The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Ed Barnhart | Lost Cities, Botflies, and a Magic Number

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

-Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/BASEMENT ! #hexcladpartner -Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code BASEMENT at https://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad -Head to https://superpower.com/basement for $50 off your membership. Get 150+ biomarkers tested every year plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://whyfileslovegold.com or call [phone] now. -One scam can cost you everything — protect yourself now. The first 100 users get 20% off with code thewhyfiles at https://coveron.com/thewhyfiles Dr. Ed Barnhart found a Maya city nobody had ever touched. Not even the looters. Then he lost it. Thirty years later he's chasing beams of light inside Khmer temples, arguing that Inca walls were melted, and hunting a number a friend guessed 25 years before anyone found it written on a wall. Lost cities, botflies, and a .45 to the forehead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I'm talking with Dr. Ed Barnhart. In 1995, he was a grad student in the jungles of Belize with the mail-order map, a machete, and a camp full of colleagues who thought he was chasing nothing. Then his students started screaming his name at the top of the pyramid. He found a lost Maya city. He was 26. When I was 26, I found a lost city, too. Atlantic City.

I lost it right back at the craps table. Everybody asked Ed about that day. Today, we're covering the parts nobody asked about. What happened when the city got handed to someone else? how around a tequila he wasn't there for got him the job of mapping Palenke and the beams of light he chased into the temples of Cambodia.

And then he told me how he thinks the Inca got those Cusco walls to fit like that. Not aliens, acid. Got an Ica with tripping balls, a Cusco, he's just a lucy and a sky with diamonds. I love with boulders. Not that kind. Ah, blah, blah.

That one I'm still turning over. After a conversation, I'll come back and break it all down. Let's go down to the basement. Dr. Ed Barnhart is here. Thank you for coming in today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Luke Caverns. Luke Reagan turned me on to your work, and I've been obsessed ever since.

I really, really enjoy it. I love Luke. Luke has grown so much as Explorer, too. He was just kind of a young guy with stars in his eyes when I first met him. But now, you know, he is my colleague. He's legit. He texted me a photo a couple of days ago of him in front of a tiger or something. Oh my gosh, maybe I got, I saw one of a flashlight on a lion at night. That's the picture.

What in the world? What are you doing? That's unadvisable, get out of there. It's unadvisable. I want to start with 1994. So you're a grad student. And before you go down, everyone knows your story about finding the lost city. you will get to that.

Did you order the map mail order? I did. Tell me about that. Where did you find that? It was a place that mostly sold USGS maps, but then it had all over the world. Every country you could get their version of USGS maps. So I went to the Belize section and got a bunch of quads that were generally. in the area I wanted to be. I actually bought like 10 wrong ones and then finally got the right one.

You got 10 wrong ones? Yeah, I, I misunderstood where I was looking. It said program for Belize, but then it didn't include the southern part that I was in. Did they, I donated them to the project. Sure. So they assigned you that area first? Yes, my professor basically said, I don't know how he picked it. I guess he picked it, because there's just one dirt road running through this huge area of, you know, hundreds of thousands of acres. And near Mile Marker 10 going east, they had found a site called Dos Humbres, and it was only like

a kilometer off the road. But he figured this west part is the one heading into Guatemala. Nobody's been out there. So he dropped us off at Mile Marker. 11. And I mean, the first day it was just me and this guy, Charles Hargrove, both grad students. That was before the city. But he dropped us off at mile marker 11 and just said, watch your compasses, cut straight west. I'll pick you up at three. And that went on for a month. Okay. So this is a bunch of land that was cleared by Coca-Cola, right? And they donated it back.

Well, they wanted to clear it, but they didn't. They didn't. Because Coca-Cola got bad PR. out of it. Sure. And so before they chopped the forest down, they sold it to Belize for something like five cents an acre. Right. And so it became program for Belize. So they say the, the country saved it from Coca-Cola, which is nice. Yeah. So the protocol traditionally is straight lines, directional to just straight line. And you said, no, I'm going to follow O Lager roads. I mean, it does make sense in most context. When you're doing an initial survey, you want to work the ground like it's a piece of graph paper, you want to be on cardinal directions so you can map out better what you found. So a transect going west in most environments makes sense. I did that all the time in Texas. But this one,

poor Charles and I, you know, we went west like he said and we went up one hill, down another one, up one hill, down another one. It was just ravine after ravine, the seven hills before we finally hit that British logging road. And once we hit the British logging road, I was like, hold on, let's follow this. And going north on it, we started running into Maya buildings. Going south on it, pretty soon we hit the road again.

And it was all 100 years overgrown, but it would have been, I did cut it out. Eventually, we had a truck that could go five kilometers in. It makes so much sense that to follow those roads, because the loggers probably did the same thing, right? They were through the jungle and they said, someone cleared roads here. Let's just work these, right?

Path of least resistance. I mean, you know, the core of engineers always, you know, you do the topography map and you say, well, we're not going to put the road right over this thing. That would be terrible. We'll go around it. We'll follow the river paths. And the river paths are the way the good places for old buildings.

villages to be. So once we started doing the road instead of the transect, and I did, my boss was not very happy that I abandoned the transect. I was going to ask you. My compromise was, great, I'll do both. So you did both? I will cut the trans, we will keep cutting the transect. I did the both for two seasons. And by the time I really had a map of it, I was like, look, Fred, you know, here's the Western transect. It hit one site. Here's my map of the road. I hit five sites. Right.

I need to keep following this road. This is doing the homework for me. Did, were people skeptical of your decision? Oh, so skeptical. I was a relatively new grad student there. They were already established folks that had been in the project for years. And before I found the city, I was a, like, open camp joke. that I was just bringing students every day to just hack in the jungle uselessly,

that they were doing no archaeology. I was just torturing students out in the jungle. Wow. Who's in your corner, though? So Charles, is that Doc Charles that you're talking about? Well, no, Charles Hargrove was the first grad student, but then Dr. Charles, you do know this story. Dr. Charles was wonderful. My students were into it.

They were into the adventure, and we did find buildings. Sure. And I think I treated people with a general respect. I have this, you know, chip on my shoulder about all of us are equal. And it really bothers me when people act superior when they're not. And the camp dynamic, without naming any names, you know, that there was a group of grad students who called themselves the super elite. They called themselves that? They called themselves the super elite.

They kind of named it after like my, uh, concepts, but they were the royalty of the camp and the students were scum. And, I mean, in a good nature, you know, prodding kind of way. But they had their own cups in the camp. Nobody could touch their cups. Everybody else had random cups that we all shared, but then their cups were special. And they got in line first for whatever the meal was. And they had the access to the trucks.

So, like, if anybody wanted a beer or anything else from 10, you had to go through the super elite. And those guys were, it was difficult time. So there was actually much more opposition and just laughter at what I was trying to do. If you call yourself super elite, you're not. Exactly. So I really, I bowed up against that. I made an entire crazy bar out in the road.

I had access to the truck. So I would go and buy a bunch of beer and sell it to everybody for just the price I bought it. and I had a bar out in the road after 9 o'clock when the lights went out. I called it the Cinnibar. And eventually it got just crazy. There'd be like 30 people a night out on the road and beer and rum. And I had like a band on the weekends. It was crazy.

And the Super Elite would come out there sometimes. Eventually I lured some of them into the fold. Sure. But I was just kind of this like rebel in the camp. And I mean, up until I found the city, they were right. I was, did not know where the hell I was going. I had a plan, but I didn't know what would be there. You've always been the clear-headed heretic.

I mean, I've watched you, it might have been the Doha debates where you're talking to other archaeologists about Graham and all of that. And you were the cool head in the room saying, look, if we're going to win hearts and minds, you can't insult people. We just need to make the case. I thought it was lovely. You don't hear a lot of that. I appreciate that.

A few of them didn't agree with you. No, no. You know, they really wanted somebody. They wanted Graham, of course, on that thing, or anybody that would even defend his point. And nobody from those circles would show up. No. And so I kind of, by default, was the closest to that camp.

And they had to stir it up. You know, they wanted, I mean, it's entertainment. They want a good debate. But that one guy going, I've got a secret. Ed says that archaeology isn't science. like, oh shit, here we go. Here we go. Here it goes. But, yeah, I...

I am who I am, and I'm not scared to be that person in any context. You're not. So take us to Discovery Day. When you sit... It was... What's the right way to pronounce it? Because I know the media gets it wrong. Game Day reveals the truth about your cookware, and it's not pretty.

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Support our show and check them out at H-E-X-C-L-A-D.com forward-slash basement. Make sure you let him know he sent you. The city? Mah-N-A. It's actually, I'm saying it wrong. Mah-Mash-Mash. A glottal stop. A glottal stop.

Otherwise it becomes spider monkey, which they got wrong, right? I think, you know, there's so many Maya languages, too. This is, I picked Yucatech. Ma'ash is Howler Monkey. And I think that, uh, bots. Bots is spider monkey. Oh, okay. So what I thought was interesting about your story is when you were down there,

you sent your students in the more promising direction. Yeah. Why? Well, because they were given their heart and soul to the project. And, you know, they made these students. students might, this might be their only experience in archaeology their whole life. I was already committed. I know I'm going to keep doing this. I'll keep doing adventures. Why don't I give them a chance to have a life-changing experience? So when you heard screaming in the jungle, was that before the

discovery? Well, I heard daily screaming in the jungle. So the students would be shocked by so many things. Those howler monkeys, they yell so loud. The first time that a student, student would find that, that would make at least a girl scream. They'd like run off to go pee somewhere under a tree and then all of a sudden there's a huge scream above. You don't think about that. Peeing in the jungle is not going to be great. No, it's not good. It's not good. You never want to take your pants off. It's terrible. You don't. I meant screaming when you thought someone was bitten by snake. It was, it was two guys up on top of that pyramid. So you found it first? No, they found it. They found it. They were up on top.

top. I was with you. You mentioned Doc Charles. So like we're just doing our survey. We're cutting out the road, but we are finally going uphill to the three hills that I wanted to get to. So we get up to the first one on the west and I would stop along the road and say like, okay, one crew go north, one group go south, depending on how the road was going. Let's see if there's anything out here. And if there's not, we'll keep going. If there is, we'll, we'll investigate that. So to the south of the road, we find this building that's like five meters tall. It's like 15 feet tall, which, you know, is, it's not huge, but it's not a house. Right. Like, okay, that's weird. We've never found something this big. This is exciting. We're going to put this right in the

center of our graph paper and we're going to, back then I called it leapfrog mapping. Now I have a more technical term. I call it relational mapping. But we're hot, we're tired. Let's just work the jungle like a piece of graph paper and north is north. So you guys go straight north. You guys will go south. We came from the east, so we don't need to go there. And one more to the west. So I had six people there. And one of them was Doc Charles. And I promised Fred I would take care of Jack Charles because he was this like 70s something retired doctor from Palestine, Texas. What was he doing there? He just was, you know, so many people dream of doing archaeology and they're more practical than me.

So they go and they're a doctor and they have their family and their comfortable life. And once they retire, they're like, my dream was always archaeology. I'm doing it now. Good for him. Dr. Charles was one of these guys. He was great. I loved him. And he's on the expedition that finds all this stuff.

Good for him. Yeah, he was great. But my job was really hard. We would just sweat gallons of water out, hurt ourselves with machetes. And Doc Charles, days before, had gotten overheated and fell over in the jungle and passed out. And it was scary. Yeah. And he was dehydrated, and he was usually pretty good about that stuff.

But he just wore himself out. So when we came back, my project director chewed me out about it and said, Charles is not doing this anymore. He's going, he's going to go to one of the excavations where he's just going to dig in a pit. He can't do that anymore. And then Charles came to me like a night later and he said, if I can't do this with you, I'm leaving. I don't want to do this other stupid stuff. It was your survey. I believe what you're doing.

I got to go. And so I went to bat for him. I went to Fred and said, I will be Charles's partner. I will be next to him the entire time. Anything that happens to him is my responsibility. I will make sure that Charles is safe. So he agreed to that. So this day was day two or maybe even one of Charles coming back.

So me and Charles took the south side. Yep. And then there was north and then there was west. West was the one. But as Charles and I were walking south and finding buildings, I heard that yell. Like, Ed, Ed, come, come here, come here. And I thought it was the snakes.

And I had the only anti-venom kit in my backpack, that and an epi-pen. And so I actually did what I told Fred I would not do. And I bolted away from Charles. I was like, I've got to go. Just stay here. Stay here. And I bolted through the jungle to go find them. And when I got there, they kept yelling, where are you?

Where are you? I'm here. When I got up there, they were way. up there it was at 18 meters tall. 50 feet? Yeah, yeah. I don't speak. 60 feet, maybe 60 feet.

Yeah. Six story building? Yeah. I mean, just little guys up there. And they were standing on a pyramid. I thought they would get, it was, we have this spooky thing that on the last days of projects are when things go terribly wrong.

Like the worst things will happen in the last couple of days. We had that kind of superstition working. And I had it in my head the whole. time. Damn it. I hear a lot. I was so close and now I'm going to walk out with just, you know, some some students bitten by snakes and the super elite are just going to roast me. But no, they were on top of a pyramid and we did it. Did you call for Doc? I did. I went back and got Doc and got him up there. And then I went and found the guys that went north. I think it was Jim Eckhart and Brent. Brent. I forget Brent's last name.

But anyway, I was so excited to bring them back to the pyramid that I was not cutting in front of myself. I was just kind of dipping and weaving. And I put my head under a big palm fron that had a wasps nest right here. And I put my head directly into it. And they dug into my hair and they just bit, I mean, more than a dozen stings on the top of my head. Jim Eckhart still makes fun of me. He said that I just, I stood up, I threw my machete in front of me, and then I said, ow, hurt, don't.

Those are the three words that came out of my mouth. I've seen your pictures and listened to your podcast, and I just go, nope, nope, nope, nope. There was a picture of you covered in like army ants. Yeah, it happens to you all the time. You really just got to have a literal thick skin to survive it. You too. So we get up there to the top of the period. Everybody's there. We're going to have lunch there.

Now the whole group's up on top of it. And I asked Doc Charles, who I love, I said, Doc, I just got stung like a dozen times in my head. You think I'm going to be okay? And he just goes, well, anaphylactic shock sits in within a minute. So if you're not dead, you're probably fine. It's like, what a cool old Texas doctor thing to say.

He's one of my favorite characters in your stories. So you guys had lunch. What's for lunch up there? What did you talk about? Lunch was the same thing. It always was. Ham wrapped in tortillas like a little roll and Vienna sausage. Fred would buy these cans of Vienna sausage.

Nobody wanted them, but they were easy to store. I mean, it wouldn't spill in your bag. And so you have Vienna sausages and ham wraps. And what's the conversation like? Gosh, I mean, just thrilled. We were sitting right next to a cave-in to the roof of the structure. So we knew that we weren't just sitting like on the top of the base. We were up there.

Then there was a temple on top with a Corval Arch. We were up here. Oh, wow. And there was a hole that probably a tree had. falling out and ripped the roof off there so we could see in there. And we fooled around. I think Jim was the one that crawled down in there to see how deep it goes and like found still stucco on the walls and where the doorways are.

That was an interesting thing. We knew we came from the east. But we did not know it was west. And so when Jim crawled in there, he was like all the doors faced that way. That's where we got to go. So we talked about where we would go. And just then, when we were having lunch, is when the howler monkeys just descended on us. There were a bunch of them.

