Stuff You Should Know - The Maya Civilization

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

After inspiration from Chuck's recent trip to the Yucatan, the fellas dive into the Maya Civilization. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Chuck here. Before we get going with the show, I want to plug a little podcast appearance that I made, especially for the old movie crushers. I was on a movie podcast called Too Scary Didn't Watch. And it is a lot of fun and the basis of the episode basically

is three very, very funny women who one of them likes to watch horror movies and the other two hate to watch horror movies. So one of them watches them and then tells the other two about it. And it's really a lot of fun. It's become one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to and I reached out to them and they were kind enough to have me on as a guest. So you get to hear me completely recap the horror movie or kind of edge of your seat thriller slash horror movie, Don't Breathe. And I had a really great time on the show. They're wonderful. They're funny. And we had a lot of a lot of laughs. So check out and just, you know, subscribe is what I say. Listen to Too Scary Didn't Watch and check out my episode on the movie Don't Breathe, which just came out a couple of weeks

ago. All right, on with the show. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And that makes this Stuff You Should Know, the anthropology edition. That's right. And I would argue our one, two, three, maybe fourth Maya adjacent podcast. There's no need to argue, Chuck. Well, we did the Mayan calendar. Yeah, the world ending in 2012. I mean, I think we did that back then, right? Yeah, it was right around that. That's the benefits of having a show run this long. Actually, I think we did that in like 2010. That's how I don't think we were.

Yeah, well, that's what I mean, but leading up to. Right. Yeah. Yeah, not after the fact, because that would be very us. And then, of course, we did our episode where we traveled to Guatemala. It's sort of like our two-part travel diary. Sure, toast. Where Jerry spoke. And, you know, Guatemala is partially where the Mayan people lived and live. So maybe we should just start out by, since I said lived and live, of dispelling some myths. Well, hold on. We did another one last December, I believe. Did climate cause the fall of the Maya civilization? Oh, right. So this is the fifth one. Easily. Maybe a hundredth. I'm not sure.

I lost count since you were talking. Well, I was inspired because, as you know, I just recently took a trip to Quintana Roo in Mexico and saw some Mayan temples. And so there's a couple of episodes coming out of that trip, because it was just one of those inspiring trips where you're, you know, when you go someplace where your endorphins are firing and your brain is doing things that usually doesn't do, those are the best trips. You know, you come back wanting to eat different foods and talk about different things. And I love those trips. Wearing captain's. I didn't get any clothes, but we did get Ruby a couple of really pretty traditional Mexican dresses.

That's cute. Does she like them? She loves them because they are colorful and have flowers embroidered and stuff like that. Totally. So there are a lot of different groups that lived over the millennia in Mexico and Central America. But the Maya stand out, in particular, for a number of reasons. They had one of the most developed alphabets or systems of writing ever in the ancient history of Central America or Mesoamerica. They came up with zero independently, almost a thousand years before it was introduced to Europe. Europe didn't come up with it themselves. It was introduced, but the Mayans figured it out independently. They also had some really top-notch calendars, which we talked about in that one

episode that were based on really advanced astronomical observations. Then not to mention, they also have the romance of having lost civilizations. Entire cities swallowed up by the jungle and lost for a thousand or more years. That's so Mayan. So for all those reasons and more, they definitely just stand out in a field of pretty interesting cultures, if I may say so. Yeah. I think that's why we keep going back to them. They just fascinate me. The more I read about them, at some point, I've heard it's a decent movie, but it's not the most accurate. But I was reminded today of the Mel Gibson directed film, Apocalypto. Man, it's almost a snuff film, dude. I saw the one human sacrifice scene and I'm like,

oh, really? I can't handle this. It's awful. It's super realistic. It's way too casual. He's a graphic director. Oh, yeah. He's super obsessed with violence. It's crazy. Have you seen We Were Heroes? No. I thought he did Hexaw Ridge. I don't know if he did or not. I know he definitely did We Were Heroes about the early, early days. We Were Heroes? Is that what it was called? Yeah. Yeah. The early days of Vietnam and it's like brains blowing out onto the camera lens in front of you. I think Hexaw Ridge was supposed to be really violent, too. It's just occurred to me. I don't know if I've seen any Mel Gibson directed film. We Were Heroes. No, We Were Soldiers. One of the two. It's that. Once we're soldiers, We Were Soldiers. Meet me in St. Louis, I think.

