Archaeologists REVEALS the FORGOTTEN Mayan Prophecy & Lost History! NEW EVIDENCE! with Ed Barnhart

Ed Barnhart 0:00
Gods did not directly communicate with humans, humans. They communicate with the spirit world, which is somewhere between the level of the gods and the spirits. And a lot of what happens in the spirit world is communicating with ancestors. The the modern Maya today who live in Guatemala have a group of people called date keepers. There's over 7000 Day keeper priests in an association still. So it's a strong tradition. Millions of people see this and they talk about the 20 days of the Maya calendar as spirits that are all ancestors. And they that they all have different powers and do different things. And they're all collectively called the mom, which is the grandmother grandfather spirits.

Alex Ferrari 1:00
I'd like to welcome the show Ed Barnhart. How you doing Ed?

Ed Barnhart 1:02
I'm doing great. Thanks for inviting me.

Alex Ferrari 1:03
Thank you so much for coming on the show. My friend I am I am excited to talk to you about the Mayan history, mind lost history. All the mines are one of my favorite cultures to study is one of the first ancient civilizations I was exposed to when I couldn't go to Egypt. I was like, Well, I'm in my 20s. Let's go down to Mexico. I went and I saw Chichen Itza to Loom, Koba and a couple other sites as well. And it really kind of changed my perspective on on ancient civilizations. So I'm really excited to talk to you you are an expert in Mayan civilizations, in how many years have you been studying the Mayan culture in general?

Ed Barnhart 1:45
Oh, gosh, you know, I get older every year, I think it's over 30 years now.

Alex Ferrari 1:50
Wow. So so my first question I have to ask you is, you know, the, when I was down in Geneva, and I saw the pyramid and and in the observatory, and the whole, that whole set that whole area, that site, the one thing that I kept thinking about even back when I was in my 20s, just like, how is it that Egypt and the Mayans, and the Chinese and Indonesians and the Japanese, they all have pyramids, but yet none of these cultures technically should have ever known about each other or ever connected? From your experience? How do you explain that kind of coincidence, if you will?

Ed Barnhart 2:34
Well, you know, I'm a dirt archaeologist. So my explanation might be a little boring for your audience. But I think it's basically trial and error. You know, if you give a kid a set of blocks and tell them to build the tallest structure, he can he build the tower a couple of times, but without rebar and cement, it falls over. If you want to build a tall structure that's not going to fall down without cement or metal, then you're gonna make a fat base, and you're gonna build it up to the tiny top. And that's how you make the biggest structure in a very basic way. And I think that trial and error for all of these groups, some of them dirt, some of them stone, they figured that out.

Alex Ferrari 3:17
Well, how do you explain, like, again, when I was at Chichen Itza, the amount of art the architecture of that, of that, that one site is so remarkable, how tight everything is, how beautifully is designed? How did the people of that time, build something so sophisticated, to the point where and I'm sure you've done this, you sit at the, at the steps at the bottom, and you you clap your hands? And you hear the birds chirping kind of thing? That's a fairly sophisticated building technique. You know, that, generally speaking, can't be I'm not sure can be done today. But it takes another level of engineering to do stuff like that. How do you explain that? And how they built it in general?

Ed Barnhart 4:00
Well, the bird call thing aside. It really Chichen is a magnificent urban metropolis. That's what it is. But what you see as a tourist is just part of it. There was a city of some 35,000 people and you know, for a radius away from the big pyramid in the middle, there's buildings everywhere, so it's even more impressive than people think. But you know, it's the Maya, as a culture as a civilization went on, you know, really, if we keep the clock going till today, they've been at it for almost 5000 years. So by the time Chichen Itza was built, let's say, you know, it's, it's Postclassic start with somewhere around 900 AD. The Maya had been building pyramids for almost 2000 years. So these guys stood upon the shoulders of giants who created all of their engineering and architecture and probably Probably transmitted it through their hieroglyphic language.

Alex Ferrari 5:03
Well, that was the first time and again, please excuse my ignorance is the first time I've heard that the Maya being that old of a culture, you know. So that's kind of new to me, because I haven't really I knew that they were, you know, maybe 1000 years prior to, you know, maybe around the time of Jesus, let's say that there was something starting, but what you're saying is, they're going back towards the Egyptian times, but you know, actually that like 5000 years back, so if my math is correct, and I'm not good at math, was about 3000. BC is kind of where they started, where are if that's the case, and where are these other structures that they've been building up that you found.

Ed Barnhart 5:44
Oh, we have an entire chronological narrative of them, you know, if we go back to 3000 BC, people are building in the Maya highlands of Guatemala, and down by the coast, they're building the first stone and dirt structures. And then you know, but but as we go up, we go into a culture called mo Kaya, and then we get into Maya, but that's still gonna we're looking at 1000 BCE, so 3000 years ago. They're building major pyramids in along the coast of Chiapas and up into the highlands of Guatemala at the same time, the Olmec culture is happening, and making their colossal heads and these multi ton statues that everybody's crazy about, that's going on to and then between them and some the other cultures like this Apotex, and the people that are when the valley and Mexico they start regularly building big stone pyramids and palaces and ball courts and all sorts of things. So you know, but let, let me revise and say it was 1800 years before teaching needs to start building their architecture that the Maya and their neighboring civilizations are experimenting with and improving engineering and architecture,

Alex Ferrari 7:06
Are the Olmecs. The Olmecs are fairly mysterious, because there's not as much information about them. They are a much older civilization than the Maya or the Aztecs, correct?

Ed Barnhart 7:17
Yes, some would call them the mother culture. They are the first real ones to start putting out big, huge religious pieces of architecture, all of their buildings are packed Earth, which is a little little strange, that they would drag a 20 ton monument into a plaza and then build an earthen pyramid in front of it. It's it's a little odd. It's it's explainable, because the there wasn't much stone where they chose to live. But they are the oldest ones. Nowadays, we have more of a nuanced understanding that they're kind of interacting with the people that are the proto Maya, and the Proto Apotex and the proto kind of way proto as texts in the same region, valley, and Mexico. And so those cultures all kind of help each other up in what we call the pre classic, then we hit the Classic period where tons of Maya cities are being built up in the jungles of the Putin. They're also all over Yucatan where teaching eats is, but there are other sites that are older around it that are less visited. And then finally, that all falls apart and what we call the classic Maya collapse, where all of those cities get abandoned, for reasons fully, not understood still. And then they evolve into this Postclassic forum. We're in the Yucatan. Geneva is the capital city.

