Good evening everybody and
welcome to the museum of science. We are here to explore the wonders
of the Maya, how exciting is that? Tonight is the first program in our series
delving into the realm of the Maya. There, well we know so much about them,
we've learned a lot there are still so many holes in our knowledge. And, the layers of insight keep being revealed to us through the work of
scientists like our special guest tonight. I just did your thing. It is work like his that is
peeling away layers of mystery and deepening our understanding of just
how sophisticated this culture was. In 2005, Bill Saturno made
the discovery of a lifetime, when he dove out of
the sweltering Guatemalan heat, he came upon the earliest known
murals painted by the Maya. Scholars refer to the site
of the Sistine Chapel of the pre-classic Maya era and
one of the most significant archaeological finds of that civilization
as it was developing. Many of us fantasize about
traveling the world, having adventures like Indiana Jones. Well, Bill Saturno is the real deal so please join me in giving
him a very warm welcome. [APPLAUSE]. >> Let's see here, we good? Let's see here. Nothing's showing. Sorry, it's vanished. So I'm just Bill. And I'm now going to have to
resort to interpretative dance. [LAUGH] So, those that wanted to see
images from the Maya world, there it is. Nope sorry, interpretive dance cancelled. We're done, that's not happening now. I know now some of you are disappointed. They're like, well,
the picture's nice but, I don't know, that dance might have been really great. Well, maybe next time, maybe next time. So, this is an image
of the Maya world and. The different dots on this image represent
different Maya sites from different eras of time. The great majority of them are done in
yellow, which is from the Maya classic period, a period that extends from
around 200 AD until around 900 AD. And, one of the key lines
of evidence that scholars use to define what was classic was
the presence of hieroglyphic texts. The presence of, sort of, grand art style. These were the things that
early scholars looked at and said, that's really the best, the pinnacle of Maya civilization and
we'll define that as classic. What came before, it we'll call
pre-classic and what came after it, we'll call post-classic. The implication being that what came
before it was not quite as good. Like on it's way to being classic,
but not there yet. And then of course what came after it? Used to have been classic but
is a little bit past its use date. So, of course, that's not really very
accurate picture of how cultures work and places develop and civilizations thrive. Of course we can talk about things that
happened in the pre-classic that were more remarkable than the things that
happened later, at any point in time. And other developments that took place in
the post-classic, which are as important, if not more important,
than anything that took place before it. So it's really sort of archaeologists
love to divide things timewise, we do. We even divide classic and post-classic
and pre-classic into separate sections. We talk about early pre-classic and
middle pre-classic and late pre-classic. That's like, so almost early classic
that [LAUGH] it's in, it's incredible. And, but there's gotta be one more,
we'll call it proto. Proto-classic, that's really past
late pre-classic [LAUGH] but not quite early classic. And the same thing with classic,
you can have late classic, but then before it becomes post-classic,
it's actually terminal. [LAUGH] Which I certainly would be
sensitive about if that was what they were calling me. I've tried in my house to use terms
like this to describe my age. I consider myself in my
late post-teens in fact. >> [LAUGH]
>> Or my early pre-eighties. However you want to think about it. You can certainly make
up time terms to do it. So, today I'm actually
going to be talking about two different time periods for the Maya. One, the pre-classic, right? And one, the, the classic,
the late classic. And I'm gonna show murals from both
of those times which are trying to accomplish very different things using the
same kind of medium that is painted walls. Now, it wasn't too long ago when
a map like this in the Maya world actually looked more like this. Right? With none of those sites known. In fact, it wasn't really until
the middle of the 19th century that Maya sites became
known to the public. And they became known mainly through
the publication of one particular book. But one of the reasons that they were so unknown is because cities
that used to look like this. This is the city of El Mirador,
in Guatemala, an artist reconstruction of what
it looked like at its height. Now look like this. So it's no wonder that they, they,
sort of, were left undiscovered until a politician by the name of John Lloyd Stephens was
sent as a special envoy to Guatemala. He brought with him a friend of his
an artist named Frederick Catherwood, and they published a book, a series of books,
called Incidents of Travel. They were published in the early 1840s. They went through 12 printings in
their first year of publication. They outsold every other
book except the Bible. Right?
That's pretty good, right? You have to admit, like if you're
up in competition, it's like us and the Bible, like one and two on
the New York Times Best Seller list. That's, that's a good list to be on. But one of he reasons these,
this book was so popular, one,
Stephens was an excellent writer, right? The, the prose involved in discovering
these ancient, mysterious places. These places that no one
had heard of before and then that coupled with Catherwood's
lithographs, his drawings, of these statues shrouded in forest. These pyramids buried under
the oppressive growth of trees. What that implied in terms of this
civilization having been lost, that had fallen out of knowledge. Right?
No one knew about it. Certainly the people that walked
these forests knew it existed. And one of the first things that
Stephens says to us is that there really should be no doubt
as to who built these things. That the people that made these great
monuments are likely the ancestors of the people who live here today. Which was really sort of insightful
given that it actually took scholars about another 40 to 50 to 80 years
to really demonstrate that fact. That there was a connection between
the modern people living there, and the people that had lived there before. In fact most of the time when
you hear about the Maya or the Ancient Maya, it's sort of prefaced
by the idea that they disappeared. Right, they collapsed, they vanished. Their cities became abandoned and
then forests grew up, and we don't know what happened to them. Except that there are actually
7 million Maya alive today. Right?
So living in the countries of Guatemala and
Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. So they're there. Their ancestors,
the ones that built these things. One of the reasons these
monuments were also so intriguing, not only because of the portraiture
of them, the mystery of them, but they were covered with a hieroglyphic
script that no one can read. Right? Now, one of the first people
to say he could read them was crazy old guy named
Augustus Le Plongeon. And Augustus Le Plongeon had decided that
he was by his own reckoning 123 years old. >> [LAUGH]
>> And having lived past the age
when most people died, he decided that he had reached a state
of as he called it living petrification. >> [LAUGH]. And that, perhaps, he would actually
age in reverse Merlin-like. And what he said to everyone was,
I can read Maya hieroglyphic script. Can you?
