know. That blows my mind. And if we're talking about calendars, are they indeed recounting a catastrophic event that happened to them around 11, 12,000 years ago, the Young Adryas? So with that said, I mean, you know, there's a lot to, that's very meaty and juicy to talk about. in terms of that. There's so much there with Gobeckley-Tepe, you know, it's kind of like a time capsule,

right? Oh, absolutely. And again, as an archaeologist, tell us a little bit about, since you brought up Go-Bekly-Tepi, how the information coming out of this site, forcing kind of the mainstream archaeology to actually rewrite their timeline? Oh my gosh, yes, in the best possible way. It's only 5% of Quebecle-Tepe, that general vicinity that's even been uncovered. And that should give us all pause. I mean, all of us. We should just all sit down and pay attention right now. Because not only is it, I don't think problematic's the right word.

Unknown. We don't really have any really one conclusive idea what they were doing there. I mean, we have a couple different ideas, but they want to say it was fertility or it was a death cult or it was, you know, an area where people could meet and come together, join together for, you know, the harvest or whatever that might be. And they all might be true. I've heard it's been called a school. I've heard it called a number of different things. And the truth of the matter is, is we don't use. space the same way that ancients did. I tend to believe that this, what we, what they've uncovered

thus far, I tend to think that it was probably some form of an area that they met after Younger Dryas to see who was alive, you know, who made it. And they wanted to venerate the folks that didn't make it. So there was a little ancestor worship that went on. We see heads. I think the newest information that came out is that they know that people were decapitated and that they were hanging heads from the little roof structure that they interpret as having there. And they found this because of the wear patterns in the skull, you know, just hanging out on a rope or some sort of sinew hanging from these roof structures that existed. So, you know, at one time they said, oh, it was an open-air site. Well, we know that's not necessarily true now because of these dangling heads that were somewhere in that structure. So.

And speaking of heads real quick, I think it's at Karan Tepe. The actual stonehead that's emerging out of the wall is just fascinating. And terrifying. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it is this terrifying looking humanoid face, um, that also seems to have kind of serpentine features. Oh, totally. And it's big old head coming out of that, that particular enclosure. So it's like, and that's crazy. You're saying it's only 5% that's been uncovered. Yeah. Wow. Exactly. I mean, and that should give us all pause. I think what's interesting about that as well, Derek, is that,

Think in terms of this. I mean, okay, so nine times out of 10, these were folks that survived this massive cataclysmic event. Like, mostly hunter gathers. Like, think if we had a major cataclysmic event today. The folks who would survive are the folks who live closest to the land because they don't need to go to a grocery store. They don't necessarily have to, you know, drive their car wherever they go. They've got other modes of transatlantic. transportation. So think of the folks that survived and created Gebeckley-Tepa as the survivors. Maybe having, you know, a pocket full of people who still had some technological level of expertise, whether that's how to make a boat or how animal husbandry works or any number of different technologies, early technologies. So what you see there is it's not as, you know, know, pretty as we would necessarily like it to be. But we're talking megalithic structures and a collaboration that would have to happen for all these people to build said structure.

You have to feed them. You have to clothe them. You have to make sure they have a place to sleep. But we don't see evidence around the area yet of these people living around this area to support the building of this structure. Where's the detritus? Where's the detritus? Where's all of the stuff that they would have needed to make this happen. Yeah, Gobeckley-Tepe, I mean, and you've got these massive T-shaped pillars, which are multi-ton. And so if mainstream archaeology is being forced to say, okay, yeah, these are around 12,000 years old or so, then it's not a big jump to look at the Great Sphinx and say, well, maybe that's a little bit older too, right? Oh, absolutely. And we need to do that. So recently I helped another researcher go back and look in some archives. And it was actually really amazing. Amazing in the fact that we need to go back to museums and review field notes. We need to look at problematic artifacts that didn't necessarily make sense in the moment when that researcher or when that archaeologist excavated that site.