Alex Ferrari 8:43
So that collapse of the Maya, which is what when I was down there, that was something that they kept saying a lot of my tour guide and stuff that like, yeah, they just disappeared, they just disappeared. And you know, that we're talking about, essentially millions of people across across the continent. I mean, it's a lot of people. It's not like a village, it's a lot of people. I've heard an explanation that it was possibly the Spanish who brought over disease, and just wiped out, wiped out large swaths of people. Is that something that makes sense or has any explanation?

Ed Barnhart 9:18
Indeed did happen but at like 1500 C.E the famous Maya collapse where everybody just abandons the city that happens between 800 and 900 AD or CE.

Alex Ferrari 9:33
And there's no explanation of it.

Ed Barnhart 9:36
Well, you know, we have various theories, nations, but big cities winners that there was a big civil war between the cities that basically were either team tikal or team calakmul the two big cities that finally settled out, and it seemed like the winners would take their bigger chunk of land and the other ones would be quiet and be subsidiary but instead had everybody from the winners and losers cities, those cities depopulate and they don't put up any more monuments, there's no more pyramids, they just walk away from them now the general population they could have gone, you know, 10, 10 kilometers out and started a little farm and archaeology and never see it. But where did all the ruling class go? Some people think they filtered their way into places like Yucatan and back down into the highlands of Guatemala and started the Postclassic cities there. There's some evidence to suggest, lineages from those abandoned cities started places like Chichen Itza.

Alex Ferrari 10:40
Why leave? It's like essentially New York New Yorkers leaving New York and going down, going down to Colorado.

Ed Barnhart 10:48
You know, a general societal wide loss of faith in the power of these divine kings, that could have been a factor. There are environmental factors that people bring up Jared Diamond's books, famously, he wrote one called drought, where he suggests from Mesoamerica, all the way up into North America, that there was this terrible period of drought that destroyed all the civilizations at its time, the Maya doesn't really work like that, because there's tons of rivers that they that they went away from, and a lot of them clustered in one of the driest parts of the Yucatan so that the evidence that they ran because of climate change, doesn't, doesn't fit everywhere. Again, the Mayan world is so huge to try to say one environmental factor affected the people in the highlands and the lowland on the coasts in the jungles. It's it's complicated.

Alex Ferrari 11:46
It was it'd be the equivalent of something like that happened to the United States, let's say, like one event has taken over, it's taken, the West Coast is taken, the East Coast is taken, taken the middle of the country out, it's like it would have to be something so massive that it wouldn't just happen to United States of prayer. It happened to the entire world, right?

Ed Barnhart 12:02
Even in the drought hypothesis, there were parts of the United States, like all the civilizations that grew up around the Mississippi River that didn't miss a beat. When this drought period was there. It destroyed the American Southwest, but it empowered the Mississippians.

Alex Ferrari 12:20
Now, there was another culture. Yeah, exactly. Very different than the Mayan. Now, there was something else I learned about which is, and I don't know if the exact name of it but the black earth, that they figured out a way to create, to regenerate soil to make it's very fertile. It was it was they found they have found it. But we haven't been able to redo something like that and like making, you know, barren land fertile all of a sudden with a technique.

Ed Barnhart 12:52
If I understand what you're talking about, right? You're talking about the stuff specifically in the Amazon?

Alex Ferrari 12:58
Yes, exactly.

Ed Barnhart 12:59
The Maya, we don't have to guess whether there were people living there. They built pyramids on top of it. In the Amazon, you know, we always had the old theory was Betty Metkers theory, counterfeit paradise, that though it seemed so resource rich that you couldn't possibly farm there. And then they start finding all these archaeological sites where there's clearly farms. And then there's some things where, you know, there's nobody there. But what you're talking about this black earth, the anthropology calls it an anthropogenic landscape that a huge area has much, much richer soil than it should. The idea, the thought is that civilizations had actually been manipulating that soil for 1000s of years. And it turned it into this fertile soil. And the the Amazonian tribes that sit on it today and farm are farming, basically in the in 1000 year old mold mulch, which is why our nation that we don't see because it's a perishable world, if they're all building their things out of wood, and feathers and pelts. All we're gonna find is, is black dirt.

Alex Ferrari 14:19
Right, exactly. From what I understand, though, if you took some of that black dirt now even it's so fertile, that it can actually help regenerate other it's like weird. I saw something about that on a documentary somewhere, maybe on the History Channel or something, but.

Ed Barnhart 14:34
Well, it is incredibly fertile. And I did a couple years back, I did a little boat trip up the Amazon and into the Rio Negro side, specifically visiting tribes and seeing where they lived. And every one of these, you know, really remote tribes can talk to me intelligently about this black earth and that that's why they put their village there because that's a big huge patch of black earth and they can do all this farming and that they know that there are places along the river that doesn't have the black earth. And that would be a stupid place to build their village because they can't farm, they are taking advantage of it. So, in many ways, you know, archeologists got the idea to look for this from the natives, which happens all too often in archaeology. There's always some, you know, white guy in had going, I've discovered this with my little friend here who showed me where it is.

Alex Ferrari 15:29
I think that happens in all cultures, essentially. And all in all, in all findings in archaeology, they're generally seems to be in Egypt, in Indonesia. So one thing I was going to ask you is, what out of all the mysteries that the Mayans have, and there are many, which is the one that most intrigues you? That just keeps you up at night? Just like, how is how did that happen? Or where did that like, questions that are just mysteries that have not been solved yet?

Ed Barnhart 15:59
Oh, that's a good question. You know, I'm, I'm a math and science nerd. So I look a lot at the way their mathematics work and their way their astronomy works. I wonder things like that. I wonder, you know, just how exactly they made their observations. I'm in like, way too deep into the mechanics of the Maya calendar. And there's a couple of things that just make their math break. If we take their word for how the calendar works. There's this this whole, like, the world resets at 13, Bach tunes their team for 100 year periods, doesn't actually work with the rest of their math in many ways. And they're such magnificent mathematicians. I can't imagine they got it wrong. It bugs me that I'm probably getting it wrong. There are things even with it. For a guy like me that has studied it for 20 years, I'm still scratching my head about, you know, certain aspects of their math. Another one is the the Dresden Codex is Venus pages. teams of people for generations now have been trying to decode the entire meaning of the math that that lies beneath it. And there's still unanswered questions,

Alex Ferrari 17:14
How could a culture that, quote unquote, primitive, comparatively to where we are today have such an advanced understandings of mathematics and astronomy?

