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

Wow. Wow. Wes.

All right, we're live. David Stewart, thank you for coming, man.

Thanks for having me.

I'm pumped, man. I've never met an archeologist before.

Well, yeah, it's a fun job, I got to say. Do you like to play in the dirt? Absolutely. I love it. I— when I was a kid, I decided that was what I wanted to do, you know? And I'm really lucky because I can do it as a, you know, grown-up. Yeah.

And your parents are both archeologists, too.

Yeah, my, my dad and my mom were, were both archeologists and worked for National Geographic, the magazine, you know, back in the heyday of all of that. So, you know, they took us on trips, me and my brothers and sister. You know, that's how I got exposed to this stuff was like going to, you know, Mexico and Guatemala, you know, back in the '70s, getting, getting exposed to these, you fantastic ruins before they were turned into big tourist sites. Yeah, sometimes, right? And I just caught the bug. I mean, I just wanted to know more about it. And, and seeing what my dad was doing, what my mom was doing, I just wanted to keep on with that. So nice.

Yeah, I mean, we, uh, by the way too, we have, we have Val with us here today. Josh couldn't make it. Uh, Josh is actually getting, I believe, a colonoscopy.

So very important.

Yeah, someone's doing, someone's doing some excavating in, uh, in his butt right now. He's asleep right now and someone's looking for secrets in his book, deciphering the text. That's pretty cool though, man. So like, you know, and from reading your book, by the way, The Four Heavens, I have it right here. History of the new history, a new history of the ancient Maya, not the old, not the BS from before. That's right.

Yeah.

But from reading your book, it was like back, I guess, when your dad was doing it, it was kind of amazing. I didn't realize how much of, you you know, their history was completely unknown and lost. And I guess there was like little bits and pieces that kind of struck me about how people were just like, even the people who live there were just like, I don't know, like no one really knew.

And this is still kind of the case in terms of people's awareness, right? So I think it's fair to say it's new in, in terms of not being out there in the public arena. And certainly in, in Mexico, you know, there are plenty of Maya people around today, but they don't have much of a sense of their own history. History. Yeah. And, and that, I find that really sad and something that needs to be fixed and corrected. So there's a Spanish edition coming out, you know, and I, I hope word gets out about this stuff and it gets into the schools and everything. But you're right, um, when, when my dad was, you know, an archeologist and, and working in Maya ruins, um, when I was a kid, there was no history, you know. So We've, we've been through this amazing time in the last 50 years where we've kind of gone from 0 to 100 in terms of knowing the names of kings and knowing the dynasties and how they all, you know, kind of Game of Thrones history of all these different kingdoms. And it's the oldest history anywhere in the Americas, which is pretty mind-boggling.

And that's, that's also crazy because like, you know, you always see stuff and like, I don't know, I always hear things on like TV and YouTube where it's like Some claim they go back to like 60 million years, you know, something like crazy. Because, I mean, I must have really chapped your ass watching Ancient Aliens back in the day. Did you like that show?

You know, I've been asked to be on that show several times.

Really? And you wouldn't play ball about the outer space travel or what?

Oh, man. Well, the thing is, I know from experience that— well, I should say that show to me is just nonsense. Really? The real human story of these places and the monuments is, I think, the real story that's just as compelling. But yeah, I mean, I was invited to be on a few of those shows. And what I realize from a long time ago is that when you get interviewed for a show like that as an, as an expert, quote unquote.

Yeah.

Of course you have no control over how they're going to edit it or how they're going to display what you say or chop you up.

That kind of sucks, actually. You spend your whole life trying to be credible. Yeah.

So I've actually had friends and colleagues who, you know, say, yeah, I'll do that. Sure. You know, and I kind of get that, right? You want to— you want to be out there and talk, but then they just kind of, you know, manipulate whatever you're going to say, you know, for their— for their narrative. Right. But yeah, I mean, as someone who studies the Maya and has been around the people, has been around these amazing sites in Mexico and Guatemala and Belize, you know, the whole ancient aliens narrative It's coming from another place. It's coming from our, you know, kind of background in trying to struggle how to explain these places. That's an old struggle that goes back hundreds of years, actually. But the thing is, now we have the history. This is what people don't realize. We, we have the names of the people who built these monuments. They're not aliens. They're, they're people.

Yeah. Yeah.

And they're doing the same stuff we do. And they have the same concerns we do.

Yeah, it was kind of cool because it really goes from what you guys have found, it goes almost back. Well, I guess further back or about the same as like as we know about ancient Greece. Like it goes like, what do you say, like 200 AD? Yeah.

So the written history we have goes back to about not quite as far as ancient, you know, classical Greece, but let's say to about 300, 200 AD. Okay. That's pretty far back. Yeah. I mean, it's 1,200 years before Columbus. And the archeology goes back further than that in terms of seeing what people are doing on the ground and, you know, tracking how they develop over time. So we hit the story kind of midstream in terms of being able to read about what they're writing about, what's preserved. And that's where we have to kind of fill in the blanks in terms of, you know, stuff they didn't write about. You know, maybe they didn't write about their economic situation and they didn't write about, you know, what was going on in their world beyond just the aristocrats. They were the ones who were writing, right? And the ones who were literate. So it's what we have. I think it's super exciting, but it's not the whole picture.

Yeah. And then, you know, I guess there was the— I've like heard about this guy, Diego de Landa, right, who burnt all the books.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, did you ever just like sit at night and like, just kind of— like, do you ever really get mad at that guy? Because he kind of did, like, ruin the whole thing.

He ruined a lot. Yeah. So, so this guy, he was a Franciscan friar who later became the bishop of Yucatán back in the 16th century. And he, you know, he's vilified because he burnt a lot of the Maya books. And smashed their, their, you know, what do you call the idols and so forth. And he caused a lot of damage in a way. He was doing his job at the time.