We need to reevaluate things in a way that perhaps we haven't before with new eyes. I think one of the things that we'll see is that they did the best they could in the moment in time. But we've come from point A to like we're at point X now based on how people were doing things in the 1920s and 30s. So we need to acknowledge that. Going back into these archives and these museums, and looking at collections that have essentially moldered for years in these museums with no one necessarily looking at them and deciding if they are indeed what we were told they were. Because the reality of the situation, just in the cursory look that I did on the field notes for this research project, it wasn't problematic, but what had happened to say proverbially that the information had been buried, it had been reburied to the point where there was information that existed that basically said, no, there are actually, there's a layer beneath an inundation layer with another layer on top that doesn't necessarily

tell the same narrative that we have been told this entire time. So again, I think it's important for researchers, whether they have a master's degree, a PhD, a bachelor's degree to go in and start doing this. And it's even more important for people from other disciplines like engineers need to get in there. They need to have geomorphologists and hydrologists and people who understand just in general to reevaluate these things because people were making a lot of assumptions early on. And with what's happening at Gobeckli-Tepi, I got to just ask you, so with mainstream archaeology being forced to admit that, okay, this is way older than we originally

fought or said, what's the chatter been like that you've seen as an archaeologist? Are they like really begrudgingly admitting this? Or are they trying to say, oh, yeah, we kind of knew this all along? Or what's the deal? Oh, that's a really good question. I think in the circles that I run, and I am not an academic, I am a, I'm a CRM archaeologist through and through. I'm a fieldwork person. Like, that's my bread and butter.

So what I do understand, though, is that, you know, they're willing to discuss it because you can't, it's controvertible. I mean, it's right there. There's nothing that anybody can say about it. And you can't bury that. I mean, it's there for the whole world to see. And I think Turkey's pretty happy about the fact that they've got, you know, the oldest, quote unquote, temple in the world as, you know, a great place to draw tourists in. Well, and even if you think about the United States, think of the find in New Mexico, the human footprints. that we know are at the very least 11,000 years old. That's the least. And we know that because they're right next to sloth prints, ground sloth prints,

and there's more than one person moving through the area. So I think, you know, that puts Clovis first to bed right there. In my opinion, it does. And I think if you go down further into South America, some of these older sites as well. And I mean, what are we discovering in the Amazon right now? I mean, you wake up every day and there's something new that's happened. Yeah, it was fascinating to see the recent light art images that came out of the

what looked like thousands of these, you know, temple ruins all over the Amazon. you can see the squarish nature of the structure is fascinating in the roads, which look pretty advanced. It's amazing. And they haven't even started talking about the number of geoglyphs coming out of the Amazon right now. And the rock art is like next level. No one's really talked about the rock art yet. So, I mean, I'm going to be really, really interested to see over the course of the next. I'd say just year what comes out of that, especially with, you know, researchers looking at things

differently now, especially in relationship to, I'm not remembering your name, but I will. She did this amazing work on rock art, and is there a language in the rock art that we see across the board, from Africa to Europe to the United States, whether you're talking about. handprints, dots, crosshatching, cruciform, whatever it might be. And there is commonality. She identified over 23 different symbols that she saw across Western Europe, which implies some level of early language. And again, you're talking about that, you know, Argnossian-Gravutian time period in Paleolithic times. And we discount them. We're saying, they didn't really, you know, have anything going for them.

When in reality, they were so much more complex than we give them credit for. So much is being revealed. These are definitely exciting times. And so much I could ask you about, was there anything else you wanted to hit on regarding ancient eclipse accounts? I do. I do. I think that there's some interesting things to talk about in relationship to, like, who found the, who documented the first eclipse? So in relationship to where that happened, as you might expect, it was in Babylon, of course.

You have some of the first documented because these are the folks that, you know, it invented writing. I'm going to say that in air quotes because I don't necessarily think that that's true, especially if there is a language and writing component involved with the Paleolithic. But essentially, the first place that we see this happening is in a site called Uyghurit. And this is basically in modern-day Syria is where it's located. It has two possible dates. I'm going to go with the younger date just because they dated this strangely. It's March 5, 1223.

BC was the first documented solar eclipse in Ugrit, modern day Syria. The first predicted eclipse happened by a Greek philosopher, Thalas, also a solar eclipse that happened 2,600 years ago. And this is definitive. We know that it's a milestone in our understanding of the heavens. And then we go to China and we have a Chinese text. And it's traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, but I couldn't find that that was necessarily true.

