Ed Barnhart on Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America

Ed Barnhart

For the vast majority of human existence, we've been nomadic and we've done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they'd move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization.

Ed Barnhart

What I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people's hearts out. They had this just grotesque, violent bend, but in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of 1,000 people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry. But they were really just surgical about it. They'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just [inaudible].

Ed Barnhart

Yep, while the person was alive.

Ed Barnhart

Yes, I do. 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, and there's some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and gave us whole new civilizations we had no idea about. So yeah, it's happened and I think it'll happen again.

Ed Barnhart

Yes, I do. And we're beginning to find it. There are these huge, what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome. And I don't think we're ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet, you use your natural resources. And 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.

Ed Barnhart

I think at the base of the Andes where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there's a lot of potential there because that's where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground except for a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep. And even then only in the dry season, because that river rises over 100 feet every year.

Ed Barnhart

Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that's almost a certainty in a lot of places. 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. The power of nature and geology is really magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there's probably a lot that are just under the ocean, and just the wave action have destroyed them and what they haven't destroyed buried deep.

Ed Barnhart

I don't think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato's many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow of it, my money would be on Akrotiri. Akrotiri is what's left of a big city that was on the island of Santorini, and when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so vast that 70 miles away in Crete there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted what was ever there. But what's left on the side of the crater Akrotiri is strangely advanced for its age. And so if there's anything that's a model for Atlantis, as Plato explained it, it's Akrotiri.

Ed Barnhart

No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it's got streets, it's got plumbing, it's got little sconces for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with a lot of, especially in terms of hydraulic engineering, it's very advanced for being 3,500 years old.

Ed Barnhart

It's an amazing place and you can tell that it's just part of it because it's pretty close to where the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger.

Ed Barnhart

Right. And I think Akrotiri's actually a great example of that because here we have the side that did preserve, that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was completely obliterated. It was shot. Chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete 70 miles away, and Plato says that it sunk. It was on an island and it sunk. Well, that's exactly what happened to Akrotiri.

Ed Barnhart

If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.

Ed Barnhart

Absolutely.

Ed Barnhart

I reflect upon that often as an archeologist. I think about this great country that I live in and love and all the things we've achieved, but we're a baby historically speaking. We've been around 200 years. Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of 800, 1,000 years, and now they're ruins. But we're barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations.

Ed Barnhart

I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years ago, and that's when our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them into, especially, finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough, the mammoths died out and the bison died out, and they had to come up with different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers, and we had things we got from hunting, and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, the gathering started to be a much more important thing.

And I think that led to figuring out, "Hey, we could actually grow certain things." And gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops, and then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn't have to roam around anymore and that's where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they stayed in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence, we've been nomadic and we've done these wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region where they'd know, "Okay, we'll be in the summer in the mountains because berries and things, and then in the winter we'll be down here and we'll hunt," but they'd move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, I think there, that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization.

Ed Barnhart

Well, I have an explorer's heart, so I'm biased. I do think that we have an innate desire to see what's on the horizon and to impress other people with our achievements, things like that. We're social beings. That's really the edge that humans have, is our ability to work together. So I think that it's much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out, but usually the carrot does the job.

Ed Barnhart

Well, first off, I agree with you, that was pretty gangster. That's a hard place to live. I listened to some of your podcasts, that guy, Jordan Jonas, he cut the mustard, but I wouldn't have made it crossing there.

Ed Barnhart

The traditional theories are still somewhat valid, or at least on the table, that when that land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had and the game went across there because there was no barrier, and they followed them across. The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for archeology. We get all these evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a young archeologist, I would've never dreamed we'd have the information we have now and that information, a lot of it's coming out of Texas A&M. We see the traditional 12,500 years ago that there was a migration, but now we're seeing one that's almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago.

And now the thing that seems like madness but might be true is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archeologist, it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that, but now it's really very clear that they came over at least by 30,000 and the bridge opened and closed, then open and closed.