That's the name of it. I don't know. Lethal weapon, too. Super violent. But some of the myths we can dispel, first of all, I kind of teased one out that the Maya are still around. It's not like people talk about the fall of the Mayan civilization. It's not like a meteor came down and did the dinosaur treatment on them. There are still Maya today and some would argue that their civilization didn't really collapse so much as just became sort of a suburban sprawl in a way. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them speak some of these ancient languages and tongues that have been around for a very long time. They carry on a lot of the ancient traditions that were passed down. So yeah, it's definitely inaccurate to say

that the Mayan civilization just went away, just disappeared. It just dispersed instead. That's right. It is also incorrect to just say the Maya were this one sort of unified historic people that we can talk about as being one thing. We're talking about a lot of different, like dozens and dozens of cities and city-states that they had a lot in common, sure, and they did trade with each other and did some of the same things, but they also were at war with each other almost constantly between themselves. And we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of years. There are different, very specific periods of Mayan culture and depending on when you're talking about, some cities may be bigger than others. Others may be not quite as large yet.

So you can't really just say, I believe Libya helped us with this one, I think. Yes. Yes. She got from a website called Mexicalor with an E. They said, just saying the Maya is trying to invent a name for like the French, the Italian, the Spanish, and the Romanian people, all as one. They were not just one people. No, and they didn't see themselves as one people. They probably saw themselves as members or citizens of their particular city-state. But the reason that we today and researchers and archaeologists who investigated the Maya to begin with considered them one group for two reasons. One, they inhabited a really specific geographical location, covered southern Mexico, Guatemala, parts of Honduras,

El Salvador, and Belize. And Yucatan Peninsula specifically. Yes. So in that area, not kind of spread out like that was the Maya's area. And then number two, even though they considered themselves separate and not like members of the same whole group that inhabited that area, they exchanged, like you said, they traded, they exchanged ideas, scientific breakthroughs, art. So their culture to those of us on the outside looks like one homogenous, cohesive culture when really it was a bunch of different cultures influencing one another and creating kind of this meta-culture that we consider the Maya today. Right. I talked about the different periods that we can talk about.

The first one was the pre-classic period. And we'll talk a little bit about each of these. But the classic period is going to be most of the focus. That's sort of the golden age of the Maya. But in the pre-classic period, this is where they started to get involved in agriculture. They started to cultivate through burning land. And as we covered in the episode on how they went away, I believe we talked about burning crops as being a lot of people think that was significantly bad for them in the long run over a population to be sure and eventual food shortage when they had a food surplus for so long. But they started out, as always, with the three sisters growing those beans and maize and squash. And then the middle

pre-classic, we're talking about 1,000 to 300, they started spreading out a little bit in that territory, the same territory that would eventually be like the classic most robust Maya cultures. Sure. And they also, at that time, in the middle pre-classic about 2,300 years ago, that's when they started to build architecture. Not the stuff that you would see in the classical period, but it was the beginning of it, literally the foundation, because they actually started, they built new structures over old structures. But this is kind of where it was born. Yeah. And all this, if it sounds like it's happening very organically, is because it did. Mm-hmm.

Lydia points out that these city centers and these city states, it wasn't some, and we know now more than we ever have before. We got a lot of stuff wrong over the years, science and archeology, but we're pretty squared away, at least we're up to date on the latest like truths about the Maya. But they, I think they used to think they were so organized, they would plan out these cities, but they really sort of grew organically because they were good at what they did and they could really farm the heck out of the land and support a lot of people. So it just sort of happened organically. I mean, they clearly were a culture that knew a good idea when they saw it. So like an elevated

highway, a causeway that's wide and can afford a bunch of traffic between one city state to another, that's just a good idea. So if you build one, the other city states can say what other city states can we link to? And before you know it, basically every city state, and I think there were four great ones in total at the height of the Maya classical period, are connected by causeways. So of course today it looks like surely this was planned. Some great centralized government planned this out and they must have been amazing. No, there's another way to do it. It's almost like an emergent property of a hive mind. A bunch of people know a good idea when they see it and they put it to use and over time it just builds up and up and up and becomes so complex that it looks

to people to come later, like it couldn't have possibly happened organically even though it did. That's right. And we've talked a little bit before about the size of these, I guess, I mean, people have called them empires for these civilizations. There were about 40 cities in total. I mean, you said four within that there were all these smaller cities. Each of these, and they're not sure. So the number ends up being a bit of a swing, but 5,000 to 50,000 people and total maybe up to 15 million people. They've done studies that found, I believe it was like double the size of medieval England at the time and farly more densely populated than medieval England, like legitimate cities. Yeah. Did I say four? I meant to say 40.

Oh, did you say four? No, I think you said I said four. No, no, no, you did say four, but I thought you just meant there were four main areas. No, I mean, there were at least 40 great cities. That was what I was trying to say. I think you said four, but yeah, we'll go with 40. One of the things that made the cities so striking though, Chuck, was the elaborate architecture. Yeah. And because it was all made from, well, not all of it, but a lot of it was made from cut limestone blocks, which by the way, they used harder stones to cut the limestone, because in the area that the Maya occupied, there's no metals that are easily accessible.

