Solving Mysteries of the Ancient Maya, Dr. Michael Coe Anthropologist

[Applause] you know I've been around the world many many times up in the Antarctic I've been all over the tropics and everything I've been all over the United States I've never been in Portland so thank you for inviting me this is the third I've probably bitten off a lot more than I can chew on this lecture mysteries of the riot there are so many mysteries many of which have been actually cleared up so they're they're old mysteries or mysteries yet to come that we don't know about but I'll take you through some of what's going on in in the Y area some of the things that we've confronted made me through the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic script we know this is the only civilization in the new world that could speak to us in their own language and that's unique history I'd like to say history does not begin with Christopher Columbus in 1492 in the Western Hemisphere history begins in the Western Hemisphere with the first Mayas who wrote down their own thoughts in their own language and that we can now read and that goes back about 2,000 years so it's a long and really wonderful story they're an incredibly complex culture well once you get into it there's no end to it I mean it's a lifetime job to really understand these wonderful people so I'm going to take you through some of this and perhaps demolish if you miss the longer way about about the Maya and introduce you to what's what's going on so here are some of the mysteries or non mysteries that I'm going to be talking about tonight first of all who were the Maya they're a remarkably living society living people today Maya the Maya are not a dead civilization by a long shot between six and eight million water and lion speaking various Mayan languages around the world including quite a few in the United States now so that's by no means a dead people but they they really have a story to tell that is I think unique what's the origin of their civilization that's a major project something that I've been concerned with and other people for a long period of time and we have a lot of the answers where we don't have all of them and this will take us back to the Olmec as you will see what did the inscriptions and books tell us about the ancient Maya for many many years for over a hundred years all we knew was we could read the date or what did the dates say what were they writing about and we know a lot about what's on the stone monuments now of the Maya but there are areas that were just getting to understand about these people because they were remarkably sophisticated people and as I hope to show you tonight I think they probably had a complete literature and this is something we've only discovered recently why did the Maya classic Maya civilization collapse that's one of the famous $64 questions in Mayan archaeology we know a lot about this now it was a mystery say 25 or 50 or 100 years ago why these these great cities were abandoned in the eighth and ninth centuries ad and we have really a handle on this now and then finally it's inevitable that I'm going to end up with this one what did the Maya say about December 2012 a few days before Christmas and everybody wants to know about that and I'll say something about that one also so these are some of the mysteries that I'm going to touch on and I'm going to on other things too we're going to roam around now where did the Maya live the Maya form part of what's called meso America that's essentially the parts of Mexico and Mexico and adjacent Central America that were civilized at the time of the conference they had a very high culture people like the Aztecs the Toltecs and xxx what kind of people have preceded them oaxaca the the chef protects in oaxaca and the maya who occupied this area all these people shared many many traits in the past and even in the present such as for instance the sacred calendar that i'm going to be talking about so we call that meso America it's a it's an enormous varied area as you can see in topography some of its high plains cold in the wintertime some of its jungle down in the Maya country here tropical forests so but it's one big culture area now the Maya area itself is divided also it's not one obvious area the Maya all of this area here was Maya speaking before the Spaniards came and still is - making in many parts of it it's a you have the Yucatan Peninsula which is a great limestone shelf that rose up millions of years ago out of the sea and essentially flat but it's riddled with caves and natural sinkholes called cenotes a few rivers here and there this is this area here is really the locus of what we generally consider the Maya civilization but many my live in the highlands which is a beautiful volcanic region of stunning beauty and very very high populations of Maya living today speaking their particular Maya language that's a more or less a typical view of the highlands of beautiful Lake atitlán which is a huge volcanic caldera sort of like crater lake but much much bigger blue like crater lake surrounded with volcanoes and many many my villages they're still today carrying on the way of life that they've had for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and many of the Maya today live up there by they're in the highlands of Guatemala or neighboring southeastern Mexico in the state of Chiapas hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Maya today so they're not a disappeared people by a longshot and because of the civil war in Guatemala many maya came to this country in florida there's huge maya populations and I know that I have heard Maya spoken in my car wash in New Haven Connecticut so they're everywhere actually very they're not dead by a longshot and their populations are increasing that's a mile lady who was weaving it actually a textile to make a pair of pants for her husband in salalah guatemala very near lake atitlan the Mayan lowlands are very very different the whole central part of the Maya lowlands a southern Maya lowlands South the southern part of it you could not Peninsula was until recently covered with a high tropical forest in the lowland well actually through much of Mesoamerica there are two strongly marked seasons one is the the wet season and you can see it here these are monsoon rains that come during what amounts to art summer summer time and without those rains you cannot grow corn the winter time is generally through the dry season and there is this alternation of seasons that's so important to Maya farmers in the lower limbs and in the Highland through as well that's in Guatemala near the site of El Mirador which I'm going to be showing you shortly the in the lowlands because of this alternation of wet and dry there and the high tropical forests at least used to be everywhere it's now being cut down like crazy there is a kind of farming which we call slash and burn or milpa agriculture which what happens is that the during the wet season at the end of the wet season say in April May the Maya farmer will cut down the stretch of Flores and burn it and all the smaller stuff and then in the ashes plant his corn with a digging stick and then pray to the rain god Chuck to come and the rains to come so that the corn can sprout and it grows all through the wet season down there and they harvest it in what amounts to the end of summer or early fall for us and that's the alternation which means that there are shifting agriculture here and probably not it limits the size of the populations that can can be sustained by this kind of Agriculture this enters into the whole problem of we'll hear later why the Maya civilization collapsed before 900 AD now where did they come from what see the origin of Maya civilization this is still a controversial subject and the huge amount of polemics go on about this what's my position on this it's the right one as the great man said history shall absolve me we have to on the Maya Genesis we have to look beyond the Maya the Maya did not invent their own civilization so who did there's a much older civilization in Mesoamerica called the Olmec we don't know what these people call themselves is it just the hint when we stick on them and they are centered on this area of southeastern Mexico on the northern side of the oscilloscope Tehuantepec along a gulf coast along these large meandering rivers that roam across the landscape and deposit wonderful silk everywhere sort of like a whole series of little Nile rivers and in that area sometime that's these by the way a radiocarbon years you have to correct them for real calendar year probably around 1400 BC they began to build these enormous centers of which this site of San Lorenzo that I excavated for three years as it it's probably the first city in Mesoamerica not with stone architecture because I had no natural stone there at all but built out of Earth and mud and but they carved these incredible monuments of a huge huge scale if you can get yourself down to San Francisco in the next few months there's a huge exhibit that the de Young Museum of the gigantic Olmec sculptures visit the Maya area here not much of anything is going on when these guys are flourishing in the Maya area it happens here this is where Mason American civilization begins and when I say these heads are big I mean big this thing weighs more than probably a dozen metric tons large these huge heads which we are convinced are the portraits of their great king this was a already these people had Kings at a state had all the