Ed Barnhart 17:26
Well, I mean, you know, I would respectfully say, sometimes we need to rethink our definition of primitive. Because those guys were just as smart as we are. And the Maya, unlike a lot of the North American cultures, created a writing system. So they actually have the ability for one generation to do studying of the sky and take notes and do math, and then hand it to the next generation who continues the observations. And after a while, you get pretty darn good at it, they get a foundation of knowledge, which they build. And probably writing was a big part of that. But also they just had a mentality to understand their universe they probably did it you know, in in the search for God rather than science like we think we're doing these days.

Alex Ferrari 18:17
Well, the thing is, the one thing that has always fascinated me about the Mayan as well is that and especially some of the pyramids and instructors that they built, they're all so perfectly aligned to the stars at a level that is almost perfection, to where the equinox the solar equinox and the lunar Equinox create that dragon that comes down the steps if I'm not mistaken as the equinoxes that create that Yeah, yeah, the snake excuse me the dragon but yeah, the snake out of the stairs, the amount of the amount of intelligence and knowledge and engineering to do something like that at that time period seems in sane to do and as well as as well as the bird clap thing. Like I still you know, if you could explain that to me, I'd be really interested.

Ed Barnhart 19:07
You know, I'm not sure about the bird clap there's a that's in a lot of myocytes and there's a quality where stone will bounce off and, and echo the you know, the Greeks did it too, on purpose to a great extent in their theaters and auditoriums. Sometimes when the when the sound bounces off a building like that. Now the the guides always say it's the it's the voice of a capsule. Yeah, you know why? You know why they say it's the voice of a capsule. That's nobody's ever heard of capsule and we will buy it. But very few people know what the heck a capsule sounds like. It's a cool effect. I do not know whether the ancient Maya meant it to sound like a bird much less a Quetzal.

Alex Ferrari 19:56
Or even it's like if you you have to stand at this one space. Go up the stairs perfectly aligned if you move over five feet and move over five, it doesn't work. But anyway, but how but that's that's that's, that's almost a parlor trick comparatively to understanding the stars and understanding the equinoxes. And how the sun is going to lie, hit the pyramid at a certain time period to create this effect of the snake. How would you explain? Or is there an explanation of how they understood the stars? So well? Well,

Ed Barnhart 20:24
it's certainly the the, the arrangements of the buildings at certain sites like Chichen Itza, in this example, with the snake coming down at Equinox, that is, you know, that's urban planning, that is somebody getting out there with a crew and an engineer and workers and looking at where the shadows will land first making models. And then, and then perfecting it, it took a lot of organization, they were a very organized smart people. And, you know, they were also wanting to agricultural people. So things with the sun are what most we see of when we talk about alignments of buildings, it's a lot of the sun, like this example. But not much of the planets, only a little bit of that, that we find in their books, we find their calculations, but they were selling the sun was so important because of the agricultural cycle. And so the march was the beginning of a season of, of the cycle. So they would all get together to celebrate that

Alex Ferrari 21:29
Would would there be an instance and correct me if I'm wrong, if the priests, let's say, of the culture, the higher the royalty, whatever you'd like to call it, understood things that they had access to the books had access to the knowledge. And they knew that if they stand at the top of the pyramid, at this day, at this time, the sun's going to come through and create this spot, this kind of shining light and almost godlike image would appreciate he would, let's say, that ruler would say, on Tuesday, at six o'clock, I will show you my power, and they would stand there and do that, and everybody will go Who is that something that? Is that something that would have would have happened back then?

Ed Barnhart 22:15
Well, I, it's possible. We, you know, we really are all recreating the what would have happened, I prefer to look at it somewhat the opposite, that if the majority of Maya are corn farmers, every farmer I've ever met, knows exactly on his own on his own land, when to plant when to sow, he says, you know, when the sun comes up over that, hill there, it's time to plant. And when it sits over near that tree, it's time the seasons are changing. So I don't think to think that regular Joe farmer Maya didn't know how the sun worked seems strange to me, I think instead of these priests and rulers, lording over special knowledge that they keep in books about what the sun's gonna do. Those celebrations that are happening at solar stations are honoring the farmers and the thing that ties all of society together. I think those are, those are honoring shared knowledge and shared important things rather than a elite teaching an ignorant public population how to do their job

Alex Ferrari 23:28
Is the Maya. For my understanding, the Maya were not as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs, let's say with sacrifices and throwing people off of pyramids and decapitations and things like that. Is that Is that true? Or was there a phase or a stage in their evolution that because they have that game, that it gets the ball through the little hoop is basically a basketball essentially, almost something like basketball, but if you lost you died or something along those that if Apocalypto showed us anything?

Ed Barnhart 24:02
Apocalypto showed us very little,

Alex Ferrari 24:04
Yes, beautiful movie though.

Ed Barnhart 24:05
Beautiful movie. I mean, it was it was a great, but it was not a maya by any stretch.

Alex Ferrari 24:13
Yeah, that's when I saw that because I understood that my uh, we're not that bloodthirsty that we were not that sacrificial Aztecs were much more known for that than they

Ed Barnhart 24:22
Well, it depends on what phase of Maya you're talking about. You just mentioned that it really is she's dependent. As we see, time passed for the Maya, the Classic period people, they're doing a lot of warfare against each other, and they are sacrificing people that they bring back from war. So there was some sacrifice there. But the main sacrifice of the Classic period was an what we call an auto sacrifice that the king would do, he would blood let himself and then connect to his ancestors. So that was, there was more of that displayed, at least in their art. Then the sacrifice of people. But once that classic period ends, and the Postclassic begins, the Maya get a lot more influenced by the people from Central Mexico, who eventually evolved into the Aztecs, but they are a much more bloody and sacrifice oriented civilization and as they influence and interact with the Maya, the Maya, pick that same bad habit up. Like in in Chichen Itza, there's actually in between the ball court and the big pyramid. There is a platform that carved all the way around it. Our skulls on steaks stacked like they're a shish kebab. And that looks just like the Aztec skull rack from their main city that's now Mexico City. So it looks pretty darn clear that Chichen Itza had a skull rack full of people that heads that were sacrificed

Alex Ferrari 26:01
At that at that site

Ed Barnhart 26:03
At Chichen Itza, I think by the time the Toltec start influencing them the Aztec the Maya do get a lot more bloody and sacrifice oriented. Classic period, not so much. Chichen Itza and the Postclassic. Yeah.

Alex Ferrari 26:18
Is that so after that, that stage is is that when they disappeared? After that stage? Or how many more years before they disappeared?

Ed Barnhart 26:26
No, they never really disappeared.

Alex Ferrari 26:28
But you know, maybe like abandoned?

