Great Wonders: Chichen Itza: An Alien City in the Maya Lowlands

okay all right thank you very much Steve thanks for everyone coming out in such a warm humid clothes evening be nice to sit and some we're really deeply air-conditioned but we just have to sit here for a while instead okay so chichen-itza I imagine that some people have actually been there it's one of the most visited sites in Mexico and and for reasons I'll be explaining it's it's quite a mystery um we are going to be talking about aliens not perhaps the usual conventional pen museum topic but for reasons you'll see it's it's very important to discuss these matters but not just aliens we also need to talk about dinosaurs what is the connection between chichen itza and the decline and disappearance of the dinosaurs these are two really compelling issues and i promise by the end of this evening we are gone through and dealt with both of them okay well actually in the meantime we'll talk about archeology and this very interesting mysterious wonderful beautiful sight of chichen itza it is one of the great tourist attractions not only at Mexico but also of Latin America hundreds of thousands of people visit it and through all those visits through all those tour guides through all those publications narratives that are developed there's ways of understanding chichen that come from the popular literature and those contains very interesting ideas and sometimes some very real grains of truth but they also contain some distortions and misunderstandings and things which as archeologists we have to cut through what we're interested in is not the popular narrative about chichen but the real history the real people and what went on there a thousand years and more ago so a little bit of orientation we know that the my area is down here on the tail end of Mexico and we used many cases to hearing about this great classic Maya cities of course Tikal and corpang Kiera guar sites where the museum has worked all the way back into the 1930s but of course there's no Cheech am here because chichen is not a great classic Maya city Chichen up in the North doesn't exist on its own it exists within this transitional era between the classic and what comes later initially the terminal classic and then into the post classic and we'll be talking about those things as I go along what's important I think is to situate chichen within not just time but also the geography and the cultural surroundings it's fellow cities that there in the north so there's core bar x belong in the east north of the west whoosh mala my apart now these sites did not coexist sequential to each other in many ways we look first at core bar it's a very ruined site it's a very atmospheric place there are beautiful lakes and wildlife but the site itself is very heavily dilapidated this is the famous novel more pyramid and it's one of the few that you can climb with me safety core bar it comes at the end of the great classic tradition in many ways it's not very typical of the north it's more typical of the southern lowlands places like tikal or Naranjo or peters Negros this is the kind of culture that core bar is part of and therefore course it has monumental Stila stretching all the way back into the early classic late classic and up till the very end of the late classic Balaam is probably much less not well-known the site is a lot smaller korban is is really core bars really vast but heck Balaam is very concentric Lee positions very tightly spaced and in the last few years has produced some wonderful stucco sculptures really elaborate things now think Balam is it sort of a brief fluorescence this is we know from the inscriptions that this is created as a phenomenon under one and perhaps two rulers the other thing that's interesting about egg Balaam is that we know that the ancient name of thick Balaam was it belong all this time people have known the ruins by the same name and we've now found it in the inscriptions as the place name and that's identity is true of Kaabah as well these are both ancient Meyer names okay so who Shmuel we're back to a very large center and really a very different one in many ways this is typifying or typifies book style architecture this is very very finely cut stones which are mosaic together with a loose rubble fill behind with these sort of monstrous masks most of them actually represent mountains rather than the rain god shark which is often said about them this is very very typical of cook style which mal was not alone there was a lot of other sites of kaaba house i yealed labna whole community of centers but all in this western cook region finally we have maya plan Maya part is different again as we will see as we go through looking at these various buildings it's modeled after chichen it's really like a little miniature version of chichen the site was excavated back in the 1940s and 50s and the site plan is radically different this is a wall sitting with very dense population insider it clearly belongs to the very late post classic it's talked about in the colonial sources and we believe that it was abandoned near either 1441 or 1461 just before the Spanish arrived with century or so before the Spanish arrived so if we're trying to locate your chain in time we have to place it in between these earlier sites of Quebec balaam Mucha mal and what goes on later on at my apartment now the line is dotted because this is the really controversial part understanding the chronology of chichen is part of the key to understanding the history of the site the people who ruled there and the cultures they inhabited it what can see is the core bar things end at 800 and this is the beginning of the terminal classic this is when things start to fall apart this is the beginning of the Maya collapse right there between 800 and 900 the terminal classic Balam survives a little bit longer has monuments going all the way up to almost almost up to 900 but not quite and truly was fluorescently in a sense superseding Hobart Omar which is caused further to the West didn't really last that much longer either this is part of the books fluorescence which came about just after the southern Maya cities were collapsing but they're all