Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Wild, Wild West.
All right, we're live. David Stewart, thank you for coming, man.
Chapter 2: What inspired David Stuart to become an archaeologist?
Thanks for having me. I'm pumped, man. I've never met an archaeologist before. Well, yeah, it's a fun job, I got to say. Do you like it? It's a play in the dirt. Absolutely, I love it. When I was a kid, I decided that was what I wanted to do. And I'm really lucky because I can do it as a grown-up. Well, your parents are both archaeologists too.
Yeah, my dad and my mom were both archaeologists and worked for National Geographic, the magazine, back in the heyday of all of that. So, you know, they took us on trips, me and my brothers and sister.
You know, that's how I got exposed to this stuff was like going to, you know, Mexico and Guatemala, you know, back in the 70s, getting exposed to these fantastic ruins before they were turned into big tourist sites sometimes, right? And I just caught the bug. I mean, I just wanted to know more about it and seeing what my dad was doing, what my mom was doing. I just wanted to keep on with that.
Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, by the way, too, we have Val with us here today. Josh couldn't make it.
Chapter 3: How did David's family background influence his career?
Josh is actually getting, I believe, a colonoscopy. Very important, yeah. Someone's doing some excavating in his butt right now. He's asleep right now, and someone's looking for secrets in his butt, deciphering the text. That's pretty cool, though, man. So, like, you know, and from reading your book, by the way, The Four Heavens, I have it right here. A new history of the HMI, not the old HMI.
Not the BS from before.
That's right.
Yeah. But from reading your book, it was like back, I guess, when your dad was doing it. It was kind of amazing. I didn't realize how much of, you know, their history was completely unknown and lost. And I guess there was like little bits and pieces. That kind of struck me about how people were just like, even the people who live there were just like, I don't know, like no one really knew.
And this is still kind of the case in terms of people's awareness, right? So I think it's fair to say it's new in terms of not being out there in the public arena. And certainly in Mexico, right? You know, there are plenty of Maya people around today, but they don't have much of a sense of their own history. And I find that really sad and something that needs to be fixed and corrected.
So there's a Spanish edition coming out, you know, and I hope word gets out about this stuff and it gets into the schools and everything. But you're right. When my dad was, you know, an archaeologist and working in Maya ruins, When I was a kid, there was no history, you know?
So we've been through this amazing time in the last 50 years where we've kind of gone from zero to 100 in terms of knowing the names of kings and knowing the dynasties and how they all, you know, the kind of Game of Thrones history of all these different kingdoms. And it's the oldest history anywhere in the Americas, which is pretty mind-boggling.
That's also crazy because, like, you know, You always see stuff and I don't know, I always hear things on like TV and YouTube where it's like some claim they go back to like 60 million, you know, something like crazy. Because I mean, I must have really chapped your ass watching Ancient Aliens back in the day. Did you like that show? You know, I've been asked to be on that show several times.
Really? Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Mayan civilization's history?
Yeah. And then, and you know, I guess there was the, uh, I, I, I've like heard about this guy, Diego de Landa. Right. Who burnt all the books. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, did you ever just like sit at night and like just kind of like, did you ever really get mad at that guy? Cause he kind of did like ruin the whole thing.
He, he ruined a lot. Yeah. So, so this guy, he was a Franciscan friar who later became the Bishop of Yucatan back in the 16th century. And he, um, You know, he's vilified because he burnt a lot of the Maya books and smashed their, you know, what he called the idols and so forth. And he caused a lot of damage. In a way, he was doing his job at the time. That's what they were there for.
um we've lost a lot of culture and a lot of history indigenous culture because of that but there's one thing i will say about londa he was in a way a curious figure he was curious about the stuff he was trying to stamp out which sounds a little weird but he he wrote this book that is basically a compilation of facts about the world of the Maya before the Spanish ever arrived.
I had that book in my house. It was funny when I was reading your book. I'm like, oh, I have that. I read a little bit of it. It does strike you as he was recounting whatever history he had.