Ed Barnhart 26:30
Oh, no, the, you're talking about the mysterious collapse at my society. That's like 700 800. So that's, that's the end of that period, where they're not doing that much sacrificing, then we have a couple of 100 years that we call the terminal classic, that we don't really, everything's evolving so fast, it's hard to see pin down and then it settles down at about 1000 into the Postclassic. And that's where they interact with the Toltec and central Mexicans more and get considerably more sacrifice happy.

Alex Ferrari 27:02
Where the Toltecs sacrifice happy.

Ed Barnhart 27:05
Yep, they seem to have been, and the Aztecs hold up the Toltecs as their model. So there, there's an indicator for you, too.

Alex Ferrari 27:15
How did how did the Toltecs create some of those these giant heads that everyone talks about? There's they're pretty sophisticated carvings. For such a brutal quote unquote, Thai, in their in their evolution, it's sometimes it just doesn't connect with me where, you know, a culture that would build something like Chichen Itza have that intelligence of the stars and mathematics, and are pretty, pretty smart and pretty evolved. Yet. They are sacrificing and cutting hearts out and cutting heads off and putting them on steaks and things like that. There's a disconnect for me there because like, right now we are, quote unquote, at a very civilized time in our, in our history as as as a as a society, quote, unquote, I say, but it's most of us. Yeah, at least most of us exactly. And there are sections of the world that are very barbaric, and still are doing barbaric things. And there are sections of the world like in the Amazon, who are living like they did 500 years ago, almost exact. So there's a little bit of everything all over the place. So I'm curious what you think. How do you kind of put that those two things together something that's, I mean, the intelligence and the wisdom of mathematics and almost like almost philosophical, the Greek period almost in philosophy that there was so advanced, but yet, just killing people decapitating them and shoving them down spikes, it just seems a real big disconnect.

Ed Barnhart 28:49
I totally agree with you. And you know, from our western perspective, those two elements of society do not belong together. But you know, my, my mentor, Linda, Sheila used to tell me when I was a student, and if you don't stop thinking like a Westerner and try to put yourself in the shoes of how these Mesoamerican people live, you're never going to understand anything. And I think that, you know, I'm still struggling to understand, but I have at least accepted that. The Aztecs the Maya, this Apotex, especially the Aztecs are proof that, you know, a lot of things that we count as civilized behavior and barbaric behavior can coexist. In a single society, the Aztecs, they probably really did sacrifice 20,000 people in a three day period to inaugurate a temple. But on the other hand, they're their leaders. Were supposed to be poets and statesmen, and they were supposed to be able to at a party, just get up and recite a poem that everybody knew or maybe a new When they made and they can play instruments and they were there and they loved flowers, the gardens of the Aztecs were magnificent. There were so many aspects of art and culture and nature and beauty that they appreciated hand in hand with murdering each other. And I, you know, it's kind of one of the magnificent things about studying anthropology. There's, there's a revelation, humans can actually live and prosper like that to good prosper. There, they said that the 10 Oh, shoot long, was the biggest market that they had ever seen in their life, there were 60,000 people milling around a very prosperous economic market.

Alex Ferrari 30:46
That must have been mind blowing to the Spanish when they when they came. I mean, it must didn't know I know, the Spanish basically took over most of South America, as we all they mostly all speak Spanish now. But how I know the stories of the Aztecs and what they did with the Aztecs and, and the Inca, they did the same thing with the Mayans, as far as they just came in, and they they gave them disease that, you know, accidentally or on purpose, and they just basically destroyed them, essentially. Is that true?

Ed Barnhart 31:18
Yep, that is, in a nutshell, that is absolutely true. They it took them a little while longer to get to the Maya, because the Maya had nothing they want

Alex Ferrari 31:28
No gold cities?

Ed Barnhart 31:29
No gold, and they didn't have much in the way of commerce. Eventually they figured out they had some things they wanted. And they were also independent city states, where the Aztecs, you could really chop the head off the snake and just go through the rest of it. If you took out the capital city, you owned the Empire, but the Maya, you had to do it city by city by city. And it was it was much more tedious to get to them all. And they didn't really have any gold they were looking for, you know, they were holding city bowls to convert. So they were you know, they were on the list, but they were there. But I think the lack of resources that they were looking for kept the Mayas safe for a bit, but eventually, you know, really, before the Spanish even started swinging swords in the Maya area, people were getting sick everywhere. The deadly diseases. You know, I think that modern studies now are are proving fairly conclusively that 92, maybe 95% of people died in the first 50 to 100 years of contact. There were like 10% of my left. By the time the Spanish really started taking over.

Alex Ferrari 32:27
Now with the new technology that we have, with sonar and aerial sonar, if I'm not mistaken, they're discovering pyramids throughout the Amazon that are completely covered, and have not been excavated yet. How exciting. Is that for you? And where do you is there any site that you've seen that they go, Oh, my God, there's this giant temple there. It's just get to it right now. It's costing too much money or something like that, to even get to that place? Are there any sites that you've heard about that you just dying to get to?

Ed Barnhart 32:50
Oh, gosh, I mean, there is a lot of progress. It's, it's coming too fast and furious. I don't even know what's gonna come next. It's Lidar is the technology that's in it kind of takes the trees away and shows us the landscape. And we're seeing all sorts of interesting networks of cities down in the Amazon. What they do is they build up these big earthen berms, and they live on top of those. And then they make causeways to other earthen berms, and the whole thing looks like a big spiderweb from the sky. But collectively, it's like city centers and neighborhoods that have 10s of 1000s of people, some of them, some of them in the Bolivian rainforest and a part called the bene have these just huge civilizations. And it's funny, the researchers down there, look through all of the the religious conversion documents from the Franciscans and Jesuits that there were people down there in the late 1500s that were trying to Christianize Amazonians. And they saw these being pure, these big mounds and the causeways going out. And they were they grumped about They said they've built this incredible network and an urban center in the middle of the jungle and all they ever use these causeways for is to go from party to party. These people are totally unproductive and won't do what they're told. So they were having a grand old time living in a big city that nobody ever realized was there that the the Jesuits did that just gave up on them because they were shiftless.

Alex Ferrari 35:04
Which brings me which brings me to my next question about the the Catholic Church, which is obviously with when Spain came over and they they brought over Jesus, because obviously, God forbid these, these heathens have not not been exposed to Christianity. But from what I understand they were priests who burned all of the knowledge and libraries of I guess scrolls or what did they hold this written knowledge of? You're talking about

Ed Barnhart 35:35
Codexes, they were kind of fanfold books that you could open up and the pages instead of having a spine and opening up, like, like wings, you open it up like an accordion and lay it long ways across the table to read it.