And they yelled and screamed at us so much. I mean, part of our conversation was drowned out by just screaming monkeys. That's why I gave it the name Mashna, because it was their house. Monkey house. Why were they so upset? Are they territorial? They are. They are.

They're territorial with each other and with us, weird, talus things. They don't like it when you're around. No. So how deep was it when he went down there? I mean, because that's an Indiana Jones moment. Into the building? Yes. Well, we were on the superstructure, and then there was a whole, there was like a talus of collapse

that Jim could shuffle down. But from the top to where he was standing inside the building was probably 12 feet, 15 feet, something like that. But there was a nice little talus. so we could get in and out of there. What did it look like in there? Vines growing through the front doors. When you were inside, you could see that there were more than three doors.

There were collapses on either side, but we could see three doors, and they're totally covered up by just a thousand years of mulch roots growing through. You're always on the lookout in an environment like that for snakes or spiders. Of course. It's easy to jump away from them in the day. jungle, but when you're in a little building like that, if you've encountered one, you're pinned. No artwork, no, no frescoes, nothing, no artwork in there. Gosh, I wish, but, uh, but most of that's gone. That's very rare. I've actually never found a really great work of art out there surveying.

I've always wished I could find a stela at Mashna. I know now that there's been more work that they did find a carved steel, and I walked right by it, you know, 30 times. But that's the nature of the jungle. Yeah. I mean, like, from me to you, there could be the base of a building. And if there's a big wall of, like, brambles,

you just don't see it. Right. So big things can be hidden very close to you there. We're going to get back to some of that exploration in a minute, but I wanted to ask you about something I found. IMDB has you listed as playing Han Solo and the Empire Strikes Back uncut in 2014. I love that.

Is that you and what 15 seconds of Empire did you shoot? It is not me. Oh, that's too bad. But, you know, I'm never asking them to take it down. No, you should never do that. Like, yeah, I am Han Solo. That's right. You are.

But people were getting upset with me. People would find that and go like, this guy isn't even really an archaeology. He's some actor. Look, he plays Han Solo. Like, I know, I really am an archaeologist, I swear. So I finally got curious enough to look it up. It's actually a Empire Strikes Back fan cut movie. Yes.

So the entire thing is nothing but clips of fans playing out various scenes. And at like minute 17, there's my ex-wife and her husband with my son and daughter. and they're playing the scene where Luke's being put back together in Hoth and like a fuzzy Nerfherder that scene and Luke, she kisses him and Luke's like this. My son, Edwin Barnhart, is playing Hans Solo. Oh, so he's Hans Solo. It's like a nine-year-old boy playing Han Solo. That's amazing.

And for some reason it's the number. It's not only on my IMDB thing. It's the first entry. everybody sees if they see nothing else they see that i am hon solo you guys star russ fans to go check out the uncuts they're one of the only fan films that that star wars endorses they put it on a new channel sure it's so for those who don't know they're 15 second clips of just families acting out scenes but it could be paper art muppets just costumes i mean what did your son was he was he in a costume what did he do um i

think they had a they had a little vest on him Sure. But it was really, you know, my ex-wife's husband who was such a super fan. I'm a super fan, too. I love it. And I mean, I as a child, you know, when we played the Star Wars games, I'm Han Solo. Of course you are. That's the first thing I'd say, I'm Han Solo.

Let's all be clear about that. And so when IMDV named me Han Solo, I'm never taken that down. No, you get me. I am never taken that down. Good for you. Yeah, sci-fi shows up in, in, everything I read about you. 2009,

for variety, you covered Battlestar Galactica. Ah, yes. Remember that? I did love that. And you said you were struggling with your attraction to Starbucks. Did you ever get over that?

And my disappointment that there was no robot dog. Right. That's how, because that's GenX, that's us, where we watched the new BSG, which was amazing, and then you go, that's Starbucks? Oh, that's probably going to be fine.

That's Katie Sackoff. That works for us. She killed it. She killed it. I love that series. Why did they ask you to write about that? Funny coincidence that happened. I lead tours around the Maya world and other places

because archaeology doesn't pay a dime. You never get anything. You just spend money in archaeology. So I lead tours And whoever shows up to the tours Those are the people I lead And it just so happened That one of the writers

For Battlestar Galaxica Season 1 Was in my group And so we're driving to Palanke In a van And we're just getting to know each other And you know, what do you do? And he said

Well I write this little show His name is Bradley Thompson And Bradley It's one of the writers for Battlestar Galactica, and I immediately like, oh, my God, I love that show. Yep. And we've maintained a friendship all this time. Him and his group of friends have come on multiple adventures with me now.

But that's how I was connected to it. In fact, I went to Bradley and Peggy Sue's wedding in the old hall that was where dirty dancing was filmed, this like log cabin thing up above LA somewhere it's actually a little town over there but anyway they were actually having they tricked everybody on the Battlestar Galactica crew

that it was just going to be like a party to announce their wedding but what they didn't know is that they were actually going to get married right there and Edward James almost Commander Adama was going to marry them. And I loved that. And I was actually there to see this thing. I was the backup because I have one of those universal life church things. I marry people all the time. Oh, you do? Yeah. It's fun. Mostly my nieces and nephews, but other people ask too. But I was the backup there. For some reason, he couldn't do it. I was going to do it. But it was so much better that he did it. It was this surprise that everybody got. And after he married them, then he went

so say we all. And it was the best thing ever. But I told my brother, because I was in between, I was divorced now. I'm married to my wonderful wife, 17 years now. But I was a free man then. And I was like, Fred, my brother's name is Fred. I'm going to hit on Starbucks. No.

Did you? She wasn't there. She wasn't there. Sorry, Katie, if you're listening to that. But she wasn't there. but I was prepared. And actually I was dating Cassandra, my wife at the time. We weren't even dating.

We were talking on the phone. Okay. And so, like, I catfished her so hard. I went to a Hollywood wedding. That week I was also talking to Disney, imaginering guys about making a Disney thing, which they just finally made. They finally made this big Maya temple,

but way back then. But I was doing a 2012 lecture, and then I went to a Battlestar Galactica Hollywood wedding, and then I went to Disney Imagineering. I have never been that cool ever again in my life. But it was like for my now wife, she was like, God, this guy's cool. He does all that in just one week. Like never again.

It's good timing. It is. I mean, speaking of BSG, I was at a dinner with a friend, and there's tons of celebrities around, and I'm not going to bother anybody. But then I see a guy in a beard, and I'm like, I got to go. So I go and I interrupt this gentleman in the middle of the meal, and I go, Ronald Moore, I'm a huge fan. I'm sorry to do this.

I just want to let you know. He's like, I never get recognized. And then I go back to the table. My friends are like, only you would bother a sci-fi writer. I'm like, how it's Ronald be more. Amazing. It is amazing. People like him are the actual, you know, indispensable elements of those shows.

The movie stars are the people we know and see. But Ron Moore. Oh, yeah. That's a celeb to me. too. I'm a huge Space 9 fan too. So you quote... This is so refreshing. Let's just talk about

nerd sci-fi stuff. Go! No. I'm kidding. Do you have a favorite? Star Trek, Star Wars. Oh, Star Trek? Star Trek, that's... I am a Trekkie. Okay. I'm a Trekkie. No, I love both. I mean, I wouldn't reject that, but it's just such an uplifting message, isn't it? And you know, you know, Captain Picard's

hobby. He's archaeologists. I love that. The thought that we could scan an entire planet and know where all the civilizations are and all the knowledge that they're able to collect

just from space just thrills me. I have a very unpopular opinion about archaeology that is destructive and we should stop. Stop digging. I mean, not period, but we should.

should always make that the last resort of what we're doing because we destroy things when we dig them and all the new remote sensing capabilities we have like LiDAR of course so thrilling so like reaching towards that Star Trek moment what I feel like you have to dig don't you don't you don't you have to excavate somewhat I mean we do we do but we but I think we should soberly recognize that we are destroying things when we dig them. And then the rest of humanity's time only has that person's opinion about what happened. Maybe some photos, some drawings,

maybe a couple artifacts, but the context is gone. And that's so important. I mean, think about nowadays we can take soil samples and get phytoliths out of things and know exactly what plants were in that, trash pit. We love to dig trash pits. Sure. We've drugged so many trash pits. Seems safe too. Like

it was already trash. I mean, we're not ruin anything. It was a trash pit to begin with. But trash pits are a gold mine of information. And how many thousands have we already dug and destroyed the evidence that if we did that today, we'd have so much more information out of it.

That's the caution I'm talking about. We just don't know what the archaeologists of tomorrow could glean from things that we think are worthless. It's a great example. I had a guess in here recently talking about the scrolls

found at Herculaneum that have basically turned into charcoal and they can read them now through 3D software, but most of them were destroyed by archaeologists trying to unroll them and just crumbling

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they think that archaeologists are just like a pack of apes. Yeah, well, sometimes they are. Sometimes they are. And oftentimes, you know, archaeology, like I said earlier, it doesn't make guns or butter. It doesn't get much money. You end up getting crews of maybe one person who knows what they're doing and a bunch of people that are volunteers or students who are doing it for the first. time. And that's just why isn't their funding for this?

The public loves our theology. Well, I mean, it's you know, in economics terms, it makes neither guns nor butter. People are excited about it, but it does not turn a profit. That's a shame. Before I ask you this next question, what's your nonprofit? What's the website again? Maya Exploration

Center, thanks for asking. And it's Mayaexploration.org and we're non-profit 501c3. Everyone go donate today. The show donating it as well. So you quote Linda Shealy all the time in every interview. Think like a Maya. But I've never heard you talk about what she was like as a person. Like what got, well, what was she like when she got excited? Because she's a rock star. Thanks for asking that question. She was,

I mean, just like a force of nature. She was actually very abrasive and rough and physical. Because she was an artist, wasn't she? She was. But she was also. Also, you know, a Alabama-raised girl who was big. I think she was probably six foot tall. Wow. And she eventually got cancer and got skinny. But at her heyday, she was also just large. In fact, you can bleep out things, right?

I'll tell you what the Maya called her. Yeah. The Maya up in the highlands had a nickname for. And in Maya, it translated Big Fucker Woman. She probably liked that. She did love it. She told us, like, they gave me a name. That's amazing.

She thought it was great. She cursed like a sailor. She was very physical. Like, if you were having a joking conversation with her, she would physically push you. She would. Yeah. She was like that. And, I mean, smart, so enthusiastic, so passionate.

That was the infectious thing about her. She was just so passionate about what she did. and even like her arch enemies who were conservative archaeologists who thought that hieroglyphs were just nonsense, she would just revel in riling them up and laughing at them. I mean, she got the last laugh there, didn't she? Well, she did in terms of hieroglyphs, yeah. I mean, a lot of archaeologists, some to this day think that they're either,

back then they thought they were just esoteric symbols that had to do with the calendar. Or even when she started to translate the stuff, there was a crowd that said, this is just propaganda. This is just propaganda from these kings. There's no way that that even happened. These are not real histories. These are just people telling lies to aggrandize themselves.

But archaeology has proven that false, too, on a number of occasions. All the wars that she was translating, we now have the archaeological proof that they did happen. But there had to be some propaganda from the kings anyway, right? Yeah, but I think that's an illogical argument. I mean, I'm actually more excited about propaganda than I am straight history. Yes. Like, that gives us insight into their personalities and their aspirations and their methods of deceit. I mean, so much, there's so much culturally packed into propaganda.

There really is. I love that. But Linda was a character, and she was, she on the one hand, was a loving, of all of her students, champion to all of us. But inside the classroom, she was brutal. She, like, nowadays, it's totally politically incorrect. But on more than one occasion in my class with Linda, she asked me publicly if I was retarded.

Like, you can't say that. Like, no, I'm not retarded. I'm trying to learn Linda. It was the 80s and 90s. You said that. Yeah, you said that all the time, all those things, the, you know, 10x sort of stuff. So she would teach the classroom

and go out in the field, like Indy? Yeah. Well, she was not an archaeologist, and she was not particularly, you know, athletic or she didn't do any digging, but she'd come in and just, to great artists, she could come into a tunnel

and just there sketch, a very good picture of what the glyphs are and then come out and think about them. Yeah. She was dynamic. She like, you just wanted to be around her. She created this community. Nowadays, you know, we lump so much onto the name Linda Shealy

that she broke the code of hieroglyphics. Linda would be the first to say, don't say that about me. I assembled the team of people that I learned from and they learned from me. And we together did something. She was a big team builder. The first time I went into her office when I was a student of hers, she gave me this speech about like, I'm not the person you're learning from.

I was being like obsequious. I look so forward to learning from you, Dr. She'll be like, you're not going to learn from me. If you're going to make it in this field, it's the students you're with that you'll learn from. You guys are the team. Those are the people. Go meet them.

Look, there's one sitting right outside waiting for me. Matt Luper, go say hi to Matt. Those, you're in a team or you're nothing. And you applied that through your whole career. I've tried. I've tried. I'm a bit, you know, I am a bit of a rebel. You are.

And my, you know, my wife, who's my biggest fan in, biggest critic, says, you know, number one, you're a control freak. And number two, she's a, she's a elementary school teacher. So she pins me with this label. You're oppositional defiant. Okay. Like, I love working with teams. I hate bosses.

Same. Same. I'm not good with authority. So Linda passed away in 98, right? Just before you were going to Palenke. That's right. Did she know what you were going to do? Oh, she did.

She did? And she was instrumental in me getting the grant. And I was so buckless. I did not. This is 98. So not everybody has a computer. Right. But I needed a computer to do this.

And I did not have the money, and the grant that I got could not buy equipment. So Linda and her husband, David, bought me the computer. They bought it. My brother, Fred, built it. And back in those days, you know, you had, do you remember the days when you had to build your own computer? Didn't you thank Fred in your dissertation? I believe I did. I owe Fred a lot.

For IT support. But anyway, Fred built the computer and David and Linda paid for it. I think it was like $2,000. Sure. And then they rented it to me for a penny a month into perpetuity, which was funny. I don't know why they wanted to do that, but I was actually renting it from the Shealy's for a penny a month. And you ended up naming something after it, didn't you?

I did, a big part of Palenke. I can brag that I know Palankay's unknown parts like nobody else does. And I was hunting. I mean, it was very emotional when Linda passed. A big group of us in Palenke heard about it. We planted a saba tree in the plaza, which is now a huge, beautiful tree. It'll be there for centuries, symbolizing her.

But I was really hunting for the right part of, the ruins to name after Linda. And I picked such a winner. It's in this generation probably nobody will dig it. But when they do, it'll be one of the coolest parts of Palanke. It's right outside the city center, right across the O'Tulam River from the cross group that's given us so much. But it's a magnificent group of terraces with a big flat terrace with a bunch of tombs that are in that terrace, but then another pyramid on top of it. So it's a magnificent group of terraces. So It's like, I feel like if there's any place that's Palanque's Royal Cemetery, that's it. And I named those the Shealy Terraces.

And it stuck. And it stuck. Thank you, Mexico, for allowing that name to go through. So how big do you think that city was? Because I've heard you say that maybe populations are overestimated because of burial traditions. Yeah. And Palankay's not very big. It's just not very big compared to, you know, the T-Calls and coracles of the Maya world.

