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Ancient Civ: Central America with Dr. David S. Anderson - Ep 73
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On this episode of A Life In Ruins Podcast, we are joined by an early A Life in Ruins guest, Dr. David S. Anderson, to talk about the Origins of early states in Mesoamerica. Dr. Anderson first appeared on our show in episode 11 to talk about pseudoscience in archaeology, and we are excited to have him back on the show to discuss with us the real perpetrators of Central American megalithic structures and ceremonial centers. Dr. Anderson enlightens us about theories surrounding the emergence of complex civilization in Central America and then we delve into the Olmec and other Preclassic civilizations. We then get our minds blown about the size/scope of the El Tigre Pyramid and discuss some other Late Preclassic Maya sites. Dr. Anderson then teaches us about all things Maya.
Literature Recommendations
- Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica by Christopher Pool
- The First Maya Civilization: Ritual and Power Before the Classic Period by Francisco Estrada-Belli
- Discovering the Olmecs: An Unconventional History by David C. Grove
Contact for Guest
- Dr. Anderson's Twitter: @DSAArchaeology
- Dr. Anderson's Instagram: @DSAArchaeology
Contact
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 73 of a life ruins podcast, re-investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host, Carlton Gover. I am joined by my co-host Connor Johnen and David Howe. Today we are joined by an early a life ruins guest, Dr. David Anderson, to talk about the origins of early States in Mesoamerica.
00:00:32
Speaker
Dr. Anderson first appeared on our show for episode 11 to talk about pseudoscience and archaeology, and we are very excited to have him back on the show today to discuss with us the real perpetrators of Central American megalithic structures, as well as ceremonial centers. Dr. Anderson, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back, guys. It's great to be back on the
Challenges in Archaeology: Pseudoscience
00:00:51
Speaker
show. It's good to be back in the semester. Radford University started classes last week, and so we are in the thick of introducing a whole new crop of people to archaeology. Nice.
00:01:01
Speaker
I can tell by the pottery on your shelf back there that you are in fact an archaeologist. Well to be fair yes I do have there's pottery on the shelf behind me but that is my wife's pottery who is also an archaeologist so we are like the two-fer household over here. But yeah it was good having you the first time because it's a breath of fresh air to hear some logic after
00:01:20
Speaker
you know, hearing so many things sent to me and that you see on TV about, you know, hand cocking and extraterrestrial things. I got an email just the other day about how about some dinosaur figurines from Mexico that show humans riding the backs of dinosaurs. I got a very honest email about how those are true or real because there are some similar figurines from the Middle East somewhere. You know, there's just a lot of stuff to weed through that and the ship never stops going forward.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we had you on 20, it was last year, like the early, early last year. Obviously some things have happened in the world since then, you know, small, small pandemics, things like that. Has anything happened since then? Or you've just been fighting pseudoscience and teaching and raising the next generation of archaeologists?
Field Season Adventures and Discoveries
00:02:12
Speaker
We have definitely been staying home a lot more and I was able to get out and do a field season this last summer with Radford. We did our archaeological field school this summer. Here in Virginia, we were working at a 19th century Appalachian farmstead site.
00:02:28
Speaker
It was really fantastic. It was fun to be working with Appalachian cabins. And I had a new experience this summer. You guys know what archaeology is like. Where we were excavating, there was a mother vulture who was very protective over her nest. And, you know, we had to work out an agreement of when we could excavate. And when she could sit on the eggs and it all it all worked out and she didn't harass us too much. But and the baby vultures were just fine and hatched before we left. But it was, you know, archaeology comes with its own unique joys.
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, wildlife is definitely something they don't teach about in undergrad, but you always have to deal with. You guys find any cool stills or anything out there? No stills, but honestly, one of the coolest things about that project, especially with the students there, it was really a great excavation to show just how active sediments are.
00:03:19
Speaker
So, you know, we were working at sites that are only about 100 years old, which is pretty recent for most of us. And yet we were finding things, you know, a solid 30, 40 centimeters down in our shovel tests, including, you know, that are obviously recent, like we found a portion of a leather shoe with metal nails in it. And that was a solid 30 centimeters down below the surface. And so it was a really great moment just to talk about how active sediments are and landscapes are when you're digging. Yeah, absolutely. Especially in that area in the Eastern Woodlands.
Exploring Early Mesoamerican Cultures
00:03:49
Speaker
So, kind of gearing us towards the topic at hand tonight, the origins of ancient civ or the rise of early states in Mesoamerica. You're a myotologist, you have done extensive work in the Yucatan Peninsula, did a whole bunch of survey and covering a bunch of sites around the region.
00:04:07
Speaker
And I took the Chiefdom's course with you, in which we did talk a lot about these Mesoamerican... What is a Chiefdom? Surface says it's redistribution. Rent-through has accumulation. Pockadot says it's all irrelevant. What is a Chiefdom? Monuments and stratified. More goods bared when people die. Chiefs on them placed way up high. What is a Chiefdom? Is it network? We don't know. Is it corporate? We don't know. How many people? We don't know.
00:04:36
Speaker
What is a chief dumb? Spiro trades with Mississippians. Refinui built colossal heads. Kusa wasn't really all that big. What is a chief dumb? I'm just screaming LaVenta. But as it goes, LaVenta happens to be part of the broader Olmec culture, which many of you guys might know for the Olmec colossal heads. And so I think the Olmec, they start around
00:05:01
Speaker
Like 1500 BC is kind of when you start seeing the appearance. We definitely get occupation in the Gulf Coast of Mexico, where the Olmec are located by 1500 BC, if not earlier. As all these things go, it's a little bit of when you want to count what starts as Olmec and when it all builds up. San Lorenzo, which is the earlier of the different Olmec centers,
00:05:24
Speaker
Definitely, it's center-like. It becomes a political center by about 1200 B.C. But we absolutely get earlier occupation in that region.
00:05:36
Speaker
leading populations in the area to congregate in larger population centers. Is there a climatic event going on or is it someone has learned to domesticate something? We see a long gradual process in Mesoamerica because we are primarily dealing with the origins development of farming villages around maize.