Ed Barnhart

Right.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah. I mean, they didn't roll in and immediately make New York, but there were people. And there were definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. When the bridge closed, DNA mutated, and so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the Americas that don't exist otherwise, and that same haplogroup game has been showing us more and more that people came across Siberia. It's not Africa. It's not Western Europe. Those are still, they've become fringe theories, but they're not totally eradicated. DNA is a developing science as well, and I think we all need to keep that in mind, that it's not like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers. And sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think we don't need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA, but they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia, that all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.

Ed Barnhart

I think it was big leaps. Now, this is just mostly guess, I'll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn't mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.

Most of those guys have O-blood type and they're haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered the U.S. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait. We have no real evidence to say they came in mass across Oceania. So they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to South America.

Ed Barnhart

I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there.

Ed Barnhart

And then mixed in with the next groups that came.

Ed Barnhart

There's an interesting correlate in Europe where today everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland, but actually Celtic people started in Eastern Europe and it was the entire area. And when Rome swept everything and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world, Ireland, that they were like, "Ah, we're not going to mess with those guys on that island. We'll leave them be." So now it looks like that's the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually it's the fringe.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah. And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about very old carbon-14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed as, "No, it didn't get a date of 40,000 years." But I think we're going to come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand.

Ed Barnhart

And I wonder whether the similarities that all those cradles have, it could be a shared much deeper past that they all have, or it could be a more Star Trek thing where Captain Kirk was always talking about the theory of parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development and that, that could be the answer to it.

Ed Barnhart

I think it's a case by case thing. I think if we look globally, I'd lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas and we have a shorter time period where the things that become major civilizations, now, I'll say up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from Asia and that, as they got separated, that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see. I'm a big proponent that there are commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a single distant origin.

Ed Barnhart

Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You're right. Especially as an American, our country's so big and we are so far removed from these places, we don't even think about it. But more and more we're seeing things that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia. It's all on the Peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday we might start talking about the Amazon more and more, but right now what we've got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE along the coast of Peru. And there are big stone-built pyramids and temples, and they're amazingly isolated, even now that we've found them.

Some of them, Caral is one of the most famous ones just north of Lima, we've known about it for a couple of decades now, how old it is. But every time I visit there, it's like I visited the moon. There's absolutely nobody there, not for miles. It's amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet still nobody goes to see it. It's not easy to get to.

Ed Barnhart

Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That desert gets really ugly quick and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched. When people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately. Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands, thousands of pyramids, and not all of them were built of stone. Some of them were Adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly, so now they're not exciting places to visit today. What's funny too, we started off talking about whether I think there's a lost civilization out there, there are definitely things that are still to be discovered, but there are some things that were discovered 100 years ago and archeologists, or back then they call themselves antiquarians, just passed over.

Caral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has, some of those pyramids that were made by the Moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics, things that you can sell for big money. But Caral was found a long time ago, but the archeologist was like, "God, no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good. We can't sell anything here." And then about the 1970s or '80s, somebody said, "Hey, no ceramics. Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place."

Ed Barnhart

Caral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it until about 1800 BCE.

Ed Barnhart

Gosh, it should be some sort of, I'll be a flaky archeologist like, "This is a place where rituals took place."

Ed Barnhart

So many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that's about what we got. A place like this, I know the one we're looking at here, I've been here a couple of times, in the pyramid behind it, the rubble's built in a way where the building won't rock apart. This is a very earthquake-prone place, but the buildings haven't fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all wiggle around and don't allow the building to fall down. And inside these, we've also found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there. There's a lot of people that see that and go, "Oh, look at that. They were sacrificing babies, these monsters."

I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices, Coral's evidence being one of them, I think it's more about the tragic nature of infant mortality. In the past, it was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn't even really properly name their kid until they got to five, because chances were they were going to die. And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices, I think they're putting them in special places because they mourn the death of their kids, and it just happened a lot more frequently then.