My very unpopular and, in my opinion, inflated estimate is about 10,000 people. That's pretty a big city. Sure. I mean, you know, I think like Ur was 5,000. That's right. So we have an unfair yardstick. Things are much taller over there in the old world than they are here in the new world. Yeah, I know you don't like the comparison comparisons, which is, I get it.

I mean, they're essential, they're important, but they can also be very culturally biased. Yes, that's very true. We'll talk about your textbook today as well, and Cahokia. Super. So everybody picks your story back up at Palenke. I want to take a quick break and come back with some stuff that nobody really asked you about, And that's the stretch the two years after. Awesome.

I'm really enjoying this interview. Thanks for asking questions that aren't regular questions. So for everyone who's screaming about not getting the story of the discovery, all of that, go watch Dr. Barnhart and Sean Ryan. She's just out a couple of weeks ago. You'll get the whole backstory. I'm trying to cover some stuff that Sean didn't, which is not easy. But that's what I'm trying to do today.

So go watch that. You were great on it. Thanks. Stories are super fun. Sean's a great guy. one of my favorite people in the world. You said something on a podcast that no one really followed up on, is that after Palenke,

so you map the site and you've got to hand it over to another university, right? Oh, I think you're confusing Mashna with Palinca, because I did have to hand over, I mean, Palenke was already the jewel of Mexico. So, MASHNAR. Right back to the government. So what happened there?

Well, back to the theme of archaeology, never has any money. My project director decided that he could get more project money into our project if he invited other professors from other universities to bring their grants in. And he needed something for them to do. So he gave them Mosh Nah. Is that emotional for you? Not now, but at the time, it really was. In Hine view, that's exactly what needed to happen to me.

At the moment, I was honestly a dick about it. Were you? I'm a little embarrassed of my behavior. I was downright hostile to the people that showed up. That's what I wanted to hear. That's what I wanted to hear. Because that's the human answer. Yeah.

I mean, because you were there with the machete and did the hard work, you and Doc. Eleanor King and Leslie Shaw. Sorry, I was a jerk. I was young. I was passionate. That's right. You were just a kid. You were probably, what, 26 at that time?

27? Yeah. No, I mean, not even. I mean, I think, gosh, 1995. I was born 68, so, yeah, like 26. You're right.

You did the man. We're kind of assholes at that age. I was fired up about it. Nevertheless, I did when I left. write them like a treasure map like here's what I've mapped here's a huge area that I know has even bigger buildings nobody's ever gone back there there's still another huge section of Mashnah that has big big buildings there's no team there now there's little there's little bits there here and there but not really no is this funding again yeah yeah oh this is very frustrating and

Not only is it funding, but I mean, I'm very proud of Mashnaa, but Mashna is a run-of-the-mill Maya city. If I did have money and I got to pick a city that I would do, it would not be Mashna, even though it's near and dear to my heart. There's thousands of them. Right. Thousands of sites. And what to pick and what gets money, add in politics, difficult.

Is it that expensive? to put a team there? Well, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to dig, like if we wanted to unearth one of those pyramids, yeah, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This government waste so much money. That's nothing. Guns are butter.

Right now, the Congress is continuing to talk about that they want government oversight on the National Science Foundation and their mandated. is if this research does not look like it will reasonably produce a profit in the future, we're canceling it. That's all of archaeology. Archaeology will never get a profit. Yeah, we set up, you know, eventually it'll become a park and you get tickets as people come in. But those don't even pay all the bills for the guards and the conservators and not even the archaeologists and the administrators.

ENA, which is the institution that takes care of all the Mexican archaeological sites, one in seven people in Ena is an archaeologist. Most of them are administrators and maintenance folks. Could pressure be put on the government? Do you think it would work? Like if we called our congressmen and our senators, would that work? Maybe. I mean, it has in the past.

We've gotten things protected. But in terms of the actual money, probably not. Probably not. I mean, it's just human nature. And government nature? Like, who gets more funding, do you think? The NSF or DARPA and the Pentagon's black budget, which is bigger? You know the answer to that.

I do indeed. Yeah, it's sad. And I'm, you know, a big fan of the humanities, and there's a lot of us. Obviously, you are too. I think that, you know, especially when it comes to archaeology, We don't know who we are unless we know our past. We don't know what we're capable of until we know what we've really done. But that's not everybody's opinion and that's not people that think in a very straightforward capitalist way,

just see no profit in what we're doing. The public really wants it, but we don't always get what we want. That's why a lot of us do it for free, you know. I've been in this for 30 years now. I tell students that want to get into it, I say, you know, honestly, I spent a decade paying for it. Yeah. I spent a decade breaking even. And finally, in like my third decade of archaeology, I can pay the rent.

Yeah, that's, that really bothers me. Maybe we'll get some donations from today. I hope everybody does. I told my wife before we married, I said, you know, just check. I'm in an arrested state of adolescence and I have very low earning potential. That wasn't on your dating profile when he catfished her. Let's just be clear about this. I also was not in my best when I met my wife.

So after 1998, you got a call from Mexico, right? Yeah, right? Just somewhere right around there, it was when it dovetails right into what you were saying And when the project at PFB gave my site away, I was actually in Honduras and somebody saw a advertisement for a field school run by these folks at Mashna. Because I was there digging the tombs of the founders in Copan with a crew from the Ivy Leagues. And one of them says, like, didn't you say the site you saw you found was called Mashna? look, there's a field school there, and I was just gobsback.

What the heck? And I went back to my project there. That year I spent like eight or nine months in Latin America. And sure enough, he had given it away. And I was allowed to do my survey one more time. And then they were all just kind of, well, you've done such good work there, Ed. Shouldn't you go further west? You can just do the West stuff and we'll take care of this for you.

I was upset about that. I was rude about it. And then I went off to Palenke, to the Palenke Roundtable, which was an annual conference where all of the big guys went. And I had a target. I was going to find Richard Hanson because Richard Hansen was running the El Mirador project. And that was the most exciting project going at the time, huge pre-classic city, bigger pyramids than even the classic period. And he's out in the middle of nowhere. There's so much more to find there.

I was like, I'm just going to do this again. I'm going to go find Richard. And I'll tell him that I will be his surveyor for free if I can just use his camp as a base camp to go farther out. That was my plan. And I did meet Richard there. And he kept saying, well, if you think you have the cohenes to deal with five meter alligator or alligators, then yeah, you can do it. And I responded, you know, well, I may not have that, but I'm sure I can hire.

you know, somebody named Manuel with a gun who can. I'll hire alligator killers. We'll be all right. So we were talking about that. But then unbeknownst to me, the project of Palenke was talking. It was a big conference, so the heads from Mexico City were there. And I don't know how much of it is today in Mexico. But back then, the way you got business done is you drank with people.

all night. And then there was kind of a plausible deniability. If you didn't like what you said last night, you could say, I was drunk. That deals off. But in one of these weird deals that I was not there at all, the head of Mexico's archaeology in Mexico City was giving

Arnoldo Gonzalez Cruz the business. Like, you've been here as the project archaeologist for a decade, and you've never even made a moment. map. You've never even made a map of this place. We don't even know what this place looks like besides the city center. And my friend Chris Powell, who's there drinking with them,

spoke up. He said, well, my friend, Ed's coming, and he just found Maya City. He's really a good mapper. And the head of Inna Archaeology, drunk on tequila, goes, Larnallo, hire that guy. And Arnold said, okay. And that's

how it happened. I came in, and Chris and Alfonso Morale, I told me they would like to offer you the job to Matt Palanke. I was like, well, that's more like it. Finally, some respect around here. No, I didn't think that at all. I was gobsmacked. Like, what? Palanke's the best site in all of all of Mexico. And I'm invited? That's ridiculous. But that's what happened. So that took some of the sting out of Mashnaar? It did. I immediately had a new plan and a new dissertation. I was about to finish my dissertation on Mashnaa, but that

Went to the wayside, and I started again in Palenke three years. In retrospect, how did that team do down there in Machinard? Did they do okay? Or did they miss some stuff? They've done okay. They've done okay. I mean, they found some cool pottery. Okay, all right.

One of the frustrations, and again, I'm, you know, I feel bad about being a jerk about it, so I'm trying not to be a jerk about it anymore. But we don't have to name anybody. They spent the first, oh, I just. I just moved a little knob here. That's just for headphones. I've knocked this wire out. I've knocked the mic cable out and just talked to them.

Like fidgety. I just turned a knob by accident. Sorry. Sorry. So what was I saying? They spent the first two or three seasons mapping Mashna. I made a map that was just tape and compass and pacing of Mashna in two weeks. And at the end of the three years, they were like, wow, your map was really good.

It's like, well, get on with some other shit, would you? Yeah. Don't waste your time redoing. I could have told you that. My map was good. So I was proud that professional survey equipment came in and like, you know, not even a meter of difference between what my map was to their map. Did they find anything that surprised you? Well, they found a carved stila, which upset.

that me? It did. What's a steela? A steela is a monolithic stone with a carving of a king or somebody on it. So they found one of those. I found one during the project, and eight of us spent like four hours

with wedged sticks and things, slowly anchoring it up and finally flipping it over to find there was nothing on it. Yep. But that one really taught me something like it took eight guys four hours to flip this stone over. How the heck did the Maya get it here?

Like that was an effort. It was a real life thing of just how hard that is. I've seen some drawings of what my cities might have looked like. Do you think they did a lot of jungle clearing? I mean, I've, like cities that's just lawn. Right. I think a lot of those reconstruction drawings are overblown. I do think that they're people. We love ornamental plants. We love, you know, we decorate everything we do with these plants. And they live in the jungle. Right. So why would they, why would they take it all away?

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Tell them we sent you. There are some studies. Not many of them. I wish there were more that actually have investigated that question. There's a paper called Garden Cities of the Maya that was, they, they, they, they, scraped the plazas, just like three centimeters worth on the top of the plazas and took samples everywhere, specifically for nitrates in the soil, and found there were patches in front of temples, just like you'd have, you know, landscaping. Sure.

There was landscaping. And so these studies in the Chenet region, no, the Pook region, proved that up that there were, they were using trees. And I know from my surveys and also from old things in Tikal, there's a weird concentration of fruiting trees that are in association with residential areas. In Palanke, there were a lot of cacao groves that were there associated with them. And there were other trees just growing. There were some that were lemons, which don't come from this side of the way. world. I don't know who the hell planted those lemons, but it was fun to find a lemon grove in the

middle of Colanke. But that, my, I didn't plant those lemons. No, no, no. But it did show that there was, you know, agriculturally rich soil there, that kind of anthropogenic soil that we use so effectively investigating the Amazon. Do you think they did, like, burning to clear? Yeah, I think they, they did slash and burn just like they do now. They are so, like, it is so ingrained in the mind of a Maya that you must burn your field. There was a moment when we were in Palanke where back, I guess it was 1998 or 1999, you remember those incredible fires that happened in Mexico

that had so much smoke that the smoke made it to New York City? Yep. I was at the epicenter of that. Wow. There was a lot of smoke, a lot of fire. It was crazy. I remember that. Wow. Yeah, it's funny, I had just given my group of speech,

we were just really starting the service. And I was like, been a hundred years, no one's ever made a map. Somebody's always stopped for some reason. And I swear to you, there will be no reason we will ever stop. We will not stop. And the next day we went out and the ruins were on fire. And I was like, we're not stopping. And they were like, you're a psycho.

Stop it. And we couldn't even like, we couldn't, the laser goes from the machine, bounces off the prism and comes back. We couldn't make the laser go anymore. or the prism go any more than like 30 feet away or the smoke was too thick and it wouldn't bounce back to the machine. In retrospect, again, I was a young psychotic man. I should have just gone home.

But I had just given a speech that nothing would stop me. And I was like, I don't care if it's on fire. Keep mapping. But anyway, what was I getting with that? The United States was pissed off at Mexico because they were sending all this fire their way and they blamed it for some stupid reason on the agricultural practice of slash and burn.

And so the law came down to Chiapas that the Maya couldn't burn anymore, that they would give them some money to hire extra guys to do cutting, but that the law was nobody could burn their fields anymore. And the guys that were on the crew, they were like honestly scared

The head guy, Pedro, he looked gray. He was just like, if I can't burn, we are dead. We are all dead. This is the end of Maya civilization. We'd burn. That's what we do. Was that the fire caused by burning? No, of course not.

Climate change stuff early on. No, it was not their fault at all. But the fault in Mexico, sorry, Mexico is to blame the Indians for anything environmental. Right, blame the Indians. Those weird indigenous people are the ones burning down all our forests. I'm glad that you mentioned that Maya farmer, because

when people think of the Maya people, we conjure up this image of an extinct civilization, but there's millions of Maya people around now, speaking 30 languages. Yeah, I'd say in Guatemala alone, there's over

10 million. Maya still living there. Wow. Even in the United States. I mean, I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but there's more than a million Maya people living here. I always tell people, you know, if that nice guy at the 7-Eleven is 5'2 foot 2, he's probably a black.

I want to hear about Plaza A. That seems to show up all the time. Plaza A? Plaza A at Machina. Oh. I don't think I ever named the plazas. You might not have. It showed up in a couple of papers.

I guess that's funny. Probably Leslie Shaw and Eleanor King and their team named the main plaza. Actually, the other ones are small, so that must be the first plaza. Shaw King, Howard, and Valdez. Well, I did not know that. That must have happened after I gone. I was gone. But that was the 18-meter pyramid that we found first day.

That was the south end of what's probably now Plaza A. And so that after we finished lunch, I said, okay, doing the same thing. We're going to go climb down here. Somebody's going north. Somebody's going south. And let's just see what we find. And everybody spread out. And within minutes, we knew that it was about 100 meters across, huge plaza.

And I think it was Jim who yelled ball court. Found a ball court there. And another person yelled pyramid and another person yelled pyramid. Wow. How did you date it? I never did. I never did. I mean, well, yes, I did.

To a certain extent. I guessed right. You guess. I was, ours was not an excavation project. It was a survey project. So I didn't put a shovel in the ground. Nevertheless, the nature of the pyramid that we found first and the second biggest one, and there was a little guy, they were long range buildings,

which in the classic period, most of the pyramids are fairly squel. square or just off square at their base. And when you get up to the top, there's a temple with three to max five doors. So the classic period is like what, 700 to 1,000 AD? No, it's more like 400 to 800. Okay. And then we get into this terminal classic period that goes from like 800 to a thousand. That's a period where all of a sudden the Maya, when they abandon those cities in that classic or that disappearance of the Maya.

When they reassemble themselves, especially up in Yucatan, they start making these buildings that are much longer. They're still up on pyramidal bases. But the building on top now is long and it has more like seven to 14 doors. And we think it's indicating a much more communal way of governing rather than like the age of despotic kings is done. Now we're going to get back to our more Maya communal roots and that these buildings that we call range buildings demonstrate that shared leadership, new formation. And so the buildings in Mashna, I could already see, like, as long as it is and all these doors, this is probably Terminal Classic. I read one of your papers on it, and maybe you can talk about it a little bit, is the period where we think maybe the abandoned the kings in favor of the councils, and I think your paper argued that the councils were there all the time anyway.

Yeah. And the cargo theory, I'd love to hear about that. Those are from my dissertation, I think, from Palenke. Yes. Thank you for reading that. You're probably number 83 to read that thing. Which is just fine. It's just fine.