Sure.

I mean, that's what they were there for. We've lost a lot of culture and a lot of history, indigenous culture because of that. But there's one thing I will say about Landa. He was, in a way, a curious figure. He was curious about the stuff he was trying to stamp out, which sounds a little weird, but he, he wrote this book that is basically a compilation of facts about the world of the Maya before the Spanish ever arrived.

I have that book in my house. I just like happened. I didn't, you know, it was funny when I was reading your book, I'm like, oh, I have that. I read like a little bit of it.

Yeah.

And yeah, it does kind of does strike you as he was like, recounting whatever history he had.

Yeah, he was talking to people and he was getting— these are unique accounts that we have. And without his book, this manuscript that was just found randomly back in the 1800s, you know, in a library in Spain, without Landa's book, we'd be really up a creek in terms of understanding the Maya. So, so I have to give him some credit, despite the fact that he did a lot of damaged at the time, like most Spanish priests of that era. It was this kind of give and take. I mean, they were trying to stamp out the idolatry, the non-Catholic rituals they were seeing, but they were, they were almost like anthropologists of their time. They were, they were writing down stuff that otherwise would just be lost.

Yeah. And what was like the— was I remember I read about Cortés and the Aztecs and there was like the ritual human sacrifice. Was that the Mayans? Was that kind of like—

they did some of that. Sure. Maybe not on the scale of the Aztecs, or at least on scale of what the Spanish talk about for the Aztecs. Some of that's exaggerated.

Yeah, I've heard that.

But, but sacrifice was real. It was part of their— in Mesoamerica in general, we, we study that, we acknowledge it. One of the things about sacrifice that's hard for us to think about is that And here I'm kind of thinking about examples that I have come across in my own research. You know, for the Maya, for example, there were ritual, like, executions of war captives. And that's kind of cross-cultural. I mean, you call that sacrifice. Yeah, but it's like a Roman gladiator, you know, arena. Yeah. Or, you know, which is very, like, performative and very ritualized. But it's a way of kind of dealing with your enemies and your captives in this kind of this way of going about executing them, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's like pretty— I would say that's pretty common. I mean, even the Spanish were like cutting people's heads off and hanging them on sticks. I think the cannibalism thing is what gets people kind of icked, if they were. I don't know if they were munching. But you're also just munching.

I think there was some of that in Ancient Mesoamerica.

Yeah, for sure.

And the Americas. It's, it's in a lot of places in the world.

I don't hold it against them. I mean, it was a long time ago.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it is hard to wrap our heads around in some ways. But the indigenous people in the 1600s and 1500s were also recounting their own background and their own histories. And they sometimes talked about that. Yeah. Or drew pictures of it. And some scholars today dismiss it as exaggeration. I think it actually did happen. Yeah.

I mean, it makes sense. I mean, even when they— because I, you know, like when Cortés got there, he was— he hit the Yucatán first. So I think he interacted with the Mayans or something.

Long before the Aztecs, he got to the Yucatán, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of— a lot of the— there was two other expeditions that got pretty much thwarted. The Spaniards before him, right?

Yeah. That era is so interesting. You know, these crazy expeditions, these guys who would just head off into the horizon, not knowing where they were going. Yeah. And the early expeditions, you know, they hit the coast of Yucatán and they didn't know where they were or they didn't expect to see mainland right there. And the Maya are there. And yeah, they have these battles that the Spanish more often than not get trounced.

Yeah.

They have to head back to Cuba and then try again and then they go back and try again. And eventually Cortés Yeah, gets his, uh, group together, finally does it.

Yeah, that was, that was the one thing you always hear about Cortés, where the, you know, popular consensus people say is like, oh, he just like showed up and he tricked the guy and they handed it over to him. It was like, no, it was a pretty long kind of like gruesome protracted battle for like, I mean, it was like years, years.

Yeah, I mean, the whole story of that, of Cortés's adventure, I, you know, I'm still waiting for the big Hollywood epic movie of this.

I—

because it's one of the greatest stories in all of history. It has a lot of painful parts to it, for sure. It has a lot of drama. But you can read firsthand accounts of it, too, that not only Cortés wrote, but one of his soldiers wrote this amazing firsthand book of his memoirs of that encounter. And it's like a science fiction novel. Yeah, it's like, it's like these guys landing on another planet. And they have to go through this process. And it's long, like you say, it took years for Cortés to arrive on the shore of Mexico and then to overthrow the Aztec Empire. Yeah, not a lot of years. It was kind of a short time in, you know, 2, 2 and a half years. But, but even after that, it took a while to kind of solidify their, their their presence there and to establish, you know, New Spain is what they called it. So that, that story is one of not just the Spanish coming in and beating people over the heads. Cortés had to, you know, there were just a few hundred guys at most. They had to make alliances with people, the Aztec, who hated the Aztecs.

That's how he was successful.

Yeah.

You know, the— there was this city-state called Tlaxcala. It's now a beautiful town in Mexico, not far from Mexico City. But that was the center of a kingdom. Cortés passed through it, actually warred with them. Eventually they realized, hey, they could together fight the Mexica, the Aztecs, you know, of Tenochtitlan. And so that's a whole drama. That's all— that's part of this story, right? And yeah, I just find it amazing. I always, you know, go back and read excerpts of that story just because it's— it reads like a novel. It's like high drama.

It really is kind of amazing, especially with the— who was it? I think Aguilar was the guy who got stranded out there. Father Aguilar got stranded and lived among them, spoke the language, and like happened. You know, he was a slave for like 6 years. Yeah. And then just stumbled upon— that's like the most— that's the one story I'm like surprised no one's ever done.