And they would say, well, no, I don't know what it says. Well, clearly, I do. So he actually couldn't read any of it,
he just made it up. But he went beyond that in fact, in saying
that not only could he read Maya script. But that Maya writing was in fact,
the mother tongue. It was a universal tongue that
was spoken all over the world. And that he even went so
far as to say that Christ himself did not speak Aramaic, he spoke Mayan. And his last words on the cross were not
my god, my god why have you forsaken me? But instead,
were now now sinking black ink over nose. Which, of course, makes much more sense. So, now, Le Plongeon couldn't read them,
no one could read them, right? The mystery of this historic text was
something that really fascinated, students of the Maya. And in reality, today we can read
about 85-90% of what they've written. But it really wasn't
until about 20 years ago that we really started to
make strides in decipherment. And throughout the 19th century,
we could read very little. And most of the 20th century
we could read very little other than the dates they
inscribed on the monuments. We understood the numerical system. But we didn't understand that they
wrote in not an alphabet, but a kind of syllabary, where they used sounds to write
words, and now we can read their history. Now, their artwork is quite spectacular. And, this is a panel. It's from the site of
Yaschelong in Mexico. The historical text is beautiful,
but all of you see these lines? That's because this is a panel
that was chopped up with a saw. It was chopped up with a saw. And it was stolen out of Mexico. It was looted from the site of Yaschelong. And spirited away in four pieces because
it was too large to carry in one. And even before people could read Maya
hieroglyphic texts, the beauty of these sculptures lent themselves to being
chopped up and sold on the black market. They would actually go into these
sites with tree saws, two handed saws. And they would stand on opposite
sides of these monuments and simply chop the faces off of them
to make them lighter to transport. The idea that this history was being lost,
that this art, and even the potential to decipher the script
by recording the signs was really put in jeopardy by this whole process, and
so the Maya world really needed a hero. They needed an archaeological hero. And of course the first person they
would get would be Indiana Jones. But they couldn't get Indiana Jones
because he was a fictional character. But they could in fact get a man
by the name of Ian Graham. And this is a photo of Ian Graham,
you can see he has the whip. He has the fedora. He founded a project at
Harvard University's Peabody Museum, known as the Corpus of
Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions. And his life's work was
to record these carved hieroglyphic monuments before they
were spirited away by looters. This is an individual that was
often shot at by the looters. This is someone that had to hide
under the body of a fallen comrade in order to avoid being
killed by the looters. This is someone that spent 40 years
tromping around the forests of Guatemala and Mexico, recording with photography and
in drawing and mapping these incredible Maya sites and
everything that lie in them and he was given a MacArthur Genius award for
his work. He could never read the writing himself. He's still alive. He's alive in England today. He could not read the writing. But the work he did recording
it was the foundation for the decipherment that took place. We would never know the history of
this great people if it weren't for people like Ian Graham recording it. And right after I had finished
my degree at Harvard, I, I grew up wanting to be Ian Graham. I didn't wanna be like Ian Graham,
I wanted to be Ian Graham. And I got the great honor of working with
Ian Graham while I was a student and after I had finished my degree he gave me the
opportunity to work on the Corpus Project. He was getting older. He decided that he didn't want to be
traipsing around the forest anymore and he was advertising for the position
around the department of anthropology at Harvard saying he was looking for
someone, as he put it, young and foolish. >> [LAUGH]
>> to carry on the cause, to, to, to take the torch. And he assured me after
the fact that I had not been his youngest candidate for this job. But that I had impressed him
with my excessive foolishness. >> [LAUGH]
>> And that that was my greatest qualification. And he actually sent me to Guatemala
with a very specific mission. There were two sites. One that he had visited. He'd actually buried a monument. He hadn't had time to
document it thoroughly. So he buried it so that it would not
be uncovered by looters and taken away, and he was curious now, 20 years later,
if the monument was still there. And so he sent me to Guatemala with
the mission of visiting that place, going to that site and ensuring that
that monument was still in place. The other was another site, a site that
had been known for a very long time, known as Naachtun. Naachtun means the far away place,
or the far away stone. And he wanted me to go to Naachtun because
there was a rumor of recent looting there. And that a new monument had apparently
surfaced, and he hoped that I would be able to go in, photograph that monument
and document it before it was taken away. So that was my mission. I went to Guatemala,
very specific instructions, he told me to hire a local guide. The guy that I was to hire
was named Bernie Middlestet. I know it doesn't sound
like a local guide. I know that. There are individuals of German decent
that have lived in Guatemala for generations. Bernie is one of them. Ian told me he had excellent vehicles,
but perhaps not to trust him fully. That he had a sense that he was
probably involved in the looting. But nonetheless, he had great vehicles and I should,
I should have him lead me on my way. The logo of the corpus. So I went to Guatemala and
I began at Ian's house, and when I got to Ian's house,
I made contact with Bernie and Bernie came by to see me and he said, unfortunately
we can't go to that first site. It's too far away, the roads are out,
we'll never get there and back within a week. So that's really out of the question. Naachtun, the mule train
will head to Naachtun but it won't leave until the end of,
of this week. So we have about a week's
time with nothing to do. So, sorry. But in case you're curious
there is this other site. There's this place that's
recently been uncovered, there are rumors that are three
carved hieroglyphic monuments. And we can get there and back in a day. So if you want to go there
while we're waiting, that seems like something
that we could do. I so, that's fine, that sounds perfect. It's within the sort of realm of
thing the corpus is dedicated to. Certainly not part of
my specific mission but part of the broader mission,
so, let's go to that place. Said this is an easy place to get to. We'll just have to drive through Tikal and
Uaxactun. And from Uaxactun,
you have about a two and a half hour drive to an archaeological
site known as Xultun. And from Xultun,
we'll begin a walk about six kilometers. So all told, it should be about three and
a half hours, I imagine, from Uaxactun. Now, once we got to Uaxactun, I probably should have know things
wouldn't go exactly as planned. I say that because there's
a sign in Uaxactun that says, Xultun, forty kilometers. Camino en molestado. Road in bad shape. Now, that might have been an indication
that problems were ahead. A better indication would have
been the fact that the sign itself was broken in half. >> [LAUGH]
>> And the arrow on the sign was pointing
straight down, perhaps towards hell. So the idea that the road
had been in bad shape. When the sign was in good shape-
>> [LAUGH] >> probably should have been an indication that this was not gonna be a three-hour
tour, and it certainly was not. It wasn't long after we left Uaxactun
that we came upon, this is us driving, that's Bernie's excellent vehicle. This is the road between Uaxactun and
Xultun. You can see it. It's quite lovely. It wasn't long after that,
that we came upon a tree across the road. There it is. Here's at this point I
realized that perhaps Bernie, though having an excellent vehicle
wasn't the best at expedition supply. Since we had no chainsaw,
we simply had a chain. >> [LAUGH]
>> And two machetes. One, two. Six guys, one chain,
two machetes, great big tree. This is not a good combination. >> [LAUGH]
>> We thought we might move the tree with that chain and Bernie's excellent vehicle. His vehicle is not nearly that excellent. >> [LAUGH]
>> The tree did not move. The vehicle did not move. >> [LAUGH]
>> And, so we had to cut a new path. Around this tree. That took some time. Certainly put a dent in our schedule. But after all, once we got around
the tree, what are the chances that we would possibly find another tree-
>> [LAUGH] >> in that 40 kilometer stretch. If you're a betting person, 18 is
the number of trees you should bet on. >> [LAUGH]
>> 18 trees, 12 and a half hours, it took us. We had, of course,
brought supplies for one day. So we exhausted those supplies
around lunch of day one. We arrived at the site of Xultun
at night and we set up camp. This is camp. I love this particular image. Remember, I'm carrying about
sixty pounds of camera equipment. I, of course, choose to take this
photo which is not that great, but does demonstrate the entire supply of food that we had-
>> [LAUGH] >> for the six of us. That is, one can of beans. >> [LAUGH]. >> And one jar of cheese. Cheese as you know,
shouldn't come in jars. >> [LAUGH]
>> Nonetheless, that's it. The next day we had decisions to make. We actually used the rest of the water
that morning to make coffee. Unfortunately, I don't drink coffee so
I didn't have any. But we decided, what should we do? Decisions needed to be made. We could in fact drive back
to Uaxactun and resupply. We had just opened the road, probably
only take us about two and a half hours. Or we could walk the six
kilometers to this new site. Now, we decided that six kilometers,
I mean it's like an hour, an hour and a half tops. We walk to the sites, take some pictures,
draw a cute, you know, a few quick maps. It'll illustrate some of the,
the Mayans very quickly. Maybe spend two hours on site. We walk back. You know, the whole thing probably
takes you know, four to six hours. Drive back to watch Uaxactun. We're a little late for lunch. So, we skip breakfast,
we'll be in Uaxactun for lunch. That seems like an excellent plan,
and I certainly went along with it. Now after all,
we're walking six kilometers to the north. I had a GPS. A lot of folks who said I got
lost in the jungle, I didn't. I knew right where I was. Didn't know where we were going,
but I knew where I was. >> [LAUGH]. >> We went off into the jungle and, which was great cuz I could
map our progress, right. So I know in my head we're supposed
to go six kilometers generally north. We started off the walk by walking
three kilometers essentially due west. Now why we did that, you might ask? Because in the jungle,
you do not walk in a straight line. In the jungle, you follow existing paths, even if those paths don't go
exactly where you want to go. In fact, even if the path doesn't go
anywhere near where you want to go. So we walked that three kilometers,
cuz at the end of that three kilometers, there was an excellent path that
all of these guys knew about. Here's a spectacular path,
very easy to walk on, and we made excellent time on that path. On that path in the next hour and
a half, two hours, we covered about six kilometers;
ostensibly due east. So having walked nine total kilometers, at that point we had meted about
a 100 to a 150 meters north. >> [LAUGH]
>> So lot of walking, not a lot of progress. But, at that point, we actually
turned north, which was helpful, and we made good progress north, except maybe
too good, because we then turned back to the east, followed by the south,
west again, then north again. And eventually we found
an archaeological site. Now, what's remarkable is I've now worked
in this area for almost 20 years, and I know where all
the archaeological sites are. To be able to pick a path,
that missed all of them. >> [LAUGH]. >> For 22 kilometers is. That beats the odds, right there. That is unlikely to happen ever again. Right?
