The DARK Magic Hidden in Mayan Hieroglyphs

Summary

Camp Gagnon Podcast: The DARK Magic Hidden in Mayan Hieroglyphs

Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Dr. James Fitzsimmons, Mesoamerican Archaeologist
Date: March 31, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the technological wonders, occult rituals, hidden histories, and linguistic mysteries of the ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations. Dr. James Fitzsimmons shares stories from the jungle, deciphers Mayan glyphs, and reveals mind-bending rituals and technologies that challenge our assumptions about "ancient" people. The discussion bridges archaeology, anthropology, spiritual practices, and the vivid humanity of long-gone cultures, revealing a world of power, complexity, and awe.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ancient Technological Marvels

• Screw-Top Pot from Rio Azul

  • Earliest example of a screw-top vessel in the Americas, possibly the world, dating to ~500 CE.
  • Used for drinking chocolate—a display of conspicuous consumption; cacao beans were a form of currency.
  • [04:04] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “It’d be like smoking $100 bills in front of people. That’s what it is.”
  • Pot features the Mayan glyph for "cacao" (chocolate), a fish-shaped icon.

• Concrete and Earthquake-Proofing

  • The Maya independently developed concrete, binding massive structures.
  • In South America, Tiwanaku is noted for tightly-fitted, three-dimensional, earthquake-resistant stones.
  • [23:28] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “These blocks fit together and they’re done three-dimensionally... like modern, cut with an industrial saw, but it’s not.”

• City-Building Genius

  • Teotihuacan (unrelated to the Maya or Aztecs proper) featured the Pyramid of the Sun — in its prime the sixth-largest city worldwide.
  • Ancient Mesoamerican cities were often rebuilt in layers by successive rulers (“matryoshka doll” construction).
  • [24:52] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “Those tiny dots are people... it’s the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

2. Rituals, Psychedelics, and the Occult

• Cacao, Mushrooms, & Tobacco in Rituals

  • Chocolate’s caffeine made it highly desirable; mushrooms and strong tobacco were primary psychoactives.
  • Maya elites smoked cigars—depicted in ancient imagery.
  • Tobacco was also ‘boofed’ (administered via enema) for a more intense effect—depicted on ceramics.
  • [13:46] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “One of the chief ways that tobacco... was taken was actually with an enema.”

• Maya Sweat Baths (Saunas) & Sensory Overload

  • Structures for ritual purification and transformation—intense heat, communal sweating, drug use, sexuality, and spiritual renewal.
  • [16:04] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “To throw yourself off balance, break you down, sweat everything out and then build you back up again.”
  • Downside: became viral incubators during smallpox epidemics post-contact.

• Ritual Bloodletting & Visionary Magic

  • Rulers and elites performed bloodletting, sometimes portrayed as stringing thorns through tongues or foreskin, to conjure gods/ancestors.
  • Lintel 25 from Yaxchilan is a trippy depiction of a royal woman summoning a supernatural being via bloodletting and visionary pain.
  • [86:42] Dr. Fitzsimmons (re: bloodletting panels): “She’s conjuring a patron god. What you’re watching is magical ritual.”
  • Pain worked alongside drugs as a gateway to the supernatural; these events were often political theater and possibly exaggerations.

• Spiritual Technology

  • Mirrors (obsidian, water) used as portals to the supernatural world, similar to practices in unrelated cultures (e.g., John Dee in England).
  • Rulers seen as intermediaries—conjuring gods via mirrors, snakes, centipedes as metaphors for crossing cosmic thresholds.

3. Mayan Urbanism & Environmental Impact

• Jungle Cities and Ecological Collapse
  • Massive deforestation for city-building and pavement—changing local climates and possibly hastening collapse.
  • Forest was managed/designed, not wild; trees and animals kept or killed for practical and ritual reasons.
  • [34:55] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “They chopped so many trees, it actually affected rain patterns.”