Well, right. This is another. Movie that someone has to make. In fact, I think there are scripts that have been—

That's cool.

Bandied about in Hollywood for a while about, about that story and the Cortés. But the Aguilar story. Yeah. So Cortés, when he first arrives on the coast of Yucatán, the, the Maya that, that they are in contact with realize, wait a minute, we've seen one of these weirdos before who was like floating in a boat. And the Maya realized, oh, there's this slave who's one of these bearded, you know, white guys who speaks the same language. Right. And so they get him, they bring him in and communicate. And it turns out it was the shipwrecked Spanish sailor who by that time was fluent in speaking Maya. And eventually he links up with Cortés. Cortés now has someone who can communicate for him. Without that, Cortés would not have been able to go very far. But the other part of this, it's an amazing story. Eventually, they link up with another Maya kingdom, you know, and interact with them. And this is where Malinche comes from. This is the woman who eventually becomes Cortés's mistress. Yeah.

He strangles his life for her.

Right. She's a princess. She speaks Maya and she speaks the language of the Aztecs.

Yeah.

So between those two, Aguilar and between the Spanish sailor and Malinche, they can actually converse. And Cortés is a master manipulator, right? That comes across in all these stories. And he's talking to the Aztec emperors and, you know, through these two and they're actually having conversations. So it's just amazing to me that that all came together.

Yeah.

You know, and it was just by chance in some ways. But, but again, that's part of how extraordinary this story is. Yeah.

And I thought in your book that, you know, the part of it I never even thought about was like, and I thought it was pretty cool that you document it was like the effort it took to decipher those like Mayan symbols and text. And I still don't understand what you're saying, like, because you get— they're like hieroglyphs, they're phonetic, but also they like— that was something I was like trying to wrap my head around, but they have like sounds almost like a consonant, but then it's also just like a pictogram where it's like, this is the thing. And they're— I don't know, that was like throwing me off. I don't know how you guys did that.

Yeah, it is a little confusing. And so this, this is my, my specialty. This is what I work on more than anything else is is decoding Maya hieroglyphs.

So you literally, like, can look at this and that's like—

that's my drawing. Yeah.

And you know what this means?

Yeah. Yeah.

Out here, dude.

That's crazy.

And it's beautiful stuff, right? I mean, visually, it's really—

it's really cool.

Cool looking. And that actually— this is one of the things that drew me in as a kid because my dad— I remember asking my dad, you know, he was finding in, like, in the '70s when we were you know, working in this Maya site called Cobá, which is near Tulum. I remember he— a couple of times he found new carved tablets and they had hieroglyphs on them. And I would say, Dad, what is this? You know, what does this say? And he's like, I don't know. Nobody can read them. And that, you know, caught me. I was like, that's interesting. And so, you know, I was really intrigued. They looked like cartoons. They looked like— I was a bored 9-year-old also. Like, I was like, crazy. I just, you know, I just started drawing them and copying them out of books that my dad had. Just being kind of interested in what they were. It was like instead of Pokémon cards, it was Maya hieroglyphs, you know, for me, something like that. So, you know, that's what caught me. And I got kind of obsessed with them and was asking people that my dad knew, you know, and they were like, we can't read these.

So it turned out that, you know, I was seeing some new patterns that other people hadn't seen. There were other people who I got to know who were also kind of on the cutting edge of stuff. And by the '80s, '90s, there were a handful of us who were these young— some people called us the Young Turks. You know, we were these up-and-coming guys who knew that we were on to something and we knew we were making inroads. And so that was a heady time. I was so lucky to time my entry into this world that way. And my dad was sort of like, you know, he was like, he wasn't involved. He wasn't pushing me into any of this. It was just my own kind of interest. And he was like, hey, that's great what you're doing. And I think he was a little weirded out at times that we were deciphering things right and left all of a sudden, you know, the words for names of kings and the word for chocolate. Yeah. You know, which is written all over the vases.

You know, they didn't know avocado was a Mayan term either. That kind of threw me for a loop.

Yeah. Well, avocado is— we borrow that word from Nahuatl, which is the language of the Aztecs. Ahuacatl.

That's what it was.

It was an Aztec.

That's right. It's pretty insane. Yeah.

So a a lot of these words for foods— cacao is a Maya word, so that's written in hieroglyphs. And to go back to your question, though, Matt, about the sounds and the pictures. Yeah, they're elaborate looking. But when you, when you cut to the chase, they're spelling words and they're writing them as sounds. So, okay, you can— the visuals distract you. The, you know, it's like Egyptian too in that way, right? We see pictures of, you know, human figures and birds and stuff, stuff like that in Egyptian, but they're also phonetic. There's just— you have to know the language to read it. So, you know, we really perfected our ability to read the language behind the hieroglyphs. And it's a language we can connect to the languages spoken today in that area. And by the mid-'90s, I would say we could read maybe 80 or 90% of my texts.

That's crazy. Especially when you— the one thing, if I have this right, was like you can have different symbols, similar symbols but different for the same sound, which I was like, dude, that's— yeah, well, that's kind of tricky.

It gets crazy because— and this is what I helped kind of work out— was just how ridiculously complex the visuals are compared to the actual system. So you can— if they wanted to write the word cacao, okay, for— that's for chocolate, cocoa. They will write that with sounds: ka, ka, wa. 3 hieroglyphs. Now, this is a great example because as it turns out, you can write the sound ka one of a couple of ways with 2 different kind of pictures. One of them is a fish and the other one is this thing. It looks like a little comb, hair comb, but it's actually the fin of a fish. So it's the same sign. But anyway, it's— they write it as a fish and the fish is like, what does that have to do with chocolate? Well, it's because the fish is the sound kai. The word for fish is kai. So that's where they get the ka sound. So ka, kawa. They're distracting you, writing the word using the picture of a fish, but that's just how they do it. And so if you sweep through, get past all the artistic sort of bells and whistles— yeah, there's a lot of them— you get down to the words.