But, it happened. We got to a site. We walk up, has this very large pyramid. Looters have dug a trench into the back
of it, it turned it into a tunnel and they've essentially dug about,
as we find out later, 45 meters. 150 feet into this structure. Before they turn and dig a different
direction, and dig that way and dig all over the place, they didn't
find what they were looking for. We walked around to
the front of that pyramid with the expectation of seeing the three
carved hieroglyphic monuments. And when we got to the front of
that pyramid, we saw nothing. We saw some trees. And no carved hieroglyphic monuments. Not even evidence that there had
ever been hieroglyphic monuments. No evidence that looters had ever dug
on the front of the building, in fact. So, this was not the right site. Now, it was nine and a half hours later. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. We've had absolutely no water and
the only food we've had all day were two limes that we found in
an abandoned looter's camp. Two limes split six ways. >> [LAUGH]. >> Yummy, right? So the guys say, don't worry. There are vines here in the forest. There are vines, when you cut them open you can shower
in the water that pours out of them. I was like, okay, well if there
are shower vines, then we can stay. But, I have no idea what
a shower vine looks like. And so they said we'll go off and
find them and you stay here. Excellent plan. So I stayed there, but
it was hot and uncomfortable there. I was irritated that I had walked now so
far. And I now found myself essentially
in the absolute middle of nowhere. 8 kilometers by the way as the crow flies
from where I had parked my car, but 22 kilometers the journey we took. And no carved hieroglyphic
monuments to speak of. I'm carrying 60 pounds of camera equipment
which I've used to take a picture of Cheez Whiz. And-
>> [LAUGH] >> This is really all I have. So, I decide to go around to
the back side of the building. I think it'll probably be much cooler
inside that looter's excavation. The sun won't be shining there. It's not hot in the forest. Cause it's about 100 degrees. It's March which is the dry season. It's really an unpleasant time to be
walking around in the sun in middle of Guatemala. So I head into this looter's
excavation in total darkness and I sit down, the first place that I see
that seems like it might be comfortable, so I walk in, I sit, and I sit in
a great big pile of bat droppings. >> [LAUGH]
>> And I thought, awesome. You know, my thought at that
time was excessive foolishness. >> [LAUGH]
>> Right? I'm like, Ian has got I'm just gonna be,
what is he gonna say. I'm like, I've gone I'm not
supposed to be here anyway, I didn't go to any of the places
I was supposed to be at. And now here I am sitting in
a tunnel on a pile of bat crap. Terrific. With guys that I don't know. That, with no water,
that are finding shower vines. Which really seems like a joke to me. >> [LAUGH]. >> Right?
Like I doubt the existence of the shower vine. I admit it. It seems like the kinda joke you play
on a chubby gringo that comes down from Cambridge and
is dying in the middle of the forest. You say we have shower vines here. And you say, really? That sounds terrific, hot and
cold shower vines, excellent. So, as I'm sitting there in the smell
of ammonia, from the bat droppings, I take out a flashlight, I shine it up,
really just to see if there are bats above me that are gonna add
to the pleasure that is this day. >> [LAUGH]. >> And when I shined that flashlight
up on the wall, that's what I see. And, I would really love for
my reaction to have been your reaction, that, wow. My reaction was, nice. >> [LAUGH]. >> Like, can't drink it. >> [LAUGH]. >> And they're probably gonna kill me for
it, because of course, all of Ian's words come back that
these guys, I wouldn't trust them, probably involved with looting. Excellent. This is the perfect thing. The first time a mural is found,
by the way, since 1946 in the Maya area. Right?
55 years have gone by where we've seen any well preserved Maya wall painting. Not that they didn't paint them,
but they just didn't last. They didn't endure in that nasty tropical
environment with dramatic changes in heat and humidity. And so, seeing this, I thought, take a picture which I took with my
first digital camera in total darkness. Still use any of that damned equipment I
was carrying around, took this picture and walked back out and sat in my hammock. This is a better image, just so
we can see what we're talking about. It's spectacular. That's how these paintings were found. It was entirely by accident, but
then what begins after that is a ten-year project dedicated to uncovering them and
preserving them in situ. So that they still remain there for
generations of Guatemalans and scholars and Maya to see and experience. Now, it is a place of pilgrimage, today,
by many of the modern Maya that live. This is a, a Shaman from Santiago Atitlan, he came to visit the site, and to ask
a number of questions about the site, questions about me and
how I was involved in the discovery of it. They tell a story of its discovery
that's very different from the one I just told you. I'm really a lot cooler, in their version. >> [LAUGH]. >> In their version,
I'm like a super hero. In my version,
I'm the idiot that I really am. But in their version,
what they saw was that, when I entered into that cave,
cave, it's a tunnel. When I entered into that space,
I actually journeyed into the underworld. In fact, I wasn't just dying, I died. And I entered the underworld. And when in the underworld,
I was actually given access to sacred knowledge,
the way of these paintings. And was allowed to return to
the surface of the Earth, in order to bring that
knowledge back to them. Told you, much cooler in their version. It's some of the most moving
things that I've ever been told. This idea that some how I have died and
got to come back, if only to share this painting with the people that are
descendant from those who painted them. Now, the painting itself is spectacular. It was painted sometime before 100 BC. All right.