arts of settled life and in a big big way suddenly springing up and this is a mystery because we honestly don't know the origins of the Olmec and I look I can tell you there were wonderful artists in in pottery these are pottery figurines large hollow babies here we don't even know what these babies are doing there but they're they like they were fascinated with this this is a portrait certainly of an Olmec King and the rather sinister looking guys smiling at you but he had got bad thoughts going on in his head wonderful carved pottery and everything with stamped with symbols from their their gods they already had a complete pantheon of gods which were just getting to understand here now and they were great great Jade Carver's they had access to Jade that they mined over in Guatemala on the Motagua Valley of Guatemala which goes down from Ramallah City into the Atlantic and up in the mountains were that weren't orders were they had to go to get that Jade and decent life size Jade mask they made of their gods that's a mask of the maze god of the corn god it's life-size his card so that you can actually wear it somebody wore it if you want to see the original it's in Washington at the wonderful Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Georgetown in Washington so they were just great great artists now the problem is that what were the Maya doing at this time well they weren't doing much of anything we know people have been excavating in the Maya area digging right down to bedrock for a hundred years and nobody has found anything prior to a thousand BC that equaled what the Olmec were doing we do know that they had a sort of a form of Agriculture probably not very successful they were doing a lot of hunting with spear points like that one that you think made out of obsidian there they were farming there this is actually a home made out of it's of obsidian the blade of a hope they were living in what we call an archaic form of life largely living on hunting and fishing and that kind of thing gathering they they had no great centered prior to a thousand of these they then suddenly and very quickly under Olmec influence from the West they began to start building these great centers and they did those very very rapidly after that you may have seen the New York Times recently on the front page they had my friend Takeshi you know Martha wonderful my archaeologist who's been digging down and a cycle say Wow which is about in here down to bedrock and he's found but just after a thousand BC these people were built starting to build huge platforms made out of Earth and clay and so forth probably under Olmec influence and he found actually a deposit of Olmec Jade Seltzer Ackland small accent Paul itself down there so it's clear to me that it was Olmec influence that resulted in the beginning of Maya civilization now the problem there is still a mystery we don't know what language the Olmec spoke it could have been Maya it could have been any one of a number of other languages we just don't know because we have really no writing for these people at all but that the writing doesn't start appearing until til five hundred years after this in the Maya area so we have no idea what the Olmec spoke if they were Maya then that's why I mean they would have just moved over to the east but we don't know how Maya civilization got transmitted to these Maya's to turn them into the most civilized people the new world has ever seen now from a thousand to six hundred all the way to 100 BC the Maya started to build enormous sites temples causeways on a gigantic scale and I'm not exaggerating when I show you this that this stuff is really super colossal these sites we knew nothing about let's say 50 or 75 years ago nothing when I was a student 50 years ago or more nobody had ever heard of these early sites the problem is that many of them are buried under later constructions so they were covered up by what we call a classic period to get to them is difficult but we don't know a lot about things and particularly I'm going to be showing you the site of El Mirador here but we know that T Khalid starts about this time Mirador and the great site of qalaat rule here building on a colossal scale but smaller sites have found all through this area here actually and on the Pacific coast there are some really interesting sites with early writing at this time what I'm going to concentrate on this area remember this is where El Mirador is it's so big but it's hard to imagine this an order is the largest of all Maya sites and it's really the oldest it's much bigger than the much more famous be called it's not easy to get there and if unless you take a helicopter and by the way cost about $1,000 an hour to fly a helicopter into there you have to walk for two days in from a little settlement called Carmelita with your own water and your own food and then walk out two days but there's a big archaeological project there going on down from that Richard Hansen runs this is a artist reconstruction of what El Mirador looked like at its height let's say about a hundred BC long before a classic Mayan civilization even begin this is a Mayan site that's super colossal I've stood on these pyramids this is now being they're excavating here this is the dontoh pyramid here in the distance that is completely made out of stone and big blocks of stone like this and they didn't stack them up this way one on top of the other they turn them in this way so they went into the pyramid doing four times as much work as they otherwise would have done connected to this one but this one on the left they'll tigre by a great big causeway it's not only the largest pyramid in the Maya area it's the largest pyramid in the new world and it's probably in terms of both the largest pyramid in the world period it's just amazing and nobody conceived of this earlier so there we are and what happened to these sites actually El Mirador and all the sites in that area disappear about 200 AD they have a collapse that nobody even thought about and that's a mystery what caused that they were abandoned these sites and they moved elsewhere the amazing thing is you can on top of the dontoh pyramid and look out now this canopy is a hundred and fifty feet high here this tropical far high tropical forest canopy you're looking out now I can't remember whether I did this from the top of the danta pyramid or from a helicopter I think from the top of the Duntov pyramid and you're looking in the distance and you see that bump there they're little bumps along the horizon those are other cities poking up through the canopy in the distance on the horizon it's ever like as exciting as say driving over one of the bridges near Manhattan and looking at the Manhattan skyline you're looking at something way over there there are probably a half a dozen or more cities like that elsewhere in that area of the El Mirador Basin which have hardly been examined at all absolutely how did they do this how did they suddenly rise like this the amount of labor that went into these places is just colossal and it's a mystery then it will take years before we understand it what's happening to this forest this is one of the last places in meso America where there's hot still high tropical forests and I hope it's saved because northern Guatemala where this is and adjacent areas of Mexico are being deforested at a tremendous rate right now just it's a horrible story and Richard Hanson and people working with him in Guatemala are trying to say in this area and I hope they do it at El Mirador this is the excavations going on here you get flanking the stairways of these gigantic pyramids gigantic masks of their gods here is an artist's reconstruction of what's going on here burning incense in front of it and this particular God is actually a gigantic bird with a great beat coming down this this particular God was apparently their supreme deity representing the Sun and we're again just beginning to understand this what we call late pre-classic and the religion of these people before the classic begins now not so very long ago so a big another big surprise came up in northeastern Guatemala still in this tropical forest region a young archaeologist named Bill Saturno working for Harvard the Peabody Museum at Harvard stumbled into this site by chair chance and got inside a ludus trench then this otherwise unknown cycle San Bartolo and found a mural looking up at it in the tunnel looters tunnel a modern looters tunnel and these murals aren't nobody even dreamed that such a thing would exist where the Lake Creek lights are just spectacular they're all in this building here inside this this building which is adjacent to a pyramid was later covered up by another pyramid and that's why they've been preserved although parts of them were demolished when they rebuilt this thing and we're found in fragments on the floor there now reconstructing the whole thing this has been one of the most important I'd say one of the 405 most important lines ever made in the Maya area the San Bartolo mural about a hundred BC and they show scenes from Maya mythology that we know much much later preserve and even into colonial Spanish times by Maya why Maya's who recorded their own mythology and this particular wall has to do with the resurrection of the maize God this is the god of made after his resurrection he's going into the underworld like a farmer puts a seed of corn in the ground and sends it to the underworld and then have to be resurrected as a plan and this is what this is mythology