246 | David Stuart on Time and Science in Maya Civilization

0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. When I wrote my book "Something Deeply Hidden," which was about quantum mechanics in the introduction, I started off by pointing out that quantum mechanics is a fascinating physical theory, also incredibly relevant both to the foundations of physics as currently practiced and to technology and basically the way we understand the world. But it was also the subject of some pretty dramatic public misconceptions. And one of the things I did was go to Amazon, type the word quantum into the search bar and see all these preposterous titles that purported to be about quantum mechanics, but really weren't. So imagine my delight when I picked up a book from today's guest, David Stuart. David is a very accomplished archeologist, a specialist in Mayan civilization and language. David was actually the youngest ever recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Genius Fellowships, so he knows what he's talking about.

0:01:00.5 SC: And he wrote a book about Mayan language, but also cosmology and numerology and mathematics and science and so forth called "The Order of Days." And I think it was published around 2009, so you can guess where this is going. In the introduction, he says, Mayan archeology is really interesting, fascinating. And yet there is this set of public statements about the year 2012 where the Mayan calendar flips over. It's nothing more or different than going from the year 1999 to the year 2000. Or maybe even better going from the year 999 to 1000, where you just flip over the odometer a little bit. But there was a whole industry of books pretending that this was really a prediction that the Mayans were saying the world was going to end in December 2012. And they never said anything like that. It wouldn't have been true even if they had said that.

0:01:58.3 SC: So David had to write a whole book explaining why. And in the intro to his book, he complains about all of these different books that you can find on Amazon about exactly this thing. So we have something in common there. Interest in important scientific theories that can be misused for popular, well, not really even popular purposes, but complete charlatan purposes is basically what we're getting at here. So in the conversation, we're gonna be talking about who the Maya were, how we know, how we know how to read their language, which is actually quite a considerable amount. And how they did count, they had a very strange counting system. You'll hear all about it, how they were led to what is called the Long Count, which is a way of having a calendar that keeps track of certain numbers of years. And in fact, they extended this calendar to literally something like 10 to the 28th years effectively. So that's a very long time, even by modern cosmology standards, and we're still learning a lot. Other kinds of science like lidar are being very useful for finding new sites for Maya ruins in Central America, Mexico, and so forth. So it's a situation where we've learned a lot in the last few decades. We're gonna learn a lot more to come. That's the kind of thing we like to talk about here on Mindscape. So let's go.

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0:03:23.1 SC: David Stuart, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:35.9 David Stuart: Well, thanks for having me.

0:03:37.6 SC: This is a departure. I think that most of the episodes that I have on Mindscape are departure in some sense from the other episodes, which is how I like it. But we rarely do history, and this is a wonderful mixture of history and science and things like that. But let's start right at the ground floor. Remind us, let's put it that way, of who the Maya were, what their civilization was, where they fit into the history of the Americas.

0:04:04.4 DS: Well, certainly the Maya are pretty well known as one of the civilizations of the ancient Americas. The Maya are still around. That's one thing I'd like to emphasize from the get go is that there are about four or five million speakers of Mayan languages today in Mexico, Guatemala. And the ancient culture goes back quite a ways. We can track the earliest evidence of Maya peoples really to about say 1500 BC or BCE. And probably even before that. And very rapidly the Maya really transformed from a pre-agricultural society into a sedentary culture. And then very quickly within centuries, really, they were building monuments and even cities. It's a tremendous cultural transformation that they went through. So we have literally thousands of archeological sites of Maya civilization. Many people have probably visited some of these places. Some are very touristy right now in Mexico and in Belize. Places like Chichen Itza or Polanco in Mexico or Tikal in Guatemala. These are some of the biggest ancient Maya sites. Infact, Tikal, I have to say, was filmed in the original Star Wars movie, right as the rebel moon base, the jungle site with the towering pyramids. That's the Maya ruins of Tikal.

0:05:51.9 SC: Was that... Sorry, was that the Empire Strikes Back? Is that or the...

0:05:55.5 DS: That was the first Star Wars film.

0:05:56.9 SC: The very first one, yeah. Okay.

0:05:58.3 DS: Yeah. It's called Star Wars. Yeah, I remember seeing it and, and going, that's Tikal when it came out. Anyway a little digression there, but, yeah, so the Maya Civilization is a complex phenomenon in the sense that it was many, many cities that were connected to each other, it was never centralized as an empire or something like that, so we have a lot of city states. So the time that we know the best for the ancient Maya is what we call the Classic period, and this runs from about 200 AD to about 900 AD, so many centuries, and this is when we have the sites I was just mentioning and many, many other city states, kings. The thing that I work on in my archeology, my own specialty, is the decipherment of hieroglyphs. And so they had a writing system. They had official records that have survived in stone inscriptions, and we have four ancient books also that were kind of science astrology manuals, very precious documents, imagine having these things. You have to imagine, this is the tropics, so Egyptologists have it. They're all very lucky.

0:07:32.3 DS: They're so lucky. [chuckle]

0:07:32.5 SC: 'Cause they have this dry environment where they have all these documents and everything, we don't have that. So, we have these four precious books also that we've studied, the larger point here is that it was a literate civilization, fantastic art, fantastic architecture. And we can access the Maya unlike any other pre-Columbian civilization because we have their own words going back centuries and centuries before Columbus.

0:08:05.5 SC: And if the Classic period is 200-900, but the Maya as a people... Some of them are still around, or at least they've been around for a long time. What happened in 900? Was it an organic thing? Or were they in conflict with their neighbors?