00:05:57
Speaker
And maize starts as a wild plant that we know today as teosinthe, and domestication of maize was slow and long and hard. And so we have some of the earliest evidence of domesticated maize going back to about 5000 BC in the form of pollen.
00:06:16
Speaker
But from the best we can tell, you know, it's the earliest corn cobs that I'm familiar with at this point come from a cave called Gila and the Keats in Oaxaca, Mexico. And I did not double check my dates before tonight, but they're about 3,500 B.C. And those corn cobs are about the size of my pinky finger. Like they are little tiny, tiny things.
00:06:36
Speaker
So there's clearly like this very long, slow trajectory until maize all of a sudden starts to become a more viable food source for people. And so we start to see sort of all over Mesoamerica, the emergence of farming villages about 2000 BC, but it takes like a solid thousand years even then where they slowly get larger and they're small, they're dispersed, there's not too many of them. They're all over Mexico.
00:07:05
Speaker
The Olmec are a funny thing, so like many listeners may have heard of the Olmec as America's first civilization, as sort of a label that's been thrown on them many a time. And this is basically because they made giant stone sculptures. You know, they have these beautiful colossal heads, which are incredible. The so-called tabletop altars, which were probably actually used as thrones by Olmec rulers and leaders, are amazing. Olmec statuary is fantastic.
00:07:31
Speaker
There's a long-standing old-school argument here that's been going on since the 40s, what's been called the mother culture versus sister cultures development of Mesoamerica, where there's been one camp for a very long time that has argued that the Olmec are the origin point for Mesoamerican civilization, and everything that comes after that sort of flows from them or derives from them in some way, shape, or form.
00:07:58
Speaker
And especially since the 70s on, there has been a growing call for sister cultures to say, you know what? What you see happening in Olmec Heartland is happening all over Mesoamerica. It's just not quite as overtly grandiose when it comes to those really cool, big pieces of stone. I am firmly in the sister culture camp
00:08:19
Speaker
particularly because my PhD dissertation research was on something from more or less the same time period in the Maya world where like, hey, we got a ton of stuff. There's even evidence that the Maya world where I was working in my dissertation was trading with Levanto, a later Olmec capital. It's minimal evidence that we can talk about that, but there's evidence that there's some interaction going on between them and there's nothing Olmec-like over in the Maya region, really.
00:08:46
Speaker
And so I'm kind of like firmly in that sister culture camp and really until sort of like the early 2000s, the sister culture camp was kind of completely taking over. But in the last 10, 15 years, the mother culture camp has kind of gotten a resurgence and there's
00:09:01
Speaker
It's increasing evidence for, you know, there's a lot of elite and royal imagery that we see in the Olmec heartland that does start to get copied by other people in some ways. And so there's definitely give and take going on here. You know, this is one that it'd take a lot to push me out of sister cultures. In fact, I don't think there's any reason to push me out of sister cultures ultimately, but maybe the Olmec were more influential than I wanted to give them credit for five, 10 years ago in some sense.
00:09:29
Speaker
So this sister mother culture thing kind of idea is that the main points of evidence are tracing cultural traits or things we find in the archaeological record and putting like a time stamp to them and trying to trace where those things spread essentially, right? Is that kind of the argument?
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much an artistic discussion about artistic style. And this is actually continues to be a problem. If listeners are interested in the Olmec, it's kind of still a really big problem because during the middle formative or middle pre classic period, there's a very common style and sort of, you know, some of the more example, more common things people think of are like
00:10:11
Speaker
what's been called a weir jaguar, which is sort of a quasi-human, quasi-feline creature that many people use. And there are other elements of shark teeth and other things that show up in this design patterns. And it's found in the Olmec heartland, at LaVenta, at San Lorenzo. And this design has been called Olmec for a long time. In the 70s, people started to make the argument that maybe we should call this a middle formative horizon style.
00:10:39
Speaker
That is, that it's a shared style and not necessarily indicative of political control or influence. And truly, you mentioned San Jose Mogote to me, one of the things we might want to talk about here. This is, again, a formative period site in Oaxaca in southern Mexico. And there's some really cool examples of this little formative horizon style showing up there, possibly earlier than it shows up at Olmec sites.
00:11:06
Speaker
And so there's definitely this sort of big question. What's going on in middle formative Mesoamerica? Lots of people are sharing iconographic imagery.
00:11:15
Speaker
Does that mean there's a shared understanding and shared belief systems? Does that mean there's political control and dominance coming out of one area? It's definitely one of these great sort of archaeological conundrums where, you know, what is the chicken and the egg going on here, really? Like, who's starting this? And I think we've got enough at this point to really push back
00:11:38
Speaker
you know, against Olmec-dominated narratives. And actually, before I slide past this, I was saying that some of the listeners might have encountered this. It's really common, especially if you go to museums or pick up art history books sometimes about this, to see things labeled as Olmec.
00:11:57
Speaker
And a lot of times what they mean is stylistically, this is middle formative. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it comes from San Lorenzo or La Venta. And so it's really challenging. I totally have this. I've had this a couple of times with students who want to do research papers where they come to me with like, I've got a whole bunch of Olmec sources. And I'm like, all of this is from Oaxaca. It's from another part of Mexico. And it's like, it's a little bit hard to sort all of this stuff out because of the way that it's been talked about for so long.
00:12:27
Speaker
So you're talking about like geographic location being Olmec or something like that and mixing it with time and then mixing it with artistic expression. You can easily see how that gets confused, especially for folks who are really interested in the art part portion of that.
00:12:44
Speaker
Yeah. We are straight up in here on what is a culture? What is an archaeological culture? What's a living culture? What's cultural? What are the relationships between cultures? What is shared? What is not shared? Like, yeah, it's this is stuff that frankly, you can get confused about in present day when you have written sources.