And that took a long time to figure out.

Yeah, I was, you know, I was shocked, you know, that, I mean, obviously it makes sense. But then there was the— so was there like a definitive kind of like, um, like deciphering codex that kind of like made everything— like the Rosetta Stone's like that big?

Yeah, well, the, the folks in Egypt had it easy compared to us in some ways. Uh, so we didn't have a Rosetta Stone. Um, and, and that was of course the key in the 1800s for reading Egyptian, we had some help. One of the things that helped us was going back to Bishop Landa. In his book, he had— and this is pretty funny— he had a what he called the alphabet of the, of the Maya people. Right. And it's like A, B, C, D, E. And it's crazy because they didn't have an alphabet. Yeah, Landa didn't get that. He didn't understand. He was like, well, if they're writing, they must have an alphabet, right? What, what Landa didn't realize is that he was writing down Maya glyphs for the sounds.

That makes sense.

Of the letters as they're pronounced in Spanish.

Gotcha.

So, ah, bay, say, day, right? It's funny, those are syllables, right?

Isn't Spanish like a notoriously phonetic language itself? I remember in Spanish class, they're like, however you look at this, this is how you pronounce it pretty much. For the most part.

Well, it's pretty— the phonetics of it are pretty straightforward, you know, as an alphabetic thing, you know, it's, it's the vowels are all pretty consistent and stuff. Yeah. So Landa was, was clearly flummoxed trying to describe— he called it actually this cumbersome writing that the, the people have here in Yucatán, and he couldn't get it. What he didn't realize was the, the guy he was working with, the Maya guy who was writing down all this stuff for him, they were just talking past each other. They had no idea what each other was asking or providing.

I saw that in your book at one point. At one point, the guy literally just said, I'm tired.

I don't— Yeah, he writes down— this is hilarious. He writes down in the manuscript, "Mangkati," which means I don't want to do this anymore.

That's really funny, actually.

Yeah, because they're just like— he's like, I'm out here. Yeah.

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Yeah, yeah.

Me? Yeah.

Who, me?

Stinkin' Lincoln. I got—

yeah, just the stinkin' Lincoln.

July 17th, please come to Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. It's the most important moment of my life. Yeah, that'll be fucking nasty.

And if it doesn't go well, I'm gonna leave this earth. I'm gonna get pyro underneath the stage and I'm gonna tell them, go ahead. Yeah, just send it.

Flame me.

I'm out, guys.

I picked up some comedy club dates all summer long. We're going to be having fun together. I'll be 6/5, uh, June 5th and 6th. I'll be at the Summit City Comedy Club, Fort Wayne, Indiana. And that is— that's in just a few weeks.

I ran into a buzzsaw over there.

Did you really?

Yeah.

Would you—

what happened?

Just an absolute negative experience.

People were just hammered. It's a fun club.

Yeah, that'll be— I'll be there in the dog days of the summer. Levity Live, Huntsville, Alabama. The Stardome Comedy Club, Birmingham. I'm excited for that. And Spokane Comedy Club, Spokane, Washington. Uh, also it's not up yet, but I have a bunch more dates, so check them out on mattmccleskey.com.

Goodbye.

Hey, so what, what's the earliest in terms of like— because, you know, that was kind of cool reading about how they figured out how to kind of transcribe everything. What was like the earliest story they have that you guys can look back on that has some like narrative arc or whatever.

Yeah, so the earliest his story of history that we can tap into is, is really the beginning of these many dynasties. We're talking about the area that's now northern Guatemala, southern part of Yucatán. We can tell that there are a lot of these great cities that are starting up. Some of them are being abandoned. There's all these cycles of rises and falls. But there's this era around 200, 300 AD when these dynasties kind of start up and they're often connected with each other. They're often rivals with each other. And we can start to read names of kings. We can start to read some narratives about what they're doing. One of the big, big episodes of Maya history that we know about now today was in the late 300s, in 378. Mm-hmm. There was this war. It was a conquest of this really amazing city in Guatemala we know of today as Tikal, a major site. In fact, Tikal is the rebel moon base in the first Star Wars movie. George Lucas filmed the scene of the Millennium Falcon taking off from the jungle. I don't know if anyone remembers that scene. That's crazy. Yavin 4, I think it is, in Star Wars.

Yeah, that is Tikal. So he filmed it there. Anyway, fun fact, the— in 378, the king of Tikal was conquered by these outsiders who were coming all the way from central Mexico. They were coming from a place called Teotihuacan, which is up near Mexico City. And they had had a long relationship. Clearly, there's this long-distance intermarriages and stuff. But there came a point where something happened where they had to take this guy down. And so they go hundreds of miles into Guatemala to conquer him. And that sets off this whole other thing so that history really picks up, let's say, in the 4th century. Then we have a lot of detailed records after that for about 400 or 500 years of just— we have thousands of texts we can read about hundreds of different actors and players in this drama with a lot of different kingdoms. And it does become like Game of Thrones, like I said, where you have alliances being forged. Those alliances often are being turned around and their turncoats and their wars in between cousins and so forth. So it becomes this really dynamic world that, you know, again, 30, 40 years ago, we couldn't talk about any of this.

That's what's exciting. Yeah. Now we can match up the places that we're reading about with the actual sites that, you know, we are exploring in the jungle. So that's also really cool. We can match up the name of this ancient place to this site.

