Lost ‘Hidden Tunnels’ Just Discovered in South America | Luke Caverns

Summary

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Camp Gagnon Podcast Summary

Episode: Lost ‘Hidden Tunnels’ Just Discovered in South America | Luke Caverns
Date: September 30, 2025
Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Luke Caverns, Anthropologist, Archaeologist

Overview

This episode of Camp Gagnon features renowned anthropologist and archaeologist Luke Caverns, who specializes in lost civilizations of the Americas. The conversation dives deep into the mysteries of Incan and pre-Incan technology, the intrigue around undiscovered tunnels in Peru, ancient stonework, and parallels between the civilizations of Mesoamerica, South America, and the ancient Mediterranean. The dialogue is densely packed with history, cultural analysis, scientific curiosity, and a candid peek into the struggles and politics of modern archaeology.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mystery of Incan Civilization and Lost Tunnels

Time: 02:36-16:30

• Incan Origins and Urban Engineering

  • The Inca, emerging around 800 AD in Cusco, developed advanced agriculture (e.g., vast terracing for potatoes), supporting a population in the tens of millions (05:34).
  • Their empire grew from the fertile Sacred Valley, eventually dominating Peru.

• Stonework Excellence and Unsolved Construction Methods

  • Inca ruins feature massive, impeccably fitted stones—like those at Sacsayhuaman and the Palace of Inca Roca—that rival or outdo Egyptian constructions (05:34-08:18).
  • "It's the greatest stonework in all of the ancient world. You think Egypt is good? Once you go to Peru... it completely outclasses." — Luke Caverns (05:34)

• The Chinkanas – Hidden Tunnels Below Cusco

  • Early Spanish chroniclers and the mestizo Garcilaso de la Vega recounted vast underground tunnel systems, the Chinkanas, believed to run under Cusco and the Andes (12:35).
  • Modern archaeological teams—some officially sanctioned, some not—are racing (and feuding) to find them, complicated by cultural politics over who can claim discovery (17:32).

• Cultural Sensitivities

  • Debates on “who built what” are fraught with tension between indigenous pride and the "lost civilization" camp, often mirroring issues in Egyptology (19:43).
  • "Looking for this answer ... and then not even being open to giving credit to the ancestors ... is bizarre." — Luke Caverns (19:48)

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2. Ancient Civilizations and Their Legacy

Time: 21:35-43:43

• Precursor Civilizations and Historical Memory

  • Many Incan (and Egyptian) sources attribute older constructions to a mysterious predecessor.
  • Luke argues that these are likely ancestral but non-Incan peoples—related ethnically, but not the same political or cultural entity (23:07–25:00).
    • "It's the Egyptians calling back on ancient, Ancient, Ancient, ancient Egyptian world ... the Peruvians ... hearkening back to an even more ancient Peruvian civilization." (23:07)
  • The Inca's stonework is partly anti-seismic technology, employing intricate joints, stone nubs, and even llama-fat mortar as earthquake shock absorbers (46:59-50:03).

• Comparison to North American Mounds

  • Similar patterns: present tribes ascribing older earthworks to "the gods"—and archeology confirming they're the same people, thousands of years earlier (22:20).

• Nuances of "Maya" and "Inca"

  • Both "Maya" and "Inca" refer more to political federations or cultures than singular ethnicities, much as "Greek" or "Native American" are broad and often misleading designators (39:53-43:02).

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3. Megalithic Mysteries: Construction, Engineering—and Purpose

Time: 43:10–54:44

• Stone Nubs and Construction Theories

  • Mysterious nubs on Peruvian, Egyptian, and even Cambodian stones: possible engineering aids for moving/pivoting large blocks, but the full answer remains elusive (43:10–46:05).
  • "There's something about the way we're wired ... that you mess with [massive stone] long enough, that's going to come out that's useful." — Luke Caverns (43:43)

• Catastrophic Ruins at Tiwanaku, Bolivia

  • Site appears "blown apart"—possibly by post-Columbian dismantling, but nature and intent are lost to time (50:25-53:40).

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4. Machu Picchu: Observatory, Academy, or Sacred Hideaway?

Time: 54:19–71:56

• Layered Histories & Construction Phases

  • Most of Machu Picchu was built in the Late Inca era (1300s), but elements suggest far earlier activity (56:30–57:01).
  • The only "megalithic" section is the so-called Temple of the Moon, prompting speculation about one-off precursor builders vs. Inca accomplishment (57:25–58:42).

• Functions of Machu Picchu

  • Likely never a large city; population estimates are under 1,000 (62:22).
  • Its advanced aqueducts and multi-purpose reflection pools suggest a focus on scientific observation and learning (62:07–63:45).
  • "I very much get a Library of Alexandria feel. This is a place of study. ... All the brightest minds in the Inca world were right here." — Luke Caverns (63:45)

• Strategic Abandonment & Secrecy

  • Unlike Vilcabamba, Machu Picchu was meticulously abandoned as the Spanish advanced—Inca records never mention it by name (68:27–69:07).
  • "Nobody—not one Inca person ... ever even uttered the actual name of Machu Picchu. So nobody knows its significance, why it was so significant, and why the Inca people ... did not even utter its name." — Luke (68:32).

• Khipus: The Lost Inca Language

  • Instead of murals or inscriptions, Incas used knotted strings, khipus, to store administrative and possibly literary knowledge—undeciphered to this day (78:41–80:35).

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5. Maya Civilization: Parallels with Greece & Broken Knowledge

Time: 55:35–103:41

• City-States and Cultural Cohesion

  • Maya civilization resembled ancient Greece—a patchwork of autonomous yet culturally linked city-states, sharing language (via universalized hieroglyphic scripts) and pantheon but often at odds (39:53–43:02).
  • "If you want to know how to think about the Maya, just think of the Greeks. It's exactly the same. Completely." — Luke (42:36)

• Astronomy, Architecture, and Calendars

  • Maya cities and monuments reflect celestial alignments, most decoding of which comes from rare surviving codices, especially the Dresden Codex (98:08–101:48).
  • The Dresden Codex, rescued during WWII, revealed that Maya "temple mistakes" actually encoded precise astronomical observations (98:08–101:48).
    • "By understanding this codex ... when you cut off the canopy and look at the way buildings are facing the night sky ... all of the cities are a celestial reflection." (98:12)

• Destruction of Written Knowledge

  • The Spanish under Diego de Landa destroyed almost all Maya written records—only three codices survived, one of which became the key for breakthroughs in Maya epigraphy (96:43–97:56).
  • "He [Diego de Landa] sent out all these expeditions to gather all of the Maya codexes and he put them in these multiple pyres ... and then he just threw matches on him and burned it all." (94:58)

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6. Mysteries of Ritual, Science, and Philosophy

Time: 85:07–107:39

• Resonant Frequencies and Architectural Acoustics

  • Ancient temples (especially in Mexico) display engineered acoustic phenomena—like the "Quetzal echo" at Chichen Itza (87:03–89:37), though archaeologists debate intentionality.

• Loss, Secrecy, and Sacred Knowledge

  • The ancients often failed to record (or intentionally hid) key secrets—like mummy-making in Egypt, or khipu reading in Peru—either for ritual reasons or to prevent rival civilizations copying their most sacred arts (91:40–92:31).

• Technology as Power

  • Mastery of the stars wasn't just for farming: knowing the cycles could provide military, philosophical, or ritual advantages (104:33–104:51).
  • "A cold war to perpetually understand ... how you can use it to your benefit." — Luke (104:44)

• Parallels in Collapse: Maya and Greeks

  • Both highly advanced, fractious city-state civilizations fell to more unified, expansionist neighbors (Aztecs and Romans, respectively) (104:58–107:39).
  • "Both the Greeks and the Maya, highly sophisticated ... made up of city states ... get conquered by an empire that sweeps in from the west. Whoa." — Luke (107:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Incan Stonework:
  "It's the greatest stonework in all of the ancient world. You think Egypt is good? Once you go to Peru... it just completely outclasses."
  — Luke Caverns (05:34)

• On Cultural Sensitivities in Archaeology:
  "…not even being open to giving credit to the ancestors of the native people who live there...is bizarre."
  — Luke Caverns (19:48)

• On the Mystery of Machu Picchu's Abandonment:
  "Nobody—not one Inca person … ever even uttered the actual name of Machu Picchu. So nobody knows its significance, why it was so significant, and why the Inca piece people explicitly went out of their way to not even utter its name."
  — Luke Caverns (68:32)

• On the Destruction of Written History:
  "Diego de Landa burned all of it. …And he left us with three codices left. Three."
  — Luke Caverns (96:43)

• On Libraries Lost and Found:
  "I very much get a Library of Alexandria feel. This is a place of study."
  — Luke Caverns on Machu Picchu (63:45)

• On Parallels between Maya and Greece:
  "If you want to know how to think about the Maya, just think of the Greeks. It's exactly the same. Completely."
  — Luke Caverns (42:36)

• On Ancient Technology:
  "The blocks don't shatter because they're pressed against each other. You have a shock absorber between the stones. …Almost like a cartilage…"
  — Luke Caverns (49:07)

• On the Dresden Codex:
  "He grabbed that and held onto it, and it protected it through the bombing. And he's the dude that later on cracked the Maya code and learned to read that Codex."
  — Luke Caverns (00:00, 97:56)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |---------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:36 | Luke arrives—background and anthropological philosophy | | 05:34 | Incan stonework, precision, and mysteries | | 12:35–16:30 | Garcilaso de la Vega, Chinkanas, lost tunnels of Cusco | | 17:32–21:35 | Politics of Inca archaeology & indigenous rights | | 23:07–25:00 | Ancestral civilizations and memory | | 39:53–43:02 | Maya/Greek civilization parallels | | 43:10–46:05 | Stone nubs and building techniques | | 46:59–50:03 | Earthquake-proof architecture; use of llama-fat mortar | | 54:19–62:07 | Machu Picchu: journey, population, stonework, aqueducts | | 68:27–69:07 | Machu Picchu's enigmatic abandonment and lost original name | | 78:41–80:35 | Incan khipus—knotted cord language still undeciphered | | 87:03–89:37 | Acoustic phenomena at ancient pyramids, intentional or not? | | 94:58–97:56 | Spanish destruction of Maya codexes, Dresden Codex survival | | 98:12–101:48 | Cosmological alignments in Mesoamerican cities explained | | 104:33–104:51 | Technological advantage & cold war analogy | | 104:58–107:39 | Maya and Greek city-states: strengths, downfalls, philosophy | | 112:25–113:39 | Why Greco-Roman writings survived & Mesoamerican didn't |

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Tone & Style

• The exchange balances enthusiastic storytelling with careful scientific skepticism—Luke frequently distinguishes between evidence, plausible theory, and speculation.
• Both host and guest express wonder, humility, and a thirst for discovery, making even complex anthropology accessible and entertaining.
• Throughout, the episode connects big historical questions to present-day issues of cultural identity, preservation, and the universal human quest to understand our origins.

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For anyone fascinated by ancient technology, cultural mysteries, and the politics of discovery, this episode offers both deep dives and thoughtful context—bridging the gap between the ruins of Peru and the wider story of human civilization.

Transcript

[Luke Caverns]

This is what I'm in right now. I haven't talked about this publicly. When the Americans are bombing the hell out of Dresden. There was a historical cultural art museum there, and one of the Maya codices was being held there. And one of the young boys working at the library, he was told to go gather some of the artifacts and bring them down in the basement to protect him. And one of the first ones he grabbed was the little Maya Codex. And he grabbed that and held onto it and protected it through the bombing. And he's the dude that later on cracked the Maya code and learned to read that Codex.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is Luke Caverns. He's an anthropologist, archaeologist and is on the hunt for lost American civilizations. And today he reveals the secret of Incan technology, from their impossible masonry and pyramid construction to why Machu Picchu may have been an ancient college for understanding the world.

[Luke Caverns]

There's a city called Vilcabamba that the American explorer Hiram Bingham was looking for. And Vilcabamba is the city that the last Inca emperor FL fled to. This is where the story gets interesting, because Hiram Bingham was looking for that in the Peruvian Amazon and accidentally found Machu Picchu. He never found the city of Vilcabamba. This episode is fascinating.

[Mark Gagnon]

We touch on a lot of ancient civilization and ancient technology, but we go all across the board discussing history of the Mesoamerican tribes all the way from Central America to South America. And no one is better to talk about it than Luke. He's a fantastic storyteller and extremely knowledgeable and I mean, this guy's dedicated his entire life to this topic. So I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed having it. Without further ado, sit back, relax, and welcome to King. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a.