And basically it reads like this, I love this. On the first day of the last month of autumn, the sun and the moon did not meet harmoniously in Fong. So it's just really interesting how different groups interpret it. And then we kind of moved to the Indian continent and you see the first mathematician and astronomer, Ariabata, this is 476 to 550 CE. So there's a big range in there where you see this concentration of focus on eclipse.

But if you even take that and encompass like all of the massive megalithic calendrical structures, we don't know what they all did yet because we have such a limited knowledge or a limited acceptance of what they necessarily did. or stood for or, you know, just what the whole purpose of their creation was. So I don't know, this felt like the most concrete of eclipse information I could find. But there's lots of interesting eclipse facts out there. And then just, you know, the whole notion of the fact that NASA now has a, they basically monitor ancient sites and they now are keeping track of, was this a solstice of megalith?

Was this, you know, some sort of tracking device for whatever it might have been? I mean, you can make up so many different things, but it's really interesting to me that NASA is now taking on this interest in these ancient structures that we've kind of always known had lots of different functions, but didn't necessarily know what they were. That's fascinating, the NASA piece. And I remember interviewing Cliff Dunning last year, we were talking about Mexico, and he brought up how it was like maybe 15 years ago.

He believes it was NASA was down at Chechnitz at the Kuukukukon Pyramid. and he was sharing how they had it all, you know, roped off and covered up and they were basically testing this thing. And, I mean, that tells you a whole lot right there. If NASA's down secretly, covertly, almost testing pyramids for energy and whatever, right? Well, I mean, have you been to the observatory at Chechnica? Yeah. That structure is just like next level astronomically because you can see the mechews. mechanisms and the gears that were likely in there that had been removed.

And it was, we, we kind of lucked out when I was there. We, of course, made friends with the guard, and he allowed us to move in and, you know, check it all out. And we were able to get, like, in it. But it is shocking the amount of just the intricacy and the mechanical nature of it that still even exists, even though it's, you know, know it's been completely it's it's been beaten up pretty badly yeah when i was there back in 2020 it was january of 2020 for right before things got real crazy i remember being super disappointed

because you know i'm used to going to peru and egypt where you get to go through the pyramids and touch everything and at chichinitz it was so roped off it was a i mean i guess i should have brought more cash to to attempt some guards but yeah i couldn't hardly get near anything it was a real real bummer but that's crazy to hear about the mechanical uh component like structure of the the i mean you could see where something in the top of it allowed it to move i mean there was a connection on the top and then you could see i mean of course it was made of stone but a portion of it you know opens up whatever it was And you could see that there was a fulcrum still in there of some sort. I mean, it was really amazing.

And let me just, I got to ask you this, do you believe that that was simply a Maya creation in their height? Or do you think it might actually predate them? You know, that is, that's the, that's the $40 million question. I'm going to say this. I don't know. I don't know, but I tend to lean towards, I think that it, I think that there are, okay, I'm just going to play on my cards. I think that there was an ancient maritime culture, older that, that predates the Sumerians. That's what I'm going to say.

And I think that there are survivors of the younger dryest that possessed greater technology. They were maritime people. And I think that they moved around a lot. I think that, you know, we think of nomads on land and stuff like that. But I think of nomads on water. There you go. That's my take on it. I'm the heretic of my comrades in archaeology.

But the truth of the matter is, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about this. I have seen some things that I can't make sense of. And a big one of those things is I have excavated through a black mat. And the black mat being that younger dry as terminus. So what you would see is it's a very definitive marker of where you would see the younger dryus occurring. And then anything on top of that happening after, anything below that happening prior to. And I've been on three excavations where I encountered the black mat. One of them in the, I'll just say the mountains of Nevada, that was a, it was pre-Clovis.