Ed Barnhart

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ed Barnhart

In fact, there's one that's now pushing 6000 BCE. That's thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one's called Huaca Prieta. And it was not an Egyptian pyramid, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.

Ed Barnhart

Well, my rude answer is pretty boring, really. A lot of people ask me, "Why are there pyramids all over the planet? Is that a coincidence?" I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid. Any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down, and if he wants one that's going to stay and be tall, he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that building something big and tall together is one of those human things like, "We built that. That will be here after we're gone. People will remember who we were." If there's any human commonality, it's fear of our own deaths and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first big monuments like that were probably a group of people saying, "We're going to do something that people will remember forever."

Now, that being said, remember we were just talking about Huaca Prieta and this one that's almost 6000 BC now, is the first one, that one's a funny case. We just talked about all these lofty goals, but actually I'm pretty sure that Huaca Prieta's first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash. I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town and it stunk. It's on the coast. It stunk like fish. And somebody said, "If we just bury this thing with dirt, it won't smell anymore." And then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said, "Well, it's squishy. If we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell." I really think that the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about deflating, huh?

Ed Barnhart

Yeah. Not to jump ahead, but in North America, where they also made pyramids, there's this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat. So these piles of shells would be near communities, and they probably became landmarks, but eventually they started burying their dead inside those too. Probably, again, about stink and about, "Well, we don't want the dogs to eat them. Maybe we'll put them in the middle of the shell pile." But then that all of a sudden became this, " That's where my grandfather's body is. That's where great-grandfather's body is." And all of a sudden people started being attached to place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when the very first pyramid was built in the Ohio area by the Adena people, it was built out of dirt, but it's full of bodies. And I think it's an echo of an old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds.

Ed Barnhart

Well, I think we're still piecing that together. Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we're still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it's hard to answer that question is, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture? We have in the Americas this long period of time that we call the Paleo-Indian time where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called The Archaic, where they're just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody's coming up with a cool different kind of arrowhead. They go back and forth with different hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years and then finally they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture.

It used to be archeology that was just the end all, be all. Civilization starts with the invention of agriculture. And we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that's been discounted. Peru was a big part of that. That area of Caral, it's connected to another city on the coast called Aspero. Aspero starts about the same time, but they're all about fishing. They have no farming. And Caral, who's upriver from them, is farming, but funny enough, they're not really farming food. They're farming cotton and they're making nets and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it's not as simple as, it's just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in, how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we're no longer scared about running out of food?

Ed Barnhart

I do think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. Actually, the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, all these places that we have civilizations that grew up, you know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.

Ed Barnhart

In South America, Caral and Aspero that I was just talking about, it's weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and things that we call temples, but we don't really know what went on in there. And there's no…

Things that we call temples, but we don't really know what went on in there, and there's no hints of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE. This culture called Chavin starts up and their main temple is up in the Andes in this place of path of least resistance between the Amazon and the coast. It's about three days walk either way, from this place where this temple is. That's where we start seeing the very first religious iconography and it's all over the temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast, but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles, and those don't come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of the Amazon.

Ed Barnhart

I do. I do think it did, and you're right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archeology can't see them at all. Sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they create and lead to, but there's an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? Those are things that archeology just can't get at.

Ed Barnhart

That's really what I'm in it for, trying to understand these people and it's real detective work, and we know we're dealing with a totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. If we look around this room here, if 2,000 years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left and what would we think happened here?

Ed Barnhart

That is exactly what I think, and I think it's all about this fanged deity who somewhere, thousands of years ago, crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That could have been a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon. But he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Viho Masse in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.

Ed Barnhart

Well, there are bona fide pantheons. Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons, and I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the art looking for them, and they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun God, and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, Texas as an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology, there's a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt. He's got really identifiable traits.

