Jaime Awe - Maya Cities & Sacred Caves of Belize

please help me welcome Dr Howard thanks Ken and um he did Coral me at the at the meeting two weeks ago and um just uh to fill in some of the information I actually got to Flagstaff in August I started teaching just this past August at na and I got there the day before I had to start work so I'm still I'm still trying to catch up um as a result and I'm really glad that it's the start of March break so I might be able to do some catching up um but anyway um you know I'm here today I want to talk to you a little bit about B especially since a bunch of you guys are going to be going and um I move around my ears are still popping coming down the the mountain um um the one good thing though about coming down from Flagstaff I I think I mentioned that somebody you can put your car in neutral and then just and then just Cruise so yeah save a lot of gas on that way but anyway guys um you know what what I'm going to do tonight is show you some slides uh first on some of the surface sites um in Western Biz because I am almost certain that those of you going to bise will be going to Western bise it is you know inp of the fact that somebody in the audience might not agree with me because her family comes from bise City Western bise is like Western us is the best part of the country and um and it was where I was born and that's where I do all my archaeological research but anyway without Much Ado just in case you guys don't don't know where the hell B is Follow the yellow arrows and you will you know you can figure it out um the one thing that's pretty obvious is there's a lot more green down B um than in Arizona in fact I remember when I first came from my job interview and I landed in Phoenix I was going there's something wrong there's something wrong and it's like yeah it's all brown but it was pleasant it was a pleasant surprise as I got up to to flag half but anyway so there's B right on the Caribbean Sea famous for having the second longest Barrier Reef in the world second only to Australia but we also have lots of archaeological sites Biz is you know an important part we like to think the most important part of the Maya world and indeed uh many discoveries in B uh have put biz on the map as either some of the earliest uh remains of the Ancient Maya uh some of the most awesome caves as you will see in a little while and uh and also some great archaeology um and today I'm going to share with you you know some of the sites in Western B there this is a closeup that's the Guatemalan border right there and you have the two main branches of the biz River and kahal Pitch is where I presently conduct a lot of my research but I've worked also at Caracol at shunan tonich um and on the site called baking pot and if you go to Western B like I said I'm almost search make sure they take you to kahal pet or I'll come back and beat you um but uh no bias of course um so there's kich and I'm sure you'll go to shenan tonich to and carac call is also awesome so I'm gonna you know like I said I'm going to show you uh some imagery uh some slides of those sites that I had the incredible privilege of working um as Ken said in the introduction I used to teach at the University of New Hampshire and in in uh 1999 the then minister of Tourism and culture for Biz called me and invited me to go down to Biz to do this uh tourism development project bise was interested in developing some of its archaeological sites for tourism for their tourism potential um and we were s of late commers to this game Mexico and Guatemala were you know years ahead of us so um I just couldn't refuse uh you know as an archa and I'm sure there are several of you in the audience here um if somebody tells you guess what we're going to give you you know a few million dollars and you can go excavate and conserve some of the biggest sites in the country it's like a it's like it's a no-brainer right so I took two years leave of absence from the University of New Hampshire and um I went down and then I found out it was going to be a four-year project and I was like oh gosh what am I going to do here um and tried to extend my leave but the university said no we need you back and it was one of the hardest decisions I I made um but I decided to stay in B and uh promised my wife don't worry we'll go back up to the states uh you know one of these days um and 14 years later you know thankfully she's from Montana and those Montana women are tough and I mean and she worked at me at all all these sites but anyway so that's sort of the story of how I ended up going back to bise and then last year I decided okay it's time to go back where Micah is going to divorce me or get rid of me or whatever so and um got lucky and I got the job at na but anyway back to bise and especially Western B and one of the first places like I said I'm going to take you is the site of Caracol which is right there it's about uh about an hour and a half two hours drive from San ignasio town and Caracol has been the focus of research activity by two very close friends and colleagues of mine Arlan and Diane chase that uh work at the University of Central Florida but like I said between 2001 and 2004 as the Director of this big project um I also did some work at Caracol where we were Excavating and conserving a lot of the a lot of the buildings so here was uh where our camp uh is um you know it was like the we used to call it the car call Hilton um of course you couldn't get any cold beer unless you brought it yourself but we did have a couple freezers but we were not allowed to use those freezers for anything else other than food because that you had to bring in everything like I said for two hours back here but anyway uh so there's the camp and we started to um excavate and conserve some of the large architecture Caracol is an awesome site it certainly ranked uh among the top you know political players in the ancient Maya World um with other sites like tial and kalak tal and Guatemala kakul in campee or Chichen in yukatan ETC but Chichen is much later um Caracol was certainly one of those dominant sites lots of beautiful carved monuments that talk about its conflicts and wars with places like tial and also alliances that made with kakm um this is the a plaza here with an Eastern group that served for astronomical purposes back in its Heyday uh this is another view taken from a helicopter of that a group with some of the other pyramids that we excavate and partly conserved one of the reasons for the partial conservation is because my Approach was if I could not understand the architecture I was not going to reconstruct it so I tried to conserve what I found and you will see you know a Fair bit of that um one of the main uh sort of achievements we we certainly had at Caracol was the excavation and conservation of the of the site's largest pyramidal building this structure is about 150 fet tall and I remember walking up these steps that's all there was in January of 2001 we had just finished building the camp and I remember walking up with this colleague of mine and I stopped in the middle because that's just the middle there's still stuff on top and I looked at him and I said you know what what the hell am I doing I've never excavated anything half the size of this and graduate school does not teach you anything about good conservation of monumental architecture um I mean like I said this thing's a behemoth so I figured out the way I was going to do it I put blinders right there or you can take your cap and just put the cap right there and I said I'm going to tackle the lower one3 first then I'll move up to the second or the midsection and then I'll move up up to the top section and that's exactly what we did so in January we started Excavating conserving the base um and those are guys down there by the way if you want some idea of skill all right there there two guys standing right there um and so then we were just you know completing that then moving up to the midsection then before tackling the upper section and I had um actually uh almost a hundred workers and we would work 20 days non-stop um you know and I remember saying to the guys if you're a Christian you're just going to have to say your prayers on the on the building it works 20 days straight and then we take 10 days off and go into town and you know what archaeologists do after 20 days in the bush so and we finished this excavation and conservation in exactly 377 days I wanted to do it within the year but we lost 10 days and that's sort of the end of that work and again you can see there's somebody for scale so just massive massive uh building um and you know one of these days if I come back I can talk more about you know Maya architecture and some of the the interesting things about it um there's a structure right across from it um from this large uh pyramid building and it has some awesome stucco masks and one of the things that we've been doing in B is in fact we're probably at the Forefront of applying um the use of