Alex Ferrari 35:47
Right. So they that they burned so much knowledge in history of the Maya. Is that a true statement?

Ed Barnhart 35:54
It's exaggerated but true. There are some times we get the impression that they just you know, they burned them everywhere. There was one big episode where Diego DeLand in the Yucatan burned a whole pile of books and people to be burned people with the stakes and the same. In the same event, we tend to not talk about that as well as the books in this conversation. But yeah, they were burning them they were they were looking to eradicate, especially religion to replace it with the new one.

Alex Ferrari 36:25
And how many of these, these the accordion esque books have you found of ancient Mayans have been found and been translated?

Ed Barnhart 36:36
We have four we have four left on the planet, maybe one, that's all we've got. I have found them archaeologically. But in the jungle, they're like stains, they're just goo piles of pigment, the papers all gone. And so we they used to have tons a lot of them did. That's why I said exaggerated a lot of the books just you know, if you put a book on a shelf in a jungle, it's gone in 10 years,

Alex Ferrari 37:04
But in the desert, but the deserts of Egypt, it holds because it's dry.

Ed Barnhart 37:08
Exactly, exactly. All those things held up all those scrolls. So the ones that we have were ones that the Spanish took to Europe. And then they filtered around for a couple centuries until somebody figured out hey, those are Maya, one of them almost got burned up in the library in Paris. It was in a stack that was going to go into the furnace to keep the building warm in the 1800s. And somebody somebody said, Hey, isn't that a Maya Codex? We should, we should keep that.

Alex Ferrari 37:38
So how did was there a Rosetta Stone that allowed us to figure out that the writing of the Maya?

Ed Barnhart 37:44
Not exactly a Rosetta Stone, but there it's actually work thanks to the work of the same guy that did all the book burning Diego DeLanda. He did a big ethnography talking to the Maya and he had an informant try to explain to him how their alphabet worked. So we had him say out like he said in Spanish, right? Ah, here right Bae here, right say here and the guy just wrote, he wrote what he heard, they actually have a Silbury, so that not really an alphabet that the land of recorded his book in the 1500s turned out to be the key to helping us break the code.

Alex Ferrari 38:27
Now, you talked about religion, you know, trying to eradicate the first religion to bring in the new religion of Christianity, what was their religion or spiritual practices throughout the from as far back as we can go to where to where they, till the Spanish showed up?

Ed Barnhart 38:44
Well, for the Maya, they had a pantheon of gods that that evolved and changed slightly over the 1000s of years. But there was a pantheon there's not necessarily a king of the Maya gods like Zeus, much like Maya society with their city states they it was kind of a council of gods and so you know, there's there's a number of them there's a corn god, there's a Son God, there's a death god. So it's a you know, that's fairly run of the mill kind of assignment of natural forces gods, but they followed those folks, those gods until the Spanish showed up. Now, the thing about that was so that the circumstances were perfect for this conversion in the regard that Maya and really all of the Native American societies before the Europe showed up, believe that illness is a supernatural attack. It's not a it's not a physical thing. You don't get a cold you get imbued by some spirits, some that makes you sick. And you're well not necessarily possessed. But do you know it's the disfavor of some see supernatural thing like so when somebody gets sick they think oh, you know some which made them sick we got to make, we got to bring our nice switch over here to Cordero to fix them. Because everything has kind of you're all part of an animate spirit. But when everybody starts getting sick, then they conclude that their gods are angry with them and that the gods are making everyone sick. So that's that's how they interpreted everybody getting sick, just in time for these guys in brown robes to show up and say, Oh, by the way, there's only one God. And if you just let me splash this water on your face, you'll be baptized. And maybe you'll save you. Oh, geez, was that water infected? Oh, sorry about that. I guess I I actually accelerated the disease with that.

Alex Ferrari 40:46
Oh my god, it's the more you get into history sometimes just you see how.

Ed Barnhart 40:50
That was the real tragedy those those pranks really didn't want those people to stay alive and be good Christians. But baptizing was actually accelerating, the spread of the disease, one bowl of holy water would be splashed on 100 people who would walk up willingly to follow this new god if it meant they stopped dying, but they got delivered the disease right to their face.

Alex Ferrari 41:11
So as far as spirituality is concerned, was it more Was there ever a point where they began to transcend these these kind of elemental gods and fight? Was there always it? Was it always kind of like a Apollyon? Poly like, when there's multiple gods I forgot the word. You know, that kind of like worshipping multiple gods, or did they ever at one point, exactly. Did they ever look inward? Kind of like the the Vedic texts or the or the Vedic cultures? Or the Indian cultures that they started to look inward for answers, as opposed to always looking outward?

Ed Barnhart 41:51
No, I don't, I don't think we have any hint of that. And again, you know, wonders of anthropology. Everybody does something different. They were very unique religions. Now there, there were elements of things that we would call shamanism short ancestor worship, that were part of it. And interesting thing about the the Maya, who have a pantheon of gods say versus the Greeks who have a pantheon of gods. The Greek gods and humans are interacting all the time. The Mayan never directly interact with the gods. They have their ancestral spirits who live in the world of the gods act as liaisons that was somewhat of the right to rulership for my kings that they had. They had people in important places that could act as liaisons. But Gods did not directly communicate with humans, humans. They communicate with the spirit world, which is somewhere between the level of the gods and the spirits. And a lot of what happens in the spirit world is communicating with ancestors. The the modern Maya today who live in Guatemala, have a group of people called date keepers, there's over 7000 Day keeper priests in an association still, so it's a strong tradition. Millions of people see this, and they talk about the 20 days of the Maya calendar as spirits that are all ancestors. And they that they all have different powers and do different things. And they're all collectively called the mom, which is the grandmother grandfather spirits. And these day keepers can commune with those spirits and divine what's going on. They kind of they can help people that are sick, why are you sick? Well, you need to do this, you need to pray at this shrine to this particular mom? Or should I get married to this girl? Well, you know, your grandparents up there in heaven say that they argued back and forth. And you need to mend some fences here before you should get happily married, that sort of thing. But they they implore wisdom from this middle level, not the gods, but the spirit level. That's all about ancestors. And when we talk about that, then it falls into the category of ancestor worship, which also happens all over China today and in the past. So it's not that in that regard, they're not completely isolated, and what they think they have a lot in common with early religions of China, I think,

Alex Ferrari 44:20
Which is odd as well, since they should have never spoken to each other. But also, it seems, but it also seems that they were have something in common with the Native Americans up in the north, which are very, very much ancestral worship, and also animal worship or elemental worships as well. Correct?