sort of done and gone before chichen has really hit its stride my pan comes in and then dominates for much later periods so let's get an orientation of the site itself in the center and this is course just downtown chichen because the site extends off in all directions we have el castillo we have the Great Pyramid in the center we have this area which is the grand terrace or great terrace and a series of other monumental buildings the great ball court template warriors high priests grave down here and then down in the south of Caracol and on Las monjas nunnery so Castillo gets its name because it was taken over by the Spanish chichen was the target of the very first successful spanish entrada so in 1532 montejo the younger went right into the middle of Yucatan and tried to establish chichen as his new capital he renamed it Ciudad rial and he put the cannon at the top of the pyramid in fact he'd poked a hole through one of the walls in order for it to project out and thereafter that's how it got his name of El Castillo the castle so it was of course still standing when the first explorers and visitors came to the site really beginning in the 19th century you can see how heavily overgrown it is already on the right-hand side this has been cleared so the left-hand side has been cleared of trees this would have been completely covered in trees at one point so when we now sort of throw ourselves forward saying to the modern era where chichen has become this great mecca really for a certain ideas of Maya spiritualism sort of a totemic Maya Center we have to keep in mind that when we find the famous snake on the equinox which this shadow is projected down here and is supposed to represent the Diamonds of the snakes back well we know the snakes were indeed there that's how they were found but the thing to bear in mind is just how ruins that pyramid was so everything about those ballast raids were archeological reconstructions they may or may not have been accurate but they certainly weren't created with the idea of certainly not in the modern era of reflecting and equinox shadow whether they did in ancient times I think it's still a little bit debatable ok so let's have a continue out tour and if she changes frames for anything other than the Great Castillo it's famous for the secretary Sinatra this is the great hole in the earth is the sink hole the as we'll see a little bit later Yucatan is coveted in these things it's to do with weaknesses underground which form collapsed structures which the water actually wears away and the ceiling collapses into what used to be huge caves here I think we don't really get a sense of the scale because these are sort of full size trees up here so it's really quite a large large and very circular structure now we have some ethnic history you have some descriptions diego de Landa was the great chronicler of the early maya period he's a very ambivalent figure a very problematic figure in many ways but certainly he made some comments and some of the very earliest documentary records of chichen so he says that into this well they have the customer throwing men alive sacrifice to the gods in time of drought you also threw in a great many other things like precious stones and things which they've prized well this quickly became translated into virgins I think we can see where this is going and indeed there she goes knowing that land had said that a great many of prized objects were thrown into the Samoan team at the people were very very interested in what my lie beneath the water so beginning in the very early part of the 20th century in the 1901 1903 kind of region people started dredging edward thompson was a leading figure in this project they found a lot of skeletal material they were indeed a lot of bodies in the cenote it wasn't possible to determine skeletally whether they were virgins or not however our great many of them were children and it does seem as if rather like practice in central Mexico that children were the victim was given up as items of sacrifice in case the Aztec they would be told that they're going to die and their tears the tears of fear would be what brings the rain so it looks as if the Sonata was used for that kind of thing and as you can see they really got serious a few years later as she went down with a full diving kit to wander around down there trying to pick things up what they discovered was a lot of precious things gold is virtually unknown in the classic my hero even though it really extends all the way down to South America far far earlier almost there just the tiniest little piece has ever made it up to the Maya area during the classic period however in the post classic that changes and you get really the vast majority of gold has ever been known for the mire comes out of the cenote so these are little golden masks this is a much finer example it's actually a face with a mouthpiece and sort of goggles for the eyes this is actually represented on one of the release of chichen you can see the same design here the same feathered serpent up here now these were gold discs but they're very very thin and not only were they thin they were also scrunched up into balls and then thrown in that's why it's very hard to see what's on this one but we using an artist rendering we can see that their scenes of warfare and sacrifice if we just exchange this for another one there's a series of antagonists and the antagonist are displayed and portrayed in the same ways so the people who are on the on the on the rough end of the deal wear feathers and they look very much like contemporary Meyer the people who are succeeding are the victors here are carrying spear throwers comical or drum major style headdresses sometimes with birds coming down here and they seem sort of we're sort of body suits so it's very different not particularly Maya kind of costume now also in the cenote was love Jade because jade was the meijer gold and what's interesting as these pieces were never thrown in almost none of them a whole they've all been smashed up Jade is incredibly hard and even breaking them up would have been quite a job but all of these pieces had all these items here had to be reconstructed from little