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Dec. 14, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
49:55
Edition 502 - Matthew Restall And Amara Solari

Researchers Matthew Restall and Amara Solari have spent years looking at the history of the Mayan civilisation...which has not, as some writers claim, died out...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is edition 502 of the Unexplained, the Paradise.
How did we get here?
Well, it was a long and winding road, as the Beatles once sang.
I hope you're doing all right.
I hope that you're looking forward to whatever Christmas and New Year that we might all have.
No idea what it's going to mean for me.
But Christmas is, I don't know.
Over the years, it's tended to be mostly for me something to be got through.
And I think even this year is going to be even more like that, if you see what I'm saying.
But, you know, I think I'll take time out to pause and reflect, as we all will.
And, you know, hopefully the virus will be on its way out in 2021 and the vaccine will start to do the job that we're spending all the money to do.
Let's hope so.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, communications.
I've had some wonderful ones lately.
And I always love it when people say, I've been there all the time.
I just haven't been in touch before.
It makes a huge difference.
And if you've contributed to the online show, if you've made a donation through the website theunexplained.tv, thank you so, so very much.
You know who you are for what you've done and for helping to keep me going and helping to keep this going.
Because, you know, if all else disappears and if the show one day isn't on the radio, then it will be here online always.
Well, as long as I can do it, you know, till the money runs out, that sort of thing.
So thank you for all the years.
And nobody's more surprised than I am that we got to edition 500 and now we're on 502.
Okay.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his constant hard work.
And Haley as well for booking the podcast guests.
All right.
What you're going to hear now is something that I wanted to put here on a podcast.
It's my radio conversation recently with two people, husband and wife team, who've done some interesting research on the Mayans, the Maya civilization, who were around for a very long time and disappeared.
Or did they?
The people we'll speak with are Matthew Restall, who's English, and Amara Solari, who's American.
They're both in the US.
And they've written a book called The Maya, a very short introduction.
They are Maya completists, enthusiasts.
They are very, very knowledgeable and have studied the Maya extensively.
You will hear things here that I don't think you will ever have thought of or will have known before.
So that's the conversation that we're going to have now on the fascinating culture of the Maya, some of the myths about them and some of the things that they have achieved over such a long history.
And a surprise, maybe a twist in the tale at the end of the story, you may find.
The Maya, a very short introduction is their book.
Matthew Rustell, Amara Solari, coming right up from the US.
Like I say, thank you for your emails.
If you want to get in touch, please tell me who you are, whereabouts in the world you are, and how you use this show.
I don't think there's any more to say now.
So let's cross to the US to Matthew Rustell, Amara Solari.
Thank you very much both for coming on The Unexplained.
Nice to be here.
Thank you, Harry.
Thank you.
Either of you really, I hope that introduction was not too wide of the mark.
Did it kind of work?
It worked very well.
Yeah, perfectly.
Okay.
Now, the way we're going to do this, and since you're together in the same room and you are husband and wife, I think rather than me saying, Amara, let me put this point to you, or Matthew, let me put this point to you, which you always hear on the BBC and I hate, let's just see if we can have a conversation between us and just you pick up, you know, both of you, whichever way you want to, whoever wants to complete whatever point.
So first of all, both of you really, and I guess it just makes sense to start with Matthew and then go across to Amazon.
I know that you're married.
I know that you both live in the United States.
You can tell me which part.
But what made you work together on this piece of research?
Well, we, yes, we live in Pennsylvania.
We both teach at Penn State University.
But we got into this topic more or less many, many years before we met or even knew of each other's existence.
But it's not coincidental because that was how we met.
We actually got together in Yucatan, in the Yucatan Peninsula, when we were there separately one summer doing research on Maya topics.
And so that was sort of the beginning of our personal connection.
And then the professional one followed after that.
And the writing books together thing is really my idea.
And I like it.
And I do it begrudgingly because he asks me too.
And I say, okay, I'll do that.
Sure.
And you know how marriages go, how it is like, usually there's like one, a brilliant idea has come up by one person in the marriage and the other one kind of goes along with it.
I think the result is brilliant.
I hear what you say, but I can kind of feel Amara fuming from here.
But writing a book together that would seem to me rather like husbands that I've known or wives that I've known trying to teach the husband or the wife how to drive.
It is an enterprise doomed to acrimony.
Perhaps the good thing in our case is that even though we both study the Maya, the Maya are such a diverse culture.