Oh, so you actually, you know exactly where it was. And it wasn't like— I don't know if this is because of that, but that was— I was kind of struck by how a lot of the history comes from just— it was like written on the walls of buildings.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think the buildings themselves held pretty much the history, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. A lot of official stuff, just like, you know, we do in a way, right? We have monuments and in our parks and so forth with some official historical records. But yeah, I mean, we're— we have— they wrote a lot, right? They wrote a lot and carved it on stone. Otherwise we'd be up a creek. Yeah, right. Because it doesn't— it doesn't preserve in the jungle. Yeah. They wrote on pottery, ceramics. So we have a lot of that stuff. We don't have anything written on paper from that era. Yeah, because it's not just like, you know, not going to preserve. Yeah, true. We— the stuff we have, the books we have, which is amazing, uh, those are much later, right? So the Spanish actually collected those.

Okay.

Um, so yeah, we are— we, we're lucky to have what we have is the way I look at it.

And they— so were they like a, uh— that was the one thing I was trying to figure out too. Were they like a transient— like they would build these giant, like, you know, cities basically, and then they would just like abandon them? Do you— is there any idea why they would do that? Was that like a famine thing, or they just would do that?

Well, this is a huge question, and this This is the thing that I think a lot of people think about when you think about the ancient Maya is this idea of collapse. And I often get this question like, well, what happened to them? Because, you know, didn't they disappear? And that's a common narrative out there that the Maya, ancient Maya just disappeared, which is kind of problematic because the Maya are still around. So as a people, they didn't disappear. But what did disappear is that around 900, 800 to 900 AD, a lot of their cities, some of them really large with tens of thousands of people, they collapsed. We call this the Maya Collapse. This is a question that we as archeologists and academics have been struggling with for a long time. What happened? So Tikal, okay, the Star Wars moon base place. That's a good example. Huge city, 80,000 people, maybe even 100,000 people who were living there, something like that in the general area. Between about 800 and 1,000, you're going from a vibrant city to nobody really living there. And it gets to be overgrown with jungle and then explorers find it in the 1800s.

What happened? So this is this, this idea of a lost city. This is really where it comes from. It comes from the Maya, you know, explorers in the 1800s. And I mean, talk about romantic exploration, you know, hacking your way through the jungle. Very Indiana Jones.

Yeah.

And here is a 100-foot-high pyramid that no one has explored before. I mean, that's the reality of early days of Maya archeology. So this fed into this question, what happened? It fed into a lot of crazy ideas about maybe what happened, that they disappeared. Well, they did disappear from those places. Yeah, they moved on. So one of the things I'm writing about in the book is, you know, what factors went into this? I think there were tipping points. It had to do with climate for sure, because we have records of drought. We know that water was hard to come by in these places. It still is. Yeah. So, so you can understand how these tipping points might come up. But big populations basically couldn't sustain themselves in some of these places. And I think also the political system kind of fell apart. There were— we can also track in the records, you know, the last 100 years of this era was there was so much warfare and, you know, there had always been conflict and, you know, like any— like medieval history, but you see it ramping up. And in the last few decades there, it's just incessant warfare.

And I think the system just breaks down.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think the Maya had a lot of agency in deciding what to do. The people. And I think they just voted with their feet and decided to just left, go off to do other things.

True.

Yeah. And so this is one of the things that I really want to try to do in my, my narrative about this is that it wasn't like some external thing that came, you know, UFOs with beams taking people away. It's that the Maya were going through a crisis and they had to make some very very hard decisions, no doubt, to do something about their dire situation in many places. And they decided to leave.

Have you seen the hieroglyph of a guy who's like— looks like he's in a rocket ship looking up, though? That was the only thing I remember from Ancient Aliens. They would show that 100 times.

Oh yeah, they keep showing—

dude, he's in a rocket ship, he took off, right?

So this is the famous, uh, or infamous image of a Maya rocket that is actually a lid of a coffin, of a sarcophagus of a great ruler whose name was Kinichana Pakal. And he ruled a place that we know today as Palenque, beautiful, beautiful site in Mexico. And yeah, when they found his tomb in the 1950s, you know, this beautiful coffin with this carving, there were— there was kind of an interesting situation after they found it. Of course, nobody could read the hieroglyphs, right? In the '50s or '60s, there were all these texts around the coffin. It wasn't until the '70s that we could sort of read the name. Maybe in the '80s and '90s we could read actually what it was saying. It was talking about this great king, his birth date, his death date, all of his ancestors. Kind of waiting for him in the afterlife and all this stuff. The scene on the top is of K'inichan Apakal, the king. He's— he is kind of taking off in a way, right? But what he's doing is he's rising as the sun in the east. He's being resurrected. And he's not in a rocket.

He's just emerging out of the earth, out of the kind of this maw, this cave. Rising up as the sun into the sky. And it's really elaborate imagery, but that's in essence what it is. So it's really cool. Not a rocket ship, but not a rocket ship. He's going in the sky anyway.

Yeah, I remember just—

that must have, you know, I was watching that as like a perpetually stoned young boy or something, being like, I knew it, this is awesome. It must have been driving you nuts to watch TV and be like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this right now?

I know. Yeah, it does drive me nuts because, you know, well, here's the thing, right? Those narratives and it's not long before Ancient Aliens, long before the show, right? There were movies. Erich von Däniken and his book, you know, Chariots of the Gods. Yeah. Talking about all this stuff in the '70s. That was at a time when no one could come up with a counter-narrative, right? So that takes hold. Mm-hmm. It fills a void, right, to explain this stuff. Yeah. And now we can explain it. So this is the conundrum that I'm facing is, you know, we do understand it culturally, historically, but it is hard for us to fight against, you know, Ancient Aliens, which is on TV almost every night. Yeah, or whatever, right? That's what people— the people who are curious about this stuff, genuinely curious, don't have a whole lot to go to to understand it. And they may come up with a show like Ancient Aliens, and that's like, oh, okay, that must be the consensus view or something like that, right?

