Dr. Ed Barnhart, an American archaeologist, answers the internet's burning questions about the ancient Maya civilization. Why was the Maya calendar year only 260 days? Who did they sacrifice? Did they build more pyramids than the Egyptians? This Maya expert answers all these questions and much more.Dr. Ed Barnhart is the director of Maya Exploration Center https://www.mayaexploration.orgCheck out The ArchaeoEd Podcast - https://www.archaeoed.com for more content about the ancient Americas.Director: Lisandro Perez-ReyDirector of Photography: AJ YoungEditor: Christopher JonesExpert: Ed BarnhartLine Producer: Joseph BuscemiAssociate Producer: Brandon WhiteProduction Manager: Peter BrunetteCasting Producer: Nicholas SawyerCamera Operator: Lucas VilicichSound Mixer: Kari BarberProduction Assistant: Fernando BarajasPost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAdditional Editor: Paul TaelAssistant Editor: Billy Ward
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TechTranscript
00:00 I'm Dr. Ed Barnhart. Let's answer some questions from the internet.
00:03 This is Mayan Support.
00:05 [music]
00:09 @billrenmusic asks, "Why did the Mayans tie boards to their babies' heads?"
00:15 The Maya put boards on their babies' heads to shape their skull. Babies' heads are very soft.
00:21 And they put those boards on there so it would elongate towards the top.
00:26 We believe that what they were trying to do is make the skull look more like a husk of corn.
00:32 Because the Maya, of course, were corn people.
00:35 Only elite people were allowed to squeeze their babies' heads this way.
00:39 And in public, a head in an adult that looked like more pointed,
00:44 that meant overtly that that person was of high status.
00:48 I've always thought to myself, there must have been Maya peasant people
00:52 who were squeezing their kids' head on the sly and just saying,
00:55 "I don't know, he just grew like that. He looks like he's going places, doesn't he?"
00:58 @ssjsergio says, "I appreciate the indigenous representation in Black Panther,
01:05 but Kul Kulkan, a literal Mayan deity, taking a big L from a 19-year-old girl?
01:12 Well, come on. He could have taken her. He let her go. That's what heroes really do."
01:17 Kul Kulkan is the Maya word for Quetzalcoatl, or the feathered serpent.
01:23 And his costuming was straight on.
01:25 But Kul Kulkan was known not just for his power, but for his wisdom, his grace,
01:30 and his good governance.
01:32 This character was right on the money.
01:34 And I can say that my Maya friends liked him very much.
01:37 So he hit the mark with real Maya people as well.
01:40 @astronik asks, "Why did the Mayans make their calendar look like an Oreo?"
01:45 Right off the bat, that's not even the Mayan calendar.
01:48 That's the Aztec calendar stone.
01:51 Also called the Aztec cosmology stone.
01:54 The Maya also had that 260-day calendar that we see on the Aztec calendar Oreo.
02:01 Now, you might be wondering, "Why 260 days?"
02:04 260 days is nine months.
02:07 It's the human gestation period.
02:09 It's our first cycle from conception to birth.
02:13 No other civilization on the planet did this.
02:16 And I think it's a particularly beautiful and unique to humans cycle.
02:21 The Maya did make the most elaborate calendar system in the ancient world.
02:26 They use typically five different cycles just to tell you what day it is.
02:32 They tell us the lunar cycle.
02:34 They were definitely obsessed with time.
02:37 One of the original archaeologists in the area, J. Eric Thompson, said,
02:41 "They're just esoteric time worshipers."
02:43 Because clearly the texts were mostly about cycles of time.
02:47 @nickbloom asks, "What was the first ever clothing trend?
02:52 Maybe Mayan sandals?
02:54 I bet those shits were hot back in the day."
02:56 Well, they did make some pretty cool sandals.
02:58 It's true.
02:59 We can see them on ceramic vessels like this.
03:01 This guy right here, they've got this nice treatment on the top.
03:04 His whole wardrobe is great.