That's very nice of you. Yeah, I do think it's reflected in my archaeology. It's reflected in the panthe. of the Maya gods, and it's reflected today in the nature of the Maya, that they are a very council kind of people. They like a group of people to work out what the community is going to do. They've always had councils. The cargo system in the highlands of Chiapas is a system today that the Maya indigenous communities use, where wealthy members of the community will take on a position within the government or a leadership, but they will pay their own money.

They will pay for the festivals. They will open up their homes. They will be there for all of the emergency meetings. They will do their part. And it's cargo because it's a burden. And so they take on that position for whatever the community, it'll be like one to three years, will be that position. During that time, they lose a lot of wealth.

But what they gain is prestige. the community now sees them not as some rich guy out of touch with who we are he's a person who was successful in our community and gave back to our community and now that person can go on and they have prestige well at the same time in rome we've got senators and councils and pre-councils who are using the position to make money and gather power the my are not like that yeah it happens to all of them It does. And it's going to happen to us too.

So why were the Maya different? Why were they so magnanimous? Because is human nature? We're unsure of when their pantheon, when their religion started, but it is interesting to note that it is a pantheon of deities who have various roles. And sometimes, like, they'll have one role in one season and one role in another. But there's no clear head of the gods. There's no Zeus.

Now, pseudosources will tell you that it's Hanabku or something like that. And there's some basis for that, right at contact. But in the classic period, the gods are a council. The gods are a council. And so if the gods are a council, we should be a council. No leader. There is no chief Maya god. That's interesting.

Does monotheism come in to their culture at some point? or at least a more senior deity? 1519. Ah, that's not the deity I was asking about. No, I don't think so. I think there was, there's a, there's a god called Itzamna in the classic period. And he's probably Kawiel, I mean, post-classic, and he's Kawiel in the classic period,

who's a god of like royal magic and the connection to their ancestors. So oftentimes he's featured. more than the other gods. But that's because all the texts are written by kings who were identifying with that guy, and he's validating their right to rulership. But they never say he's the Zeus. Didn't Linda find some texts that were just documentation of administration,

things like that? Actually, what I'm getting at is, I just want to know what a Tuesday days like, if you're a Maya, at the height of the civilization, you wake up in the morning, take us through the day? I think that before the wars really took on, that people were living a very safe, secure, and abundant life. And like, if we take Palenke as the example, you know, I'm at 2,000 buildings there.

A lot of them are houses. I think that those people, they're in these little, um, courtyard groups. So I think like an extended family lived in a courtyard group and they got up and they cooked together. I've lived with Maya families before in modern times that work much the same way, a little compound and everybody at night and in the morning meets in the kitchen area and talks about things. But then they would probably, some of them would have craft industries like right there.

So, you know, mom and the daughters get to be weaving and the boys would be making pottery that they would then once a week they would go to Palenke's market. On a typical Tuesday, they might say, you know, even if they're not going to sell stuff there, they might go over there. They might, you know, go get some food from their favorite restaurant or go get a haircut. I mean, there were public places where Palenke's parking lot is right now, it's there because it's the closest place next to the ruins, next to the temples in the middle that had no buildings.

Palanke is very, very dense. And yet there was a parking lot-sized place right next to, like maybe 100 meters from the palace. That had to be the market. So I think a lot of people gathered in there. And I think they felt very safe because they had the religious authority of their king, who had the favor of the gods. But they were also just a big, huge area. producing huge amounts of food.

In the case of Palenke, it was up on a terrace. So they were some hundred meters above the planes so they could see people coming. They had the mountain at their back. I think they felt great about things until powerful people screwed up, started fighting each other. I think it was, the Maya were the first to have pressurized water. there. Wasn't that discovered? I doubt we could boast they were the first.

I mean, I imagine somebody over there in the, you know, the Indus Valley or something. I just mean on this side. They certainly did have pressurized water. Palenke was incredible like that. They had six rivers running through the city that came from the mountain springs and down to the plains to the big river. So they had moving water already, which was essential. But then they would put these pipes into the river, especially the ones going up into the palace. And we've found some of those pipes.

And we can see that as they go up to toilets in the palace, they constrict in size. So it's big and then it constricts. And that's just a simple way to use gravity and pressure to push it up. Yes. A simple, I mean, you know, a lot of our most profound engineering is based on very simple things. Sure. That's the foundation. And this is one of those things, how to make water pressure.

But the Maya figured it out. How did the cities interact with each other? Did each one have a king, or was there a hierarchy? There was a hierarchy. There was a kind of tiered system, probably not unlike the feudal. system in Europe where there were major cities that had kings and then they would have a kingdom like palanke for example the city center where the kings lived that was actually named la comha big water or water gift and then the kingdom of palanke was called bak-naal skull place or

place of bones which probably meant ancestors not creepy stuff like i think it does but within the city within the kingdom of Baknal, we know of at least five cities that were smaller and had kings or let me say mayors. They, they, a king is in a how. A mayor of a littler town is a Sahal. And so they name themselves Sahals. They would have hieroglyphic panels and temples, but the temples would instead name, instead of naming that Sahal or showing him, they'd show the king of Palanke. So we could really see that there was a kingdom with subsidiary lords, and then those kingdoms would abut each other. Some of them went intermarry and become an even bigger, nice kingdom. Right. Some of them would fight. And so there was, they were like the Greeks, independent,

city states who had alliances and enemies. It's a shame we don't know more about that. I will plug a colleague of mine's book that just came out, David Stewart's book, The Four Heavens that just came out. Dave's done an amazing job of really cross-analyzing the texts and the genealogies of these cities. And he's finding some amazing stuff that they're really, you know how Europe got to that point where every king was related to every, other king, like really got to be weird incestuous.

The Maya were doing the same thing. They were intermarrying to each other. And you could see where as time went on, there was really just one or two families that were the royals for all of the cities. And it sounds creepy to us and incestuous, but they were really just trying to form alliances. I'd love to read the Pelophanesian War version of what. was going on down there. I, you know, me too.

And I think it's amazing that we're coming up with it. It is so beautiful to me that it was only the 1970s that we broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. But now, every day, their stories and their words are coming back to us, just like the Greeks. It's a day that probably Edward Thompson thought would never come. But here we are. And every time we come up with a new text,

we now have a team of experts. I mean, within two days, we've got the translation, and we know what's happening. And like, oh, this guy is the brother-in-law, that guy. And it's all coming forward, and it's a beautiful thing to see. But it's not fully compiled yet, right? Not compiled yet, and we have so many, you know, barriers. We have the propaganda thing. We have, you know, they're spread out across five countries.

We've got the money. thing. That's always, that's always trouble. You know, you find a beautiful panel full of hieroglyphs and carvings of a king, but that sucker's two tons. And it's out in the middle of the jungle. Right. What are you going to do about that? And if you don't protect it, looters will come with chainsaws and destroy it. So, like, there's a scary thing about finding a beautiful piece of art. Right. So you can't just grab a couple of photos and call it done. You've got to protect that. Yeah.

Years ago when I was a student in Copon, before I went back to Mashna, I went into Guatemala. And I had a friend who told me where Steve Houston's project house was. But they hide those things because they have the ceramics and all that stuff in the house. And looters will come and beat you up. So I'm in Antigua, Guatemala. I'm walking down the street. There's a white guy walking with a box. Uh-oh.

And I just took a chance. Like, what are the chances? I mean, everybody else is my around here. I bet you that's Steve Houston. So I went up and I was like, are you Steve Houston? And he looked scared. It's so like, because he had a box with a beautiful painted ceramic in it. And he was trying to sneak his ass from his house to the lab without getting known.

And here's this guy meeting him in the street. It freaked him out. And that's, I mean, he was right. I mean, gosh, am I a looter? Is the next thing going to be a punch in your face and take that box out of your hand? I didn't consider looters. When we talk about those temples being empty,

maybe they weren't. You know, how you find empty pyramids in Egypt, but they weren't empty. They were just robbed. There's a lot of things that got robbed in antiquity, for sure, and destroyed. I mean, after the days of any classic, culture, then, you know, the roughnecks move in.

Yep. Every Maya City has clear evidence of squatters. Like the plazas will have crappy little just post holes where we know somebody just put a thatch and pole house up. But they were living in there and they were taking stuff. They're people just like us. They were probably, you know, looking for antiques. your podcast is super fun what what's the name of it so people could find your podcast uh archaeo ed

arkeo ed that's that i always come up with these names that nobody can spell nobody can find it because like how do you spell arkeo i do this to myself all the time i thought it was clever but well it's fun because if you want to learn more about specific like you'll be on a podcast and tell a four minute story but if we go to your podcast you could be 10 you could do 10 episodes on certain things i do that And I like to think of the podcast as my most casual thing. I am really just talking off the cuff, honestly, like you and I are doing right now. My YouTube channel is where I put in some more professionally and polished things,

history information that people could use. But the podcast is me just talking crap about my adventures. I love it. The descriptions sound like a pulp novel. forest fires, mangoes and skinny dipping. More snakes, more temples, and a robbery at gunpoint. I got by with a little help for my friends. What happened at gunpoint?

Yeah, in Palenke, there were two, like, 20-something boys who were just walking. There's a myriad of trails out in the woods around Palanke, so you can get to it from any direction, and the local folks really know those trails. I got to know them, but there were two boys. It was me and this English traveler named Elizabeth Corrin, who really just, like, she was just a traveler, and I needed somebody for my project. People had fallen through, and I bought her a pair of boots, and she worked with me for a month. But we were in some little group drawing, and I had my machete boys and the expensive machine, thank goodness, closer to the parking lot. I was having them cut some things we do tomorrow.

But Elizabeth and I are drawing and measuring things, and I see these. these two boys moving fast through the woods. And I was like, oh, Elizabeth, get up. Those guys looked like they were trouble. And they, sure enough, were, I mean, I didn't even move three steps before they turned back around, came into the little group we were in, and one of them pulled out of 45 and just walked right up. He had it pointed at me until it was on my forehead.

I was like, oh. What did he want? Money. Money. It was a funny exchange. They were boys. They were playing good cop, bad cop. The one with the gun was obviously bad cop.

He yelled some things at me. I said, I don't speak Spanish. He hit me in the head with the gun. He, like, pistol whipped me a couple of times. And I was like, listen, you got to talk slow, be calm. And then I'll understand what you want in my bad Spanish at the time. And it turned out that, you know, they wanted our money. Like, sure, like, here's my money.

here's things in my bag. At one point, he tried to take Elizabeth's ring off. Oh, no. And Elizabeth said in her broken Spanish, no, it's a gift from my mother. Don't take it. My ring.

And Good cop was like, hey, it's from her mom. Put it back. And that's when I knew we weren't going to die. Like, yeah, this guy's caring about Elizabeth's mom. We're okay. And so in the end of it,

they took my money, which was a Friday, so I had my huge amount of money in my pocket to pay my boys, which was both of them got $35 a week. I was going to ask why they disappointed. He got like 70 bucks off me. And not only that, he took it all. And then good cop counts it and he gets a 50 peso bill and he hands it back to me. He's like, he said, para su pasciencia.

That's for your patience. Like, oh, well, this has been nice. Thanks, guys. Come rob me again some time. So it wasn't quite as dangerous as you'd think it was. It wasn't like guerrillas getting me in the woods. It was boys with a gun that they should not have. Yeah, I mean, you said I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow. Yeah.

So besides gunpoint, what else? Oh, yeah. What other danger today? Certainly the gunpoint was unexpected. Yes, yes. That was not one of the dangers. The dangers are just like, you know, twist in your ankle and rocks or bugs or snakes or lots, everything in the jungle has thorns on it.

And a lot of it is like trigger loaded. So you could cut with a machete here on a vine and it unravels one over here, which comes, hits you in the neck. And now you've got a bunch of spines in your neck. And that was the sort of thing every day we would get hurt, just going through the jungle. That's just how it was. you would come out bloody. It's funny, people think, oh, it's so hot there. You should dress in shorts and a t-shirt.

No way. Me and the Maya had full clothes on, and those clothes would get ripped. I mean, my jeans got ripped. And you'd just get hurt all the time. There was one that the boys, the Maya, just laughed at me forever about where, again, it was wasps. And we stirred up some wasps. we all spread out, but one of them got in my ear.

Oh, no. And then I tried to pull it out of my ear, but I just dug it way in my ear. And it was like, ah, and I was just like dancing around the jungle, freaking out, like, ah, ah, ah, I'd get it out. Like, I'd get a stick and put it in my ear, like, they were just rolling on the ground going, look at that idiot Gringo. He's really dying over there. How did you get it out?

Just smashed it in here? I eventually just smashed it until it stopped buzzing, and then back at, you know, At home, I showered and just got a bunch of water in my ear. Oh, gross. It just like dumped it until I saw the wasp on the shower floor. Like, ha, that's done. And just bugs everywhere. But I had, my first wife at the time was there sometimes to visit,

but she didn't like it at all to a point. Like when I'd come home, she'd say like, you've got, I got ticks. and I gave them to my dog. You gave your dog tics. I gave my dog tics. And she would be like, that's it. I'll go into the bathroom and strip. I'm not letting you in the house

until I know that you're not covered in ticks, which I might have been. I might have been. Didn't you have a student that had a bunch of bot flies in her hair? Oh, yeah. In program for Belize. I've covered bot flies.

Can you tell us about how those work? Oh, God, they're so gross. Oh, yeah. And painful. Some other, like, mosquitoes carry their eggs. Mm-hmm. And they just find animals mostly, you know, but humans if they want them. Mm-hmm.

And they insert the egg into a person. And then that grows into a worm. Yeah. And the worm has got like pinchers in the front where it just hangs on. So you don't, as it grows, it'll grow for about six weeks. Spikes around its body. Yeah. And then it flies out of you.

Right. If it goes to term, you know, for the normal, like, you know, peckery, it's on six weeks. It's on its way. But humans, you know, we'd squeeze them. Once they get big enough, you can squeeze where they are. Because they've always got a little air hole right there. And the tail will come out and flash. We did, we had a, again, Jim Eckhart had one in his arm.

And there was a reporter from Toledo with us who came out to my weird little bar in the in the street on the dirt road. And we were doing this thing, not for their sake. It was just something we did occasionally that we referred to as juicing gym. We would take a like snake bite extractor kit and put it over his, his bot fly and then pump so that it would pull it up. And the tail had come out and flash. And everybody goes, ah, how gross?

And then we'd stop and it sucked back in. And, you know, Jim, just go to sleep. That's the way it was. But this one girl, I think that nice shampoo attracts them. Because the girls got it in their hair more than anybody. And I was a dirty person. I never got one. You were too gross.

I was too gross for even bottle lies. That's a statement, isn't it? What did she do? Did she let them grow for six weeks? Well, I mean, you couldn't even get to them unless you shaved her head and she had this beautiful long hair. So, I mean, she never came back to the field. No. I would see her at night sitting alone in the cafeteria just drinking vodka. She's soured on it so badly.

And there was a girl that had one in her hair and didn't know it. And we went back to UT Austin. and in the middle of class, in the middle of anthropology class, a botfly flew out of her hair. It's like, oh, God, was that a botfly? It was. Oh, God.

She didn't know it. She didn't know it was there the whole time. No. Gross. You know, I did get a botfly. I got one in my arm, and unlike the other guys, I asked, I like to ask the Maya things.

They always know what to do. Sure. And some, some uncles, of one of the Rangers told me he said it's a simple solution all you got to do

take some tobacco from a cigarette get it wet on your tongue and then rub it into the the air hole that makes it drunk and then you can pull it out and I did it I rubbed the tobacco

on it and I squeezed and when the tail came out I pulled it all the way out without it If you try to pull it out, it'll break off. Yeah. And then you're infected for sure. Right.