Matthew is really clued into the historical aspects, and I'm an art historian by training.
And so I take over the material culture.
And so we can say to each other, I think I know a little bit more about this than you do.
And then we're a good balance because of this.
Right.
And what is it for both of you, really?
What is the appeal of the Maya?
I said at the beginning of this, people only know two things about the Maya, I think.
Pictures of wonderful temples being unearthed and stories about strange people who say, I've been following the Mayan calendar and the world is going to end.
The latest one is 21st of December this year, 2020.
Well, for me, the things you mentioned are what really drew me in when I was a child.
My parents brought me down to the Yucatan Peninsula when I was about 12 or 13 years old.
And those pyramids that you see pictures of in the tourism magazines, you know, I got to climb them because you could Back then, and I became one of those nerdy, dorky children who just tried to absorb everything I possibly could.
Went to college and realized, oh, wait, you can actually study this for a living.
I had no idea, and just went straight through.
I just fell in love.
The more I learned about the Maya in terms of history, the more intrigued I became.
For me, it was just a very simple, easy fit.
And the truth of it is, sorry, you were doing the very thing I asked you to do.
And look at me putting my great big feet in there.
But Matthew, you can pick this up.
But the point of the matter is that over here in the UK, people don't understand that much about this culture because we have other cultures over here to be interested in.
So you're a British guy.
Interesting that you were so captivated.
Well, when I, my story is a little bit similar to Amara's in that I went there when I was very young.
But I was an undergraduate in England and had an opportunity to spend a summer in Mexico.
I had to write an essay to get the funds and off I went and I went down into Yucatan.
And the Americans don't understand this, but you, Howard, and I think your audience, some will be able to get it.
It reminded me of England.
So of course, the climate is completely different.
The vegetation is totally different.
People speaking different languages, different peoples.
But there was something about it that reminded me of particularly the English countryside in the south of England.
If you've ever driven through the south of England from village to village and you've got these roads that's too narrow with big hedgerows and in the distance you can see the spire of the village church and you go into the village and the buildings there, if you include the odd stone circle that's in a field of sheep or something, go back over hundreds, if not thousands of years.
That's what Yucatan is like.
And that's what got me.
And I realized, oh, here I am standing in a plaza.
There's a church that's 400 years old.
There's the ruins of a pyramid that's 1,000 years old.
And then here are children playing soccer who are Maya, that they're still here, right?
The Maya never left.
The Maya never went anywhere.
They never disappeared.
They never went anywhere.
They're still with us.
And that's what really got me was that mystery, right?
Not the mystery of where did the Maya go, but the mystery of how are they supposedly gone and ancient, and yet they're still with us?
Like, what is that kind of disconnect there?
And it's not just people far away across the other side of the Atlantic that think that it's people all up in North America as well, in the U.S. and Canada.
Even where I grew up in California, where there are people who have immigrated, who speak Maya, who live in San Francisco, Californians still do not understand that there is this massive indigenous population, millions strong, in what used to be known as the Maya world.
We tend to think of it, don't we, if we think of it at all, as being just another version of ancient Egypt in another place.
Yes, absolutely.
And the hieroglyphs, the hieroglyphs thing is key to that, because for reasons that I'm not sure I can explain at all, let alone briefly, the Maya writing system is called hieroglyphs.
It's not really.
But that in the mind of English speakers connects them to ancient Egypt and ancient Egypt civilization.
And the pyramids.
And the pyramids, of course, they're not really No, well, the photographs I've seen, they're stepped and they're flat at the top.
Yes, they have temples.
Typically, they have or had temples on the top.
And we're old enough that we got to visit Maya, ancient Maya sites and climb up these pyramids over and over again.
It's difficult to do now.
Really?
Because quite rightly they're protected.
They don't want them being eroded away.
They're protected and they've had tourism accidents, I will call them, of people falling off the top of them.
For good reason, you're not.
They're difficult.
They're little steps, you know, and it's the tropic, so it's slimy and clammy, and people can fall down.
People see pictures and they think, oh, we can do that.
Sorry, you were saying that.
exactly but not to not to anticipate a question you haven't asked how but um this is why we the We were big fans of the very short introduction series.
But the things that we were just talking about, the reason why we wrote this book, that there are hundreds of books out there about the Maya, and almost all of them are bigger than our book, full of glossy pictures, you know, the sort of the kind of books that you just mentioned.