[Luke Caverns]

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[Mark Gagnon]

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[Luke Caverns]

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[Mark Gagnon]

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[Luke Caverns]

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[Mark Gagnon]

Luke Caverns. How are you, sir?

[Luke Caverns]

What's up, man? We've been talking about doing this for way too long. Too long.

[Mark Gagnon]

Honestly. I mentioned to you in our text that our initial DMs are now ancient history.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I think we've been talking since, like 2023.

[Mark Gagnon]

Let the record show I'm an OG Luke Havern supporter. Maybe at that point you're already pretty popping. But I mean, earlier than Rogan, you know what I mean? I was, I was, I was watching before. I was watching before you went on Rogan. You know what I mean? I'm a real one. But yeah, dude, I'm just like a, A casual anthropology nerd and I love reading anthropology books. And then of course, by, you know, the work of, you know, Graham Hancock and, you know, folks like him. I have become fascinated with ancient civilizations and I think similarly. And you, much more, in a much more robust way, have really taken that on as like, a life calling to, you know, actually go to places and dig into not only what you can see and feel and sort of, like, touch by being in these places, but also the actual data and, like, science behind it. Right. Having, like, an anthropology background, you can actually be like, okay, here's what's really going on. And I think you straddle, like, a really cool lane for, I think, younger generations of, like, explorers that are excited about the world and I think, ultimately answering like, the biggest questions about what humanity is. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? And then the biggest question that I don't know if any of us can answer is, where are we going? But we'll, we'll focus on the first two for now. So I'm curious.

[Luke Caverns]

You.

[Mark Gagnon]

You had even mentioned in the text, which is so funny. You're like, dude, I'm happy to be in New York.

[Luke Caverns]

I was like, really?

[Mark Gagnon]

You're like, yeah, bro, I'm mostly in different countries where I can't really speak the language and I'm trying to, like, get by.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So you just, you said that you were recently just in Peru. Yep. And where, where in Peru? In. In Lima.

[Luke Caverns]

I was in Lima for a couple days, and then, then I've spent most of my time in the. In Cusco.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And what, what brought you down there? What were you, what were you going to look At.

[Luke Caverns]

So usually. Well, so I, I work for an organization called the, called the Maya Exploration center and basically we just take people on like adventure travel tours and, and while I'm there, I spend a little bit wherever I'm going and researching things that I'm interested in, making videos for YouTube. And then a couple times a year I just travel somewhere completely on my own. Nothing to do with, with touring or anything like that. So that's why I was there. And then my poor wife, I still haven't taken her on a honeymoon in like two years. So that was like, it was like our second pre honeymoon. So I took her to Peru. She just, I was telling you she graduated from dental school and so I took her with me.

[Mark Gagnon]

She paid respect. Yeah. Now that she's a doctor. You know what I mean?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I was down there researching the Inca and all the, you know, crazy stonework that's, that's in Peru and, and just taking some people around Peru. Yeah, I love it down there.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. What can you tell me about the Inca?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh gosh, man, there's so much, you know, we know a lot about the Inca. Essentially they seem to appear sometime around, sometime around like 800 AD. The Kingdom of Cusco emerges in the current day city of Cusco. And they start out as a kingdom and they exist in this really fertile valley. They call it the Sacred valley. And so you've got these terraces. Have you ever seen the terraces in Peru? It's like essentially they square out a part of the mountainside and it'll go, I mean, dude, literally goes from one horizon down to the other from the bottom of a mountain all the way to the top of the mountain and it's just farmland, like these lines of farms. And so they're raising a lot of potatoes here. I mean they're, man, they're making so much food in ancient times that they can feed like 20 million people just in this little valley. And so the kingdom of Cusco, which are the Inca people, they control that. And so over time all that wealth bubbles over like it just, you know, like the pot overflows and they eventually become an empire and they take over all of Peru. And so Cusco is just a, just an incredible town. I think that the most interesting thing about the Inca world that everyone is obsessed with is the stonework that's there. So maybe you've heard of or seen Sacsayhuaman, which is, you know, the stones that are like, I mean, there are some stones that are so big you couldn't fit them in this room, right? Just absolutely gigantic. Nobody really knows how exactly they cut them or shaped them into the shapes that they're in. Just so enormous. And then down inside the city, there's stonework that's not this large, irregularly shaped polygonal stonework, but we call it imperial style. And they are square or rectangular stones that are just perfectly cut alongside each other. And it's the greatest stonework in all of the ancient world. You think Egypt is good? Once you go to, when you go to Peru, you're going to see stonework there that just, I mean, dude, it, it just completely. Other than one, one or maybe two temples in Egypt, just completely outclasses. Yeah, yeah. There's just. You could click anywhere. There's all different kinds of stonework. So that, so that one right there, that's the 12 angled stone. That's the 12 angle stone at the palace of Inca Roca. And it's just amazing. So they call it granite, but it's actually gray andesite. And it's just the, the precision with which these things are cut or, or they're shaped is just. It's really amazing. And seeing it in person is, is quite, it's just, it's just quite mind blowing.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, it's remarkable. Like, how big are these stones specifically? Like the cuts of these.

[Luke Caverns]

This stone is probably a similar size to this table. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably the face of it now, I would say it goes in maybe two feet or so. So it's about the size of this table. It's about two feet thick. And then all of the stones are just perfectly aligned to every stone around them. And there's not one stone in all of the Inca world that is, you know, there's no two stones that are identical, so they're all shaped to fit alongside the stones around them. And it's just, it's just amazing, man. I mean, so when the. I guess the place where the mystery comes from with these is, is it's kind of like if you go to the Inca realm or if you go to Egypt, there's the debate whether did the Inca really do this or was it. Did this happen a long time ago, you know, thousands of years ago? Did the Egyptians really do this or did this happen thousands of pre Kingdom? Was there a prehistoric civilization that did this?

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up, people? Let's take a break really quick because I want to talk to the fellas.

[Luke Caverns]

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[Mark Gagnon]

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[Luke Caverns]

ABC Wednesday. Shifting Gears is back.

[Mark Gagnon]

He has arisen. Tim Allen and Cat Dennings return in.

[Luke Caverns]

Television'S number one new comedy, what what? With a star studded premiere, including Jenna Elfman, Nancy Travis and. Hey buddy. A big Home Improvement reunion welcome. Oh boy, that guy's a tool shifting gears. Season premiere Wednesday, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. Lowe's knows how to help make your home holiday ready for less. Get select Style Selections vinyl flooring for just $1.99 per square foot and have it installed before the festivities begin. Our team can help you every step of the way. See a Lowe's red vest associate or visit Lowes.comholidayinstall to get started. Lowe's we help you save basic install only date restrictions applied subject to availability installed by independent contractors. See associate for details. Contiguous us only the way the wedge that initially starts that conversation, at least in Peru, was you had Spaniards who were there early on. And you know, most Spaniards were just invested in conquering these, you know, native kingdoms and plundering them for all their gold. Gold and everything. And then there were some people, like there were friars and priests and stuff that actually care about the natives and wanted to convert them to Christianity. And then you had some people who maybe like me and you would you. And I don't really. I mean, yeah, having a bunch of gold would be cool, but I'm not really in the place in society where I can take advantage of that. I'm also not like a priest either. I'm not baptizing people, but I can see the significance of these people. And we should know more about this. Like, just a general interest in that, in the history and the anthropology. There were people there that had those interests. So one of them is the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish. I forget, was he a captain or. He was a general. Anyways, his name was, I wanted to say Gaspar de Carbajal, but it's not him. It's Garcilaso de la Vega. And so he's the son of an Inca princess. And he essentially writes this account of his childhood up until the point he was like 18 or 19, or maybe he was 21, that he grew up in in the city of Cusco. And dude, it's a book that's like this thick, this big, it's huge book. It's called the Royal Commentaries of the Incas. And it's essentially him talking about his childhood. And there's all these strange things that he talks about. And when he talks about the stone work up at Sacsay Woman, he says that the Indians that were there. I'm using the term Indians because that's what he says. He says the Indians were that were there would speak of that the gods or That a race before, like. Like an earlier people had placed these stones here, that the stones had always been there. And then they speak about underneath. Underneath Sacsay woman. He remembers going into a place that. That was called the Chinkanas, which was this huge tunnel system that would go underneath Saks. So you have Cusco here, and up on top of this hillside is this fortress of Sacsayhuaman. And so they're both in Cusco. But he talks about how there were these tunnels that you could enter in up at Sacsayhuaman and go underneath the city of Cusco. And then from there, these tunnels would go out into the Andes. So, like, under the ground for thousands of miles. I mean, or hundreds of miles, at least. Must have been. He talks about that. There's so much more that he talks about and other Spaniards talk about and that people in. I would say. So he. So that book came out in 1609. There's another account written by, like, an anonymous. We don't know who the author was, but it's a Jesuit chronicler from the year 1600. And then there's Cieza de Leon, I think, in the 1650s, he writes his account of Cusco, and there's several others, but they just give you these glimpses into things that were going on in Cusco. And, like, it'll just be one sentence. He'll say, the Indians say that the stones had always been there or something, something akin to that. And there'll be multiple instances, and then they just move on, you know, and it's like they almost don't even realize that they just wrote down, like, this huge mystery, right? And so by the 1800s, over 200 years later, people go back and read this, and they're like, wait, this is weird, right? And so from the 1800s, well, people been looking for the Chinkanas, this tunnel system, since the 1800s. But there's all kinds of other things that people are looking for for almost 200 years now that are highlighted, or at least spurred on to us from the Spanish chroniclers that tell us that there's something more here than just like, oh, the Inca made this. Right?

[Mark Gagnon]

That's interesting.

[Luke Caverns]

That's where this whole mystery starts. That's why people are interested in Peru.

[Mark Gagnon]

I've heard similar things about the Egyptians that, like, sometimes the New Kingdom Egyptians will talk about, you know, Giza or any of the other pyramids, and they'll say, oh, yeah, this came from the people before us, or something to that effect. And it's like, oh, are they referencing old kingdom, Egyptians, which is, you know, a thousand years before or whatever. Or is it from the proto society that you know, was before them? But it's a similar kind of phrasing where like these stones have always been here. Like these stones are from the people that were before us, which you can imagine if you are Incan, which this guy, you know, ethnically, you know, obviously was mixed like Spanish and Incan, but has, I would imagine that they would have some type of reverence for their people and they would say like, no, no, no, we did this. So I'm curious where that comes from. Right? Like, is it a, is it almost more respectful to your culture if you say like, oh, this came from before us, or is it an actual historical account that oh no, this was already here and no one really knows how it happened, you know?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So this is something that's happening right now with the Chinkanas. And so there's multiple teams in Cusco that are looking for these tunnels. And in fact I'm the, I'm the face of the English speaking campaign, like the crowdfunding to do this. We just launched it last week. And then I've got a, I'm working on a video for the Cusco's Ministry of Culture right now. Like a crowdfunding video. But there's, it's, it's highly debated over who actually discovered them or who is supposed to be able to get the credit. Because the team that I'm working with is the team that's actually licensed by the Ministry of Culture to be carrying out these excavations. There's another team that's not licensed to be able to do this. And the reason that the feud happens is because the team that's not licensed or they don't have the, they don't have the permits or whatever to be able to dig for the tunnels and scan for them. It's a, it's a very complicated subject. I don't know all the details of it, but apparently it's because their motives, the team that doesn't have the permit is they believe that it was a lost civilization, a pre Inca, maybe pre, pre Peruvian native culture. Right. And then so the Ministry of Culture in Peru is like, no, your whole objective here completely insult cults, our ancestral heritage. Like why would we give you this permit to be able to do this when you don't even think that we did? Like, like the indigenous people did this. Right. And it's, it's kind of like where that comes from is it's, it's a Backlash for the complete annihilation of the native world. Right. During the colonial period. So now you have people there that are completely 100 full blooded Inca, you know, speaking, still speaking Quechua, the language. And they're tired and there's a lot, I should say there's a lot of white people that work on this other team that wants the permits. So they come in looking for something and they're saying, yeah, we want to come into Cusco and dig here. But we don't think that the, we don't think that the Inca are responsible for this. And the Inca are like, excuse me, you know, so it's kind of like you have a lot of this race.