is all about it's a wonderful story and they're coming in and bringing him water and a gourd food these lovely young ladies are bringing him tamales and things to eat and anything reguard the maize God is the most important of all the Mayan gods naturally because it was their staff of life and if you look at this carefully this mural that he's turning his head he's looking out this way if you put that Dumbarton Oaks Jade mask that I showed earlier whooshing down out of this green at the thing turn it on its side you will see that he's done as an Olmec with a down curved mouth the same features and everything exactly fitted I did this of course in Photoshop but that's the Olmec heritage there absolutely there's no doubt that the Olmec had they remembered the Olmec the way same way that we remember the Romans and the Greeks or the Romans remembered the Greeks of a past time there's no question in my mind that that was a great ancient civilization that they knew about and wanted to emulate underneath that building and San Bartolo there earlier constructions they'll go back to about 400 BC and they found this block of stone in there not so long ago one of the Guatemalan archaeologists working there and it's got a text done at a hieroglyphic thick this is it here we can't read it all unfortunately it's so ancient where we know don't know a lot about the Mayan script when it really begin we can read one of these hieroglyph one here reads a how a how means King it's got the name of a king there and tells us about it but that's about all we know but that's the oldest Maya writing discovered so far and we wish we could read more of it so now what about the Classic Maya they begin rolling that about 250 AD and we know a lot about this from excavations at Tikal watch I've told safe well dozens of Maya sites that have been thoroughly excavated and worked on over the last 50 or even 75 years and I'm not going to go into that in great detail on the whole business because there's not all that much mystery about it anymore we know a lot about these people because we can now read as I say we can read their voluminous text there are thousands of Maya inscriptions that can be read just about let's say 90% confidence rate in Maya we don't know even which my language that they use as their sacred script so these are all classic myocytes up in Yucatan down in Guatemala the LEAs site of copan and western Honduras this was the area of the Classic Maya civilization built on the foundation of those great early early sites that I'm talking about Tikal of course is one of the best known ones and easily visible huge monumental constructions pyramids with temples on top as pyramids one and two or the sacred plaza palaces and we know we're occupied by the kings and even very old cemetery burial sites inside older constructions of all their past their kings we know a lot about vehicle and of Washington and sites like this one of the most spectacular discoveries of all time one of the four or five great ones before San Bartolo and the murals where the murals of Bonampak and not a very big site in the southern Maya lowlands but about 880 days amazing murals were put in one particular building there which showed many aspects of Maya palace life of Maya warfare going on dancing musicians who were named singers theatrical performances this is the arraignment of prisoners by this king whose name is John Juan we know what his name is these are his underlings that you know people in his court these are noble women of his mother and his his mother-in-law actually whether a mother-in-law who came from another site that had control of Cordova Park named Sheila so we know tremendous amounts about this and they've been torturing these prisoners over here by managing their fingers up and eventually they'll be beheaded there's plenty of Maya warfare we know a lot about it used to be denied about that there was any warfare they thought that these people were somehow or another they didn't have war they lived all lived in peace unfortunately the exact opposite is true they're humans like all of us the humans can't stay away from war so now about the classic wired collapse what happens to these people now that was a big big mystery for a long time and all sorts of theories have come up there was one guy who claimed that it was old giant earthquakes well that's great but the Maya lowlands are not in an earthquake zone they never have quake so that one won't do disease one thing or another I think we're getting a handle on this one too when a civilization disappears when it collapses we now know this and Jared Diamond's wonderful book collapse which I highly recommend but it's not just one cause it's multiple causes that hit these people all at the same time and they can't they could have recovered from one or two or perhaps even three of these things but they couldn't take the whole thing and that's what happened to Rome and what's happened to the species I'm a fisherman fly fisherman and I love to fish for Atlantic salmon Atlantic salmon are starting to disappear wherever they are found in the North Atlantic and there are multiple reasons why this is happening fish farming over netting in the open ocean netting at the mouths of the rivers climate change all of these things are hitting the Atlantic salmon at the same time and unless those things are changed all of them they're going to disappear the same thing with civilizations that's what tikal would have looked like in about a thousand AD now going into ruin people camping out in it and whatnot the jungle coming back so what are the causal factors well you've got for the collapse I'd say a major one is overpopulation and environmental destruction which it's going on now in the same area as they're chopping all the forests down for for lumbering and for cattle ranching which is terribly destructive of everything it happened back when the Maya population had built up through just an incredible amount so overpopulation and environmental destruction is without any doubt a prime mover here drought we can only speculate about this before now we have absolutely firm evidence for a small series of major droughts that hit the Classic Maya at the end of their span that is in the end of ninth century ad just before 900 going over into a thousand we've got lots of evidence from different angles from tree rings now from the cores made into two lakes and ponds tremendous droughts at this one and they've all been well dated by radiocarbon dating so drought hit them at the same time as they were suffering from overpopulation and environmental work stepped-up warfare I'll show you that and plenty of it foreign invasion the what happened to the Romans were the Huns coming in at the Visigoths and what not probably happened to the Maya at this time people coming in from the wet from from from the rest of Mexico hitting them bringing in different ways of doing things in it upsetting trade routes and then what Eric Thompson the greatest violinist of his day always claimed revolution and that sounds sort of romantic and whatnot I think there's plenty of evidence for this there's hardly a Maya monument or a Maya painting that hasn't been destroyed in one way or another smashed up smashed of all or they didn't manage by themselves somebody did it and I think there's plenty of evidence for that occurring all of these things happen together and Maya civilization in the lowland was cut foot for a while and then it picks up later on and northern yuca thought there's some of the evidence for it here on the left you can see exactly heavy sedimentation erosion taking place we are have just firm evidence from geophysics from agricultural studies and one on all of these things took place here's an example of this deforestation today from a satellite showing here's Guatemala here the Paton and Guatemala over here and here's Mexico they were in Mexico they have chopped down in the state of Champa all their tropical forests there's no tropical forest left tropical high rainforest in Mexico anymore and that's probably what the Maya area looked like at the end of the classic and this is what Guatemala is turning into now they're cutting all this stuff now except for the area around El Mirador and plenty of warfare this is a rollout from a Maya raised bun photographically showing warriors at it with each other plenty of evidence for a heavy Maya Walker especially near the end of the classic and as our 3rd Emirates is shown at the DOS pilas in Guatemala before 761 this is what the site looked like nice temples everything palaces everybody's happy here and then after that you suddenly get all of these temples are now being converted into defensible mountains so it is fake and they put a palisade around the whole thing couple of Palisades and they're all camping out putting all their houses inside the ceremonial areas clearly trying to defend themselves against enemies and there's plenty of evidence from almost all Maya sites that this was going on what about the Maya writings the mystery of the Maya code I'm not going to you heard from if you were lucky enough to hear Linda Sheila how the script was deciphered so it's a wonderful story it's a detective story really but we now read a lot of this stuff and I'm not going to read this for you this is a late slab of stone from the beautiful site of Palenque at the end of the lake classic it's probably around 800 850 8 d and it's got 96 hieroglyphs on it and from the upper left to the lower right we can read hi reckless