But what they do is tend to have a chapter at the very end saying, oh, and by the way, then the Mayas survived Spanish colonial rule and the modern era, and they're still with us.
And that's kind of it.
And we wanted to write a book that was a little bit more balanced, that someone who was curious about the Maya, maybe had been on holiday in Mexico or wanted to go and would pick up the book and in 100 short pages would really get a sense of how the whole scope of Maya history does include the last 500 years as much as it includes the thousands of years before that.
Well, that was the first thing that made me raise my eyebrows when I was making notes on your book today.
The first thing that came on like a light bulb was, oh, God, they're still around.
I didn't know.
I had no idea.
That goes for most people.
Okay, let's look at a bit of history here because this first segment is about who were the Maya.
Now, they have a history I derive from your book that goes back as far as 8,000 BC.
They were remarkable in the way that they organized things because they were a civilization, but they were not an empire, right?
That's correct.
And I think it won't, the first thing we really need to talk about, I think, is that the Maya never historically have conceived of themselves or did conceive of themselves as a cohesive ethnic group, right?
So they would never, people had allegiances to their families, their last name, the Patraline, they had allegiances to the town where they lived in.
But the Mayas who were living in another city, you know, 40, 50, 60 miles away, they weren't considered to be kind of culturally in the same group, even though they may have been speaking a version of the same language.
So the term Maya is kind of an invention of scholars, really, of the 20th century.
Okay, so it's a broad brush thing.
And they were quite cool with the fact that it wasn't a cohesive thing.
It wasn't the Roman Empire.
It was just a federation of states, but without the federation.
Without the federation, yeah, I think kingdoms you can use as kind of a model, or perhaps city-states usually gets thrown in there.
So there'd be a kind of powerful, what we would conceive of as a capital city, right?
And I'm talking about what we call the classic periods.
This is between 250 and about 950.
And this gets turned a bit when we get closer to our present day.
And of course, with the Spanish colonization, but these city-states would have been kind of pivot around a single or a primary city.
And there would have been a kind of ruler who was both a political and a religious overlord.
And then, of course, there were lots of secondary lords.
And then they had relationships that were mostly tributary in nature, diplomatic in nature, with outlying towns and villages.
That sounds very organized.
A lot of history, certainly over here in Europe, as you know, Matthew, is bloody and brutal.
Were they civilized to a degree that perhaps some of the people over here were not at that time?
Or did they have their fair share of blood and brutality?
They did.
They certainly had their fair share of blood and brutality.
And the Maya waged war.
And I think there's a line somewhere that we have in our book saying that we can't imagine that there was any Maya person at any point in the last few thousand years of Maya history that lived a full life to old age who did not experience war.
And really, that's what we should expect, right?
I think the way to think about that topic is that the Maya were no more or less warlike than anybody else in human history.
What did they war over?
The same things that everybody fights over, right?
Over resources.
And so conflict over resources, how to get hunting grounds and agricultural areas and access to water and things like that.
Access to very elite natural resources like jade or, you know, areas where important birds were located, you know, things that the wealthy, the elites, wanted access to.
And kingdoms expanded and contracted a little bit like, let's say, history of the British Isles, if you go back a thousand years, right?
Was there a sense of the entire British Isles that everybody had the same common identity and spoke the same language?
No.
And the Maya did not all speak the same language.
They were, as of 500 years ago, there were about 35 to 40 different Mayan languages.
Going back in time before that, there would have been more than that.
So they didn't speak the same language.
They weren't unified politically.
They fought.
Kingdoms would expand and create little kind of mini empires as they would absorb and conquer other kingdoms and then they would contract just very much like the history of not just of the British Isles, but Europe, if you go back to the same time period, equivalent to sort of medieval and before that.
Okay, so as we come to the end of this first segment about who these people were, I think it's important to ask, how did they view the rest of the world?
Did they know anything about it?
Oh, that's a good question.
That's a great question.
I think it depends what you mean by the rest of the world, because the rest of the world, until European contact in the 16th century, of course, it's just going to be what we consider to be the Western Hemisphere.
And the Maya certainly were aware of the very diverse and far-flung cultures through what we would consider to be northern Mexico today and down through Central America as well, because they traded like you would not believe.
We find things that we know were mined, you know, in Guatemala being used in Maya cities way up in Yucatan, for example.
So goods and people are moving constantly and they're sharing just not material objects, but they're sharing ideas.
You can, because of hieroglyphs, we can actually, in some cases, chart the movement of actual human actors and understand political overthrow.
