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, I find it a fascinating study in the capacity of humans that, you know, we make these dichotomies of good behavior and bad behavior and good and evil. And here's this culture who, you know, definitely checks the boxes of evil, you know, cutting people and ripping their hearts out and killing children. Okay, bad, bad, bad.
But then on the other hand, you have poems and music and love of flowers and public money spent on botanical gardens and museums. And at least outwardly saying, we are politicians, we're diplomats, we're public servants. So there was so much... that we would think you're either a barbarian or you're civilized.
But here's a culture where the two were like two sides of a coin and there was not a conflict of interest in their lives.
It was so impressive to the Spaniards that they would ask Cortes if they had really seen what they saw. They were so astonished by the city of Tenochtitlan that they couldn't believe it. Imagine the things that they had seen back in Spain. So it kind of gives you an
I was just reading back Bernal Diaz's book, and he says that when they're on the causeway first coming into the city, he said, one of the soldiers looked at me and said, are we dreaming this? That's cool.
That's amazing. And their market, I mean, was it 50,000 people a day, 60,000 people a day? Yeah, 60,000 people a day.
And they had institutions of basically people who were policemen going around and catching people who were selling fraudulent goods in the markets that were there. The Aztecs did.
There was counterfeit money. People would make ceramic chocolate beans and try to... try to buy things with counterfeit money and they'd get busted. But there were like haircutting places. It was like a mall. There were stores where you could buy various things. There were like soothsayers. And there was a court in the middle of the – probably a couple of different courts in the market.
But if two people were arguing about something involving their economy, they could walk up – to this judge's platform, and that person would decree who was right. And they'd hear the story and say, okay, you're in the wrong, you're in the right, give that guy his money back.
And it's just a tiny glimpse, you know, just maybe a couple years into their, you know, a glimpse into their world. So much more than just, you know, that sacrifice. And they were sitting on giants of the rest of the Mesoamerican world. So you can just imagine... all the history that has been lost because of the destruction. And at this time, 1492, Christopher Columbus lands in the Bahamas.
Slowly after that, Europeans are exposing themselves by trading and just exploring on the coast of the Yucatan. And that disease is beginning to spread all through the Americas.
A year later, that market we just talked about is – covered in dead bodies with pustules all over them. That's when the Spanish actually bust in to finally conquer the city, like a year and a half after they start. The causeway they take is close to the market, and they say that trying to get to that market The streets are just piled with dead bodies, not from war, but from disease.
13 different deadly diseases. 13 different ones. Yeah, the big ones at that point were mumps, measles, and smallpox.
The... Malaria and yellow fever don't really come in until so many people die that the Europeans start importing black slaves. And then from Africa, yellow fever and malaria come in. Wow.
Yeah. And a lot of these diseases actually, you know, they begin along these river systems, these tightly populated river systems. And several of them came from the Nile, like we were talking about earlier, 1800 BC. Now they're in the Americas. You know, these things have just constantly mutated, you know, since the beginning of civilization.
And they've crawled their way all the way over to the New World.
Which I think is also a point, you know, in the debate of how early did Europe meet the Americas? I feel like if there was substantial contact at any point, that we would see disease spread from that point, and we would find some sort of pattern. Some of those diseases you can't detect in bones, but some you can. Like smallpox, you can tell from bones.
And so, if archaeology would find some sort of mass, if... misunderstood die off because we know that happened i mean that that that signature is clear as a bell at the the known contact period in the 1500s just mass death but do we see it earlier like it is confusing the
There is actually a big hiccup in North America, somewhere right around 1300, where a lot of the, maybe it's the 1200s, where the Mississippian sites, a lot of them are abandoned and new ones start up, and wonder what caused that shift. It's temptingly close to when the Vikings were hit and had briefly a compound or a... a place in Canada.
1538.
Showing 1721–1740 of 1,858 · page 87 of 93
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