Danny Jones Podcast
#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
Mon, 02 Dec 2024
Watch all episodes ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Ed Barnhart holds a Ph.D. and has over 20 years of experience in North, Central, and South America as an archaeologist, explorer, and instructor. In 1994 he discovered the ancient city of Maax Na (Spider-Monkey House) & in 1998 he directed a three-year effort to survey and map the unknown sections of Palenque's ruins. Ed's map is currently one of the most detailed and accurate ever made of a Maya ruin. SPONSORS https://buy.ver.so/danny - Get 15% off your first order. https://bit.ly/viiadannyjones - Try VIIA & use code DANNY. https://manscaped.com - Use code DANNYJONES for 20% off + FREE shipping. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://www.mayaexploration.org Ed's YouTube channel: @archaeoedpodcast Luke's YouTube channel: @lukecaverns FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Finding an undiscovered Mayan city 09:32 - How many undiscovered pyramids are left? 15:35 - Ancient Mayans' advanced calendars 28:29 - Ancient Mayan archaeoastronomy 36:43 - White Sands: oldest humans in America 46:50 - Younger dryas population reset 51:58 - Undiscovered lost cities in the United States 01:01:40 - Graham Hancock 01:27:02 - New theory explains how Olmec heads were moved 01:40:45 - Why all ancient civilizations built pyramids 01:52:47 - Death & religion in ancient Egypt 01:59:53 - Drugs in ancient America 02:05:32 - Blood rituals in ancient Mayan civilization 02:14:21 - Warfare in Mayan civilization 02:22:50 - Ancient influence on modern architecture 02:25:28 - Human sacrifice in Aztec culture 02:34:40 - La Noche Triste 02:44:48 - Spanish disease in Aztec civilizations 02:54:13 - Aliens or lost civilization? 03:04:30 - Easter Island Moai heads 03:10:18 - New mystery of Easter Island 03:13:53 - Patreon questions 03:15:26 - Mercury & chemicals in ancient South America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What led to the discovery of the lost Maya super city?
All right. Thanks for coming, guys. Dr. Ed Barnhart, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you. Luke, welcome back. Thank you very much for having me again. Yeah, man. I'm excited to chat with you guys. Ed, why don't you introduce yourself and tell people who are listening a little bit about your background and how you discovered a lost city when you were 25 years old? Well, okay.
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.
So when you just first discovered that Lost City, what was the name of it? And how did you sort of figure out where to look or what did you use to guess where it would be and where they would put it?
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Chapter 2: How many undiscovered pyramids are left in Mesoamerica?
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.
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Chapter 3: What were the ancient Mayans' advanced calendar systems?
10 days ago? Yeah, yeah. Where were you exactly?
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
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.
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Chapter 4: What is archaeoastronomy and its significance to ancient cultures?
Chapter 5: What theories explain the movement of Olmec heads?
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.
So when you just first discovered that Lost City, what was the name of it? And how did you sort of figure out where to look or what did you use to guess where it would be and where they would put 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.
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Chapter 6: How did ancient civilizations deal with population resets?
Chapter 7: Why did ancient cultures build pyramids worldwide?
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.
So when you just first discovered that Lost City, what was the name of it? And how did you sort of figure out where to look or what did you use to guess where it would be and where they would put 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.
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Chapter 8: What cultural significance do burial mounds hold in North America?
Oh, that's a very long answer. We've got plenty of time. No, we can see that their system begins with a foundation. First, they have a counting system, which they decide is 20, not 10. That's one proof that they're not being overly influenced by the old world. I mean, why would they come up with a completely different base system?
Um, from there they can count things and they start using it to count primarily the days. I mean, we know they're counting all sorts of things probably in the market as well, but we see them counting the days and then they decide they want to make a year. They want to make a, a cycle. that they can talk about one year to the next, but they don't pick the solar cycle at first.
They pick a number 260. That's their sacred calendar. It's called the Sol King or the Chol Ki, depending on whose language you're talking in. All of Mesoamerica does it, not just the Maya. It begins with the Maya or the Olmec, and then it goes everywhere in Mesoamerica until contact. So it's the most important one.
But it's 260 days, no months, no weeks, just a combination of 20 symbols and 13 numbers. 20 times 13 is 260. why that number why 260. best we can reckon and what the maya themselves today continue to say is that it's the gestation period of human it's nine months so if you're impregnated on one a how chances are your baby will come out on the next one a how
And I think it's beautiful that instead of – so many other cultures look to the heavens to make time. But they decided to look inside themselves. Like what is a cycle that is uniquely just us? We look around the world. The sun is 365 days. You know, animals give birth on different time scales. We have this long, strange nine-month pregnancy. So they looked inside themselves.
And from there, they built out... The 365-day calendar. I think once they started a farm, that became a lot more important, knowing the solar cycle, when to plant, when to harvest. So those two numbers, a 365-day solar calendar and then their original 260-day calendar, when they put those two together like cogs spinning into each other, you're only going to hit the same day every 52 years.
so for 52 years you'll have a unique day it'll have one the first part of it will be its 260 day calendar name the second part will be the 365 calendar name but because the two cogs which they never made or envisioned that's for western minds to try to envision it the two cycles only meet up again at the same number every 52 years that's how we get 52 years
Can you imagine how many generations it takes to do that? You have to have astronomers that are watching the stars daily, recording these things and then handing it down for generations. Not for this part.
One part's human and one part's just the sun. These are the low-hanging fruit. The astronomy comes in when they make their next calendar. Sure, sure, sure. They make a lunar calendar.
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