He also likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around, but he's the fanged deity and he's there. He shows up in Chavín de Juantar, the capital of that Chavín culture, and he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity they call Viracocha, but Viracocha is the fanged deity. When we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this almost Islamic thing where they say you can't understand the face of Viracocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they'll make him just a blob, like he's just unknowable, but he's at the very top. I think we're misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings.

If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course, Christianity is monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise, but who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons and Jesus Christ? I don't even know who the Holy Spirit is, but he's some sort of supernatural being. But it's that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That's where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient Andean art is.

Ed Barnhart

Well, certainly without the advent of writing, depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them, and there are certain, what we call diagnostic elements. We can pull apart the same sort of thing like in the Greek pantheon, you know by their dress and what they're holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from Zeus by the different things they're holding lightning bolts or tridents or whatever. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them. So that's how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say, "Okay, here's a deity here in Chavín culture." Now we move forward 500 years. Now we're in Moche and Nazca culture. Where are the deities here? And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures.

He's got circular eyes, he's got a fanged mouth. He's got claws on his hands and feet. He's a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt. And then not so much in Chavín, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they're like, in the old literature, the Moche will call him the decapitator deity, but then they have these other like, "Oh, here's the crab deity and here's the fox deity." But if you look at them, the crab deity is just that guy's face coming off of a crab, and the fox deity is that guy's face coming off of a fox.

So I think on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was able to turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted, and he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the fanged deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don't have anymore.

Ed Barnhart

Right. Wari has them too, Tiahuanaco, that famous place, Pumapunku, he's all over there.

Ed Barnhart

I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavín, there's a later one in Inca times called Pachacamac that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they're sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So Chavín was a place where people from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in the archeology there. There's these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the fanged deity all over them that have… One labyrinth will have all pottery. The next labyrinth will have a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone. So people are showing up and giving this tribute and they're learning and then they're going back to their communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became just like pilgrimage spots do. Somebody goes back and they build a temple to the fanged deity.

Ed Barnhart

I think he had two sides of the coin. A lot of the Hindu gods are… One aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people's heads off, and he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity, but then there are other funny things about him. He is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts. When it comes to the Moche, there's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men, and some of them show their faces transforming into that fanged deity, he is acting through them.

But the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fanged deity has a little puppy. He has a puppy that's just dancing around his feet and jumping up on him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he's in these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house and a fanged deity, and there's a puppy just scratching at the door like, "Hey, you forgot me." And then finally, one day I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fanged deity. I was like, "Oh, he really is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy?"

Ed Barnhart

So yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.

Ed Barnhart

Puppies, yeah, it's true.

Ed Barnhart

And I've added rock and roll to that list since actually. Rock and roll music is also a big part of it.

Ed Barnhart

They call spirits down. There's this whole spirit world. There's the ancestors and the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice, they don't talk about the fanged deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back. It was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don't talk about him much anymore though he's still around. They're around Trujillo. They call him Iopec. But music, in the Amazon, they play flute. Sometimes a chorus of women sing and that's supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There's a spirit that's hurting the person that's sick, and then the priest or the shaman or the corundero, whatever you want to call him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what's going on.

So when the music starts, that's bringing those spirits in and people don't see them unless they've imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is this hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was Ayahuasca. On the coast, it was San Pedro cactus, but that's what allows you to actually see that other world.

Ed Barnhart

Bold move.

Ed Barnhart

Oh, I think longer than anybody can remember, but it's a natural plant that's been there forever. I think that it's thousands and thousands of years. That's another thing Chavín de Juantara was talking about where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There's this wall on the backside that faces the Amazon side. So if you're entering the city from the Amazon path, you see this wall first, and it's a bunch of faces that some of them are humans. Some of them are total jaguar and some of them are transforming in-between. But there's a group of them that are midway through transformation and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that's coming down their face. San Pedro doesn't do that to you, but Ayahuasca does.