Yeah.

Not knowing that any archeologist thinks that's BS. Yeah, we're just not very good at communicating with the public, to be honest. Makes sense. You know what we do know. Yeah. And I'll be the first one to say that academics are terrible at communicating some of the realities we think are, you know, that are out there in terms of history and culture. So, I mean, this book, I hope, is a small effort to you know, tell what's really going on to explain some of what we think we know.

That's pretty. So in terms of like, you know, being an archeologist and like kind of like the, I guess like the day to day, like I just like, you ever have people because it is, you know, you're out there, you're digging, like you have people who like break stuff all the time and like, how do you deal? That must be, that must be like really tough, like really high stakes of like a, you know.

Yeah, yeah. It's So archeology is— well, it is a lot of fun. You're out in the boonies, often living in a camp with a bunch of people for months at a time. That's what I was doing in my younger days, at least, you know, in remote places. And it is a little crazy. I mean, you're studying this ancient stuff, but you're also kind of isolated and You know, I just remember living in the jungle before there was any internet or anything like that. You know, you kind of go bananas. Yeah, yeah. But, but also, yeah, there when you're digging, not necessarily a big pyramid or something, let's just say you're digging an ancient house and it might be a pile of rocks. It's a couple of feet high, you know, a platform in the jungle. There's pottery everywhere. There's a lot of stones, you know, wall stones. It's boring, maybe even for a specialist. It can be kind of boring. Yeah. You don't find cool things every day. Maybe once in a while there's something. And usually in my experience, the coolest stuff is discovered when there's like 2 days left.

Really?

Season. And they're like, oh shit, what do we do? Like a tomb, you know, royal tomb or something. Yeah. This is typical, right? Because, you know, after you dig deep, a lot of time passes, then you find the cool stuff. So it can be stressful that way. If you find something special, there's a lot of bureaucracy involved. Yeah. You have to let people know what you found in the government.

Yeah, they try to take it.

And you mean, you mean you get guards down to protect it?

I was wondering about the theft because I imagine it's like you guys have a pretty decent-sized crew digging, you know what I mean? So, yeah. I would imagine, you know, if I was just there digging, I wasn't an archeologist, I would definitely snag like an old mug or like, I, you know, you'd want to, right?

Well, I know for a fact that stuff does get taken by the laborers we sometimes have or, you know, back in the old day, archeologists were notorious themselves for stealing stuff, you know, in a way that probably at the time maybe didn't seem unethical. But, you know, 100 years ago, archeologists working in Mexico, you know, you'd go to their archives and you'd actually find artifacts that they brought out. You know, you wouldn't do that today.

No.

Yeah, but, um, what's the penalty?

You just get like, lose your like license? Like, how do you—

well, yeah, nowadays it's, uh, as a professional archeologist, you— all artifacts have to be cataloged. You have to report them to— if you're working in a foreign, foreign country, of course you have to report everything you you have and that you found. But, you know, there are— there's a dark side to all of this, too, which is like the art market and the market in looting ancient sites. And that's what we're often fighting against, sometimes directly, you know, looters in the field. I've come across gangs of looters in northern Guatemala who are tunneling into pyramids looking for tombs.

Yeah, that's my next question. What do you do for security? I guess you just said you get security around on the site because I'd be kind of like nervous. I was out in the woods.

Yeah, I'd be nervous.

Guatemala, I'm digging precious artifacts. I would assume someone's going to be like, yeah, let me get that.

Yeah, yeah.

No tunnel underneath it.

Yeah. Well, this is what we do too, as archeologists. We have to tunnel into— if the building is large enough and stable enough, that's the best way to understand its history, is to actually start digging a tunnel. It's like you're mining. Yeah. You know, into a pyramid. And the looters do the same thing. So the irony of a lot of this, too, is that the guys that archeologists have trained to dig, when we go home, they don't have a lot to do necessarily. And they're like, hey, let's go. We know how to dig these things now.

Yeah.

And they go to town. And so this actually is what happened a lot in the '70s and '80s, like There isn't an ancient Maya building in northern Guatemala that doesn't have a trench right through it, mostly by looting. Yeah. And it's really sad. But a lot of the stuff you see in museums today in the States, fantastic Maya pottery or whatever, a lot of that's not dug by archeologists, but found by looters, sold on the art market, collected by either museums or private collectors. I understand that because it's beautiful stuff. I mean, if I had the money and wasn't an archeologist, I would— I understand, you know, I'd love to have a Maya chocolate vase in my living room. Yeah. So there's, there's that constant struggle, right? There aren't enough archeologists to go around. And there are a lot of people who are really interested in digging this stuff up who maybe aren't scientists. And, you know, what's interesting is that all of this kind of becomes this big mix. It becomes this way of accessing the ancient past. It may not always be through archeology, but I'll tell you, the stuff in museums now that maybe doesn't have any context to it, or we don't know where it's from exactly, sometimes those objects have stories to tell.

That we can read or we can figure out, we can reconstruct it. And so that's part of it too, right? I do a lot of work in museums instead of digging in the dirt because— and there's still not enough of us doing this kind of research, frankly. So it's overwhelming. Yeah.

So you're saying there's just like a ton of stuff that's been found and it's just the matter of taking the time to decipher, right?

Figure it out. Yeah, yeah. We have thousands of— it's like having a bookcase or a library of thousands of books. And there may be, I don't know, 10 or 15 of us who can read them. And, you know, we have jobs and other things we're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of work still to be done to figure this stuff out.