03:06 He's got a jade skirt.
03:08 It's got this hatch pattern.
03:09 They wear tunics.
03:11 The Maya had style.
03:12 @superpowerarmor asks, "Anyone else pissed that the Mayans were wrong
03:17 and the world didn't end in 2012?"
03:19 Not me personally.
03:20 I like still being here.
03:22 It turns out that the Maya are talking about a start day of their calendar at the year 3114 BC,
03:31 specifically August 13th.
03:33 They say it's the last day of the third creation and the beginning of the fourth creation.
03:40 So if we do the math and like the odometer in your car,
03:44 the last time the calendar switched and reset,
03:47 we move our odometer forward from 3114 BC and we get to the year 2012,
03:55 specifically December 21st.
03:57 That's where we get that 2012 thing.
04:00 For people like myself that pour through texts related to the Maya calendar,
04:05 there are a few key texts that make it clear it's not going to be in 2012.
04:10 It's going to be in the year 4772.
04:14 @tigerwoodsucks asks, "How are the Maya and the Aztecs alike?"
04:19 Well, the Maya and the Aztec do share a lot of similarities.
04:23 The Aztecs were an empire.
04:25 The Maya were independent city states.
04:27 The Aztecs were very much focused on conquest, warfare, and sacrifice.
04:33 The Maya really didn't do that much sacrificing.
04:36 They did auto-sacrificing.
04:38 The kings would actually bloodlet themselves in public
04:42 as an act of protection of the people and to please the gods.
04:46 @dogsmovesilent asks, "What did the Maya do for fun?"
04:50 They had a sport they adored.
04:52 We just call it the Maya ball game.
04:54 Some people call it polka-toke.
04:56 We can thank the Maya for making rubber,
04:57 but they didn't make it for elastic in their underwear.
05:00 They made it to play the game.
05:02 They made balls just like this.
05:04 I made this ball out of the latex from rubber trees
05:08 and the sulfur from morning glory seeds.
05:11 They would use balls much bigger than this,
05:13 and they built actual sports courts.
05:15 From above, they kind of look like a capital I.
05:18 So they had a lane running down the middle of them,
05:20 and there was a center line and then two out-of-bounds places.
05:24 And teams would face off at the center line
05:26 and bounce these hard kind of giant super balls
05:30 up on a sloping wall back and forth,
05:33 kind of like tennis goes or volleyball.
05:35 The trick was they could not touch it
05:38 with their hands or their feet.
05:40 They had to use their hips or their chest.
05:42 Some versions of the ball court also had rings on either side.
05:46 And if you get it through the ring, that's it, game over.
05:49 So 3,500 years ago is when this game began.
05:53 By the time they got to the Aztecs,
05:55 each Aztec city had their own football team,
05:59 like the Chiefs or the Dallas Cowboys.
06:01 Sometimes when two cities were arguing,
06:04 instead of going to war,
06:05 they could settle it through a ball game.
06:08 They had big crowds that would watch,
06:10 and especially rich people would be able to sit up close.
06:13 And it was their job to throw out things like treasures,
06:17 jewelry, things that were gifts to the winning team.
06:20 If a rich person tried to sneak out
06:23 just before the game ended,
06:24 the team had the right to run them down,
06:27 tackle them, and take their jewelry off of them.
06:29 It's not true that the winners
06:31 of the Maya ball game were sacrificed.
06:33 You'd have a pretty hard time coming up with good players.
06:35 @terraswest asks, "So who got sacrificed to the Mayan gods?"
06:40 It was mostly people that were warriors
06:43 captured in some sort of ceremonial battle.
06:46 They'd go to these little wars
06:47 that were kind of elites against elites.
06:49 They'd stab them in the leg,
06:50 and they'd drag them back to sacrifice them
06:52 up on top of a temple.
06:53 The Aztecs sacrificed almost anybody.
06:56 @mdvnasser asks, "Did a young school boy
07:00 really find a lost Mayan city or just a field?"