Ayahuasca traditionally, they'd take a blow gun and just shoot it up your nose or up your ass, but a lot of times up your nose and when it shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the backside of this temple from 3,000 years ago.

Ed Barnhart

I think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like they open the mind now.

Ed Barnhart

In the Americas, yes, I do, though hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they're global and they can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were outside of the Americas. So they were part of the experience here in a way that they just couldn't be in other places.

Ed Barnhart

I think in terms of South America, they probably really were.

Ed Barnhart

In North America where we're in a more northern climb here, and there are less of them, not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics, things like tobacco was always a big part of it. There's more than one way to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation. And for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation, and then they'd cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe triggered hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs. I would much prefer the drugs route.

Ed Barnhart

Hallucinogens are poisoning us. They're killing us. It's a near death state and people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that other world, death. You entered this other world and that when you took this mighty dose of poison, it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.

Ed Barnhart

That picture is evolving. Forever, it was just the Chavin people that we've been talking about. The ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture, and they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff, but then all of a sudden, we find Kerala. The next one that we've barely even begun looking at, but it's probably older than Kerala, is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year and just from the bus on the highway, I could see, "That's a pyramid out there. Oh, there's another one." And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It's again, 3000 BC. We're just barely beginning to understand them. Kerala frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. We've got stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on, and they didn't have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don't know what those people believed.

Ed Barnhart

That's our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.

Ed Barnhart

Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where it is center around towards Columbia.

Ed Barnhart

And the City of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Xingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. People don't really think about it on the map, but the entire United States would fit inside the Amazon. That's how big that place is. And these two are on either end, but both of them have evidence of civilizations. It's lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is they'd make these big mounds and then they'd make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been found in the Xingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people.

Again, it's not stone built and it's been under the forest forever. So it's very torn up, but it's there. Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now, and a thing that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these what we call like geometric earthworks. So there's more and more evidence of these civilizations. It's not, it could be there. It's there for sure.

Ed Barnhart

Yep.

Ed Barnhart

So quickly.

Ed Barnhart

And it happened for sure in the Amazon. One of the ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where people were in the Amazon, because yes, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence, but they're finding more and more of these places that they call terra preta, which is black earth, and they're huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes. And what they're saying is that that really dark earth couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes, that sometime in the distant past that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the point where they totally turned the soil black and it's much more enriched.

And when I took a trip into the Amazon, I went from Manaus, up the river, the Black River a couple of days, and went and met some different communities. And I asked them about this black earth, and they were like, "Yeah, that's why we're here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra preta, and that's where we're going to put our village, because that's a place that all of our gardens work. The other places, they don't."

Ed Barnhart

Yeah, there's so many of them. A thing that excites the world about archeology right now is Gobekli Tepe, and this 10,000, now Karahan Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called the Tas Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago, but it was just an archeologist rowing through the area and ask a sheep herder, "Hey, you guys know where anything ancient is?" "Oh yeah, let me show you this." And then all of a sudden we've got a lost civilization. And the shepherds always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them.

Ed Barnhart

Well, I've met Graham, and personally I like him. He's a nice guy, got a nice sense of humor, and I think he's smart. And I also think he is a very good researcher. He and I are working on the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham's idea that a single, now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don't see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art, historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he's very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agree to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation.

Ed Barnhart

Frankly, I agree with him. It's just like what I was just talking about. It's the conclusion part that we differ from.

Ed Barnhart

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. They're everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle, we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question and also a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don't know and what could be.

Ed Barnhart

My main point of disagreement is that his… And his ideas evolve like everybody's. No scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die. His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain. A core of them are that there was a very advanced single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions, and the younger Dryas hypothesis is part of that. Most recently, he used to not say that. Now he's into this meteor thing, but he believes that that civilization was destroyed, but that members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world's civilizations for the next revival.

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 of… In his early books, he suggested it's Atlantis. I don't think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. And archeologists, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we could have the story wrong, but one thing we're real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can't even find a potsherd from.