fiberglass replication of stocko monuments and uh placing them in front of buildings um and and this this is one example where we found this stco mask in front of this building and the quandry was like okay how the heck am I going to preserve this I either do like the Maya did and that is reberry it or come up with a method and the method we came up up with was to do a copy in fiberglass and then place that copy about a foot in front of the original and in pour soft dirt uh in between um and like I said the Maya themselves had difficulty trying to keep these things um they would have to replaster and repaint it regularly because the tropical rain and heat or sun um you know just WS havoc on this kind of stuff because of the contraction during the dry weather and the expansion during the rainy season and then we get all kinds of little bugs boring through the Limestone So eventually the mile themselves gave up and they would just build over it cover it up um we did exactly that but we did it we covered it with a replica in fiberglass and if you didn't know it was fiberglass you wouldn't be able to tell so if I didn't tell you lots of palaces around uh caracal too so certainly if you manage to get up there on your trip I think you're going to you're going to really enjoy it um um you know and we continue to do research and uh conservation work at Caraco the next site I want to take you so caracola is way down here is the site of shanon right there and I also have the like I said the privilege of of doing work there around the same time in fact we were doing this work concurrently at seven sites my theme song used to be on the road again because I would go and spend you know about three four days at one site and walk around with the guys you know like the conservator and the other guys who are work with me and I'd say okay we're going to do this we're going to do that we're going to do the other Etc and then um and then leave go to the other site and do the same thing and just continuously doing the Circle um so Shen Anon and scalet are the next two sites I want to share some imagery with you so there again uh Shen Anon here you can see the mo the modern town of San ignasio which is my hometown um and then Shen Anon is about 6 miles from there so if you see at a hotel there it's about 20 minute drive very very close um but anyway again Shin antonich this site um I I I always remembered I I sort of ate my my own words on this site I had promised myself that I would never ever work at chin Anon why well because almost every archaeologist who had ever worked in bise espe especially the Brits um and I did my my PhD in England you know no the like for the Brits but almost all British archaist whoever worked in B did work at chanon and then a bunch of you know American and Canadian archaeologist so I thought no no enough people have worked there and indeed just before I went there um this other colleague of mine from who was at uccla at the time this guy named Richard lenthal had done some some work there but like I said I ate my words and in 2001 I ended up at shanon and I came up with a sort of conservation plan and so one of the first structures one of the things I was trying to do was trying to determine okay if we want to develop the tourism you need some wow factor all right to compete against Mexico and Guatemala but I I did not at the same time I did not want to do you know what some of my Guatemalan and Mexican colleagues have done you know where it's mostly complete excavation and conservation so anyway so I decided to tackle the Castile at chinan nich this was the before picture and here we are when we finish that midsection and then we decided to tackle I did the same sort of thing here by the way you know do a section of the lower section but not in you know not in totality and then a part of the midsection and then the upper section and I'll show you a slide right now right here and over there there were some beautiful stco decoration as well in fact originally when the Maya were still here and using this building this building on top was decorated with stule on all four sides but the north side and the south side behind it had not preserved the East Side miraculously you know and why the east side was preserved kav as they say in Spanish you know who knows but uh but anyway so here the this building is like I said you know from from the start here to as we went through and conserved the front um then here the stule freeze over there is right there now I again I didn't throw in all the slides because I mean I could be here all night talking to you about this stuff and you guys would be passed out and I'd still be going um but anyway this thing here is about 30t across and about 10 ft High and what you're looking at is the fiberglass replica before we do this and I'll explain to you and and you know like I said if I ever come back I'll bring some slides showing some of the process um before we did this uh conservation work we used to have a big roof metal roof over it to protect it from from rain rain or water is Public Enemy Number One to the conservator in well any part of the world but especially in the tropics well I said we used to have this metal roof and every time we got a tropical storm or a hurricane we used to donate the whole structure to Guatemala because this the the site is right on the border and it's the highest point so the hurricane winds would come lift the darn roof and just sail it over to Guatemala and of course they never repatriated the the roof I still use it as a bone of contention with some of my Guatemalan colleagues so again you know I was thinking okay what are we going to do well there was a big challenge here and I'll go back a couple of slides this site is to get there you have to cross this little hand cranked ferry across the river um you know for years we've been thinking ah we should put a bridge but all the tourists go no you can't do that we like the old ferry so we have a sort of new Ferry but it's little hand cranked so you can't get anything up there and and this stco decoration is about you know 75 ft up you can't get a crane up there either so we had to make the where we made some of these uh by the way um and I'll do this really quickly because like I said I'll keep you here all night um you can't do a replica from the original because if you paint the uh the latex with the gauze on the original when you peel that off bye-bye original and I would have been sacrificed slowly right by by the whole country of Bel so we actually had to produce a replica made out of clay and we did that right there you know there's a huge flat area there so we would make an actual replica and I remember going and looking guy goes ah that nose looks more like mine than the Maya guy there but we could run up there and take our tape measure and because we had to do it three-dimensionally so it was a good place to to do the replica then we would make the mold out of latex and Gauze from the one that we did and then pour the um the fiberglass Etc but how the hell were we going to get it up top we did it in four sections and we had to pull it using uh ropes and pulley but and I imported from England uh several steel rods about that big where stainless steel rods because then we could you know anchor it into the building and when you go there I'm surely you're going to go you can't tell where the seams are we managed to do it that that well um I I was a nonbeliever until the guys actually pulled it off so but anyway like I said um another they're building at that site so and I'm actually going back to Biz this summer uh to continue doing some of my field work and I might be going back to Shen antonic taking some of my NAU students for the first time on uh field methods and archaeology uh course and now to my baby um kahal pet kahal pet is my hotel California you know the line of the song that says you can check in but you can't leave that's the case here I did my PhD research at K petch I can't even remember how long ago and uh every year I keep going back in fact my wife keeps asking me is there anything left at goal petch that you have not dug and I keep finding things to do so there's still a lot more so calet like I said it's actually smack in the middle of San ignasio Town it is now encircled by the town but one of the things that um we did um one of in fact one of the first things I did way back in the 80s when I started to do the research for my PhD was we demarcated an area for a for an archaeological Park and today it's one of the only areas with nice high forests right in town but anyway this is sort of a you know reconstruction of the downtown part of Cal when you visit these M sites today it's only the downtown section that you actually see the rest of the city extends for kilometers in every direction and that's certainly true here um you know so here we were um Excavating and I started this project when I was teaching in Canada where and I took down a bunch of ragam muffin Canadian students to work