4. The Mayan Writing System—Hieroglyphic Insights

• Decoding the Code

  • Maya writing among the world’s most complex scripts; ~85% now readable.
  • Decipherment aided by the work of both a Spanish friar (Diego de Landa’s “alphabet”) and a Cold War Soviet code-breaker.
  • Writing was elitist—1–10% literacy, intentionally designed to be arcane ("inefficient") and used as esoteric power.

• Hidden Meanings in Glyphs

  • Glyph for “birth” is a frog/iguana hybrid, possibly with toad eggs—a metaphor for fertility.
  • “The field’s at the stage of uncovering the hidden history for each glyph... figuring out why, say, the glyph for birth looks like a toad-iguana.” [67:22]
  • Glyphs for death are still partly unreadable; multiple glyphs for different aspects of the soul.

• Humor & Humanity

  • Ceramic pots feature cartoon-like thought bubbles, jokes, and banter between gods and mortals.
  • “Most pots have these little, like, thought bubbles... it’s really in those little captions that you... get the human aspect.” [104:29]

5. Rulership, Gender, and Magic

• No Divide Between Priest & King
  • Maya rulers were the ultimate priests and sorcerers, directly conducting rituals and wielding occult power.
  • [91:44] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “There’s no difference. The rulers are the primary heads of the religious... it’s a theocracy.”
• Legendary Figures: Lady Six Sky
  • Iconic female ruler who styled herself “king” and is depicted standing on defeated enemies, bowl of burning sorcery implements in hand.
  • Combined masculine and feminine elements, invoked fierce predatory animals in her regalia, and led conquests by magic.
  • [96:15] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “Not gonna let me be king here? Fine. I’ll call myself king where I came from.”

6. Collapse, Warfare, and Conquest

• Honor-Based Society & Generational Feuds

  • Rivalries and grudges tracked for generations—wars fought as both material and supernatural duels (rulers summoning magical diseases to fight like Pokémon).
  • [109:00] Dr. Fitzsimmons: “The fights take place not just in regular space, but supernatural space... images of these things fighting on ceramics.”

• Sacrifice and Cannibalism

  • Aztecs and Maya practiced human (and sometimes child) sacrifice, with the Maya generally less extreme.
  • Retellings of mass Aztec sacrifice likely exaggerated by Spanish; Maya evidence for cannibalism is tenuous at best.
  • The gods “eat” human offerings or their surrogates; cannibalistic names were mistranslations, not literal.

7. Lost Cities and Ongoing Discoveries

• No Cities of Gold... but Lost Cities Remain

  • Mesoamerica prioritized jade over gold; no mythical “city of gold” exists, contrary to later legends.
  • Lidar (laser scanning tech) is revolutionizing archaeology. New sites continue to be found, especially in the Amazon and hostile/unexplored regions.
  • “Nothing like reading something nobody’s read in 2000 years.” [161:29]

• Looting and Cartel Involvement

  • Looting remains a serious issue—biggest threat when cartels move in.
  • Personal stories of near-misses, including being offered a stolen stele from an ice-cream truck.
  • “I prefer not to die. Like, I don’t know, is this a setup?” [164:17]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Technological Flex:

“They were literally just trying to flex. They’re like, I’m drinking money.”
– Mark Gagnon [05:36]

Pain and Magic:

“The rulers are the prime movers and shakers. ... They’re actually the ones doing all this... conjuring these personified diseases, what the Spaniards might call demons, and sticking them on enemies.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [91:44, 108:09]

On Maya Writing:

“It’s a writing system purposely built to be inefficient. Designed to be esoteric. To confuse, not to work.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [74:27]

Brutality of Elites:

“She becomes a sorceress, then a warlord—a rare trajectory for a woman. Kind of Disney-esque.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [97:04]

On Collapse:

“There's always a Floridian in every society—someone who insists on staying when everything is falling apart.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [44:52]

Sacrifice Nuance:

“The difference between sacrifice and murder is really difficult to determine. What’s ritual, what’s just killing? Hard to tell.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [121:28]