We can understand diplomatic relationships.
Yeah, and I guess one way to think of it is if scholars have sort of invented the concept of Maya civilization, well, not really invented the civilization, but invented the label, right?
As a way of understanding how people in this area of southern Mexico and northern Central America shared kind of cultural things in common.
If we accept that, there's also another invention of scholars, and that's Mesoamerica.
And Mesoamerica includes the Maya area.
So Mesoamerica extends from southwest United States down into Central America.
And the other big center of culture and population was central Mexico.
So for most people, they realize, oh, that's the Aztec Empire.
The Aztec Empire was only around for 100 years before Europeans arrive.
But the area where the Aztec Empire was, which is now central Mexico, that was another big civilizational area.
And the Maya and people in central and southern Mexico very much knew of each other over many, many centuries.
And there was trade.
There was even political relationships, which scholars are still trying to figure out.
There have periodically been theories that have been accepted and then debunked involving conquest, people from central Mexico coming down and conquering parts Of the Maya area.
That's sort of not fashionable right now, but no doubt it'll come back into fashion again.
So there's another big civilizational area right next door, and there's a lot of interaction.
Beyond that, there's no, there's not much, and there's no evidence that there was an awareness of peoples in the Caribbean or beyond.
Okay, well, you've answered my question because I was just going to ask in a few seconds, and we've got to wrap up this segment.
But we're learning more about ancient civilizations of various kinds, and we're discovering that some of them may have had the capacity to be seafaring, to go to sea and discover places we never thought they could.
You're saying no real evidence of that for the Maya.
They didn't come and visit Europe.
No, they didn't come and visit Europe, and they so they sailed up and down the coast.
There was a lot of movement, coastal movement.
But there's no evidence that they built, they wouldn't be ships, but even built boats that were capable of crossing to the islands.
Now, no doubt, just as later on, Europeans in the islands accidentally came across the coast and were shipwrecked on the Maya coast and so on, no doubt there was some of that in the other direction, but it definitely would not have been outside the Caribbean islands.
Okay, that's a great introduction to the Maya.
Hold that thoughts.
Matthew Restall, Amara Solari, husband and wife team who've intensively, as you can hear, researched the Maya.
And we come to this question, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, husband and wife team writers-researchers, about what was so special about the Maya?
You know, why is it that we're talking about them, I guess is what I'm asking?
You know, I think that their culture and civilization was so rich that you ask a Mayanist that question.
Mayanist.
Every single Mayanist is going to give you a different answer.
You know, it's not an obvious thing.
It's not that everybody's going to say, oh, it was the architecture or the writing system or whatever.
For me, I think the writing system is always fascinating because it does such an amazing job at doing what writing systems are supposed to do, which is to communicate.
But it's also beautiful.
It has an aesthetic quality which our alphabet cannot match.
A piece of text.
Well, it looks beautiful.
You're right.
Yeah, I mean, you may have beautiful handwriting, Howard, and that's lovely, but if you write a letter and then if it's translated into Maya hieroglyphs, it's not going to look initially like just a piece of text at all.
It's going to look like some kind of work of art, which is what it is.
Right.
Okay.
So, but what about their we think of them romantically, I think we think that they are quite mystical people.
They had beliefs that might resonate today.
And they used hallucinogenics, plant-based hallucinogenics, and connected with something.
What do we know about those aspects?
Well, we know quite a bit about their ritual practices.
And I think that's what you're starting to allude to there.
We know that they would, how do I explain this?
They would have intentional physical alterations, meaning they would enter into trance-like states.
And I don't mean everybody at the household level.
I'm here talking about kind of at the most elite levels of the religious hierarchy.
So those rulers that I was talking about earlier in the show, they would take a certain kind of substance or they would let their own blood or perhaps they would fast for days on end and they would enter into trance-like states.
Some scholars will talk about this religion as kind of a form of a shamanic religion, but that's also a problematic term.
But they would enter these states specifically to converse or interact, perhaps, with deities and deified ancestors.
So for me, I'm a specialist of Maya religion, and I find the complexity of their supernatural universe to be extremely intriguing.
So kind of how the supernatural world, they conceived of it interacting with the natural world.
And much of their artwork, their sculpture, their paintings, even their architecture, is really just a reflection of the sophistication of that religious system.
And what did they believe they could do?
Did they believe that they could, to put it really crudely, do magic?
No.
No, no, no.