now that can be read and I'm not going to do it it can be read in the particular lot in my language that it was written in so there's no mystery anymore about these monuments they are describing in large part historical events of the dynasties that random by era and we know this in great detail just briefly the calendrical stuff was worked out in the 19th century you can do this mathematically once they discovered about bara numerals you know me that a bar stood for 10 and a dot stood for one and therefore that's the number 13 right there the sacred Maya calendar which is found all through the same calendar of Mesoamerica operates like this like two cogwheels going here simultaneously 13 numbers / mutating against 20 named days and that gives you a 260 day sacred count and the Maya that has never stopped that is still kept up today by Maya living in the highlands and you can tell you exactly what the day is if never it was one day in several thousand years then that / mutates that particular set of wheels / mutates against the month times over the 365 day year each month of about 20 days each and then an extra month of five days at the end of it that's your approximate 365 day so over here the two of those things working together gives you a 52-year account and that's super sacred also and found all over meso America and found no mo no Maya the Maya added to that an extra one and this is unique to the Maya what we call the Long Count and I'm again not going to go into huge detail but this is account from when it begins August 13 3114 BC it's a cycle of about 5,000 one 25 years and they tell you this and so this all adds up you're to multiply these units by your bar and dot numbers to come in to the number of days that have elapsed since that day then this particular monument here is one that one million four hundred and fourteen thousand eight hundred days day by day by day by day until you get to the actual date of that monument which is March 17 76180 how do we know that it's March 17 76180 will you back in the night late 19th century a wonderful guy named Joseph D Goodman who is Mark Twain's first editor in Nevada when Mark Twain was a young newspaperman in Nevada named Joseph T good actually on his own I mean how he did it I don't know gave us the correlation between the Maya and our own calendar and this is what we follow today I mean it's amazing he was a great friend of Mark Twain's - Mark Twain couldn't figure out why he did it but he did it what am i have books tell us there's four known lyin folks that's all his letters of the thousands they probably once had marvelous books the best of which is he and most complete The Dresden codex which is preserved in the State Library and Dresden Germany and was first published in 1880 by a wonderful librarian there on the Dresden State Library named Ernst first oven and Firstman worked out the long count and many details of the calendar just sitting there in his dusty library back in the 19th century tremendous work I mean all details of the Mayan calendar the four codices the four known ones we have are completely ritual and calendrical and astronomical there's a lot of astronomy in The Dresden codex very elaborate and accurate this front of me the Maya could as you can see predict eclipses at least tell you when they're likely to happen both solar eclipses and lunar eclipses and you might sit down and wonder yourself do you know how to predict eclipses the Maya did they tracked the planets against the background of the stars such as Venus which has a 584 day period and that's in The Dresden codex too and so is Mars and probably Jupiter as well and perhaps even mercury they were incredibly good a naked-eye astronomy and all of this learning is in this particular codec if we didn't have it we wouldn't know anything about this and it wasn't that the Spaniards were being helped either because they did their best to destroy everything how do we know how to read the rest of it other than the date and that's again a warrantless story which I've told in writing the wire code that really centers upon one particular guy my friend Yuri late friend yuriy morozov who in the soviet union in 1952 managed to break the Maya script to figure out how it actually worked not just the calendar but the stuff that followed the calendrical date and he relied upon a famous piece of a manuscript that a bishop 16th century bishop of Yucatan named Diego de Landa wrote down about Maya life in his day it was London ironically enough who burned vast quantities of these codices of the book and could also figured out how to use the signs that he gives which are turned out to be a kind of syllabary and this was a huge breakthrough from that time on we could really start to read this stuff in Maya what the Maya writing system now this is just a crazy of it it really operates on a couple of principles one of which is logograms and the other syllabic rims writing and syllable so to take a thing like a Jaguar now remember there or if you don't know it there's four known spotted cats in the Maya area of different size the Jaguar is the biggest if you want to write the word for Jaguar which is Balaam and old Mayan languages you could write this as a logograph as a head it's a picture son you can also add a syllable that's first syllable to begin this is Bock and there's a celeb ogram one sign that means bot you could stick that in front of it say okay this is a spotted cat that begins Bob have to be brought love or you could write it with its last sound which is an M or ma they wrote out this you didn't pronounce the final vowel you're just stick a ma sign with London gives us it back there or you could have it bought in front and ma at the end of it so you know this is blah blah or you could write the whole thing syllabic Li ba la ma or follow and they did all of that in the Maya area it's very much if you've ever studied Japanese it works very similar to the way the Japanese script works so we know we've known for a long time now about emblem glyphs which are found in the Maya inscriptions classic my own scriptures that each of these stands really is peculiar to a certain site this is the emblem glyph for Tikal for instance this is the emblem glyph for safe Paul etc there's the emblem glyph for Palenque these two here and what they tell you is if we're going to read this this is the holy coal how Lord of Tikal tickles actual name was was true in ancient times oh it's cool Missoula how the holy lord of the holy lord the holy king of this particular place we know this for all these different sites we have emblem glyphs in the inscriptions - chillin for instance this one here has got these these little that have all of this history on them of several of their major kings have been wonderfully deciphered there's a drawing of a battle going on with the principal lord who is got the name of bird jaguar he's the lord holy lord of caelin here and he is taking a captive here he's got an underling who was called a sahal here that's his is a his glyph and it starts off with a calendar round and it says Kukoc he is conquered or he is captured and then it means this guy here was named on his thigh as you can see here and it says it is his captive he is captured so-and-so and he is a captive of bird Jaguar holy Lord of yashi lon and then this one this guy his sahal or underling is taking this guy out here we can read all this stuff now there's no mystery at all about it by the way another wonderful example of warfare from all of this a political history can now be written which has been done by two young people relatively young used to be young hi youth of India Simon Martin in england and nikolai grabbe in germany and they have constructed a political geography of the whole myelomas for instance here's Tikal here's kalach role these were the two giant sites giant political one and here are the different relations they had with the rest of them sometimes they have diplomatic relations sometimes they are exchanging women as royal wives giving them to other sites sometimes they are fighting them for instance collect will came all the way down here to Palenque to kelabra polenka and took it and smashed it up for a while and the two great enemies were calakmul and Tikal they loathed each other and had perpetual warfare going on and they weren't that far from each other for instance here's the Lord of one of the Lords of Tikal the guy called huh south junco Whelan this is an illiquid and little over one of those temples that Pico and what he has done is he's come and he's finally collaborate collect rule up here he called finally conquered collect wool and he's boasting about it up here he's taking this guy and with walk through warfare and defeated him and that he was the so-and-so the holy Lord of Calakmul so we know a lot now about the political geography what else is in these besides all this political stuff and boasting about their wonderful Wars that they fought and cutting people's heads off and whatnot what else could the Maya writing but and I think they wrote about a lot of things that we hardly really understand a lot of this we pick up on the pottery Classic Maya pottery from the from riot tombs this particular one it's Malone it's now down in a museum in Texas shows one of their monkey man gods the the the god of the scribes were part monkey howler monkey and it's a long story too but this guy is looking down at a Maya codex you're seeing it from the side or all stacked up my books go like this they're they're accordion shape