[Mark Gagnon]

Cultural politics getting in the way of actual good archeology and good history.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And it's kind of like as someone who, you know, I know a lot about ancient Egypt. It's a, it's like my, I don't know, like a passion of mine. Right. But I'm, but I'm educated in. And I would say my specialty is the pre Columbian world. Like, you know, native and studying Native Americans. And in the time I've spent studying it, I've learned to really learn to kind of sympathize with that. Like I first would sort of roll my eyes like, ah, they're not trying to erase you. They just don't think that you did this, you know, whatever. And so I'd spend more time learning about, you know, the colonial world and everything. And I was like, okay, this actually is a real argument like you know, saying, looking for something that looking to find this answer to this ancient mystery and then not even being open to giving credit to the, to the ancestors of the native people who live there. Yeah. Is bizarre. Like, and the more I get into it, the more I'm like, yeah, that kind of is a colonial mindset. Like, okay, I get it now. And it just, it's. But it took years of me being in it to sort of, for it to sort of set in. But then you have the backlash of like, like, you know, people say that way of thinking is like too woke, you know, whatever. It's like, well, man, history is really, really complicated. Yeah, I've heard it said that history.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is a different country. You know what I mean? That like if you try to ascribe like your modern day morals onto it, it's like, dude, it's a different world. It fundamentally like ethically was completely different. And by trying to politicize it and then letting that get in the way of the work, you're doing seems like is would be fraught with issues, and that's why I like the way you're approaching. It's like, no, no, let's just actually figure out where these things are, what they were used for, and, you know, from that, we can deduce, like, who created them. Right?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of. This is the way that I would. This is the way that I would describe what I think is happening is I think it's possible that the Inca are not responsible for everything that's in Cusco or at Sacsayuaman or Machu Picchu. You know, there's a lot of amazing stonework there. And there. There are Spanish chroniclers that talk about the Inca giving credit for the stonework to some precursor people. Right. You know, they say that the stones were always there. There's even mound sites. I think. I think this is a great example. In. In the eastern United States, there are giant mounds that. That are out here on the east coast.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is this like the Serpent Mound?

[Luke Caverns]

Serpent Mound, plus a million others. Maybe a million. Literally a million others. And there are European explorers going through North America. This is very, like, I never see podcast people talking about North America, but there are European explorers going through that learn to communicate with the natives. And they say, who built these mounds? And the natives go, the gods made them. The mounds were always here. Okay, well, that doesn't mean that it was. Yes, it does mean it was entirely, entirely different civilization. But archeology has showed us when we excavated all that, the people who made those are the ancestors of these people five to 9,000 years ago. Right. So not the same civilization, a completely different people, but ethnically, they are connected to each other.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

And so what I think is happening in Peru and what I think is happening in Egypt is it's the Egyptians calling back on ancient, Ancient, Ancient, ancient Egyptian world and, like, hearkening back to it. So it was the. It was always the Egyptians that did it. It wasn't like a precursor. People that are of a completely different race. And for the Peruvians, for the Inca, when the Inca are saying, you know, the gods built these, these were always here. Well, they're probably hearkening back to an even more ancient Peruvian civilization. Right. That's what I think is actually happening there. So it's really a mix of both.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's fascinating. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, that's actually a great distinction that the Inca is almost a nationality. Right. Like, that's like a federalized version of the people that are there, and they Built an empire. But then there's an ethnic heritage of whatever you want to call that. It's just the people of the land. Right?

[Luke Caverns]

Like, yeah. And the Inca are late comers. They're. They're all right.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is 800.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, 800. 800.

[Mark Gagnon]

There were people there for however many thousands of years.

[Luke Caverns]

The, the earliest evidence that we. I say we. The earliest evidence that that is recorded, that they found archaeological evidence for. But here's the problem is it would be like, it would be like trying to get the permit to do huge excavations in New York City to try to find like the most ancient evidence of habitation. You know, hard that would be to do that here. Like how much of the infrastructure you'd have to. Yeah. You know, dig up. So they found a little bit of evidence of people as far back as 2 or 3000 BC in, in Cusco. So people have been living there for a long time because it's a very advantageous place to live. Like, people identified it thousands of years ago that it's a great place and people just always live there. But those very first people were not Inca. Right. Like the civilization of Cusco did not exist. It's just. It's the prehistoric precursors to what will eventually become later on.

[Mark Gagnon]

Likely the ethnic ancestor.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's a great distinction.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And that's kind of the way I feel about Egypt is it's like. So I'm sure you've heard the conversations of Zep Tepi and the King's list. And the King's list goes back 27,000 years ago. And then people, you know, some people will say, well, this is, you know, the Egyptians talking about, you know, they have this 27,000 long year history and they come from this ancient civilization. So there was another people that did this and often that gets wrapped up with Atlantis. But there is a distinction between, like Zep Tepe is not Atlantis. Those are two different things. But yeah, it's, it's very interesting. I was having a conversation with Julian about this and he has a good saying where he's like, yeah, when we talk about history, the further back you go, the less details, you know, so it becomes really easy to skip centuries like this. But if you were Talking about the 1900s, man, you could study your whole life and not fully understand the 1900s. But. And it's so, it's funny how cavalier we talk about, you know, that's just one century ago. It's so. It's weird how cavalier we are about like 47 centuries ago. You know, I was just talking to.

[Mark Gagnon]

An Egyptologist, and he was like, oh, yeah. You know, there are some pharaohs in this period. They didn't rule for very long. And I was looking at, like, the dates of, like, their. The listing of the pharaohs, and it was like, seven years, 10 years.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

I was like, dude, that's a whole presidential. Two terms. You know what I mean? Imagine if you were just like, oh, yeah, Obama, he didn't roll very long. It'd be like. No, I mean, it was a massive moment in US History. Like, it really meant a lot to the people.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly right.

[Mark Gagnon]

And you just kind of brush it off. Like four of those in a row, you're like, yeah, these guys didn't matter.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And there's. There's so much nuance there. Yeah, yeah. Was this the Egyptologist you had on the show?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Dr. Manning.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So I'm curious with the tunnels specifically in Cuzco, do we know of any of them? Have we. Have any of them been discovered with lidar?

[Luke Caverns]

Not yet, no. Well, okay, so they're running gpr, so ground penetrating radar, and they see pockets in the ground, but they're deeper than they thought. And so as they're excavating down, they keep running the GPR inside the excavation hole, and the cavity is still below them. So they're trying to find it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is it possible that with this gpr, that. That's like an aquifer or. Like, is it possible?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay, so they might just be drilling into the ground, like, oh, we're gonna find a tunnel. And they're like, ah, we found the water table.

[Luke Caverns]

Yep. Yeah, it's very possible.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, that's. That's tricky.

[Luke Caverns]

And, yeah, they're just. Man, they're just, like, throwing darts in the dark. Like, it's. Yeah. No one has seen these tunnels since the Spanish chroniclers. Nobody really knows what happened to him. Like, there's all kinds of stories from. From the early 1800s to, like, the 1980s of people who supposedly saw him, people who were supposedly taken into the tunnels, but yet they're always sworn to secrecy. They say they saw things in them and they can never talk about where the tunnels were. But we know that they're. I mean. I mean, I feel very confident in the fact that they're real. Like Garcia Laso de la Vega, like, the way he talks about seeing them as a kid, the details are very exact. And he. He doesn't harp on it. He doesn't make this big thing out of the tunnel.

[Mark Gagnon]

You know, obviously the tunnel.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly, exactly. It's the way he talks about it. Now, if there were a whole chapter and he's going on and on and on about how amazing it was, how cool it was, and blah, blah, blah, if he's really building it up, then I might be more spectacular. It's speculative, but. No, he's just kind of like mentions it as if anyone would know about it. Right. Does he mention what they were used for? No, no, he doesn't mention what they were used for.

[Mark Gagnon]

Could you speculate?

[Luke Caverns]

Well, every pre Columbian site, I shouldn't say every, but a lot of pre Columbian sites, major ones, are built over natural caverns in the ground. So when we call them tunnels, my guess is they're modified caverns, you know, and the Inca just go in and renovate it and turn it into a huge thing. Right. And like, maybe they do actually make tunnels that branch off from this cave system. But ancient pre Columbian cities a lot of times are built over the top of caves and we don't really understand why. You heard of Teotihuacan, the Pyramid of the Sun Moon and the Temple of Quetzalcoat or the Temple of the Feathered Serpent? Huge pyramids in Mexico, those are built over cave. Cave systems. There are caves at Chichen Itza. There's a good night. There's a cenote right underneath the Great Pyramid at Chichen Itza. Cenote? Yeah, it's just a different kind of cave. It's like a sinkhole where, you know, probably millions of years ago the. The land base basically just falls into this hole into the ground and there's these huge rivers that go into ground. Anyways, it's a cave. And then there's a site called Yashilan that's got caves like the pyramids are built onto these hillsides and in the hillsides there are caves inside of them. There's another site called Balam Ku that has this amazing cave underneath. It's like this, this mouth that opens up of this Maya Tem, it's in Campeche, Mexico. And this mouth opens up and you go down into this cave and. And they say it goes like 500 yards back and had all these burials in it. And oddly enough, when I was there, they told me that no one had been in it since 1995. I don't know why. These are very sacred things, but man, it's literally all over the pre Columbian world that sites are built over the top of massive caves. Why? Oh, the site of Mitla is built over a mitla Mexico, is built over a cave, which is a modified cave that's turned into tunnels and labyrinths now. And there's another. There's a Francisco Borgoa, who was a Portuguese explorer. He went down in those caves in, like, 1674. And he says that, like, the wind would. The wind would whistle through the tunnels, and it was so cold, it would blow out their oil lamps. And they said that the smell was so putrid that they thought that it must have been the gateway to hell. And so they covered up all the entrances to the tunnels and built a church over it. And so now a team there is trying to find the tunnels, the entrance to the tunnels. So all over now we're talking about Cusco. That's in Peru.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

But Mitla is up in Mexico. Right. So it's all over the Americas that when Native Americans find a large cave system, they build a city on top of it. And, man, we don't know why they did that. That's fascinating. But it's such a. It's such a universal thing. It's just everywhere. Everywhere that there are caves and you can build a city on top of it. It happens. And we don't really know why exactly that is. There's so much speculation, because the way that a Native American in Mesoamerica, which is like Mexico and Central America, might view a cave, would be inherently different than a Peruvian might view a cave in Mesoamerica. They call them Xibalba or Lyoba, which means the underworld.

[Mark Gagnon]

I remember that from Ro Del Dorado.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. And so they thought that. They thought it was like a gateway to the underworld. And so you would have underworld priests that would go down there and perform rituals of which we don't really understand what these rituals were. Or the king might. If there was. If it was a civilization that had kings, and it would kind of go back and forth between, like, a priest class and just a king, and which. That's a fascinating discussion in itself. But, you know, we think that the king would go. He might be wearing, like, a certain garb, and he would go down into the underworld and perform some kind of ritual and come back up wearing something different and take part in some kind of parade to do something and for some kind of significance that we don't understand. It's like, dude, it's just a completely lost world. The. The pre Columbian Americas, it was a insanely sophisticated world that was just completely eviscerated by disease. And we lost all of the context to this. I mean, you walk around A Maya city. Like, I could take you to a place called Yashilan. It's awesome. It's like being in Indiana Jones there, or more like Tomb Raider. It feels like Tomb Raider. And you're walking around these temples and you know that the people who built these temples are incredibly intelligent and that every single little detail of the temples is important and we don't know anything about it. Yashilan starts in about. So despite what some people might think, we actually have a pretty good timeline for the ancient Americas because they did a really good job of making it pretty easy to, to carbon date things, so, and, and to know the chronology. So like, like in Egypt, they built the pyramids in such a way where the pyramid could be robbed. You could go in and out of the pyramid. Right. If you could put a body in it. If the pyramid was a tomb and you put a body in it, which is highly debated. And, and, and I have a, I have a particular opinion on this that I have not met anyone that, that shares. But we can talk about it when.

[Mark Gagnon]

We get to Egypt. We'll get into that.

[Luke Caverns]

But, you know, the Egyptians didn't do a very good job of building pyramids for. Wow. This is actually something I thought about, about, like, if they wanted to build a pyramid that was just a tomb and no one could ever break into the tomb, they could have done it. They could have done it the way that the Mesoamericans did it. So anyways, the Mesoamericans, what they would do is the pyramid would start out half as tall and the, the king would live in the palace on top of the pyramid. And then when he died, his palace would be turned into a tomb chamber and he'd be laid to rest in it, and they'd build a whole new pyramid on top of it. So it was impossible to break. So it was completely preserved forever. So we know when we break into that tomb chamber and you date his bones, you know exactly how old he, how old this guy is, and you know exactly how old the structure above him must be. Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

So, so we have a very good understanding of the chronology of Mesoamerica. So Yashilan here begins about 200 AD, although there must have been people living there before that. But like, the kingdom really grows from there and it goes until about 850 or 900, so about 700 years. And, and this is Mexico. Mexico, yeah, along the Usamasinto river. So right across the river from Guatemala. And, and so think about this. This is something I think is crazy. Is like this Civilization starts in 200 AD and it falls somewhere around 800 to 900. That feels like it's kind of recent to us. But what I've learned is when I study the pre Columbian world, that's exceptionally far away because they, they fell 600 years before Columbus arrived. Like an entire civilization rose and fell. And then 600 years would go by and these jungles are being covered up or these ruins are being covered up by the jungle. And then Columbus arrives.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

So like, like that happened. That happened hundreds of times to hundreds of different civilizations throughout the Americas where they would rise and fall and it would be a, you know, nearly a thousand years or thousands of years until Europeans would arrive.