00:13:01
Speaker
I kind of don't know where to go here because it's pretty clear like Scar and Fagan from this ancient civ book I'm reading are definitely in the mother culture camp. So I basically have a whole chapter of Olmec influence that I'm not sure what to do with at the moment. Is there a, and I know this is like kind of unethical sometimes, well not unethical, just like odd to do, but is there like a comparative old world culture that is like a sister and mother culture kind of
00:13:24
Speaker
comparison to get a reference. So I do hear it like Aztecs, like Romans and like Mayans Greeks, but that's like not correct. You know? Yeah. You know, I think there are some comparable things going on. If you look at Egypt and Mesopotamia,
00:13:40
Speaker
There's a push back and forth of who started writing first and who is being inspired by which side. I'm not up to date on the latest arguments on which one started writing first and which case here, but this is definitely a classic.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, who influenced who, sort of story. And, you know, it's hard. When I was in grad school, our advisor, Will Andrews, warned us a lot about my sightism. Like, well, at my sight, it's like this. And it's true. We can get really myopic and focus on our sort of information sources and ignore other people's. But I want to do it anyway.
00:14:25
Speaker
I wrote my PhD dissertation on Stobo, which is a middle pre-classic, middle formative Maya site that was not just one site, but was surrounded by an entire regional occupation of over 90 to 100 other middle pre-classic villages around it. We have an extensive middle pre-classic occupation just in northwest Yucatan alone.
00:14:48
Speaker
There are similar middle and early and late, well, when we get to the late pre-classic in the Maya, the Olmec have fallen and the Maya start doing some really cool big city stuff. But in the early and middle pre-classic, there are villages.
00:15:03
Speaker
across the entirety of the Maya lowlands throughout the Yucatan Peninsula. Most of them aren't huge. Stobo, where I worked, was about a square kilometer in extent. We've got a nice plaza with two eight-meter tall pyramids at it. There's a ball court, which is really cool.
00:15:20
Speaker
You can go to other pretty big sites like Knock Bay down in northern Guatemala, which is a few times bigger than Shobo, has this really beautiful pyramid platform architecture known as triadic groups, lots of sock bays or causeways going between different groups in there. There are
00:15:39
Speaker
hundreds, if not thousands, of middle pre-classic settlements throughout the Maya lowlands. There's a handful. This is part of the problem in archaeology too. You guys know when something is found first, it becomes the model for what we expect all later discoveries to look like.
00:15:56
Speaker
And way back, the Set of Cyborg, when the Carnegie Maya people were working there, this is like the 30s or the 40s, there was a cache of jade sculptures that were very similar to some things that have been found in the Olmec world. And so, you know, back in the early 20th century, we started talking about Olmec influence on the pre-classic Maya.
00:16:17
Speaker
And you know what? We have found like two or three other jade caches since then. And we have found hundreds if not thousands of sites as well. Like the narrative has shifted. We've got an extensive middle pre-classic settlement going on throughout the Maya lowlands that
00:16:35
Speaker
Sure, they're interacting with the Olmec. Sure, they're interacting with the rest of Mesoamerica and the Olmec. I think I get accused every once in a while of downplaying the Olmec. The Olmec are awesome.
Teotihuacan and Mesoamerican Urban Centers
00:16:45
Speaker
They're doing amazing, really cool things, but they're not the only game in town. They're far from the only thing going on. Excellent. Well, we have two more segments going on, so we'll be right back after these messages. Building mountains, trade networks, run by chiefs and their families.
00:17:05
Speaker
Growing crops in the fields, surplus feed, trash, specialness Sometimes warfare will threaten you, so you build a palisade But if you need a weaker tribe
00:17:24
Speaker
Will you take the town by? Will they be a tribute? What is a chief dump?
00:17:42
Speaker
The Celts might have had some fates, Hawaii had further caves, Olmec traded lots of jade. What is a chief dumb? Is it simple or complex? Spanish went on lots of treks, the Americas got wrecked. What is a chief dumb? Social hierarchy?
00:17:59
Speaker
Welcome back to Episode 73 of A Life in Ruins Podcast. We are here with Dr. David S. Anderson, just to be clear, and there's a couple of those archaeologists out there. And we are talking about ancient civilizations in Central America specifically.
00:18:17
Speaker
We kind of touched on and mentioned the three geographic areas, kind of the Olmec, the Maya lowlands, the Zapotec area as well. But we wanted to mention that in the basin of Mexico, there are some things going on during this kind of early and middle or pre-classic kind of era. So what is kind of going on during that time?
00:18:40
Speaker
We got a couple of cool things that are going on in the base of Mexico and based on the Mexico archaeology is always a little bit hard because a whole chunk of it is underneath modern-day Mexico City, which makes excavations a little bit more difficult sometimes. But there's some really cool stuff. There's some flotilco, early pre-classic villages that have been excavated.
00:18:59
Speaker
Totilko are early farming villages, but they have some pretty expressive cools. Some of the things they're best known for are sometimes called duality masks. These little ceramic masks that have sort of a line down the middle and it's like one side smiling and one side frowning and whatnot. They're almost kind of like Greek comic and tragedy masks in one sense. And they're really cool. Totilko stuff, they're farming villages. We don't know a whole lot about them.
00:19:26
Speaker
But the art they made is so expressive that it just really captures one's imagination. And so there's definite farming villages going on in the area early on. There's another thing that really complicates understanding the transition from the late pre-classic into the classic period in the central Mexico. A lot of listeners have probably heard of the city of Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan is this massive, wonderful, classic period urban center in central Mexico.
00:19:56
Speaker
It's about a half hour outside of Mexico City by bus ride, maybe 45 minutes. If you owe it to archaeology to go to Teotihuacan if you're ever in Mexico City, it is just one of the most amazing places. In its classic period height, it has this beautiful avenue of the dead as it's called down the middle with the pyramid of the sun and the moon on the sides.
00:20:17
Speaker
and these incredible huge urban apartment complexes all along it, Teo got its start in the late pre-classic. Again, kind of like Mexico City, it's hard to know too much about the early origins of Teotihuacan because it became this huge classic city that covered 16 square kilometers and was home to 100,000 people or more.
00:20:39
Speaker
It's hard to get under that and get a good picture of what was going on before. But one of the things we do know about is another late pre-classic site called Cuicuilco. Cuicuilco is found in the southern end of the basin of Mexico and was also thriving in the late pre-classic. And it looks like Teotihuacan and Cuicuilco were kind of, you know,
00:21:05
Speaker
two different centers in the basin, maybe political opponents, maybe friends, we don't really know, but the two growing spaces in that late pre-classic environment. Cuicuilco has a very relatively unusual round pyramid in central Mexico, but then it's about 200 AD. So the late pre-classic is coming to an end and we're sliding into the early classic period. Cuicuilco met a sudden end by volcanic eruption.