0:08:25.8 DS: Right. So these are great questions in archaeology today, for those of us who are studying the Maya. Around 900, we have a widespread phenomenon where many of the cities, not all of them, but many of them were abandoned, we call this the Maya collapse. And it's no doubt a very simplistic, kind of one-off description for a very complex phenomenon, and we're still trying to understand it. Most ancient civilizations went through these kinds of changes, whether you're looking at the ancient Mediterranean, ancient Egypt, we have these ups and downs. And there was a lot going on before 200 AD, before the Classic period, there were cities, we call that the pre-Classic and after 900, we call that the post-Classic.

0:09:18.5 DS: So they were buying around, they were doing different things, but that Classic period is when we have those... Most of the written sources and so forth, so we know more about that. Now, what happened? My own take on it... And you talk to any Maya archeologists, they probably have different ways of talking about this. My take on it is that there was a... What we have really good evidence of rapid population growth, kind of stunning trajectories of population, say from 600, 700 to 900, that must have put a strain on the existing resources, on the existing infrastructures they had. A lot of people nowadays are looking at climate change and its connection to this. I don't think that's a causal factor. But I think it may have been something that was part of a mix of different factors that a few years of drought could put real stress on these resources again, that people were competing for.

0:10:37.6 DS: But what we're really looking at around 900 is a collapse of a particular political system, the system of kingship. And those institutions fizzled for whatever reasons, and people left many of these cities and went on to other places. So you go to a site like Chichén Itzá today in Yucatan, in Northern Yucatan, it's a grandiose Maya ruin, Maya city, it's post-Classic or it's right at the end of the Classic period. And it's representing a new flavor of Maya civilization that emerges for a few hundred years and then it too transforms. So I'm really interested in seeing how these episodes when Maya civilization kind of remade itself in different ways.

0:11:27.7 SC: I guess one, maybe overly implicit question is, how do we balance these external or ecological factors of climate change or over-farming or whatever versus purely human factors, like there was a revolution or they had a social system that couldn't be sustained for too long? Is there even any way of deciding between these possibilities?

0:11:50.9 DS: Well, that's a great question. It's hard to differentiate these things, and a lot of research is going into these external factors right now. I think there's a bit of... There's obviously a connection there to our own interests in climate and how it affects people on the ground, and how it affects demography and how it affects what happens in history.

0:12:19.0 DS: Now the human factor is always going to be key, in all of this. And one of the things I didn't mention a few minutes ago is that if we read the histories that they're writing about themselves, starting around 700, 650 AD, we just see this incredible growth in records of war. These city states were fighting each other and these dynasties were... Even though they were related to each other, we're talking about interrelated royal families. They're going after each other all the time. And we just see again this trajectory, along with the population of conflict. And so that to me is the most important human factor here. Now what's causing that population again, maybe climate change, all of these things are interrelated. It's so hard for me at least to put one factor in front of another as a primary cause. I think they're all crystallizing together into this sort of bad mix of things that's happening over a couple of hundred years.

0:13:27.7 SC: It's hard to resist drawings, sweeping conclusions from this, because we tend to think that our own civilization right here, right now is having its issues, but still things are growing. The economy is getting bigger, science is advancing, but historically civilizations come and go all the time. There's plenty of collapses around the world. So there is a cautionary tale, maybe.

0:13:53.2 DS: Certainly. And again, we're on the inside of our own situation. We're not gonna necessarily see it the way people do in a thousand years. And one factor here that I think about is that if we were able to walk around a Maya capital, a city state say before the collapse around, say 750 AD, we would've probably seen an incredibly vibrant, very healthy looking city. The art was extraordinary. The presentation of culture. The high arts. Yes, there was... Population was growing, but there were markets everywhere. We know this. We know that there were lots of people living, sometimes quite comfortably in some of these spots. Maybe a hundred years or so before the collapse as we know it.

0:15:00.9 SC: Yeah.

0:15:01.7 DS: I ponder that sometimes because I don't think they necessarily saw it coming. Maybe they did, but who knows? It's hard to say.

0:15:08.5 SC: Yeah. It's very hard. And to give the Maya their props, if I understand correctly from my very superficial Wikipedia reading, even though there was some collapse in your post classical, et cetera, they were like you say, still around when the Spanish came over.

0:15:22.9 DS: Certainly.

0:15:23.0 SC: And in fact, it seems that they held out longer than the Aztecs or the Inca's did against the Spanish conquest.

0:15:29.7 DS: Well, that's true. There was no really single conquest of the Maya. When we think about Cortes and the conquest of the Aztecs, that was really the conquest of the capital. What's now Mexico City. And that took a couple of years. But when we look at the Maya area, it took decades and decades for the Spanish to exert control over big areas of what's now the Yucatan Peninsula in Guatemala. And in fact, until maybe a hundred years ago, there were still areas even less than that. There were still areas that were with independent Maya communities. There's no single episode of conquest. It's this protracted thing. One amazing kind of historical fact here that nobody thinks about. The last Maya kingdom to be conquered was in 1697.

0:16:33.2 SC: Okay.

0:16:33.6 DS: That's almost 200 years after Cortes.

[laughter]

0:16:37.9 DS: And that was in Northern Guatemala. And this was... They were still independent Maya after that. I think we're living in a world that... In that part of Mesoamerica where this is still a very raw history in some respects. It's only a few hundred years or less, which is a drop in the bucket in terms of history.

0:17:06.7 SC: You mentioned the vibrant social scene and the arts. What about the technology and science? What kind of technological civilization are we talking about here?

0:17:16.7 DS: Well, we're talking about a... They didn't have metal, which is really interesting when you think about it. They didn't have iron or bronze or steel.