Yeah, he was talking to people. These are unique accounts that we have. And without his book... this manuscript that was just found randomly back in the 18 hundreds, you know, in a, in a library in Spain without London's book, we'd be really up a Creek in terms of understanding the Maya.
So, so I have to give him some credit, despite the fact that he did a lot of damage at the time, like most Spanish priests of that era, it was this kind of give and take. I mean, they were trying to stamp out the, the idolatry, the non-Catholic rituals they were seeing. But they were almost like anthropologists of their time. They were writing down stuff that otherwise would just be lost.
And what was like the... I remember I read about Cortes and the Aztecs, and there was like the ritual human sacrifice. Was that the Mayans?
Was that kind of like... They did some of that, sure. Maybe not on the scale of the Aztecs, or at least on the scale of what the Spanish talk about for the Aztecs. Some of that's exaggerated. Yeah, I've heard that. But the sacrifice was real. It was part of their... in Mesoamerica in general, we study that, we acknowledge it.
One of the things about sacrifice that's hard for us to think about is that, and here I'm kind of thinking about examples that I have come across in my own research. For the Maya, for example, there were ritual executions of war captives. And that's kind of cross-cultural. I mean, we call that sacrifice, but it's like a Roman gladiator arena, which is very performative and very ritualized.
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Chapter 5: How has the understanding of Maya history evolved over the years?
They have to head back to Cuba and then try again. And then they go back and try again. And eventually Cortez. Yeah. Gets his group together. Finally does it.
Yeah. That was, that was the one thing you always hear about Cortez where the, you know, popular consensus people say is like, Oh, he just like showed up and, He tricked the guy and they handed it over to him. It was like, no, it was a pretty long kind of like gruesome protracted battle for like, I mean, it was like years. Years.
Yeah. I mean, the whole story of that, of Cortez's adventure, I'm still waiting for the big Hollywood epic movie of this because it's one of the greatest stories in all of history. It has a lot of painful parts to it for sure.
It has a lot of drama, but you can read firsthand accounts of it too that not only Cortez wrote, but one of his soldiers wrote this amazing firsthand book of his memoirs of that encounter. And it's like a science fiction novel. It's like these guys landing on another planet and they have to go through this process. And it's long, like you say.
It took years for Cortes to arrive on the shore of Mexico and then to overthrow the Aztec Empire. Not a lot of years. It was kind of a short time in two and a half years. But even after that, it took a while to kind of solidify their presence there and to establish new Spain, is what they called it. So... That story is one of not just the Spanish coming in and beating people over the heads.
Cortes had to, there were just a few hundred guys at most. They had to make alliances with people who hated the Aztecs. That's how he was successful. There was this city state called Tlaxcala. It's now a beautiful town in Mexico. Not far from Mexico City, but that was the center of a kingdom. Cortes passed through it, actually warred with them.
Eventually they realized, hey, they could together fight the Mexica, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan. And so that's a whole drama. That's part of this story, right? And yeah, I just find it amazing. I always go back and read excerpts of that story just because it reads like a novel. It's like high drama.
It really is kind of amazing, especially with the – Who was the, I think Aguilar was the guy who got like stranded out there. Father Aguilar got like stranded and like lived among them, spoke the language and like happened, you know, he was a slave for like six years. Yeah. And then just stumbled upon, that's like the most, that's the one story that I'm like surprised no one's ever done.
Well, right. This is another movie that someone has to make. In fact, I think there's scripts that have been bandied about in Hollywood for a while about, about that story and the Cortez and, But the Aguilar story, yeah.
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Chapter 6: What role did Diego de Landa play in Maya history?
I ran into a buzzsaw over there. Did you really?
Yeah. What happened? Just an absolute buzzsaw.
Negative experience. People were just hammered. It's a fun club.
Yeah, I'll be there in the dog days of the summer. Levity Live, Huntsville, Alabama, the Stardome Comedy Club, Birmingham. I'm excited for that. And Spokane Comedy Club, Spokane, Washington. Also, it's not up yet, but I have a bunch more dates, so check them out on metmccloskey.com.