and when you put them together and put them on their side you will see them from the side like this one here here's this little rabbit gun has lifted up the cover they had Jaguar skin covered and he's writing something here down here this guy's pointing to something in his book right here we they probably had thousands of thousands of books on bark paper coated with jet fine gesso that have all gone absolutely or gone either destroyed at the collapse of the Classic Maya or destroyed by the Spaniards who make huge bonfires of them what was indeed and we get from the the pottery probably an idea of what this is a roll out photographically done of a cylindrical Maya base which incidentally all these cylindrical by obeys it held chocolate that's another story here's one of them here that probably held chocolate there's the king it's at night time in his palace he's seated on the throne there this is lit by a guys carrying torches here lit torches and they have brought in tribute to him which is being explained by an interpreter here he's labeled up here as a chill up which means interpreter it's somebody coming in from a foreign Kingdom who is trying to butter up this guy here maybe to get a royal bride or something of that sort and they had complex things going on in the phallus which were just getting a handle on now some of them this is a detail from a vase it was discovered in a tomb at Tikal late classic probably about 750 ad and it shows the Supreme Maya DDT at that time it's um not seated here on a throne that's a Jaguar throne and a hummingbird God has come in here part hummingbird and so what does he say this is what business what they're actually saying to each other there's a conversation going on here y'all no hito no 180 it's enough said the hummingbird so known as hummingbird to T it's Anna said the humming he said this up here he's talking and this is a Concordat of text here this suggests to me but these people wrote real literature that's missing now that we don't have it these people have every opportunity to do this here's another my veins are rolled out here photographically by my friend Justin Kerr and it's got to do with God's again this is a rabbit God here the same guy who was writing that codex you thought and he's taken the Flannery over a god of the underworld we know of us God L taking his hat all his jewelry is clothing and whatnot now God L is kneeling before the God eat something not here and what is he saying he says up here and this he took my clothing my tribute is is kvetching tribute is patent here my knee is mine it's literature they wrote all this stuff out with real writing you could pick this book up and read it this is probably painted on the base from a long disappeared codec so this is a mystery of all mysteries it and will probably never solve it what were they writing about what what they probably had whole libraries of this stuff that we don't have we only have a fraction of Maya culture actually so I'm going to end this with the 64 super question 2012 don't worry yeah honestly don't this isn't gonna happen it can happen someday we all know that there's all kinds of stuff rattling around heading near us who knows but it's certainly not going to happen in December 2012 we're sure about that but it's a whole industry now there's money and then our acts of destruction here and I don't know if any of you saw this flat movie 2012 all of this stuff is based upon the fact and it's a real fact that the great Maya cycle but we're currently in it's going to come to an end in December 2012 now north of we hole through my a pig Rafi say December 23rd the guys who write these books and make these movies and get on the internet about this a December 21st two days earlier well do more though it doesn't matter it's going to happen that's the big question it is true but in The Dresden codex there's one page here which shows a destruction of the universe probably by floods coming down from this gigantic monster here here's our friend God elegant who is also a God of warfare and he's hurling speared them on the earth and this old goddess with snakes writhing in her hair she's pouring down water now we know that this happened at back and you know 3114 BC according to the Maya projecting back the beginning of our creation a previous one ended in destruction when the sky fell on the earth there was the earth was covered by great flood the sky fell on the earth that God had to lift the sky up and recreate the sun the moon the stars and everything and I'm convinced that the Maya the Classic Maya but we haven't heard from her you know since 900 AD would have thought that something big was going to happen there's no doubt about that but what was this going to be the end of all time but why I could actually have calculations back in time millions of years and they have calculations ahead up to over billions of years into the future we know this we have monuments in which they're fiddling around with those numbers if they thought that all time was going to be destroyed you know this is the end of everything they wouldn't have made those calculations oh there's going to be another cycle that's going to begin then I wouldn't worry about it you're going to wake up on December 22nd or December 24th which take your pick I think it's going to be December 24th and you're going to find that a lot of snow outside that you have to shovel if you're live where I live and you know you're gonna worry about it will that I get so and so Christmas presents my god I forgot this time you know for cousin so-and-so it's going to be a day just like any other so I'll be like Alfred e Newman Y being worried I wouldn't worry about it we're not classic Maya that's the bottom line of it life will go on that's one mystery you don't have to worry about thank you okay now we're gonna go to the microphone we're gonna have we're gonna have questions hi thank you my mind is filled with the questions I might give you more than one the first one is how does the Mayan history of the flywheel aid to the judeo-christian in our Noah's Flood in terms of timing why do I do we have them in both cultures secondly on your slide about the collapse of the Mayan civilization it certainly reminds me of what's happening Egypt in the Middle East right now and it strikes me that you're on first two reasons he seems to me the upper population came first and environmental destruction and then um and then we have drought and and then that produces the socio-political revolutions and the Wars and I'm creating I guess you're right okay I agree completely about the fact that floods flood miss occur in other cultures that it doesn't begin with judeo-christians it begins with some variance you you know much longer before which has a flood myths I found this in Konya phone records that's probably where the you know where didn't happen the Bible picks up on that actually if you have the idea of psychical creation and destruction you have to have to have something to destroy them now the Aztecs who were closely related to the Maya or their Mason or American they had they that the flood myth is just for the last career end of the last creation they had earlier ones that ended in other ways of our own creation according to the Aztecs in our present creation it's going to end with earthquakes but it is curious that the flood seems to be the last one you know other than ours if I could ask you a question about the each when you talk about the drought and the collapse or you talk what is the time period three thirty years that would you care to comment on it happened this series of droughts happen in a very small period of time actually within within 20 years one after the other and the effects were felt all the way up into Mexico we now know from tree ring records in Mexico that have just been published last week and very accurately dated so it was it just hammered them and I and you have the right idea that this was a nail in the coffin they just gave up and moved out I mean they didn't all die-- some of them moved up into the highlands some of them moved to the north we have an idea and some of the records from the north that there was a migration from the south up to northern yoga thought but it really it ruined them in the southern Maya lowlands very quickly that was the end of them yes please professor ko it's our privilege to have you here we're glad that you finally came so why I have a question you didn't mention anything about Teotihuacan because it's outside of your graphical area but some of your books mentioned that the t OT volcanoes probably conquered or at least they had consorts with mayans could you say just a little bit about yes co t ohan influence yes that's an immensely important point there were 30 what kind or 30 or what kind of you would say it an Aztec and no one that was the largest city ever in the new world and in his northeast of Mexico City today in its own Valley there to work on and it was destroyed about 600 AD by hands unknown probably barbarians coming from the north burn burn extensively but from the beginning of our era until around 500 they had enormous influence on the Maya area and the bottom line is what do I think about it I think it was the largest empire that Mason America ever saw was - are really peculiar about that they don't want anybody coming in and messing around where their beloved Maya and yet everywhere we look and what we call the early classic from the fourth century AD during this period until about 500 there's evidence of