0:17:28.8 SC: Okay.

0:17:29.8 DS: There was metal jewelry late in Maya history, gold and silver. But there was no technology of metal working that was used in tools and so forth. They were essentially what we would call a stone age technology. Now that has all of these meanings in our own culture.

0:17:49.3 SC: Yeah.

0:17:50.3 DS: But this is a high civilization where they are building massive structures and monuments and cities with stone tools. I don't want to say stone age, meaning that they were in some way primitive. We have to reconcile these definitions we have from the old world.

0:18:15.6 SC: They weren't living in caves.

0:18:18.4 DS: What's that?

0:18:18.6 SC: They were not living in caves.

0:18:20.6 DS: They were not living in caves. They were making amazing things out of the technology that they had. And in its own way it was a remarkable technology there. And also the... This idea of technology and science, we group those together in some ways, but their scientific awareness of the world around them was extraordinary. We see this mostly through astronomy. We see this through the records we have of the calendars that they kept, the observations they made of the heavens and of horizon based astronomy. They knew what was going on in the cosmos in a way that many ancient civilizations did. We just happened to have the records that the Maya were keeping over the long term of these things.

0:19:18.5 SC: Is it even a sensible question to ask, did they think that the earth was the center of the solar system or the sun, or did they talk about those questions?

0:19:26.5 DS: Well, they didn't have a sense of a solar system.

0:19:28.6 SC: Okay.

0:19:29.7 DS: They recognized the observable planets, of course, and they differentiated those from the stars in the background. We know this because we have the astronomical tables.

0:19:42.9 SC: Yeah.

0:19:43.6 DS: This is amazing.

[laughter]

0:19:44.9 DS: We have tables of Venus and Mars, for example, in some of the documents where they know the cycles. Now they recognize them much like the Greeks and the Romans as these moving stars. Right. And they ascribe them maybe some kind of animate qualities, as deities or as Gods. But they have it down. They know what's going on in terms of their movements and their cycles. So they see the earth as the center of everything. Their concept of what earth is just the surface on which everything happens, and they're observing the heavens above them and all of the action that's happening there. They frame their cosmology around these observations of the sun and of the planets these regular cycles, and they create an elegant understanding of these things that I like to call indigenous science. It's in no way primitive. It's exactly what really all humans have been doing. Looking at the sky over thousands and thousands of years.

0:21:05.2 SC: Astronomy is always the first science to become precise and quantitative among ancient societies. It's really quite amazing and universal. And we have a lot to say about calendars and science and astrology, but I do wanna finish up with the archeology here. You mentioned the number of sites, some of them are touristy and so forth. Do we know all the sites? Are we done? Are is there a ongoing discovery of New Maya relics?

0:21:34.6 DS: Oh, we are in no way done. Just last week, there was the announcement of a discovery of a new Maya site.

0:21:43.6 SC: All right.

0:21:44.4 DS: In the forests of Southern Mexico. So this is an amazing time to be studying Maya archeology for many reasons, but one of them right now is the use of LiDAR technology. LiDAR in the last 15 years has really revolutionized our understanding of what's on the ground. Now you have to understand, and I know this all too well from all of my time in doing field work it's really hard to see a Maya ruin in the jungle in terms of all that's there, the buildings, the mounds, the features, terraces, you can walk through the rainforest in northern Guatemala and you can see maybe some big piles of rocks, and those were ancient pyramids. Sometimes you'll see walls, but you can easily walk over stuff, and not even know what it is.

0:22:47.1 SC: Yeah.

0:22:47.4 DS: Roads, for example, causeways. Now, LiDAR which is and I'm not an expert in LiDAR technology. Some listeners probably know much more about it than I do, but it's this ability to use lasers to penetrate the forest canopy, to essentially scan the forest floor and to see all of the relief that's there. It's almost like you're shaving off all of the forest and seeing the terrain. I mean, my God, what you see is incredible. You see the sites, we thought we knew that people spent months mapping [chuckle] on the ground turn out to be two or three times the size.

0:23:31.9 SC: Wow.

0:23:33.3 DS: And they just keep going. And also completely new sites that we didn't know about just in the past few years. So a colleague of mine just announced last week, as I mentioned a very large brand new site in southern Mexico called Ocomtún that he's named it. And it looks pretty special. It looks really pretty large. So we're still, even today finding literally lost cities, there's no other way to put it out there in the forest.

0:24:09.8 SC: That's amazing. And it reminds me that I should take this opportunity because I was recently asked on an ask me anything episode of the podcast, is it even conceivable that there could have been anywhere in the world, a highly technologically advanced ancient civilization, that we just have no idea that they're there because we've lost all of their relics? Or is archeology worldwide advanced to the point where we would know if there was a computer terminal hidden somewhere under the rock?

0:24:40.5 DS: Right. Right. Well, I'm in the camp very squarely with archeology, knowing the general parameters of these things. And we would know if there was a whole civilization waiting to be discovered. There's quite a bit of what we call pseudo archeology out there about very, very ancient civilizations that are so old that we don't see them. And I have to say, the evidence that's brought in to argue this point is just not up to snuff.

0:25:18.8 SC: Good. That was the answer I gave I'm glad [laughter]

0:25:21.9 DS: Yeah. So a lot of it's wishful thinking. A lot of it's tied into kind of crazy ideas about Atlantis and all these rabbit holes involved with that, but real archeology... We know the general Timelines around the world. There are always new discoveries. There are always things that push things further back in time. That's to be expected We're doing that in the Maya world all the time. We're finding new things that are older and older but no new civilizations, I think are gonna be out there. Archaeology is always full of surprises, but I have to say, it's come a long way over the years and we know a lot about the ancient world.