Lost Cities:

“Are there lost cities? Yes, absolutely. One of the wonderful, romantic things about being an archaeologist is you can still hack and slash and find things.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [160:17]

On Public Scholarship:

“If academics don’t engage the public, the public will find other people—then it’s all aliens, all the time.”
– Dr. Fitzsimmons [106:06]

---

Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• Screw-Top Pot & Maya Tech: [04:04]–[07:16]
• Ritual Drugs & Bloodletting: [08:11], [13:46], [81:43]
• Sweat Baths & Sauna Culture: [16:04]
• Building Marvels—Teotihuacan & Tiwanaku: [23:28], [24:52]
• Color, Spectacle, & Performance of the Pyramids: [33:32]
• Environmental Impact of Jungle Cities: [34:55]
• Maya Writing System—Decipherment & Purpose: [53:38], [74:27]
• Glyph Hidden Meanings: [63:26]
• Lady Six Sky & Maya Gender Roles: [93:41], [96:15]
• Ritual Sacrifice & Forensics: [111:46], [121:28]
• Cannibalism Evidence (or Lack Thereof): [123:59]
• Atlatl (Spear-Thrower): [131:06]
• Spanish Conquest & Disease: [146:31]
• Lost Cities & Ongoing Discovery: [160:03]
• Looting/Cartel Encounters: [162:55]

---

Final Thoughts

This episode is a treasure trove for anyone fascinated by ancient technology, magic, language, lost worlds, and the dramatic, very human history of the Americas. Dr. Fitzsimmons’s stories erase the “primitive” label from ancient Mesoamerica, instead painting a portrait of sophisticated, sometimes brutal, people obsessed with legacy, spectacle, transformation, and the supernatural. If you want to move beyond Indiana Jones and aliens and discover the real awe (and weirdness!) of the ancient Americas, this is the conversation to hear.

Read more in Dr. Fitzsimmons’s book: Blood on the Wind.

---

For further inquiries or to connect:
Dr. Fitzsimmons is the only archaeologist at Middlebury College, Vermont, and author of Blood on the Wind.

---

Transcript

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time. New friends, Gary the Snake and your

[Podcast Host]

last name, the Snake Dream Team. Get new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney. Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney plus and Hulu for just 4.99amonth for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months, plan auto renews and $12.99 a month terms apply. The Maya were an honor based society. And the fights take place not just in regular space, but in terms of all the sorcery stuff will take place in supernatural space. And you'll get into these scenarios where these rulers will summon one and then summon another one, almost like Pokemon. And they'll go after each other and you'll actually have images of these things fighting on ceramics of like, you know, like flaming skeletal, flying creature versus owl with a head attached to it, you know, fighting each other. Right? To me, that's a lot more interesting than the alien stuff.

[Podcast Host]

What if the ANC civilizations of the Americas weren't primitive at all, but operating on a completely different level of intelligence? Because thousands of years ago, in the jungles of Mesoamerica and the highlands of South America, people were engineering concrete, building earthquake proof cities that are still standing to this day. And developing writing systems sophisticated enough to record history in detail. They were drinking chocolate not as a treat, but as a currency, using psychoactive substances and rituals designed to break the mine and rebuild it, and reshaping entire ecosystems, cutting down forests so aggressively, though they may have altered the climate themselves and contributed to their own collapse. This isn't a lost world of simplicity. It's a world of power and hierarchy and deeply complex belief system centered around death and transformation in the afterlife. And today we are joined by Dr. James Fitzsimmons, a brilliant storyteller and an expert in the field, to explain everything about these people. He's a Mesoamerican archaeologist whose work uncovers how these civilizations lived, the people in them, what their actual life was like, what they believed, and how much of their story we're only just beginning to understand. If you are a fan of lost civilizations, of actual cities in south and Central America, we still haven't discovered cities of gold like El Dorado and ancient technology. Well, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Canada. Doctor Fitzsimmons. Thank you so much for joining me.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is. This is a pleasure. I love the tent.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad I did it. Just so the archaeologists that I meet will feel at home. Okay. I wanted to make a big campaign tent.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