with me and then when I was in New Hampshire I also brought down some ragam muffin new englanders um and now I'm going to take some South westerners to to Cal pet so here we are you know doing some of the excavation work and at the end you know the the one thing about the Limestone it starts to darken nicely so it fits in uh beautifully with the with the environment that's that same structure and there's that large Courtyard uh the structure I just showed you is right here at the corner um here again you can see some of the students Excavating uh doesn't look like much but eventually once we get all the overburden uh removed and conserved voila you know you can see this building at one time this roof would have gone right across there so this is a different angle from that same building um the last four years I have focused work on the Eastern triatic shrine at kahal pitch it's on the east side triatic because there are three pyramids and so there's the before and there's the after that's after only um three summers work so again you know some of the guys that work with me have been working with me since the Paleo Indian time um so they're really good because I can tell them now you know okay we're going to do this we're going to do that and they get it done um you know just awesome well one of the the great things about Excavating this building is we found some of the most amazing tombs ever found not just at galet but in the mile World um I'm actually heading to Tain on a week from today um the Tain has its Maya weekend and this time is um uncovering Royal Maya burials or something like that and I'll be talking about the awesome tombs we have found in this middle building here at kahal pet and I'm going to show share with you just a few um slides of the awesome um grave Goods that came out of these tombs that also include some very unique objects that have here to far not ever found in the mile world so again you know not a very large site but certainly um incredible so there's that structure and I started to dig down often the tombs of the royal uh Elite or the elite rulers of the sites were buried in these Eastern shrines especially in the biz River Valley and here we are in fact this guy here is Mark Zender who is a professor of epigraphy Maya hieroglyph systems at Tan University um and Mark has been working with me uh there and so here we are going down I remember uh this is uh my my um bioarchaeologist and um she said don't take a picture because I promised my husband I would not go anywhere that's kind of dangerous and of course you know I didn't listen about a week later she was so excited about the stuff we were finding that she goes take a picture so anyway um but you know like I said some you know the the beautiful jewelry or the Jade that came out from uh from this Barrel this is a closeup you can see some of the ear flares there this long uh tube probably you know either used as a pectral this is a pendant of a of a maze God this beautiful polychrome uh vase actually it's stco and you can see some kind of it looks almost like um like a dragon and in fact it's probably an Earth Dragon as the as they call it there's the the mouth or the ma and teeth and then there's the eye so just awesome um this is a beautiful Jade uh plaque about that big that was fun right over the the waist of this one ruler and much of this by the way is on exhibit right now in the US um before I left bise um I signed an agreement for this stuff to go um on exhibition it started off in Minnesota it then went to Colorado to Denver it's presently in Boston and in a few months it's going to be heading to San Diego um just one of the best exhibitions not just because it has stuff from theise but trust me P you know I wish it would come to Phoenix um you know it's just like I said just an awesome awesome exhibit well just want like I said I wanted to share with you a couple of the unique objects that we have found in the in in a couple of these tombs one of them was this it looks like a deer antler ring or tube and it has hieroglyphic inscriptions we actually found three of them uh two of them were broken fragmented but we can put it together and this one was the only one that's really complete and Mark Zender was able to you know decipher uh the hieroglyphic inscription on it and actually say this is the ring or bone tube of Lord so and so all right and I like I said I'm G to share that with you in a minute well in another one of the tombs we found uh fragments of this turtle shell also with hieroglyphic inscriptions and what was really cool about it is that the hieroglyphic inscription on the turtle shell from a separate tomb also included the same glyphs at the end as the bone ring bone tube and so allowing us to finally establish the elite lineage um or the toponym as we call it sometimes it's like the the emblem Glyph of the site of kahal pit and um so there you can like I said you know and I didn't put down the uh the the translation for it but it says the bone tube or ring of Lord uh Chan no kinich Chan balam and it's a long title it's just like if I were to say her highness her royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth only Elizabeth is a name the rest are all Royal titles same with this so Chan is very likely the family name and Ka is like he of the son etc etc so the other unique object we found in this tomb was this ink pot made out of Kong shell we see lots of imagery imagery um where these cribes are sitting down and they have a pallet and often a a Kong shell holding in their hands and you they have the stylus on their hand dipping well only four of these have ever been found um two in Guatemala one in B and then this one from car pitch one of the ones in Guatemala actually had red pigment um only one has been found in archaeological context the other two are in private collections the one from Biz has blue red yellow and black pigment what is really cool about that too those colors are the colors associated with the cardinal directions in the Maya and you will see some of that coming up in in a little bit so like I said some um this is also an exhibition right now this traveling exhibition like the Jade head and some of the other uh jade jewelry um but anyway that you know that sort of gives you a little taste of some of the surface sites in Western B now I really wanted to talk to you not so much about that but about some of the awesome cave stuff that we have been doing so again um if I'm going a little too fast let me know but I don't want to keep you guys all night so um in addition to working on all these awesome sites in Western Biz and I also have worked on some awesome sites in the biz district and and you know northern and southern Biz but I've done some uh you know I've had the great privilege of working too at some of the cave sites um just like surface sites we have hundreds and hundreds of cave sites all over B in fact we have the perfect recipe for cave formation the central massive of the Maya mountains are all granitic and all around it we have Limestone Hills well rain falls up on the granitic Sandy um Summits and Sandy soils are very acidic that water flows down hits the Limestone and it starts to dissolve it and you add a few million years and voila you know perfect recipe for making lots of caves and some of our caves you know many of them have Rivers going through in fact most of the caves and B are um formed by rivers and we have some huge caves in fact this Cavern called the Chul Cavern is one of the longest cave systems anywhere in the Western Hemisphere we have mapped 22 2 km of this cave and it kept going but unfortunately it went under the biz Guatemala border and there was no darn immigration guy there to stamp the passports so we had to stop and you know discontinue but um like I said you can see some people here there's a person standing on that rock there there and there uh to give you some idea of scale other caves are a little tighter uh for the more Brave of spirit and brave of heart and um I usually when I take my students I said come on you know if you can get your shoulders through you can make it you can do it um and I usually take a little bit of uh shortening just in case you know to it makes you sort of squeeze through some of the small openings a little bit better um so anyway here we are this is actually my wife and my my brother-in-law and his wife uh you know taking them cing they were Dawn visiting from Montana um some caves are a little more challenging um you have to repel that down and I I usually tell people I remember uh 15 20 years ago repel yeah let's do it now it's like why the hell am I still doing this I I as you guys know as you get older your sense of mortality becomes more real I'm there folks I'm I'm really there with you um but anyway you know sometimes you have to Brave through uh climb up um on some uh you know in areas where there are Rapids um so cave work is challenging but one of the most amazing things is that I have yet to go into any cave where the