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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
and flew dozens of miles out into the middle of the Peten Rainforest, which the Peten is, I think it's at least the second largest rainforest in the Americas, which is second to the Amazon, but it's like 1 50th the size of the Amazon, but very, very remote. And it contains the largest pyramid in America. Definitely in the Maya world. And it's called La Danta. It's La Danta and El Tigre.
And so that was really amazing. And one of the things that I was so interested about going there is because the head archaeologist at El Mirador, Richard Hansen, he refers to the architecture there and the stonework there as,
the phrase that he's kind of coined for it is conspicuous consumption, and that at the beginning of the Maya world, they were just so wealthy that they could create these pyramids out of the biggest stones that they're ever going to make stones, or that they're ever going to use throughout the rest of their 3,000-year history, or the 2,000-year history.
And what I was amazed by there is that the stone architecture is so much different than... As it said, it's so much different than anywhere else in the Maya world. But rather than taking these huge stones and laying them horizontally, they lay down the stones vertically and slide them in basically the least efficient way possible. But as far as managing your resources.
But in reality, it was the most efficient way possible because...
Throughout most of the Maya world, when I went down last December, I took a 10- or 11-day expedition down into Quintana Roo of Mexico, landed in Cancun, went down to this ancient city called Calakmul, and I paid this local ranger a few hundred dollars USD to take me out to this city that, as far as he knew, didn't have a name, but I was able to find it later on.
And it was this site with – I maybe covered a few hundred yards over the course of four or five hours. And just by the architecture, I was able to... I could tell what era the site was, that it was pre-classic.
You can just tell when you walk up on top of a pyramid if it has a triadic... If it's a triadic structure, it's basically a pyramid with a platform at the top, and you have three more pyramids with a larger one in the back. It's pretty... I mean, that's iconic for the pre-classic period. Sure enough, I was able to do research later on pre-classic structure, but...
That entire city, the smaller stones, you know, as the trees grow into... As the trees and the vegetation of the jungle climbs up these pyramids, it grows into the structure and pulls the blocks apart. And eventually they look like mounds. And, you know, trying to take photos of these things, it's really hard to convey the size of structures. But in person, you can see it.
However, at El Mirador... Even though the construction there was the least efficient way to do it in managing resources, it actually preserved most of these sites perfectly because when they peel the layer of the vegetation off, the stones haven't moved at all. They were too big for the jungle to ever grow through them, you know, over the last... Yeah.
The stones there are just too big, too tightly packed. You know, I would say that they're as long as this table and maybe a foot and a half, 18 inches, 24 inches wide. And they're all slid into each other. And it's too monumental for the jungle to ever grow through it. So this was something that it's like the primordial beginnings of the Maya world.
And I've just been looking forward to seeing it for so long. I finally documented it. It was so hard to find great photos of this in person. So that's what I was doing 10 days ago.
Yeah.
Oh, that's – you know, somebody like Luke should actually count them all up as best we can. Because Egypt, we know the number, right? Yeah, it's like 140, 130. Yeah, yeah.
In Egypt, it seems to kind of vary between – because, you know, a lot of those smaller pyramids, they were quarried away to rebuild modern-day Cairo. Oh, yeah. You know, so the number kind of drifts between 125 to 140. And he and I were talking, the first trip I ever joined him on –
We were in Palenque and everywhere you would drive and everywhere you would walk, you know, you can go to an area of Palenque where it's all cleared away and, you know, and the grass is perfectly laid for all the tourists that are there. But he took us out into the outer ruins on the outside of the city and everywhere you walk, it's these huge pyramids.
And we were talking there and he was like, you know, the common term is that Egypt is the land of the pyramids, but it's pretty obvious this is the land of the pyramids.
thousands and thousands of them out there and recorded you know at least hundreds probably over a thousand it's part of the problem is how do we define pyramid which you know is a sticky thing like nobody even wants to say anything here in North America is a pyramid we call them mounds which kind of you know makes them inert and so in in the Maya area
Does it have to be a pyramid-type freestanding thing to be called a pyramid? How tall does it have to be? Is a five-meter one a pyramid, or should we call it another kind of building? But in the broadest definition of pyramid, I'd say that Palenque alone has 100. Wow. What is the size of Palenque? It's 200 hectares, about two and a half kilometers across and only a half a kilometer wide.
It sits up on this plateau above the plains. So the mountains come up about 100 meters, a plateau of about half a kilometer wide. is where the city is, and then the mountains continue to rise above them.
Showing 1281–1300 of 1,858 · page 65 of 93
← Previous
Next →