00:21:33
Speaker
because the whole, you know, central Mexico is volcanic in every way, shape and form. And this is not Pompeii. Pompeii was covered in ash and people have been excavating and finding stuff. And you get these really cool plaster molds. They're cool. Other people who passed away that were at Pompeii. Kwaku was covered in lava.
00:21:55
Speaker
And it is literally like buried in volcanic tuft. And so, well, the archaeology of Kwakuoka is kind of hard to do. There's been some done. There's, you know, enough to know what was going on there. But lo and behold, Teotihuacan kind of took off after that.
00:22:13
Speaker
and grew a bit larger and had more people because maybe their main political rival in the basin was destroyed by the volcano. You never kind of know what rural nature will play in politics, right? Yeah. It seems like that's an easy decision to not go back to that place and do that over again. It's like, I'm not sure I want to go back there and get burned by lava again.
00:22:41
Speaker
Or even just the political and religious theater by the elites of Teotihuacan using their moment to be like, well, you see. There's a way to stop this. Can only imagine how this was spun. Yeah.
00:22:57
Speaker
They also got plenty of raw obsidian material out of that, too, I'm sure. You know, that's a good question. I don't think I don't think it created any obsidian flows that I'm directly familiar with because, yeah, the the most famous central Mexican obsidian flow is in Pueblo, which is further away called Pachuca. I don't know if you guys have seen this stuff before, but it is like bottle glass green obsidian. Yeah, I've seen that stuff.
00:23:22
Speaker
Yeah, when it's in a solid chunk, it still looks pretty black and it's not that necessarily noticeable. But when you flake it and you get the prismatic blades out of it, you hold it up to the light and it is amazing. It is like totally green. And it was widely traded as a result because green as a color, as a prestige good was high quality throughout Mesoamerica. And so we end up finding that Central Mexican obsidian sort of widely spread all throughout Mesoamerica as a result.
00:23:51
Speaker
That's way more interesting than the green glass that we find in, you know, the United States, which is usually associated with alcoholism and or something else like that. I was just proud. We found in our field school this summer, we got a like complete intact Dr. Pepper bottle from like 1940 or earlier. And it was just like, well, yeah, this is, you know, it's good stuff.
00:24:14
Speaker
Well, did we define pre classic per chance? That would just be like, I guess, like the, the, the Maya proper that we think of what the temple complex is. This is like build up to that. Well, if we're going chronology, sort of the standard chronology for Mesoamerica, we start pre classic roughly about 2000 BC. And that is sort of this transition from primarily hunting and gathering economies to farming subsistence economies.
00:24:40
Speaker
The earliest farming villages vary around the region.
Maya Civilization: Development and Collapse
00:24:44
Speaker
At this point in the Maya lowlands, we don't have anything earlier than about 1200 BC in terms of farming villages. Some of that's going to be preservation. Some of it might be that they migrated into the area later.
00:24:57
Speaker
We work our way up so that we do an early pre-classic period that is like first farming villages until about 900 BC, depending on where you are. The middle pre-classic emergence is basically when we start to see political complexity.
00:25:18
Speaker
So San Lorenzo, the Olmec Center we were talking about before, emerges early. And that's definitely hopping by about 1200 BC. And we see some evidence. There's this really cool building called the Red Palace at San Lorenzo, which is, the Red Palace is a bit of an exaggeration in that term palace, but it's twice as big as the other houses at the site. It has a basalt column in the middle of it. It has basalt drain stones underneath it, which regular houses don't have.
00:25:45
Speaker
You have that sort of emergence of an economic or political elite in some way, shape, or form. That continues on for a while. Middle pre-classic throughout the Maya lowlands, throughout central Mexico, into the basin of Mexico, you're seeing the emergence of political elites and you're seeing political complexity grow.
00:26:05
Speaker
And late pre-classic is Kano when things get crazy. At least for the Maya, anyway. Levente is the later of the two Olmec capitals. It pretty much gives up the ghost by about 400-300 BC at the end of the middle pre-classic as we're moving into that late pre-classic. And the Olmec
00:26:25
Speaker
The Olmec are followed by a group of people we very creatively call the Epi Olmec. And the Epi Olmec are some of the least known and understood cultures of Mesoamerica because their sites are very poorly preserved, but they started writing.
00:26:42
Speaker
And they started writing long texts. And we have like the La Mojara Stila. La Mojara Stila number one is one of the coolest monuments ever found in Mesoamerica. It is a late pre-classic monument with a lengthy hieroglyphic inscription on it, with a long count calendar date on it. It was found in a river. We don't really know that much about the rest of the site.
00:27:05
Speaker
who these people are, we know very little about, but they are writing in a hieroglyphic fashion that is extraordinarily similar to what the Maya start doing in the late pre-classic as well. And that really gets going in the classic period for the Maya. Late pre-classic Maya stuff is big. This is where I usually throw like lots of pictures of students in my classes where I'm like, oh my God, look at this. Look how bloody big this is.
00:27:35
Speaker
The site that you have to talk about is El Mirador.
00:27:39
Speaker
El Mirador, I mean, I have not had the privilege of going. It's in far northern Guatemala. I saw a reconstruction drawing of the Tigre complex pyramid at El Mirador when I was an undergrad. And I kid you not, that is why I'm here today. Like that's why I wanted to do pre classic Maya. That's what everything it was. The El Mirador site is so big. It has two of the largest Maya pyramids that were ever built. When it was first found, it was just assumed to be classic because you're like, well, I mean, that's it must be a classic site.
00:28:10
Speaker
When Ian Graham was this incredible pioneer of Maya archaeology, who spent a ton of time going through the jungles, documenting my hieroglyphic inscriptions, Graham made it there in the 60s. He was not the first archaeologist there, but he was the first one to draw a decent map of it. The Carnegie Maya folks were there back in the 1930s, and it's one of those classic stories where they got there, they had run out of water by the time they arrived there, and so they had to leave, and they couldn't really do anything.