I think about it, and I explain this sometimes to my undergraduates because it's a strange concept.
I always think about it as more of a reciprocal relationship.
So when you go back and people have translated or deciphered different kinds of mythical stories of the Maya, we are only around, we being humans, because Maya deities created us through an act of sacrifice.
And so it's our jobs as humans to give back to those deities to make sure that the natural world that they actually control stays in balance.
So my undergraduates often say to me things like, oh, well, they're just, you know, doing these things to keep the gods happy.
And I say, no, they're not doing it to keep the gods happy.
They're doing these things to keep the gods well, to keep them in good health.
So the natural world stays in balance so that the sun comes up when it should and you get the rain you need, but not too much rain.
Because remember, this is a pre-modern culture.
So if the natural world goes haywire, people die, children starve, you don't get crops that year.
So they were the original environmentalists.
I don't know if I would go that far either, because at the elite levels, their artwork, in particular their architecture, demanded this kind of aesthetic that they created, demanded what we would understand as extreme deforestation of the environment, specifically to make plaster.
So when we look at those giant Maya pyramids, right, in the tourism magazines, they were actually coated in a very, very thick layer of plaster, almost like if you think of that fondant on a wedding cake, And then painted a bright color.
So we think of these pyramids as being gray and stony, but they would have been smooth and sometimes bright red.
But making that plaster takes an insane amount of firewood because you have to burn limestone to create the plaster.
And so huge swaths of the Maya forest were actually deforested for this architectural aesthetic.
Right.
So that's not too eco-friendly, but I guess they wouldn't have known that.
But they did also, though, have an understanding, like I said, of balance between the natural world and the supernatural world.
It's not quite the same thing, I don't think, because one's about maintaining resources in a more responsible way.
The other one is about maintaining the status quo in a responsible way.
I'm reading a headline here.
I just put Maya into a search engine here, just out of interest as you were talking.
One website here is saying UFOs visited the Mayans.
Now, do you think that there's...
There is some kind of otherworldly extraterrestrial connection between the Maya.
And that's one of the reasons why people today are interested in them.
Yeah, we deal with that all the time.
We get questions like that all the time.
And, you know, it's important as scholars of the Maya to have...
Well, you know, I don't mean you, but when we give talks and people in audiences ask that, it's important to kind of be respectful of where they're coming from, right?
And the reason that's important is because the answer leads back to European colonialism and ideologies of racism.
And so it's important to answer the question in a way that you're not accusing the person asking it of being racist, because that's not really where they're coming from.
So what am I trying to say?
When Europeans discovered the Maya area, some of the cities that the Maya had built over the previous centuries and millennia had been abandoned.
Just as in any civilization, people don't necessarily live in the same place over many, many, many centuries, right?
There are political upheaval, there's environmental change, environmental catastrophe of the kind that Amara was just talking about.
So cities become abandoned and population centers move up and down the region, which is what happened in the Maya area.
So Europeans come in and they see these abandoned cities.
And at the same time, the Maya population is declining very, very dramatically as a result of disease.
So, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic, nothing like the kinds of pandemics or epidemics of disease that were sweeping through the Maya area in the 16th century.
The Maya population over the course of about 100 years may have dropped by as much as 80 or 90 percent.
So that meant that there were more cities and towns that were abandoned or were very sparsely populated.
So at some point, Europeans, or now we know, because generations go by, and Europeans see these cities and they see incredible buildings.
They see amazing artwork.
They see hieroglyphic texts that they can't read.
And then they look over the other end of the valley and who's living there?
Who are the Mayas who are left?
They're farmers, right?
They're no longer creating these big cities and creating these hieroglyphs.
And so in that disconnect, a whole bunch of half-wrong or totally wrong ideas emerged and evolved over the centuries.
So you're saying that some of the hieroglyphs, for example, were misinterpreted.
I mean, I'm just reading a piece from a, I have here a piece from a newspaper here in the UK.
And I'll quote you.
In a tomb at Maya city-state Palanke, I think it is, a carving of Pakal, the penultimate ruler of the ancient Mayans, was found appearing to control an upward-facing machine with flames and smoke coming out of the back.
Archaeologists claim this carving actually represented the tree of life or a descent into the underworld, but others would be suggesting, I think, the implication of this is that maybe they were visited, as it's claimed the Egyptians were visited, by something not from this earth.
Yeah, see, the problem, so what Maya scholars, of course, absolutely, you know, to a person, dispute the idea that aliens came and taught the Maya civilization how to be civilized.