It was a pre-Clovis site. We found, it was a rock shelter site. We found basketry, beautiful fishing hooks. It was right on this Pleistocene Lakebed, a beautiful tonne. Bolo finger where someone could have been fishing and of course I walk out there and I find a beautiful fishing implement, this beautiful little point that had to have been used. There was a tortoise shell inside the cave that we were excavating and they had used it as a bowl or a way to drink water or something to that effect. There were so many things that just didn't fit. They

didn't make sense. So yeah, I don't subscribe to it because I have experienced things that don't fit into that narrative. You didn't happen to be excavating in Lovelock Cave, did you? No, I wasn't in Lovelock. I was in the Ruby Mountains. I've been to Lovelock Cave twice. and I don't know if you're familiar with the legends regarding that cave and the legends aside what the archaeologist found in there in the early 1900s is simply incredible I mean the most elaborate duck decoys ever discovered I think yeah yeah that's true and so much of what you're you're discussing they found literally tens of thousands of artifacts I believe including these, you know,

skeletons of pretty large proportion. And there's like a pestle that's got to be that long. Incredible stuff. But even I went and found the original archaeology field report from the original archaeologist that were doing what you were doing in there. You know, this is before a lot of political correctness and ivory towers. And they write pretty freely in there that there was, culture in here that goes back. I think they said to at least 6,000 years old.

6,000, yeah. And that they even said themselves these esteemed archaeologists of their day that we found a lot of stuff that does basically lend credence to the legends of the Paiutes. So that was just crazy to go down those rabbit trails and actually, you know, read what the archaeologists were saying, which is, again, why I love having you on. So that's fascinating that you. you got to find some stuff like this yourself. Well, and the truth of the matter is, you know, my background, I worked at a lot of military

installations. I was the assistant post archaeologist out at Fordor-Wen National Trading Center in the Mojave. I worked on the Idaho training range, and I worked at the Nevada test site on a regular basis. So, again, I am a field worker. So I am, you know, boots on the ground. So if anyone's going to see anything weird and report it, it's going to be me. And while I don't necessarily, you know, do the dating, I'm the one collecting it all,

and I'm the one who identifies the stratigraphy and making sure that it lines up with what we all know to be true. And what I experienced in my undergraduate career, and when I was in graduate school, I worked abroad. I worked mostly in Sardinia and Jordan. But being stateside and having all of that experience mostly in the west and in the southwest, the Great Basin and the southwest, it really opened up my eyes, especially because when I worked on my master's degree, I worked, I did experimental archaeology. So that also sets me aside from regular archaeologists because I made Southern Paiute pottery with the help with elders from the Paiute. tribe. I worked with them directly. I sourced it. I did all of my collection and creation, firing everything with them directly. And I listened to their stories. I listened to what they had to tell me about their, you know, their history and prehistory and who they believe they are.

And I think that that's my other big takeaway is that indigenous people are the key to understanding how, where, why we are and how we got here. I mean, to me, there are so many kernels of truth in their rich cosmologies and stories. We need to start listening to them and giving them their due. 100%. That makes me think of my last trip to Peru. We had some amazing guides.

The owner of the company that we partnered with, with is a, you know, a Quechuan guy and, and one of our leading guides, you know, it comes from Inca lineage. And these guys, you know, I've gone through all the hoops to be, you know, certified tour guides, which is a real rigorous process in Peru. But when you, you know, when you get these guys off the record, man, the stuff they share, like you're saying, they're real oral traditions that they know that have been passed down. It is so fascinating. I learn more just from them, you know, than, you know, any book I've read or anything, anything they'll tell you at a mainstream museum, you know, they'll get you off to the side. They're like, here's what really

happened. And they talk about so much of the same, you know, ancient cataclysms and a golden age. It's crazy. So I know we've got not a whole lot of time left. So I'll let you steer the ship where you want, Jan. I know you live in, you moved to New, the New England states. So I wanted to definitely ask you, there is some incredible structures over there. Most people have no idea that exists. Probably the most famous one is called America's Stonehenge, which is this stone circle type. But I'm also part of a Facebook group that people post photographs. They never give the locations.