Ed Barnhart

Right.

Ed Barnhart

Well, that's the bottom line.

Ed Barnhart

Everything's theories were… And as responsible scientists, we're trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That's one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps. We're supposed to be disproving what we think is happening, not proving it.

Ed Barnhart

Yes, it's job security. I like that part. But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if we are busy burning books of ideas that we don't like, that's where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.

Ed Barnhart

Well, a lot of them are these… By uncontacted, we mean we don't know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are, but places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them. So we have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and talk to us, that's one thing, but we don't go out and there looking for them, but they do seem frozen in time, and I don't think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that. But we were saying earlier that humans change based on pressures of their environment. Mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change, it's pressure. And one thing the Amazon is, once you figure out how not to die in it, it's a paradise of food. Food's fallen from the sky all the time there, and once you learn to adapt to that environment, you've got very little need. There's no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.

Ed Barnhart

And not just foreigners. They attack each other. The Yanomamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other.

Ed Barnhart

I'm a relatively peaceful person, but I've got the monster in me like everybody does.

I've got the monster in me, like everybody does. And I think that these, it's cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Yąnomamö, they really, part of the right of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village. And they go in there, they oftentimes, the way they don't let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically, but they typically go and steal women from far-off communities, and that starts a big fight.

Another thing that starts fights, that when nobody even fought, is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn't seen as a biological thing, it was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick, the question is asked, "Well, what spirit is menacing him and who called it out on him?" And then, the rumor starts, "Well, I bet you it was Joe over there in that other community. He's still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter, and we ought to go over there and kill Joe, and then he'll get better." And so this round of never-ending violence, like Hatfields & McCoys had that thing, and the people of New Guinea also do that. So there are certain areas, mostly wooded areas, now that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural institution.

Ed Barnhart

And yeah, there was a fascinating story in Peru, I guess it was probably like eight years ago or something. But there was a ranger from one of the biology stations who, just in the by and by of protecting his area, met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone. Not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods, not in their community. And he started to learn their language over a couple years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day, a couple of them just came out of the woods, and just plugged him with arrows, and just killed him, and then they went back in the woods. Like, "That's the one guy who understands what we're saying, we should kill him and move our village."

Ed Barnhart

You know, everybody's got it, I think. I think we need to listen to our better angels, because if we don't, we, as a human species, can easily devolve into just using violence against others to get what we want. It's a daily choice we make not to be savages.

Ed Barnhart

And our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive, where somebody's not dead at the end of it.

Ed Barnhart

That's another complicated one, another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is a lot of the questions in the Amazon and what we're talking about now is the Patan and the mountains there. Those aren't places archeologists want to live, they're horrible. I mean, I've been there. I don't want to live in a tent and eat rations. I want to live in a nice town. So a lot of the places where the answers are, we still really haven't gotten there, because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they're looking at, and tough enough to want to be there. I've done my tour of duty, I'm now in a nice little podcast studio. But seriously, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya, very close to where the time period for that Chavin culture, is about 1800 BCE.

There's a culture that's some called the Mokaya, not Maya, but they're on the Pacific coast, where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It's called the Soconusco. And those are the first people that are really going to be culturally Maya, and they're interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as Mexico's mother culture, which is the Olmec. They're kind of the same thing as we were talking about in South America, where the Maya, the original Maya, there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion. 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, in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Ed Barnhart

I just finished filming a whole thing on the Olmecs and their interaction with the Maya for The Great Courses. I'm thrilled for it to come out next spring. I think they co-evolved. Archeology, in this regard, is the worst enemy of this. So we put these names on cultures, we talk about how they evolve from one to another, we draw these lines where there aren't any. We make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name, where I'm pretty sure they didn't care about any of those names. But the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's happening in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time.