There were also no draft animals. So they did everything with stones basically and with human labor, not with animal labor. So what they did is all the more impressive when you realize that because they built these huge temples and huge pyramids that are just amazingly well designed and well built, so much so that they still survive today. But then on top of it, when you start to investigate the way that they're oriented, you're like, oh my goodness, each of these staircases is completely in line with each of the four cardinal directions. How do they do that? Or if you stand on this one temple at Chitzenitsa and you look at the other three temples, depending on whether it's a solstice or an equinox, the other temples are in line with

the rising sun. How did they do that? So yeah. So in addition to just the visual amazement that you get, the kind of intellectual amazement of how they were designed and planned is even more impressive. Yeah. And you can stand on these things because they're still there. A lot of the civilization is gone now. But if you go down to the Yucatan Peninsula and you visit Tulum or someplace like that, I highly encourage you to take one of those stores and go see these temples. Well, we're not exactly sure what they were. We think that their temples sometimes are called palaces, but it's pretty clear from like the size of the rooms that they weren't for the hierarchy. It was a very hierarchical society, but they don't think like the kings

lived in these temples that are still these pyramids that are standing. It was probably for ceremonies. This may have been where I guess we have to talk some about the ritual sacrifice. This is where a lot of that took place as well. Yeah, particularly the temples and the pyramids. But they, yeah, we should talk about sacrifice at some point in time. We'll pepper it in. Okay. But the something you talked about, I want to kind of flush out a little more is the hierarchical society. So again, there wasn't some one great central government that organized all these city-states. In some of the city-states, not all, there was a strong centralized government, a leader, a priestly class, a divine king or something who ruled over that

city-state with an iron fist and by divine right and could say, I'm going to kill your kid to sacrifice them for a bountiful harvest or for more rain or something like that. It was that level of control, that level of hierarchy. And it was really rigid. But again, to kind of underscore how each of these cities was kind of independent in its own kind of thing, not all of them had a hierarchical structure like that. Yeah. And I think that's one reason they were, it seemed like I saw a couple of like documentary, documentary, documentary videos. Hi, I am new to Earth. I'm new to Earth. What is YouTube? It seemed like they were always at war

with one another. And I think that, I think that was just sort of the nature of the hierarchy of these places. I feel like it just seems like these kings were always at war with another king over something. Yeah. And apparently the first researchers who started to investigate the Maya, I think it started in 1830, the 1830s, when Westerners, when Europeans first started to, well, I don't want to say that because the Spanish were aware of them, when say Western Europeans includes Spain, say. You are new to Earth too. Northern Europeans. How about the English? The English first stumbled upon, you know, Mayan cities. From that point on, for a very long time, researchers just assumed that the Mayans were this really advanced, intelligent, peaceful

culture. Right. And it wasn't until later that we started to find more and more things like fortresses, and battlements, defensive walls that were like, oh, actually there was a lot of warfare. And then as we got to know more and more and cracked their language, we're like, oh, wow, this is a deeply violent group of cultures that really killed a lot of one another in some really brutal ways too. Right. But we did mention they also traded with one another. So it wasn't like, there was just a guarantee that their closest neighbor, they were going to do battle with. They traded all kinds of things. They traded, it's an area very rich in jade apparently, obsidian, obviously things that are a little more commonplace like salt

and seeds and grains and things like that they would trade. But copper and jade and obsidian were sort of the money things that you would trade. And they traded, like you said at the beginning, they traded ideas and cultural ideas and they traded art with one another. They had a lot of influence. And this was in one of the documentary videos that I saw online. The Olmec civilization was a civilization that they really, really borrowed from, or not borrowed from, but were influenced by, I guess. Yeah, the Olmec I was reading are considered one of six pristine civilizations, meaning they just grew up out of whole cloth. They weren't influenced by other civilizations or other groups.