But in the deep woods up there are these stone structures everywhere. Yeah, that's true. seem to predate, seem to be much more older than we would be told. So tell us if you've seen these and what you believe is going on here. I mean, I live on eight acres of Abanaki land and down on the lower acres where I live, I have a complete stone fence is what they call it, but it's much, much larger than an actual fence. And then there are structures above and beyond that.

you know, defy reason. So I think about these in a couple of different ways. I threefold. I think you have indigenous structures and buildings. I think you have colonial structures and buildings. I think we have Nordic structures and buildings, which are rarely, rarely talked about. So last year, I spent two weeks in Iceland touring around and looking at all of their subterranean structures, there are rock fences, there are walls, why they build them, what they, you know, the whole idea behind them. And I also spent like three days on the wharf hanging out with these old crusty ship captains, which was amazing as well. So I got to learn a lot about my whole idea of maritime culture, being in boats, what that means. But back to these structures, I think you have a whole

host of things going on in relationship to what we see in New England. So I'll start with the colonial structures because those are easiest. They were people clearing fields so they could grow stuff. Easy. Second, let's go to the Nordic structures. We now know that the Nordic folks were all up and down New England because we found sites and they're not necessarily talked about. I'm going to a speaking event actually today's the ninth so tomorrow about a Nordic woman who settled on the coast of New Hampshire a thousand years ago like 500 years before Columbus and it's documented it's documented on the Nordic side it's documented in Iceland so and And even the Abanaki folks and some of the other groups in this region will say, yeah, they were tourists.

They called them tourists. We saw them all the time. They were nice. They didn't try to kill us. Awesome. And then let's talk about the Abinaki or the indigenous structures. These structures are so incredibly complex. They are some of the most involved earthworks that I've ever seen.

They almost always have a hydrology component. They're almost always associated with water. There is a lot of shaping. There's the idea that there was a serpent cult or a snake cult because you always see these beautiful heads that are shaped like serpents, almost always associated with anything that has indigenous identification. Okay, so there is a fourth component that I didn't add. fourth component being back to America's Stonehenge, the possibility that there was another group or other groups that came over, the Phoenicians, bronze age folks that, you know, were they were sourcing.

They were looking for sources of bronze, essentially, is what they were looking for and resource management. So I think there's a lot going on here now is America's Stonehenge Phoenician. It's been touted as Phoenician. They believe they've found glyphs that indicate or Phoenician writing. Now, it hasn't been proven. That would be a very difficult thing to prove. And honestly, the way the rock degrades here, it's really hard to discern. It is a really compelling site.

I'm not going to lie. It is. I've been there and it's aside from, you know, the current owner assigning, like, different values to it, like, it's a ceremonial site. This was the, you know, they were, this is the sacrificial slab. We don't get to know that. I mean, that's out there. But I think that, I think it should be investigated. I definitely think it should be investigated.

Right now it's privately owned. And I think that the owner does, he does his own excavations, which is a little bit problematic, but whatever. He's going to do his own thing. The local indigenous population, how do you say that name again? Abanaki. Abunaki. How old do you believe they go back?

Oh, that's a hard, that's a hard one to answer. I mean, I would say, you know, just like, most ancient groups or native to North America, they see themselves here since the beginning of creation. So I would say, I think if they tell me that they're pre-Clovis, I'm going to believe them. I'm going to also say with the Abinaki, these are folks that they understand lifeways of the ocean. They understand how to navigate, you know, a small craft in a big ocean, a big water.

So I don't know. I think anything's possible. They're an ancient group, though. I do believe that. Would you say, would any of those groups relate to the ancient mound builder class that seems to have been in existence? And could they have been part of building any of these structures? I do think that that's a possibility, especially with the, the snake cult connection. I think that you have, you know, just like we have different types of

Christianity, I think that there could have been, you know, cults that, you know, we're the red snake cult or whatever it might be. I definitely think that that's a possibility. We don't see mounds here, but, you know, we're also pretty close to bedrock where we're located right now. So that doesn't entirely surprise me. Thus, they were probably stacking rocks versus, you know, building up anything to that effect. And the truth of the matter, a lot of what I see when I'm out just doing basic surveys in the mountains around here in New England, there's so much detritus and there's just so much forest build up, it would be impossible to see if there were earthen works in there. So back to the whole ancient history timeline, you know, it'd be great to just

here and again I don't want to put you in the spot or get you into any kind of trouble but again the mainstream you know narrative is that you know especially in Egypt this goes back to you know the dynasty Egyptians came arose about 3,000 BC and they built these pyramids as tombs and before that it was just the pre-dynastics a bunch of cavemen walking around give us your perspective because I know you've been to Egypt when it comes to the sphinx and the pyramids do you kind of lean towards what Cliff would believe? Again, Cliff Dunning from Earth Ancients, myself, Muhammad Ibrahim, and others that these pyramids are actually far older. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that from what you've seen.