fragments now one of the things they were throwing in in terms of jade was heirloom pieces that were already very old so this is an item we can trace to a historical person in each yacht now buck he was the King of Piedras Negras way way way to the south and it has some dates on here which are 699 706 this character the King of Kiros Negros was his tomb burial 8 was actually excavated by the museum way back in the day in 1930s and in fact until relatively recently we had his teeth on display but they're not on display Namur the other thing that was emerged from the debt the cenote is feet and feet and he's reportedly sixteen feet of blue color so it was an immense amount of blue had been poured into the cenote over the years the seem to have been one the major ritual activities so moving on in our tour let's have a look at I think the western side of the site and a great ball port bull court and the tzompantli so the chichen all court is unusual well it's it's more than unusual it's complete YOUnique it's absolutely enormous chichen has in the region i think a nine ball courts ten in total it has nine other ball courts and they're all very typical size they're all kind of you know a few dozen meters this is on a scale of magnitude bigger and this has been a reconstruction what it would have looked like with associated ten points of course there are rings in which the ball should pass through but if we see most of the rings in other sites of course they're nice and low and you can imagine getting a ball through them these ones are impossible and out of that became the whole sort of um the sort of popular narrative idea that it was so hard to score that if someone scored they won the kingdom or had the head cut off or something whatever it was that it was very rare event i think it's its nying inconceivable to get a ball through there and i think this points to the greater purpose and I'm not the first person to think this that the site that the the structure is not a ball court it's a temple it's a temple in the shape of a ball court that's the way to understand and so when we have all these carvings in these reliefs which run down the sides including of course balls with skulls inside them ball players here with axes and near a kneeling ball player with his head chopped off and snakes sprouting out we're really looking at mythology we're not looking at a how-to guide of dealing with the winners or indeed the losers of a ball game but if we want something grisly and gruesome and shows the darker side of chichén it's very close by because sometimes Lee which is just behind the ball court is a large base for skull rank what you can see are these skulls which have been pierced by snakes and of course we know the structure and the name of course is not even Maya this is a Nahuatl this is a effect word because we have these described for central Mexico specifically Tenochtitlan in the capital of the Aztec empire so we have depictions of these same kinds of structures the same kind of vase covered in skulls and then in recent years even on the skulls themselves you can see that they're all pierced with a stake that goes in this case through through the side so there is a dark side to chichen there is a militaristic side which this is designed to emphasize now I can't entirely go through his picture Cham without talking about Nepal Zhang he was one of the Great's of mystical characters he comes from this transitional period the 19th century when you have some really important scholars emerging with some very interesting and long-lasting ideas but you also get people who are that's a less mainstream paul-jean believed that chichen had been founded by freemasons who had escaped Egypt via Atlantis this was also part of his we had a larger model that that Palenque had been had been built by Polynesians so we see that you know that the scholarly tradition emerging out of a kind of antiquarian and a much more sort of far-fetched concepts if you're floating around in the 19th century um one of the portions contemporaries was someone a completely different order it's one of his photographs and charnae the Frenchman sharni took some of the very first photographs of my buildings and he also traveled very very extensively he had been to central Mexico he had been through all the coastal regions he'd been to all part of my area and so he brought not perhaps a sort of scholarly background but someone was tremendous visual experience and so when the Chuck Maul this reclining figure which we'd seen in the previous back in the Porsche ons photograph he knew where he'd seen these things before he'd seen them a long way away in central Mexico this is from the site of Tula which is going to feature quite heavily now so charlet and after him a series of scholars tazza of Thompson Morley he began this whole tradition of comparing chichen with Tula Tula is to the north west of Mexico City it's not a huge site but the important thing for our purposes is how much it resembles chichen sharm a separated two channel into two parts there was the start of the park which was clearly influenced by the book so this is the same kind of style we found at a Porsche Mar this is part of the Mon house complex and here's the the church the iglesia this belongs to a southern portion of the site this is the caracal this is an observatory we think it has these concentric viewing points which are believed to line up with various stars it could also be a wind temple and talk about the ways in which wind flows through these apertures it's very typical wind temples of they're circular in central Mexico okay so that old chichen is down in the south and the rest of the site he dubbed new teacher you chichen has the chuck mores it has the figures where was believed that heart sacrifices took place just there he has the feathered serpents and it has a very distinct very monumental style of architecture with lots and lots of these columns lots of serpents everywhere this is part of the this is temple of warriors going through into the group the thousand columns and we switch now to Tula you can see how similar it is again is the colonnades of columns in front and the platform behind now there's