One of how many? Six, including I think the, like, Submarians. I think maybe the Egyptians, I can't remember a few others, but the Olmec are considered, yeah, the Olmec are considered a pristine civilization, which is pretty cool. Wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah. So I say we take a break and come back and we'll talk about the religion and the science of the Maya. What do you think about that, Chuck? Let's do it. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you mentioned religion and science. We'll talk about that now. Previous to the break, you mentioned the priestly class. From what I saw, the priestly class was basically the highest class under the ruling class. And I guess in a lot of older civilizations, that's sort of the case is the religious leaders had so much influence and were just under the king,

and had a lot of influence on the king as well. But there was that priestly class who organized these ceremonies and these rituals. They were the ones who developed the mathematical system and the astronomy that we talked about. And they were able to accomplish some pretty amazing things, not only with math and their alphabet, but with astronomy. They were able to accurately predict solar eclipses. And this is in, I guess depending on which period you're talking about, like thousands of years ago. Well, I think we've entered the classic period, which I think was from the second century to the ninth or tenth century CE. Okay. So that's when most of the astronomy and the math and sort of sciences were advanced. Yeah, but yes. But again, for comparison,

at this time, England is in smack in the middle of the dark ages. Right. While the Maya priestly class are predicting solar eclipses and can accurately track Venus as transit around the sun. So they use this information, this astronomical information, their ability to use math, their extensive calendars, they use that for those rituals and for those, to basically reinforce their priestlyness. Like what we would recognize as mathematicians and astronomers today, imagine if an astronomer said, this comet is going to pass by Earth in two days. It's going to be amazing. And also the sun god will be driving it like a chariot. So everybody don't leave your house that day. You're really on the money on one part of that.

Right. But I mean, that's kind of like what their priestly class did. They were right, but the interpretation was wildly different from what we interpret things as today. Yeah. They had a solar calendar. And again, we did a whole episode on the Mayan calendar, but it was very advanced for the time. They had 18 months on their calendar, 20 days per month with a five-day unlucky period each month, which is pretty funny. I love that. No, I think that was every year there was a five-day unlucky period. Oh, it was once a year, not once a month? I think so. I think so. I didn't do the math, Chuck. I'm no Mayan priestly class guy.

And then they also had an overlapping calendar, a 260-day sacred calendar. This had 13 cycles and 20 named days. And as we all know, in 2012, the Mayans never said that the world was going to end in 2012. This was just internet hokum, basically, because their calendar was ending. Yeah. It wasn't made up entirely from scratch, like the Olmec civilization. It was based on a misinterpretation, a misreading, an exaggeration. In 2012, the Mayan long count calendar reset. It was a thing. And to the Maya, that may have included some sort of apocalyptic thing, but it wasn't like the end of the world. It was like a resetting of the world order, as we understand it. And that got turned into the world is ending starring John Cusack.

Should we talk about the creation story? I think we should. It's pretty cool. There were a couple of sacred texts that survived. As we'll see later, a lot of their written history was burned by Christian missionaries who said, you don't need that stuff anymore. You're going to be like us. Very sadly. But there are some texts and codices that survived. And a couple of them, the Popovu and the Chillum Balum, had these creation stories wherein there was a god of wind and sky called Huracan, Hurricane, something like that. And there was a seba tree planted on the earth to create space between the earth and sky for people and animals and plants and things to grow. And humans came

third after the plants and animals. But in the text, it said that they were made out of mud. Sound familiar. And they could speak but could not think or move. It sounds like a lot of modern day Americans. Yeah. All they could say is please kill me. So the god said, no, that's not good. So they destroyed them with water. Then they tried again, created a man from wood and woman from reeds. And they were sort of like functional humans, evidently, but were immortal and didn't have souls. So the god said, well, that's no good. Yeah. They got him with boiling water, right? Yeah, that'll do if you're made of, well, I guess, I thought if they were made of mud, that would do. But I guess wood and reeds,

boiling water would, in their minds, it would kill them. It sounds more torturous, but it didn't kill all of them because some people survived. Some of the reed and wood people turned into monkeys. Also very interesting. Yes. In terms of like evolutionary theory. And then finally, they got it right in their minds. They created what we think of modern humans in their creation story from maize dough and their own blood. But then the gods thought, hey, they're a little too scary, smart, so they might threaten us one day, but we won't destroy them. We will just cloud their minds and their eyes and make them not as smart. Right. And that's their creation story. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. They had a pantheon

of gods, much like the Greeks had that were dedicated to like a sky god or rain god. There were like more than one creator god. It depends on what period of the maize civilization you're talking about, which one was more important than another. One might be a little more important to one city state than another. So they kind of just jockeyed in and out of importance, but they were still generally the same pantheon. And again, in addition to art and like other ideas, their religion was traded amongst themselves and with outside groups as well. That's right. Like they would trade gods, right? Yeah, like I'll trade you a rookie chal for a 88 tops cuckoo con. This part, this next part really sort of gets me going intellectually

is when we talk about their system of agriculture. They were great, great farmers. You know, some say too great and that they over farmed. I guess that would make them not great farmers because they know about over farming, but they were really good at making things grow. And depending on where you were, which Mayan culture you were talking about, it could be very, very dry. If you weren't near water, if you were inland and they have your rainy season and your dry season, they have to contend with that dry season. And they did so by building these huge underwater cisterns that would collect enough water to basically last them about half of a year. Yeah. Yeah. So like every built structure was engineered so that

