Dr. James Fitzsimmons

I mean, there's probably some of that, but there's a whole lot of gruel, too.

Yeah, so the site sizes vary pretty widely.

You get a site from, you know, a quote-unquote city might range anywhere from about 6,000 people, but there are some places where it's like 130,000, 140,000 people living in these places, right?

So it's a pretty wide variety.

On the diet thing, so even funnier, we think about feasts, right?

We're sort of rulers having feasts and things.

One of the funnier aspects that we have about feasts, and this is not my work, this is Steve House and others' work, is that we think about feasts and the rulers throwing these big parties and things.

But if you look at actually who's actually eating at these feasts...

it seems to just be the ruler.

So when you get invited to a feast in ancient Maya society, it's basically, you have all this abundance around the ruler and the ruler's sitting there and feasting and things.

And it's pretty rare that anybody else is doing anything other than just sitting and watching.

And it's really uncomfortable.

Yeah, like that would be a really uncomfortable thing.

Like imagine like a medieval feast where it's like just the king and they're just like, I'm gonna eat in front of you.

Again, it's consumption.

It's like, look at all the stuff I got and you don't.

It's wonderful.

It's wonderful.

Back in the day, the ruler's like, you know what's up?

I'm just going to sit here with my food.