So in terms of like, you know, Do you guys have a good sense of like what the Mayans, I guess, like philosophy, their religious worldview was and, you know, where were they at and how do they compare to like Aztecs? Or is there, is there like big differences or—

Yeah, great question. So we do know a lot about Maya philosophy and religion. I think it's hard to distinguish those things. Yeah. And it is a lot like the Aztecs because they're all part of this same kind of Mesoamerican world, which is sort of like, you know, think of Greece and Rome or the Mediterranean world where a lot of those myths and religious ideas are kind of the same, but maybe with different flavors. Same idea. One of the things that excites me, and I'm thinking of my next book actually a little bit, is one about this, about Maya. Religion and philosophy. Because as much as we can read about kings and wars and dynasties, we can also read about their gods and about their outlook on the world and their cosmology. And the Maya of today have a lot of those same ideas about, you know, the way the sun moves around the sky and how that creates this kind of overall structure of the universe. And that structure is reflected in a lot of other things. There's this really elegant cosmology to these folks, and it's not just in Mesoamerica. I think a lot of it is Indigenous American about the structure of the world.

And they were observing their world just like scientists do. Like, they didn't have the tools of modern science, but they were smart. And they could see how the world was working, the patterns of the seasons and of time and of agriculture and this sort of cadence of the world around them, that, that, that's what created their philosophy. It's rooted in, in literally rooted in kind of the earth and the sky and not to get too abstract about it, this, this is stuff that really I find fascinating because it's, it's like an archetype, you know, it's like one of these things that a lot of cultures share even beyond the Americas. I mean, if you go to traditional societies in China or philosophy there in Asia, in Africa, you see a lot of the same ideas about cosmology and, and structure. That I don't know, we've kind of forgotten some of this stuff in our world. But I don't know if you're a farmer in a traditional society and you're relying on the seasons and you're relying on, on, you know, how the sun works and how it moves and the rain. I mean, that creates a template that's kind of universal in, in, in the human experience, I think.

And so I'm kind of interested. I don't know a ton about outside Mesoamerica, but I'm really interested in, in kind of probing those deeper ideas. Not that people were sharing those ideas, but I think they're old. I think they're just really fundamental about, about existing on the, on the earth. And, and we can tap into it. So that's pretty cool.

Yeah, I, from, from just like the little bit I read about Cortés and the Aztecs, there was there was this idea with the Aztecs that like if they didn't complete the sacrifices, like that blood, the blood was like some universal life force that they would like, you know, display to appease the gods. And if they didn't, the skies like would literally crash down. And like, yeah, there was like a balance held by all this stuff that if they didn't do the rituals, right, it would just look like the sun would fall out of the sky or just everything would fall apart.

Yeah, yeah. But this is part of a bigger idea of, of renewal. Renewal. It's all about renewing the world. And sometimes it involved the offering of one's own blood in bloodletting or sacrifice. It could also involve lots of different transactions with the forces of nature to ensure renewal. So if you step back a bit and look at the bigger picture, there is a philosophy behind it, right? Which is that Humans have a responsibility to renew things. I think that's very powerful. You know, we don't do that in our world necessarily, right? We kind of do the opposite of that. Yeah, but, but in this pre-industrial, whatever world, you know, they were— they saw that, you know, there were problems with climate. Sometimes there were years of drought and so forth, you know. Not everything was stable every year. Right. So this is where that idea comes from. The Aztecs took it to a certain level in their ideology that that's different maybe from other cultures. But the underlying idea there is that, that humans have to do certain things. We can call that ritual. They didn't have a word for this as ritual. They just saw it as the work they had to do.

Yeah. To ensure that, yeah, the sun would come up again after the 52-year cycle or that, you know, it would be as strong as it once was or that the rains would come. I've been part of ceremonies as a kid. I was a part of a ceremony as a kid in Cobá, in this little Maya village. Now it's a bigger town. The rains weren't coming one year that we were there, my dad's project. And the village was in crisis because without that rain, there was— you couldn't even hunt the animals because they weren't around anymore and people could not grow their corn. So the local priest decided to have a rain ceremony. And this was completely genuine. This was not some kind of tourist thing for us. Yeah, yeah. This was for the village. And we had— they constructed an altar in the plaza of the ancient ruins. I mean, talk about atmospheric. I mean, it was wild. And it was an all-night ceremony to renew rain. And it's called the Chaac, which means to summon Chaac, the rain deity, who's a deity we see in the ancient art, by the way, and is one of the I was young.

I was 9 years old. The shaman, called a Xmen, a doer. He needed kids to be part of the ceremony. So he asked me to be one of the kids that would rotate around every, you know, like an hour here, an hour there. There were a lot of us to sit under this table, makeshift table. It was his altar and it was a four-sided model of the universe with the four world directions. And I was one of the four kids that sat under the table facing in the world directions to call the rain god. And I had to sit there for an hour in the middle of the night going, "Wah, wah, wah, wah." How old were you? I was 9. Whoa. I was a frog.

Yeah, that's awesome.

And I was calling the rain god. And we were all sitting around going, "What? What? What?" And, you know, there's fermented drinks going around and it's just wild. You know, no women were allowed. It was just men and the boys. And I mean, I was a kid from North Carolina and I was all of a sudden, you know, kind of in this thing.

Yeah.

And my dad was taking pictures and being the anthropologist, and I was just sort of going there, like, "What am I doing here?" But that experience for me was— it really, really brought home in retrospect to this idea that, you know, we have to do things to renew the world. And all religions do this, right? A Catholic Mass is kind of a renewal ceremony, right? Yeah. All sorts of ceremonies are renewals of the cosmos and they're doing it their way, right? And they do it in these weird ways that we think are— well, they are kind of nuts. I mean, sometimes these, you know, the human sacrifices that the Aztecs were doing was a kind of renewal because the life force is the blood of these people and the cosmos needs its life force. There are a lot of complicated ideas behind all of these. Things.