Ed Barnhart 44:39
Yes, yes. There's a lot of overlap or you know, core similarities, I should say, between all of the religions of the Americas North America Mesoamerica like we're talking about here and South America. I see it as my theory is that 12,000 years ago now made You know, starting 33,000 years ago, people started coming across from Asia. And as they filtered through, they developed their own cultures. But just like languages can be reconstructed to a core language, I think that religions also work that way were their core principles, that they're all. They're the foundations of all of these religions, and they turn out to flower in different ways. But when you look at the core things, they're all the same, like, for example, North America versus the Maya, both of them at the core of how they think our cosmos is constructed, they have the four directions and the three levels of the universe. And both of them make all sorts of art talking about that four directions and those three levels, but they never met each other. That's a core principle of religion that I think came over 10s of 1000s of years ago.

Alex Ferrari 45:56
Well, I mean, at the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, at the core, have very similar ideas.

Ed Barnhart 46:06
Oh, there they are a group called you know, Joseph Campbell calls them all the Judeo Christian religions. And then you've got the the Asian religions that he called what he called Confucius, there were some Confucius Buddhism, you know, there's another word I'm missing that but there's, they lump all those ones together as well. Hinduism and Buddhism, of course, are, you know, Buddhism sprung out of Hinduism. That's, that's what the book says.

Alex Ferrari 46:32
It's pretty fascinating. Now to about 12 years ago, there was a lot of hoopla going around. The Maya, were really in the news in 2012,

Ed Barnhart 46:42
Those were good times for me that

Alex Ferrari 46:44
I'm sure they were I'm sure you were in high demand, sir. So you're an I demand back then. You're speaking right?

Ed Barnhart 46:51
Like loved Maya math, like a nerd was all of a sudden, somebody people wanted to hear from those interested in years.

Alex Ferrari 46:57
Exactly. What What can you explain to people what that whole end of the Mayan calendar was? We know what the prophecy was, and what it actually meant? And did the calendar restart itself after 2012? Or that was just the end of was it obviously it wasn't end of the world because you and I are still talking. But it seems to have been an end of an era. And then certain things have to happen are happening after this error. What's your take on it?

Ed Barnhart 47:26
Oh, gosh, you know, back in those days, I had a whole hour lecture explaining it. Can I do that in a couple of sentences let's let's

Alex Ferrari 47:34
I give you I'll give you like a few cents more than a few sentences. Go ahead.

Ed Barnhart 47:39
Okay. Well, the crux of the problem was that people believe that the Maya calendar, reset itself to start the fourth creation of my of the Maya creation story, in the year 3114 BC, specifically, August 13. And so if it reset itself, it went 13 sets of 400 years Bach tunes in Maya, and then it reset to zero like the odometer on your car. So that meant if you follow the that math logically, that when we get to 13, more 400 year periods from 3114 BCE, the clock is going to reset again. And we're going to start the fifth creation. Oh, what happens to us the last four creations got totally trashed, everybody died. And if you do the math, you get to December 21 2012. And so mathematically, it looked like the Maya were saying the world's gonna reset in 2012. But that's not really what they meant. And it didn't happen. You can see like, math nerd guy like me, I've looked through all of the cylindrical math that we have available to us in the Maya and there are a number of places where they talk about time. Well laughter 2012 And they talked about time away before 3114 BC so we were misunderstanding the cycle. I I still don't have a good answer why the calendar reset at 13 5000 years ago. I think it the creation story implies that the magical deeds of the hero twins, reset it, like pressing the button on your odometer. But then normally it should run each cycle should run in groups of 20. My math is based 20 RS is base 10 decimal, there's his base 20 for decimal. So in our little odometer analogy See, when it clicked to 13 and 000, the next number was 00001 for the first day. But the Maya math can't work out like that. That was something I was saying at the start it the whole system breaks, if it jumps at 13. There, because it's based 20, it shouldn't be a 20 there. And there are a few texts that actually do tell us that it is a 20 there, because Bach tunes for 100 year periods is not the biggest period, the Maya also talk about a pic tune, which is a 8000 year period, and a column a tune, which is 160,000 year period. And there are bigger ones, too. Sometimes they'll talk about millions of years and a calculation. So and that whole, that whole math system of how they tell me to go back 5 million years, it breaks. If it's a third team, mathematically, the Maya would have never done that.

Alex Ferrari 51:01
So this was this was an example of y2k, essentially.

Ed Barnhart 51:07
Yes, it was yes, it was, you know, they were both good excuses to have great parties, weren't they?

Alex Ferrari 51:16
Without question, without question i attendees were fantastic. And what's fascinating to me is, is the, the, the lens that we look back at ancient civilizations across across the world, we look at them through the lenses of our technology today. And we look at them as primitive because they don't have an iPhone or the internet. But yet they in many ways could have been more advanced than us and other aspects of our lives. Whether it be mathematics in a way that we just can't grasp anymore, it'd be the equivalent of someone finding an iPhone 500 years from now. And there's in the Amazon somewhere, they're picking this up, they're like, What is this? How do I explain it? They have no context. Or like, like your, like your mentor said, you have to think like them, but it's very difficult to think like them if you weren't there.

Ed Barnhart 52:07
Ever. That's that's the fun of the job is to recreate the stories and I'll admit openly, you know, sometimes archaeology is the best story wins. Yeah, well, the story of the that would fit the facts gets the most gets the most love.

Alex Ferrari 52:22
Well, let me ask you this being an archaeologist. There is a lot of there's a lot of theories. I mean, there's so many theories flying around about ancient civilizations. Obviously, the History Channel has built an entire billion dollar business around it. Without question, but it seems to me that there is some things that when they're brought up to, to mainstream archaeology, in all aspects, that they're very resistant to change to so much. So an example is to my understanding, the concept that the Great Pyramid of Giza is worth tombs came from a white guy in the 1800s, who said, Oh, this must have been this, this and this, and they just kind of ran with that idea. And please correct me if I'm wrong. But in that, but inside of the Pyramid of Giza, there is no tomb, there is no hieroglyphs. And Egyptians were very well known to do all of that, and to talk about everything they've ever done, because they, they love the press. So why do you think that sometimes? And do you agree that sometimes mainstream archaeology might be resistance to change as as with physics, as with medicine, as with any major institution?