0:26:11.3 SC: Well, thank you for indulging me with that. Now we get to roll up our sleeves a little bit and go into what has been your specialty, which is the decipherment of the writing system that the Mayans have. I mean, well, I guess let's get a bit common basis to talk about this. What is the writing that we have you mentioned a few books. Is that is that where we get most of our knowledge of how Mayans would write?

0:26:37.8 DS: We have a few books that have miraculously survived. The Spanish were quite good at wiping out archives that they came across in 16th century and the few that we have were saved by... As curiosities at the time I think and taken back to Europe. One was found apparently in a cave in Mexico and surfaced about 50 years ago. We have a lot more than just the books. We have thousands of texts on stone monuments. That sometimes are sitting out in the open. Sometimes they're inside of temples. These of course are official kind of ritual texts or histories about dynasties. We have... Well, what's interesting is that Maya wrote on everything. They wrote on their dishware. They wrote on the walls of buildings, graffiti. They wrote on their Jade necklaces. And so we have a lot of raw material to work with and it's as I was saying earlier, it's the it's amazing to have the words of ancient Americans to read. It's just a stunning thing. I sometimes have to step back and realize that I'm reading something that was written in the year 600 about royal history. And this is a history we're still sifting through and it hasn't quite reached the public consciousness the way I think it will. I'm writing a book now on my history that I hope will...

0:28:39.9 SC: Oh, good.

0:28:42.5 DS: Get out some of this amazing narratives.

0:28:45.8 SC: I wanna pause for just a second to give us a little bit of indulge in some righteous indignation about the fact that the Spanish intentionally tried to wipe out all of these records. So this is again something you see throughout history when one culture encounters another one. It's just a terrible human impulse. There's not as enough of an impulse inside us to just say, "Yes, these people are different than us, but it's worth preserving." We wanna wipe it out. This is just weird.

0:29:16.4 DS: Yeah. And it's hard to read some of the accounts that are there of Spanish friars who were very proactive in burning the books, literally. Now I wanna balance that by saying that there were many of these same individuals, Spanish intellectuals of the time who were maybe Franciscan priests who spoke fluent Maya, who were converting the Indians as they call them, converting the Maya to Christianity. But you also see some respect there. You see that they're really interested in this native culture. They wanna know more about the science of the Maya, they wanna know more about the ruins that they saw. Even in the 1500s there were plenty of ancient Maya ruins lying about. They wanted to know the history. They wanted to know, okay, what's going on here? Who are these people? What is the writing? Even though some of them burned it. Some of them actually learned to read and write in the ancient script.

0:30:39.2 SC: People are very complicated.

[laughter]

0:30:41.0 DS: People are very complicated, right. So you see this tension in the documents of that era where they're writing down all of this stuff. Thank goodness, because they were like the anthropologists of that time. They were providing again, a lot of raw material for us to study and dictionaries for example of the languages which are really key for us in the decipherment and so I have kinda love-hate relationship with these early chroniclers who were trying to preserve some things but also were very active in destroying.

0:31:22.1 SC: So what is the kind of writing system they would use? Not like a symbolic alphabet like we have, more like hieroglyphics.

0:31:29.9 DS: Right. So we call them hieroglyphs or glyphs. That's a term we've borrowed from Egypt. No connection historically in any way to ancient Egypt.

[laughter]

0:31:39.0 SC: The aliens didn't spread the word back and forth?

0:31:41.5 DS: No. No. It's a word a label we've just transferred over. So it is a beautiful script. It is highly ornate, and I think to someone who has never seen a Maya text before, if one looks at it, it looks just like a sea of squiggles and you see some pictures of things. So it's a pictorial system in that, let's say the graphic units of the script are things of daily life or maybe images of... You see hands, you see faces, you see unrecognizable elements too. But it's not a symbolic system. What we've discovered in the last 50 years is that it is a phonetic writing system. Everything is related to either a word or to a sound. And so when we're reading an ancient text, we're reading it in its original language. We're not ascribing it some sort of general interpretation. Early scholars were kind of doing this, saying, "Okay, well, this is the sort of the sense of this hieroglyph." No, we have to read it in its original language. And so one of the hats I wear as a epigrapher, that is someone who studies ancient texts, is being a linguist. When I first got interested in Maya hieroglyphs at a very young age, my mom and dad dragged me into this 'cause they were archaeologists.

0:33:28.9 DS: I was just enchanted by the look of Maya glyphs. They were phenomenal looking. But in the early '70s no one could read them, really. And I didn't think in order to really play and understand with this writing system that I would ever have to really be a linguist.

[laughter]

0:33:54.1 DS: So it turned out as we made progress in cracking the code, I had to sit there and start learning Maya grammar and morphology and all of these phonetics and all of this stuff in a way I never anticipated, in a way no one probably anticipated back in the old days. But the point is, we can now read probably, I would say, about 80-90% of it in its original language.

0:34:21.6 SC: Does the fact that there are still people speaking languages that descended from Mayan ancient languages help at all? Can you ask them for some clues about pronunciation?

0:34:34.2 DS: It absolutely helps. The language... Well a couple of things. The language of most of the ancient texts we have, it turns out, is one language. That's good for us because we don't have to try to learn a bunch of different ancient Mayan languages. What it seems is going on in the classic period is that there's kind of an official courtly language, a lingua franca, if you will, where they're writing their official texts in a particular language we call classic Mayan. And it was probably a somewhat archaic form of language in its own day. It wouldn't have been spoken by people out in the fields or even maybe in the royal courts, but it was the official language of documents, kind of like Latin in the Middle Ages, something like that. Now, we can relate that language to current Mayan languages.