07:03 A boy in Canada, about 16 years old,
07:06 was using maps and Maya codices,
07:09 and he identified what he believed to be a Maya city.
07:13 Now, in that case,
07:14 it was not actually what he believed it to be,
07:16 but there is real potential for finding Maya cities.
07:20 And with now the advent of LiDAR,
07:23 wow, we are finding them faster than ever.
07:26 Google Earth gets refreshed all the time.
07:29 And as people move out into these jungle areas
07:33 and cut down the trees,
07:35 all of a sudden they reveal these temples.
07:38 What I tend to look for are irregular
07:41 or unnatural geometric shapes or arrangements.
07:45 Maya pyramids are usually arranged
07:48 in groups around plazas.
07:50 So if you see a hill with a square in front of it
07:52 and two other square hills around it,
07:54 that's a good chance that that's actually man-made.
07:58 The city I found in Belize, which I named Mashna,
08:01 was back in the 1990s.
08:03 So I didn't have the pleasure
08:04 of all of this great new technology.
08:07 I used a topography map,
08:09 looked at the area and said to myself,
08:11 "If I was a Maya, where would I wanna live?"
08:14 So I looked for the tallest mountain in the area.
08:16 When I found that,
08:17 I saw two little mountains right next to it.
08:20 And I said, right off the bat,
08:22 in my apartment in Austin, Texas,
08:24 "If I was a Maya, I would build a city there."
08:27 And two years later,
08:28 after hacking out there with a crew and machetes,
08:32 I was right.
08:33 There I was, standing on top of a 70-foot tall pyramid,
08:38 looking down into a plaza with a ball court.
08:41 It was something that I really just didn't ever think
08:43 was gonna happen to me,
08:44 'cause I was only 25
08:46 and this was supposed to be my life goal.
08:48 In some ways, I stood on top of that temple and said,
08:50 "Well, God, what am I gonna do now?"
08:52 @waywardjim asks,
08:55 "So for at least the Mayans,
08:57 "money really did grow on trees."
08:59 You're referring to cacao, of course, chocolate beans.
09:03 And yes, the Maya did use them as a,
09:06 at least standard in their barter system.
09:08 They're easy to dry and transport, they're small.
09:12 By the time the Aztecs were using it as a currency,
09:15 there was also a counterfeit ring.
09:17 There were people that were making little seeds
09:21 out of ceramics and making them look like
09:24 they were chocolate beans,
09:25 when really they were counterfeit.
09:28 And there were Aztec police
09:29 who would walk around the market
09:31 looking for counterfeiters
09:32 and bust them with their ceramic beans.
09:35 Chocolate was the drink of the elite.
09:39 It was a pleasure.
09:41 It was something that they frothed up,
09:44 they put chili pepper in it, never sugar.
09:46 It was a spicy drink.
09:47 It was only grown in the Maya area.
09:50 It was something about that tropical forest
09:52 that allowed cacao, chocolate to grow.
09:55 @OsleWamua asks, "Timeline period for Mayan civilization?"
10:00 You could actually take it back to 10,000 years,
10:02 but something that we pretty much all conservatively agree
10:06 would be 2000 years.
10:07 So that really starts the Maya world.
10:09 So then we get to 200 CE, it's current era.
10:14 That's when we really get classic Maya civilization.
10:19 They start building their giant cities
10:22 in the jungles of Northern Guatemala.
10:24 Tikal gets built.
10:26 So the classic goes on for a full 400 years.
10:29 We have dynasties of kings.
10:31 We have fully elaborated hieroglyphs
10:34 and them telling us their history,
10:36 carving it into monuments.
10:37 That goes on all the way to about 800 CE.
10:42 And that begins a very short period
10:44 we call the terminal classic, the transitional.
10:48 Everybody's moving around.
10:49 Cities are being abandoned.
10:51 New ones are starting up,
10:52 but it settles out into the final period.
10:55 And the post-classic period goes from about 900
10:59 all the way up to the moment of Spanish contact,
11:03 somewhere around 1500, maybe even a little earlier.