00:28:36
Speaker
Graham got there in the 60s, and he drew this really cool map, and in his publication, he actually says that it must be a different ethnicity. When he sees the site, he knows it's different, but he can't put his finger on why. Well, he knows there's no hieroglyphic inscriptions, there are no monuments, there are no stela.
00:28:55
Speaker
He's been spending years upon years of his life documenting Stila and hieroglyphic inscriptions. And here is one of the biggest sites he's ever been to, and there are no hieroglyphic inscriptions. And it's just a big WTF moment for him. And it turns out, and we had some excavations in the 70s and 80s and the 90s at the site. And gradually, I actually was trying to piece this together once a while ago, and I never found the aha moment.
00:29:20
Speaker
But by the 90s, the archaeologists working there finally realized it is all pre-classic. It's just insane. And we're talking like the Tigray Pyramid complex is 55 meters tall. It's an acropolis complex. There are little buildings all through this thing, all over the place.
00:29:42
Speaker
And an extraordinarily small percentage of this has ever been excavated by an archaeologist named Richard Hansen. And it's incredible. And the Donta complex is 70 some meters tall, which is across the other end of the site and is only partially known. Hansen was made the news, well, he's made the news for
00:30:01
Speaker
worst reasons recently but a couple years ago he made the news for some stucco sculptures that he found at the Donta complex which Carlton knows where I'm going to go on this. Hanson called them the hero twins.
00:30:16
Speaker
There are two guys. Carlton had to sit through classes with me, so he knows how I feel about this stuff. If you've heard of the Maya Hero Twins, good on you. You're in the loop here. The Maya Hero Twins are these really cool culture history heroes that we know from a book called the Popolfu. Popolfu wasn't written down until after colonial occupation, and it was written down by the Quiche Maya, or actually some Spanish priests working with the Quiche Maya in Highland Guatemala.
00:30:42
Speaker
We're talking about something that's like 2,000 years earlier than that. And my big problem with hero twin identification is that Hanson and a lot of other scholars do this, and I'm actually in a minority here, so maybe I'm the wrong one. But my art is not personified.
00:31:00
Speaker
They don't, you know, it's not the warts in all of the Romans. They don't, you know, depict someone as they actually looked in life. Everybody looks the same. And you might get a hieroglyphic label that says, this is, you know, a how so-and-so, or this might be the queen so-and-so and whatnot. Otherwise, everybody kind of looks the same. And there's a tremendous tendency when anybody finds two people in a picture, two men, I should say, in a picture to say, well, those are the hero twins.
00:31:28
Speaker
And that's when I'm holding up my hair and saying, but all guys in Maya art kind of look the same. And so calling them the hero twins with no other identifying features kind of annoys me. But he found this really, really, really cool stucco sculpture that clearly shows some Maya men in an aquatic setting. And there's some really cool stuff going on.
00:31:48
Speaker
This is absolutely one of the coolest archaeological sites that has ever been found. To this day, last time I heard, I think it's a two-day mule trek to get there or a helicopter ride to get there. This is an incredibly remote setting in the present day. Hanson made the news like,
00:32:06
Speaker
I guess a year or two ago, I think it was pre-pandemic, less nicely. He was basically trying to get some US senators to help bankroll, turning the region into sort of a theme park. Oh, this is that. Yeah. Yeah. Vice News did a whole breakdown where, you know, I would just tell people to watch the video and listen to Hanson and what he says. I'm not going to put any words in his mouth, but I think the words that come out of his mouth are pretty bad in that interview.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, they're not great. They're not great. Two things. One, someone recently emailed me asking for help and knowledge in identifying hero twin stories on the Great Plains. And I haven't responded to that because I mean what we thought of you. And then second, so you said La Danta.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah. Is it 172 meters? 70 meters. Just 70? Yeah. Okay. This infographic is wrong. No, because I'm looking at an infographic and it says 172 meters. No, no, no, no, no. To all the listeners out there, this is that you cannot trust everything you look up on the internet.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah. It's showing that it's taller than Kufu's pyramid, which is like weird. Yeah. Kufu's pyramid is 400 feet or 400 meters. I'm going to get that one. It's 139 meters. 139 meters. Okay. Yeah. No, it is not taller than Kufu's pyramid.
00:33:30
Speaker
Okay, that was about to get blown away, but Shibu Adventures for your Guatemalan tours and travel, don't, you're lying, stop. I wonder if these are the same people, there was definitely a friend sent me a link back in like 2011, before the whole Maya 2012 debacle.
00:33:50
Speaker
And it was a tourism company offering tours to the Maya world. And basically on their flyer, they said, like, come and see the Maya sites before 2012, before the end of the world. And at the very end of their flyer, they're like, and we have our own scholars who have done their own calculations. And it turns out the end of the world's coming even sooner. Book your tour now. Oh, my God.
00:34:17
Speaker
We will put a link to the Vice news article in the description. And my Vice right now is my archaeology. And on that note, we are going to end this segment and go to segment three.
00:34:36
Speaker
What is a chief dum? Cahokia L'ventor What is a chief dum?
00:34:47
Speaker
So do we really know what a chief don't wear? Is it really a thing? Can archaeology help us to see what we want to know?
00:35:09
Speaker
Let's end the story. Welcome back to episode 73 of a Life Remorse Podcast. We're here with Dr. Anderson talking about pre-Columbian civilizations in Mesoamerica. And yeah, I think this is a potpourri section. So what would you like to talk about?
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, I was telling you guys before we started, this is the stuff I'm used to doing with my images, too, where I can slam these big, giant pyramid pictures in your face. But I think the really cool thing that has always stuck with me is how the transition from the late pre-classic to the classic period for the Maya. This is going to happen around 200 AD, 400 AD as it happens.
00:35:53
Speaker
For most people, if you've seen Amaya Monument, Amaya Pyramid, you've seen a classic period thing. And you've mostly seen something from about 600 to 900 AD, which is the zenith of complexity and expansion of classic Maya power.