Maya did not precede me all right I mean the Maya were always there first and the evidence that they were there still remain you can see the two Footprints here in a cave we aptly called footprint cave um in other caves you know we find lots of uh complete pots sometimes cave art I'm taking one of my students down to do a master's thesis on some rock art that we found in one of these caves and of course we also find lots of human remains in many of these caves um and this case we had like nine individuals here you can see some of the skulls right there but why why is it that the Maya were using many of these caves well to answer that question it's important that you have some knowledge of Maya ideology Maya religion um and we fortunate working in the Maya area because um not only do we have a rich ethnohistoric record um recorded by the Spanish the Spanish were also awful I mean you know Bishop Landa who will chat a bit about you know destroyed lots of books Etc um but the native Maya still continue living there and some of them in very traditional ways and so what do we know of mayia ideology well let's first look at their cosmology like most cultures all over the world the Maya divided their Universe both vertically and horizontally the vertically the Maya had a tripartite universe or perceived of a tripartite universe we do the same thing if I ask you where is Heaven you'd probably go that way if Earth were here and if I ask the underworld down below well the same sort of thing with the Maya so vertically right three levels so the heavens Earth and the underworld and horizontally they perceive of a of a world that was quadripartite or foursided or you know um quadrilateral if you want with color is associated with the cardinal direction so white was North yellow was South red was East and black was West and the East West um comes from a perception not just a perception but a belief that the sun obviously rises in the East and then travels to to you know the 13 levels of the heavens and at night or at dusk the sun is transformed into the Jaguar god of the underworld and the as the Jaguar god of the underworld the sun must then travel through the underworld through the nine levels of the underworld because the Maya subdivided the heavens into 13 layers and the underworld into nine layers and why choose the Jaguar I remember you know thinking about that and it was like duh look at the color of the Jaguar it combines both light and darkness right it's got you know spots it's orange with black spots or some people say black with orange spots depending how you want to look at it so again you know um very interesting a cosmogram the other um so why did I put the slide in there anyway same I the same sort of thing well one of the things that's really interesting is that often when we find information data uh artwork in some of these caves knowing some of that ideology allows you to try to link what you're seeing with the belief system and I remember not too long ago I came across this cave and you can see there's a Jaguar you know um this was done much later when you know the great Maya cribes were no longer around but nonetheless you know you can see the Jaguar there and there are some uh pseudo glyphs there that may they may have been trying to say you know it's the road uh of the Sun in this case the sun that's been transformed into the Jaguar god of the underworld uh through the Earth and through the cave um the Maya also believe that certain Gods lived in caves and the gods that are associated um with residency in caves include the rain God chak and the reason for for this is that often you see you know Mist coming out of these caves and all these caves are formed by water so where is many of the streams coming from from inside of caves so the rain God is often believe well it's it's believed that the rain God resides in caves Earth Spirits also um live in caves and most importantly humans originated in caves in fact the Maya believe that all humans were made from corn now how do you make corn grow you dig a hole in the ground and you put the corn in there and water drops on it and it sprouts and in fact depending on what part of meso America you are you know the mythologies associated with the origin of corn often says corn was either found under a rock in a hole in a cave that it's one of those versions like I said depending in what part of meso America you go so again the creator of humans the corn God also you know is associated with the underworld and we'll chat a little bit more about that caves are also perceived as the womb of the Earth right and therefore associated with fertility now what's amazing is that the Maya you know you're looking at probably going oh you know a erotic art in the Maya area believe me the Maya were darn prudes have any of you ever been to Pompei did you visit the little room where every are any kids in here you can bleep this one um but you know where there's like every position you can think of on you know and then some um depicted on the wall well the Maya were prudes but the few times that we find um any kind of erotic type art is usually associated with caves um so again you know you can you can see that another major source of information that we have about the role of caves in Maya Society comes from Bishop Landa that's the guy who collected so many of the beautiful painted books by the Maya and destroyed them because he believed they contain uh you know paganistic uh information and uh all this kind of you know stuff and so he single-handedly destroyed most of them the other source comes from a book we call the po Vu and the PO Vu was a native account that has two sections part of the pap Vu talks about the creation of humans and then the other part is associated with it and it talks about a story we call the myth of the hero Twins and I'm going to give you the really quick little version um of the myth of the hero twins but um Father Francisco Jimenez when he worked in Guatemala in the early 18th century um was able to record the story and uh wrote it down in Spanish that um book was eventually lost and uh found by this guy here by another uh Catholic uh priest um and in fact the Catholic priest found both a book written by Bishop Landa and the pap Vu but like I said you know what is it that the pap Vu tell us well the first section like I said about the origins of human the creation story and um I already sort of you know told you that the May believed that they were made from Corin they actually believed that uh creation happened three times the first time the gods created humans they made them from clay or mud but these people did not honor and uh conduct the appropriate ceremonies beit of the Gods and so the gods destroy them the second time the gods attempted to make humans they make them from from wood or sticks but same thing these guys dense not doing what the gods wanted the gods destroy them some of them survive and they become the monkeys of the forest and that's how the Maya rationalized why some monkeys look cuter than some of us the third time the gods make humans they make them from corn and this corn is found somewhere like I said under the ground under a rock in a hole in a cave Etc the second part of the P Vu talks about this really interesting sto story called The Myth of the hero twins now this is the very abbreviated version awesome book you should read it one of these days it's been translated there's a free copy you can get by Alan Christensen um you can just Google Pap Vu and you can download on PDF format this free version uh by Alan um really nice guy super super work too but anyway in the pap Vu it talks it continues talking about creation but it says it talks about two sets of twins the first set of twins known as hunapu uh one hunapu and seven hunapu um like playing the ball game they're Hunters Etc and they're playing this uh ball game you know quite often and the bouncing of the ball on Earth really annoy the gods of the underworld and said all right that's enough we got to punish these guys so they're summoned into the underworld and the guys go down into the underworld and they're put through a series of tests eventually they fail the tests and they're sacrificed and the gods decapitate them but they take the head of hun hunapu or Wan hunapu and hang it on this Barren tree and shortly thereafter the tree begins to bear fruit and it Bears the Calabash well they decide to you know not allow allow anybody to go and see this tree but of course one of the daughters of the Gods of the underworld decides she wants to check this out and she does and when she goes to look at the tree the skull talks to her and beckons her nearer and asks her to extend her hand out she does and the skull spits in her hand and she becomes pregnant eventually she can't hide her pregnancy and the gods decided all right off with her head um and you know she's being taken to be sacrificed she convinces the Warriors who are going to sacrifice her to let her go back up to Earth to rejoin her