This is so much bigger than any tent I've ever had. I mean, the tents that I get are. You know, the tents that I'm used to are sort of. They're not quite coffins. We do have archaeologists who sort of sleep in these sort of really small ones. But this is. Yeah, this is a big one.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. No, this is going to be a nicer experience than probably what you're used to deep in the jungles of Guatemala.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. This is a. A bigger tent and it's closer to coffee shops, so.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It is. It is. So don't worry. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I'm really excited to chat with you. I am. I'm fascinated and sort of weirdly obsessed with Central American history, specifically as it relates to, you know, Olmec, Maya, Aztecs, and all the little ones in between that I don't even know that much about. And there's so many things I want to jump into from lost cities of Gold that may or may not still be out there to sort of like, the history and the famous battles and the wars, as well as, like, the death and like, ritualistic customs of many of these different people groups and kind of like the. The occult nature of kind of how these, like, systems sort of operated and like, the. The stories they told themselves. But the thing I want to start on first is I. I was asking this before. What are some of the technological features of some of these ancient groups that blow your mind that they could have ever existed in that time? Sure.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, the thing, I think when we were talking earlier that sort of the first thing that came to mind was there's a pot at a site called Rio Azul in Guatemala that actually has a screw top. As far as I know, it's the first and only screw top that exists in the Americas, but it might even be the earliest screw top that there

[Podcast Host]

is, like, literally like a. Like a water bottle.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Like it's. Yeah, well, it was a. It was a chocolate pot, so it was for drinking chocolate. And, you know, in Mesoamerc at least, chocolate was not in bar form. They didn't have stabilizers. So it was actually drunk in sort of liquid form. Right. And it wasn't like Swiss Miss chocolate, nothing like that. It Wasn't like that. It was actually really bitter and kind of, kind of gross actually.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

But the reason why it was, it was important was because it was hard to grow. Chocolate's a really finicky plant. And because at various points in time in Mesoamerican prehistory, it's actually being used. The beans are being used as the lowest denomination of currency. So if you, when you were drinking chocolate, it was not something you just sort of did in your house or something. Right. You'd usually do it in front of a crowd. So you think of it as like conspicuous consumption. Like, you know, I'm going to flaunt my wealth. Think of like some guy. They've got like a chocolate pot. They've put all this labor into grinding, you know, they've had someone put all this labor into grinding the beans down into a sort of a somewhat palatable form. Right. They mix it with water. It's usually tepid water, sadly, they might put something in it like chili pepper or honey or something of that sort. Right. And they drink it and they drink in front of a crowd and they just like upend it, like hahaha, you know, drink it. Right. And it's conspicuous consumption. So it's sort of. I have this and you don't.

[Podcast Host]

They were literally trying to just flex.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

They're like, I'm drinking money.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes, it's drinking money. It'd be like smoking like, you know, $100 bills or something in front of people. That's what it is. Yeah. And so what I find really fun about this one pot is that it's a screw top. And so it was basically for storing, for sort of storing this stuff. So kind of a fun little invention.

[Podcast Host]

Is it possible to look that up? Like what, what would you Google for that?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I guess you'd Google Rio Azul.

[Podcast Host]

Rio Rio.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

R I O Azul. A Z U L Screw tops. Yeah. Screw top pot, I guess, is what it would be. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I would love to see what this looks like.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And would this be for like transporting it?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I don't really know. I think that, you know, the real pot, as far as I know, was found in a burial. So it was actually buried with somebody.

[Podcast Host]

And what year would this have been used roughly, if you had to estimate?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Riwa Soul. I want to say this is late early classic. So this is probably like 500 or so A.D. somewhere on there. Common era.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

500, 550, something like that. And as far as sort of the sort of other inventions, another invention might be just I mean, it's rather humble, Right. But like concrete. We're talking about concrete earlier, right? The Maya did have a form of concrete. Yeah, there it is. There it is. Yeah, it's got like a thing and then you push it down and you lock it in place. It's like, oh, wow.