0:35:42.9 DS: There are a lot of Mayan languages. This is something I didn't really say earlier, but we can identify 30 or so Mayan languages. Only some of those are really related closely to the hieroglyphic writing, but those descendant languages are still being spoken in different parts of Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala. So absolutely, if we can document more about those languages, some of which are dying off, I have to say, boy does that help. Just getting a sense of some of the semantics, let's say, the meanings behind a particular word in the glyphs, it really helps. I was just doing this recently, fine-tuning some interpretations based on the semantics of terms spoken today. We can actually use that information to get a better sense of what they're really saying a few hundred years earlier.

0:36:50.7 SC: And presumably these languages develop, evolved completely independently from Indo-European precursors or East Asian languages, Are there nevertheless similarities in grammar or structure? I'm just very interested in the extent to which there's convergent evolution. Different language groups find the same solutions to similar problems.

0:37:11.3 DS: Well, here we're getting a bit out of my area of expertise, but it is true that Mayan languages and other indigenous languages of the Americas developed on their own. The landscape of languages in the ancient Americas is really complicated, and there are a lot of language families that we can't historically relate to one another. The Aztecs spoke a language called Nahuatl, which is a Uto-Aztecan language related to some languages like Hopi in the southwest US, completely unrelated to Mayan. Spoken kind of in the same general region of Mesoamerica, but historically not related. And none of these languages really have connections to the old world, to Indo-European or anything else. So it's true they are independently tracking and developing. And yes, I think many languages do come up with similar grammatical structures and more phonemic structures across the world. Again, this is an area that I'm not an expert in.

0:38:30.7 SC: That's fine. Yeah. [laughter]

0:38:31.3 DS: Compared to linguistics. But it's a fascinating subject. There's a lot of deep cognitive coding here, this is what Noam Chomsky was writing about a long time ago. That there's underlying grammatical structures that feed into languages whether they're historically related or not.

0:38:54.9 SC: Well maybe you can give us a little bit of the down to earth what it means to decipher these languages. Like when you see some symbols on a stone in a site in Guatemala how do you go about connecting these to sounds or meanings or anything like that?

0:39:14.5 DS: Right. So the deep structure of the writing system. We have really two kinds of signs in the script. We have signs that can represent individual words, so a word like King Ahau in classic Mayan can be written with a particular sign. Actually there are variants of that. So there may be two or three different signs that turn out to be the same thing. That was a hard thing for us to figure out.

0:39:54.3 SC: Yeah, that's annoying.

0:39:54.4 DS: In the decipherment process. Man, that drove us nuts. Once we realized that there were... It was a very playful script in the sense that they were throwing at us all these kind of variants trying to make us guess, but turned out they're all the same. They could also write the same word using sounds, and what they used were consonant vowel syllables.

0:40:19.0 SC: Okay.

0:40:19.5 DS: So we have signs for, sounds like, ha, wa, ku, ni. They could combine these to really spell anything they wanted to. So Ahau, king. Yeah, you could write it with a single sign or maybe down, a few lines down in a text, the scribe will say, no, I'm gonna write it differently here. I'm gonna write it, A-ha-wa with three signs. When we are approaching a new text we're always seeing things we recognize, but we always see something new. We always see a new kind of spelling or a new little spin on a word. So there was a built-in flexibility, kind of an artistic sensibility into the script that I think makes it fantastic to study. One particular decipherment that I made quite a few years ago now was on a vessel, a clay vessel that came out of a royal tomb in Guatemala. And it had a lock top on it. It had a handle on the top, you could lift it up, but if you twisted the handle, the lid would come off the vessel.

0:41:41.7 SC: Okay.

0:41:42.6 DS: And it was painted with this beautiful inscription, and one of the glyphs on it was, I saw at the time, it was a combination of syllables, and it read KaKaWa, cacao [laughter], which is a Mayan word.

0:42:00.6 SC: Okay.

0:42:00.8 DS: Cocoa. Right? Cacao, that's a word we've borrowed from Mayan. Mayan borrowed it from other Mesoamerican languages, but it's a word that was pronounced in the ancient times as cacao for chocolate.

0:42:13.3 SC: A very important word.

0:42:14.7 DS: It's a very important word. And at the time, I told the archeologist, hey guys, "this is a chocolate pot."

[laughter]

0:42:25.8 DS: And this is great. They took a sample of the residue that was, again, miraculously preserved inside the vessel, they sent it to the Hershey labs in Pennsylvania, [laughter] to have it tested. And sure enough, it came back with the signatures of Theobroma cacao. So it was deposited in the tomb with chocolate. So that's when we kind of knew we were on the right track in terms of the decipherment.

0:42:55.3 SC: And I guess... So I was a little bit wrong earlier. In some sense it is an alphabet. But rather than letters as we think of it, they had symbols, meaning sounds, but they were not semantic symbols. Like there's not a symbol for a leopard, a symbol for a banana or whatever.

0:43:13.8 DS: Well not necessarily, there were word signs. So we have jaguar.

0:43:18.3 SC: Okay.

0:43:18.8 DS: As is a head of a jaguar or a drawing of a jaguar could be Balam for jaguar or you could write it phonetically.

0:43:28.0 SC: Got it.