00:36:10
Speaker
There's something really wild that happens at the end of the late pre-classic as we move into the early classic that we don't fully have enough data on yet. El Mirador falls. We have one of the largest Maya cities ever built with some of the largest pyramids Maya people ever built.
00:36:30
Speaker
and it collapses. And it's a pretty good parable, I think, for modern day in that, again, we don't have a ton of evidence, but the city is surrounded by bahos, these lowland swamps. And what is very clear in some cores that were done by an old colleague of mine, Bruce Dallin,
00:36:47
Speaker
is that there was a tremendous amount of erosion. He did some cores and excavations in the Bajos swaps, and there are these huge layers of sediments eroding from the lands surrounding the Bajos into them.
00:37:02
Speaker
And, you know, he posited that this is massive deforestation, and certainly, you know, El Mirador was a big place. They were clearly, you know, growing a lot of corn to feed those people. Every single building was covered in plaster, sometimes thick, thick plaster. Some of the plaster floors at El Mirador are crazy. They're like a half a meter thick sometimes, because they would just renew them over and over again. And every time you make plaster, you've got to burn limestone, and that needs more trees too.
00:37:30
Speaker
And so, you know, between feeding people and building this site, there's no doubt they were cutting down huge sloths of the of the jungle around them. And lo and behold, yeah, there are huge layers of erosion showing up in those bachos. And so clearly there is some form of environmental collapse that happens that brings an end to the Elemira Door city, state or nation or whatever we want to call it. And a lot of not all
00:37:59
Speaker
But a lot of our other late pre-classic sites become abandoned as well, like Knock Bay was going in the middle pre-classic. I mentioned it continues in the late pre-classic some, but it gets more or less abandoned. The whole area that's been known as the Mirador Basin, which apparently is not actually a basin, so that's a misnomer,
00:38:18
Speaker
But all of the area around Mirador, which was thriving, kind of fizzles as a result of this. And we see a new order come into place. And one of the best known is Tikal. Tikal is a real oddity in the Maya world, because not only does it thrive in the classic period, but Tikal lived through the late pre-classic and the middle pre-classic without the same sort of major interruptions that happened at El Mirador.
00:38:47
Speaker
There is a great middle pre-classic occupation at the site of Tikal, best known from some excavations in the 90s in a group called the Mundo Perdido group, which, if you know anything about Maya archaeology, was actually one of the early E groups. E groups are, you know, it's a long debate about what these represented, but they have some association with solar astronomy. They have alignments with soltices and equinoxes.
00:39:10
Speaker
Tikal had a middle pre-classic E group that was expanded through the middle pre-classic, it was expanded through the late pre-classic, and Mirador falls, and Tikal just keeps chugging along. And in the early classic, Tikal starts to produce the Stila cult complex that we are so accustomed to with the classic Maya.
00:39:32
Speaker
And the classic Maya period, like the classic Maya are best known for their hieroglyphic writing. And one of the things that the main thing they did with that was erect these stela, these standing stone monuments that would have a portrait of a ruler on one side. And then there would usually be sort of a lengthy inscription about how awesome that ruler was on the sides or the backs until it makes sure the people knew all the good things that that ruler did for the people.
00:39:57
Speaker
And Tikal, it's not the only place by any stretch of the imagination where we see this kind of transition, but Tikal is one of these few places where there's this nice, steady passage from that pre-classic era into the classic period, and we start to see the growth of these mayapalates.
00:40:14
Speaker
There's some other cool stuff going on. We need more data. We need way more data, which is also another thing. Again, I know you guys have some listeners who are interested in getting into archaeology. I've totally had students ask me this before, like, is there anything we have to do? Oh, good God, yes. There is tons to do everywhere you go in the world. You know, it's like, yes, we've had a hundred years of archaeology, but we need many hundred years more.
00:40:40
Speaker
El Mirador, Kalakmul, which was a neighbor of El Mirador that was doing some similar things, we had this emphasis on huge acropolis buildings like the Tigray Complex, which were these gigantic pyramid complexes, and they were decorated with large stucco masks.
00:40:58
Speaker
These things go away. And then in the classic, we see this emergence of the Stila and Alter Complex, where the classic Maya rulers are exalting themselves on the Stila. There are other sites, and one of my favorite sites in the late pre-classic that, you know, suggests, you know, maybe, you know, something going more similar to Tikal.
00:41:17
Speaker
If you've not seen the San Martolo murals, like that is like everybody stop and go look those up right now. The San Martolo murals are late pre-classic Maya murals that are some of the best preserved murals that have ever been found in this humid tropical jungle place. And so you don't get very many things like this.
00:41:36
Speaker
clearly very focused on rulership. They were first found by archaeologist William Saturno back in the early 2000s, and there's this little room that's a late pre-classic room on the back of a later classic pyramid, and the whole top sort of rim or sort of border around the top of this room was covered in this mural, this
00:41:57
Speaker
very narrative style mural where you see people walking from place to place and different things happening along that route. And it's very rulership focused. I get the north and the west wall confused. There are two preserved walls. And I forget which one is which. They were both reproduced by artist Heather Hurst. And she actually won a MacArthur Genius Grant for her work on her reproductions of these murals because her work is just stunningly beautiful.
00:42:22
Speaker
And one of the walls ends in the scene where some sort of crown of rulership is being handed up to somebody sitting on a giant sort of seat. So it looks a lot like a ruler being passed a crown. But leading up to that is where we get some of our early views of Maya mythology and religious beliefs and what they're thinking, what they're doing.
00:42:43
Speaker
Leading up to that is a series of images of a male walking up to a variety of different trees. There's definitely a cacao tree in there. There's a sabre tree in there and a couple others. And they are practicing genital bloodletting at each tree.
00:42:59
Speaker
And this is one like we knew that Maya priests and rulers practice genital bloodletting. We've known it for a while. But when you get to the classic period, they don't really show it. It's like he's got his knees up and there's a stingray spine sticking between his legs. You don't really know what's going on. In the San Bartolo murals, you see a man holding his penis in his hand and shabbing a giant stingray spine into it and drops of blood flying like in every absolute direction.