It's actually about 900 years earlier than the paining that we knew from 1946. It was about 500 years earlier than
the painting that we knew from the site of that vanished. It was destroyed after archeologists
excavated it in the 1940s. So, nothing about this painting says, it's
the first one they ever painted, right? Nothing about this says practice, right? The quality of the line,
the calligraphy of, of the stroke, the fact that they don't even
end the brush strokes, right? They always take a brush stroke and
they paint it. And then they put dots at the end. Just [SOUND] just cuz they can. Really remarkable. The story on the wall,
even more remarkable. They're a series of trees, four of them,
symbols of the four cardinal directions of the world, and each of those trees is
this monstrous bird, not a normal bird. Right?
We know it's not a normal bird because of a number of things. One, it has spear points in its wings,
and most birds do not. Two, it is covered in jewels,
right, on its tail, which is glorious, great big talons. It has jewels coming off of its head,
off of its headdress, and it has a two headed snake in its beak. And it has the symbols for
sun, for the day, king, and darkness in its two wings
as it stands in this tree. Right. Now in front of it is a character, both of these characters are individuals
that we know from Mayan mythology, from much later Mayan mythology. Mythology that's written
down in the 17th century. All right? In which they talk about this monstrous
bird in that time named Vucub Caquix. Archaeologists like to call him the principle bird deity
because we see him quite often. The interaction is usually between
this bird deity and this hero, a hunter known as one hunter or
Hunaphu First Lord. He's always marked by this
single black spot on his cheek. So, here we have this version. Now this version that we know from the
Popoviex's book written down in the 17th century tells us about Hunahpu, right,
that's first lord first hunter, shooting this bird out of the sky,
and so, so that the real sun can rise. That's the purpose of it. Right?
It's like this vainglorious false sun that sits in his tree in the East, and this real sun won't come
up until he's been vanquished. For the Maya, it was sort of
a symbol of the primordial world, right, before creation. This sort of monstrous thing
that inhabits the four corners the area that's bound by forests. Now as we go along this wall,
we see here he's making a sacrifice. He's actually running a tree
branch through his genitals. That's where they let blood from. This is the blood of creation. I'll show another image in a moment
which is even more obvious, but he's doing so in a field of flowers. See this little blossoms, and
these blossoms have little swirls of, of scent essentially
rising up out of them. The whole bottom of the painting
colored yellow from these flowers. But as we move down the wall, it's really
like we're turning the pages of a book, all right, like we're getting to read
this story, and we have that same bird. This part of the mural is broken,
but you can see his wing is there. Here's the two headed snake. The jewel that used to be on his
forehead is now floating in the air, blood dripping off of it. The sacrifice that's being made here by
our hero, our first lord, our Huna Hao. He has these great little birds
tied to a basket on his back. He's actually floating just
above the ground level, and he makes an offering of his own blood. You can see the gouts of blood
coming from his wounds, and he makes an offering of a turkey,
that's actually bent backwards. Here's its head. Little waddle, all right? Here's its talons,
its tail feathers, its wing. It has three stones piled up on it, and sort of smoke rising from
these stones that are heating it. It's being cooked as an offering for
this bird, and it's as though we turn
the page once again. And we get another tree, right? One of these four trees, the four
cardinal directions with another bird. In this instance,
the bird-snake is missing a head. It's floating there. The offering being made,
is being made by our hunter once again. This time he stands on the ground. All right. He's not floating in the air. And he has a little deer
thrust to his belt. The sacrifice that he makes I won't
bother with that yet, is a deer. You can see its hooves, right. Its belly split open. Those same stones piled up. Its other hoof, it's in a rather dramatic position,
it's, it's face is looking downward. And then we turn the page again,
and when we do, we have yet another tree, this time on
the banks of a flowing river, all right. We have our protagonist. He's got a fish this time in a,
in a net on his back, and the sacrifice that he makes is of
a catfish bent backwards over that pyre, this time with five stones
piled up on top of it. What's remarkable is that all of these
sacrifices are sacrifices that we've actually seen before, and
we've seen them on these four pages of one of the only books we have
preserved from the Maya world. It was a book found in
a library in Dresden. It somehow survived the conquest, survived
the burning of books done by the Spanish, and was spirited back to Europe, along
with three others, one found in Madrid, one found in Paris, and this one
found in Dresden, the best preserved. And on these four pages
of the Dresden Codex, the bottom of each page,
which are called the New Year's Pages, are a series of ceremonies that are done
to renew the world at the new year. And those ceremonies involved making
a sacrifice in front of four trees. Trees that are labelled in the hieroglyphic texts by
their cardinal direction. So the tree of the East. The tree of the West. The tree of the North. The tree of the South. But also labelled as the tree
of that monstrous bird. It's that bird's tree of the East. That bird's tree of the West. And the sacrifices that are being
offered are the hock of a deer, a fish piled on two stones, a turkey and incense, or the smell of flowers. Right, so this is from around 1400 AD. So 1,500 years later, on the ceremonies to renew the world
enacted by a priest, a ritual specialist, making a sacrifice of these things is
actually doing the same thing that the gods did in great antiquity to
organize the world in the first place. So they're reenacting this pageant
of creation 1500 years later. In fact, this is a pageant
that's still reenacted today, by the same folks from Santiago
that came down to visit the site. All of this was done to essentially set
up the world so that kings could rule it. Kings related to those gods. Kings that are seated to the throne
on top of great wooden scaffolds. All right? Kings that are handed their
crowns by attendants, dressed up with headdress
of that monstrous bird, and a text between them, that actually
ends in the word ahau, or lord. Or king. This is a coronation scene from
the 1st century or 2nd century BC. And it's identical to the carved
hieroglyphic environments that we see throughout the classic period for
the next thousand years. Mya kings accede to the throne
receiving the same crown sitting on the same scaffolds. All right. So this idea of the classic representing
a pinnacle, perhaps in some senses. But this is evidence that all of
those things that we expect to see only in the classic were certainly
present in the pre-classic. They were present in the 2nd century BC. And they were present at
the site of San Bartolo. A site, by the way, that is minuscule
compared to other Maya sites. Now, keeping this mural intact
was not an easy thing to do. It involved the use of wall painting
conservators both from the Getty and the National Park Service. To actually inject plaster material,
grout, the same material that
the mural is made of. Essentially, to fill the cracks
just to keep it from moving. Nothing was done to the surface of this. All of the colors that you see
are the colors as they exist today and are the colors as they
existed 2,000 years ago. Now in 2010,
one of my archaeology students from Boston University,
a kid by the name of Max Chamberlain. Comes down to spend a semester abroad
in Guatemala to learn Spanish and to practice archaeology. And when he comes down he says,
you know Bill? You found a mural. I'm gonna find a mural. And I was like okay Max, I mean 55 years
hasn't gone by, but whatever, that's fine. It's always good to have goals,
good to have dreams. And so, Max spent every day and
his lunch hour mapping the site of Xultun. The site that I had started my
journey from is now the site that I'm investigating. Right?