But I was able to pull one out with tobacco. It gets drunk. Yeah. Some old Maya uncle told me it'll make him drunk and he'll release and you can pull it out. And he was right. I got to ask the locals. Always ask the locals. They know and they know where all the ruins are too.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. You say that whenever you discover ruins, there's a good chance to local people kind of already knew they were there. Was that truth much, not? So look, something quiet happened this week that most people missed. A former CFTC chair, the guy who used to regulate derivatives, went on record. And what he said should stop he cold. Congress banned a central bank digital currency. The Fed swore it wasn't building one.

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No, that was a strange one. And the rangers were very surprised. because the other sites in program for Belize have a lot of looters trenches, and they had some idea of them, but when I brought the Rangers to Mashna, they were all like, nice job of exploring, kid. Yeah.

None of us knew this was here at all. And as proof, there are no looters trenches at Mashna. I really did find one that not even the looters got to. Have they gotten to it yet? I'm unaware. Hopefully not. It's so far away from any community that you'd really, it's unlikely because there's ruins right in their backyard.

Right. Why would they go five kilometers into the jungle off of the nearest dirt road? It's going to take them a while to get to that one. How many cities could be there do you think? In the Maya area, gosh, I mean, conservatively hundreds. Conservatively. I mean, you know, somewhat the answer to that question depends on your definition of city, which is a struggle. And, you know, archaeology doesn't have a grand poobah that tells us what the numbers are.

True. You know, I just recently on my YouTube kind of threw out there, like, you know, 100 people is a village. A thousand people is a city or a town. Yeah. Over a thousand people, you're getting into city range. Yeah. And so if we, if that totally arbitrary out of my mouth, uh, assessment is right, then the number is thousands.

Wow. But if we're talking about a city, you know, if we, we benchmark it of, you know, it's got to have at least 5,000 people. Then I'd put it down into the hundreds, but still, huge area. About a year ago, you said, um, LIDAR, not much was happening. He was mostly just for clicks, I think, which you read how you phrased it. But recently he said there has been some developments. There really have been.

And Luke was here talking about some cool stuff with the LIDAR. You know, Luke has charmed his way into having some friends. He's a charming fellow. That have a lot of this LIDAR data. And they've shared it with Luke. And Luke, with his eyes and experience, has been using it to find pyramids here in the United States. And a lot of them. He's not the first guy to do it.

But Luke's been finding some amazing stuff. And I'm actually looking forward to one of these days, Luke is going to invite me to go take a look at some of these things. A lot of them are on private land. It's a trick. You don't just row up to them. Some you'll get shot in the middle of Alabama. So we've got to do some politicking,

which that's where Luke needs me. Because I'm good at talking good. old boy. If, yeah, I had one, one, one, one, light our plane, it was funded. Where would you send it? Yeah, just get one. Hmm, just one.

Just one. Like, I got to know what's there. Hmm. I'll give you a random new answer to that. Okay, I'd love it. Cambodia. Cambodia. Cambodia.

There are, you know, you know, Ancorwad. I do. Everybody knows, you know, the city. of Angkor. But there are huge cities out there. That was the capital of an empire of millions of people. I mean, heck, just Angkor had almost a million people. Right. And so there are cities out there all over the place. I've been told about them multiple times and I would love to know where they are. I think Cambodia, especially Cambodia is such a poor country. There's besides again and again

Lidar in Ankhore, we need to go out into the jungle there. Years and years ago, when I was doing the survey in the Maya area, a grand old man of archaeology, Michael Coe. He was from Yale. Very, very decorated career, but Coe calls me for some reason. He was also over in Cambodia doing things. And he had returned there. late in life and he said, Ed, you've got to get over there and do the surveys that you're doing

in the Maya world because the field over there is dominated by just French people and Australian people and we need an American presence up there. He was very, you know, patriotic in that regard. But I was like, Mike, I mean, aren't all of those places full of landmines still, which they are? They are. That's right. Or Cambodia is just full of landmines and people, you know, children with one leg. It just sucks. Yeah. And it's such a process there.

They are, they estimate they have taken like 30% of the landmines out and there's 70% of them still out there waiting to kill a child. Don't get me started. It's so terrible. Don't get me started. So terrible. But I was like, Mike, what about all the landmines? He was like, don't worry about it. They've trained chickens who go ahead of you and they peck the landmonds.

minds. It's like, I'm not going to just have a murder of murdered chickens in the end of me. I was like, well, my wife doesn't even want me to be in Central America. I think Cambodia is going to be hard sell, Mike. You won't kill a fear to land snake unless you have to. You're not going to harm a chicken. Oh, God, wouldn't that be just bizarre if you're just like, I need more chicken. More chickens. Had a good day. We blew up 20 chickens. How bizarre. But the point that I was long-windedly getting to was that Oh, we have known for a long time that there are a hell of a lot more anchors out there in Cambodia. Could it be as dense as Maya? I think it could.

I think it could. I mean, just the ones we know and they've cleared the landmines. Sure. It's insane how many. I bring people out there to Cambodia, which is lovely. The Buddhists are there. I mean, anybody who's worried about going over there, don't be. The people there are so sweet.

I tell my people like, please don't get angry. You're going to freak people out. These are like the most passive, nice people you'll ever meet in your life. And Ankur Wat, I think, has been active and still active for a thousand years. It's a living temple. Yes. It's so neat. Unlike the Maya area, the people walk into those temples, and it's their same religion still.

In fact, every one of the temples in Ankur have nuns and monks that are attending each one of them with their incense and they sit in there all day long. There's a staff of, you know, there must be. three, four hundred monks and nuns who were just out there maintaining the temples of their current religion, which I think is beautiful. I do too. Is there a continuity? Yeah, is there a library there?

You mean like modern library? No, no, no. I mean like how far back in history were monks scribbling the history? Like are the scroll stash somewhere? It must be, right? It's a jungle environment, so I think a lot of the scrolls have gone away, but they were scrolls, and they do. do know, like, every one of those big complexes, like Ancourt, for example, if you picture it in your mind, you've got that long causeway that goes to the big temples, right?

The beehives. Midway along that causeway are two big buildings that they refer to as libraries. And that is a standard formation. There must be, you know, a dozen different things within the city of Angkor that have the moat, the causeway, the big temples, and all along the causeway, midway are. the libraries that held all the scrolls and they have carvings on the walls still and they say I'm fascinated because they have an astronomical component that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe it doesn't, maybe I'm not going to, but they say that they are the, they're a pair of libraries because one is to the waning moon and one is to the waxing moon.

Very interesting. So I have spent hours standing on those causeways like, if it's here, does it work? what do my compass say here? Maybe here. I'll stand next to the Naga. No, not that one. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out why the heck they're called the temple. The libraries of the waning and the waxing

moon, but it must be astronomy. It must be. And we're going to talk astronomy and math a little bit later if you don't mind, because I'm fascinated by it. My favorite subjects. Thank for asking. Really? Archaeo Astronomy. Archaeo Astronomy. I love that. Me too.

It's kind of off topic, but it's got me thinking about Namadal and how nobody really knows what that was. Do you have any thoughts on that? I don't have a whole lot of study of that particular area I've been asked for. I think one time I think that that show the proof is out there. Yeah. They love to give me things that I don't know about to study and give my opinion. So Namadal is very cool. I don't find it particularly mysterious, though. I mean, they're in a regular time period. I think the most mysterious thing is their lack of contact with the other major civilizations around them

when huge temples are being built in Java and in Cambodia and Vietnam. Why are they so isolated? They are major constructions, but not much evidence of them contacting or being dominated by those guys or China that was coming through at the same time. Yeah, it's strange because they have irrigation, they have plumbing, all of that.

They had to get that knowledge somewhere. So they must have communicated. They must have. But they, I mean, they seem isolationist. Yes. They seem like intentionally isolationist. They're, I hope I'm not thinking of the wrong site, but the way they build their buildings out of that columnar basalt. That makes it look like a log cabin out of, yeah, igneous rock.

So fascinating. And I think that its island is one of these weird places where volcanic lava went through water and cooled super fast into those hexagonal shaped columns. Yep. And so I've never actually seen, have you seen where the quarry is on that island? Nope. It must be a huge quarry full of those, because you can see it in the pictures. They're not just columns like the Ulmec ones. are columns.

They're just like cylinders. Yes. But you can see the hexagonal patterns on the logs in Nonmodal. So somewhere on that island is a quarry that has those hexagonal things. There's one in Northern Ireland. There's a couple of them around the world

where this, geologically, it's just flowing lava, hitting water, super fast cooling into these cool hexagonal shapes. Yeah. I want to talk about Easter Island a little bit. All right. Love those guys too. Yeah.

I love what you did there. So you flew fixed-wing drones over Easter Island. Nine days, right? Yep. We just got nine days in. We're dying to get back there. Well, what I thought was kind of funny is in nine days, you covered more area than you'd spent like 25 years with a machete.

Yeah, it's true. Gosh, it's so, you know, they just did LIDAR of Palanke. My map held up, thank God. They did find some pyramid. They found a pyramid that I didn't see. Your maps always seem to hold up. You know, I'm, I'm anal. I'm an anal retentive person.

I, if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it right into the best of my ability. And, you know, sort of is not good enough for me. Well, Easter Island was, I think you were talking about how some families didn't even know what land they had anymore. What was the problem there? It's a trick. I mean, it's a crisis for the entire community of the remaining Rappanui people, which I think maybe this year they're climbing to 6,000 people, which is a ridiculously small amount for the descendants that made those incredible statues. The tragedies upon tragedies that happened to this community is such a. such a human resilience story that they even still exist.

At its height was about, what, 30,000? I think that's what they say. 20, 30,000. And the island is tiny. I mean, its longest distance is 12 miles. You can't find it. Good luck finding it on Google Earth. You need to know exactly where it is.

It's nowhere. Such a speck. Yeah. And it's such an interesting thing. But we do know that they had, I think it's like nine to 12 clans. and that those clans each had their own territory. And we can see it from the Ahus and the Moai where the centers of those territories are.

What we don't know is where their borders are. And neither do the Rappanui. And they're not very, they fight each other about it. There's a few families of those 6,000. They have names that are connected to those clans. And they want to know where, their ancestral land is. A lot of them have their own

opinions. I'm sure. I know where that land is. But they don't know. And that's one that's my goal in the mapping project or one of my goals. I may fail in it. I mean, I'm trying to find a way to see if we do a

settlement pattern survey map can we find things that mark the borders from one clan to another. Now, geez, I hope I don't start like some crazy clan war if that happens. But there's, it's funny,

the island works just like it used to. In the ancient past, we know there was a head clan, the Murru clan, and they had the best land and the biggest land. And then there were a number of scrappy clans. Same things happening on Rappanui today. There's,

the, the, the rich family are the Rappoos. Okay. And families like the Pacharades. They don't, They have their own popularity, but they're not as rich as the rapoos. And the people get pissed at the rapoos.

Did you find like borders? Did you help solve any of that? No. No. No. In fact, I've got to get back there because the thing that really tripped me up is that I couldn't find the houses. I found the rich houses near the plazas.

They're called Harry Penangas. and they look like boats and they're built a stone. But where are all the houses that everybody else was living in? I find the stone chicken coops and I find the stone garden areas called manifize or sometimes they're spread out gardens. Where are the houses? I don't, I did not know how to find them then. I think now I do.

I looked back into the oldest records. I read everything I could read and there was one smart guy that was a surveyor. surveying the land where the airport is now in the 1970s. And he figured out a connection between those Harry Penangas that are the boat ones. They have these patios of rounded stones called Poro. And Poro are like, good luck, good manna for your house. Every house should have one. What he was finding was that they were building perishable houses but still had the circular stone

Harry Penangas. And those are like under the grass. So now I got to go back and walk that land, find a couple of these, and then use my photogrammetry to say, okay, that's where it is. Let's zoom in. Let's look at it. What are the signatures? Once I know that, then I can go to the rest of the photogrammetry and find them. LIDAR can't find these, huh? I don't think so because it's weird It's volcanic rock on volcanic rock And they're so low

I mean Lotter is incredible It can find things that are like You know less than a meter But these are Boulders about like river cobbles Or stone The beach cobbles like this big

And they've dug into the earth Rains have just pushed them into the earth So they're like only this much Out of the earth if they are So Lidar's not going to find them for us Got to do it on the ground Got to do it on the ground Luckily it's a tiny little patch of thing

I swear if they just I'm waiting to be invited back I am doing it for the Rappanui They are very distrusting of archaeologists from the mainland And there's been a couple of archaeologists From the United States Who have rubbed them the wrong way

I went out with the director of Malhanua which is their cultural association that now protects the ruins or the places of their ancestors. And we had some beers and he talked pretty openly about a couple of people who he does not want to invite back on the island anymore. Well, you were generous and you gave them the data, didn't you? No charge? I gave him all the data. He was funny.

In that conversation, because we did that in July of 2019. Okay. and then COVID hit. Oh, that's right. And the island went into lockdown for four years. Nobody got on that island. And in the interim, that crazy politics I was talking about that are modern, a bunch of people just whooped some rapu people. And the chief archaeologist was a rappo.

And a lot of his staff were rapos. And so when this all went down, they ransacked the archaeological office and all of the computers that had all of the GIS data and everything that I had given them was taken. Why? Why? Well, because screw the rappoos. That's why. That's it? Just vandalism?

Like you guys were misrunning it. We're taking over. None of your stuff. You don't get it back. but then he did recover one of the computers. Okay. I mean, it's a tiny island. I don't know where they were hiding.

We know it is. Somebody's chicken coop or something. But he said, we found one of the computers, and we fired it up, and it had your map on it. But it didn't have your name or anything. And we were like, who the heck made this map? This is a map of all of the settlement stuff that nobody's ever done. He said, and then... The computer crashed, and we lost it.

And that was like six months ago. No. Now I realize that was you. And at the time, I was like, well, I'm in. This is great. But something else political has happened. And I'm just waiting. I'm relentlessly sending them requests and various things,

but I don't want to be too much of a pushy American. Yeah. My guys who are really the guys who make the map, Jeff Kresik, is my guy and he is ready to go and ready to volunteer and use his stuff and his skills. He's frustrated with me. He really wishes I would win the day. Me too. Well, yeah.

I got to, you know, you've got to approach these things with respect, though. I can't just, like, demand, do you know who I am? I'm an important archaeologist, you little rapoo people, should let me in here. That's not how I roll. No, it's not. I mean, I've got to be invited. This has got to be the Rappanui. trusting me and inviting me.

And trust in these communities is a long road. And you never get that way being pushy. No. It feels like there's got to be so much more than my heads, right? There's got to be more stuff there. Oh, I mean, there's the communities. There's the people. Yeah.

There's caves full of petroglyphs. There's so much beautiful to focus on. There's their astronomy. They have astronomy. towers. There's their prowess as sailors. I mean, how the heck did they get there? Right. That's, you know, the catamaranes that they made were technologically, uh, amazing inventions. As the, as humans progressed out into the Pacific and the South Pacific, there was a technology point that they could not cross with their boats. It, you know,

for a thousand years, they were at one point and they couldn't go any farther. And then an invention and an improvement on the size and functioning of catamaran's allowed them to get to Hawaii and to Easter Island. So, I mean, just that alone, just their prowess as sailors. Yeah, you look at the map and it's just like, how did they anyone even do this? My phone rang last week and the caller ID said it was my bank. The area code matched everything looked right. A calm voice said there was suspicious activity on my account and needed to verify my card number. Classic move. Ten years ago, I might have fallen for it. Instead, I hung up and called the number on the back of my card.