00:43:27
Speaker
painted by Quentin Tarantino. Yes. It is like full on everything you could possibly like. Yes. And it's, it's extraordinary. And these are my, my favorite thing about the San Martolo murals. Like if you look at the art in these, this was not somebody's first painting.
00:43:46
Speaker
This is not somebody screwing around trying to figure out what they want to do. This is incredible detail. This is incredible artistry. This is incredibly laid out with a very specific meaning behind it. That's how much we've lost, right? Like this is the one that survived. There were hundreds of these or at least dozens of these at the very, you know, like.
00:44:05
Speaker
this was a normal thing that people were doing. And, you know, when it comes to a human jungle environment, it's just not going to survive. And so, you know, we might get lucky and find another one of these someday, but we will never find even remotely the corpus of all these that were.
00:44:21
Speaker
Because the stelae, as you're saying, preserve because they're just big blocks of rock that are carved into. But these things, these San Bartolo murals are completely different and that they're actually like art on a wall. And the one I looked at, yeah, you can definitely see the stingray spine and the Quentin Tarantino blood associated with it.
00:44:44
Speaker
One of my colleagues was presenting this in class and one of the male students in the class passed out when he put this up on the screen. So this is not for the faint of heart if you haven't googled it already.
00:44:56
Speaker
That's just an experimental art. No, I'm good. Hard pass. Hard, hard pass. I should say though, cause to, to make this fair, this is actually something I like to talk about in my classes because there's a, especially when you get to the classic period, we don't know as much for the pre classic, but when you do the classic period for the Maya, there is a gendered pattern of bloodletting.
00:45:17
Speaker
where male rulers and priests were doing genital bloodletting. They were doing other things too. They were cutting their ears and doing other bloodscattering rituals and whatnot. But there is a female ritual as well that we only see women doing. Actually, somebody showed me once a pot showing a man doing this. So there's one counter example that I know of, but we see a pretty strong gendered pattern where males are doing this genital bloodletting
00:45:43
Speaker
And what we see women do, and the best examples of this come from the site of Yaxi Lan, was pulling a thorned rope through their tongue. And this is, you know,
00:45:54
Speaker
followed by, you know, if we look at the narrative scenes that are presented in the Wintils at Yaxchilan, followed by some hallucinations that happen afterwards, possibly from blood loss and pain, but certainly also possibly for some other reasons. And so it's not just the guys who have a hard time of this. The women had their own hard time in this process.
00:46:14
Speaker
Hmm. And that was to communicate with like deities, right? Yeah. The Yashti Long lintels, these are classic Maya lintels, you know, from like seven, 800 AD. They're really cool. There's a whole series of them. A lintel, it's easier when I can point to this, but it's the cross piece at the top of a door.
00:46:31
Speaker
And so to see these, you would have had to walk into the doorway and look straight up. But the site is known for these incredibly narrative-esque lentils. And there are several series of them that show, for this issue in particular, some of the female rulers of the site, female elite of the site, letting blood
00:46:49
Speaker
and then letting that blood spill down into a bowl, and then in that bowl we filled with paper, and that blood would spatter down onto that paper, and in other scenes we see that same bowl full of that same paper lit on fire.
00:47:04
Speaker
And the smoke curls up from the fire, and then out of that smoke, you see a spiral of a vision serpent. And the serpent always has its mouth open, and there is a human figure emerging out of that mouth. And so this would appear in some way, shape, or form to be a means of contacting ancestors or contacting another world and interacting with that spirit world in some way, shape, or form.
00:47:31
Speaker
There's only a couple things in archaeology that make me cringe deep down inside. One of them is the elongation of skulls. You see in South America, that sounds terrible. Also, trepanning of those skulls also sounds
00:47:49
Speaker
awful and painful, but a lot of the Maya rituals that you see and that are mentioned also make me, I would be one of those people that passed out in class because it's intense, but it's cool to see that stuff preserved and to understand that. We can double down on it because there's definitely skull binding that happens in the Maya world too, so we get them both.
Maya Cultural Practices and Misrepresentations
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah. Actually, oh, I can, I can take it another step for you if you want. Dental modification. So the classic Maya rulers would file their teeth and also drill little holes in them and embed jade into them. And so they would actually like sort of decorate their teeth and there's, there's no Novocaine going on with that process whatsoever.
00:48:33
Speaker
Yeah. I can see one like ambitious, like Spanish priest. That was a translator. Be like, okay, I'm, I'm guys, I'm cool with everything else. Like, that's fine. Or like this one. Let's, let's, let's do away with that one. Didn't they portray that in Apokolipto? Like both elongated heads and the Jade, I mean,
00:48:55
Speaker
Yeah, Apokolipto had the jade inlays on the teeth. They did do that. You guys obviously have seen this movie, or you've heard of it at least. It seems like I'm grateful that more and more of my undergrads have not heard of this movie any longer. But Mel Gibson directed a Maya movie back
00:49:13
Speaker
Early 2000s that come out. I was in grad school when it came out. Late 2000s, yeah. Yeah. And it was definitely like, it was very problematic. And in the way it sort of mushes together pre-classic, the classic, and the post-classic all in sort of one scene and suggests that Maya farmers had no idea there was a city about a five hour walk away from where they were living. They knew that. They would have known that.
00:49:40
Speaker
There was definitely one, like the movie was shot where all the actors were speaking Yucatec Mayan, which was cool. And I liked the idea anyway, but it was one of those moments where I went to see the movie when it came out in the theater and I was watching it. I felt really good where I was watching the movie. I'm like, I understand what they're saying. Mayan Yucatec is pretty good.
00:49:57
Speaker
And then I realized, no, no, just everyone, everyone but two people in the movie learned Yucatec just for the movie. And it's like all of their lines were like really basic expressions. And I was like, Oh no, I'm just barely keeping up here is actually what's going on. I did like like the, obviously it was incorrect in every single way, but like the set design and like.
00:50:19
Speaker
Just you got to see like a, you know, like a bustling Mayan or Central American city, which you don't really get to see in movies. But the worst part of it is like, that's people's perception of it now. And it's not correct. Yeah, it was. That was what I was really hoping for. When Apokolipto came out, I'm like, we're going to get some good visuals when I see what the Maya world looked like and introduce people to that. And it was.