Having spent ten years at San Bartolo, we moved on to Xultun,
its big neighbor to the south. And Max spends his lunch hours poking
his head into looters' tunnels. Going to looters' excavations
just looking for paint. Now Max found, according to him,
about six murals. Pretty much every day. >> [LAUGH]. >> Max was not really discerning
in finding paintings. But whenever he saw paint, sometimes a handprint, sometimes
just a little color, it was a mural. In his mind. And one day,
actually the day that I finished all of the conservation work
inside the tunnels at San Bartolo. Leaving those things intact; the over
burden of the building on top of it supported. So they would be there and endure for
as long as we can imagine. Max came and said, Bill I really did it,
I really found a painting. I was like, Max, you say that everyday. He's like, it, but, I did this time. I really, I found one. It's spectacular. And, he shows me this
drawing that he's made. And, on this drawing, there's this guy. He's a king. He's got this headdress and an ear spool. And, it's spectacular. And I was like, well. That's, that's great, Max. Of course, you know, I just spent the last ten years
dealing with the last mural we found. I just finished it today. >> [LAUGH]
>> So not really interested in a brand new mural really just yet,
like give me an hour maybe. Something. Like to relish in the fact that I am now
done with the first one that I found and was responsible for. And then it took about a week, and
it was actually on Easter Sunday. Finally went out and I said,
all right, Max, let's see the murals. And this is Max's mural. I know it's not as cool
as the one I just showed. But, for Max this was a circle. You can see the red line. He thought this was the ear. He thought that there was a face here. Then there's this red line. There's this red line. There's not a lot to see. And it's not really a surprise. The looters had uncovered it at some
point, it had been left exposed for god knows how long. We have no idea how long it was left
out in the rain, in the elements. And so it's not surprising
that there's nothing there. And I said well Max that's great. This room was painted. And it's a room inside a house. It wasn't some great temple,
it wasn't some monumental architecture. It's a room in a house. I thought, that's really great. You know, all we can really do, Max,
is find out how big the space is. We can say how much had been painted. But unfortunately, we're never going
to know the words on the walls. It's just not going to preserve. We're so close to the surface,
that's it's just not going to be there. But it's cool that we at least
get to know that it was painted, that we have evidence of this great
residential painting in this house. And I said, all right,
let's just find out how big it is. I'll just, I'm gonna touch the back wall. All right? I've got your wall,
I wanna touch the other wall. I have three walls,
I know how big the space is. That's all I need to know. Figured I had about 30 centimeters, about a foot because looters have
excavated into the building. About a foot until I
reached the back wall. And I excavated that foot. And when I did, that's what I saw. I thought, I actually just,
this one, I laughed out loud. Right? The other one, it was like, nice. This one, I was just like,
this, what are the chances? Right?
That this would actually, that is preserved, and in fact, what we're
looking at, was the face of a Maya king. Right? This is his great big green blue
headdress and his eyelash is right here. His eye comes here, this is his nose. This green stuff are feathers
coming off of him. He's got this great red
hat that he's wearing. It's really spectacular
that this would preserve. And, this is the building that it's in. It's a tiny, little building. It's really, only about three meters tall. And it's right below the surface. >> [LAUGH].
>> And, this is where the looters cut in. And, you can see that
image on the back wall. But, what's in this room, for me, is more remarkable than I
could ever have imagined. The walls were painted. The back wall had an image,
right, of our Maya king. Seated right here, right. This great green feathered headdress,
right. His red sorta half of he's wearing
this little white scepter in his hand, this other bag behind him. My favorite guy in this
painting by the way? That guy.
You know why I love that guy? It's like the world's first photo bomb. Right.
I mean, it's just sorta like. >> [LAUGH]. >> Did you get me? Am I in this? This is actually labeled
as a that's a performer. But he's probably helping as a servant
holding up the headdress behind him. This guy in front is sorta kneeling and
he's got a title, there. Itz'in taaj it means
younger brother obsidian. Something that we really
don't understand just yet. >> But, also on interest, on the walls,
not just this painting of the people, but a whole series of other things. These little texts, little numerical
tables, that are on the walls. Mayan numbers are very simple and
very elegant. They represented any number
imaginable with three signs. The dot, which is the number one. Right. You have one dot, one, two dots, two, three, four, and then a bar, for five. You never get more than three bars and
four dots, the number 19. After that they use the zero. All right?
One of the great inventions of the Maya was the zero. But the zero to them isn't
the same as the zero to us. To us a zero represents nothing. An absence of a number. For them, this is also the glyph for
full, complete, right? Zero means that it's so full that you
have to start another unit, right? You need to move up. And what these are are actually
five digit numbers. In which these are ones,
these are 20s, all right? These are 360s, approximately a year. These are 20 360s, 7200s, and these are 20 7200s, or 144,000s. They're enormous numbers. And each of these columns, ranges, and
this is like 2,400,000 something or other. And they're counting days. But what they are counting isn't
just days, it's interesting, because the Maya had lots of
different calendars, not unlike us. They had a solar calendar, 365 days. They had a ritual calendar of 260 days. They combined those two
to make a long calendar, 52 years long, which was 18,980 days. Each of these numbers is divisible
by 18,980 and 260 and 365. They're all common factors. They're also divisible by 584,
which is the period of Venus. They're also divisible by 780,
which is the period of Mars. They're also related to a shorter
period of a 170-some odd days, which is a period of Mercury. They're also tied to a 2000-some odd
day period of the eclipse cycles. The archeoastronomer Tony Aveni
looked at this table and thought, if I were a Maya,
this would be my room. >> [LAUGH]. >> All right, because this is about the
geekiest [LAUGH] room you will ever see in the Maya Lowlands,
because what they're doing is, they're actually writing these tables
that the only place we've ever seen anything like this are in the books,
are in those preserved books. This is another table. In this table there are series
of numerical columns. And at the top of each column
is a glyph of the moon. And each of these columns represents
a sum from the previous column. And in each column
they're adding 177 days. Sometimes 178. And the reason they're doing that is
because that's how they calculated the period of the moon. The moon takes about 29 and a half
days to go through its cycle, right? But the Maya didn't like fractions so
much, so they used multiplication
to get rid of them. So they did six lunar cycles was 177 days. And that's close. But it's not perfect. >> [LAUGH]. >> The same way we use our leap year,
all right? That 365 days is good, but 366 days every four years is better. Even better is, every 100 years,
you don't do a leap year. All right?
The centuries, you don't do a leap year. Except if it's divisible by 400,
then you do a leap year. >> [LAUGH].