mother-in-law and to kill a deer instead and take the heart of the deer as proof of the sacrifice they agree she goes up to earth goes to live with her mother-in-law Bears a second set of twins and these second twins like their father and Uncle before them do the same thing they like to do magic tricks uh they also play the ball game and I nearly said any um and so they they annoy the gods of the Underworld the gods summon them down and they go down and they're put through a series of tests too but they're a lot more astute and capable than their father and uncle and they keep you know outwitting the gods um but eventually they are they they're sacrificed you know like I said I'm going to give you the abbreviated version they sacrificed and they asked that their bones be ground up and thrown into the river now look at all the symbolism going on here folks what happens if you throw corn in water guess what happens to the second set of twins they come back to life right and then they start to travel through the underworld doing a lot of tricks Etc and one of the things that they did was they would sacrifice each other and bring each other back to life the evil Gods here about these awesome magicians and invites them into their um into their court and um and so they do and God said can you do that to us and they of course oblige but they don't bring the back the gods back to life and then they go and they resurrect their father remember the skull of the of their father and their father is the corn God and so then they rise up to the heavens and they go to the three hardstone place of creation where the god their father then creates the first four humans who become the ancestors of alemaya all right so like I said that's a very abbreviated version uh in the pap Vu well one of the neat things that you know we've been able to see and in fact Michael Cole you know started talking about this some some time ago is that much of the imagery much of the artwork we find on these beautiful ceramic vases in the Maya area are actually depicting or retelling an aspect or a part of the papul Vu this vessel from beli the hero twins sometimes it's even much more it's a lot easier to identify the twins because of certain characteristic features on them um this is another vase from uh Biz and look at this it's a woman she's on the top of a deer and a deer in his mouth has a little tree and guess how many a little around what I think are calabashes in there how many levels in the Underworld there are nine fruit we find a lot of times the number nine associated with underworld themes all right so very likely you know is it possible that what's being depicted here is you know the the daughter of the god from the underworld right who is supposed to be sacrificed um look at this this is a roll out of a vessel of a vase and here you see these twins and this twin here look around his mouth he's got all kinds of spot he's got like jaguar skin sections attached to him and this guy has dots in Maya numerical system a DOT stands for the number one right if you have two dots is two three dots a bar is five in my numerical so that's one hunapu and his brother shalan um these are the second set of hero Twins and they're talking to one of the Gods of the underworld and right here in this bundle there's a skull there's a face right there it's their father's skull look at it down here this dude here is itna this God uh one of the the gods um who lives in the Underworld and look at the twins there again here's the guy with the you know with some of the spots um and you can see some of the hair again the Jagger um sorry no this is hunapu and there's the the Jagger guy and right there look this is a big pot and right up on on the pot there's a skull so they're going down into the underworld to try to resurrect your father um one of the things that the hero twins do when they go into the underworld they're forced to play a ball game against the gods of the underworld here you can see look at the guy he's got all the Jaguar spots this is painted in a cave um not to Niche and this is the side of the ball court there's the ball and there's a number how much did I say a bar was equal to so five so again you see those kinds of connections once you understand the ideology you able to interpret a lot of this art which is really cool um and then look at this dish that was found um again I don't know whether this is uh from a private collection but nonetheless the Maya often depict Earth either as a crocodile floating in the water or as a giant turtle and you can see twins this one here look at the Jaguar piece of the Jaguar skin and around his face there's the guy with the number one so it's the second set of twins and there's a crack in the top on the back of the turtle shell and what's inside is a skull and he's pouring water and there's a water lily okay so this is Earth floating on you know in water very you know simple to see why they would have thought that Central America practically floats between the two oceans and he's pouring water to resurrect his father the corn God who is seen resurrecting here so again like I said you know uh once you start to understand the ideology uh it's so easy to interpret some of the incredible artwork so anyway you know why did I then decide to go uh do some work in caves well right up until um 19 the the middle 1990s not a lot of of serious archaeological work had been done in caves mostly people going to explore spend two days you know three days um indeed uh the bulk of work good scientific archaeological research had been done by this really good friend of mine who teaches at you um Cal State LA uh James Brady um and I there were still lots of questions to be asked about what's going on in some of these caves so I'm not going to bore you with that I came up with a whole bunch of different um questions I wanted to address when I went into the cave based on what other people had said including people like Bishop Landa um so there were some of the the questions and so I decided where am I going to work Western B of course it's home right and I decided to investigate cave sites to do a regional study and compare because if you just work at one cave like many people have done before you have the sort of tunnel vision View and I wanted to see if I could make you know meaningful comparisons so I decided to look at caves on the Roaring Creek Valley the Barton Creek Valley and the maal river valley and so I'm going to show show you some of these now I don't only you know go and do work in caves because of this obvious interest in Maya uh prehistory but caves are awesome you know they're beautiful they're like nothing you know that we are accustomed to seeing uh up here but I was teaching in New Hampshire and I only got off in the summer when it's the rainy season and I remember some of my friends said you're going to go do cave work in the rainy season duh you know some of these kids flood etc etc etc but anyway so here we are um you know and so sometimes youd have to Brave over in fact a couple times you have to sleep over there um I never showed this slide at the University of New Hampshire and if any of you pass the word up to na um I am very Adept at Human Sacrifice so I started to do some of this work at the in the Roaring Creek Valley because I had done some uh preliminary work there some years before and um this other friend of mine colleague who is a geomorphologist how he does cave formation processes and I used to cave with Tom Miller he's an American um now teaches at the University of Puerto Rico and um I used to tag along with him and he would be going and checking out you know the erosion and all that kind of stuff um the boring stuff um and I would of course do the archaeology well I had told Tom about a cave I had worked in the lore Roaring Creek and so in 1992 yes um folks from National Geographic wanted to do this documentary that was made and called uh Journey to the underworld um they wanted a cave archaeologist to be part of it and uh I don't know why the hell they asked me to do it but uh I I did and so they wanted me to go into a cave I'd never been to before and so I get got in touch with Tom and I said Tom do you have a because I used to tell him about new caves I found I said do you have a new cave for me and he said and he said I can still recall he goes do I ever have the cave for you um and it's this cave called Akil mukal which means Cave of the stone supper but the acronym we use for it is ATM um so I decided to go there and awesome cave in fact I remember when we were doing the um the show with with the National Geographic the guy said said to me um well how is it going in there for the first time and I said uh I have two ways I could answer that question one for public television and one for adults only the one for public television was you know how it is for a kid on his on his or her first time at Toys R Us it's like you know um I'm not going to give you the adults only right now check this guy's recording me