direct intervention by Teotihuacan armies politicians and warriors and important leaders in the Maya area in both the highlands of the lowland throughout the whole thing there's even imports from that the areas of it oh the economy that theater what kind of controlled such as green obsidian from the highlands that pouring into the Maya area very special kind of green of city and wonderful stuff where you have in the Maya inscriptions from cocaine from Tikal and other important Mayan sites dynastic records that show that the old dynasties were wiped were overthrown by intruders coming in specifically from the West and setting themselves up with sort of barbarian names I eat there to work on names I it had to be an empire they they control the Maya area they control all the Maya probably for the space of about 150 years all the way from the Pacific coast of Guatemala up to northern you could thought but Mayan is as I say oh you can't have those awful Mexicans coming in you know doing these things with our beloved Maya they did and they did it not just once but twice later on the Toltecs was so many - that that the Toltecs ever existed well as my former student called Talbot says the Aztecs thought they existed why don't wait but that's part of the thing I mean you cannot mess around with a wire according to these people and they were messed around with twice they were under Mexican control but Teotihuacan was also emulated by Maya rulers after that Teotihuacan had as its principal deity or one of them the war serpent who had big goggle eyes and special kind of mosaic headdress and whatnot and Maya warriors right through the late classic long after their work on with destroyed dress themselves up as theater work on warriors wearing that costume it has to be an empire there's much more evidence for it archaeologically than there is archaeologically for the Aztec empire we only know about the Aztec empire if the Spaniards tell us about it is we have those records from the time of the conquest and afterwards if you didn't have those records you never would have thought that the Aztecs conquered a large part of Mesa for America and not the Maya area but the rest of it but this is the way that goes yes Oh way up there yeah hi but so do you think that the Aztecs and the Mayans had contacts with the people on Easter Island Easter Island well if there was any contact it would be the other way to record the the Polynesians we know were fantastic and Micronesians were fantastic seafarers who could get the Easter Island the most remote part of the world and we know that they hid the Maori have archaeological evidence that they hit the coast of South America where they fought chickens believe it or not that it now dated archaeologically their Polynesian chickens to the west coast of South America took back the sweet potato into the Pacific I doubt very much whether they ever got into contact with the Mayans or the Aztec I really don't think so but they could have done it but we haven't got the evidence that they got to do for that part of the world but they were fantastic navigators I mean if they could get the Easter Island which is a thought in the middle of the Pacific I mean it doesn't look like anything I mean huge Pacific and they think they could get anywhere and did so something somebody may find it but it's for contact but not yet not now yes if an archaeologist from the future were to come to our civilization they'd find these buildings with crosses and somebody hanging on it they might conclude that we practice ritual certain fiction so my question is methodologically how do you distinguish between the carvings and pictures that might have to do with mythology right and others that might have to do with actual practice well the only hard evidence apart from the art with the actual excavations and you know there's limited amount of evidence for this from the Maya area there's a lot of evidence for it at 30 work on which we were talking about earlier just Matt Matt inhumation of sacrifice warriors all at one time Cynthia they work on practices on a big scale the Aztec sacrifice that has been over done by the Spaniards I mean they made crazy claims that the Aztecs you know slaughtered eighty thousand people at a time for particular temple ritual it's almost impossible to slaughter eighty thousand people by hard extraction takes four people to hold the guy down and a fifth one to pull it out if you work out there's at a time and motion study that can't be done we know that they greatly exaggerated I mean yeah thanks practice sacrifice but it was it was relatively limited it probably no worse than what some of our ancestors did so it's been overrated really but it was important to them there was very much part of Aztec culture that the gods had to be nourished with blood yeah but you know who are we to talk about brutality Michael mr. Cole I've read many of your books and I've been very impressed and I feel privileged to ask a question of you now what I like to do is draw article sort of your gleanings now after many decades of research and contact with the Mayan Aztec and the ancient civilizations of Mexico the substrate of their spiritual research is there anything of value there that you've seen that can be a value to the millions and millions of Eurasians who have now come into these American lands that a different kind of a focus that may be of value to us well first place remember that all these people are still there amazing Americans have not disappeared by a longshot in some respects they've been of course in Mexico payments for this and that there's been a kind of syncretism between between the Europeans and and the native peoples of Mexico and less to a lesser extent in Guatemala and other country when we conscious the syncretism trying to put these two things together the at the very root of national American religion it's not you know sacrifice of blood gore and war and all this kind of stuff but agriculture making a living maize is the absolute staff of life for these people it all revolves around mate and all Maya aren't all Mayan mythology whole Aztec mythology a snake heart at the base of it is the heart and religion of an agricultural people who rely on nature to provide them with these names and of course we come in with a very mechanistic idea no people were no longer an agricultural country we were back when the the this country was founded for a long time until you know my grandparents generation predominantly agriculture we've lost all of that and we've lost touch with with the world as it is I mean look at me I run around with iPad iPod two computers that's doctor view does two laptops I'm totally electronic man I've lost it myself and I think these people can still have something to tell us about the earth as it is and I think we can learn a lot of lessons from Mason or American mythology lots of them so we what we've lost we can still regain and that's why we study people like the Maya thank you no my love our cabbage hotchky-motchky Mujica can watch hello but like they asked a brief question about dialect and I know that the a pig refers have chosen the Cholan dialect do the more chemical you a ssin of those glyphs and I'm not in a pig River but I'm curious do you feel that this will go out of style or that this is reliable no it's it's it's reliable there there about for those who don't know this and they're about 29 or 30 distinct Mayan languages they're more than dialects there there there are languages that are basically mutually unintelligible but closely related like for instance English is related to Dutch rather closely but you have to study Dutch to understand somebody's speaking it the same way with these Mayan languages there's a lot of we know so much now about the this writing system that it well it was proposed years ago by Eric Thompson and he was right that it's going to be a cholan language because that the Cholan languages were distributed across the southern mile owens at one time back when the Spaniards first arrived that it would be a cholent language now it comes down to one particular ancestral language that is still spoken today by a small number of chorti Maya on the border between Guatemala and Honduras if you drive from Guatemala City to cope on for instance in and on earth you go right by these villages where they're speaking basically classical Raya that's it's amazing there's only about 50 or 60,000 speakers left it's a fast disappearing language that has been very well studied all the Mayan languages have been extremely well studied by language so we're not operating in in the dark about this they're probably better known to linguistics than almost any other Lane which is of a native new world and it's come down to between the appear furs and the linguist all of the constructions and whatnot are actually ancestral what we call Jolteon I don't think there's any other way about it however Yucatec has a language the Mayan language spoken in Yucatan has influenced it so for instance the one of the major of kings of Palenque we used to call him using : Joe Tehan or : Lisa : Paulo which is basically snake Jaguar he had a composite name in chilton it's caramel oven and Yucatec Maya and now we know that he called himself can't blow up he was using a Yucatec Maya from yukata language for his own name and as you moved further north in the Yucatan the descriptions of Chichen itzá which many of you have been to or equilon to the north of that the definite influence of the language on that Yucatec