11:06 @JPNijiru asks, "What's the difference
11:08 between Mayan and Egyptian pyramids?"
11:11 For one thing, the pyramid standing in Giza Plateau
11:15 is the tallest pyramid on the planet.
11:18 It's 150 meters tall.
11:21 The tallest Maya pyramid is about 68 meters tall.
11:25 So only a third of that size.
11:27 For the Egyptians, they built those pyramids
11:29 from the beginning, purpose built as tombs.
11:33 The Maya, the kings would use the temple in life.
11:36 And then when they died,
11:37 the temple would be retrofitted, dug into,
11:40 and their tomb would be put inside.
11:42 When it comes to who built the most pyramids,
11:44 the Maya excel virtually everyone on the planet.
11:48 We have seen all of the Egyptian pyramids.
11:51 There's about 140 of them.
11:53 We're not gonna find any more.
11:54 The Maya built thousands of pyramids
11:57 and there are definitely thousands more
12:00 hiding under the jungle.
12:02 So if one culture owns the name
12:04 and the right to pyramid builder,
12:06 it's the Maya, not the Egyptians.
12:08 @rkingwood asks, "What tools did the Mayan use?"
12:13 The Maya were not a metal using culture.
12:16 None of their tools were made of metal.
12:18 When it came to building things like their temples,
12:21 tools were made of chert.
12:23 We also call that flint.
12:24 It's a harder stone.
12:25 And they would shape that into axes.
12:27 And those axes could cut the softer limestone
12:31 into whatever shape they wanted.
12:33 For finer cutting, they used obsidian.
12:35 Obsidian is a volcanic glass.
12:37 It never gets dull.
12:39 I have taken pieces of obsidian out of an excavation
12:43 and cut my finger on the glass.
12:45 It lasts forever and it's very, very sharp.
12:48 @fg1133 asks, "Do you believe the aliens helped out
12:53 the Aztecs and the Mayan empire?"
12:56 No, if they did, we'd have all sorts of evidence
12:59 of cooler technologies than stone and temples.
13:03 I really feel like a question along those lines
13:06 is just once again disparaging the abilities of people
13:11 that were not originated in Western society.
13:14 So no, I think they did it on their own.
13:16 @AndroidFaro asks, "King Pakal as an ancient alien astronaut?
13:22 King Pakal's sarcophagus lid shows man tilting back
13:25 surrounded by glyphs and symbols.
13:27 What do you see when you look at that?"
13:29 Well, I definitely don't see an alien spaceship.
13:32 What I see is King Pakal at his moment of death
13:36 falling down the world tree into the skeletal jaws
13:39 of the underworld where he will go down
13:42 and then eventually he will rise up to meet his ancestors
13:46 and the gods in the sky.
13:47 Pakal was the most important king in the history
13:51 of the city of Palenque.
13:53 He became king at the age of 12.
13:55 He died at the venerable age of 80,
13:59 but he brought that city back to its height.
14:02 His sarcophagus is honoring the greatest king
14:06 in the history of Palenque, and it is not a spaceship.
14:09 @dperry913 asks, "In your opinion,
14:12 what is the best Mayan ruin?
14:15 Palenque?"
14:15 Palenque is definitely my favorite Maya ruin,
14:18 and it's because I spent so much time there.
14:21 I spent three years of my life making a map of the site.
14:25 Anything in orange is a building
14:27 that we've actually excavated or investigated.
14:30 All the buildings in gray, archaeology has never touched.
14:33 So you can see how little of this city
14:36 we've actually excavated.
14:38 There were probably less than 10,000 people
14:41 living there at any one point.
14:43 But despite that small population,
14:45 it was the height of Maya scientific
14:49 and artistic knowledge.
14:51 Engineering, they made a kind of corbelled arch
14:55 and a kind of cement that was stronger
14:57 than anywhere else in the Maya world.
14:59 One of the great buildings of this site is the palace.