>> All right? That's our system. We thought the Maya had crazy calendars,
we're, our calendars are just as strange. But what they're doing is,
they're adding that correction factor so that in the grand total,
you have 162 lunations. And it comes out to 4784 days, which calculates the period
of the moon to an error of about 20 seconds over a 13-year period,
right? That's what they're doing in this room. They are calculating these things. They are writing them on the wall. They're erasing them. They're writing them again. [LAUGH] they're making corrections the
same way they do in Maya books, all right. These are these same tables, the same
numerical table that I just showed you. This is of course from the Dresden Codex. That wall was painted at Xultun in 760 AD. This was done 800 years later. They also do this thing on the wall, and Xultun's the only other
time we've ever seen this. It's a ring number. This was discovered by David Stuart. A ring number. See how they put this little circle around
this number nine, or this number 14? That means that these dates that they're
giving us here, we count backwards. So that actually takes into
the previous period of creation, which gives us 3207 BC. So they're just counting way back in time. The question is, why are they doing this? Why these incredible
calculations about time and the motion of planets and how do they
relate to that king on the wall? In 760 AD, Maya kings are tying the events of their daily lives to
the motions of planets and stars. They're tying them to this concept of
cyclical time, that events that happen in their lives are repeating events
that happened in deep mythology. They are repeating the events that
happened by their patron gods, their patron deities. And when they set out to
establish their kingdoms, what they're doing is they
are in fact reestablishing kingdoms that have these
long mythic histories. In the same way that that
priest in the Dresden Codex is reenacting the creative act of the gods, the kings are reenacting the creative
acts of their ancestors and their gods. But the important aspect of it is
they're doing it on specific dates. All right, because that's
the date when the event repeats. And if you cannot tell me when it really
happened the first time, then it, and where the moon was, and where the sun was,
and where Venus is in the sky and where Mars is going to be, then it's not exactly
the events we should be predicting. And that's what the Maya were about
in the seventh and eighth century. They were about tying their lives
to theses cycles in the stars. To being able to fix their lives,
which they knew to be miniscule in comparison to the great
cosmic cycles around them. To give them meaning, they had to
be connected to events that had come long before them and
repeatedly happened through time. Now, who painted these things? Who made these calculations? On this wall of the room, the wall
that Max found, this is what Max saw. This is what we excavated. And this is what we're able to see. Three guys, painted in black,
dressed in only loincloths, with a single medallion around their
chests and a medallion in their headdress. This one is labeled as the older brother, the elder obsidian, to the junior
that was shown on the other wall. These guys are shown as youths,
that's the title above them, all right? It's an order of people. Usually in Maya court scenes, you see everyone dressed
up in all their best stuff. If you're gonna appear before the king,
you dress up to be before the king. You're there to be seen. In these instances, we have a bunch of
guys painted black, wearing loincloths. And they're all wearing
the same loincloth. I mean, not exactly the same loin cloth,
obviously they're different loincloths, that would be gross. But. They're, they're wearing loincloths and
these headdresses that we see them on. They're a uniform. It's a cohort. It's an order. And one of the remarkable things is,
is that when we actually excavated, one of my graduate students, Franco Rossi, he's gonna finish his degree this
year from Boston University. When he excavated under
the floor behind this building, he found a relatively simple burial. It was buried with one pot. And two artifacts. The medallion for its chests, and
the medallion for his headdress. The guys that occupied and used this room
that are copying tables out of Maya books, that are putting tables into Maya books,
that are making those calculations. That are interacting with the kings,
that are making those plans that, that justify the lives of
those royal activities. Those guys are living and dying in this house group attached,
we think, to the palace. These are our thah, our brother's thah. Our elder, our junior, and the other
sets of titles that go with them. And this is what we're now finding at
sites like Xultun and San Bartolo. Sort of, adding mystery, but
taking away mystery, right? We have more knowledge about
the Maya today than we've ever had. At the same time, there's so
many aspects of their lives and their knowledge that we are still
figuring out, everyday. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] I am happy to take questions. >> Does anybody have any questions? >> Where did the looters
takes the stuff to? >> Where did the looters,
what did they do with it? >> Yeah. >> They generally sell it to a middleman,
that pot will sell at auction or on the black market anywhere
from 5 to 10,000 dollars. So, the looters make very
little on what they do. And they do so to survive, essentially. It's a very dangerous job the looters
have, because they're thieves, and there's no honor among thieves. Looters tend to work with family members,
so that if they go out as four and they come back as three,
they have to answer questions. All right, if they go out with people
they don't know, accidents happen. So, but that's what happens to the stuff. >> Next question here. [SOUND]. >> How are the murals preserved for
so long? >> How are the murals preserved for
so long? One of the things that the Maya do, is that they build one building
on top of another, right. And so when they're done with
a building they bury it, and it just so happens that when they were
done with this building, they buried it under an enormous pyramid,
it's about 26 meters tall. And so in the end, this painting, or
two walls of the painting, cuz in reality of the four walls, the Maya destroyed two
of them because they were in the way. So they broke them into tiny bits and they
threw them into the fill of the room and we found more than 4,000 of those
fragments that we're putting together. But, when they buried this whole
thing under that other pyramid, it ends up being covered by
about 15 meters of Earth. Which means in the 2000 years
it's existed, its temperature and its humidity had remained
relatively constant. One of the first things that we
did before we excavated any of it, is that we actually spent two years monitoring the environment inside
the tunnel the looters had left. To see what our changes in temperature and
humidity were going to be like. So that if we uncovered it,
would we be damaging it? And we just happened to be lucky. In that 15 meters underground,
artificial ground nonetheless, 15 meters underground in Guatemala,
it is 83 degrees, everyday. It is 98% humidity every day, every hour of the day, doesn't matter what's
going on outside, what's going on inside. We have environmental
monitoring systems that send all of that data to a satellite
that we can then download it from here. So that we can keep track
if there are any changes. If a tree falls down and opens a crack,
you know, and water starts to percolate and it starts running across the surface
of the paintings, we'll know. All right? But as it stands,
83 degrees and 98% humidity for the last 2,000 plus years
has kept it as it looks. Yes? >> In general terms,
what percentage of all of the Mayan sites in the region
have been actually excavated? >> What percentage of Mayan
sites have been excavated? Of all the Maya sites
that we know to exist, we have excavated less than 1% of them. We have done excavations in
less than 1% of the sites. The sites themselves that
we've done excavations at, we've excavated less
than 10% of those sites. So, of all the remains we
possibly could excavate, right? We are at 10% of 1%. Or, one-tenth of a percent. >> [LAUGH].