The Olmec are really bringing the religion part, but the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other stone types. So you've got the Olmec in the middle, where Mexico gets skinny, and it gets swampy down there. That's called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That's where the Olmec are. Then, you've got the Maya to the east of them. Then, you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the people called the Zapotecs, they're rising up. And then, you have the Valley of Mexico, which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia. All those areas are interacting with each other.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah, sure.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah, the time period we're talking about, where the Olmec are there, 1000 BC is a great midpoint of it. I'd say it starts about 1800 BCE, and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone, and a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happened. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here, I'd say about halfway through the Chihuahua Desert, up there in the top left, that's about the boundary of Mesoamerica. There's this big desert where almost nobody lives, and once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral Pueblo people of what's now America, the Four Corners area. They're not Mesoamerican, they have different lives.

Ed Barnhart

Modern Mexico ends, right, you see the name Maya there with the white line around it?

Ed Barnhart

That's Guatemala, so Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America.

Ed Barnhart

But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras, and then it's really kind of a no man's land. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, they really, they're neither. They're not Mesoamerica, they're not South America. They're more South America, because they've got some gold there. But then, basically, you get on the other side of Panama, and you're fully in South America, with two distinct groups, too. You've got the guys that are on the Andes, on the west coast, and then you have the Amazon.

Ed Barnhart

Yep.

Ed Barnhart

Just the Andes and the coast to the Pacific there. That's Andean civilization.

Ed Barnhart

Not that archeology can prove, but it's almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it's just, it's biased to think that these people couldn't travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did, but there's all sorts of hints like that first ceramics I was talking about, that the Maya made, they show up strangely sophisticated technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for 1,000 years before. So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South America to the Maya.

Ed Barnhart

We're still piecing it together. You know, I'd be lying if I told you I had the answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. They were small people. Generally speaking, people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller, probably about just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.

Ed Barnhart

I think there's some truth to it. I mean, the Pygmies are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small. There is definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, there's a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has hand prints in the cave. It's somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand, like a negative print. We can date that charcoal, and it comes from 10,000 years ago, and the hands are all small. It's typical Old Mexico. I walked right up to these things and could put my hand… I didn't mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands, and they're all smaller than my Northern European hand, and so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10,000 years ago, or it was people of Maya stature who did it.

Ed Barnhart

And actually, we have one that's I think 2,000 years older now, just a couple years ago, again in Yucatan, in a cave, they found a woman they named Naia now, and she's like 12,000 years old.

Ed Barnhart

Was kind of a co-evolution, the technology of ceramics I think got there through an interaction with—

Ed Barnhart

I've been doing a deep dive on this for this Olmec course that I just did, and it really does seem like these other cultures that have jade, and hematite, and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp, and building things out of dirt, but they were importing those materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts of religious iconography, and then exporting them back to them.

Ed Barnhart

No, the fanged deity is nowhere in Central America and Mesoamerica, that's why… There's jaguars, there's jaguar iconography, but it's not the same thing. This whole jaguar transformer deity does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.

Ed Barnhart

That's a question I've spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life, and certainly, they saw, like every ancient group did, like, "Are those the gods? Why are those things far away?" But I think that the Maya especially looked at it with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night, and if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They're just this blanket, they're like this curtain behind me. They're the stage upon which some very important players are dancing, and that's the Moon, the Sun and the planets.

There's five planets we can see visibly. So they started watching, like, "Why are just those seven moving differently than the rest?" And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The Sun, of course, was also involved in the agricultural cycle, so that was important in and of itself. But the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math, and seeing that there is a repeated cycle, and then coming up with mythology around them, like Venus for them was associated with war, and they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus.

Sometimes, in the classic period Maya, it was the first appearance of Venus as the Morning Star. That was a good time to go to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post-classic, with Chichén Itzá being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like, if you watch Venus day after day, it goes slowly up every day, and then when it hits its highest point as Morning Star in the morning, it goes down to the Earth like three times as fast. All of a sudden, it just shoots down and hits the Earth. And so the people of post-classic Maya civilization saw that as the gods shooting a spear into the Earth, and that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was like war time, when the spear is going to hit the earth.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah, and they did it really well. Now, of course, they are the only ones to develop a fully-elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the quipu, but it's so different than our writing. We're still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there's math there, too. But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next generation, who would then do it more and do it more.