on that but basically this language that's in the hieroglyphs in both the codices and in the inscription was a prestige language probably not a lot of people spoken I mean and it's good to move around just a little bit if you've studied Chinese to reach I need you study literary Chinese nobody speaks literary Chinese it's a prestige language only for writing if you study India and anything about Hindu culture you you have to learn Sanskrit nobody speaks Sanskrit as their language anymore but it's a prestige language of the Hindu religion Lattin I don't know how many of you probably don't studied Latin anymore I had to study it revived five or six years I loved it it kept up as a prestige language in the Catholic Church or youth of it the same way with what's in the inscriptions is this classic Jolteon or Classic Maya definitely exist I don't think they're going to go back and say it's anything else and it's a prestige language that everybody agreed upon that's the language of their literature so that's I mean I don't know if I've answered your question or not I think it's solid and the people who have done this are really great scholars so I think it's got a stick really impressed by the scale of those buildings and structures unless I understand they were made out of stone correct the the ones at El Mirador that huge site but are really early they stole and the other one the other sites how do you build those pyramids that same ones that are on the same time level they were doing the same thing but but my question is what kind of stone was that and yeah the source of that stones and all kinds of transportation well I told you that the Yucatan Peninsula the whole thing it's one big limestone shell but the stone is local its quarried locally but on a colossal scale I mean stones are really think that they were using I don't Meredith or I've been there I was stupefied by they're not at work that when it they built the causeways out of stone they could have just piled up earth to do it their quarried locally the quarries have been found they know exactly where they got the stuff from limestone is quite soft when you cut it you know when you're first quarry it and it hardens up later when it's supposed through to the atmosphere so it was a wonderful building stone really that they had everywhere it reminds me of Cambodia which is another one of my interest where the buildings at hung or uncork what places like that are basically made at a ladder right and that's available everywhere your take down and Cambodia anywhere and you'll find this ladder right which is an almost old soil probably millions of years oh you cut it easily and stack it up you can build anything out of it the same way in the Maya area they were using that wonderful limestone everywhere and that's what they did they couldn't use that in the Olmec area though the much earlier only because a there isn't any limestone and B there isn't any native stone all those rock for those colossal heads was transported from 50 miles away in a an area that's volcanic to the to the width of the line of elements there and transported those huge heads which way of the twelve were brought there the Maya didn't have to worry about that they could use the local stone the means of transportation the means of transportation were humans dragging these things pulling them with ropes and they had they they didn't have wheeled vehicles because not because they were dumb and didn't know about the principle of the wheel but rather they had no draft animals and you put enough people to work on bringing and moving a big stone it's amazing what you can move and if they know what they're doing we used to move I've moved a colossal head in San Lorenzo you know multi-ton colossal head just with their labor of my workmen who knew how to do it and that's all you need enough people there then of course it was on a colossal scale and plays like El Mirador it would have taken thousands of work that to do what they did for a long period of time that that really boggles the mind going back to your point about what we can learn from the Mayans know one of your key points was that they had environmental destruction and deforestation how long did it take the of surrounding areas to recover and did they ever fully the area of let's say we call the central my area between the Highlands and northern you Katan that area of northern Guatemala neighboring Finney's neighboring Mexico Chapman that area of course after 900 went back to high forest and it probably didn't take an awful long time what's going on today however in that same area and in exactly in that area is destroying that land forever they will never regenerate once you've put cattle ranches in that's the end and Unix you you expose the soils too to you know just constant rain and Sun and rain Sun and you you later' eyes them they turn into brick and all the nutrients go out cattle are really destructive cattle ranching and in the tropics and of course we're the cause of it because we eat all those those luscious hamburgers that's where it all goes and it it will never come back with it it came back after 900 because he didn't have any but there were no cattle in the world until the Spaniards got here but I think now it's not going to go back heaven hello professor hi may I ask you three questions go ahead thank you you just answered my first one my second question is the knowledge that we all have about the ancient mines some of which you have excavated yourself it's based on to the extent what we have actually asked evaded out of the known Maya sites can you give me a and a number of how many of the sites are fully excavated and how many are known but haven't been asked excavated because of insufficient resources oh boy that's a really tough one well in the first place no site has been completely excavated and rightly so because you always want to leave something for future generations that are kind of come in with techniques that we haven't even dreamt about I mean who would and you know 75 years ago have ever saved samples of charcoal you know or little fragments of wood because today we use that for radiocarbon dating which was only invented in 1948 so we always leave part of the sites there I say we buy archaeologists the how many sites have have never been excavated and how many have there's an awful lot of excavation going on today families for instance the there's more archaeologists and there are people there I mean it's everybody think bellies and say especially if if you don't want to learn Spanish you go there because everybody's face English there it's really hard to say I'd say what's more but certainly only 50% of known important Maya sites have been at all investigated by archaeologists every night last a couple of months ago three or four months ago I went with a photographer friend of mine from the West Coast we're doing a book together on he's doing the photographs and I'm doing the tech on major website and I went to the area some of which I hadn't seen around what's called Rio Beck and that that region they're back on and I'd say we saw the site saying that nobody has really looked at all and they're big so there's there's plenty still to be done without any question you can never know complete me of my aside secondly how much do we know about the wire for what we dig up this is a tropical humid Maya area with heavy rainfall with very little preservation of any organic romaine we know we have no textiles most of their art was probably in wood all of their books are gone except for those for late codices that have been preserved most of their culture we don't have we were being made if we had complete reservations there's no say it was like the coast of Peru where everything is preserved because it's so dry and wet areas like this most of the culture is gone and almost certainly most of their art was in wood or in textiles and it's also every one of those maya buildings probably major one in a classic Mayan site was completely painted on the outside with big tech Maya texts and whatnot just have few fragments kicking around so that when you go and look at a site like Tico watch each in eats up in the north or any place like that that isn't what the wire would have seen they are seeing a blaze of colour and that's all gone where we have preserved murals like the one that sent but Tolo or one o'clock we're lucky on that yes chillin I've been all over the Austria lon which is not all that far component part and every and quite a few of those temples any little fragment inside the rooms of brilliant colors of plaster and you know that this whole thing was covered with with mural which we lack so there's a lot of things we don't know about the Maya and that we will never know there's no way to recover it we have to keep that in mind we are only seeing what has been luckily preserved someday I hope here there won't happen in my lifetime in my time happen in York somebody's gonna go into it a dry cave and I would guess bellies were there lots and lots of caves or the adjacent particle Walla this is karst topography with caves all throughout somebody's gonna find a dry cave with a fox and it's gonna have five or ten liya books in it and everything that we thought we knew about the Maya before is going to be completely changed by those ten books it could happen it really could but you may have to wait a hundred years yes my final question is with history me and my favorite subject I've studied the rise and fall of many civilizations the Greeks