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One scam can cost you everything. Protect yourself now. The first 100 users get 20% off with code the Y Files at coveron.com slash the Y Files. That's coveron.com slash the Y Files link in the description. And they have their whole oral tradition. You know, they will tell you exactly how it happened to you. It was, what's his name there? Their first king, Hottumatua, is the first king whose priests had a vision.

that there was a new land that they could get to. And he believed them enough to send a crew in these new boats out. And it took them 30 days to get there. They came back. They brought people. They landed on a beach that everybody knows Anakana Beach is where Hottomatua landed. And he had nine sons who established the clans. And they have so much oral tradition that they're very humble about.

They always qualify like, according to oral tradition. But, I mean, you're like, who are these moai? We know who the moaii. The Rappanui can say in certain moai, that's ancestor such and such. He was famous for this. He protected this clan.

And we made him a moai. That's, I never consider that, that every one of those statues has a story. They're a person. And when you put the eyes in, their spirit can come through. but when the eyes come out, they're just a rock again. Okay. That's what they tell me.

I mean, I, you know, I spend a lot of time listening to indigenous people, not just because it's fascinating, but, you know, I believe that they know better than me. They do. They do. Let's take quick break and come back and talk about math and the stars. All right. Before we get into math and stuff, the last page of your dissertation, page 161. you mentioned and you thank your dog loki and your cat vlad is that Vlad the impaler

it was Vlad the impaler he was a black cat whose fangs were so long even when his mouth was closed you could see them hanging out of him so so he earned it Vlad yeah I thought it was funny it came out of nowhere oh that's I totally forgot that so me to thank my dog he was you did Um, so when you were talking to Sean, you said you could spend an hour on the Khmer temples.

Yeah. I don't know if we need to do an hour, but I'd like to hear more about them, like starting with the hole in the roof, the Oculus, I think they're called. Yeah, well, I hadn't heard that term, but yes, it is a viewing point out the top of it. Yeah. I went there looking for archaeo astronomy because we had found so much evidence in the Maya area of this one particular phenomena called Zenith Passage that we don't get up here in the States. If you're not in the tropics, zenith passage does not occur. So Zenith Passage is

so that it's high. Simply, it's the day that the sun goes directly over your head and at noon you cast no shadow. Noticable. Absolutely. Yep. Only happens around 15 degrees or so latitude. Well, it happens between 23 and a half north and 23 and a half south. It is what defines the tropics. You know, the concept of the tropics was around in antiquity. Yeah. India knew it very well. They put their astronomical capital right at 23 and a half degrees.

And my fairly solid, I think, theory is that they were judging it by zenith passage. But what's fascinating about Zenith Passage is that it's latitude dependent. It happens at different days depending on your latitude. Summer solstice, June 21st, everywhere on the planet. Even in the southern hemisphere, it's winter solstice, but it's still June 21st. Zenith Passage changes by your latitude. At 23 and a half degrees, it is summer solstice. Right.

It's just one day. Right. And you go farther north, you'll always have a shadow all year long. But south of 23 and a half degrees, then you start, the days start dividing. You get two zeniths a year. You go down like 20 miles, all of a sudden your zenith passages are five days apart. You go further, they're 10, 20, and it gets to be months until the zero line, until the equator. and then it reverses towards 23 and a half.

But this gives you a fascinating insight into the communications between astronomers. Because in the Maya world, we could clearly see the guys at Chechnica knew that their zenith was different than the guys in Copan, Honduras. And they would talk about it. And they would sometimes align their buildings to not their zenith passage, but somebody else's zenith passage. Why would they do that? Honoring geographically important places, especially Copon.

There's a weird thing that happens at that latitude, and across the Maya world at that latitude, it's like 15.5 degrees, I think. That's what you were saying. Where the year is divided by the zenith passages into 260 days and 105 days, 365 total. Yeah. but the Maya have this sacred calendar of 260 days.

So they all recognized that at that latitude, their sacred calendar was defined by the two zenith passages. North and south, it was not. So we see places perhaps even Teotihuacan in their weird orientation of all the buildings. It's just a fact that they're actually, that orientation sees the setting sun, rising and setting sun at

the zenith passage day of Copan. It's a theory. That's interesting. But so does Edsna. There's a number of places. I found one in Chichenitsa in the observatory there. There's a window that points out. It doesn't point at their zenith.

It points at the one down there at 15.5. So all this information, we kind of ran out of ways to understand zenith passage. So I kind of innocently asked the question. Well, let's look at what other ancient civilizations thought about zenith passage. And I quickly discovered that most of the ancient civilizations that we consider the big ones are outside of the tropics. So they never did that. It was not a question. It wasn't a tool in the astronomers kit.

Right. But Cambodia is at the same latitude as the Maya. So I went over there thinking, well, let's see if we can find something, not knowing anything. And those holes in the roof. are zenith tubes and that one hole on zenith day a beam of light like Indiana Jones

just comes down and illuminates the central temple have you seen that? Oh I've documented it so many times now and the trick was that the first couple of times we went there I clearly showed that it would function like that that's not good enough to say

that's why they did it they could have had a hole in a roof for all sorts of reasons Maybe they want the rain to come in. Right. I don't know. You know, there's a lot of reasons. And all the Khmer temples are very cardinal direction oriented.

They're north, south, east, west, maybe a degree off in certain places, but they're cardinal direction people. So my trick of finding orientations in the Maya world was not working. It was not working. Okay. In the Cambodian world. But I found a site called Koucair. Yes. Which somebody else, a guy named Giglio, I think is his name.

I totally slaughtered that name. Sorry, buddy. But he's an Italian astronomer who saw it before me. But he saw it on paper that the orientation of Coquare looks like it's totally looking at the day that the sun rises in Sinith Passage. This is a little counterintuitive. Like if you're looking at the day that it's straight up, it's not. But all these ancient cultures are horizon-based astronomers. They make everything fit in by looking at the rising and settings.

So even though the day was the day with no shadow, they would fit it into their astronomy by looking at where the sun rose that day. And this complex, only one complex in Cochere is oriented to their day of zenith passage. The rest of its cardinal directions, but there's this weird place in the middle that they on purpose tweet. And so I went down there, and there's a huge pyramid there looking over a complex, and I was able to record that the sun is indeed on Zenith Passage going right there, and it goes right over a temple, but at noon, the beam comes down. Wow. So what is it about Cocare? Was it a temple in that community? It's a big complex within that larger community, and it's a strange place. It's the temporary capital.

of the fourth king of the Khmer civilization. The first three kings are at Angkor. The fifth king returns to Angkor, but for some reason, this king went out and made his own capital, and he oriented one of the sections to look at Zenith passage. And I think that is a smoking gun that it is intentional. I can link the holes in the roofs,

which they used to have a capstone. When the capstone was on there and the hole went through it, the hole was only like six inches tops and that would concentrate the light in to make such a tight beam and it would only happen on those days of zenith even a day off it wouldn't happen nothing so but they although capstones have been knocked off because there was a jewel box up in the roof with a hole in it there's a there's a square box with a hole in it so the light can still come through there's also one's jewel boxes underneath the altars inside the pyramid? Actual jewels?

Actual jewels. So that could have done magic with the light then? I wonder about that. Like how would that function? Did that? I mean, if it shot a rainbow of light in there, that would be fantastic. That would be fantastic. So I don't, I've tried to piece out how that would actually happen.

At the moment, I don't see that happening. But gosh, what a missed opportunity. Yeah. Hindu temples today, they bury different kinds of precious gems in the foundations of the buildings. It's just part of their establishment of a holy place. So it's still happening today. So there's jewel boxes underneath the altars inside those bee hive looking temples. There's a hole in the top jewel box with a hole in it.

And then it comes down and it hits exactly on the top of the linga, which actually, like a little gnomon inside the temple, because it has no shadow when the light comes down. And then underneath the altar is another jewel box, but those jewel boxes don't have the hole. The hole is very intentional. Yes. And unfortunately, the looters knew that these things were here.

So they climb up on the top, they knock the capstone off, and they get the jewel box. And now they're littered around the temples. I always find the knocked off capstone and sometimes the jewel box. What kind of jewels do they use? It sounds like emeralds and rubies.

The stuff that you'd find in India typically, but different color ones, sapphire. Sapphire is a big one in Cambodia. They have a lot of sapphire. So blue, green, red, like rainbow stuff. Yeah, it would be neat stuff. Even if it's just quartz, it would be beautiful. So now when they've knocked the capstone,

off. Now the hole in the top of the roof is like this big. Right. So the things I'm recording happen a couple of days and like the light will come in this way one day and that way the other day. But on the actual day, it still comes directly down onto the Lingayani complex. And the the linga is is a phallus. It's a, it's a phallic symbol. But it points straight up. So it's like a little gnomon inside the temple. When the light comes down at noon, it cast snow shadow. And the French were so interested in the architecture that they never really thought about the astronomy.

Right. And so this astronomy is there and clear. When I first came in, there were priests and nuns who would attend these shrines deep inside, like the bayon is this huge one with 52 towers like that. So the light show inside is incredible. But I go deep inside and talk to a nun. Nun, be like, are you ever sitting in here in this dark place? And all of a sudden, the whole chamber lights up.

It's like, yeah, that happens sometimes. That's why you're? Do you know what's going to happen in 15 minutes? Did you do that? What? And I say, yeah, I'll come back. We'll talk about it. You're like a Yankee.

And I was running around there. And I came back into this nun who's lived her whole life in there. And she's standing there looking, like, just standing there in the light going, who the hell are you? Right. Why did you know that? Like a time traveler. One of the last times I went over there, it was so cute.

I love, I mean, I'm so honored that I've affected the way people are seeing these things. I came into that same temple complex with the 52 different ones, the Bayon, in Anchor Tom. And it's about to happen again. I've got a little group where, you know, it's so funny, I've got 10 minutes, twice a year to record this. That's right. And I don't know which one's going to work and which one's not. So every time I go, I say, spread out everybody, you take that tower, you take that tower, you take that tower, let's see what happens. Because we've only got 10 minutes.

I can't run to all of them. So I'm running around, placing people in places. And this little kid comes up. And he's like, do you want to see the coolest thing that could happen here? It happens every day. But at noon, I can take a special picture of you with a beam of light coming down inside the temple. And I did not tell this kid who I was at all. I was like, all right, kid, I'm in, Johnny.

And he had a cool little thing that he could do. He took my iPhone and he like had just the right angle where somebody could stand there with the beam of light coming down. And I was like, when does this, how did you know this would happen? He was like, oh, it happens every day, which was wrong. Right. But he was definitely, I paid him my five bucks. I was like, nice job, kid. Thanks for the picture.

But it's like, that's so beautiful. It is. I just like, I just made this little kid money. This little kid's making money for his family on this funny little thing I found. Worth it. Totally worth it. Just beautiful. Like I felt like, oh my gosh, did what I do just help modern Khmer people? I would love that.

And they're starting to do things. There's guides that know. And so I've come into the center temple of the Bayon where guides are talking about it and they're all witnessing it together. And they're bringing their tourists in to see it. And I'm just standing there like fly on the wall. Like, yeah, I did that. That's cool.

The second time I went into the second time I did it. I went back into the central temple of the Bayonne, where I had explained to the nuns and priests that it's going to happen. And then they were excited about it, it seemed. I came back in with my wife and my baby. My little baby Alice was like a year and a half. I just brought her with me to Cambodia. That's normal, right?

That's normal. But I came into the central temple, and one of them was like, it's him. And I was like, oh, you remember me? and one of them said, get the guards. I was like, oh shit, I'm in trouble.

But when the guards came in, because I was like, I'm not running, I'm not doing anything wrong. When the guards came in, the nuns and priests asked them, can we please take down this parasol? Because this is about to happen.

He's here again. And if we take down the parasol, it'll actually hit the statue. It's blocking it. And so the guards allowed them to take the parasol down so that the effect was even, better. Wow. And I was so happy. I had a moment like, oh my God, I'm an intruder. I'm going to get

arrested. But then they just wanted to see it better. They totally understood what I was talking about. And the, the psychological effect it has on them makes me feel like I am onto something. You are. This is hitting a chord with these folks in a real way. Um, just going to a different part of the world. But everybody looks at the Kusko wall, has the same thought, that that's not possible with hammers. And you have a theory that sounds crazy and it's not aliens about how those stones got stuck together. Acid. I think that they are melting them together. Hydrofluoric acid.

Well, you know, I'm a little crazy to say hydrofluoric acid. Why? Why is that crazy? Because that's a dangerous substance. Yes. I mean, a super dangerous substance. You would have to, I mean, I think we haven't looked for it yet, but we should find like melted fingers.

I mean, we should find people that were damaged by hydrofluoric acid if they're using it, and I have no proof of that. And, but conceptually it can be done. What turned you on to that idea? I've thought it was acids for a long time. What did you see that made you think that? There's a number of places in Kusko and outside of Kusko that the walls get rocked apart where you can see the stones on the inside. And they're fused together.

Especially there's a neat one in Kusko called the Palace of Inka Rocha. It's megalithic stones. Most of the stuff in Kusko is made of the imperial style, which are these small blocks, which I also think are. melted together. But the ones, the megalithic ones, there's a section of it that is not the tourist section that was rocked apart by earthquakes. And you can see one stone below, one stone above. And the stone below has like a muddy footprint in it. It like curves up and wraps along the stone above. I can't explain it by chipping away at it. Why would they make a lip? Right.

Why would it be an indention? So it looks like the weight of the upper stone squished into the lower stone. And I've got lots of pictures of it. I mean, I've puzzled about it for a while. And then in the imperial architecture, there's a place in between the main plaza and the Korakanscha, which is the golden enclosure,

the big temple of the ancients that's still there. There's a church over it. But there's a wall that you walk down on one of these streets. And there's a place on one of the blocks. They do this pillowing. It kind of pillows out of the wall, each one of the blocks. There's one that has a wipe on it. Like somebody took a rag and wiped a section clean.

And you just, you don't wipe and a site. I do not know how that wipe occurred. That's not the only place I've seen wipes, but there's a really great one that's just like, it's across the street from the JW Marriott. It's like right out in front of everybody, but I always bring people like, somebody tell me how that happened.

You're the first person that I've heard say this. What acid would it be if it's a hydrofluor? Oh, there's people have been saying it's acids for a while. There's a lot of anecdotal things from the contact period. There's a little bird that pecks into cliffs using acidic plants that it barfs up onto them. people have been trying to explain it as acids for a long time but the problem is that no naturally occurring acid can do it

my dad was a chemist yeah his whole life and so you know when I came back with this theory first I called my dad because he knows what and he read me the riot act you're an idiot there's no way there's no natural there's no natural acids I've looked into it there's a lot of acids that get created Like the Atacama Desert is full of the acids that we make nitroglycerin out of. That's why Chili stole it from Bolivia. Bolivia's got no coast because Chile wanted to make dynamite.