anytime it rained during the rainy season, that water got channeled right into that underground cistern. And it wasn't just carved out of limestone, Chuck. I mean, it was they carved it out of the bedrock and then covered it up, but they also covered it with stucco so that it would be waterproof and could hold enough water to keep everybody going for the rest of the year. So cool. They had aqueducts in one of the cities. I would pronounce that palink. Palenque. Palenque? Okay. You say that as if you'd know for sure. I've heard the word before, palenque. Plus, it's more fun to say than palink. That sounds like an internet challenge from several years ago. The palink challenge? We like that, huh? Yeah, it's really, I don't know.

I've never done an internet challenge, so I always think it's funny when they pop up. Yeah. So the palink challenge went away, but the palenque, they had a system of aqueducts and they actually, I mean, in my mind, I don't know what the Chinese were doing. It seems like they invented everything, but in my mind, they created water pressure. They're the first people I heard of to create water pressure. Right. Using like a drop in elevation and a narrow conduit that forced the water through. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. And then little kids would just dance and play in front of it. No, that wastes the water. There's also like great use of filtration, too, which is amazing if you think about it, but at Tikal, they use zeolite and quartz. Zeolite's

kind of like a clay-like silicate and quartz is quartz. The thing is, is neither one of those are found at Tikal. They're found kind of far away, so they were purposefully put in their water reservoirs. And the reason why that's so impressive is because zeolite and quartz are used today to filter microbes out of water. Amazing. Yeah. And they figured it out. They think probably they just realized that the natural aquifer around the zeolite quarry tasted better, was clearer, that kind of thing. So they just quarried the zeolite and moved it over to their own reservoir. It's possible. It's a pretty good guess. We just don't know for sure how they got the idea. We just know they didn't. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this seems like just brilliant innovation and a

lot of it seems like just good common sense. Yeah. It really does. They knew a good idea when they saw one. That's right. They also had irrigation canals. They had tiered agriculture fields that were cut into the hills. So it would prevent erosion. It would prevent flooding and water would just sort of drain down like a beautiful champagne fountain. Yeah. I mean, that's terraced farming and that's been like invented multiple times by different cultures independently. It's just again a really good idea. Wonderful idea. They also invented, or at least employed, raised beds for farming. So if they're, you know, they wanted to keep things a little drier, they would build a raised beds and then you could still have wildlife underneath, aquatic wildlife.

Yeah. I think they were actually doing aquaculture too. Like they were raising the fish and the turtles in that, the swampy area next to that, next to the raised beds. Wonderful idea. So they also did what you mentioned before, slash and burns called milpa. It's where you take a section of rainforest, cut it down, leave the vegetation in the trees in place and burn them there. And then the resulting ash covers the dirt and you plant directly into the ashy dirt. You don't till the soil and it's really, really good at fertilizing an area without any kind of input. Certainly no fossil fuel based industrial inputs and it keeps the land going for about two to three years. But then after that it gets depleted, which means that you have to take that plot of land

and leave it fallow for about 15 years. So if you do some pretty quick back of the envelope math, you have to have a tremendous amount of land to cycle through so that you can leave each spot fallow for about 15 years. You either need a lot of land or very low population. And that's one of the reasons why some people say we must have covered it in our episode from back in December. But some people say that's what led to the decline of the Maya. They over farmed, they over slashed and burned. Their population got too big to support through slash and burn agriculture because it just requires too much land because of the fallow period you have to have. Was that December 2021? I believe so. I mean the years are running together these days,

so it's possible. It's really crazy. I would have guessed that was seven years ago. I'm pretty sure it was December 2021. Another thing that they did was sports ball. Yeah. I don't know what it is, Chuck, but talking about this particular game has always annoyed me. Why? I don't know. I don't know, but I've always hated this game. Because we talked about it before? We have, yeah. And plus, I mean, it's a big, anytime you talk about the Maya, you can't not talk about it, you know. Why would it annoy you? I don't know. Annoying that they did it? It's just an annoying game, I feel like.