Ed Barnhart 53:36
Well, it is a conservative field based on that. We have very few facts to go on. And we try to conservatively put forward our theories based on those few facts. But yeah, and there are there is a there's a generational thing that goes on I, I want to say that I partially agree with that statement. And I partially don't the part that I do, there are people who are just people who have spent their entire life championing an idea. And the thought that some new person is going to come with a brand new idea that invalidates your idea and via that your entire life is a hard pill to swallow. Fair enough. And people who just will will fight they're wrong theories till their deathbed and they exist within the field. Definitely. But I'd like to say that also, you know, myself, and a lot of my colleagues are very open minded about things. We are actually thrilled when we prove each other wrong, or prove ourselves wrong. That's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be advancing our understanding. And oftentimes, it means giving up what we previously thought and I think that you know, the whole idea of mainstream archaeology is funny that's it's really just a collection of guys like me that get paid A professor wages were were mainstream now Graham Hancock is mainstream archaeology, we hide in the foxholes of academia. But the smaller voices,

Alex Ferrari 55:13
Right! No, you're absolutely you're absolutely right. And I have heard that though there are the new generations coming up. The younger, the younger professors, the younger, just different generations, they're becoming more open to this because you're exactly right. We should be disproving ourselves constantly because as as history has shown us, man, I always thought they had it figured out at the moment that they figured it out. You know, when Zeus was around, I was Zeus, you know, there was that there was nothing else it was Zeus, God forbid, it was anything else. And same thing goes. So when quantum physics showed up, it threw a monkey wrench into physics, they're still trying to, to try to deal with that. But newer, newer generations are going oh, wait a minute, they have no attachment to the status quo, to those old things. Those ideas and theories have been held on to for centuries. They're like, Well, wait a minute, there's a new way of doing this. There's a new idea. Let's do it. Let's go into that new idea.

Ed Barnhart 56:12
And new techniques, give us new information, things like Lidar is a is a miracle for archaeology. Another one is DNA studies. I mean, gosh, we have gotten answers to things about you know, fundamental things like, you know, who migrated where were, some of those were terribly wrong in the early publications of archeology. And DNA has turned us around, and really given us a dimension that Archaea you know, when I was a young archaeologist, I never thought we'd have that kind of information at our disposal. And it really does change some things we thought were fundamental. And I think it's my job as this generation guys to accept that and move forward instead of die on my own sort of my old theories.

Alex Ferrari 56:59
You were talking about the cycles that the Mayan we're talking about in their calendars? Is there a correlation with the the Indian yugas, which is a 25,000, or 24,000 cycle that repeats itself constantly? Is there any correlation?

Ed Barnhart 57:17
I don't think a cultural correlation, but they are structured similarly. Oil. I'd say that they are similar in that they cover vast periods of time. They, you know, if you take a maya period as 13, Bach tunes which I just explained, I really don't. That is 5125 years. And if you take five of them, that's 25,000 years they important number there is that that is the full cycle of procession for us, which is close with all the way around us 365 degrees and come back takes 25,000 years, which is essentially about that. One degree of procession is 72 years. And so they would watch that and sometimes that number would pop up in their numerology in weird ways. That's one of the numbers that drive me crazy. And I hunt.

Alex Ferrari 57:17
Yeah, so it does sound that there is a correlation at least structurally, that because it's

Ed Barnhart 58:15
The Yuga is 1200 2400 3600 4800. And it goes in a cycle. That's the difference that once the 40 801 ends, a new 1200 year one starts, and then the cycle keeps going. The Mayan Calendar does not cycle, at least, at least a long count. It is linear, which is weird, because the my aren't linear people, they're cycled people.

Alex Ferrari 58:43
But that 25,000 year cycle, regardless of how it's piecemealed seems to have a correlation with the stars of all the stars wrapping around so they two different groups figured that out.

Ed Barnhart 58:54
That's like the Holy Grail of Archeo astronomy. If your culture could actually calculate precession of the equinoxes. They were badass astronomers. And the Maya did it like maybe earliest? It's either the Babylonians or the Maya who did it earliest. And then the Greeks figured it out. The Hindu figured it out. But a lot of cultures

Alex Ferrari 59:16
Chinese and Chinese figured out?

Ed Barnhart 59:20
I don't know. I don't think I mean, everybody did eventually. But I know a trick for archaeology is like, Well, did they hear it from those guys? Or did they actually calculate it on their own? The Babylonians and the Maya? Pretty sure they calculated on their own the Babylonians probably told everybody else and just you know, it kind of fell into a dark hole for a couple centuries and then somebody rediscovered it alone for the rest of time.

Alex Ferrari 59:46
Exactly. Now during with your with your research, have you ever heard of any mystical stories, mystical experiences in the Mayan mythology or religion? Anything of anything in the mystical spin space? Well it defined mystical, mystical, godlike. Well, things that would if we sound if we heard today we'd be like, Oh, well, that's kind of interesting. You know, because there's mystical things that happen in the in the Hindu traditions. There's mystical things that happen in the Chinese tradition. There's mystical things even in the in the Arthurian tradition.

Ed Barnhart 1:00:22
We're talking about, you know, mythology.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:25
Yeah, mythology. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. mystical, mystical mythology kind of things. Yeah.

Ed Barnhart 1:00:30
Well, along the lines of You just defined, the, the populvuh is full of that stuff, their their creation document is full of all sorts of magical mystical things that happen, we follow the adventures of these hero twins, who, who talk to animals and turn people into monkeys and go down into the underworld and play a ball game against the Lords of death and turn it to cat fish and dogs. And it's it's a really fun adventure.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:56
So they so they have it again, it's fascinating that a culture that that's not connected to any other culture, they always figure in other cultures on the other side of the world, they have an underworld, they have, they have these kinds of similar aspects that connect the I'm trying to connect the dots is one of my favorite things to do with, with everything I do on this show, is to connect dots to things that I'm just trying to put it all together. Now just one piece, the Maya is one piece. But there's a 1000s of cultures around the world at different time periods. And I always like to see what's similar in them. So obviously, the Greek said, the underworld, obviously, the Egyptians, and now the Maya, is that something that's innate in humanity, to feel that there is an underworld and a heaven if you will?

Ed Barnhart 1:01:43
Well, a lot of world cultures do think of it that way, a three tiered universe, the world of living the upper world and the lower world AI. For the Maya. It's a little Mesoamerican, in general, it's a little more convoluted it the underworld is not necessarily hell. And the upper world is not necessarily heaven. And the entrance from this world to that is the same. It's sometimes I want to call it the other worlds because there's, there's things that are going on in that supernatural world, some low, some above. But they're not necessarily like a bad place that it is that there are scary Lords of death in the Maya one, but that's where everybody lives. That's where all the dead people continue living. That's the world of the dead. And the Lords of death are scary guys, to the people that are living, but to the people that live in their realm. They're just the people's grandparents are still just hanging out in villages and farming and getting water from the river, just like it is on the on the world of of that's what the hero twins find down there.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:50
So it's almost it's, I wouldn't call it parallel realities, but definitely different dimensions of existence, essentially.