[Mark Gagnon]

We might be closer. I mean, I have to check my math on this. We might be closer to Columbus today than they were to Columbus when they fell.

[Luke Caverns]

You know what I mean?

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, if it's 1492. Right. Like, it would be like not far off, which we think about Columbus, really. Oh, that's ancient history. These people were twice as old twice as when they fell.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, that's remarkable.

[Luke Caverns]

There's so much.

[Mark Gagnon]

And what they were building in 200, I mean, even just these buildings here are just like unbelievable.

[Luke Caverns]

It's amazing. Well, in the Maya world had already existed for well over 2000 years leading up to this. So it's. The pre Columbian world is just, it's just amazing, man. It's so dense. There's so much mystery and there's so much that we don't understand. Like, and that's why I kind of. My answer to a lot of things about the pre Columbian world will be like, well, this is what I've seen, this is what it's like when you go there. But ultimately, I don't know, it's actually a lost civilization, a lost world. Right. It's just a lost world.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you need help pitching your tents. Yes. And that's what we do over here at camp. Maybe you're, I don't know, in line waiting for a concert somewhere and you just need something to lean on. May. Who knows, maybe you just need help pleasing the special man or woman in your life. And Bluechew is going to help you lay it down, okay? It's got all the active ingredients that are in like Viagra Cialis. But is the chew okay? And it's an amazing service that's coming straight to your door. And for the listeners of this very program, they are going to get their first month of bluechew for free. All you need to use is the promo code G A G N o n. And you'll have them gagging. You know I'm talking about, you know, I'm, you know I'm saying, my boy. So go to bluechew.com and try the promo code Gagnon. G a G, N o n. And you're going to get your first month free. All you got to do is pay $5 for shipping. That's like a coffee. Okay, so to skip your morning cold brew and instead get that hard brew for an entire month, yes, that is. @bluechew.com use the promo code Gagnon and start laying it down like they deserve.

[Luke Caverns]

Let's get back to the Show.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the Internet last year, and I think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies.

[Luke Caverns]

Stay fit for the season.

[Mark Gagnon]

And Abercrombie's newest arrivals shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online and in store.

[Luke Caverns]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp app, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] and the cool thing about the Maya in particular is that they all share. They're kind of like the Greeks. So it would be an oversimplification to call to say that ancient Greece was all one civilization. Because if you were to go, they all realized that they worshiped the same gods and they sort of had the same way of life, but Athens and Sparta really didn't get it along. Corinth really didn't like either of them either. And so it's kind of like, you know, they all don't really like each other. However, they all kind of have the same culture.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, the Cretans today, you know, Exactly. Exactly. They would barely call themselves a Crete.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. And so the Maya world is exactly the same way. Exactly. Precisely the same way. So when we, when we say terms like, like Maya civilization, they probably wouldn't see it that way. Not necessarily during all Periods would they exact where they see it the same way. So it's like every single city that you go to in the Maya world, you have to treat it in some ways like its own individual civilization, because it had its own kings, it had its own royal family, they have their own history. It's incredibly dense.

[Mark Gagnon]

So when people say Maya, what are they really saying? Like, it's just like the broad.

[Luke Caverns]

It's the, it's the broad term of that whole Yucatan Peninsula down into Guatemala, all the way down to the Pacific coast on the other side, down to El Salvador and Honduras. It's this giant section of Mesoamerica or Mexico and Central America in modern terms. And essentially what makes people Maya is they worship this collective group of gods. Well, there's a bunch of them. We could go through all of them, but. But it kind of doesn't matter. But they, they worship the same collective group of gods and they have the same way of life, but they all have a different local language. However, they would all ascribe to A. To 1. How do I even say this? It's like a. It's like a. It's like a. It's like a collective language. But it was, it was written so you would write in hieroglyphs. So all my hieroglyphs are the same language.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Luke Caverns]

However, it would be like, okay, you know, I'm from Texas and I speak. I would speak Comanche. You're from. Well, you're from.

[Mark Gagnon]

From Florida. I speak Seminole.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So seminal. And so, however, you and I have agreed that we're both going to speak that everyone's going to speak Cherokee also so we can communicate with each other. But when I'm at home, I'm going to speak. Speak my language. When you're home, you speak your language. Language. However, we all, we can all also speak Cherokee. And so we've all agreed that we're similar enough that we shouldn't be. That we, we're similar enough that if our land got invaded, we would. We're still going to have our, our scuffles and our fights and maybe our wars and battles, but if someone who's not anything like us attacks us, we'll all come together. Right? So it's kind of like the Greeks. Like all the Greeks come together to fight Persia. Well, well, the Maya kind of come together to fight outside threats as well. So the Maya world and the Greeks, like, if you want to understand, if you want to know how to think about the Maya, just think of the Greeks. It's exactly the Same.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, that's fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Utterly, completely. Exactly the same, actually.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right? Yeah. I mean, I've even spoken with like, Native Americans and they'll be like, yeah, like the term Native American, like, just doesn't even, like. Like it's a descriptor for just all people of the Americas. Like, it's like, it's a non descriptor. Right. It's like calling like everything in the ocean a fish. You know what I mean? Like, it's generally. Right, but like, you're missing so much.

[Luke Caverns]

Nuance, so much man.

[Mark Gagnon]

So with. I don't want to get off topic really quick on the Peruvian stones, because there's something that I've heard with the notches.

[Luke Caverns]

Okay.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm curious what your theory is with, like, the notches that on these stones. Would you mind pulling those back up? Christos. Thank you. Like, on these stones I've heard, like, oh, these notches maybe were used for framing the other stones that they were cutting out.

[Luke Caverns]

Out.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that they were used to basically almost acts like a stencil so that all of them would fit perfectly together.

[Luke Caverns]

The next photo you'll see. There you go.

[Mark Gagnon]

So, like, these, like, nubs that you see and that perhaps they all had these nubs and some were shaved down, some weren't. I'm curious what is. Do you have a thought on this or have you read anything that you thought was compelling?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, it's. It's tough, man, because again, like, you know, I'm. I'm a cultural anthropologist and like, historian, so. So I do, like, I study the way lived and the way they interacted with their environment. And then I just studied, like, the cultural history. So this would be like engineering, right? You would need like an engineer's eye to look at that. But my guess is I have seen these things all around the world. Now the popular ones are Peru and Egypt, but I was just in Cambodia and I saw it on the. The Cambodian pyramid of Coker, massive pyramid, and it had these nun nubs. My guess is that if you have generations upon generations of people who are working this kind of stone and they're moving things that are this heavy, there's got to be something about that nub that you would like. If I gave you 500 years to learn how to be an expert stonemason and I gave you no tips at all, no advice, you just had to figure it out and you were living for 500 years, I think something. Something would happen naturally where you would end up with that nub. That's what I'm Saying it's like there's something about the way. Way we're wired and the way we interact with stone that you mess with that thing long enough, that's going to come out that's useful. I don't know exactly how. My guess is it's a pivot point. I don't know why with there's two of them on there. If there's. If there's two. I. I don't know if it's two pivot points necessarily, but I know it'd be a lot easier to drag that stone if you just had those two points like this on the ground and you're dragging it rather than if you're dragging the whole thing. Right. Because it'll move. It'll move much more easily on those two points. You can also turn the stone. Right. So if you had, like, if you had it bound with ropes, you could spin the stone around and leverage it. But why at so many places you don't see. You'll see so many nubs that just never get shaved down, man. I don't know. I do not know.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are some of them shaved? Like, do we know that?

[Luke Caverns]

Like.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, there was likely a nub.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, we don't know that. We. Yeah, I don't. Maybe if I stared at, like, every block I ever see on a wall where there's nubs, I might find something. I don't know if there's anyone who's done this.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

But. No, we just assume that. We just assume that there had to be other stones that had those that get shaven, shaved down and flattened. Because. Okay, so at the pyramid of Menkara in Egypt, it's very, very, very, very similar to the stonework right here, at least these large, lower gray andesite stones. And they're all pillowed out. And then you can see on one part where. Where they're coming across and they're flattening all the stones and getting rid of this pillowed effect. And then they just stop and just ends. It's like they all just. All the workers just put down their tools and never worked on it again. And in Peru, we see walls that are like that as well. So we just assumed that there were definitely stones that had those nubs that just. Just for whatever reason, it never got shaved down.

[Mark Gagnon]

Fascinating. And is there a theory or a couple theories as to why they're so different? Like, none of these stones, like you had mentioned are, you know, there's no two the same, which, you know.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, well, yeah, okay. I know what you're asking is. So Peru is. The Andes in general are prone to earthquakes and, and earthquakes plays like a, a major role in the destruction of civilizations. So like Lima culture, this is in the city of Lima. A lot of earthquakes and Lima culture really had always been there. But I could be wrong. But I, and I'm not an expert about Lima culture. It's not really my interest. But I think their height is somewhere between 500 and 1000 AD and they had experienced so many earthquakes that they learned how to build pyramids that were anti seismic. So like it couldn't be knocked down. So what they would do is they would take, they would take bricks about like. Can I grab this?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, please.

[Luke Caverns]

So they would take bricks about the size of this little.

[Mark Gagnon]

Actually that's full of dominoes, if that's helpful for your illustration.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. So they take bricks that are about this size and then they'd sit them on top of each other. And so you put one here, put one here, but you leave a little space in between them. And then you take another block, like a lentil block, and you add it right here. So you have all these blocks stacked on top of each other with little bits of space. And so when an earthquake would happen, the whole structure would jiggle back and forth and so it would never fall down. It would just move with the, it would just move with the earth. Oh, that's so clever. And yeah, it's amazing. And so what we think is that by using stones that are this large, there's also something that you're not seeing here. So only the faces of the stones touch each other as soon as it goes inside it. Okay, so say. Trying to think of like, how can I describe this? So you have the face of the stone and if you were to you take one layer off and look down on it from the top, you would notice that the face here is connected, but on the inside, the sides of the stones move away from each other. So there's a triangular space between each side of the stone and it's filled with gap fat. It's like this, it's like this red paste glue stuff that they would make from llama fat.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's like a mortar, but kind of.

[Luke Caverns]

But it was like, it's like a. The way I would describe it is like shock absorber. And so when, when an earthquake happens, you. The blocks don't shatter because they're pressed against each other. You have a shock absorber between the stones. And so the stones are moving back and forth like this and they stay Perfectly. The, the, the various shapes of them. It allows the face on the outside to stay locked together. But if the stones were pressed up against each other, they would, they would all crack. Like you'd see a crack go down the middle and none of these stones are cracked because they have this like a, they had this almost like a cartilage. That's what I was, the word I was looking for. It's like a cartilage between the stones. And, and does the cartilage still exist? Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, like it hasn't, like, like degraded due to.

[Luke Caverns]

I don't know about, I don't know about that, but I know that I have looked between stones and it's still there.

[Mark Gagnon]

Fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

That is so clever. And so it's basically like anti earthquake technology.

[Luke Caverns]

Yes. Yeah, it is. Wow. It's fascinating.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that's seen all throughout, like Central and South America.

[Luke Caverns]

No, no, this is, this is exclusively to what we call Inca sites.

[Mark Gagnon]

But because they're more earthquake prone. Yes, because they're on a fault line, I presume.

[Luke Caverns]

I don't know, but I was guessing. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow, that is so interesting. I, I never would have guessed.