Okay. Well, they had a ball game called either pock to pock or pock a talk. And you know, it's sort of, like I'm of the belief that most of these sports games are pretty similar, soccer, hockey, basketball, American football. They're all sort of the same, which is they sort of simulate war, like here's our side, here's your side. We're going to try and go on your side and do something, and you're going to try and come to our side and do something, and we're both going to try and prevent one another from doing that thing, whether it's putting a puck in a net or a soccer ball in a net, or a basketball in a hoop, or a football in an end zone. And this may or may not take place during a 10 cent beer night,

too. But they had a game, all long went away of saying, they had sort of the proto version of this game, where they have been able to sort of reconstruct how it might have been played, except they did not use these a little rubber ball that they used by mixing latex with juice from a morning glory vine to make it bouncier, and they wore padding like you would in football, American football. That's news to me. I didn't realize that they wore padding. Does that annoy you? No, it's okay. I'm neutral on that. And then the key here with this game, though, what makes it so different is they didn't use their hands or their feet. They would use mainly their hips, I think, but their elbows and their

knees as well to move this ball until you, in a very quidditch-like move, throw it through two stone rings. You almost just got us torn to pieces. I'm really glad you corrected yourself. Maybe it's quidditch, right? Yeah, I believe so. Well, it's close, quidditch-quidditch. So maybe it's the use of the hips. It just seems really painful and that they should have been like, this really hurts. Let's try our hands or our feet instead. It seems intuitive to use hand and feet. Yeah, and not hips. There's no other game in the history of games as far as I know, and I know a lot about games that use the hips, but it's twisted. They did. Or maybe golf. It's all in the hips. I've been playing on a golf again lately. Oh, you have? Yeah, I got back into it

after like a 20-year layoff. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Are you still loving it? I'm having fun. That's a lot of fun. That's a good way to spend some time with friends. That's what Tiger Woods says. And he also says, must dominate. All right, let's take a break and let's come back and talk about the supposed fall of the civilization right after this. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush

boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're gonna get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying

to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so we talked about all these different periods. And the end of the 9th century is typically considered the end of the Maya classical period. What you referred to earlier is the golden age of the Maya. And for a lot of people, that equates with the fall of the Maya civilization. That was it. That's when their cities were abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle. That's when their ideas and thoughts and languages and culture were lost. That was when the Maya became a lost civilization. And like we said at the outset, that's just not true. I mean, the Maya are still around today. But in addition to it being more of a dispersal than a fall, that didn't happen all at once to all of the Maya city. Depending on where you were in the Maya

territory, some of those cities not only kept on going just fine, new ones were developed like way after this supposed fall of the Maya civilization. Yeah, which that's really interesting to me. In fact, we get Maya, I don't think we said, from Maya pan, which is one of the last ones. And that was founded in 1263. So this was after the supposed, you know, fall of the Mayans in the classic period. One of them, in fact, the last one to fall, which is in modern day Guatemala today was almost in the 18th century. It was in 1697, when the Spanish finally took the final Mayan city, basically. And we mentioned the Spanish because they were, they were the big reason why things stopped. It wasn't, I mean,

there was a dispersal for sure. But when the Spanish came and the Christian missionaries came, is when things got really ugly. And they basically said, we're going to squash your culture. We're going to take away your language. We're going to burn your written history. And you're going to be like us now. Right. You're going to be Roman Catholic, and you're going to like it. And as we learned in Guatemala, that the modern Maya and the Maya from this colonial period got into syncretism, which is where they took their original traditional religion and meshed it with the forced upon them Roman Catholicism, so that they associated saints with specific deities, like Mashamo, the Maya deity who helped me quit smoking. Yeah. Good old Mashamo. Yeah. He was

associated with Saint Simon. And you would go to him and say, I have this vice I need to, I need to get rid of. Please help me, Mashamo. Give him a cigarette and some, I think, Maniac root wine or liquor and light a candle and he would take care of you. I forgot all about Mashamo. Oh, how could you? That was one of the neatest things I've ever done. I think I got a thousand years ago. Yeah, that was a long time ago. And we obviously shout out our friends at Coed, the charity organization that we've been working with for years, who got us down there to begin with. Yeah. So just go check out their work and sponsor a kid. Give them access to books and education. Yeah. Coeduc.org, right? Yeah, go check them out. So you said that the Spanish

missionaries, the Franciscans in particular, were the ones who came in after the leading tip of the spear, the conquistadors, who would come in, slaughter a bunch of people, subjugate them, and then the Franciscans would come in and rebuild them in the European style and foist, you know, the Spanish language on them, Roman Catholicism on them, and that the Maya kind of adapted with syncretism, right? But one of the big ways you get rid of somebody's culture, getting rid of their writing, and I think you said it earlier, but the Franciscans burned almost all, almost every book, as far as we know, except four of those Coeducies, were burned, destroyed by Spanish missionaries in the colonial period when they were trying to subjugate and