So what's the earliest in terms of like, because, you know, that was kind of cool reading about how they figured out how to kind of transcribe everything. What was like the earliest story they have that you guys can look back on that has some like narrative arc? Yeah.
So the earliest story of history that we can tap into is. is really the beginning of these many dynasties. We're talking about the area that's now northern Guatemala, southern part of Yucatan. We can tell that there are a lot of these great cities that are starting up Some of them are being abandoned. There's all these cycles of rises and falls.
But there's this era around 200, 300 AD when these dynasties kind of start up and they're often connected with each other. They're often rivals with each other. And we can start to read names of kings. We can start to read some narratives about what they're doing. One of the big, big episodes of Maya history that we know about now today was in the late 300s, in 378. There was this war.
It was a conquest of this really amazing city in Guatemala we know of today as Tikal, a major site. In fact, Tikal is the... Rebel Moonbase in the first Star Wars movie. George Lucas filmed the scene of the Millennium Falcon taking off from the jungle. I don't know if anyone remembers that scene. That's crazy. Yavin 4, I think it is in Star Wars, right? That is Tikal. So he filmed it there.
Anyway, fun fact. In 378, the king of Tikal was conquered by these outsiders who were coming all the way from central Mexico. They were coming from a place called Teotihuacan, which is up near Mexico City. And they had had a long relationship, clearly. There's this long distance intermarriages and stuff. But there came a point where something happened. where they had to take this guy down.
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Chapter 7: What are the common misconceptions about Maya sacrifices?
And yeah, when they found his tomb in the 1950s, you know, this beautiful coffin with this carving, um, There was kind of an interesting situation. After they found it, of course, nobody could read the hieroglyphs, right? In the 50s or 60s. There were all these texts around the coffin. It wasn't until the 70s that we could sort of read the name.
Maybe in the 80s and 90s, we could read actually what it was saying. It was talking about this great king, his birth date, his death date, all of his ancestors kind of waiting for him in the afterlife and all this stuff. The scene on the top is of Kanishana Pakal, the king. He is kind of taking off in a way, right? But what he's doing is he's raising as the sun in the east.
He's being resurrected. And he's not in a rocket, he's just emerging out of the earth, out of kind of this maw, this cave, rising up as the sun into the sky. And it's a really elaborate imagery, but that's in essence what it is. That's really cool. Not a rocket ship, but he's going in the sky anyway.
Yeah, I remember just, that must have, you know, I was watching that as like a perpetually stoned young boy, something being like, I knew it, this is awesome. It must have been driving you nuts to watch TV and be like, what are you doing?
Why are you doing this right now? I know, yeah, it does drive me nuts because, you know, well, here's the thing, right? Those narratives, long before Ancient Aliens, long before that show, there were movies, Erich Von Donaghan and his book, Chariots of the Gods, talking about all this stuff in the 70s. That was at a time when no one could come up with a counter narrative. So that takes hold.
It fills a void to explain this stuff. And now we can explain it. So this is the conundrum that I'm facing is, you know, we do understand it culturally, historically, but it is hard for us to fight against, you know, ancient aliens, which is on TV almost every night or, or whatever. Right. That's what people, the people who are curious about this stuff, genuinely curious about,
don't have a whole lot to go to to understand it and they may come up with um a show like ancient aliens and that's like oh okay that must be the consensus view or something like that right yeah not knowing that any archaeologist thinks that's bs yeah um we're just not very good at communicating with the public, to be honest, you know what we do know. Yeah.
And, and, um, I'll be the first one to say that academics are terrible at communicating some of the realities we think are, you know, that are out there in terms of history. and cultures. So, I mean, this book, I, I, I hope is a, a small, um, effort to, you know, tell what's really going on to, to explain some of what we think we know.
That's pretty. So in terms of like the, you know, being an archeologist and like kind of like the, um, I guess like the day to day, um, Like I just like give her people because it is, you know, you're out there, you're digging like you have people who like break stuff all the time. And like, how do you deal? That must be that must be like really tough, like really high stakes of like a. Yeah.
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