[Luke Caverns]

Now in Peru, the Inca are, are really the only people that achieved this kind of stonework. The only thing that's similar is in Bolivia you have. Good Lord. What's the name of it? Tiwanaku in, in Bolivia. And it's very similar stone work there. But Tiwanaku is a crazy place because it looks like a bomb went off in, in the city. It's just, you have these giant stones just scattered around and for so long nobody knew the assortment of the stones and how they all went together. And they've been reconstructed. Like somebody scanned it all and reconstructed it using like 3D models, like blocks. And it used to be some kind of building and, and it's like, like, it's like it, it's like it just blown up. Okay, so that's one there. So that's actually a courtyard. It looks like it's a building. It's. Yeah, it's the next photo over, sir. If you just go one to the right. Yeah, yeah, one to the left of that one.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, that one.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, wow. So, so you can see all these stones. They're kind of. So what they're done. What's happened here is they've laid all these blocks out and they've laid all these blocks out in a way where you can walk in between them almost like it's a little museum. But in the original photos, it just, they Just, they're like blown apart. It's just scattered all throughout Puma, Punku and Tiwanaku. And nobody knew the original assortment of these stones for a long time. And we still don't necessarily know. There's just a model of it that was recreated where it was supposed to be some kind of temple that's surprisingly unique in the pre Columbian world. Like a, not like anything anyone has ever seen before. And nobody knows why they were all scattered about. My most boring answer is that it happened during like early colonial times and they just ripped that thing apart for some reason and it was never recorded like it was.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do you think it was ripped apart by humans? Like, not like a earthquake or some other type of natural phenomena? Overgrowth.

[Luke Caverns]

It's. Yeah, it's, it's like two. Well, so this is in, this is in a high altitude valley. So the overgrowth, you, you wouldn't see that. And, and it's just, it's just grassland out there. And I don't think it was shaken apart by an earthquake because like the way the stones are scattered, it's just not the way it would look like in an earthquake. It looks like it was dismantled. It's, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very odd. But it was never recorded. And so my most boring guess is that that, is that in the early colonial period they just dismantled the entire thing for who knows what reason. I don't know. A lot of weird stuff happened in early colonial times that wasn't recorded. That's my most boring answer. My crazy answer.

[Mark Gagnon]

Aliens.

[Luke Caverns]

My crazy answer is I don't know. I have no idea what would do that. There's, there's other places in Egypt that are like this where the entire city is just utterly, completely destroyed. Or I should say the tower temple is complete, like the temple of Bubastis, the temple of Tannis, Egypt. The city is just utterly annihilated and there's no explanation. You know, I've seen ruined temples in Egypt and they don't look like this. This looks like somebody hit this thing with a cruise missile and yeah, it's very odd, bizarre.

[Mark Gagnon]

I wonder and like you wonder if the Spanish did it, they may have recorded it, right? Like they would have been like, hey, we destroyed, you know, a pagan temple. We, we got rid of this thing and we're, you know, like proselytizing.

[Luke Caverns]

You would think so, but, but not all the time. You know, the Spanish were. Spanish were as good as they were bad.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right?

[Luke Caverns]

A lot of, a lot of really fascinating, brave, amazing Spaniards during the colonial periods. And then a lot of really bad, evil people, right? Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, that's fascinating. Okay. And when you were just in Peru, what was the specific site that you were looking at? Is that the one that we just saw with the, The. The stone?

[Luke Caverns]

I went. I went all over the place. I was at. I was in Cusco. I went to Sax Woman. I went to. I went to. Good night. What's the name of the. Well, I went to Oonte. Tombo. There's another one. Why? Can I think of the name? There's. There's another city that I went to. And then Machu Picchu. And. Yeah, so went there. Went to Machu Picchu twice. That was. Machu Picchu is amazing. Have you ever been.

[Mark Gagnon]

No. That is a bucket list item.

[Luke Caverns]

It's. It's. I was telling Joe, this is. It's. It's more amazing than Egypt. It just. It's not comparable. It's. It's. Egypt is in the middle of a major metropolitan area, and the pyramids sit up on top of this hill, and there's a million people there, and the smog is insane, and, you know, it's fine. But the pyramids are amazing. They really are one of the most amazing things in the entire world. It's not like being in the Indian Amazon after you've traveled for days to be able to get here. Like, if I wanted to go see the pyramids, I could. From New York, I could be there in. In 13 hours like that. As soon as I land in Cairo, I can see the pyramids. I cannot just be like, oh, I just want to go check out Machu Picchu. You know, it's. It's a journey.

[Mark Gagnon]

You don't. They limit visitors.

[Luke Caverns]

They do, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

You have to, like, get a ticket and like.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Whereas at Giza. Great, great example, at Giza, you can just show up and buy your ticket that day. You have to make. You don't have to make a reservation with Machu Picchu. You're looking at, like, six months in to. To book your ticket online. And then you, you know, you have to travel all the way down to South America. You have to go from Lima to Cusco, and then you can't. And then people don't realize Machu Picchu is four hours from Cusco, and you have to go by car, and then you got to go by train to get into the Amazon to see Machu Picchu. And so, you know, it's a. It's a whole journey just to get out there. And then when you're standing up on the mountain, looking at the city with the win, with wicu, the mountain top behind it, it's just. Man. Yeah. Like, there's no comparison that this is one of the most amazing places in the entire world.

[Mark Gagnon]

And do we know when this was built? Like, what is there an estimate on, roughly?

[Luke Caverns]

Well, the. The vast majority of the site was made. The vast majority of the site was built during, like, the late Inca period. So right up to. They were still building the city that. When the Spanish arrived. So it's very, very late. Late, at least the majority of the construction. But there's archaeological evidence of people on this mountain, I think 2000 BC. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So people have been living in this area for a long time.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

But then Machu Picchu itself was built much closer to 1340.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. The main. The main mystery here, the. The thing that gets thrown into a wrench is, do you see on here. Do you see the. The blank part in the middle of the city where it looks like it's like a dirt floor floor? So right next to where that. So right next to where that grassy knoll is, just to the bottom left of that. Yep, right there.

[Mark Gagnon]

That thing. Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

So that's. They call that the Temple of the Moon, I believe, because they think that it has a lunar alignment, but I don't. I don't think it does. It's the. The. The alignment doesn't work. We don't really know what that temple was. But in that temple right there, it's the only part of Machu Picchu where you have, like, the huge megalithic stones, the things that you would see in Sacsay Woman and in Kut Cusco. Oh, yeah, look at. So you can. You can tell, like, those stones are really, really, really massive. I would say one of those stones is the entire. Is the size of your entire wall here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

And up on top of this mountain. It's really amazing. And so that's kind of the wrench that gets thrown in here. It's like, okay, if it was a precursor civilization and it wasn't the Inca, why did they only build one temple here on top of this mountain? Mountain like this, and all the rest of it is built with. It's still great architecture, but it's much more crude than that. So it's this wrench that gets thrown in where people will think Machu Picchu must be built by this really advanced ancient civilization. However, when I was there, I wasn't expecting it. But it was only that one temple that had that construction. So I was like, well, did those guys really come out here and only build this one temple way out here up on top of this mountain? I don't know.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, is it crazy to think that a precursor civilization built a specific small, smaller, relatively temple with these giant megalithic rocks, and then a later civilization built the rest of it?

[Luke Caverns]

It's not crazy. You know, yeah, the ancient world is a foreign country. It's. It's not. It's not crazy. But it. But certainly, it certainly challenges, like, my rational thinking. Right, because you almost have to throw your rational thinking out of the window in some cases when you're studying the ancient world. Because, you know, I look at this in one way, I look at this one temple and I go, oh, you know, I came to Machu Picchu. Yeah, it's only this one temple that has this massive megalithic stonework. I don't think an ancient precursor civilization would come all the way out here just to build one building. I don't know. Maybe the Inca really did do it. And the reason this stonework is here like this is because this was one particularly important building. However, that's assuming that I understand even 1% of the Inca mindset or the ancient Peruvian mindset. There could be a perfectly rational explanation if I could talk to someone who lived in a precursor civilization and be like, well, why did you build this? And it would go, oh, why did we come all the way out here to do this? Well, because this, this, this, and that happened, and we thought we needed to build this here sacred alignment in the sky, blah, blah. And I would go, oh, that's. That's crazy. Okay. And then. And then they would, you know, and if he could be like, and there's actually more of these scattered throughout the mountains here that you just haven't found. And I'd be like, oh, I get it. So this is like a. It's like a pilgrimage. It's like a. A place of study or of worship or of astronomy or whatever. And it's this one place where you got. I mean, dude, Native Americans do all kinds of stuff. Like, the more I've gotten into this, it's so much of a battle to remind myself, to constantly remind myself that I don't know everything, you know, because it's like Linda Shealy, who was my mentor's mentor, she's like a world class Maya archaeologist, and she would constantly say that we need people from outside of the field to look inwards because it's so easy to know so much, much that you confuse yourself. Like, you get so lost and.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. You get so close to the mosaic, you can't even tell what you're looking at.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. Right, right. And so I constantly have to take a huge step back, you know, and like, okay, why would. Just arguing for the ancient lost civilization idea. It's possibly just as likely that this little temple here existed long before the rest of the city, because the people who went there would perform something that the. I think it's the Native Americans of the Great Plains that would go into the wilderness and starve themselves and like. Like, hang themselves to a tree and starve themselves until they would hallucinate and they would have visions, and then they would go back and give, like, the prophecies of that vision. And that was, like, a central core component to that society. Well, this could easily be the same thing. Right. So it's like, it's just a completely alien world that we're trying to study here. And to feel super confident about an. Any. About assertations about something like this is. I think it's a misstep. So, anyways, yeah, that's. That's Machu Picchu.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is there anything else with Machu Picchu that you find interesting or stark? Like, obviously, we have this one specific temple that was potentially used for something. I. I'm maybe remiss in calling it a temple, but was. Was there a large population of people living here at one point?

[Luke Caverns]

They don't think so. They think that the population was under a thousand, 000 people. They. They. There. There have been people who've gone in and, like, looked at each and every room and exactly how much water. So from where the photo is being taken, you're actually standing on Machu Picchu. And what you're looking at this peak in the background that we always think of when we think of Machu Picchu. That's actually W. Picchu. So he's standing on Machu Picchu. Most people have never actually seen a photo of Machu Picchu. It's. It's funny. So. So if you. If you'd zoom out. Yeah. Thank you so much. So on Machu Picchu, the mountain that he's standing on, there's a spring up at the top. It comes out of the mountain and it trickles down. And they. They reshaped the mountainside and they made these aqueducts where they turned the. They turned the path of the water to go down into the city. So originally it was just going off the mountain. Mountainside. They turned it to the side and it goes down into the city, and it winds through the city into these, like. Not, I say natural, but they're fountains with. With natural spring water coming out, and you can drink the water today. And those. The fountains have been running for, you know, since the city was. Since the city was made. It's amazing. And so what's. What's crazy is they say that at least the research that's been done is that 60%. Here's. Okay, here's something else I should add. Most of the megalithic architecture at Machu Picchu, the only thing that's accessible is that one temple. But they found other gigantic stones like that underneath the floor that you walk on. Like. Like the entire foundation is made up of those megalithic stones. And 60% of the stonework of itself at Machu Picchu is the foundation of the city, because it has tunnels in it that are about this big, and it directs the water and provides a stable foundation for this city that exists on top of a mountain in an area that gets plagued by earthquakes. So they built up the foundation of the city. Yeah. It's totally insane. And so the tunnels aren't accessible. Oh, yeah. So here's where one of them pops out, and so you can go up and drink that water today. It comes right out of the mountain. That is wild. There's so much, man. It's an amazing place. What I think Machu Picchu is when I'm there. Oh, yeah, it's beautiful. Um, what I think Machu Picchu is when I'm there is I very much get a Library of Alexandria feel. This is a place of study. This is a place where the most important people of this civilization were allowed to come here. And another thing that's really fascinating about it, man. Oh, this. This is, like. This is what I'm in right now. I haven't. I've never talked. I haven't talked about this publicly. So, like, lost cities of the Inca. This idea has fascinated explorers for a really long time. There was a city called Vilcabamba that the American explorer Hiram Bingham was looking for. And Vilcabamba is the city that the last Inca emperor fled to. And why am I. Sorry, I'm blanking on his name right now. I'm blanking on several things. What's it. Monco Inca. He's the last Inca in emperor. He took about 250,000 Inca people out of Cusco, and they either built a new city or there was an ancient city that they knew that they could use way out. Yeah. So here's Monco Inca or there was an ancient city that existed out in the Amazon. I say the Andean Amazon, but you know, it's still in the Amazon that was available. Maybe it was abandoned or maybe it was like a, not a very powerful place. But he knew it's where he could bring hundred, several hundred thousand people to come build this new colony to get away from the Spaniards. So he takes 250,000 to like 500,000 Inca people out of Cusco. It's basically a mass exodus way out into the mountains to a place called Vilcabamba. And I think that they live out there in peace and no one knew where they were for 11 years. And then Monco Inca comes back into like the semi contacted, like colonial world and he gets stabbed to death in the street. And eventually, and eventually the city of Vilcabamba, like the people kind of starve out and they have to come back. And the city is eventually lost to history. But it was this famous lost Inca city. And this is where the story gets interesting because Hiram Bingham was looking for that in the Peruvian Amazon and accidentally found Machu Picchu. He never found the city of Vilcabamba. It was later explorers that went on and found Vilcabamba. So what, what this has opened up here and this, I think that this is only sort of recently and it's something that I only became privy to last month in Peru was I was talking to a Peruvian historian there and he was telling me about his idea that there's something more special about Machu Picchu than the city of Vilcabamba. Because Vilcabamba was no secret. It was only the location was a secret. But everyone knew about.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, there's a huge exodus.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But Machu Picchu, the Inca explicitly went out of their way to never ever talk about it. They abandoned it at contact period when the Spaniards were getting, when they had taken over Cusco and they were starting to spread out people just the Inca people picked up everything and abandoned Machu Picchu because they can tell when they excavated it there was like nothing there. Literally there was nothing in the city other than, you know, there's some leftover artifacts, like there's a little museum there. But way it's like, it's like stark how much is not there that should have been. And so there's this idea that okay, well, they must have picked up and left and abandoned the city. But never nobody, not one Inca person, all of the Incas that were interviewed and used as sources in Spanish chroniclers, not one person ever even uttered the actual name of Machu Picchu. So nobody knows its significance, why it was so significant, and why the Inca piece people explicitly went out of their way to not even utter its name.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, the silence kind of indicates the importance in a way.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Why do we know that it's called Machu Picchu? Like what does that mean?