convert the Maya, which is extraordinarily sad because it just makes you wonder how much history and cosmological thought was just totally lost forever through that. Yeah. I mean, they wrote a lot of books and those Coeducies were made from fig tree bark and they were folded accordion style and you can, there's some of that stuff that's carved into monuments that you can still see. Yeah. Some of it's painted on walls and pottery that you can still see to survive, but just those four survived and these were basically post, just after the end of the classic period, so there is good stuff in there about, you know, prophecies and medicine and their history and astronomy and science or religious rituals and stuff like that, but again, like you said, I mean, like who knows

how much we would understand if they hadn't just torched everything. Well, so, and then the surviving stuff, the surviving writing and the hieroglyphics at Mayan system of writing that was so developed, it wasn't cracked until not that many years ago. I think the 21st century and there's a really great Nova episode on PBS called Cracking the Maya Code and it's just almost like this thriller where like a group of like linguists got together and figured out, you know, what it meant and without a Rosetta stone, nothing like that. They just had to make conclusions and assumptions and they finally figured it out. But one of the other things that happened to one of the remaining kind of bits of written information was on the hieroglyphic stairway at Copan, another great city.

One of the temples, Chuck, was a pyramid and it had the staircase and the staircase was made of limestone blocks with hieroglyphics carved into it that told the story. But unfortunately, the first archaeologists who excavated it back in 1930 disassembled the staircase to examine it and when they put it back together again, I guess they realized that they hadn't noted where it was originally, so they put it out of order. So whatever it was trying to say is lost to history forever thanks to 1930s archaeologists. And they said it says, there's a lady who knows all that glitters is gold and as she winds on down the road and they're like, no, no, it's all out of order. There's something about a bustle in your head, Joe. That doesn't make any sense.

It still doesn't make sense. Not really. The colonial period that came much, much later, the indigenous languages were discouraged is one way to say it, kind of squashed is another way. And then finally, in the 1970s and 80s, there was a revival of the Maya in Guatemala to basically say, you know, our language is important, our cultural rights as indigenous people are important. And they made some concessions. They're not officially, believe Guatemala still has not accepted any of the indigenous languages as official co-languages like it does with Spanish, but they are acknowledged. They're part of the national identity in Guatemala and believe that

you can receive public services in your native language. Even though they're not official languages, they still guarantee that. That's really something. And that also actually comes after a genocide. There was a genocide against the Maya by the Guatemalan army, which presumed that the typical indigenous Maya in Guatemala supported the guerrillas in the late 70s, early 80s. And something like 200,000 Maya, indigenous Maya were killed in 19, between 1980 and 1983. And another one and a half million just disappeared and are presumed to have been killed. And they keep finding like mass graves that definitely underscore the fact that they were killed. So almost two million people were killed in three years in tiny little Guatemala. So much so that

like there was a substantial hit to the Maya population in that country. But they managed to hang on and stay around and maintain links to their traditions still. Yeah. I mean, if you go there today, you will see traditional Mayan people. Sometimes the women might be wearing the traditional clothing, which is beautiful. Eat some of that food is my advice. Sit down with some of them. Have a conversation if you can. Sure. I guess we should finish up with a little bit about human sacrifice. Sure. Why not? Instead of that lovely note. Yeah. So there's a great article in the Economist called Who Did

the Maya Sacrifice? And there was another one in Reuters called Ancient Maya Sacrifice Boys, not Virgin Girls, colon study. But there was this notion that, I mean, sacrifice happened in numerous ways. There was bloodletting sometimes. There was the ballgame that we spoke of. A lot of times they would play the game against another city state and someone in that city state would die if they lost and be sacrificed. Sometimes they would sacrifice children like you spoke of. They would throw them in the cenotes, which are the swam in them when I was in Mexico. And it's an amazing experience. But to know that that kind of thing happened there is a little sobering to say the least. Yeah.

But the underground pools in these caves. And there's no way getting around it. They sacrifice people. And so they definitely did it with, when at war, they would a lot of times sacrifice someone from another city state to sort of appease the gods and not their own. But they thought, maybe we can find out who these people were. And there's a lot of Gabbadi-Gookie science that we won't get into and how they did it. But they looked at these, at teeth. And from examining the teeth and the isotopic ratios, they're able to basically determine where people came from depending on the enamel of their teeth. And what they ended up finding out was what they called it was anywhere and everywhere, where who these people were.