15:03 It has a three-story tower.
15:06 Nowhere else in the Maya world ever attempted such a tower.
15:09 And in a testimony to how well they made it,
15:11 it's still standing today.
15:13 That city was abandoned 1,200 years ago,
15:16 and yet the tower lasted through all those rainy seasons.
15:20 It has not settled more than two centimeters
15:23 in a thousand years.
15:25 @rosssandylands asks, "Did any indigenous peoples
15:29 in North America have any type of writing
15:31 like the Mayan people developed?"
15:33 Yes, there were certainly other writing scripts,
15:36 especially in Mesoamerica, the Zapotecs, the Olmecs,
15:40 but no one did it like the Maya.
15:42 The distinguishing characteristic of Mayan writing
15:45 is that it reflects the spoken word.
15:49 There are actually symbols that mean sounds.
15:52 This is one section of one page
15:55 of one of our four surviving Maya books.
15:58 Their writing system was one of only four
16:01 in the entire history of the world
16:03 that was an original writing system.
16:05 We have Mesopotamian, which is cuneiform.
16:08 We have Egyptian, Chinese script.
16:11 Those are our four.
16:13 But the Maya distinguished themselves
16:15 in all of the Americas as the only civilization
16:19 that did it on this side of the world.
16:20 Each one of these glyphs is a word,
16:22 and it's broken up usually into syllables.
16:26 The first symbol here that kind of looks like a comb,
16:28 that's the word ul.
16:30 Here, these top say ma.
16:33 This says ka.
16:34 So they're both vowel-syllable combinations.
16:37 So umaka spells umak, which is his burial.
16:42 This is the death god.
16:43 These are telling us whether it's a good day
16:46 or a bad day to do something.
16:49 Is it a good day to plant my corn, or is it a bad day?
16:53 And this first glyph here that says umak, his burial,
16:56 that's a kind of a Maya colloquialism to say,
16:59 no, it's a bad day to do that.
17:01 And the bars and dots here are the different days.
17:04 These are day names, and they take a long strip of bark
17:08 off of a tree, and then they fold it like an accordion.
17:11 Then they'll paint that with limestone paste and stucco.
17:15 They open the whole thing up,
17:17 and maybe a book is 10 feet long.
17:20 They flip it over, and they read the whole other side,
17:22 and then they accordion it up,
17:24 and they put it back in their bags.
17:25 @trishking6 asks, "What does Mayan sound like?"
17:31 We have the great benefit of having millions
17:33 of Maya people still speaking their language on the planet.
17:37 The biggest of those language groups is Yucatec Maya,
17:41 and there are about 5 million people that speak Yucatec.
17:44 If you wanted to hear a good example of it,
17:46 I'd recommend the somewhat dubious movie, Apocalypto.
17:50 Here's some of it right here.
17:51 [speaking in Yucatec]
17:55 They actually made the effort
17:56 to have the actors speak actual Maya.
17:59 There are a number of sounds that they'll make
18:03 that have a stop at the end of it.
18:05 T-Z apostrophe, and that's "tch."
18:07 [speaking in Yucatec]
18:11 The word in Yucatec Maya for fire is "kak,"
18:16 and that's K apostrophe A K apostrophe.
18:20 One thing that Apocalypto overdid was the human sacrifice.
18:25 That was really the Aztecs' thing.
18:26 When the Maya met the Aztec, yes,
18:29 they got a little bit more into the human sacrifice,
18:32 but the scenes of people being killed one after another
18:35 on top of Maya temples, that's not how the Maya rolled.
18:38 @ratlabmuseum asks, "How did the ancient Maya
18:43 build such large cities far away from lakes or rivers?"
18:47 Tikal is a great example.
18:49 There are no rivers near Tikal,
18:51 but what they did is they quarried for all the stone
18:54 they needed to build the city.
18:56 The quarries became reservoirs.
18:59 They lined them with stucco,
19:01 so they were like giant swimming pools.