00:50:39
Speaker
It was decent. It did some good things, but it also did, you know, there's a shot. We were talking about El Mirador. There was a shot in that scene where they very directly lifted a recreation painting of what El Mirador looked like, and they use it as the backdrop or the inspiration for the city in the movie.
00:50:58
Speaker
But it's that problematic shot where, wait, it's like an Elmirador was this huge place that... Now I'm blanking on the right names here, but this was not a place that looked like Amaya City. This looked wrong when archaeologists first started going there, and we finally realized that it was pretty classic and not classic, and that was what was wrong about it.
00:51:23
Speaker
they used a pre-classic city as a backdrop for what was in the movie presented as a classic period story. And then the Spanish showed up, which that doesn't happen for another 500 years. And so, you know, this is, I say this a lot, you know, in another example, I use another, we talk about this in some of my classes. If you look at the animated film, El Dorado, they kind of did the same thing where they just pick and choose a whole bunch of stuff in the backgrounds from like, it's Maya, it's Latin American, whatever, just throw it in there.
00:51:53
Speaker
I would compare that to movies set in Europe like the Hunchback of Notre Dame cartoon or any of Mel Gibson's other historic epics. They don't make those same background mistakes. The Hunchback of Notre Dame cartoon doesn't have the Roman Colosseum as the same time period as the Cathedral of Notre Dame. That's the kind of mistakes that are happening in the background of Apokolipto.
00:52:19
Speaker
And I don't expect my fiction to be 100% accurate. And we shouldn't have to expect our fiction to be 100% accurate. But there's something going on here where the European fiction and the Western fiction is way more accurate than that depicting Native American populations and Latin American populations and whatnot.
00:52:40
Speaker
They can do a little more research. They could have just picked Tikal and used all buildings from Tikal and used that as their inspiration for the movie and it would have been fine. But they picked and chose these different things and mushed them together when they didn't belong from the same time period. And you get this really bad mismatch as a result.
00:52:59
Speaker
Well, and that's frustrating because you consult one archeologist, one myatologist, and be like, okay, this is the time period I'm looking for. This is the location I'm looking for. How do I portray that? And it's an easy solution, it seems. I didn't come to attack anyone, but since we're here, Richard Hanson was the consultant for the movie. And since we've already talked about him, I don't know. Full circle.
00:53:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's full circle. I've had some very nice pleasant interaction with him. He does some really good archaeological work, but he has been mixed up in some problematic things too.
00:53:40
Speaker
Vice News and Apokolipto, all right. Well, before we end the show, Dr. Anderson, what are a couple sources, you know, like one to three books, articles, videos, et cetera, that you would recommend for anyone interested in learning about the formation of states here in Mesoamerica or the Maya or even just general Meso? You know, Chris Poole's Olmec book, I'm going to forget. I think I'm going to forget the exact title. So I'll give you guys some links and you can put them up and whatnot. But Chris Poole's book on the Olmec is fantastic. It is the best one out there.
00:54:09
Speaker
There are some other competing ones that are okay, but they, in my opinion, they fall into that mother camp culture category and they don't necessarily give you the right representation of this stuff. Francisco Estrada Belli has a really good book on Formative Maya stuff that's nice and readable. Another good pre-classic book. We got lots of tons of tons of good pre-classic articles to read out there, but it has not been as well represented in the book world.
00:54:33
Speaker
My favorite actually, I'll throw this, this is, this goes back to my undergrad days. My, my professor in undergrad was David Grove and David Grove did absolutely fantastic middle pre-classic excavations at a site called Chaka Tsinga that we haven't, uh, got to talk about tonight. Really cool site, has one of the greatest monuments that's just like this giant open mouth.
00:54:56
Speaker
and it was set at the doorway of a temple and so like to get in and out of this you would have been going in and out of this giant mouth and it's just this wonderful monument. David Grove retired a few years ago and wrote this fantastic narrative of what it's like to do archaeology in Mexico and he got he has it is full of
00:55:14
Speaker
Not his juiciest stories that he told us in class sometimes, but it is full of a lot of good stories about what it's like to do pre-classical archaeology in Mexico. And it is just fun and rip-holicking in a good time. And so I highly recommend that to anyone. You want to know not just what archaeology is, but what it's like to be an archaeologist. That is definitely a good one. Excellent. And all of those will be in the description for our listeners who are interested. So you'll find links for that when you're listening to this podcast.
00:55:41
Speaker
Yeah. And where can our listeners find you on social media or academia and stuff? Yeah, you can find me basically on all the social medias as DSA archaeology. I'm on Twitter most of all, but I've got a Facebook account and a Instagram account under those. And I don't know, everyone keeps trying to push me into TikTok, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready.
00:56:02
Speaker
Dude, you would crush it at TikTok with your retorts on things. Like that's what people like on there. But anyway. Yeah. But it's also a dark, dark world. Such a dark world. Yeah. I'm already on Twitter and I think that's enough dark worlds for me right now. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, when we just interviewed Dr. David Anderson, you can find him on Twitter.
00:56:24
Speaker
Instagram, Facebook as DSA archaeology, not to be confused with democratic socialist something. You mentioned it last time you're on. I have definitely been accused to be the democratic socialists of America. I think it is. DSA just happens to be my initials. Like I'm not trying to make a political statement one way or another. We can have that conversation later, but it's just my initials. Excellent.
00:56:47
Speaker
Please be sure to rate and review the podcast and provide us with feedback on whichever podcasting platform you guys listen to us on. Send us an email, smoke signal, you know the usual. I would appreciate it. Thanks. And with that, we are out.
00:57:08
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Oh, they're both bad. I have two of them. We'll see.
00:57:26
Speaker
So gents, the mind taught me that if you don't finish something, it's not really the end of the world. No, Gibson's Spaniards are on the way, so we should probably wrap this up. Okay, second one. Back in 2011, my friend predicted the world would end in 2012.
00:57:49
Speaker
I said your guess is as good as mine. Thank you for that credit.
00:58:15
Speaker
Are they too hard? Are you out of date? Are you still useful for comparison?
00:58:34
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.