so any anyway um so here we were at uh ATM one of the first things we did at this cave was we did a map of the cave like any good archaeologist and we found that most of the archaeological deposits were in the lower section the cave is actually about four miles in length and um but like I but the bulk of the archaeological stuff there from here on the cave becomes a lot more challenging and we didn't find uh any remains there so I'm going to just take you to a couple places not you know every spot um where we found some awesome cultural Remains the first place I'm going to take you is what we call the Stila chamber um and we call it the Stila chamber because we found two slate monuments that were held together by a bunch of spelio thms spelio thms fancy word that I got from the geomorphologist that can mean either stalagtite or stalagmite or Cave Rock all right so held together by by these uh spelio and um and then all around it you can see there's a part of a big dish Red dish and we found two obsidian blades down there and a few other objects that I'll share with you we also mapped this little alve it drops off and here's a little alve and right in the middle there is where we have these uh two slate monuments and then artifacts artifacts artifacts artifacts so here's a closeup of the two slate monuments right away I remember looking at this when I when I took the photograph and if you look carefully look at this one it's notched on the side guess how many notches on each side damn you guys are good cave archaeologist already you're better than my students than any of you and then this one here is pointy um pointy like an obsidian blood Letter now when I remember looking at this too I thought what seems to have notches Stingray spines you know what the Maya used to use Stingray spines for well for those who don't know I'll tell you but do not try it at home they would use the stingy spin or the obsidian blood letters to pierce their thumb tongue or penis and collect this blood and then burn you know on bark paper and then burn it and folks I'm not making this up I'll show you some images um we also found uh next to it like I said here are some of the pots this was a beautiful pot and this was a crude representation of talok or the rain God it's a sort of Mexican version of Chu the Maya rain God so so and then right at the base here we found those two obsidian blood LS so I thought is it possible that the Maya would stop here as they made their way deeper into the cave to conduct blood letting rituals and as I said often we see lots of images of Maya rulers you know either sitting or standing um you know piercing whatever part of their body dripping this Blood on the bark paper and then l burning this paper and as the smoke went up you know the essentially um you know life-giving blood goes up into smoke the essence of life so to speak um and so and usually they would use these big ballls and like I said we have four of them that we found there uh again just a closeup of some of the Slate monuments here I I was going to some of the examples here you can see this male holding what seems to be a torch inside of a building and the woman here is running this exaggerated rope with thorns through her tongue and then she collects there's the dish and there's the paper with drops of blood on it this comes from a second yashan here a painting from the cave site of nat tunich in Guatemala and this guy here you can he's grimacing and right and you know he's got he's doing something between the legs go figure this is a figurine from haa haa is a small island off the coast of ciche guess what he's doing same sort of thing here this guy has probably already blood L and there's the ball so we have good um you know evidence of this I mentioned the little slate crude slate Effigy Of talok um we also found this beautiful dish um this is the same dish I just took photographs as I turned it and here's a scroll out drawing it shows this Warrior right here presenting a captive the captiv is kneeling down um to this Lord the Lord has got like a war staff and all the fancy headdress there's a little dwarf in the second panel um there's also a little dog you can see the dog head dwarfs and dogs are usually associated with cave art because dogs and in fact even in Northern mes America I don't know about this area here but dogs lead you through the underworld all right so there's that that kind of connection up in the main chamber there was all kinds of really awesome um materials as well as just beautiful cave formation um this is the the main chamber um and and again like I said just really really uh beautiful uh area rimstone dams beautiful uh Limestone formations um again my brother-in-law and his wife and my wife uh in in the cave there uh so just going to share a few of the awesome cave slides and then everything you see above ground is either Potter or a skull or or grinding stone um and I'll show you uh some of those images and we rarely ever find any complete artifact because the Maya believed that after you whenever you did some of these rituals you were supposed to use things that were zi pure uncontaminated so you make something new and then you go and you use it for the ceremony and at the end you terminate it you terminate it either by Smashing it Knocking a little piece off or cutting a kill hole into it and you see you see that throughout the cave um you know sometimes you'd find you know a vessel and it's missing a leg and in fact in a couple cases I would find part of of it way over in another chamber and I often tell my student my I remember one student said why did I do that I said to screw the archaeologist um but anyway again you know some uh some more examples of some of the you can see a little kill hole right there this one had a little chip on the other side of the vessel um this one vessel here had a little monkey figure and I'm not going to go into why monkey figures but many of the artifacts we were finding in the caves um were in fact what what did we find out about them well many of them are agricultural or food producing implements that's from a figurine the little head of a dog um these and these stone tools were very likely utilized as hes to till the soil and of course the Metate with the mano to grind the corn and in cases where preservation is good we find offerings inside the pots like small ear years of corn the corn cob from the first years before the the corn actually matured um today the m still do this they go into caves to take food to feed the dead on the Day of the Dead which is my birthday appropriately um people you know in my in in some of the traditional communities will take uh offerings of food to the graves I remember as a kid I used to go with some of my buddies and we eat some of the food my mom never knew this if she did would have been toast burnt toast um but anyway so you know so a lot of the the materials we find in caves uh seem to be associated with agriculture or agricultural fertility um or you know one of the ways that I've now interpreted is that the Maya were going to some of these caves to offer food to the gods because it's an act of reciprocity if you feed the gods the gods will in turn feed you and we start to see this from you know from fairly early on but as we get closer and in fact during the time of the decline of M civilization we start to see them uping the ante they start to offer humans now remember what are humans made from so you're feeding the gods so they up the ante and they now start to sacrifice humans in the caves and we have lots of evidence for that there's one skull you can see there's another skull there another skull um this lots of children in fact children are the preferred victims of sacrifice to the Rain God that was true even in the Aztec area in Waka I mean all over mzo America they had children were the preferred victims of sacrifice and in fact the the Spanish priest said that a lot of times they would pull the nails off from the children to force them to cry all right because the crying summoned the rain God from from the caves um again children this uh little guy here was no older than uh than 12 months same thing here in fact this is the little skull right there you can see the trauma to the skull right there and you can see the little leg bone right there another leg bone this kid here is about 7 years old this one uh about nine you know plus or minus of course um and this uh this skeleton here some a young male probably somewhere around 16 to 16 17 years old um so we find lots of evidence and what was also interesting is that doing the work in the rainy season paid off because I noticed a pattern many of the skeletons that we were finding we were finding them either in areas where water flowed or where there was drip water from stalactites again why if humans are made from corn water will make them resurrect like the corn God so it's a fertility uh Association um and you can see another cave we worked at look at the skulls right where this is where the