I do. I'm just going to say it. I know I'm probably getting myself into trouble, but yeah, I do. And I don't think they were tombs either. that the great pyramid, at least the the great pyramid at Giza, I don't believe that that's a tomb. I just having been there and identifying just the mechanics of the structure, my husband's an engineer.

So I will often be like, so if you build it like this, do you need A, B, and C? And he'll be like, yeah, you do actually. So again, we need to get other fields of study. in here looking at these places that we've been told one thing and in reality it's something very different even when i think of like the you know the the bent pyramid or the step pyramid or you know the the red pyramid at dashur these don't necessarily they don't jive with what we've necessarily been told in the sense where there's a technological component that's been taken away or taken out.

And like you said, we want to believe that these folks were, you know, cavemanish. They weren't very sophisticated. They didn't have the intellect. And I would argue that they had more time to have that technology development and more time to invest in these types of more. complex designs or buildings because they could organize because they, you know, didn't have a commute. So yes, yes, I do believe they're older.

Now, how old they are? I don't know. But there's a lot of compelling evidence to say that they're, they go back much further in antiquity than we are told. Isn't it something when you actually go in the Great Pyramid? how the functionality doesn't even feel like it was made for humans to be traversing through. Those steep 300 foot descending passageways that goes down to the subterranean chamber

with a little backpack on and a bottle of water, it's backbreaking to be bent over going down that shaft, you know, holding on to the railings and the staircase. So again, people probably get so tired of me asking you this. but how could the dynastic Egyptians of 3,000 BC do that with in a big funeral procession with a sarcophagus? They would slide right down that like a slip and slide. I mean, I think that I think a couple of different things. I think a lot of, a lot of, let's just agree, archaeologists are great at digging in the ground and methodology.

They get, you know, high score. But when it comes to interpretation, I don't know that archaeologists are necessarily always the best people to be interpreting or extrapolating the things that they find at all times. Thus bringing in, you know, other people, whether it's, you know, when I went to Egypt, we traveled with a carpenter, like a master carpenter. There was an engineer on the tour. And they said some of the most compelling things that I've heard in relationship to the tools that they would have had to have used, to the hardness of the saws or, you know, copper's not hard. So it's really difficult for my brain to ascertain, you know, chiseling through some of those stones that they were using, especially like the the rose quartz everyone wants to talk about the rose courts it's hard and when you go to the as long quarry you're like oh hell no they were not necessarily making any headway in any short period

of time chisling through this stuff yeah especially when you see a demonstration of how they supposedly did it taking this sharp rock and something like that it's it's literally impossible they had some kind of advanced technology and you can see those one meter scoop marks all along around those obelisks yeah that would go down and pull out and it's when you see it you get it and it's like there's so much more than we've been told well this has been a fascinating interview jen any closing thoughts you want to blow our minds with before we call it i don't know if i have anything mind-blowing. I guess I just want to say that this is a shared history. I encourage people to, if you find a subject you're interested in and a region or an area that really brings you joy

and you're able to travel to that place and investigate it in a meaningful way, I want to encourage people to do that. A curiosity about the world only makes us better. And people who, who have a different mind's eye, a different perception, bring such value when it comes to, again, interpreting how things were used or how we even think about them in this modern day without putting our own perspective, our own, you know, 21st century minds eye on all things at all times. Well said. And speaking of that, I'll give a shameless plug.

We got three tours coming up this year that are going to be incredible. We got Egypt in May, England, end of June in early July, and Peru and August. So if anybody wants to join me on one of these amazing expeditions, we're going to see all the sites, private visits in the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu. We're going to go into Bolivia 2 for the Peru Tour. So you can go to Stargatevoyager.com slash tours. And at the time of this recording, we still have some pretty epic discounts. can lock in and all the promo codes are there. So Jen, this has been a great interview.

Where can people follow you, connect with you if they want to see what you're up to in the future? The only social media I do is Jen Deo archaeologists on Instagram. So you can catch me there. I post pretty regularly. And if I go anywhere, I do anything, I almost always do a shout out.