0:43:28.0 DS: It's not alphabetic. Alphabetic scripts are a consonant and a vowel as separate signs or... Alphabetic writing turns out to be not that common historically but syllabic writing was quite common in the ancient world. Sumerians used it, for example in Cuneiform and other ancient scripts are syllabic as well. So it's as phonetically accurate as an alphabetic script.

0:44:02.4 SC: Right. Okay good. And this helps us cycle back as it were to the astronomy calendar kinds of questions. So you've deciphered some of these symbols, you know what they mean and one of the things, I guess, at least this is from reading your book, so I'm biased, but they had a lot of calendars, a lot of dates lying around, and you could figure out what they were talking about.

0:44:23.9 DS: Yes. They did. And actually this was the first wave of cracking the code way back when in the late 1800s. The first insights into the ancient writing was the numerology, the numbers were readable, bars and dots. So very early on early scholars saw the bar was a number five, a dot was a number one, combine these, and you get numbers from one to 20. And using some of the Chronicles that the Spanish wrote in the 1500s, they described some of the calendars in those documents. And so it didn't take much to link these things up and this created a situation where [chuckle] early Mayanists, early epigraphers could read some inscriptions, but they could only read the dates...

[chuckle]

0:45:29.8 DS: Which is weird. Imagine looking at some sort of Roman history and you just see the calendrical records and nothing else is readable. It was amazing what those early scholars could do. But they basically hammered out the various calendars that existed in the ancient Maya records. There was a lunar calendar, there was a solar year calendar of 365 days. There was a ritual divination calendar of 260 days, not connected to any observable phenomenon in the sky or anything like that or so directly. And then there was this much, much larger system we call the Long Count, which is a, it's based on the number of 360 days. This is almost a year.

0:46:35.6 SC: Okay.

0:46:36.3 DS: But Mayan numerology is based on 20, it's a, what we call a vigesimal numeration system, not based on 10 because 10 fingers and 10 toes makes 20.

0:46:51.3 SC: I Guess [laughter] That was my guess.

0:46:51.5 DS: So there you have it.

0:46:53.5 SC: Except I got to interrupt because I really need someone to talk me down from this weird modified based 20 system they use where almost all the digits in a number are base 20 except that the... What? There's a single digit that only goes up to 18.

0:47:10.4 DS: Oh, you had to ask me that, Sean. Okay.

[laughter]

0:47:13.2 SC: It's been bugging me.

0:47:16.0 DS: So they have a base 20 system just in their counting independent of calendars. But in the language, they just have a base 20 system of counting. So what happens in this larger calendar system we call the Long Count, is they have the number 20 and they're gonna fit that into a solar year. Now they can only get the 360, right?

0:47:39.7 SC: Yep.

0:47:39.8 DS: So that creates a unit of time. That's almost a year. It's not quite a year, but that becomes the building block of this calendar system that we call the Long Count. So 18 units of 20 days makes 360.

0:48:01.7 SC: Got it. I did not catch that. Good.

0:48:03.3 DS: And that's where the 18 comes in. It always confuses my students when I'm trying to explain the calendar, is everything is 20 except that one unit where you have to make that 360 unit of time.

0:48:18.5 SC: Right. Right. So, just to be super clear, 'cause the audience is only hearing the audio. Like when we have a number like 1,382, we all know that that's the one in the thousands place, the three in the hundreds place, etcetera. And all of those slots go zero one up through nine. But in the Maya way of doing it, if I get it right, there's a bunch of slots and the rightmost one is the ones, and it goes from zero to 19, and the next one, what we would call the tens, goes from zero to 17, and then all the others go from zero to 19 again. And...

0:48:55.2 DS: Everyone's confused.

[laughter]

0:48:56.5 SC: Yeah. I just want to drive home that this is just as crazy as it sounds, but good for them for keeping it straight.

0:49:02.1 DS: Well there's a reason for that though. It sounds crazy. But they're counting days.

0:49:09.5 SC: Yeah.

0:49:10.5 DS: This is only a calendrical construct. So they're counting individual days. One through 20 makes a period, and then instead of going, well, 20 of that period makes 400 and 20 of those makes 8,000. Instead of doing that, they're trying to anchor it somewhat in reality in terms of observable solar years. And so they go units of 20 days, they fit that into a solar year and then they take off and 20 periods of 360 days makes a period called a k'atun. 20 of those makes a baktun. 20 of those makes a Piktun and 20 of those makes... So this is where we get this remarkable representation of deep time in some of the ritual records that we have. They're calculating not just thousands of years, but millions, billions, even beyond in terms of some of the dates they're representing.

0:50:25.2 SC: I'll give you a quick chance to explain to us why the world did not end in the year 2012 [laughter] Didn't you guys tell us it was gonna end? I mean, I feel misled. [laughter]

0:50:37.1 DS: Well, it wasn't us. This is a meme that took off. Many of us will remember going back over a decade ago now that there was this big kerfuffle leading up to December of 2012. There's even a movie about it. That the world was going to end. That the Maya predicted the end of the world. Well, they never said anything of the sort. I was tearing my hair out at the time, giving many interviews. But it was impossible to [chuckle]

0:51:11.4 SC: Oh yeah.

0:51:11.8 DS: Counteract...

0:51:12.4 SC: Uphill battle.

0:51:13.1 DS: This cultural phenomenon that was ours. I just think our culture, civilization, whatever we want to call it, sometimes we just go through these kind of crazy episodes of whether it's Y2K or whether it's 2012. There'll be something else down the line. The Maya never said the world would end. What happened was that there was a turn of a period in the Maya calendar, a switchover called a baktun. And this is a roughly a 400 year period of time. It's a big deal in the Maya calendar in the long count. I was kind of telling my students about it. Like, Hey guys, we're going to live through the turn of a baktun. This is awesome.