Yeah.

But in a nutshell, it is about renewal. That's pretty—

so what's, what's like the pantheon, like the Mayan pantheon looking like? Do they— do you have a good sense of like all the different gods like they do?

Yeah, well, they, they had it— so they, they existed in, in what we would call maybe an animate universe, in that, you know, we know that we're living beings and plants are living beings and animals, but they also saw an animation in mountains, in the earth, in the sky, anything that the sun that moves around, you know, it has animation. It's— it has agency in a way, right? So when we're talking about gods, we're talking about in many ways these kind of natural forces. And so they gave names to these— the rain deity, right? Who is still venerated. Yeah, he's, he's one of the most important, right? Because he's a storm. He's like a storm cloud. Chac. That's exactly what they call him. When there's a storm cloud coming in Yucatán, I remember this as a kid. They would say, "Aquí viene Chac." Here comes Chac.

He's coming.

He's coming, right? And he's coming with his machete to break the clouds, to bring the rain. And in ancient times it was an ax. Yeah, stone ax. But these ideas don't die, right? They're, they're still there. And it's, it's easy to say it's like mythology and stuff like that, but, but this is part of their lives, you know? And I think they had all of these deities and so-called gods and forces in their world. Some of them are ancestors, some of them are forces of nature, some of them are combinations of all of these things, right? So it gets to be very, very complicated very quickly. But yeah, they were, you know, like a lot of other cultures, they just saw this kind of animation in the universe around them.

That's pretty. And they're— I know they were notorious. The calendar is the big one.

That— yeah, time, time was animate. Time was a living thing.

Yeah, that was kind of cool because you always hear about the Mayan calendar, but in the book, the, uh, you were talking a little bit about how they seemed almost like pretty hell-bent on like really nailing down all those little kind of swirling gears of time and how it all fit together. And it was pretty— that was pretty neat. And that was one of the reasons it was, I guess, easier to decipher because they had such a good, a strong calendar system that you were able to see the date.

Aren't we lucky that they wrote everything down according to the very day when things happened, right?

Yeah.

So I've actually had these conversations with people who study Egyptian history or even Greek history. Like, there's a lot we know about that, but they may not know the exact day when Tutankhamun died. They might know the year more or less within a couple of years. We know because of the Maya calendar in the way they mesh with our calendar, the very day when K'inich Ah Naab of Palenque died and was resurrected. We know when the War of 378 happened at Tikal. That was on January 16th. We know when all sorts of things happened to the very day. And that's really unusual any time in ancient history, no matter where you are in the world. So we're really lucky we have that for the Maya. They were so interested in their cosmos and in the patterns of time and everything that they, they wrote that down with precision. So yeah, it's great for us.

How many days was the Maya year? Was it 360 or—

Well, they had our year too. I mean, they had 365 days.

What?

They had that. They had a notion. Well, This is cool. There we have a base-10 counting system, right? They had a base-20 counting system.

How's that? How's that?

Because we count our fingers, but they also counted toes.

Didn't even think of toes. So I've been doing math with my 6-year-old daughter. I'm going to bust my toes out now.

So, so once you get that idea of fingers and toes, okay, base-20. So they have a counting system that's 20 instead of 10. 100,000, right? It goes 20, 400, 8,000. Well, and so I mentioned this because they, they understood time to be 365 days like we do, even with the leap days in there. But they also had this idea of 360 days. Okay. Because 20 will go into that. They liked that. And they were like, okay, we'll use that as sort of a basic idea of a year in this calendar that they developed. And it doesn't track with real time, but they used it and they used it to create this massive calendar, the scale of which dwarfs our cosmology, you know, in terms of the Big Bang, like the dates they were writing sometimes in mythology go back you know, billions and billions and billions of years. So that's another kind of cool topic.

But well, so their mythology has dates and— Yeah, yeah.

No, they're talking about gods doing things way before our Big Bang. Yeah, it's, it's really crazy when you think about it.

What is their, like, Genesis myth? Like, do they, they have, like, a standard Genesis myth, or is it just kind of—

Yeah, they do. In fact, this is something I've been working on in the last few months. I haven't even published on this really, but I think there's one essential myth about the raising of the earth out of primordial sea, you know, which sounds like a lot of myths in the world, right? And it's this stone that is the surface of the earth. And there are four guys who kind of hold up this big table-like stone and create the world. That's recorded in some ancient myths I've been working on. The— it's interesting because Maya kings talk about renewal when they were marking their calendar festivities. They would have to recreate that myth by raising stones. These are the monuments we sometimes see at Maya sites today, or the stones that are symbols of of that. And there's another myth that's about kind of a hearth that is created in primordial time, 3 stones that get set in a triangle. And that's called the First Hearthplace. And that seems to be a really essential event in the creation of kind of the order of everything, right? So we have these— here's the struggle right now among us who are studying this stuff is we have these little episodes of myth and mythology.

I'm trying to create more of a narrative out of them all. Like, what's the real story? How do they all connect? Right. How does the stones over here connect to those stones over there? Anyway, I'm really optimistic that in the next several years we're going to be able to talk about Maya mythology, ancient Maya mythology, in a way that we talk about Egyptian or even Greco-Roman mythology. In terms of this stuff, right? So it's, it's exciting.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Well, nice. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, man. And, uh, yeah, if anyone wants the book, it is The Four Heavens by David Stewart. Good job. Thank you. Good job getting, uh, figuring out what this stuff means. I, I couldn't do it.

There's more to do too. It's great fun. Thank you, man.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

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