But the problem that we have with that is that it is rooted in the idea that the Mayas could not possibly have done that.
That somehow Maya peoples are not smart enough.
So it underestimates their ingenuity.
It devalues and degrades them.
I understand that.
And I would argue that most of the time when you read those headlines or when you see the, I don't know if it's broadcast in the UK, but here in the States we have a show called Ancient Aliens and it traces, you know, supposedly how alien life forms came down and helped people like the Maya build their cities.
When you see those kinds of shows, inevitably, every single time, it's not the aliens going down to visit ancient Rome to help the Romans build their magnificent structures.
It tends to be Amerindian peoples.
It tends to be ancient Egyptian peoples.
There tends to be a kind of racialized element to that discourse that I mean, I think that ancient, there were sightings of UFOs over ancient Rome, but we don't get the stories of them.
I agree with you to the same extent as we get with the Mayans, the Egyptians.
And in a very unintentional way, as scholars have come to know the Maya better and better, our own scholarship, again, unintentionally, has fed into this because we now understand that the Maya, they understood astronomy remarkably well.
So they had their own knowledge base that was based upon observation of the heavens, the stars, the planets.
They built structures that were typically aligned to astronomical phenomena.
So there's a way in which the more we learn about the Maya's own astronomical knowledge, it seems like they have some kind of like alien insight.
So they would have believed if they were not visited by UFOs, and you know that I will have listeners who would dispute that point, but if that didn't happen, they were aware that there might be something out there.
I'm not sure about that.
That's a great question.
And I'm not sure about that.
But at the very least, they were curious as to why.
They were curious.
Oh, yes.
They had full-time specialists.
Full-time job was to be what we would consider in our own society as an astronomer.
Which is pretty damned advanced, isn't it?
It's pretty damned.
There's an intriguing and kind of cruel irony to what Amara is talking about.
Our discovery that the ancient Maya had all this incredible astronomical knowledge that has tended to then feed into the idea that, oh, well, then, you know, the lesson should be, as you just said, how advanced they were.
And instead, the lesson too often becomes, oh, well, that must have been something that they learned from aliens.
In fact, of course, what would aliens be most interested in teaching them about?
How to get from one planet to the other?
And that's not the origin of that idea.
The origin of the idea that aliens came to teach the Maya is earlier ideas that, oh, well, someone must have come because the Mayas couldn't do it themselves.
So maybe it was the lost city of Atlantis and the Atlanteans went there.
Or before that, it was the lost tribes of Israel.
We're going back hundreds of years.
So there's a sort of idea.
They could come up with it themselves.
Right, exactly.
On another topic, then, did they, I've never read anything, and I read newspapers, okay, but I've never read anything about them believing in, for example, ghosts and paranormal manifestations of that kind.
I know, these are great questions.
These are really difficult questions, and mostly we don't know those kinds of things because that's not the sort of things they wrote about.
Right.
So a lot of the texts we have are primarily political in nature, particularly from this classic period that I was talking about earlier.
And we have to say, we have to say that we're going to get into this in the next segment, but a lot of what they wrote was actually destroyed, wasn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
So we'll talk about that in the next segment.
But look, they were a remarkable civilization.
Last question in this part then.
You know, they built these pyramids, pyramidal structures, different from the ones in Egypt, and they had beliefs that went along with them.
What did they believe that they were connecting to?
Just connecting back to the earth?
You mean in building these buildings?
What were they venerating?
Different deities.
It just depends on the structure.
Most of those pyramids, if they have texts inside the little temple on the top, the texts will speak of the patron deity of that particular building.
And the pyramids in the Maya world, really, they're just monumental bases.
And the important part of those structures are those very small temples at the top.
That's where those rituals are going to take place.
And so those pyramids are just really built to lift up that little temple because you have to understand pyramids as being a kind of stage.
There's going to be always a massive plaza in front of the pyramid so people can watch the temple, the religious rituals that are going on on the top of the temple.
And that explains those sort of paved areas that I've always wondered about in front.
Amarit, thank you for that, Matthew.
Fascinating, and I'm learning so much here.
We've got 10 minutes in our final segment.
We can cover a lot of ground in that.
I want to ask you about the Mayan calendar, which everybody talks about.
I also want to ask how they were perceived to have come to an end, but actually didn't.
So we'll get into that in the 10 minutes remaining.
The Mayan calendar.
