#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America

"But we have 33 Maya languages today that are mutually unintelligible. And we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that the glyphs are in."

"The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the written language was a dead language. But Yuri, not knowing any of that, went about it in the way that he was taught."

"There's one long string that the little ones dangle off of, and each one of the dangling strings have sets of knots on them. The knots, some of them are mathematical quipus, and those, we can just do the math."

"Life cannot continue without death being part of the cycle, and we get our lows, we get our highs, but the cycle continues forever."

"The cyclical nature of life is something that we must embrace. It's part of existence and our evolution."

"You know, I do two different things on that podcast: Sometimes I teach about cultures, but my favorite ones are the stories of my adventures."

""And created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious ideas that look similar to everybody building pyramids.""

""We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow. The idea that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large, that we can't even find a pot shirt from.""

"Religion is really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful ideas. They're the strongest myths that tie people together."

"But Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands, thousands of pyramids."

"The earliest pottery in all of the Americas is found in the middle of the Amazon, pointing to interesting cultures developing there."

"So now they don't look... they're not exciting places to visit today. You know what's funny too? We started off talking about whether I think there's a lost civilization out there."

"I mean, I could see how that would piss people off, but it's also a pretty powerful way to say, like, the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect are now in the capital."

"Does that frighten you? Yes, terrifying, but I am an optimist."

"But the Olmec have this religion they develop and they start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in the religion that's being created by the Olmec, who are to the north of them."

"We didn't steal them. We have given them a new place of honor, and you're welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did."

"So what's the dating on Corral? Corral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization until about 1800 BCE."

"It was a story of domination, of erasure essentially. In North America, there's a new term in the literature that I like. We call it the Mississippian Shatter Zone."

"I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate, especially under distress."

"I really think we're making headway in this generation, and it's exciting to be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together."

"Her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes, apparently."

"I think there were missing stories in our understanding of mythology. It's about how across thousands of years these ideas and beliefs evolved."

"I have a lot of questions to ask here, but just a natural stupid confusion I have. So first, did the Maya or the Olmec come first? And are they distinct groups?"

"Okay, simple. It's the truth. It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here. There's a great site in Nova Scotia called L'Anse aux Meadows, which definitely has what's left of a Viking colony."

"Margaret Mead famously said, 'Never underestimate the power of small groups working together. Those are the only people who have ever changed the world.' This highlights how collective action can bring about significant change."

""And we're gonna make it part of the curriculum for every kid in the US to know the full history of this country. That's a great project.""

"But the Maya, they love it. They're not spooked about it at all. They think it's exciting."

""That's simply not true. I think it should be part of our history books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce as part of American history the part before European contact.""

"I think they co-evolved. Archeology in this regard is the worst enemy of this. We put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolved from one to another, and we draw these lines where there aren't any."

""And I think that kids in the K through 12 level should grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492.""

""But there could be a lot of other explanations. And for, even if it's a simple, compelling explanation, there has to be evidence for it, right? And what would that evidence look like?""

"In the first 50 years after contact, it's estimated that 90% of the Native American population was decimated due to diseases brought by Europeans, illustrating the tragic consequences of the Columbian Exchange."

"All of a sudden, these civilizations went through a loss of knowledge when their elders and knowledge keepers died off due to the rapid spread of infectious diseases, marking a critical turning point in their history."

"I think it's a failing of archaeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities, populations moved, no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm."

"What do you think explains that? It seems to have declined very rapidly, and that's how we get the mysterious Maya collapse. That's one of the great mysteries of the Maya civilization."

"And in fact, we have found some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we've got Gobekli Tepe, and we've got the stuff that's going on in the Amazon."

"We see, we know when a city was attacked and burned. Mostly that didn't happen. People moved and migrated. I think a lot of things led to this."

"In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy, Sahagún, who was a very responsible chronicler, that was pretty specific that there was a distribution thing."

"So yeah, it's happened and I think it'll happen again. Do you think there's a lost civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up or is hiding the evidence of?"

"So the llamas were the kings. And that was one thing that, like, for some reason, the Inca owned everybody's llama instantly. And he would take anything he wanted."

"Well, I think there would have been an Aztec empire that would last for a very long time? Well, I think they would have finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate, and everybody hated the Aztecs."

"In the Amazon, there's not a whole lot of stone. What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles."

"I think a lot of things there, that looks like Rome in the Amazon. I don't think we're ever gonna find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon."

"The Grand Canyon was dug by water. There's this wimpy little river in it right now, and you can't possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did."

"If something existed a very long time ago, it’s very possible that it was just eaten up by nature. Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that's almost a certainty in a lot of places."

""The quipus were more than mere records; they represented a complex system of communication that indicated a written language, yet we still can't break the code today," indicating the ongoing mystery surrounding these artifacts and their function in society."

""Diego de Porres had a vision to teach the communities, but the reality was harsh. Their quipus were burned, and the individuals that knew their history and language faced dire consequences," illustrating the tragic loss of cultural heritage due to colonial actions."

""The power dynamics shifted from kings to councils in the Maya civilization, suggesting that over time, the structure of governance adapted, revealing complexities in leadership and social organization," offering insight into the evolution of authority and democracy."

"The long count system is interesting because it estimates the year as 360 days which is miserably off a solar year, leading to an array of complications in how ancient civilizations understood and celebrated time."

""DNA has been a total game changer for archaeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before.""

""But now it's really very clear that they came over at least by 30,000 years ago. The bridge opened and closed, and opened and closed. That's during the Ice Age.""

"There's a strong thread of mythology surrounding floods in different societies, indicating a shared understanding of environmental change, which feeds into modern discussions about climate and reshaping culture."

""So now it looks like that's the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually it's the fringe. So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans.""

"Astrology, despite being seen as unscientific, might carry wisdom that connects various beliefs about circumstantial events and time. When looking at astrology from a Maya calendar perspective, there may be unseen correlations."

"But the facts that he's basing that on are that terra preta, are the huge geometric earthworks, are the ever-increasing evidence of them. They are now from the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana."

"There's where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization from the past and that they all hold things in common because they have this common ancestry."

"'So Chavin was a place where people from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together.' This highlights the significant role of Chavin as a melting pot of cultures and beliefs, bridging gaps among different communities."

"'In fact, we saw it in the archeology there.' This emphasizes the critical evidence gathered from archaeology that supports the discussion about ancient rituals and their societal implications."

"It is fascinating how accurately the Maya created a calendar that not only recorded time but also intertwined their agricultural civilization with their understanding of heavenly cycles."

"The Maya civilization established very ritualized times for conflict, which revolved around celestial observations. They regarded Venus as a significant factor in timing such events."

"'I think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like they open the mind now.' This statement suggests a continuity in the use of hallucinogens across time, emphasizing their importance in facilitating spiritual and creative thinking."

"The Aztecs believed that their agricultural success was contingent on maintaining a balance through sacrifices, which led them to conclude, 'it's because we haven't been killing enough people.' They associated droughts with insufficient blood offerings."

"In their rituals, they employed a technique to extract hearts while the person was still alive, demonstrating a gruesome but efficient process that reflected their beliefs in human sacrifice being sacred and necessary to appease their gods."