water flows there are two three skulls in this area um we also found some artwork in some of the caves and I'm not going to dwell too much on this you know handprints are the oldest form of human cave art they started doing it in the upper Paleolithic it's like you know almost 100,000 or more years ago and they still do it the Aborigines in Australia continue to do it as a said a sign I was here um Barton Creek cave this is the other um River Valley again we did our map and then we went in there's a person there for scale there's another person right there sitting down so some of these caves like I said are massive all right you can get loss in them um in fact you can get you can easily get turned around and in good preservation we we find pine torches so they were using pine torches I I had nothing but respect for ancient Maya cavers um I mean these guys I go in there with you know uh good um hard hat a petzel hard hat with you know great lamps and lots of batteries etc etc and you know these guys were carrying all kinds of stuff as offerings with torches and um and bare feet um good preservation baskets um or or in this case bags that they were taking organic materials as offerings um and again skulls and here you can see an example of one of these early cobs of corn it's like the first like I said the first ears where they're taking them in as as offerings and as thank you a human um little uh finger bone carved in the form of a of a person you can see the nose the mouth there the little arm elbow Fingers um and then we also did some radiocarbon dates and this is where it started to get really interesting because most of dates were lining up between 750 and 900 ad now why is that important well who are the people using the caves obviously the folks that live up top and what is going on up top well 750 to about 900 ad is the terminal classic it's when all hell is breaking loose when things are starting to go awfully wrong for the Maya in fact so wrong that eventually many of the large cities like some of the ones I showed you are being abandoned and people are packing up and going all right there is no question about that we know that b we guesstimate that the population around 5600 ad was about a million today we only have 350,000 um but you know a lot of these places are just completely abandoned um around this time and um you know we mapped sites all over the place uh and again dates that we get from this site indicate abandonment between you know this 750 to to 900 ad uh period now that cave that I just showed you is right there and we have big sites and these are all sites that we mapped In this River Valley um the yellow is the flood zone so we didn't find anything there so you know these areas were very populated today you go in there and it's all jungle and you think wow you know why would they leave such a lush um environment well when you look at that kind of density population density you know that that area was probably very cleared off um and in fact today we have just started to use lar survey do you guys know what lar survey is it's God's gift to the tropical archaeologist it's like you go and you tell you know you you say nalm the forest burn off all the forest and then you can see everything down below well Western B we just got this big Grant a couple years ago and we light our survey um all around the sites that I just showed you a little while ago um and I'll give you some I'll show you some lighter images for Caraco which today is in this really thick uh chick Forest Reserve so uh we'll come up uh to to the liar survey of that area um we also did some work at another cave site Up In this River Valley here called chha and just quickly here the entrance to chha really small but once you got in there just tons of pots and we found preserved in there corn cobs anato seeds and cacao seeds cacao for making chocolate um and one of the things we decided to do there is look at the use intensity um to see whether it matched up with what we were seeing at other cave sites and so again lots of pots you know kill holes you know smashed sometimes just a little piece chipped off um every room in here was just filled with lots of patry and again they're using these caves from very early on from about 900 BC but they start to intensively utilize the caves for ritual around this time period of 750 to 900 ad so something is going wrong because if you're going into the caves to conduct rituals or to rec request that the rains come that for agricultural fertility then when is it that you pray the most as we say when you're in deep you know what right um I usually pray a lot when I'm hanging up on those ropes now coming down um but anyway so again you can see that's when there you know the activity in caves intensify and there's got to be a a reason for this intensification so here we go yeah so one of the things that I've started you know I started to argue is that when you look at the occupation the settlement of some of these sites today you look there and it's all jungle you know these trees are over 100 feet tall when you take a lar photograph there's that same building and this whole landcape was clearcut these are all agricultural Terraces I have another image same structure and look at all the lines these are all agricultural Terraces all over and every Hilltop these are all AR olical these are all you know Mount groups on every Hilltop so again we know that by you know 7 to 900 ad we have you know highest settlement density and the Maya were farmers they relied on corn agriculture you cannot plant corn under the shade of the tree okay like cacao it doesn't work you clearcut and so we we have evidence for massive deforestation station um not only to plant corn but also to use for wood I mean wood for cooking for making lime you know and lime was really important for them for construction for processing corn Etc um again look at this you know and we've gone out to ground truth it and these are all agricultural Terraces there's a wall of the Terrace so the evidence for you know intensive settlements and deforestation is incredible and then we got even luckier around the same time that I was in New Hampshire this uh colleague in the geologist Department informed us and said guess what there's some breakthroughs you can now cut stalagtites and stalagmites and they actually have rings like trees but they work a little bit different you know how tree rings the thickness is based on precipitation whether it's Lots or little precipitation well in the case of stag mites and stag ties it doesn't work like that but we know that certain ratios certain oxygen Isotopes vary between wetter and drier periods especially oxygen 18 that's also true of these little things called uh these microorganisms uh up in the um in the ice sheets in you know in the far north for aeras also absorb um oxygen Isotopes well this other colleague had had caught one of these tag ties and you can also date each ring like I said I'm not going to get in in too much detail here and what he found was that look at this between about 800 ad or starting from about 700 AD right up to about 1200 ad there were some major drought conditions going on uh in in the area around Caracol so you know I and and up there you know there was no rivers to do irrigation right so we decided Well let's you know get some a grant and let's do a whole series of other stalagmites and stalagtites and we did that uh from Southern B and like I said you know using uranium thorium or thorium uranium dating systems you can date each ring but then you can also measure the amount of oxygen Isotopes which reflect dry and wet and we have now established like a 100y year record of climatic change um and even longer and you can see some examples here again from about 700 AD to about 12200 look if you were to draw a median right through there just before 700 AD they're getting a fair bit of rainfall once in a while you have droughts but not too bad and then you get to about 700 AD some serious droughts it picks up a little bit there but it continues and look at that long extended periods of drought um and when you match that with other events other proxies in a second this is that same time period if you look at these lines it goes like this a terminal classic period 700 to about 900 ad major droughts right there here again this time we compared other um studies that were done of Lake sediments um Lake chanab in the Yucatan and again look at these serious drought conditions right around 7 00 ad and then in the karako Basin in Venezuela again some very uh major droughts right about there now when we look at archaeological sites let's so forget the climate climatic record look what we see about a th000 BC Maya population is going it's increasing lots of new sites are being added cities are getting even bigger and then you hit about 750 ad and the death rate of Maya cities so again you know it you know and here you can see and we've plotted this major cities and then by 750 to 900 ad they're abandoning