19:03 The plazas between the temples,
19:05 they canted them just one degree.
19:08 So with every rain that fell,
19:10 all of those plazas funneled water into their reservoirs.
19:14 Tikal kings loved to put water lilies in their headdresses.
19:19 A way that the Maya have always detected
19:21 whether water is fresh enough is water lilies.
19:25 Water lilies are a very fragile plant.
19:29 If the water is polluted, they don't grow there.
19:31 So if there's water lilies on the surface, it's pure water.
19:35 When I made the map of Palenque,
19:37 I could see that there was a sewer system
19:40 running through the neighborhoods.
19:42 They crisscrossed it using gravity,
19:44 probably also had makeshift toilets,
19:46 getting fresh water from above,
19:48 and sending the gray water down below
19:51 and into the larger river system,
19:53 well away from the city.
19:55 @itsroblaw wants to know,
19:57 "Bro, how did the Mayans figure out the stars?
20:01 Like, how?"
20:02 Most ancient astronomy is what we call horizon-based.
20:06 A priest would stand in a single spot every night
20:09 and watch what rose and set,
20:12 what day it rose and set,
20:14 and where along the horizon it set.
20:16 If he did that again and again and again,
20:18 he starts recognizing the cycles of planets,
20:22 the moon, and the sun.
20:23 So an astronomer could spend his entire life
20:25 recording cycles and then hand that data
20:29 to the next generation.
20:30 And after just a few generations,
20:32 they got darn good at it.
20:33 The ancient Maya also oriented their buildings
20:37 to interact with the cycles of the sun.
20:40 The most famous of those is El Castillo in Chichen Itza.
20:44 Chichen Itza has this big pyramid in the middle,
20:48 and it's oriented just right so that on equinox,
20:52 as the sun sets,
20:53 the shadow of its terraces
20:56 cast onto the balustrade of one of its staircases.
20:59 The shadows look like an undulating body of a snake
21:03 going down the staircase.
21:04 @softtouch25 asks,
21:07 "Anyone out here in X-land understand Mayan math?"
21:11 I do, yeah.
21:12 The Maya had only three symbols.
21:15 They had a dot, meaning one.
21:18 They had a bar, meaning five.
21:21 And then they had the all-important zero,
21:23 like a shell for zero.
21:25 But they could also use a flower.
21:26 So if you wanted to write the number seven,
21:29 you'd use two dots, one, one, and then a five.
21:33 Let's say we want to add the numbers three plus five.
21:40 So that would be eight in the way we'd write it.
21:42 But that eight has nothing to do with the three and five.
21:45 But watch when you do that in Maya.
21:47 If I take three, which is three dots,
21:50 and I add five, which is a bar,
21:54 it becomes a bar with three dots over it.
21:58 It's this actual symbol plus this actual symbol
22:02 equals the symbol for eight.
22:04 The Maya managed to make a more elegant mathematical system
22:08 than the one the Western world is so proud of.
22:10 @mizbrianna asks, "But where the f*** the Mayans go?"
22:14 The Maya are actually still here.
22:17 By my count, there's about 15 million Maya still on the planet.
22:22 Yes, at contact, they were persecuted.
22:25 Their culture in many ways ended.
22:27 And 12 infectious diseases wiped out probably 90% of them.
22:32 But their communities continued,
22:35 and they've grown over the last 500 years.
22:37 In fact, many of the Maya people live right here in the United States
22:42 at your convenience store on your corner.
22:44 If that nice little Mexican woman is under the height of 5'2",
22:49 she's probably a Maya.
22:50 There's a big misunderstanding about the disappearance of the Maya.
22:54 I think about 700 years earlier,
22:58 when classic period Maya abandoned their cities,
23:02 they moved out.
23:03 They didn't die off.
23:05 They didn't disappear.
23:06 They weren't picked up by aliens.
23:08 So those are all the questions for today.
23:09 Thanks for joining me in Maya support.
23:12 (cymbal crash)
23:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]