[Luke Caverns]

Was that it's the name of the mountain?

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, it's just the name of the mountain.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that's the name that the Inca used?

[Luke Caverns]

No, well, well, well, it's the name that the Inca, that the Inca people were using in 1911 when Hiram Bingham was down there, in fact, the city. Right. So they called the mountain Machu Picchu, but this is 115 years ago. That's what they call that mountain. So he just used, if my history is correct, he just used the same name for the mountain, for the city.

[Mark Gagnon]

That makes sense.

[Luke Caverns]

We do not know what the city's name was.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. It's crazy, right?

[Mark Gagnon]

And the fact that they keep it so silent, it does kind of give it an air of reverence or maybe like a hideaway. But it's also a massive undertaking to build a city like that. To not tell anyone or not have anyone know.

[Luke Caverns]

Right, right, right. My thought is there's so many observatories. There's little reflection pools that are in some of the. So reflection pool is about this big and they found other reflection pools that are made out of, that are made out of slate and like black basalt and, and man, they're so expertly made. It's amazing. Like we talk about, we talk about the, I'm sure you've seen the, like the precision predynastic vases from Egypt, that kind of stuff. Stonework. The same quality of stonework is seen in these reflection pools. And it's basically this, basically this circular clock about this big. It's just perfectly carved and perfectly circular. And so they would sit it in the middle of these open roofed buildings. And so astronomers would sit down and there would be, there's these little grid marks on the side of these bowls. And so they'd have the water sitting perfectly flat in it. And they would be watching the stars inside this bowl. And so they would, they were figuring out like the cosmic way wheel. And these artifacts have been found all throughout Machu Picchu. It's actually, it's one of the most common things found at Machu Picchu. And so my thought is, oh, this is an Alexandria type situation here. This is a university. This is where all the brightest minds in the Inca world were right here for a long time. It was, it was thought of, it was thought of as the, the playboy mansion of the emperor. Like, what would they do? There was this legend that one of the palaces that's at, that's at Machu Picchu is like the palace of the concubines or it's like where the, his concubines were being held. And one of them is called the nursery because he would impregnate all the most beautiful women and they would give, you know, they would give birth here. That's kind of just a myth, or at least people say it's a myth. There's nothing really behind it. These are just kind of popular myths and legends that have been passed down. But you know, the way my mentor, where Dr. Ed Barnhart and I look at it is like it's probably both. You know, it's probably, it's the Inca emperor can do whatever you want. Machu Picchu is the most stunning place in the Inca realm, maybe other than the ancient city of Cusco itself. Cusco must have really been amazing. But like, you know, if in the winter the Inca emperor wants to go up to Machu Picchu where there's these amazing views and the brightest minds, well, why wouldn't he have like some concubines there to hang out with, you know, while he, he's got so I don't know. But yeah, Machu Picchu, my guess is probably all of the sacred knowledge of the understanding of the cosmos and the universe and maybe religion is, was happening at Machu Picchu. And how diff.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like it's difficult to get to Machu Picchu now. How difficult must it have been then?

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, it was almost impossible. I mean, yeah, I mean, he talks.

[Mark Gagnon]

The two week journey like by foot.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh man. You know, I don't know how long it took him to get to Machu Picchu from Cusco because he didn't know he was looking for it. He's kind of meandering through these outskirts of the, of the Inca realm and try and like, you know, asking locals for clues. You know, I'm looking for this lost city of Vilcabamba. Is there anything that you. Here, this is, this is like, here's like the discovery of Machu Picchu broken down into like a paragraph. Hiram Bingham is going through the outskirts of the Inca realm. He knows about the lost city of Vilcabam. Vilcabamba. He knows it's off to the east of Cusco in the Andean Amazon. So where the Andes Mountains meets the, meets the Amazon, it's very, very. It's just a jungle. It's a mountainous jungle. And so he's going from village to village and asking the locals, do you know of anything of, of cities in the jungle? Like abandoned cities you ever seen, you know, like Tiemplo Tmplo, you know, and trying, you know, communicating with them. And all of them are like, yes, yes, you know, and he would be taken to sites left and right. Most of them were, are very insignificant. And I think like all of them were not that significant. There would be little, there would be little vestiges along the river where, where there'd be like a little farmhouse at the bottom of a river that was covered up by the overgrowth. But on top of it you could see the terraces going up the mountain. You could tell, oh, this was a wealthy farmer who was wealthy enough to build this big stone house. But this isn't a city. This is like his estate, basically. And so, and so these locals out near the modern day city of Aguada Phoenix, say, yes, up here on top of this mountain, there's, there's some temples up there that, that we know about. And he's like, okay, take me up there. Now. These are temples that. Think about it, probably 600 years ago, or, I'm sorry, 500 years ago. Ish. When Machu Picchu is abandoned. Well, not everybody leaves. Like probably. You had my guess. When I'm up there and I'm just thinking about all the little stuff that never gets recorded in history, you probably had people who are living down at the bottom of the mountain that are just farming because there's all kinds of farming terraces there too. So you had 700 people that lived in the principal part of the city, but you probably had maybe a few thousand that lived on the outskirts, out on the outskirts. And they were all farmers, right? Lower class people. Well, when the city gets abandoned, you definitely have. People are like, dude, we should just go live up there. You know, let's just go, let's just.

[Mark Gagnon]

You got a sick spring. Like you got nice little architecture.

[Luke Caverns]

We know that this was happening in the Maya world. Like, we found evidence of later Maya people living in the ruins and hanging out. Like we've even found little Maya board games from kids that were going and hanging out in abandoned buildings playing games like, like kids do today. So, yeah, it's, it's amazing. And all of that was pre Columbian, right? So it's like we found evidence of kids hanging out in abandoned building buildings after the city had been abandoned before, way before Columbus was ever there. So it's just fascinating. So you probably have these farmers that when Machu Picchu gets abandoned, all these guys are like, dude, we're not going to Vilcabamba. Let's just go live up there. Like, the Spanish aren't going to find us. And then eventually those people get absorbed into the. Like, as the modern world spreads out into those furthest reaches, they eventually come down from the mountain to get things like plumbing, electricity, blah, blah, blah, right? And then the jungle just grows over all those ruins and they sit up there and a few generations later, the grandchildren of those people are like, yeah, you know, there is a. There is like a little town up there or whatever that my great grandpa used to run around in, but.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Luke Caverns]

I've never been up there. I've never, you know, and then so this guy comes and he's like, he's like, oh, this gringo wants to go see these stupid abandoned buildings. Okay, yeah, well, give me, you know, give me a hundred dollars and I'll take you up there. And so they go up there and it's a. There's like. It was really, really difficult to get up there because they didn't know exactly how to get up the mountain because at some points it's just sheer rock, granite face, right? And there's all kinds of stories of. They'd be going up and it start raining in the middle of the day. It rains almost every. It rains almost every day there. And, you know, he had his guys, like, falling down the side of the. I don't think anybody died, but they would slip and fall and roll like 30ft. And so every. Everybody, according to the story, everyone would just bust out laughing and they would all just sit on the side of the mountain for like 30 more minutes and rest and then go back up. And I think. I think it takes him. I could be. I could be wrong on my history here. I'm not an expert on Hiram Bingham, but I think it takes him a few days to like, get up there and get settled. And then he starts really wandering around the ruins and he's having to cut his way through the jungle. But he talks about how the stone. Stonework. The jungle never affected the stonework like this. The stones are just so tightly packed together. And I think he says. I think he explicitly says he's at the Temple of the sun in Machu Picchu, and it's like this Half circular temple where there's a straight edge wall on the side. And we know from the alignments that it's a solar temple, because the sun, I think it, I don't, I'm not sure what equinox or solstice it is, but it rises up through a gateway. On the opposite side of a different mountain, there's a different stone gateway that they eventually found. And I mean, it must be like two miles away, but you can see it up there. Like when people are walking up there, you have to stare and you can see people walking up there. And so the sun will rise on some equinox or solstice and it'll shine through that gateway and come straight through the window. And when it hits that back wall, they know that this new season has started. So there's so much there telling us that this is an astronomical observatory, this is a university, basically is what Machu Picchu is, or I should say it's the navel of their understanding of their world. Right? Like this is where their understanding of everything comes from. But when Hiram Bingham found that temple, he didn't know any, any of that about it. But when he found it, he says something like, he would dare to say that it's the greatest stonework in the entire world. And he was obviously up to speed on Egypt, at least for 1911. Maybe he had never been there, but definitely he'd seen photos and stuff. And he explicitly says that, that it's either, it's either the greatest in the world or I think he may even compare it to Egypt. And he says that it's better. And when you see it in person, you're like.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are there celestial hieroglyphs around Machu Picchu or like any type of art outside of just the architecture?

[Luke Caverns]

No. Isn't that so weird? So the Inca, if they are responsible for, if they are responsible for this stonework, the Inca were a non written language for culture. They did not write down language and they did not have hieroglyphs in the way that the Maya did or the Egyptians did. So you go all throughout their temples and they're just blank. It's just empty. Like, it's so weird, right? Because they can manipulate stone so well and yet they write nothing into it. Their form of language is what we call Khipus. Have you ever heard of this before? It's like a string and coming down from the string are more strings that are tied into little knots and formations. And we know that this was a language, it was a numerical language that's never ever been deciphered. And that's how they wrote stuff down. And so you would go into a building and it'd be like a library where you could sort through the Khipus and you would be able to keep up with information. And it was like a. Supposedly. I mean, obviously it's genius. But we never deciphered how to read this. But it was an ingenious way of keeping vast amounts of information in such a small, easily transportable little device. It's like a hard drive. Yeah, exactly. And so you go into, like a library. If you wanted to know something, you would go sort through the khipus that are hanging from the ceiling and you could read the Khipu by like, I guess, running your finger down it. And man, I don't know, it beats me.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, what fruits can we eat in this area? And somehow you can decipher it from. Right, like, basically this, like, library, this book that's written into these threads.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, that is fascinating. And we've found these.

[Luke Caverns]

These khipus.

[Mark Gagnon]

We found some of them.

[Luke Caverns]

There's a lot. There's a lot of them. Yeah. Like, there's so many that, that. There's a hotel that I stay in called Hotel Room US in Cusco, and they've got two quipus framed on the wall. So there's a lot of them, but we just have no idea how to read it.

[Mark Gagnon]

No one, like, has. Has there been one that's been deciphered, I guess, without any type of context?