some controversy to this because parts of Tula will reconstructed with this analogy already in mind so we have to take some of this some of what we see here the grain of salt but the similarity is nonetheless up are blinding the central figures at Tula are warriors and they wear those drum major headdresses they have these butterfly motifs on their chest and they carry spear throws at chichen we find identical characters again the same butterfly pectoral and carrying spear throwers again this is reflected time time again this is Atlantean figures these are thrown supports originally they all sorry originally they were colored when they've when the first what color has arrived at chichen you could just about see the color which is now disappeared and then we switch to tula we find almost the same objects so the intriguing thing is just the distance between to learn chichen these are a long way away over a thousand kilometers and in between there's really very little in terms of a widespread phenomenon of this particular style and it is generally referred to as Toltec now the Toltec are referred to in the sources of central mexico has been great warriors the Aztecs saw themselves as being descended from the Toltecs and they were presumably with the inheritors of the power of t to work on which had collapsed by that time the end of the classic so the Toltec are turn more classic and into the early post classic the problem is that the old tula itself beyond some of these references beyond things have come through aztec sources we have very little tangible data what and the Toltec were really all about a lot of the time we interpret tulip by means of chichén and this adds a kind of circularity which means that both of them become more confused now in terms of ethnographic sources we do have Maya sources and they come in the form of the Chilam Balam documents these are groups of collections of prophecies and myths as well as it was much more mundane matters which were constantly being collected and recopied so the copies that we're seeing probably 18th century in date but the information within them is much much earlier and it refers to the Maya calendar and all sorts of interesting ways but they're very cryptic they're very their language is very complex and difficult to decipher so if these documents that we find the early historical references to chichen itza but unfortunately they're not fixed in time they're attributed to what are called cartoons now anyone who came to be belaboured by my talk about 2012 might have remembered cartoons or 20-year periods and what happens is that they cycle and depending on the number they will rotate through a set of 13 which ends comes together to 256 years now after 256 years the cycle then repeats itself so when they say that something happened in cartoons 6 a how it could have been at any one of those points all those six cycles going back in time well anyway it tells us that chichen itza was founded in 6 a how that it was abandoned in a - how they did for how it was occupied by the ETS are now the eats are featuring a number of other documents and they're treated as being Mexicans they're specified as coming from Mexico they're said to be our warriors we occupied and took over the Yucatan Peninsula it then talks we think later on about a conquest of chichen itza by another character who may or may not be associated with my apart as soon as of names are connected to these events but in reality it's very very hard to untangle it all it's irresistible to use this information but we have to be very cautious about how we do that what the sources doom mention is the arrival of Quetzalcoatl which in Maya was cook or calm now Quetzalcoatl was the great emerging gods complex any ology in central Mexico Quetzalcoatl had at one time been amongst a series of other gods in the same sort of strata but his identity became subdued subsumed into historical character and any one time it's very hard to tell whether they're talking about the God Quetzalcoatl or they're talking about a human Quetzalcoatl but the sources in Mexico say that Quetzalcoatl was had to leave he was ejected and he went to the east the sources nuketown say that Kukulcan came from the west and ruled at chichen itza these are all little fragments of information that we're trying to pull together so this is just a little bit of the evidence that of this feathered serpent which is what Quetzalcoatl means was already a very very major part of the iconography of central Mexico this is such a calcio site which is in some ways influenced by Maya architecture and dates the classic period but equally of course the Aztec had lots of others plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl so the central El Castillo temple was described as being the building the the temple to Kapil Khan and of course the serpent who haven't seen them here but the serpents running out of those Palisades and some of the iconography at the top support the idea that the plumed serpent was being celebrated in this building so we might hope that the inscriptions of chichen might illuminate some of this they might help to let us know who the eats are were tell us about Coco car tell us about all these interesting events that took place both we know archaeologically iconographically and ethno historically but unfortunately they do almost none of that the inscriptions at Chichen are not not few in number they're quite numerous but their preservation is poor on the whole and even when when it's not poor their content their phrasing the ways that they use their signs is very very difficult to read so those of us who work in earlier periods and work in the southern lowlands you can have a pretty good handle on most inscriptions that might come out of the ground but a chichen we're presented by text that we can barely read at all they use a different kind of chronological system and that can be very hard to read and just extracting people events the whole narrative of Chichen inscription seems to be different so this is Stila one we don't even have a proper date we can't reconstruct the date um some are as I say well-preserved and they supply certain names some of which we can read