Andrew Schulz

And so the bottom of the pyramids of El Mirador actually span the entire central part of the city.

So when you get down the pyramid, the actual base of that pyramid is the entire...

It extends out far into the jungle, and then people were living on that bottom pyramidal platform, right?

No, it's rock that they brought in, all of it.

And at El Mirador specifically, El Mirador is one of the oldest sites in the Maya world, and just like you see in so many other places,

The farther you go back in time, the more sophisticated the architecture becomes.

Most of the Maya world is just rubble that's about this big, and it's packed in with this really sophisticated, superheated cement that they use to bind the structure together.

And they have these really nice...

They have this really nice stone framing on the outside to make all the stones look square.

This is in later periods.

But in the earliest times, 3,000 years ago, at the site of El Mirador, in the middle of the jungle, the most inaccessible place you could possibly be, and they're so protected, right?

Because no one's traveling far out into the jungle, so they're able to build up the city without being invaded by raiders and marauders and stuff like that.

So they quarry out these stones that are...

Eight feet long, a couple feet wide, a couple feet tall.

And they stack them not like Lincoln Logs, but they stack them in vertically.

Or I'm sorry, horizontally laying down.

So they're like slid into the structure, right?

So it makes the structure impenetrable like most Maya pyramids.

When they're left in ruins, a tree will grow, like its roots will grow into the pyramid and pull the blocks apart.

Well, at that site, the jungle grows on top of the pyramid, but if you pull a tree down, it actually just pulls the jungle off of the stones like a carpet laying on top of it because the stones are so big and packed together that the foliage cannot possibly penetrate.