>> It's a long way to go. >> A long way to go. There's so much, there's so much there. Now, a lot of that has
been touched by looters. I would estimate that,
of the number of Maya sites that exist, the number of Maya sites that
have been touched by looters. Borders around 99 to 100%, all right? So there's a long way, for us to go. But even when sites have been looted,
like San Bartolo and Xultun, though that's damaging,
as archaeologists if we just let it go and, and then, we abandon those
sites simply because they've been damaged. We lose the opportunity to find these things that we wouldn't
otherwise find, right? Cause I certainly wouldn't
have dug that 45 meter long tunnel into the building in San Bartolo. Nor would I have necessarily dug that
tunnel into the building at Xultun. So, the damage that they've done, we're
still recovering something from it, but there is, it's remarkable to think that
after more than 100 years of systematic excavation in Maya sites, beginning
at the site of Copan in the 1890s. After more than 100 years,
we're still just scratching the surface. >> Next question here. >> Can you, compare the complexity
of Mayan civilization to Egyptian civilization, because it seems though
you know in terms of astronomy, and some mathematics that it's a very advanced
society and what you're thoughts are on. >> In terms of astronomy and math, the
Maya are really at the top of the class. Right? Things like recognizing Venus
as a single planetary body the Maya recognized it as one. The Greeks did not. Because Venus is strange,
it appears for about 260 days and then it disappears for about 50 days. Then it comes back for about 260 days,
then it disappears for like eight days. So its constantly reappearing in,
in, in different parts of the sky, but they understood that to be one. The invention of the zero,
of course, is also a real, sort of boon not used in,
in much of, of the old world, right? That's sort of two independent inventions
of the concept of a placeholder, and the use of, mathematics with places. Right, so that certainly is
an accomplishment in that, in that regard. But we're also talking about
very different times, right? If we're talking about, you know,
PyramidS of Khufu in Egypt, the size of them is dramatic compared
to what we see in the Maya area, even some of the largest pyramids. And the, the methods with which
they were built are very different. Their, their purpose is similar in
some instances, different in others. It's hard to, to like, set a bar and
say, who's above it and who's below it. It's more that there's certainly
enough complexity to go around. And we shouldn't think of the Maya as the
the lesser developed of various cultures. They could compete with
just about anybody. >> Next question here. Once you excavate a site and
do restoration, how is it secured after you leave? >> Well in a place like San Bartolo, we actually put security at the site
before we ever actually began excavation. So I found it in March of 2001. In April of 2001,
we installed security at the site. We actually began
documentation of the paintings with funding from the Peabody Museum and
National Geographic in June of that year. So there were guards there for, you know,
three months before we ever showed up. There have been guards
at the site ever since. So for the last 15 years, there have been
four guys living at that site year round. They go on 22-day shifts,
where they're there for 22 days and they take eight days off at home,
then they come back. So, that's how they're protected. But in reality, I have to say those
guards don't really protect the site. Those guards report if anything happens. But they're not armed,
they're not there to defend the site. They're there to report incidents. What keeps this site safe is the good
will of the populations that live near this site. And San Bartolo is located
in the middle of nowhere. We're about 50 kilometers from
the nearest village, all right? But that village, there are only about
65 to 80 families in that village. And all of them in one way or another
are tied to the project at San Bartolo. Either they work there, or their brother
works there, or someone else is a, a watchman at the site, or an excavator
at the site, or their sister or mother does laundry that gets
brought out from the site, or they drive a truck that brings
supplies into the site. So the economy of is tied to the success
of the project at San Bartolo and Xultun. And if looting takes place
at either of those sites, then the projects will lose their
permits and that work will disappear. And so it's in the best interest of those
communities to protect those sites, and it's that good will more than
the four guys living out there that really keep them safe. >> Cool. Next question here. >> It sounds like, can you hear? It sounds like, succeeding,
generations at Xultun and San Bartolo. Both built on top of,
buildings that had the murals and they would, kind sometimes of destroy
the murals I think you said, or whatever. >> Mm-hm. >> Was there, no link,
really, from one generation to the next that they had no compunction
about destroying the images of a king, or rituals, or whatever, from the generation
before, in order to build theirs on top? >> The idea that, when the Maya build one
building on top of the other, all right? They're, they're doing so not only as a destructive act,
we see it as sort of destruction. For the Maya,
in part it's preservation, right? In part it's actually
consuming that building. It's, it's taking the power of that
building and transforming it into yours. So it's certainly a matter of respect,
right? I mean there's a certain
economy to it as well. If you wanna build a ten meter tall
building and you've got a five meter tall building, rather than build it next door,
you build it on top. But it also, when it covers that,
it preserves that sacred space. If that was the spot of the ceremony
in the same way that Saint Peter's is over the spot of the crucifixion
of Peter, right, in Rome? Like, the same way that that ceremonial
location is preserved with that connection through the architecture,
that same thing's going on in Maya sites. So even though they're
destroying parts of it, that location becomes more
important than the building itself. Now in very rare cases, the Maya
preserve buildings in their entirety. They actually entomb the entire building. And one of those cases from the site
of Copan the building of Rosalila, which is spectacular. They just totally entombed the structure. There's a building like
that at Xultun as well, where they entombed the entire thing,
all of its plaster masks, everything. We're still investigating that building
as to what exactly is inside it that led them to treat it with such piety. The mural room at Xultun was treated
with about as much respect as they ever treat other things. They actually filled that
room in through the doorway. Right, usually the Maya collapse
the ceiling, fill in the empty space, level it out and build on top. At Xultun, they came in through the door,
they built a column in the middle, and then filled it to support the ceiling,
and then filled in around the column and then walled up the door on their way out,
and then built over the top. So they actually left that
entire space preserved and intact, buried underneath the house
floor of the building above it. So they treated that room differently than
they treated the room next door to it. The room next door they
raised to the bench. So you actually, if you're next, in the
room next door, in this room you're here. In this room, you're way up here. Climb stairs up, you're on top of
the room that used to house that mural. So there's certain, certainly
an indication that they keep track, and they make those decisions
on a case to case basis. Yeah, cool. >> Next question here. >> Well, thank you very much. This has been very informative and
provocative. I would like to ask if you could make any
comparison of the status of the culture, these Mayans, versus what was going
in Europe as to say, Columbus. >> Mm-hm.
>> And whether or not there's any way for the Mayans to have records to
read about the myth very much earlier than what was going on
when Columbus hit these shores? >> Yeah, I mean, certainly Maya
history goes back to around 400. We're literate enough to read their
history going back to around 400 A.D.. There's writing that goes back to around
400 BC but we can't quite read it yet. At the time the Spanish arrived on
the Yucatán Peninsula in the early 1500s there were no cities on the peninsula that
compared in size with those in Spain. The cities of the Meshika Empire of
the Aztec Empire in Central Mexico dwarfed any of the cities
that existed in Spain. The largest city in Spain at the time
was Seville, it was about 30,000 people. Tenochtitlan in,
which is under modern day Mexico City, had a population of over
200,000 at that time. So the Spanish were often
found themselves in awe of what they were seeing when they first
encountered the people in the New World. The native populations found themselves
underwhelmed from their native accounts. That they found the Spanish to be dirty. They found them to be uncivilized and
that they didn't bathe. They liked horses,
thought the horses were really cool, never seen an animal like that, cuz
the largest animal they have is a deer, so a horse would be quite dramatic. They were impressed by the dogs the
Spanish war mastiffs were very impressive compared to the small Maya
dogs that they were eating. Those were very different. But, in terms of how they saw each other,
each of them saw the other as there were some aspects of
it they didn't understand. But the Spanish talk about
how they were impressed mainly based on their impression
of the Caribbean Islands, that the Caribbean Islands were
basic in the terms as they expected. But, this world of Mesoamerica
of the Maya, of the Aztec, of the Zapotec,
of the Highland Kingdoms in Guatemala. These were things that they didn't expect
to find and they were very impressed with. >> Were they convinced that they
were more advanced than Europeans? >> Some were, many were not. Most of them saw them as
heathens to be subdued. Interestingly the Maya saw the Spanish
as heathens to be subdued. [LAUGH] So, I mean, there, there's,
I mean, one of the things that I like to point out is, you know, Yucatán, right,
the name Yucatán, right, the Spanish talk about it as though they like to say,
it means the land of honey and deer. Yeah, it does not. It means I don't understand you. Which is an awesome thing to think about. Sort of like, what do you call this place? I don't understand you. You call it I don't understand you? I mean, it's sort of an Abbott and
Costello sort of routine, right? [LAUGH] I mean,
that's what's going on, right? There's, there's very little understanding
in the communication that's going back and forth. So, their impressions of
each other I say they, they both saw the other, there were
some aspects that were impressive, and there were other aspects that
they saw as totally unimpressive. And certainly the Maya
resisted Spanish conquests for about 180 years in resistance. So, it was not this,
this thing that just happened over night. >> This will be the last question. >> D, d, do you know how big is this site? And how, how is related with
the rest of the cities around, one, question one, and question two. I saw that you was scan it. >> Mm-hm. >> The mural to, in order to record it. >> Yep.