Let's just talk a little bit about the Mayan calendar because that is a work of ingenuity.
And people say all sorts of things about the Mayan calendar.
Like, for example, it predicted the end of the world at the end of 2012, which didn't happen.
And now they're saying that the end of 2021, December the 21st, could be that particular juncture.
And please, if you're listening to this, do not get spooked or worried or upset.
You know, it's not going to happen, but there are people who are saying these things.
So the significance of the Mayan calendar.
Yeah, we were sort of arguing here in mime over who was going to talk about the calendar.
When you were asking that, I'm pointing at Amar and she's like shaking her head and she's pointing at me.
Sort of Mayan version of spin the bottle.
Who did it point at?
Because it is really, it is very complicated.
And it makes it complex because there's many, multiple calendars that are operating simultaneously.
Most are cyclical calendars.
And there's one that seems to be what we call longitudinal.
So it has a start date, like our own start date of what we call year zero, right?
So that's the one you're talking about.
And Mayanus referred to that particular calendrical system as the long count.
And it started in 3114 BC and just shoots out like an arrow from there.
But much like our own system has a series of kind of internal cycles.
So we have, you know, time for us, for all intents and purposes, starts at year zero, but then we chart our time in cycles of 365 days that are interspersed with seven days, right?
Seven days of the week that are interspersed with the days of the month, so on and so forth.
So the Maya had this system, and just like us, it had its own little internal cycles going on of one day, 20 days, so on and so forth, all the way up into the thousands.
But I always say when we talk about this with undergraduates, I guess there's a most common audience, we do exactly what Amara just did, is talk about our own calendar and say, look how complicated it is.
Our calendar is very complex and has multiple cycles, but our calendar is also full of irregularities.
Like, try explaining to an ancient Maya person why the months have different numbers of days to them, right?
It's complicated.
There's a history to it.
It ultimately doesn't really make any sense.
The Maya, at least, had eliminated that.
Their months had 20 days.
There was no months that had like 18 days or 23 or whatever.
So they had a calendar that is as complex as ours, but also has kind of a logic and structure to it.
Now, the long count, Amara said it began in 3114 BC.
We only know that just by the logic of its numbers.
We don't have any knowledge and nothing has survived from that far back of a group of Maya elders sitting down and saying, let's start the long count.
They almost certainly started it later than that and for reasons we don't know, kind of backed it up to that particular point.
And then it then proceeds forward.
Now, the Maya had a different numbering system, obviously.
They didn't call it 3114.
They called it 130000.
And then over the course of how many years does it end up being?
It's 13 cycles.
The next time that long count comes to 130000 was in our calendar.
It was 2012.
And so there is a basis for that idea that, oh, the long count is coming to an end.
Therefore, that's the end of the Maya world or that's the end of our world.
It's just the end of a cycle.
It's not the end of the world.
It's just the end of a cycle.
It's just the end of a cycle.
It's just like saying in the year 19, when 1999 rolled over into Y2K or 2000, the world was going to end then.
It didn't.
And there was no reason to believe that.
And it was very easy to logically explain, no, these are just numbers and there are historical cultural reasons why those particular numbers are attached to that particular moment in time.
it's exactly the same thing.
I'm just trying to maximize these minutes.
But so for the same reason, people are starting to say now, 21st of December 2020 is going to be, you know, the end of the world.
It isn't.
It's just the end of a cycle.
It's the end of a cycle.
There's no, yeah, we, so the previous, not to, not to, to, um, prompt another book, but our previous book we wrote together was called 2012 and the end of the world, the western roots of the Maya Apocalypse, in which we argue that the Maya in no way were predicting that the world was going to end on this date.
And in fact, the origin of this apocalyptic anxiety is in Western civilization, which is not what we're talking about here, Howard, but I'm sure you can imagine all of the roots that go back and how many times in the course of the last thousand years in the West and how many times in the last century people have believed and come up with a specific date when the world is going to end.
That's our civilization.
That's a story at the heart of how they're thinking.
Just before we get to the story of how the Maya died out, which they didn't, present-day Maya, Mayans, how do they regard those stories about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world?
Do they just laugh?
The ones we do laugh.
The ones we know, the ones we know laugh.
I think they have very kind of mixed, they have a mixed response because on the one hand, they know that it's nonsense.
But on the other hand, this is attention given to their civilization, right?
This is a rec, if you think, there's a way of thinking about this that, oh, wow, let's read about the Maya.