[Luke Caverns]

No, no. And I think, I think. I think the Spaniards explicitly went out of the way to kill the Khipu readers. To get rid of them. Yeah. So, you know, they wanted to basically just eviscerate anything that wasn't Christian. Right. And in doing this, they. They covered up a lot of. Of like, ancient knowledge, sacred knowledge of, you know, the native understanding. Like there's a place in the middle of Cusco called the coracancha. And I gave a lecture in the middle of the Kora Concha, talking about. Talking about what exactly it is today. So the Kora Concha is. It was a solar temple. It's a sun temple in ancient times for the sun God Inti, I believe. And the Spaniards, when they came into Cusco, they. Okay, so you can see the Spanish church built over this wall, this lower wall here. So that lower wall was the outer wall of the coracancha. And in that little. In that little curved area was a corner, and it was a shrine for the sun God. And so the Spanish, they Tried to go to great lengths to pull down all of the native architecture, but they just couldn't do it because the stones are so heavy and they're so packe. So they're like, okay, well let's just build something on top of it. And so by building this massive church over the top, what they did inherently, whether they knew it or not, my guess is the Spaniards maybe didn't understand it all, but they essentially understood that, that what they were doing would stop the function of the temple. And so what the temple is, is they are. They're again, astronomical observatories. They're solar and cosmological clocks. And so you would have these windows that would have different kinds of alignments. And man, there's you. If you and I could walk through it, I could express it to you more. But we would go into each little room and I would go look at. I would go look at the amount of niches, which would be a window that doesn't actually go through. So there's a wall on the other side of the window. It's like a window to nowhere. It's called a niche. I would go, go in this room and we count them up to seven, and in the next room we count them to five. In the next room we count them to four. They're empty on the opposite side. This one would have three. This one would have five. This one be. Would one has seven with a door in the middle. And then pull out our compass. Okay, so this faces such and such direction to the east. So you can guess if I removed the Spanish church that's on top of it, that cuts off the windows on such and such date, which is usually be like the, let's say the end of springtime, the beginning of the wet season. Okay. So as soon as the sun would come up this corner, it would shine this window into the back wall, into these niches. And the astronomer general would know that the raining season has begin, it's time to start planting everything. And like, like it's so there. And that is just one aspect of it. And there's probably, you know, there's probably a mixture of different things that are happening it in affecting their religion, their cosmology, their, you know, philosophy. Everything, you know, was. Was in that one building. And by the Spaniard just building the church on top of it cut off of the power. Right. And so it's like impossible to study it now and to observe these things happening. Because you have now what's another cultural heritage site? Because it's a 500 year old church sitting on top of it. So it's like, it's like it just cut off the power of the temple itself. And that was the whole purpose of it.

[Mark Gagnon]

The fact that there's no symbols almost lends more credibility to that. This was an academic cosmological institution and not necessarily only ritualistic or religious, I would presume. Right. Like if I, I think it's a strange comparison, but even an observatory today or an academic building today, it's not necessarily having sculptures or pictures of the academic things. It's almost austere and stark in its ornamentation. And in the same way they're like, yeah, we're using this to figure out when the equinox is. We don't need, you know, deities or anything like that because this is not a ritual place inherently. This is a play, this is a tool. This is basically literally like an atlas in a building.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Crazy. It's crazy. And that's.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Luke Caverns]

And that's everywhere, man. It's all over the pre Columbian world. All over it.

[Mark Gagnon]

I want to ask you about resonant frequencies.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, gosh.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up guys? I'm on the road. I would love to see you guys there. Obviously, if you don't know, I'm a stand up comedy comedian and stand up comedy is my passion. It's the thing I love to do and seeing you guys all come out to the shows truly makes my life. I hang out after the show and say, what's up to everybody? So if you want to come through, check out the show, say what's up? To me, it would mean the world. You can see me at all these dates and more on my website, markagnon live.com and I'll see you guys on the road. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebgliss. After an initial dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking EGL achieved itch.

[Luke Caverns]

Relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBGLIS Librekizumab LBKZ, a 250mg injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who Cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to to Epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief.

[Mark Gagnon]

Ask your doctor about epglis and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. Okay, so resonant frequencies. I've heard from people that they are able. I heard from one person in particular that is a vocalist, that in going to some of these sites, specifically in central South America, there's like, windows that you can, like, sing into that will like, have this resonance that is a specific key. And if you know the key, it creates like this hum that like reverberates throughout the entire space. Have you seen anything like this? What can you say to that?

[Luke Caverns]

I've seen people. I've seen people do. Doing it, but I, man, I just. It's one of those things that's. It's not in the archeology. It's a phenomenon that we can observe. But, and, and I mean, there's no doubt that it's happening. They're actually going there and finding this resonance or this key, and it, it really reverberates, you know, quite significantly in this chamber, in this niche or whatever. But whether it was something that the ancients were aware of and were. Were using, man, it's just one of those things that, like, if they were doing it, they weren't talking about it. Right. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't happening. Two things I should say about that. It's kind of like the Egyptians never. Okay, well, I'm going to make multiple points with this one point, but it's kind of like we find something. And at least for me, I want to give the ancients as much credit as possible. So have you ever seen this phenomenon where people go to the temple of Quetzalcoat Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, and they'll clap in front of it. It'll make the sound of the quetzal bird. Have you seen this? Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can we pull it up, actually? Because it's great. If anyone hasn't seen it, it's fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, there's, there's so many archaeologists who Will say, no, that's just completely a coincidence. Right, but the, but the Maya were genius people. You know, everything that they did in their civilization indicates to us that they were genius people. And I also don't think that they have to write every single thing down either. You know, it's kind of like, oh, yeah. So let's play it this, this is a simple echo, actually. It's very simple to explain. When you clap in front of pyramid.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean of, of a slope, the.

[Luke Caverns]

Sound will go to, to the top, in this case a pyramid. And in of front, if, is there a cavity or a temple, like in this case, the echo will come back to you. If you clap in front of an Egyptian pyramid, nothing happens because the sound goes away. But here the sound comes back. Why sounds like a bird. Don't ask me that because we don't know. But this is really impressive. Experts from different countries, experts in acoustics have come here to study, to, to try to. Fascinating. It's crazy, right?

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, it's like it, it stuns me every time.

[Luke Caverns]

And so another phenomenon about this pyramid is that the, and I'll get back to the, to the acoustics thing is that there's. On the spring and fall equinoxes, the, the sun, it's basically rising and setting at, or what are called cross quarter days. And so it's rising and setting on the, on the, the corners of the pyramids, on the northeast corner and the, or I'm sorry, the. Yeah, the northeast corner and then the southwest corner and. Or maybe that's inverted, but essentially what it's doing is it's casting light down onto the pyramid. And then from the corners of the pyramids, those stepped corners, it casts a light onto, onto the, the side of the staircase where you have a serpent head at the bottom. And throughout the day, or I should say really in the morning and at the evening, it looks like there is a serpent undulating down the entire pyramid. So it's coming up and then it's descending back down into the underworld. And inside the serpent's mouth is its own rattle. It's like its own tail. So it's telling you it's this cyclical cycle. Like the serpent's going down in, into the, into the ground. So both of those phenomena happen at that one pyramid and it's about 50, 50. Some archaeologists look at both those and like, yeah, of course the Maya knew what they were doing. Look at everything else that they've done. Yeah, this isn't, it's not crazy. Of course they Knew this. And then there are others are like, ah, it's probably coincidence. Like I know, I don't know if they were that smart, you know. So, you know, a lot of people were kind of quick to dismiss some of these things. Now another thing I should say another point to make is just because a civilization didn't write something down doesn't mean that they weren't doing it. Right. So one of the really silly arguments about whether or not the Egyptians built the pyramids is that they, you know, they might, people will say the Egyptians never wrote down how they built the pyramids. Okay, well, do you also know that the Egyptians never ever, ever, ever ever wrote down how to mummify somebody? Do you know how many people they mummified? They never wrote anything of it. They never wrote any of it down. Why? Because it's probably sacred, coveted, important knowledge. Right. Like, to be mummified means that you're being elevated beyond the natural realm. Your body is being preserved for eternity. Also, the, the Egyptians are the only people in the ancient world that are being mummified in, in such a way. Why would they want the Mesopotamians to know how to do this? You know, why would they want rival civilizations to know how to do this? Why would they write down how they built the pyramids so that the Syrians can copy it. Right. You get what I'm saying? So it's kind of like a, that's kind of like a non argument, you know, people for me to dismiss it because they never wrote it down. Well, the Egyptians never wrote down how they mummified anybody, and yet there's millions of mummies.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's also hubristic to say that just because we don't have it doesn't mean they didn't write it down. In addition to that point. Right. Like, I mean anything for Egypt, for example, like in the, you know, like the Delta would have just absolutely been eviscerated by humidity or whatever else. Like papyrus would have just been destroyed if it was kept in that region. And I imagine the same thing with, you know, the Maya or anyone else in a rainforest in Central America. Like if they wrote anything down, which I mean, are there any manuscripts or like any types of written?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So the Maya are, it's probably. Well, okay, well, let's say in the Americas, the maybe Maya are almost certainly the most sophisticated civilization that ever existed in the Americas, some could argue the most sophisticated ancient civilization ever. You know, as far as their understandings of the inner workings of the natural world, they far outclass the Egyptians far outclass. It's not even remotely close. Probably similar would be the Greeks like the Greek understanding of astronomy and of the natural world and philosophy and science there. That's why I was saying earlier, that's why I was comparing them. The Greeks and the Maya are very, very, very similar. So the Maya had writing, full blown writing. They also, they even had like all, they had formal hieroglyphs all the way down to cursive writing. And they had many, many different languages, but they had, you had your one like general federalized language that all the different kingdoms would ascribe to, to know how to communicate with each other. And they're writing in structures, stone, on pottery and on paper. And we call them codexes, but the codexes don't preserve very well. So you'll.

[Mark Gagnon]

What are, what are they written on?

[Luke Caverns]

It's a, yeah, it's a, it's. I, I want to say it's a type of thatch paper, like, like thin cut thatch. Right. I don't know the process of how, of how they made them, but they're analog to papyrus.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like basically it's, it's. Yes, it's a fibered paper that they made out of whatever the, the local arboriges.

[Luke Caverns]

Yes, exactly, exactly. And so papyrus were scrolls. One long piece of paper that you would roll up and a codex is one long piece of paper, almost exactly the same, but compressed differently. Where have you ever, have you ever had sticky notes where you pull them out and it's like an accordion. That's how they would fold it. They'd fold it accordion style. And so you read it like this and then you flip it over and read it the other way.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Luke Caverns]

And so, you know, they're about this big and they can be like this thick. We assume that there were thousands of them, but in 1574 I believe, or maybe it was, maybe it was the 1600s, but I actually think it was the late 1500s. The, the Spanish, the Spaniard, Diego de Landa gathered up all of the, he sent out all these expeditions to gather all of the Maya codexes and he put them in these multiple pyres. Now a pyre is a small mound. So like, you know, imagine how many books I could stack from the floor to the ceiling here in multiple different pyres. And then he just threw matches on him and burned it all up. And so we assume that there were thousands of them because we have several different Aztec codices. But the Aztecs were not as sophisticated as the Maya. The Aztecs are late Comers, They. They arrived. I guess here's where we could sort of differentiate the civilizations. But the Aztecs are arrive thousands of years after the Maya had been around. The Aztecs are late comers to the game. The Aztecs aren't even from Mexico. I should say so, but we can get into that. But when the Spaniards arrived, the Spanish chroniclers that were going through the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and keeping record of everything, they said that they were told that the aztecs were producing 180,000 pieces of paper or their code codices a year. 180,000 books a year were being made. Okay, that's 15, 20ish. All right. The Maya had already been riding for 2,000 years leading up to that. And so Diego de Landa burned all of it. Oh, God. And he left us with three codices left. Three. Three of them. Of them left.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, they were just like, just found somewhere, like, stashed or he kept.

[Luke Caverns]

I should do. I should do a video on how these were preserved. I think one of them was. Was kept by one of his men to be studied. And he studied it as well. He's a weird guy. Like, he learned how to. He learned how to speak one of the local languages and learn how to decipher the language, but he was also the guy that burned them all. Bizarre, man. And then there were two others that were. I think that the two others, we don't know how they were preserved. One ended up in Germany and in Dresden, Germany, and survived the bombings. Here's fast, fascinating story. When the Americans are bombing the hell out of Dresden. There was a. There was a historical, like, cultural art museum there. And one of the Maya codices was being held there. And I could be getting my history wrong, people fact check me on this. But I think one of the young boys working at the library, his parents worked there. His parents owned it or something like that. And he was told to go gather some of the artifacts and bring them down in the basement to protect him. And one of the first ones he grabbed was the little Maya Codex. And he grabbed that and held onto it, and it protected it through the bombing. And he's the dude that later on cracked the Maya code and learned to read that. That Codex.

[Mark Gagnon]

Whoa.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. So he's. So he cracked the Dresden Codex and. Which is what tells us the world of. It tells us about the world of Maya astronomy. It allowed us to be able to understand how much they understood about the stars.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that's just from one random codex that happened to get preserved some oh.

[Luke Caverns]

Dude, listen to this. So the Dresden Codex is. Yeah, Yuri.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yuri N. N. He's a Soviet and Russian linguist. Wow, that is fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, crazy stuff, man.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can we look at the Dresden Codex? Could you just see? I would love to see what that looks like.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, that is fascinating. So, yeah, here it is. Is.