[laughter]

0:52:03.2 DS: But the interpretation of this as the end of something, was really just on us. Because for the Maya, it was the beginning of something too. And the calendar didn't stop. It kept going. This is something that I wrote my book about at the time. [laughter] I was asked to write a popular book about Maya time and the Maya calendar. I don't think anyone read it. [laughter] But it was trying to explain that no, the calendar keeps going. And in fact, the scale of the calendar is such that, this one period that turned over in 2012 was just a minute little cog in a much bigger system.

0:52:55.1 SC: So there's the long count, and then there's like the super long count. I don't know what the technical name is.

0:53:00.9 DS: Yeah. Yeah. The long count uses this baktun period. And so, you have what I was describing earlier, we have this kind of place notation system of days of 20 days, of 360 days, and then 20 of those makes a, 20 year period of a K'atun. 20 of those makes a baktun the 400 years roughly. Now those five periods is what we call the Long Count. You take a baktun, you can exponentially create more and more and more. And in fact, they did. They just went on about 19 periods on to gargantuan periods of time that they're representing. That's what we call the grand Grand Long count. And they wrote it down in its full capacity in only a few places. And this is what I was really interested in seeing, the representation of these cycles, it's a numbers game. It's just using 20 exponentially counting these periods. But to them it was a cosmological and numerological statement about the universe. And one of the points I made in the book, Sean, is that their representation of the scale of time dwarfs our own cosmology.

[laughter]

0:54:29.9 SC: Well, I would imagine that once you've invented positional notation for numbers, it's just kind of fun to write down big numbers.

0:54:39.3 DS: Exactly. Right.

0:54:39.9 SC: We still have that.

0:54:40.8 DS: Just keep going.

0:54:41.4 SC: And as you do point out in the book, which is called T"he Order of Days," still very worth reading, they were writing down numbers of years that go into the octillions. So for those of us who have no idea, like me, what that meant, 10 to the 28th, years is the kind of thing that they're thinking about.

0:55:01.7 DS: Right. Yeah.

0:55:02.0 SC: Which indeed...

0:55:02.7 DS: To the point where it's almost meaningless in terms of scale, we can't wrap our heads around that. But the reason they're doing this, it's a good question to ask, why bother with this?

0:55:12.9 SC: Yeah.

0:55:13.5 DS: What they're doing is, they're taking the baktun period and they want to create basically, 20, orders above that. Here's that number 20 again. So once they get to that spot, all the way up the line, then they stop. That's what I mean by saying it's a numerological construct of time. They're not observing anything that creates this. They're simply putting it down on paper as a fun, fascinating representation of a structure of time.

0:56:00.1 SC: So did they attach any meanings of a beginning or an end to the universe this way?

0:56:04.7 SC: Well, I suspect they did. They had creation stories. I think that the world went through transformations in mythology and in history. So they extrapolated back to create narratives about, I think the creation of the world order as they understood it. Understanding that there were previous creations as well. And this is mythology. This is the kind of thing we see across the world. And for the ancient Maya, the narratives that we can read today, talk about 3114 BC as not a historical date, but as an important date in the creation of the present era.

0:56:57.8 SC: Okay.

0:57:00.0 DS: We have myths that go further back in time, hundreds of thousands, billions of years where they talk about gods dedicating monuments and things like that, and that's all backstory for what kings are doing. But in 3114 BC we see kind of the ordering of the world. The gods can all confer together in the darkness. They have kind of a big meeting to order everything in the universe. And we have some records of this. And this is the foundation for some of the other myths that we see in the dynastic records 'cause Maya kings were relating themselves to the gods. And it's also related to some of the stories we have from much later on and from historical times even after the Spanish invasion.

0:57:57.4 SC: So we are imagining some Maya in the year 500 or whatever telling stories about what happened in the year 3000 BC. That seems... But it wasn't 3000 BC, it was 3114 or whatever it was, very very specific. How did they get there from here? How did they start to the year 500 and go, I know when the current order was set, it was in the year 3114 or whatever?

0:58:23.5 DS: Right. So that 3114 BC date is kind of the base date or the zero date for the short version of the long count calendar. You have to think of it. It's almost like an odometer of a car.

0:58:42.9 SC: Yeah.

0:58:43.8 DS: If you have five numbers in front of you, all of them set at zero, that's 3114 BC August the 13th of 3114 BC in fact.

0:58:56.5 SC: Okay.

0:58:56.7 DS: Now, you just start clicking day one, day two, day three, and then you accumulate these progressively higher periods you get to a baktun after 400 years. Well, 13 baktuns, 13 is a very sacred number, gets you, guess where? To December of 2012.

0:59:21.2 SC: Okay.

[laughter]

0:59:23.1 DS: So 3114 BC and 2012 are kind of the brackets you might say of Maya historical time or of their sense of kind of human time. It keeps going just as it was progressively going earlier, back in time. Yeah, 2012 was a big deal for the Maya. It wasn't the end of the world, but it was a change. And...

0:59:53.0 SC: I guess it's just interesting to me because by this process you just outlined, they put themselves in the middle of the period, which is kind of interesting. It wasn't like we're just at the beginning or we're near the end, it's a little different than other things I've heard.