the ancient Romans and in this case the Maya it's been and it's been my magic best educated guess that the death of civilization or the collapse of it is not just natural disasters and foreign invasions it has also been the death of ideas yes I mean the loud the whole legacy of civil light of a civilization is not what is not the so much the ruins they leave behind but the ideas that are still passed on to future generations so my question is has any extensive study ever been done to determine the how much ancient Mayan customs have survived to and are still practiced by today's Maya people there the I'll tell you something about if you look at civilizations and that their their life spans I mean in the old world as well as the new world six hundred years but some strange reason sixth century seems to be this fan and we've been a couple of hundred a little more than a couple of hundred and while we've been today American civilization so maybe we've had four hundred years ago the interesting thing even looking at this country for instance its its history the best ideas happen at the beginning I mean you can't beat the founding fathers for what they thought up it's amazing same thing is true with Greece but the really interesting thinkers in Greek civilization all or at the beginning but the real impetus of the civilization needs to be in the earlier fears this is why I'm really interested in the old make because I don't think there's anybody quite as wonderful as the Olmec anyways in the new world and their early I mean incredibly early thousands of years old Egypt the pyramids old all belong to their first period the greatest Egyptian art is really from the beginnings of this kind of thing so I think you have to look at all these civilizations in terms of their other total life spans what what they're up there and I think you're right where you seem to run out of ideas towards the end of it of a span of a civilization kind of patterning sashan I think some people would would call it the Mayans have something gave us something really wonderful that if you don't already know about it you want to know about it and I hope you all heard or some of you about the Popol Vuh it's a sacred book of the kharkiv Cal Maya under the keychain Maya of the highlands of Guatemala and it was preserved and written in using Spanish letters but in keychain Maya in the 16th century and it's come down to us it's been translated many times quite quite beautifully translated recently it's a wonderful wonderful account of what the Maya and and the law their own idea of themselves it's as far if you're gonna look at maya iconography and try to understand what you see in classic why are you have to know the Popol Vuh it's basically the bible and it's a wonderful story it begins with a creation of the world and goes through various destructions and recreations is the Maya think cyclically not linearly and ends were the Spanish conquest but it's gotten wonderful stuff in it having to do with the beginning of our own era that is of the Maya area that we're now in and about to end and if you haven't read the Popol Vuh Pio pol then capital V new page it's the greatest piece of literature I think for the whole new world by anybody you want to see it it's got really kind of the basic ground plant with a way that laia think and so I put in the back and there were wonderful people and still are I'm just curious as to how they may have gone about like decoding and understanding the Mayan writings once they discovered them that's one heck of a long story had been really it took about a hundred and fifty years can you believe it for the Maya script to be deciphered and I can tell you why it wasn't deciphered for such a long period of time because of bad concepts about the way writing systems work the people who were studying Maya writing or seriously until this wonderful Russian came along didn't know anything about other writing system and you can't study a civilization really as a scholar without knowing about other civilizations there's nothing new Under the Sun people under similar circumstances will come to similar ways of doing things solve problems if you have the problem of putting a language into visual form there's only so many ways you can do this and we know a lot about that from the study of scripts in the old world how does Chinese script word how do Japanese work how does Egyptian word how does cornea form writing of the Middle East word etc the the riot specialists pay no attention that is because they thought there was you know the Meyer unique there there special case if nobody ever liked them well it's partly true but mostly the Meyer humans like anybody else and they solved this problem in certain ways and did it and the the fact that the greatest student of Maya writing in his name with the late Sir Eric Thompson he had no idea or what at all interested in other scripts doesn't ever refer to them in any of his work and so the upshot of it was that he never did cracked the Classic Maya script which the Russian do about these of this group originally thought it was a student of Egyptian he knew Chinese he knew Japanese he knew all of these corny reformed scripts he was a specialist in them so he knew how they work and you can only study really the human past on a comparative basis you can't study in them say well these people are like nobody else whatsoever who have ever lived there for anything else anybody says about other cultures doesn't matter that's not science and these people were not scientific who were studying the Mayas for it and that's what held it up and once that dam got broken by konato saw or the Gordian knot cut by him in one stroke that was it yeah back to the deforestation a question with Tamiya I mean today there deforesting again in Guatemala and the Chiapas they're also native are they native Maya also the Chiapas in Mexico it's a it's a complex thing the people who are moving in first to to kind of cut the forest now are actually still tell Maya from the highlands of Chiapas Mexico who are moving into what a while into southern families in and if they are kicked gee I'm sorry not so well tell or itself though somewhere kick Jean wire and they go into to do slash and burn farming slashing very far means flying because they after a certain number of years because of poor increasingly poor yield the farmer will eventually abandon that plot and allow it to regenerate so the forest comes back then what's happening is the lumber guys come in a lot of that is illegal lumbering going on most of it is and these people are not why out by a long shot their their mestizo Latinos I call them in Guatemala they're going and they speak no native language whatsoever they're out to make a fast buck cut all the good timber that they run roads into these places illegally then the next thing that happens is that the farmers eventually aren't making a go of it the catchy and chill tell Maya and the lumber the the big cattle guys come in and a lot of you want to know the real truth about what's going on now a lot of that and these guys are contemptuous of course the wire and whatnot the a lot of that stuff is money laundering that is the result of immense quantities of money being made by the illegal drug trade that's going up through that whole area now and a big big scale and it's destroying this country's terribly and again it's again we eat the hamburgers that the cattle produce but we also consume the drugs that are coming up through this pipeline and in a country like Guatemala is really brought to its knees by this right now so it's a tragedy that's going on now and this this will destroy the land for all time you know how did the Maya view the environment I mean they've gone through this cycle of overpopulation deforestation the decline of their you know civilization yeah they learn anything from it is it is there any evidence of that in the old books or in the people that still live the Maya they live today aren't they yeah are they you know do they have any sort of connection with the environment or they're just kind of well they do have a connection with the environment but they don't wouldn't know unless we told them the scientists told them what had happened back 918 the problem is that the Mayan inscriptions which tell us so much about you know Maya politics and Maya marriages and Maya wars in that sort Maya religion there they tell us nothing about the end of the Maya classic Mayan civilization there are no inscriptions that tells us what went on the books man the the disappeared books man he's done this but we don't have it so the Maya themselves did not really have anything to tell us directly about the tragedy that it struck them you know unlike the Romans for instance who wrote about what was going on and say for 58 year or whenever it was whether the God came in the Visigoths of the hunt we don't know anything about this from the Maya themselves and they lost all memory of this in later times but they they they you know the Maya today are a lot of them were very literate people and they they know what what archeologists have found out about their ancestors yes and they I think a lot of them do know what went on now [Applause]

Channel: Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series

Views: 19,050

Rating: 4.7811551 out of 5

Keywords: Maya, decipherment, Maya script, Classic period city states, factors in teh collapse

Id: dFPbc4XyJ0s

Length: 103min 26sec (6206 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 06 2018