They were, half of them were locals, about a quarter were from some distance. Others were from hundreds of kilometers away. And they were, you know, there were children, there were boys, there were girls, there were adults. It was sort of all over the map. So I think they were hoping for sort of like a tidy little answer there. And they did not get one. No. But didn't they say that it was ultimately mostly younger boys, like teenage boys? Well, that was the Reuters study. And that was when they would specifically, I think, throw children in the cenotes to call for rain. I think they used to think that those were, they sacrificed virgin girls. And what they found out, that was because I think they had

jay jewelry and things like that. But they said, no, they found out that they were, in fact, mostly young boys. Right. And they would throw them in the cenotes because those were considered portals to the underworld. And they were sacrificing not just for rain, but also just to keep things going. Like they believe that the gods were nourished by human blood. And by sacrificing humans, the sun would come up, crops would grow, night would come and turn into day again. Like the world would just keep functioning as a matter of nourishing the gods with human blood. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely something to keep in mind when you go to tour and swim in a cenote. You should always sort of respectfully think about that kind of stuff, I think. Yeah.

And don't look down. Don't look down. You're down already. Don't look up. That's where the bats are. Did you go scuba diving in it? No. We went on a great tour. It ended up being just the three of us and this one other woman. This very nice lady from Dallas. And we were the only ones down there. And our guide was this awesome dude. And it's like caving. You go deeper and deeper and deeper and knee deep in water, this cool, beautiful, perfectly clear water with blind fish all around you. And then you get to the sort of the swimming hole part. There are other cenotes down there that you can scuba dive in and zipline in and the inner tube. And there's tons and tons of people. But this one was way off

the beaten path and very quiet and very private and more of a historical educational type of tour. It was great. Yeah. A little known fact that Maya invented the zipline so that they could zipline in the cenotes. But he gave us these waterproof flashlights, you know, see our way around. And I was floating. He gave us about 30 minutes just to sort of swim and float in this one main swimming cavern. And it's they've electrified it down there. They had these colored lights. It was really spectacular. But I was laying there and I was floating and I saw these big sort of look like portals, just these little indentations in the ceiling above me. I was like, oh, wonder what's in those? And I turned on the light and it was like 20 bats just hovered and sort of

shaking and shivering together. Oh, wow. And there is no more natural instinct than to get out from under that hole. Right. Like a bat's going to just fall on you like, no, they fly. But your instinct is like every time one of us walked under one was like, ooh, I don't want to be under that. Right. Yeah. It was very cool, though. Yeah, that is cool, man. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, Chuck's got nothing else. I don't have anything else. And since that's the case, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this our second kidney donation email. We did one in our last episode we just recorded. And this one is from a kidney donor and it's pretty great. He discovered our podcast

six years ago and said about seven years ago, I had the opportunity to sign up to donate my kidney to a stranger. I was fortunate enough to be a universal donor. Our blood type was a match and the ride started. It took blood work every two weeks for four months to get cleared. I met the recipient and his family. They had two young kids. So it made my decision that much easier and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Some interesting facts. The remaining kidney can grow up to 20% larger to make up for the missing friend. I don't think we said that. No, I didn't know that. I was also curious at the time how they decided which one to take. They scoop out the one that has the longest ureter because it makes for an easier transplant. Here's another one.

One part was not mentioned is the six inch incision at the waistline where the surgeon reaches in almost elbow deep to grab the kidney. Wow. Isn't that something? Yes. Hopefully very, very clean arms. He said he made the mistake to watch a video surgery video after he had it done. Yeah. That's probably the right word. He said now that I'm a living donor, I'll be at the top of the waiting list if I ever needing a kidney. Not sure if this is the case everywhere, but it would help others if it would help others that are on the fence about it to know that. Our seven-year transplant anniversaries in May. I had to write in and give kudos for the great episode. That is from Shane Green and Candia New Hampshire. Shane, we usually

don't do shout-outs, but I think the rule now is if you give a kidney, then you get some shout-outs because Shane wrote back after I said he was going to be on listener mail and said, please shout out the Dartmouth Hitchcock transplant team. Please shout out Donate Life, which helped pay for Shane's bills while he was out for five weeks. Very nice. Most importantly, my family that backed me up. My lovely wife, Bree, and my daughter, Maeve, we are all listeners and our anniversary is coming up soon. That's fantastic. That's from Shane Green. He sent a picture of him and Big Mo, his transplant friend who was six foot six. That's why they call him Big Mo. It's just a great story. It's amazing you did that, Shane. Yeah, Shane, way to go. You

definitely get shout-out anytime for that. Just write in next time. You're like, I'm in the mood for a shout-out. I had a nice cheese steak the other day. Right, exactly. If you want to be in touch with us like Shane did and let us know something amazing you did, we might give you a shout-out too. Who knows? You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Introducing The Biz Tape, your all things music, business, and media podcast.

Join me, Joe Wasleski, and my co-host, Colin McKay, every Wednesday, where we discuss the breaking news, changing the music industry, and what your favorite artists and creatives are up to. Listen to new episodes of The Biz Tape every Wednesday on the Nashville Podcast Network, available on iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.