1:00:08.3 DS: Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting, I'm glad you brought that up because what I suspect is going on is that this very esoteric calendar system was probably invented in the early days of Maya civilization, not in 3114 BC. There was no real Maya cities or writing going on then, there were people but they were hunting and gathering in the area. I think probably around, I don't know, 700, 600 BC, this is just a guess, this is the fledgling stages of Maya civilization. This calendar was invented, and what they wanted to do was create a system of time, a representation of time that was scalable so that they could go back and create narratives about history and even further back about ancestors and gods, but also project forward. So they put themselves in the middle, I think, in a very practical way in order to represent time in both directions.

1:01:22.9 SC: It does sound like there are structural similarities between the way they thought about these things and what I anyway am more familiar with European history and so forth, where there were gods, there's, I don't know, many of the societies I know about had creation myths where the Earth was vomited up by a dragon or cracked from an egg or birthed by a Titan or something like that. Are there those kind of specific fun mythological accounts?

1:01:53.0 DS: There are. The most compelling narrative that if people want to access some of this is... I mean, we have plenty from the ancient texts that we're actually still deciphering and publishing. Right now we're kind of going through this. But if listeners are interested in some of these narratives, one source that's just remarkable is a book called the 'Popol Vuh'

1:02:24.4 SC: Oh, yeah.

1:02:24.8 DS: Which is a Maya epic poem about the creation of the world and of humanity's place in it. And the 'Popol Vuh' was probably not written in hieroglyphs, in any of the sources that I'm studying, but rather it was written down in the Colonial period in K'iche' Mayan. This language is still spoken in Guatemala today. And it was recorded again, by a Spanish priest, Francisco Jimenez. Thank goodness he wrote this down in its indigenous language, its original language, and in Spanish. So anyone can... They're great translations of the 'Popol Vuh,' anyone can...

1:03:16.3 SC: Okay, good. I was gonna ask, yeah.

1:03:17.3 DS: Can order it and find it, and it's like the 'Iliad' or the 'Odyssey.' It is a tremendous story about the world being created out of darkness, about... There's a wonderful story within about a pair of brothers called the Hero Twins, who vanquished the lords of the underworld and resurrect their father, who turns out to be the god of maize in the ancient sources. And so it's tied into kind of the real world in that sense. And the kings of the K'iche' Maya at the time of the conquest. They were connecting themselves to these creation stories, just like you see in the Old Testament. And it's a similar kind of impulse, I think, that we see.

1:04:11.8 SC: Yeah, that is very fascinating. And just to be helpful to the audience, how do you spell 'Popol Vuh?'

[chuckle]

1:04:17.8 DS: 'Popol Vuh,' P-O-P-O-L V-U-H. Two words.

1:04:23.8 SC: Got it. And this is something you can buy a good translation of?

1:04:26.8 DS: Absolutely. There are some really good translations out there, two or three I can think of that are available online and on Amazon. It's a great story, and we can see those narratives in some of the ancient art as well, just like you see the 'Iliad' or 'Odyssey' on Greek vases...

1:04:49.4 SC: Right.

1:04:49.4 DS: We see them on Maya pottery, paintings and so forth.

1:04:52.8 SC: And it's fascinating to me, the rough similarities of that kind of story versus the Mahabharata or the epic of Gilgamesh or whatever, completely disconnected societies came up with very similar stories to tell.

1:05:06.0 SC: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's a human impulse to do this. It's a... We all need stories, we all need narratives. And today, science is creating these narratives also. And I see it not necessarily as this division between science and mythology because for so many human civilizations, the two things are intertwined.

1:05:37.3 SC: Yeah.

1:05:38.8 DS: And that's the background of course of our history of science, going back a ways in the west.

1:05:45.1 SC: Well, let me give you an, opportunity to close up to, you've already mentioned that this is an exciting time to be studying these things. I mean, what is on the horizon? What are we gonna be hopefully discovering or figuring out over the next decade or two?

1:06:00.0 DS: Well, good question. I think it is the best of times in our field. I mean, archeology is often seen as a very, literally a dusty field that maybe that doesn't have a lot of new things going on. But in our particular corner, in my archeology, we're seeing a transformation not only through new technologies like LiDAR and explorations and new finds, but we're seeing a convergence of the, kind of on the ground field archeology, with a historical awareness. That's quite new. And so we're able now to link these great ruins, these so-called lost cities like Tikal or Palenque or Copán, these were once seen as these impenetrable signs of a lost civilization. Who built these ruins no one ever knew?

1:07:07.5 SC: Yeah.

1:07:07.7 DS: Very romanticized ideas about the Maya developed out of that. But now we know. Now we have the original voices of the Maya in these places talking about them. So we have the dynasties, we have the histories. The future for me is gonna come out of this convergence of the physical sites and the science of archeology and the history and the culture that we see in the documents. And what I really wanna see happening in future generations is an awareness of the great actors of Maya history, the Great Kings, Yuknoom Ch'een, one of the great figures of history for the Maya is going to be known, widely, I think, I hope school kids learn about some of these great figures and the things that they were doing and even some of the intellectual achievements of the Maya and the astronomers that were doing amazing things early on. All of this is coming together, I think right now and will in the next few decades.

1:08:21.5 SC: And for people who live in the Americas, this is part of our heritage. It is something we should know a little bit about.

1:08:27.3 DS: It is. Absolutely. And especially for the indigenous peoples of the area, for the Maya who grew up often at least historically in recent years, not having any awareness of this legacy. It's now really on the cusp of being laid out in all of its glory and complexity.

1:08:51.1 SC: Well, I'm very glad the world didn't end. Maybe it will a next baktun away. I don't know. I can't predict those things.

1:08:57.4 DS: Right.

1:08:57.4 SC: But David Stuart, thank you so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:09:00.3 DS: Thank you, Sean.

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