some of which we cannot here is something just or kokum and kokum is an interesting name because that becomes a pattern in it comes rulers name at my apartment possibly connected possibly not there are certain relationships between these characters and we can assemble family trees to some extent we can project who we think the rulers using titles that we don't really see anywhere else but I think a lot of that information is is really struggling is really grasping at things which we can't pin down so I think much as I've loved there to be a great epigraphic solution to this mystery there's almost nothing there what we can say is a few little fragments this is the Casa Colorado this is the the Red House and inside it has a carved thought Jam and that is the inscription it's very well preserved one by chichen standards it talks about a series of ritual events interestingly it has some vernacular Yucatec Yucatec is the language of the northern lowlands and yet one with all inscriptions even the ones in the north are written in a different language they're written in cholan they come is the prestige language of rulership from the south but here there are some verbal structures and some indications that you could take it being spoken and is sort of filtering into the writing system now there's a what we call a collocation there's a sign group which is common not just in that text but in a number of other places as well and we can break that down quite easily into syllables our Park Carla and that makes a very legible name I've got back our fire is his shield this was the first Maya name to actually be successfully deciphered David Kelley in 1968 published this decipherment perman it predates that Paco who's buried at Palenque and she led to that decipher so what's interesting is that we turn back - those Chilam Balam documents they talk about a powerful captain of the Itza and they do so just here and just about see it it's caca Baca so these may not be the same person this may be very very different repeating names with it's when you see things like this you can't automatically assumes the same historical person but clearly there is a continuity there this is not a common name and it's something that's obviously quite embedded at chichen so what I've portrayed up until now is the sort of the grand narrative the old chichen the new chichen the maya are taken over by the itza the it's our Mexican invaders there's been a collapse everywhere else and they arrive they take over chichen they build all these great monuments and they rule from there and i would say up until the 1980s this was the complete received wisdom but beginning in the 1980s people began to change their minds and one of the first steps in that was real proper dirt archeology with ceramic analysis now i'm not illustrating any sherds here because it doesn't really tell the rest of us too much about that kind of stuff but there are two types of fancy high status elite where at chichen and one is called cap edge and the other one is called saputo and they had always been seen as sequential capatch belongs to the maya the the fluorescent mayer and so Tudor belongs to the invaders but when people began to dig into certain context they discovered that there was a mixture that the although serves as broken parts have reflected both types together and this led to a radical idea the idea was that there's a total overlap that these are not chronologically distinct they are actually little cultural two groups of people or two people identifying with two different ideas who are living side-by-side this merged with ideas that became very popular the 1980's the 1990s about the way in which architecture is not a code for people's cultural affiliation it might actually be a choice if we go to Washington DC we do not believe that we've been thrown back into the Egyptian past neither do we think we're part of the Roman Republic we're very use the idea that within our society we reuse architectural styles we actually put them to new purposes we take religious iconography we take secular iconography and we merge them together in all sorts of complex ways which are very hard to predict this can even extend to transport system DC metro so in the 80s and 90s it became much more popular to see the old model is wrong that there was no sufficient basis to prove it that the ceramics have been mixed together and what if the whole style of chichén was not in fact introduced by invaders it was willingly adopted by the maya and in fact when you look at the construction techniques between the old chichen the new chichen they're the same there's really very little doubt that new chichen was built by the Maya so when I was first getting involved in this in 1990s I was reading the sort of the new ideas and telling people who maybe gone to chichen on holiday that no no no there's no such thing as new chichen all teaching and new chichen are the same they've just adopted an international style and it's part of the ideology of Quetzalcoatl which they have taken yes from Mexico but it's the Maya who are doing this now the in that particular picture really came from this building this is the high priest grave it's a sort of small version of the Castillo pyramid and up there at the top crumbles and fallen were a series of columns which were carved and here this has a relief sculptures it has the plumed serpent balustrade this is a mount new chichen and the figure is rather destroyed but this is a standing figure here it's actually seems to be a captive because he's got ropes around here this is pure new chichen toltec international style and it has a text you can see what bad condition it's in but with a lot of work then that inscription comes out of it and there's no a picker for today who has any question mark about that chronology and those dates why is that important well because cocklebur car was king of chichen was the Lord chichen up until about 890 and then everything goes quiet so for pretty much a century we find no inscriptions or no surviving inscriptions at chichen and then all of a sudden associated with pure Toltec international style we have the high priests grave and affirmed eight four nine nine