Dr. James Fitzsimmons

Um,

It's not so much that I don't understand how it's built.

So one of the things that you wind up doing as an archaeologist is that you're working in these places.

And we have this idea that you go to these sites and they're pristine and you excavate these things.

That's not how it is.

Looting is an enormous problem in the Americas, an enormous problem in Central America.

I worked at places where my first day on the job, 80% of the buildings have holes in them because people are looking for...

whatever gold there's no gold actually but they're looking for wealth or anything anything they can sell and i don't blame them i really don't um

You know, in some places you're sort of dealing with really high poverty levels and you're trying to feed your family.

So I don't blame, like I would do the same thing, right?

But you go to these places and they're not pristine.

And so many of the buildings have tunnels in them already dug.

They have pits dug in them already.

And so you can see the profile of the building.

Like you look at the building, you can see exactly like how many floors there were, what was inside, like pretty much the entire cross section, right?

So I don't normally think about how they did this, or at least technically how they did this.

I do sometimes think to myself, how did they get people to do this?

So were they drafted into it?

Is it a Corvée labor situation where you have a labor tax?

In lots of parts of the Americas, you have a labor tax.