>> You, you think it's a good a way
to preserve the murals? If thinking in another, in other murals. >> Mm-hm. >> Scan it [INAUDIBLE] like this, okay. >> Yeah. Yeah, there are couple, two things. So, in terms of the,
San Bartolo itself is relatively small, about a square kilometer. Xultun is currently known to
be about 16 square kilometers. As we begin our investigations at
Xultun what's become apparent is that it's contemporary with San Bartolo and we
don't actually know if they're two places. It might end up being one place,
if we dig enough. It may still be two, but it may not be. Xultun, we have not defined its limits,
as yet. We've gone eight kilometers
away from the site and we're still in the center of town. So it is a very, very large Maya site. And it spans and its dates from around
3 or 400 BC up until around 900 AD. So, it is a large urban center
that lasts for 1,500 years. So it is something for us to really
consider in terms of how it relates. It's in, at war with Tikal for
a certain part of its history. It was probably aligned with Tikal for
other parts of its history. It's interacting. Wives are being moved from Xultun to
other Maya cities to establish alliance. So there, it's a player in a system
that we're still trying to understand. In terms of scanning the paintings,
that was done because well, taking pictures of them wasn't really working
mainly because a tunnel is very small. You can't open a great big tunnel,
and at the bottom of the tunnel, you're about 80 centimeters away from the
painting, and at the top of the tunnel, you're at the painting. So, all the pictures would have
to be at oblique angles and the fragments that I was
finding in the fill. I was scanning to make a scale replica
of each of those fragments, and I could manipulate them on the computer
and put the pieces back together. And I thought, it'd be great if I had
like a baseline to put these back up on, like I could digitally
restore the painting. So, even if people could
not get to it to see it, cuz it would be far off in a jungle,
always. And, it would be deeply buried even if,
though we did the preservation work. You know,
they'd be able to see it digitally. If only I could create this
perfect replica of it. And so I took the scanner that I had been
using to put the pieces on; I thought, I wonder if this works on its side? And it does, it doesn't like it,
but it does it. It lets you know it's unhappy,
it makes a, it makes a noise. You hold it up to its
side it's like [SOUND]. [SOUND] [LAUGH] So it sort of
struggles along, but it does the job. And so I took it out there, my students though it was absolutely
crazy because I show up out at the site, I've been scanning pieces
back at the lab back at camp. I showed up out at site with
a scanner under one arm, right, and this big extension cord and
my computer under the other. And I'm like this is going to be great,
I have a feeling this is going to work. I set it up and I put the scanner
up on the wall and I hit scan. And it goes [SOUND] and then the picture
emerges on the computer, and it was actually part of the painting that we've
never been able to take a picture of. Because there was a big rock
that was really you know, about four inches away from it. And the camera could never quite get it,
but we just put the scanner right up
against it and it was perfect. There were problems with the scanner. One is that the surface is a little
bit irregular, and as a result, it has to have the scanner, you just
has to have the right depth of field. Also you get light leaks. Right?
Which alter the color tone of the scans cuz it's obviously not
designed to do that. And so, we did it a second time. You also get rotational issues
make it hard to stick together. And so, we came up with this
plan as to what we would do to scan it a second time better. We, we set up a series of laser levels so
that we could make sure the scan bed was level as we went across
to eliminate rotational issues. We put a color bar, a standard Kodak
photographic color bar on the scanner. So with each scan,
we had a base color bar so that we could correct
the colors back to a normal. We did that. And the problem was
really the light leaks. And so we were like,
we could develop a gasket so that when you put it on
the outside of the scanner, you put it up on the wall,
it would seal and no light would get in. And we talked about this, myself and
the artist, Heather Hurst. We talked about this for like a year. And then we were in the tunnel one day and
I thought, hey, I know how we can get rid
of those light leaks. She's like, what? And I went click, turned off the lights. >> [LAUGH]
>> I'm like, like if you do it in the dark,
there's no light to leak. [LAUGH] So it only took a year. I'm not the brightest. I'm not, you know. It's a good idea, it's just, I'm slow. >> [LAUGH]
>> So, it just, but it worked out and we did it again, and the second time it
worked out really, really, very well. So remarkably, when we found Xultun,
the technology was already in hand. We're like,
we'll just bring out the old scanner and start scanning the walls again. And actually today my son texted me
an image today, from a former student. He posted it on his Facebook page that,
it was saying, using a scanner to document
urban painting in Pittsburgh. You know, Chenzo,
tell your dad, thanks for ripping off the top of the scan bed,
[LAUGH] like, he just sent it to me today. I was like, great. >> [LAUGH]
>> So yes, so other people are, are, are, are using it. It is a great method to use,
because it creates a flat two-dimensional image that's at full scale and whatever
resolution you want to scan it at. A colleague of mine decided to do the same
thing for mural fragments that he had found on the wall at the site called
Holmul, or Sufricaya, north of Holmul. And he forgot about getting the scanner
and it's really, only some scanners work. And he stopped at, he stopped at
a Walmart on the Texas border and he picked himself up a scanner. But the only scanner he could pick up was
a combination printer, scanner, printer, scanner, copier, fax. >> [LAUGH]. >> Right. And so, he picks up, Francisco
Estrada-Belli, shout out to Francisco, picks up this printer, scanner,
copier, fax, and is hold, trying to hold this thing up on the wall,
right, in order to scan this thing. But every time he puts it up
on the wall he hits this, [LAUGH] he hits the fax button. And so the whole, and the, the thing
stays put and the scanner, the bed moves. And so it's like [SOUND] pushing him
out of the way, pushing him back. He was like, this thing is horrible. This never worked at all. So he didn't, he didn't actually do it. It ended up becoming a,
a habitat for ants. >> [LAUGH]
>> That's what, that's what ended up happening. So thank you very much. >> [APPLAUSE]. >> Thank you so much Bill,
I mean, that was amazing. I feel like we just heard the classic
hero story, you know, who has to go through the trial by fire to come out
the other side with the prize, you know. That was amazing. Congratulations. >> [APPLAUSE]. >> And I certainly hope that in my
post-proto-early-middle-age period, I have a modicum of excessive foolishness
to use especially in my lunch hour. [LAUGH] Anyway, thank you all so
much for coming. On February 11th,
we do our second program in the series. We're bringing the scientists who
are really shifting our understanding of what happened to the Maya, and
it should be very fascinating. So we hope you'll come back for that. And thanks for coming out. Good night. >> Good night. >> [APPLAUSE]
Since I saw this I have thought the people who win the Fields Medal should also get one of these hats and a medalion.