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
Well, the thing is, a lot of these pyramids, especially the ones, let's say where a lot of them is in the Mesoamerican world, a great majority of those pyramids are actually tombs. They're places that people might live during their day, and then they're entombed inside of it. And there's thousands of people buried in pyramids all over.
The vast majority of pyramids around the world, there are people buried in them. So it's just a funny thing. If we're going to look to the other side of the world for an answer, Pakal's tomb is a great answer. I mean, that's a pyramid that was only built to be a tomb for him.
I have a theory here in North America where, you know, we have pyramids here, too. We have, you know, the famous ones are Cahokia and Poverty Point. But I think they start really, really early, like 6000 B.C., where we see hunter gatherers living along the rivers of like Tennessee and Kentucky and that area up into Ohio. And one of their big resources are these shells from the rivers.
And they make these big shell mounds. They're all over here, too. There's a bunch of shell mounds right here in St. Pete, aren't there? There was a time a couple thousand years ago where this shell, riverine, or ocean resources was a huge thing. So they built up these giant mounds. And in Tennessee and Kentucky, they started just putting dead bodies in the shell mounds.
And, you know, maybe it was to keep the stink away. Maybe, you know, maybe there were practical reasons. Maybe there were religious reasons. But the practice started long after the first shell mounds were happening. Like down here, you don't find any bodies in the shell mounds. But up there, they started doing it along the rivers.
Then all of a sudden, that shell mound isn't a pile of dirt anymore. It's where grandpa is. And then your ancestors get connected to that land. But then the Adena culture starts, like, not that long after, maybe, you know, a thousand years, which is not much archaeologically. The Yedinas start building dirt mounds, and they put all of their burials in there.
And they're building them out of dirt because they're in a different area that doesn't have all those shells. But maybe their cultural practice at that point was, that's where we put our dead. We put them in mounds. And since we don't have enough shells to make a mound here, we'll make it out of dirt. And this begins this tradition of burying people in mounds in North America.
But the core of it was thousands of years ago, probably putting a stinky body under the shells where you can't smell them anymore. Ancient landfills. Yeah. Wow.
A lot of my theories revolve around that.
Ancient landfills. I'm sorry. Trash management is a very underappreciated aspect of human motivations. I think half the cities that were walked away from were probably mostly because they smelled like shit. Yeah. Yeah, that would explain why they keep them near the coast, right? Like, it's a really dirty and disgusting topic.
But, you know, if you make a city of 20,000 people and you don't have plumbing, I mean, you can only dig so many holes before the place is literally a cesspool. And you have to move away for health and safety issues. Hmm.
Yeah, there's a parallel topic to that that sort of explains why we think that burial sites in Egypt become sacred sites. Egypt is one of the places where they think that the bubonic plague began. And, you know, living right along the river with, you know, you're in this high concentration of, you know, all these rats and snakes and rodents that are living around you.
And, you know, they're living among your little house that's next to the river. It's the perfect place for diseases to begin. And so it's thought that, you know, you have limited place to bury your dead. And because the vast majority of Egypt is wheat and barley fields.
You don't really just want to throw grandpa like out in the field, you know, and you don't really want to bury him among this very scarce, precious land that you have. So what do you do? Well, this kind of gets off into another thing of the Egyptian psychology and their worldview.
But, you know, they would acknowledge that the sun, which they were a sun worshiping culture as so many cultures throughout the ancient world were, they would acknowledge that the sun was born every day in the east and it would die every day in the west. And so they believed that when they died, they should be buried in the west and facing east. That's how all tombs throughout Egypt are.
They're always on the west side of the Nile facing towards the morning sunrise because they thought that they would die in the west and then be reborn again in the east. Oh, wow. And so, but this began, you know, that early psychology was probably there and they always wanted to be, they always wanted to be buried on the West side.
But eventually, originally what they do is they go out to the desert where the sand, you know, where these big sand pits are and they clear away the sand and they, you know, you bury grandpa in there and maybe you bury him with some of his crap that you don't really want. You know, it's like, ah, maybe grandpa would have wanted that. I don't really have a use for this thing.
don't really have a use for this vase i don't really have a use for you know this necklace like this is nice but i never really liked it i'm just going to bury it with him and you know you maybe there's some guys in town that are like you know i would have liked to have that vase why don't we just why don't we just go out there and take it
So, you know, eventually somebody returns to go see his grandpa's grave, and it's been desecrated. And then you can see how the cycle of developing stigmas and, you know, superstitions about burials begins. Cursed tombs. Cursed tombs, and it becomes obsessive, right?
And you can see this natural progression from sandpit burial to a sandpit burial being covered with stones, because they thought that would stop people from desecrating the tombs. And then it just continues and continues until you get to these rock cut tombs that go into the ground. But that's not enough. They've got to put a building on top of it. So then we call that a mastaba.
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