eight so at last we have separation again we can pull apart new chichen an old teacher and this is combined with a reworking the archeology a new generation archaeologists going back into the site many many people have worked there but there's been very little hard say c14 evidence to really be able to date these particular buildings and also to look at the chronology of the ceramics when the old chichen buildings were penetrated excavated and they look for ceramic sherds there's no stitute err that's no surprise there's no Kitsch because in fact those buildings predate both of those styles it's back into another phase so capatch and so Tudor are both later than all chichen but when you really can control those contexts you find that there is a separation those mixed contexts are where people have reused fill thrown things together and mix things up capatch Institute are not completely overlapping these are excavations which show that the grand terrace where the Castillo stands is actually man-made it's not just level piece of bedrock it actually is composed of earlier platforms that have been filled to form a nice flat layer so two recent archaeologists are Volta and Braswell have been re looking at the carbon-14 data and they've been doing so with what's called Bayesian statistics Bayesian statistics that are not particularly complicated what it says is that if you have a wood sample say a lintel that used to be support the roof or maybe a piece of wood which comes from a ritual offering that's been burned and buried if you can see the wood grain then you know that the ones on the outer side closer to the bark are going to be new wood and those closer to the core going to be old wood if you take a series of samples throughout that there's the section of the wood then you have already have a piece of data as to which is early on which is later and this helps to constrain that the the always erratic nature of how how wide apart a certain c14 result might be the end result is you get more accuracy and here a series of early Maya style the old chichen buildings have been calibrated to show these kind of ranges whereas the terrace which is being filled up in time preparation for new chichén and finding Castillo all fit where we expect them to in other words in sequence to each other so these are not completely contemporary they are actually one happening after the other and happening in the same kind of date ranges that the monuments were suggesting for cocklebur car around here and the high priests grave range up there in around 1,000 so we can now we had the vision charnae had the vision of Tula and chichen and old old chichen and new chichen and then we had revision we had the birth of the International style where people were making choices they weren't being invaded and I think we're moving quite rapidly back to the old model sometimes it really is as if it looked like a duck it really is a duck we have a break which is very close to the general meltdown of classic Maya civilization coming just shortly before nine hundred and then a period we don't know how long where all of a sudden Chichen becomes galvanized and changed so were the eats our invaders were they people who came to the central potato to the Yucatan Peninsula or is that a fiction that scholars have told ourselves we're still trying to fit these pieces together but I think the de facto idea that that's not possible I think is wrong and I don't think it can be supported the reason for that is that we already have or we now have a good precedent we know that there was influence between Telecom and the central patent in this case Tikal but not just t-carr which happened much earlier yeah in the round late 300s 400s there's still a very active debate about what that relationship Teta work on a massive Imperial Center its judgmental call but I'll make it and some iconography this is a piece from Tikal showing t to work on style warriors heading but building over here which is much more in Meyer style the murals in some of the temples that chichen show tremendous amounts of warfare they are part of a whole narrative of conflict and attack and potentially invasion it's not inconceivable the same things happen so when we talk about aliens i think it is an alien city people go to chichen today for Maya experience to see Maya architecture and see the gods the Maya worship what they see is the Castillo it's not a Maya building they see Quetzalcoatl it's not a Mayan god and in a sense they have seen something very atmospheric and very wonderful not something which is particularly historical to Maya culture and civilization oh yes what about the dinosaurs well surprisingly enough there is a connection we know that we think we know that a comment or asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and in fact you can see here on this map I've been showing this feature which is not a normal geological artifact this is a dude gravity anomalous and this is how is reveal that what is called the Chicxulub crater live underneath the Yucatan this is the crater which it seems the majority opinion it lines up 65 million year extinction of the desired dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period if we look at the cenotes they may form a very distinct pattern they are influenced by the crater because the shockwaves which lie deep under the ground and our crystallize in the limestone have created those faults creative as weaknesses which open up into cenotes and so by only a very small stretch of the imagination the location of chichen is determined by the same phenomenon brings the end to the dinosaurs with that I think I've been finished and thank you very much for your attention

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 184,052

Keywords: University Of Pennsylvania Museum Of Archaeology And Anthropology (Museum), Penn Museum, Philadelphia Museum, Chichen Itza (Tourist Attraction), Maya Civilization (Event), Tourist Destination, Mexico, Cancun, Cancún (City/Town/Village), Science, Archaeology (Interest), History, Well of Sacrifice, Ballcourt, Maya, Maya Peoples (Ethnicity), Dr. Simon Martin

Id: Sj4HW8tS94I

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2015