Right. And all those acids, right south of Kusko, there's an evaporated lake that has very high concentrations of acid. In fact, that little valley blew up about 30, 40 years ago. A lightning strike hit it. and ignited something and the acid caught on fire. Wow. The whole thing blew up. It was, you know, big news in Peru.

So these acids are here, but no naturally occurring acid could do it. So I've been working with a chemist in New England named Charlie Wynn, who's been great. In fact, Charlie's been the driving force. I'm not, you know, I try not to get too far out of my lane. So I have chemists who are, who I'm consulting with just the other day. he was having some conversation with Claude that excited him. Well, is there fluorite there and is there mining there? There's mine, the gold and silver mining all over the place, right?

They're famous for it. The Inca and cultures before them. A byproduct that's coming out of the mines today that's an environmental disaster is hydrochloric acid. Yes. It's a byproduct of the mining. It's pouring out of all the mines. It's actually an environmental disaster today. fluorite is in huge quantity in Peru.

In fact, the Inca were making lots of jewelry out of fluorite. And Charlie and I have been going back and forth, and he were sure that hydrochloric acid and fluorite with, you know, it's a little more complicated than that. It's not just peanut butter and jelly. But you could make small targeted places of HF with these two things. It could be done. It is possible.

Now we've got to prove it. Now, Charlie, I've been arguing with him, not arguing, but begging him and his chemist friends, like, let's just do it. Let's just get some Andesite and get it into the lab and burn it. Let's burn it up and record it. And their opinion is, listen, Ed, we all know we can do that. It's not an experiment. That's a known. What you've got to prove is that the residues of these acids are still in the seams of the walls.

In between, if this really happened, you can get a sample and we can do neutron activation, and we can see exactly what chemicals and things are in between those cracks. And if it was an acid, we'll be able to see it because it'll seep into the stone. So have we seen it yet? No, I haven't gotten that far. I know, at one point Charlie hooked me up with a guy in Washington who said, I'll send a student down with you. We've got this machine that looks like a drill. We drill in.

We get a sample of about the size of a wine cork. And we can analyze it. And we will do all this for you. So I wrote to the heads of conservation in Kusko. And they hated it. They were like, well, you know, they said it was kind of rude, really. And that's not Peru saying this is one guy in a chair in Kusko who said, you're ignorant, this is stupid, you can't touch the walls,

and it's clear that you have no understanding of, you've never read anything about Peruvian archaeology, which is patently unfair. I've read a lot about Peruvian archaeology. So the guy just said, I'm ignorant, I have no idea what even studies. I wrote back saying, like, well, if there are studies about that, this, could you please share them? No response. So I kind of got dead-ended there. And then I got into, you know, life happens. So, you know, I'm in Cambodia. I'm doing all these

other things. It's a, it's a project I need to get back to. What I really need to do, which I screwed up to the beginning, is all of these things are teams and partnerships. Here I am trying to be important, Gringo, just writing a letter. I just, you know, just, I'm going to come in and take some cores out of your walls. That was not the right approach. When I get back to it, what I need is a Peruvian archaeologist partner. And I need to let them take the lead, and I just provide resources. I'm not interested in being the guy that solved it. I'm just interested in solving it.

So next time around, I'm going to be in the background, and I'm going to support somebody from that country, and maybe it'll happen. I think the people in Olion, Taetamba, would be a lot cooler. So I might just skip Kusko all together and go out to a more purely Ketchwa community. That's a good idea. That's a big discovery. It's all just a hairbrain scheme at the moment. But, you know, this is what Shealy taught me.

Shealy, what I loved about her, she shot from the hip, people would argue, but she would come up with out-of-the-box things, challenge people to prove her wrong. And when she was wrong, she would never be mad about it. she would laugh and say, now we've advanced the field together. How else can I piss you off and motivate you to figure this stuff out? That's the value of Graham Hancock, who I don't agree with a lot of his work, but he makes people talk. You're absolutely right. He is challenging us to prove him wrong. And I like that.

And he's okay with that, I think. Oh, he's totally cool with that. You know, they're pretty, some of the conservative people in my community of archaeologists are pretty pissed off about him. But, you know, personally, I've set it on a number of shows. I'll say it again. I like Graham. I think he's smart. He has a good sense of humor.

He is very well researched. That's the one that really pisses off my colleagues. That got you in trouble when you said that. Oh, you got in trouble with that. Well, I stand by it. I mean, I saw, you know, Graham and I, when we first met in Palenke for his ancient apocalypse thing, we sat for three hours kind of having a intellectual tit for tat. And he'd bring up some research.

I'd bring up some research. He'd bring up my research. I'd bring up his research. I'd like, you know, I did, I actually do read all your books. I don't find, I don't find it fair to criticize someone unless you've heard them out. And we were very clear. I do not believe his primary theory. That's okay.

It's okay. We can still be friends and disagree. Isn't that what academia is supposed to do? It is. I mean, speaking of Graham, what's your theory on the, on the Fang deity? Oh, well, is Graham on board with my fang deity theory? That'd be super. Probably not. Probably not, but I thought it was cool. I think all too often we project our own ideas about religion as archaeologists.

We paint a model on things and we come up with false truths. In the case of Peru, we've forever been talking about this loose pantheon of course. gods, but it's never smacked right to me. And when you really look into what's religious art, you see a face again and again and again. It's a humanoid guy with goggle eyes, fangs, claws on his hands and feet, and snakes coming out of his belt. They come out like this and out of his head. And so diagnostic. I mean, this is a very specific character. I thought all the gods were equal in the pantheon. I don't think there's a pantheon at all. I think that there is, I think that Peru is monotheistic and that there's a

single god, the fang deity. You can also call him veracocha. You could also call him Pachacamac. You could also call him IApec. It goes through time. But if you look at, you know, the art historical analysis and the way that Linda Shealy taught me to do it, and it was in Linda Shealy's class long time ago that I first came up with this theory and she gave me an A plus plus and sent me to talk to the people in Peru who thought I was full of shit. And I was, you know, 22. You know, why wouldn't I be full of shit? But I've continued with this theory and I've found nothing but strength in it.

You know, Lucas, it busts me every week to like, when are you going to write that book, Ed? You've been talking about that book for a couple of years. I know. I'm such a flake. This is my genre. I like to talk to people. I'm actually a terrible writer. So we can see that fang deity now, can we?

Oh, he's everywhere. I mean, you mean in modern times? I mean the Milky Way. Oh, gosh, do tell. I wish I could find him in the Milky Way. The Milky Way has constellations in it, but I don't know of any of them called Veracocha or a god. There's a fox.

There's a bag of coal for some reason. There's a llama and her mama. I mean all the cultures that see the Milky Way, the actual planet of the ecliptic does the road to the afterlife. Oh, that is very true. And that's across the Americas too. That's another paper I did way back in Chile days. The Milky Way is the path to the other world. From the tip of Chile to Alaska, every group that's going to talk to you about the Milky Way, even today, know that it is the path to the other world.

for the Maya, it's the world tree, it's the primordial, as it moves through the night sky, it turns into different things. It starts as the primordial sea as it's laying down on the horizon. And then as it tilts up, it's the canoe that brings the hero twins father up into the sky to become the corn god. And then as it finally erects it north-south, just at dawn on August 5th, August 13th, I'm sorry. It becomes the world tree. And the story plays out. Shealy's great book, Maya Cosmos, talks about it from the hieroglyphs position and modern-day people.

Modern-day people in the Maya world totally see it as that. And everybody in this country, all the indigenous people here, see the Milky Way as the path of souls or the path to the other world. And what's really fascinating is, you know, the Milky Way is squirley. It goes, it moves like the stars. The planets are always, you know, they're going to, they're in our solar system. Yeah. The stars move, but it's that northwest position. It locks in like one of those wheelhouses of a train.

It's, you can't cross the Milky Way to the other world in every position. It's when it locks in north-south, that's the opening of the road. Oh. So if you die and it's not locked in, what happens? I think you have to wait. In fact, I think that we haven't even talked about Mississippi and civilization right here in North America that were pyramid builders, cities of tens of thousands of people. They have this interesting pattern in their burials where they have a charnel house,

they prepare the bodies, but then they put them in the mounds in groups. they will hold them for an unknown period of time but when we see these like groups of people that are buried in the mounds they don't have any like pathology in their skeletons that say that they were wounded they were people killed in a battle, killed all at once they were obviously died at different times

but they're all interred at once I think they might be waiting for the Milky Way I think that they were grouping them together and doing the final ceremony that would send them on their way when the road opens up. There's no way to prove that, is there? It's a great theory.

No. There's, my colleague, Bill Romaine, has been doing some super work about orientations of things within Mississippi and cities. He's noticing, even in Big Cahokia, that there are

just off north-south alignments that are happening between major buildings. and that's just what the Milky Way does. And Bill was the first one to enlighten me about this. I hadn't really thought this in depth about it. But since the Milky Way kind of curves, you're never going to get a moment where it's pegged to the south and the north. If it's pegged in the north, it's off a few degrees on the south.

If it's pegged to the south, it's off a few degrees on the north. And he's been finding example after example of things oriented just off north-south and that's just what the Olmec huge platforms do they do it also they do it just off north-south and there are these long kilometer long things that would you know i think they're mirroring the road this is again you know shealy taught me to be part of the lunatic fringe and publicly say things like this that no i can't substantiate them but it gets us thinking it does and it's one of the things I like about you is how you talk about, if you have enough post holes, you can make them line up with anything. It doesn't mean anything, you know.

I'm jealously protective of the reputation of archaeo astronomy. It was, you know, at the start of my career, archaeo astronomers were crackpots. Oh, yeah. You're still a little wacky. Yeah, we're still a little kind of crackpots. But now we have enough legitimacy where I get upset when I see a published article that's really just shooting blanks like that, you know, like, well, You can't. I mean, there were 50 other options here. Don't,

don't shoot us down by publishing your responsible stuff. Let's be solid about this. Agreed. So speaking of, I can talk all the shit I want, but I'm not, you know,

I'm not publishing this conversation. What's the puzzle with 360-day calendar that's bothering you? What's that puzzle you're trying to solve? 360-day? You mean the 260-day one? No.

Don't the Maya have, a 360 day year? Oh, okay, I know I understand what you're talking about. You're talking about the year within the long count. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that is a weird one. The Meyer very cyclical.

They have many different calendars. You know, we oftentimes misstate that they had the most accurate calendar in the ancient world. A better statement would be they have the most elaborate calendar in the ancient world because so many different cycles on a typical Maya Stela, you'll have at least five independent calendar cycles that just were carved to tell you what day it is. And what are those five counting? The oldest one is the 260-day calendar. That's their sacred calendar.

It's still the most important today. The second one we call the hob. That's the solar calendar. It's 365 days, no leap year. It drifts. It drifts. Then they have the lunar count. And that's six, it's grouped in six lunations, six from new to full.

And then within that, it's either 29 or 30 days. And so there are five or six glyphs that tell us, which moon is it of the six? How many days are we into it? What's that moon's name? And another glyph we don't really understand. So there's three of them. then they have a weird nine-day cycle that's like a week we call it the nine lords of the night but that just revolves through too we very little understanding of why the heck they're doing that

nine cycle Venus is a nine-day cycle is it I think so and what I don't know what's the and what's the last one that we can't figure um the long count the long count is the neatest one because if anything was linear counts of days for the Maya, it was the long count. So this is how the apocalypse was very good for you? Yeah, 2012. 2012. You were the biggest voice of the apocalypse for a couple years. I don't know about the biggest, but, you know, like Garrett Morris said, the, uh, 2012 was

very, very good to me. Right. You're selling calendars, which I think is cool. But I think mathematically, they did not say that it was 2012. Well, that's why you were kind of a drag to a lot of people, because you're like, it's going to be fine. You know, it continues. Who knows what's going to happen in the future, but I can clearly tell you that the Maya did not say that. In fact, we know exactly how this started.

It was my old friend Mike Coe, the same one that wanted me to go out and kill chickens in Cambodia. Right, right. And I asked Coe about it at some dinner party. He wrote in the textbook that he had inherited from professors before him, just simply called the Maya. He wrote in like the 1960s, well, if you do the math, if it reset at the 13th Bakhtun,

which is part of the long count at 3, 112 and 14 BCE, then if we go 13,400 year periods into the future, we get to 2012. And so, you know, if it, if it reset at 13, and that's 13, 400-year periods as well, well, maybe we should brace ourselves for an apocalypse. And Mike told me clearly, he was like, I was just trying to be funny. Like, if I knew all this stuff was going to happen.

It goes back to that one guy. It goes back to Coe saying that, and then it goes on a very, you know, wormhole kind of thing where Jose Arguez of the. dream spell system gets involved. There's a guy named like Tony Shear, I think his name is, a reporter from Denver who's very into Aztec stuff, and he somehow mixes up the Aztec stuff with the Maya stuff and predicts that the Aztecs predicted that from the approach of Cortez going forward, that we'll hit 2012 as well.

so the two combined to some kind of Mesoamerican thing, and then Jose Arguez is a huge figure. He's the one who creates the harmonic convergence. You remember that time when hippies all around the planet gathered into archaeological sites to try to do the harmonic convergence? That was linked into all of this as well. So what is the 360 puzzle that you're working on? So the long count has five basic positions of it.

It's got days, months, years, 20 years, 400 years. That's Bakhtun's 400 years. So days, one day, sun. They even call it keen. They call it sun. Months, they decided, 20 days. Okay. All pretty normal so far.

I mean, we do 30 days because that's a lunar cycle. Right. But they pick 20 because their counting system is a veggisimal system. It's base 20. We're base 10, decimal. The Maya are vag decimal, base 20. So 20 days, that's just their counting system. That's like us favoring 10.

But then it's the next one up. If you're in a 20-based system, you should go 1,000, 400, 8,000, 160,000. That should be your progression up in the positional system of numeration. So the long count goes 1, 20, 360. And then 7,200 and 144,000. So it augments at the year called the tune. And obviously they're such good astronomers. They weren't off by five days.

But why didn't they pick the 400 that is their mathematical system? The easy answer is, well, they were just picking a, you know, a 20-based number that was closest to the year. Right. But for a primarily agrarian society that, you know, lives and dies on the changes of the seasons and the passage of the year, that's a stinky system. Five days off every year, I mean, a farmer that's useless to them. It's useless. Could it have anything to do with procession? It's possible.

The best theories that I know of are from my friend and colleague Christopher Powell, who made a ridiculously long chart. It wouldn't even fit on this table. But he just went through it. Chris is great about thinking like a Maya. So he just said they're all about synchronicities. They're mathematically. They're about highest common divisor, lowest common multiple. Did I say that right?

So he just started going through. with the long count and the 584 days that's Venus, the 780 that's Mars, the 117 that's Mercury, and the 260 day sacred calendar, and the 365, he just started playing out the days. And he said, as you go forward, all of a sudden, all of these synchronicities start lining up with the long count. where none of that would happen if they picked 365 or 400, this system makes synchronicities between cycles happen like fireworks. Wow. This is a good job for machine learning. Yeah, actually, Chris could be out there asking Claude about his chart right now as far as I know.

He's quit archaeology years ago. He's a Spanish professor in a low-income place. in San Francisco. These guys, they don't know what the heck this guy with all these adventures are doing there. How cool would it be that the planets figured into the long count? I love that idea. It really did. Chris has infected my mind with, he saw something that actually we learned was found in the 1930s as well.