[Podcast Host]

It's really beautiful, actually.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, they are beautiful. They are beautiful. Right?

[Podcast Host]

This looks like something you would see in like someone's home today.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So what's really funny also is that if you look in that image on the bottom there, on the left, there's writing. Right. The ancient Maya had. We were writing. It was a writing system. On the bottom. Yeah. On the bottom left. There we go. Bottom left. That's the word for chocolate. That's cacao.

[Podcast Host]

That's cacao?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

It looks like a face.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It is. It's a little fish.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. The original glyph for it is a fish, but the first part is ka, and then the second part is ka. It's another ka. And then the bottom part is wa. Kakao. So that's where the word cacao comes from.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow. Is it possible that the ancient version of sort of like this chocolatey drink had psychoactive effects?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It did and didn't. So one of the reasons why chocolate was actually being drunk as money is because it had caffeine in it. And it's, you know, I'm drinking, drinking coffee right now. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

People fought over this stuff. And while you might not think of people fighting over chocolate per se, people will fight over caffeine just fine. Right. And if it's the only source of caffeine, which it was the only source of caffeine in the area, people definitely fought over was a precious resource. It's like, you know, there's no coffee and there's no tea in the Americas, but there is chocolate. So fight over.

[Podcast Host]

So was it high doses of caffeine that would kind of make you like buzz a little bit?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I don't know. I mean, I imagine it would make you buzz. You're just drinking the raw. I mean, you're just drinking the like ground up beans, right? Coffee, you know, chocolate beans. In terms of psychoactive stuff, though, and weirdly enough, I was actually getting into this in my class, so I'm teaching this. This class called Sorcery in Mesoamerica. And this class the other day, we were talking about sort of psychoactive properties and things. The main psychoactive things were not actually sort of coffee or anything like. I'm sorry. Or chocolate or anything like that. It was actually mushrooms. So they were mushrooms and probably tobacco. And I know you don't think of tobacco as having like major psychoactive properties, but as anyone who's ever sort of smoked a cigar and smoked it wrong has ever, you know, will tell you. No, that'll knock you out. Like, that'll knock you out.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, dude, I. One time I went to the UAE and I smoked something called a medwar. I don't know if you've heard of this.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I don't, I don't.

[Podcast Host]

It's basically just like a pipe and it's a tobacco. Yeah. And it's a very concentrated, like one hitter.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And so you're just supposed to like light it and just.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And dude, for like 20, probably like two minutes you're just like. You can't really move. No, like it. Not. It's just tobacco. There's not, there's nothing else. It's not peyote. It's not like you just. And then for 20, it's like a hard like probably like 20 seconds. Like my vision is just like spinning.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like it felt like I was just like a, like a, like a. I don't know, like a casino. Like it was just like everything moving around and I'm sitting on the couch and my whole body just gets all tingly. Yeah. This thing right here.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. No.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, man, that knocked me out.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I've never had that. But yeah, if you, if you, if you inhale. That's why you're not supposed to inhale a cigar.

[Podcast Host]

Well, this one you're supposed to inhale and it feels, it kind of feels amazing. I'll be honest with you.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

For a couple of seconds. Yeah, for a couple of seconds it might. Right. But. But then you're just like, boom.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I came out of it after like five minutes where I was normal, but I was like, whoa. Like, if you're not ready, you might pass out.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

So they're. They're ripping this back in the day. Potentially not literally this, but a tobacco dense concentrate that would basically give them that effect.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. Yeah. So other sort of fun things. So you're talking about technology, Right. So I mentioned concrete. Right. And the concrete that they, they used that held together a lot of their buildings. It was. It's a separate invention. It's not like it's gotten from the old world like that. It's their own concrete. Right. So that's kind of an amazing thing. But back on this, on this tobacco thing, one thing that's probably not all that commonly known is actually they had cigars. So they actually were rolling cigars just

