Dr Adrian Chase

speaker

354 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Adrian Chase’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Rise of the Ancient Maya · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

So you get the surplus of food, you get the rising population, and then as you have this food surplus, people can start doing other things other than focusing on food.

So they can be artisans.

They can make jewelry, whether it's carved bone, marine shell coming in from the coasts.

They can start being long-distance traders.

They can move salt to the inlands, or they can transport obsidian.

You start having people that specialize in different activities, whether it's ritual or political or commercial.

So you get the whole gamut from violence to peaceful interaction.

One of the things that I can say is that Karakol, from excavations that were in 2009 published in 2010, we have a Teotihuacan burial.

So we have a cremation in the center of the northeast of Krakow.

Exactly.

So over a thousand kilometers away from us.

And it would suggest a peaceful interaction where somebody's come in, they've married into one of the local families, and then when they're buried, they wanted to be buried in their traditional custom.

Okay, so we've got people moving vast distances.

From the isotope data here and elsewhere, it seems like maybe 40% of people in different Mesoamerican cities, whether it's Central Mexico or Maya, are migrants who've come in from elsewhere.

So you get these periods of globalization locally within Mesoamerica and then periods of isolation.

And the history of the Maya and Central Mexican peoples is basically a flip back and forth between those systems.

Well, surprise, surprise, like everywhere else in the world.

Right.

At its height in 650, it may have been the seventh largest city in the world.

It's very rare to have a city that hits 100,000 people before the Industrial Revolution.

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