much of this area that we're talking about so one of the neat things then from our research is that it started off you know looking at caves to determine why the May were using them and at the time I had no idea that we would end up in investigating questions about the collapse of Maya civilization but that was certainly a ferous sort of end to to some of this work because now what we think was happening is that starting around 700 AD we start to see this area being affected by Major droughts now how do people respond to times of Crisis well let's use an American example many of you have certainly read about the Dust Bowl in fact it happened not too far from here right and when the dust ball started to get bad first thing people did was they turned to religion and in and first science they turned to science in fact they brought in people to shoot Rockets up into the clouds hoping to you know that their explosion would make it rain that did not work when the science failed then they turned to religion and they you know they tried everything in fact one of the things um that they even tried was to apply uh indigenous religion native religions one of the things they would do is they would round up uh rattlesnakes and kill them and hang them off fences because the natives believed that the snakes were like lightning and it would bring the rain that didn't work now human sacrific is against the law in the US and was during the dust Ball but eventually what did many of the people do they packed up and left in fact there were even there was a club formed called the last man's club and those guys vowed they were not going to leave right around Oklahoma and that area there that was seriously affected and eventually even the guy who organized the last Mon's Club packed it in and took off and they moved to Wyoming to Montana to California Etc we have good modern examples guess what the mile did same sort of thing right they probably turned to trying to you know build agricultural or do whatever and it didn't work and then they started to pray and they started to make more offerings and then they U the ante they started to sacrifice humans but even that was you know the last hurah and then we start to see abandonment of this area and some of the cave research like I said has helped us to see you know the struggles that that were going on at this time today the modern Maya still go to caves and guess what they pray for rain and agricultural fertility and they still take food there are nine buckets with food there's a makeshift altar the altar is four-sided just like Earth and then they Bend two B bows over and when the leaves drop as they dry they represent rain and underneath they have nine like I said buckets with food much of it corn right um here again they're going in and they go in just before the start of the Agricultural season and when the first harvest they will take some of that food you know I don't know if we have good Protestants in in the ver Valley but you know in England and in fact in believe the Protestants used to have Harvest day well we call it Thanksgiving here what do you do on Thanksgiving you give thanks for the good harvest okay it's a it's a religious ceremony really to a large degree and so you know people all over the world do this kind of thing um but like I said eventually you know they they moved out and we have other examples right here in the southwest you know people eventually packed it in and moved out thank [Applause] you if you have any questions Ken's going to answer them where did they go well one of the things that we see around the same time is um we see increased populations in Highland Guatemala and also in the Yucatan now what's interesting about the ucatan migration there are also um you know oral uh myths and stories of people coming into the ucatan because we're not too far from the coming of the Spaniards so some of the oral Traditions uh kept going but the Yucatan was not as badly affected by the droughts because that area has no surface rivers to begin with all the water there is underground and guess how you access it in sink holes so evaporation and all that doesn't affect it as much and um I remember just recently reading the rate of water loss up in Flagstaff in Lake Mary as a result of evaporation it's substantial um so many of the sites almost all the sites in the Yucatan are located around these underground river systems so yeah so they move up to the Yucatan and also eventually they start moving back right they start moving back but the Spanish arrived not too long after yeah yes I noticed one of the images of car had a feature that appeared to be a b at least it was an oval future yes is there history of ball courts in this area oh yeah we have all kinds of ball courts um um in in Western B uh one site that I work at baking pot has three ball courts uh kahal pet has two Caracol has at least two and I'm actually presenting a paper at the bise archaeologist Symposium in July and it's ukan influence around the same time period as the sites in the in the patent you know in the center of the mile World start to be abandoned there are still some hanger on um you know like the last man's club and now the influences start to come from the Yucatan and I found at shanon the only site in B where I have found round pillars which are common of the sites in the Yucatan and also a ball court hoop it's the only hoop we have in Biz and I found it at shanon I'm going to be talking about some of that yes the Prest down there ones that they ever have you ever noticed whether they have ped their feet or their faces blue yes in fact well blue was often used especially with sacrificial victims they would paint them blue I notic that there were other tribes like in Africa also use color blue yeah rrishna or the color blue is that to do with religion or something in that order oh certainly uh Warriors are usually sometimes painted black again in some Maya art the the bonampak murals are beautiful in that sense yeah yes my I didn't I don't know if I understood your your question I want to hear you again well how do we do that I can put my car in neutral another weekend and I can roll down the hill and talk to you about some more stuff there I don't mind coming [Applause] down yes all the work done isise this for well the big project that I went down that I left my job in New Hampshire um was to develop the tourism potential and this summer I'll be doing some more work like that and what has happened when I went down to bise in 2000 we were averaging around uh 200,000 visitors perom when I left last August we were averaging a little over a million visitors per anom we now get more than three times the amount of visitors as population so three times more people come to visit B than live there yes did you mention the Spanish decreasing and disrupting the population I heard the figure this morning early this morning on BBC of 50 million uh indigenous people lost population with the European invas from all the Americas yes oh yeah that that that's uh that's conceivable um you know certainly you know the the Spanish in the Maya area used to take censuses from some of the communities and you can see you know right at arrival some of the first census um would have had like you know thousands of people in a community and then a census taken like five years later um was like a couple hundred now a lot of them as a result of you know they were dying from some of the diseases sometimes too they would escape and move elsewhere so it was a combination of both U but yeah without without doubt there was some major um drop in population yes do you have an estimate about how many May at their you know there like I said belies alone we conservatively estimate at least a million um and B is the second smallest country in Central America if you look at the patent Province and you know all of the rest of the the Mexican states and El Salvador um we think you know anywhere between 10 to 20 million Maya when the Spanish pardon when the Spanish ar uh or just before yeah yeah so lots of lots of yes I know presing langage yes uh the um the question was you know is the Maya language being uh preserved and and taught um in bise we have three different ethnic Maya groups we have yucatech mostly in the northern part of the country and then we have mopan and keki uh in the South um in Guatemala there are about 20 between 22 and 25 um Native Mya languages still spoken um in bise there are now uh in some of the communities people trying to teach the the young because it's often you know the young get acculturated and you know they don't see the need to do so well let's thank Dr IE once more we can't post uphill so we got to let him get maybe we'll ask him to come back in the fall after he fin the summer [Applause] summer thank you all for coming out

Channel: Verde Valley Archaeology Center

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Id: eWHzbYQW7B4

Length: 87min 23sec (5243 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2015