But it's this number, 949. It is a magic number in the Maya. It is the foundation of the long count. 949 days as you plug that into math it starts popping out even increments of all the long count and I mean Chris has shown it I can't talk math here too much or your your people turn your podcast not these people but but the freaky thing is about 949 is not only is it the mathematical foundation of the long count as Chris has clearly shown in his dissertation which is on Mayaexploration.org, his whole dissertation, or masters actually for that one, is there.

You can see this chart, see what I'm talking about. 949 is 365 plus 584, which is the sun and Venus. And so that number is actually rooted in the sun and Venus, but it does all these magical divisions within the long count. And then Chris went further because there's another count late in the period called the 819 count that back in the 70s we discovered was the Maya way of incorporating Jupiter and Saturn into all of their data. They weren't able to do that before. And it was developed at Palenke by Convalam and Pakal. And then in 20 years it was in Honduras, like a very well-celebrated new cycle. but Chris showed how the 949 system and the 819 system mirror each other,

that they used the structure of the long-count system with 949 as its base to create the 819 system, and they all meet just like the Maya would do in a single number that is like 1,193,000 and something. And back in the 90s, me and Chris are in his little apartment, you know, it's spilling wine late at night. And Chris shows me this whole thing and says, and it all culminates in this number. And I was like, you're crazy. It was like, the Maya must have known this number. I was like, well, we can never prove that. That's crazy.

I mean, I see how it all works. 25 years later, somebody digs up a house in the ruins of Shultoon. in northern Guatemala. It's an astronomer's house. He's written calculations all over the walls. There's Chris's number. No shit. It gives me chills talking about it.

Like I was like, holy shit, is that true? I had to go back and get his masters and go, yeah, the Ivy League guys who posted it didn't read Chris's dissertation, so they didn't see it. But I called Chris up. And I was like, Chris, you're a number. And he was like, That's neat.

Chris is amazing. He kind of just gave up on this stuff. His thing is ancient geometry. And all this cool stuff I'm talking about about the astronomy. That was actually side studies that he was doing as geometry as his main stuff. His stuff about Maya geometry is absolutely groundbreaking. It's paradigm shifting. It's amazing.

I wish there was more out there. I'm kind of his acolyte in this. But now, Chris, last time I talked to him, he's like, he's got another paper, a stack of papers that's two foot tall on his desk. And he's figured out geometry things we don't know about the Egyptians, about Renaissance art, about, I mean, so many things.

We've got to get him in here. Chris is amazing. I mean, if you, I would love to see that. You should bring Chris Powell in. He will blow your mind. He is such. Chris has this way about him. I used to always say like, Chris could look you in the eyes and go,

the moon is made of cheese. And you'd be like, God, is it? He's just like, he's so, like, convincing. But he's not full of shit. He actually knows. I mean, he predicted a number like 1,193,0,460 or something. 25 years before we found it on a Maya wall. I really thought that would never happen.

But there it is. That's kind of the thing that keeps me in archaeology, just the what-ifs out there. And the craziest things when they, this moment, you know, that's it. I'm going to be a lunatic for the rest of my life. Yep. Tell me about the textbook before America,

or is it before the Americas? Before the Americas, thanks for asking. You know, right now it's conceptual. But I think we have enough data now, not just about South America and Mesoamerica, but North America as well, where we can tell the story of the history of civilizations before European contact.

And it's so important. The part that I'm really thrilled about is North America. Nobody here in this country realizes the great civilizations that were on this land before us. Nobody's heard of Cahokia here. Nobody's heard of Kohokia. Nobody knows. I've been on a rant these days on my YouTube channel. I've just been doing pyramids of Alabama, pyramids of Georgia. Next week is pyramids of Oklahoma. I'm going to do pyramids of Wisconsin and just go through state by state and go, here it is. It's actually a public park. Go visit. But we have swept it under the rug. But there are civilizations here, and especially in North America, I think our high school. kids would benefit and our society would benefit if they just had some understanding that America wasn't some blank slate that was just waiting for Europeans, just like everywhere

else on the planet, there were major civilizations that rose and fell here. Yeah, we're not, we're taught about American Indians, but it always goes to Buffalo and TPs and stuff. And maybe you get advanced to talk about aircoignation a little bit. You know, it's a product somewhat that's a product of scholarship. Right. By the time we as, you know, Western civilization got interested in doing things like ethnologies, we were two, 300 years into the conquest. And so those guys on their horses, you know, out there with their feather headdresses,

they're living in a post-apocalyptic world. Those are the people that have survived the downfall of a civilization. This is, you know, those guys that Buffalo Bill met, that was like Mad Max. Yeah. It was over. But before that, there were civilized cities, independent city states that fought against each other and made alliances, but with, you know, with engineering, with houses that were like subdivision complexes and social hierarchies. Are there? Advanced.

Yeah, advanced. Is there a Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great? Are those people in our history, do you think? Not yet in, well, let me correct myself for a minute. Not really in North America yet, because we don't have a written language. That's a tough one. But at contact, we have the names of some people who I think, you know, maybe not a Julius Caesar, but we have important and noble leaders of entire kingdoms.

We have, you know, for one, the big one that I just talked about was Tuscaloosa. You know, almost everybody that's listening to this, Tuscaloosa, I know that. It's a town in Alabama. Right. No, it's a Mississippian king who beat the crap out of DeSoto on his way through. That's right. Triced him. Now, Tuscaloosa lost and he probably died, burned in a town called Mabila.

But he was a great king. And before that, he demolished the De Soto demolished the civilization of another one in South Carolina, a beautiful queen called Kofitakachi, who welcomed him in, saved him and his guys from the wilderness. They were about starved to death. And she in an entourage show up with all sorts of food, guide them into her city. And he responds by taking her hostage, putting a big ring around her neck and walking her towards Tuscaloosa. Yeah. Some of her loyal people save her.

That's an interesting story. It is an interesting story. I mean, that's one, you know, for your curious audience, just start looking into the DeSoto expedition of the 1539 to 1541 when he dies at the Mississippi. But he goes through kingdom after kingdom after kingdom. That's what I want my textbook to be. I haven't already. I've got an outline. It would cover North America, part one, Mesoamerica part two, South America part three.

And the trick would be with this. The reason we can't do this yet is because we have, you know, for lack of a better word, guilt, societal guilt. We all are pretty aware that infectious diseases killed millions of people upon contact. That's a horrible tragedy on our hands. Not our fault. Certainly not us modern people's fault. Nope. But we have a hard time getting to the real conversation because that's a stumbling

block. What my textbook will do is never touch that. I'll leave that to other people. We'll just talk about, like, my textbook will end at like 1,500. Well, what's chapter 1? A couple of decades before. I start off with South America and then end with North America. But that's the one I really want to get by.

I'm making them like volumes so that a teacher could choose just North America. But I'd love to see, you know, a pre-American history course just to give people an appreciation that there was a continuation on the land we now sit. And it wasn't the tribes that everybody thinks it was. There's a deeper, more beautiful, more civilization-wide thing. There's the Mississippians. There's also the people of the American Southwest, the people that built Chaco Canyon, the ancestral Pueblo, and their people are still here.

We can talk to them. The Ho-Hocom of Arizona, nobody knows about these guys, but they built the largest aqueduct system, ancient aqueduct system on the planet over 700 miles of very sophisticated irrigation systems. They're in Arizona. We're close by here.

You know about the monsoons. And, you know, it's like two weeks a year that you get a lot of rain. Yep. And then it's dry as a bone. Yes. The holocom made a system 700 miles worth of these aqueducts or the,

what do you call them, irrigation canal systems that would, take that water and spread it across Arizona. They turned Arizona like a thousand years ago, Arizona was green. And it wasn't because it was a different climate. It was because the Ho-Hocom managed the entire place. That's more than Rome. It's huge. It's absolutely huge. And actually a lot of the systems that Arizona uses today are on the foundations of the Ho-Hocom's superior hydraulic engineering. Why not? It's still gravity

and water. And shouldn't we know about that? We should. Shouldn't our kids have an appreciation that there was this magnificent civilization here before us that did these great things and that they were, you know, on par with the Greeks? We're so like, you know, we come from the Greeks and they came

from the Egyptians and the Romans and you know, we got this line and we tend to ignore that the beauty that these inventions have happened independently around the planet, which to me means that we humans

are more the same than we are alike on a very genetic level whether our skin is black or red or yellow or whatever color we want to call it. We're kind of pink actually. We have a lot more in common. There's a human independent spirit

that has been replicated independently around the world and I think that's wonderful. That's a reason a deeper connection that we should all see each other as brothers. I agree. I've heard this number, and I want to know if it's correct, that 90% of the people died in a 50-year period here? Yeah.

Is that true? That's the conservative number. Conservative. Some people say more like 95, but the infectious diseases, say 13 different infectious diseases hit the Americas in the first 50 years. And it's kind of proof that there was not, substantial contact before.

Right. What did we lose? Millions of people. I mean knowledge. What went into the ground? Oh, well, I wish I knew. That's my whole career trying to dig this stuff back out. But I think some things are just going to be gone.

If you really think about the moment that, you know, these multiple infectious diseases come to the Americas, a people who believe that illness is a supernatural thing. thing, that it's a spiritual thing, that your spirit is sick, and spirit plants can help you not be sick. But they don't know what an infectious disease is. So they're using their spiritual methods that are not working at all. And you get entire communities where, you know, a disease, an epidemic disease comes in, multiple come in.

Who are the first people that get wiped out? The old and the young. Yeah. So you got no children the next generation. the ones are teaching and you got no old people and in a oral tradition society that doesn't hasn't developed writing yet that's the transmission and the transmission gets broken yeah the old people aren't there to tell you the young people aren't there to learn it the middle people are struggling to bury the dead and they're terrified to raise a family yes who would bring a baby

into this world right and and then all of their stuff that is, you know, we divide church and state, supposedly. That seems to be going badly at this city. It's going badly. But they did not. Church, state, science, religion, they were all one thing. So the disheartening thought, when a couple people get sick, it's a evil spirit or, you know, maybe a witch doing something,

sicking spirits on them. When everybody gets sick, that's the gods. That's the gods. That's the gods. That's the gods. And then terrible timing for these guys in brown robes to show up and go, you know what your problem is that there's only one true God. And you need more of this.

And you've got to convert or you will all die. I mean, from a people who already had a perspective that gods make you sick, this was proof positive that Christianity's God existed. And they converted and they were willingly converted and they were willingly converted and they were willingly rejected. their old ways. And at that moment, the loss of knowledge, unfathomable. I thought I heard you say it might have been on Sean's show that these missionaries were baptizing people with infected water, making it worse.

Innocent, innocent. They thought they were doing the right thing. But now we understand how infectious diseases communicate. And that was exactly the wrong thing to do. Speaking of generations, your family celebrates the Day of the Dead. You have an altar? We do. Who's on there? Well, you know, as they grow, a growing amount of people.

There's, I like it to be people that we know. I mean, a lot of Americans. Shealy's on there? A lot of Americans don't even really know what the day of the dead is. Can you explain it? Because it's kind of important. I think it's beautiful. I think it's, you know, we, the same time of year we celebrate high.

Halloween, ghouls and ghosts and vampires. It's all very connected to the world of the dead. Our Halloween stuff. It's based on All Saints Day, which was in Europe, but there's also a tradition in Mesoamerica. Essentially what it is is just venerating our ancestors. A holiday specifically to remember and love our past ancestors. And you make this altar full of beautiful flowers and food. You try to put out things like my sister Cheryl's up there,

and I put a little thing of raspberry absolute vodka there, which was terrible. I hated that she drank that. Terrible, but she liked it. That was the Cheryl thing. So, you know, there you go, Cheryl. That's what you do. You give them, you put things that they loved in their life near them,

and you put kind of a little pyramid of pictures up in frames. Everybody does them different. They're very much like, you know, your family tradition. I like to, I'm very orderly, so the oldest guys are on the top and the youngest ones are on the bottom. How far back does your pyramid go? Back to my great, great-grandfather. I am Edwin Lawrence. My dad was Edwin Lewis.

My grandfather was Edwin Leroy, and his father was Edwin Lawrence again. And my son is Edwin Lloyd. That's beautiful. But so I've got one from the 1800s up there. but I've got my mom, my dad, I've got my wife's deceased folks as well. She still has both of her parents, thank goodness. But that's what you do. And it's just a beautiful way.

I love that instead of talking about monsters and ghouls and candy with my kids, we talk about stories of who these people were. When we put up the altar, it's a very, you know, it goes up on Halloween night, and then it stays through the first and the second, and then we'll take it down. But when you light the incense and the smell of the flowers, it's got to be marigolds, those smells and smoke make a road like Milky Way for the dead to come back and to commune with you. And that's what we do. We talk about, you know, my dad passed away a year and a half ago now. He's the newest member on our altar, and I will spend the day talking about that.

stories of my dad. So my kids know who he is. What little object do you have up there for dad? Oh, I haven't even thought yet. It's kind of, geez, I don't know. That's a great question. I do have a couple of like artifacts from him that, that I got from his house. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll put like, he was a scientist, chemist, maybe I'll put his slide rule right in front of him. That would be cool. He loved that slide rule. Nobody even knows what a slide rule is now, but when you were like a chemist, your slide rule was everything. But if he's coming down, he would, he would really, he'd like to see it there. I think so.

It's something that just said, you know, we know, we remember who you are. Have you seen the movie Coco? Of course. That's the one that got it for my kids. I mean, what a beautiful thing that was. It's a really beautiful tradition. I wish we had more of it. Last question for you.

What do you want on the altar for you? Wow, that's a good one. You know, nothing that would aggrandize me. I wouldn't want something that was like an accolade of mine, because I think those things are worthless. I think that that moment when you die and you see the flash before your eyes, you don't see your trophies or bank account. You see the people you loved and who loved you.

So I would try to make it something that my can, kids would remember that I loved them. Dr. Ed Barnhart was here. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you. Bye, everybody. That was Dr. Ed Barnhart. Genuinely a great person. We had a blast.

But let's break down our conversation. Starting with the city. I pulled the published report on Mashna from the team that followed him. The discovery paragraph credits a reconnaissance team. Ed's paper gets one citation filed under Edward. His name is Edwin. He left them a treasure. anyway and apologize to them on this show.

Now, the number. In the 90s, Ed's friend Chris Powell worked out the number where the Maya calendar cycles line up. I found the thesis. It's right there. 1,195,740. In 2012, a Boston University team published an Astronomer's Painted Workshop

at Joltoon, Guatemala, in science. On the north wall, 1,195,740. Chris wrote it down more than a decade before, before anyone found the wall. How does that not give you goosebumps? Then the acid. Ed thinks the Inca fused the Cusco stones with hydrofluic acid.

He has no proof and says so. No one has tested a scene. The man in Cusco whose desk it landed on said no. It's a hypothesis with a chemist attached, one chemist ahead of the alien theory. Ed calls his guesses guesses, and that's rarer than a lost city. It's on YouTube at the Archeo Ed podcast,

A-R-C-A-E-O, and M-E-E-E-O, and Maya exploration.org. Everything I mentioned is linked below. Until next time, be safe. Be kind. And know that you are appreciated. Scenario 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I would.

I love my UFOs and paranormal fun. So I'm singing the like I shus. And it never ends. No, it never ends. All with M. K. Out truck. A being on. We're the shadow people.

Just thought the smiling man Game was cold Gunned Dirk Stations, planets are both And where the dark watchers Fowell