Ed Barnhart 1:02:59
Yeah. So it's a little different than, you know, the Christian idea of we all go up to the heavens or the hell, that we reincarnate.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:07
So it's not fear based. It's not a fear based mythology in the sense that if you go down to the underworld, you're going to be poked in with it with a pitchfork kind of thing.

Ed Barnhart 1:03:14
It is a scary place for the living who don't want to die. But once you're dead, they lay off then then you just get to go live there.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:21
And is it a nice place to live? Or is it a dark place to live?

Ed Barnhart 1:03:25
It's a nice enough place to live. When the sun goes down, it rises in the underworld, and so they get sun to sun themselves and grow their crops and do their things.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:36
Now, but then how about the other world, the third, the the above world,

Ed Barnhart 1:03:40
The upper world is where the gods live. And as I said earlier, they're totally disconnected from the Mesoamericans except for liaison of dead ancestral spirits. Maya kings, the Classic period. Basically, their story of their right to rulership was that their spirits, the ants, their ancestor, spirits went up. They started down but then they were allowed to ascend to the level of the heavens and they could act as liaisons, not Joe Maya's parents are just down in the underworld. He could do rituals to contact them, but he just get his grandpa, the king gets his grandpa who's up in heaven? And he obviously has connections.

Alex Ferrari 1:04:25
Yeah, he knows. He knows

Ed Barnhart 1:04:28
That his dad is up in heaven. Talking, negotiating Well, for us.

Alex Ferrari 1:04:34
Which is fascinating, which is very similar to a priest or or an organization, saying, Oh, if you want to talk to God, you got to come through us. And we're the ones that have the privilege of going so it's again, similar ideas that seem to be innate in human just humanity's brain, essentially, you know,

Ed Barnhart 1:04:56
Or aligned to gain power that we just keep falling for

Alex Ferrari 1:05:04
There is that my friend, there's the Oh, you are you scared? I know someone, I follow me, I can help you

Ed Barnhart 1:05:10
Don't worrry I got this.

Alex Ferrari 1:05:11
I got this though. Well, he says he's got it. Let's go follow Joe. Joe those up. It is it is really fascinating. The connections between all these cultures and the Maya, and I could talk to you for hours.

Ed Barnhart 1:05:27
It's like, it's Star Trek, which I'm also that kind of nerd. They had a theory of human parallel development, that there was going all over the universe. Of course, that was, you know, a little too far. But I like to think of something akin to that, that there are certain qualities that all of us humans, regardless of, of the color of our skin, or where we are on the planet go through levels of discovery and evolution at different time periods. But there's kind of a commonality that, you know, that thing that we said at the very start where humans all across the planet, decided that they wanted to build something tall, and they ended up with a pyramid because the because the tower kept falling over.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:11
What does it remind me the I always forget the name of it, the Pyramid of the Sun.

Ed Barnhart 1:06:20
Teotihuacan

Alex Ferrari 1:06:21
Teotihuacan that's Aztec and if I'm not mistaken

Ed Barnhart 1:06:24
Pre before the Aztecs they're actually a weird enigma. They they're not even a culture. We named that culture for the city Teotihuacan.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:32
So that culture that created those pyramids was not is not the Aztecs?

Ed Barnhart 1:06:37
They weren't the Aztecs. No, they were they that city burned to the ground and 650 ad. So

Alex Ferrari 1:06:45
But the pyramids, the pyramids, so the pyramids were there. So but we don't know who built those pyramids them?

Ed Barnhart 1:06:52
Oh no we know who the Teotihuacanos are. It's just a weird culture. They don't they act different than everybody else. And for a while they impose their will on everybody else, all the way down into the Maya world. Teotihuacan took over and then the city burned and things changed.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:09
Well, isn't there a lot of incidences between Teotihuacan and Giza in the way it's set up? Astrologically? The size of the base of Teotihuacan is the same size of the base of the pyramid, which is exactly half the size. I mean, that's that's coincidental to say the least.

Ed Barnhart 1:07:29
I consider that a coincidence that the spatial dimensions are not perfect, perfect. They're pretty close, which is weird. And they aren't, you know, the the biggest pyramid by a stretch is Giza, Cheops. And then, well, actually, depending on who I'm gonna said that I mean, I really think that I've betrayed my own hand. But the numbers volumetrically say that the biggest pyramid of the world in the world is Cholula, which is a couple hours away from Teotihuacan and the Pyramid of the Sun. So number two is Giza. Number three is the Pyramid of the Sun and Teotihuacan, both two of the three biggest are in the Valley of Mexico. But they It is weird that they're, you know, they're not aligned the same. That is not true. Neither of them have different alignments. The Talulah is way wider. And it's based then Giza and Giza and Teotihuacan have almost it's not perfect, but they are similar in their base, though totally different in the way they pit. Sure. Yeah. They have one has one has steps, one doesn't. And one is just smooth and exhibit some some neat geometry that the others don't.

Alex Ferrari 1:08:50
And it is a fascinating story, my friend. It's it's the stuff that you could talk to about for 30 years as you have been doing so sir, and will continue to do so. I appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us about all this amazing stuff. Where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing?

Ed Barnhart 1:09:07
Well, thanks for asking. Well, I'm the director of my exploration center which has all sorts of free for the public use information on the website. I also run a couple of tours around the world through that most of them are actually sold out this year. Funny enough. I also do a podcast that's you know that that's my biggest hope if I my appearance on your podcast, I hope it helps my podcast, which is Archeo Ed it's a weird bit of a weird spelling but if it's on all the major podcast things and it's really just me talking like I just did to you for an hour and a half on varying subjects I'm I'm really happy with it. It's my own thing. I don't have a big crew it's just me but I put it out once a month and I hope that your your audience takes a look at it. Now your audience is mostly filmmakers, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:10:00
No, no, that's another podcast. So my podcast Yeah, my original podcast was Indie Film Hustle, which is that was all filmmaker based. But my, my current one is more our ancient civilizations, last history, spirituality, near death experiences.

Ed Barnhart 1:10:18
Ok. I'm sure your gonna have some overlap and I'm always available to help out with films and things. I love doing that. But that also hits your audience, very well, demographically, that sort of stuff you talk about. So I hope you take a look at it.

Alex Ferrari 1:10:34
My friend, I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much for for giving us a really great hour of fun stories and information. So I appreciate you my friend. Thank you.

Ed Barnhart 1:10:44
That was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me, Alex.