Let's recognize that the Maya existed and maybe recognize that they still exist.
Let's think about the Yucatan Peninsula as a place of Maya civilization, not just a place where we go and get drunk on the beach, right?
It has drawn attention and drawn tourist interest and validation of them.
Validation may be not quite the right word, but it's keeping them in the headlines.
I think so.
I think validation, though, yes, you're right in some sense, because it absolutely made the world aware of how intellectually sophisticated this ancient culture was.
And before the 2012 craziness, I'm not sure the general public had a sense of that.
No, I think you're dead right.
Okay, we have three minutes or less.
How did we get the impression that this highly successful multi-thousand year civilization came to an end?
When if it didn't come to an end, because there are still people around, it certainly went off the boil.
What happened?
You might disagree with that.
Maybe off the boil is a bad way of putting it, but what happened?
No, there's a dramatic shift, and that shift can be linked, I think, most significantly to something that we call the European encounter, which in previous generations would have been called the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
And, you know, as Matthew was discussing earlier, when the Spaniards arrive, there are a lot of these abandoned cities, metropolis.
These are huge cities that are, for all intents and purposes, empty.
And I think that starts a kind of intellectual trend where, even in the 16th century, Spaniards are talking about disappearing Mayas, right, disappearing from these cities, but then also disappearing because of disease.
And so that's going on at the same time that a massive evangelical campaign is happening, right, with the appearance of the Spaniards.
And so there's a really dramatic religious shift that is happening with these people.
And so I think that those two kind of streams come together and this idea of disappearance is built upon that.
So it's kind of double whammy then.
It's a double whammy, exactly.
The reason why the idea persists is because it's such a simple one.
Oh, the Maya disappeared.
Let's go on holiday and we'll go to Chichen Itza and you see this huge city and it's empty.
You maybe not even notice that the people who are going to be able to get it.
And we could say, gee, isn't it so sad?
Those really clever people who built this are all gone now.
Right.
And then, and then they, but the contrary, the explanation as to why they didn't go is a whole series of factors.
And it's hard to do in, you know, in anything less than an hour's, you know, history lecture.
It's like, well, there was a cry, there was an environmental crisis at the end of the classic period.
Then there was Spanish conquest and there was a drop in population.
Then there was the spread of modern European racist ideologies that denigrated indigenous peoples.
And all of these things kind of pile on century after century to give the impression and reinforce the idea that Maya civilization.
And ground them down.
But there are, as you say, and we're coming to the end of this now, sadly, because the clock is always the thing that we have to.
Sadly, and it's not the Mayan calendar, but all of those things conspired to give the impression that they'd gone.
And in fact, the good news is that they are still here.
Millions.
You are trying to.
They're in Belize, Yucatan, all over Guatemala, Honduras.
I mean, the whole Maya area is as populated with Maya peoples now as it was in its absolute peak heyday.
Their population has more than recovered.
And has their civilization changed?
Yes, of course.
But civilizations are constantly changing and evolving.
We shouldn't expect Mayas still to be building stone pyramids and worshiping at the top of temples.
Why should they not have cell phones and be watching television or listening to your show?
And if you doubt, just as a final point, that may be bad philosophy, but maybe philosophy nonetheless, our civilization is going to change because of coronavirus and the experience of it.
Don't kid ourselves, I don't think anything will be quite the same.
And there's a bit of a mile marker here along the road.
That's how these things happen.
That's exactly how these things happen.
Okay, so the book, The Maya, a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, available both sides of the Atlantic?
Yes, absolutely.
Good.
And how do we find out about you?
Have you got a website?
I haven't checked.
Have you both got a website that we could look at?
I don't, but Matthew does.
Go on there, Matthew.
Says MatthewRustl.com.
Well, I've loved this conversation.
I love conversations where I learn stuff, and that's exactly what I've just done.
And thank you so much.
You know, the Maya have been discovered and rediscovered, I think, more times than ABBA.
But I'm really delighted that we've learned so much about these people's rich culture.
It just makes me want to go and visit now even more.
Thank you both.
Very much indeed.
Thank you both.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Great questions.
Thank you.
Well, you know, you can tell that they come from an academic environment because you come out learning something, but you don't feel that you've been to a lesson.
It's been a really nice experience of learning along the way, don't you think?
Like I said, the book is called The Maya, a very short introduction, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari.
And I think it was out originally in the middle of October thereabouts and is, as they said, available worldwide.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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