Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, for sure. I know I'm going to hear a lot about it tomorrow. No doubt.
Sounds like a nightmare, man. Could you imagine the people who are, you know, I used to work in nursing homes when I was in college and yeah, during college and the things that people admit to at the end of their life is shocking. All the time in nursing homes, in people's last days, they admit to a murder and
Could you imagine living with the cloud of that over you after you had done something that dark? One of my chronic nightmares is that I have murdered somebody and I'm trying to live with that. I don't know why this is happening to me psychologically. Those dreams are so freaking dark and so scary and so filled with guilt. I couldn't imagine people who had actually done that, you know?
Past life, could be a past life. It could be. I was like Jack the Ripper or something. Yeah, could be, could be. But, you know, yeah, I just couldn't imagine. This will be our last episode? Yeah. No, I'm just playing. But yeah, I just couldn't imagine actually living Having actually done that, dealing with the guilt of it.
I mean, not only have you done something awful, you have also ruined your own life. You know what I mean? It's just horrible. All the way around, it's horrible.
I'm an archaeologist, explorer, educator, and I've been at this for over 30 years now. I'm 56 this year. I got my start in archaeology in – I was a student in the University of Colorado at Boulder. Went to Honduras to go to the Maya site of Copan.
There I met my future mentor, Linda Shealy, and I went to study with her for years, learning Maya hieroglyphs, and also from UT going out to do archaeology and survey in Belize. And that's where, at the age of 25, I found a Maya city. I used a topo map, kind of played the game of if I was a Maya, where in this huge region would I put a city? And I guessed right.
Two years into the project, we actually found a bunch of pyramids around a plaza with a ball court and a palace and stela. So, yeah, that was certainly a pivotal moment in my life. And since then, I've – I taught for a little while after I got my master's and then my Ph.D., but – Where I really wanted to be was out back in the jungle and all those adventures.
I didn't want to be teaching cultural anthropology to a bunch of people who were asleep in my classroom. So I ditched that, and I started the Palenque Mapping Project, which became ultimately my dissertation. And then from there, I created Maya Exploration Center, which is now over 20 years old. And Luke here is the latest member of Maya Exploration Center.
And we kind of, in an almost rogue fashion, teach folks out in the field. We do field education tours. So we give lectures at night and we bring people actually through the ruins and teach them about it. And it's been great. For years now, I've traveled all over Mesoamerica and South America teaching people, but also selfishly, Making it like I really want to go there.
I'm going to make a trip and people can come and be involved in my research. And now I've done that for a number of years. I've gotten into this podcast world by creating a podcast. I actually... I didn't mean to make a podcast. It was COVID. My kids wanted to make a Dungeons and Dragons podcast. So I spent a week learning how to make podcasts. But by then they were over it.
So I was like, well, damn, somebody's making a podcast in this house. I guess I'll do it.
Well, I used everything that I had learned from Linda Shealy and my other classes as a graduate student. And I looked at this big area called Program for Belize. It was something like 200,000 acres that were given to Belize by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola wanted to cut it all down and put an orange grove there to create Orange Crush. Or is that theirs? Yeah, theirs is Crush.
But anyway, this huge area was then a research place, and UT had a contract for 20 years to study it. Most of the things they were doing were right along the one and only dirt road through the middle of it. But I bought topo maps from not even the Internet in those days. It was the early 90s, so I had to actually call people.
But I found topo maps, and I looked at the whole place, and I said, okay, my – are mountain worshipers, and they call their pyramids Tuned Wheat Stone Mountains. And they oftentimes create them in triadic forms, three temples staring at each other. So I'm going to look at this topo map and try to first find the tallest mountain in this area.
So I located that, and just as it happened to be, there were two other smaller mountains right next to it that made a triangle, and there were three rivers that were running in the middle of them. And I thought, that's it. If I was a Maya, that's where I'd want my city to be. And it was about 10 kilometers out off the road. So we had to just hack out there a little bit, a little bit every day.
And we found four or five villages along the way. But then finally on, I was crossing one of the smaller peaks on my way to the big peak. And that's where the city was on one of those three peaks. It was nice and flat. And that's where we found it. And when's the last time you were down there, Luke?
10 days ago.
I was in Guatemala. Okay, what were you doing? Yeah, so I was leading a tour for Maya Exploration Center, so we did... There's a few really well-known sites around the main Maya city of Tikal, but we led a tour there at Tikal, and then that was really amazing. I mean, Tikal is... I mean, it's a...
it's a central city to the story of of the maya um you know everything eventually through the height of the classic period runs through t call and then um so we led a tour out there and then by the end of the tour i did something i've been wanting to do for years which was uh booked uh through him i got on a helicopter
Showing 1261–1280 of 1,858 · page 64 of 93
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