That's how they figured out kind of the Holy Grail of ancient astronomy. How good were they was whether they could see the procession of the equinoxes, the fact that we're just barely wobbling, and there's a 26,000-year period where the stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It's 26,000 years. But the Maya we're able to figure out, "Wait, it's moving one degree every 72 years," and did a calculation based on where it should be in the ancient past, and they were using constellations. They're showing us they know by saying like, "This planet's in this constellation right now, and 33,000 years ago, it would be in this constellation."

Ed Barnhart

I think we absolutely could, and that's actually one of the things that I'm hoping to move the needle on in my generation, with my career, is to give these cultures the respect they deserve, as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect. There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment. Their math is incredible, their hydraulic engineering is incredible, their chemistry is incredible, and so I hope to talk about these things differently, as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way.

Ed Barnhart

Don't know, you got another five hours?

Ed Barnhart

No, I'm kidding.

Ed Barnhart

Yeah, I do this just to show the world that calendar system is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system they made, just like our system is.

Ed Barnhart

It's neat how obsessed… They were really math nerds. It wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that interlocked into each other, like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But the Tzolk'in is their oldest one, and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260-day count. No weeks, no months. It's just 13 numbers combined with 20 day names, for a total of 260 days, and then it goes again.

Everybody in the highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they're supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit and what's supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the Mom, the Grandmother, Grandfather spirits, and they talk to each one of those days, and they pray to them. There's now an association of some 8,000 people that are called [inaudible], that are daykeepers who are keeping the days, and they're also like community psychologists, almost. People come to them and say, "You know, my life is mixed up. What's wrong here?" "Well, let's ask the Mom. Okay, well, it looks like you're not doing this or that, or you know what, you're an accountant? You're not supposed to be an accountant. You're supposed to be a midwife. What are you doing? You're living your life wrong. You're a Kibʼ. You need to start being a Kibʼ person."

Ed Barnhart

Right. Like, I'm Kibʼ, I'm 13, Kibʼ, and it's funny how accurate a lot of them are. Mine is basically, is I'm an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me, so my family still prospers. Like, well, God, that's horribly accurate.

Ed Barnhart

Absolutely.

Ed Barnhart

And the Maya really feel this, in this system. So that's the core system. This 260-day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago, and it's the one that's most important today.

Ed Barnhart

Most Maya agree with this today, and who knows what the original architects, thousands of years ago were thinking, but it's nine months, it's the human gestation period. So if you conceived on the day 13, monkey, chances are your kid's coming out on or near 13, monkey, and I think it's beautiful. I mean, if that's right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, "We need a count of time for us," they didn't look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. "What's the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?" and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.

Ed Barnhart

The Haab is the solar calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it's second, though, because when they start talking about it, they use all the symbols and the numbers from the 260 one. They say, "Well, we need a solar one, too. Let's just keep counting this another 105 days, and we'll get to 365."

Ed Barnhart

Right.

Ed Barnhart

Right. Though, interestingly, they never put a leap year in. The Haab is also called the vague year, because it's just 365, which means every year, they're off a quarter of a day, and eventually, it starts really adding up. In fact, it's even caused modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight math from 1,000 years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of Eastern Guatemala. They write me nasty emails saying, "I don't know what time the year is," but their relatives changed it in the 1950s, because their agricultural cycle was so far off. They moved it 60 days back to make it in the spring again, but it drifts, which is strange, because it's not a very good thing for the agricultural cycle. It's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for.

Ed Barnhart

The Long Count is their really mysterious, cool one, because it's a linear count of days, which are not like them. It's a bunch of cycles, like ours. [Transcript continues — content truncated at source extraction limit]