[Mark Gagnon]

Dude, I mean, these are beautiful.

[Luke Caverns]

It's. And it's complex too, man. They're still trying to understand everything about them. It's. It's so. It's so little understood that my mentor, Ed Barnhart made a discovery about the. About the Dresden Codex. He'd have to explain it. It has something to do with Venus and he thinks that in all of these numbers and codes, the, the cycles of Venus are being tracked through the, through the mathematics in these. It's. Dude, is. You can do three hours just talking about this. It's crazy. So this Dresden Codex is so complicated and illuminated so much about the Mesoamerican understanding of astronomy that there are. There's a book that I have called the foundation of Mesoamerican Astronomy that's based on this codex here that's this thick and this big. Because what it did was it illuminated so much, like in a very simplistic way. I'll tell you, by understanding this codex, what it did was when explorers are exploring the Maya world, they don't understand why the cities are kind of strangely aligned. Like, why is the street not straight? Why is the front wall of this temple parallel to the wall on the other side of the road, but yet the wall, wall, the. That the retaining wall is. But the inside wall is cocked a little bit to this other angle. Like, are these guys just really incompetent architects or is there a reason that it's cocked off to the side? And so it makes the city look like it's asymmetrical. And there's a lot of mistakes. Okay. Proverbially speaking, the deciphering of this Dresden Codex essentially told explorers and archaeologists studying these cities to cut off the canopy of the jungle that sits over the top of the cities and look at the direction that the buildings are facing towards the night sky. And use that as your compass to figure out the way that the cities are constructed. And so what it did is just pulled the lid off that was covering up the answer. And then when you do that, you realize that the. The cities are a celestial reflection of the night sky. And all of the cities are solar cosmolog physical clocks trying to figure out the messages in the sky. Because if you understand the the daytime sky to a certain extent, but most really the nighttime sky. If you understand it, you can understand everything about the natural world. Like, there's so much. Okay, so one of them is if you lock the northern face, at least in Mesoamerica, if you lock the northern face of your pyramid towards the helical rising of the Pleiades constellation, which is the seven stars. This is where you get the seven sages, the seven wizards, seven cities. Like, this is where the significance of the number seven comes from, at least in. In the Mesoamerican, pre Columbian world. If you lock it onto the helical rising, what a helical rising is, is when a constellation brings the sun into the sky, right? It's the last constellation to appear before. Before the sun. If you lock it onto that, you will automatically lock your. You will lock the opposite back corner of the back wall. If you build the temple just right, you'll lock the back corner into the rising of the sun. And what will happen is when the sun rises, it'll create this knife in. Into the back wall. And then this tiny little knife of light will perfectly align with that back corner. And when it aligns lines, you know that that spring has started, and it's. It's like a clock. And so you can figure out the secrets of the whole world by studying the night sky and building architecture that acts as a clock. And this goes into so many other avenues. But the Dresden Codex told us a lot about the understanding of. Of that also comes into numerology because they're. They are. Basically, what they're doing is you have these astronomers that are watching bodies through the night sky, and they realize that some of the stars move and some don't. Some are permanently locked into the night sky. And some of them move like the planets move, right? And so they're able to identify over time, the planets. But then they realize that, like, the planets don't always seem to come back to the same spot in a regular rhythm as other planets. And so they're tracking them and tracking them and tracking them. Then they end up tracking celestial movements over the course of multiple generations. So you have people who are spending their entire, entire life tracking the stars and then handing it down to other people. And so with the Maya, the Dresden Codex showed us that over the course of hundreds of years, they were tracking the alignments of certain celestial bodies and they could calculate dates, days, dates like 30,000 years into the future and like a million years into the past. It was just totally insane stuff was happening. In the Maya world. And. Yeah, that's why I'm just obsessed with it.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, that is fascinating.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And now just as far as like, practical aspects, application, like just understanding the seasons obviously has a litany of benefits. Right. Like you can understand like, which animals are going to migrate. Like when things will come into season, like when it will rain, you can plant crops. Are there other benefits beyond just like agrarian? That would be my assumption. But I wonder if there's any.

[Luke Caverns]

Must be.

[Mark Gagnon]

I wonder if like when to have children. You're like, okay, well we need kids to be born in this season because they survive more. So people should have kids around this time. Like, I wonder if it just transcends.

[Luke Caverns]

Sends everything, you know? Yes, I, you're exactly right. You're hitting it on the head that that's what I think is that these things are more important than just knowing the time of the year. It, it must have affected everything on a level that's invisible to us. It's imperceivable.

[Mark Gagnon]

If we go to war during the rainy season, we lose more. So we need to go to war when it's the first day that's dry because they won't know it. And if we have good technology, then we can do a surprise attack.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly. It's like a, it's like a. It's like a cold war war to perpetually understand the natural world and how you can use it to your benefit. Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

And with the most technologies, you win more. Like you have more people, you grow more food. Like, it just seems like it is the down river of everything.

[Luke Caverns]

Yes, it is. Yeah, it's. It's interesting. There's also an inversion of that that seems to happen because here's a really interesting parallel. The reason I bring up the Maya and, and paralleling them to the, to the Greeks is because they're actually both plagued by the same philosophical and mor. Moral issues. Like the Greeks had all the brain power to be the Roman Empire, but they're too moral to, to do that. And the Greeks cannot unite because they don't agree with each other. Right. They're. They're very philosophical people that have differentiating views and a very high moral compass. Right. So they can't always get along, so they always end up battling against each other. And then what happens when to the Greeks, none of it ends up mattering because an empire from the west just mows them all down swiftly. You know what, within a couple hundred years just mows down all the Greeks and takes over their cities, which is the Roman Empire. Exactly the same thing happened to the Maya. Literally exactly the same thing. The Maya are, are Maya city states that are obsessed with science and we assume must have been philosophy is right there with some science. But if it was written down, it was destroyed by Diego de Landa. So we don't understand Maya philosophy. But definitely it absolutely existed. Actually, I think it definitely did exist. And I haven't heard any historian talk about this, but I just read the account of the conquest of Mexico and the Aztecs had philosophers, so the Maya definitely did because the Aztecs are just riding on the coattail of, of these previous civilization. So the Maya definitely did. I need to think about that more. I just now thought about that. But anyways, the cities can't get along with each other because they're so sophisticated. They view things differently. And they probably have a very high like bar, right. And they're, I don't know, probably much more conscientious than like the Romans would be. Well, the Aztecs don't care about any of that. And all they care about is empire and expansion. So they just swept through all of Mexico and destroyed the Maya. Just, just now the Maya were kind of already collapsing, but they just sweep through and destroy them. So both the Greeks and the Maya, highly sophisticated, very advanced civilizations obsessed with science, technology, probably philosophy, that are made up of city states that all ascribe to the same culture but can't get along. So they're. So they, so they have this weakness of them and they both get conquered by an empire that sweeps in from the west. Whoa. Yeah, it's crazy.

[Mark Gagnon]

So it's almost a direct analog.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. And. And they're exactly about 500 years apart from each other. Or I'm sorry, they're exactly about a thousand years apart from each other.

[Mark Gagnon]

So we know so much about like Greek philosophy and, you know, Greek, you know, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and their contributions to, you know, math, science and philosophy. Is that the same way with the Maya? Or if, if not, why, like, why are. Is it just because the writings are gone? Like, I wonder why the Greek writings were preserved in such a way, like these ideas of the Republic and things like that, despite, I mean, I'm assuming being older in terms of like chronology.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so, okay, so let's follow, let's follow the collapse of ancient Greece, right? So if you go back to like the Archaic period. Well, okay, let's go to the Bronze Age. You have like the Mycenaeans and then you have the Minoans. Well, the Bronze Age collapses and it goes into this archaic and dark period. That's where like the earliest spark of like real Sparta happens. And what will be classical Athens, that's where the spark begins. And then by about 500 BC we enter into the classical period. The classical period of Greece is basically framed by two major wars. You have, you have the Persian wars and then you have the Peloponnesian wars and everything in between. That is like the height, kind of the height of the western world, like the birthplace of the western world, who you and I are, the way we interact with each other, the way we talk with each other, was born in Athens, Greece during that like 80 year period. So first off we have Socrates who is a smelly hobo that walked around Athens and just ask people questions and annoyed the hell out of everybody. I love, I love being like tapped into ancient Greece TikTok algorithm because it's so funny, like people making memes about, making memes about soccer team Socrates. But anyways, so they kill Socrates and they immortalize him. Plato spends his entire life basically validating Socrates and who he was and perpetuating his teachings, but in a different way. And then you have Aristotle. And the reason his teachings are perpetuated is because Philip of Macedon basically told Aristotle, you're going to teach Alexander. Alexander conquers the largest empire in the world and spreads Hellenism, Hellenistic culture across the Mediterranean down into Egypt. Okay. The next person to step in to basically take over that Hellenistic world are the Romans. But the Romans don't really get conquered by anybody in the way that the Aztecs do after they conquer the Maya. Right? So the Romans don't have this people that show up from the opposite, these aliens that show up from the opposite side of the planet and just eviscerate the Roman world, right? So the Romans, Romans were essentially just barbaric, vicious, extremely violent people that basically took over all of Italy. And, and they had this awakening at some point that they shouldn't have kings anymore. So they, they kill all the kings and they have this pretty cool republic for a while. But, but the Roman, but the Roman Republic is just so poor. It was a city of like brick buildings, buildings and mud. Like it just early Rome would have sucked to live in like you think people talk about. Like living in Rome during the empire would have been rough. Living in Rome during the republic would have sucked. So eventually Rome, you know, they grow, they grow, they grow. We don't have to go through the rise of the Roman Empire, but eventually they turn into a full blown Empire and they adopt the aesthetic of ancient Greece and the aesthetic of Ptolemaic Egypt. So that's the city of Alexandria. They adopt those aesthetics and basically bring them to Rome and build these new like pseudo Greek buildings.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is the Greco Roman architecture people talk about. Specifically Greco and Roman.

[Luke Caverns]

Yep, yep. And then, and then they also have a, they also, there's, you know, even though the Romans had to conquer the Greeks, the high ranking Romans had a respect for the Greeks. Like they didn't. You've heard the name Archimedes before for.

[Mark Gagnon]

Absolutely.

[Luke Caverns]

They didn't want to kill Archimedes. There was an order that was sent out that once by some general or whatever when to, when they get to Archimedes apartment in the city of Syracuse, Sicily to not kill him. But he died in the frayed anyway. So there was a, there was a respect and a reverence for the great minds of Greece because you know, they wanted to adopt that and pull that into Romans.

[Mark Gagnon]

Water displacement. They're like, dude, how do we do this?

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, exactly. And so they refer to revered, they revered the Greeks and they held on to that. And then they would copy the Greek manuscripts and basically keep them up. They had their own libraries. Well, Rome just never really gets conquered. It kind of teeters off. But it's still today, Rome's not really conquered. You know, it survived ever since the rise of the empire, even though it's kind of morphed into different ways, of course. And then so the medieval period kicks off and then you know, the power kind of moves from Rome all the way up like through Germany. Eventually the power gets to France and then one day ends up in England. Well, all this hearkens back to the Holy Roman Empire. And so you have these new manuscripts that are copied and those, the Greek writings just are, are intentionally preserved and they sit like in the farthest back corner of our mind. And, and our civilization is just like. I don't think people realize it, but I mean, you know, we, we morally and philosophically we descend directly from the Greeks and we were just lucky that nobody ever conquered the Romans just burned all their writing because that's what happened to the Aztecs into the Maya.

[Mark Gagnon]

So now taking, I mean, first off, tremendous recap. I mean that's like a phenomenal telling of basically like Greco Roman history in a nutshell for even idiots like me to understand. I mean, truly, I'm flummox.

[Luke Caverns]

You're not an idiot, man. You know, you know a lot.

[Mark Gagnon]

I know a little about Archimedes. I mean that's that's. That's. That's it. Thank you guys so much for tuning into the first episode of Luke Caverns.

[Luke Caverns]

As you can tell, the guy is.

[Mark Gagnon]

An absolute genius and an expert when it comes to Mesoamerican history. We have a second episode coming out with Luke very soon where we go through the entire anthology of the Olmecs, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and even the Inca where Luke explains the totality of why they exist, how they interface with each other, and why it matters to the understanding of the Americas today. So if you're interested, make sure you subscribe. Subscribe so you don't miss out when that episode drops. Thank you so much to Luke and thank you so much to you guys for tuning in. In the meantime, you can check out Religion Camp, you can check out History Camp or some of the other episodes on this channel. Episode 2 with Luke will be coming out very soon and we'll see you guys next time.

[Luke Caverns]

Thanks so much.