#272 - Ancient Archeologist Discovers Lost Maya 'Super City' in North America | Ed Barnhart & Luke Caverns
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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?
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What led to the discovery of the lost Maya super city?
0:07–3:13
2
How many undiscovered pyramids are left in Mesoamerica?
3:13–5:05
3
What were the ancient Mayans' advanced calendar systems?
5:05–9:02
4
What is archaeoastronomy and its significance to ancient cultures?
9:02
5
What theories explain the movement of Olmec heads?
0:28–13:20
6
How did ancient civilizations deal with population resets?
13:20
7
Why did ancient cultures build pyramids worldwide?
0:28–18:55
8
What cultural significance do burial mounds hold in North America?
18:55–3:27:28
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Danny Jones Podcast
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