[Podcast Host]

like, how we would do them today.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

There's images of, like, Maya rulers and gods and things smoking cigars.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. Just like old mob bosses.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's kind of fun.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, that would be. That would be a good, like, time travel place to go. Yeah, like, go back in time with, like, an old, like, Maya emperor.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay, so here's the thing about time traveling. You might find this sort of surprising. Surprisingly, coming from an archaeologist, like, the past is a terrible place. Like, I. People sometimes ask me, like, oh, would you want to get in a time machine and go back and such. I might go back if it was like, hermetically sealed bubble. They can't see me. No one can hurt me. Nothing. I can't get sick. Maybe. Maybe. Right? Maybe for like, five minutes, ten minutes. But really, I would never want to go back because it's the odds of getting killed or getting sick. Some sort of horrible disease, something happening. Too high. Really. Yeah. I would not want to. I don't want to see that stuff. Nope. I mean, as I said, if I could see it and never be seen, never, never interact with anybody, but just, like, you know, view it and be completely safe, maybe. But other than that, in a way,

[Podcast Host]

you wouldn't go just do like a little. A little mescaline, you know?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No. No, I think. No, probably not. Okay, well, the thing is, like, score

[Podcast Host]

more with the college branded Venmo debit

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

card and earn up to 5% cash

[Podcast Host]

back with Venmo stash. Got paid back with the Venmo debit card.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You can instantly access your balance and

[Podcast Host]

spend on what you want, like game

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

day, snacks, gear, tickets, and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up [e-mail] collegecard the Venmo Mastercard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA Select Schools available Venmo stash terms and exclusions app at Venmo me germs max $100 cash back per month. So good, so good, so good.

[Podcast Host]

New spring arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores. Now get ready to save big with up to 60% off. Rag and bone, Marc Jacobs free people and more.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

How did I not know Rack has Adidas?

[Podcast Host]

Because there's always something new. Join the Nordic Club to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Free.

[Podcast Host]

Great brands, great prices that's why you rack.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You can't really get. Meyer. Archaeologists, or just academics more generally, right. To do this stuff and admit it. Fair. That's a good point. You can't get us to admit it. Right. You can't just do this stuff and admit it. And it's not really a technology, but it's something that. Related to this. One of the chief ways that sort of tobacco and that sort of stuff was being taken. Some of it's actually just being. Not just smoked, but actually sort of painted on the body, and that's being absorbed. Absorbed that way. Right. But one of the other ways, especially with other kinds of psychoactives, is actually with an enema.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

They're boofing it.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They are.

[Podcast Host]

Come on.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They are, they are. They are. They are.

[Podcast Host]

Like, like, like. What kind of. What kind of substance are they doing?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I don't. We don't have a good handle on that yet.

[Podcast Host]

Is this like psilocybin? I've been like mushrooms. Or is like peyote or.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Like, it might be tobacco. I don't know.

[Podcast Host]

How are they getting it up there?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So there's usually. No, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. No, no, I'll go there. I'll go there. It's got. I go there with my. I go with my students all the time. It's fine. You know, we talk about this sort of stuff and, like, it's. You know, you'd think I'd be embarrassed to talk about it, but I've talked about it for so long that it's. It's just sort of. Okay, fine, whatever. Usually what happens is there in a. You know, there's usually a. When you see it on. On ceramics, when people are sort of talking. It was talking about this on ceramics or showing it on ceramics. It's usually. There's usually. It's usually a man. There's usually a woman behind him with a. Like a. What looks like a bladder of some sort and just, you know, no way. Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

It's funny. They make a woman do it. They're like, yeah, look, I'm gonna boof this drug, but I'm not gonna have my boys do it. That'd be crazy.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, maybe, maybe. Maybe there are examples of this. I don't know. None come to mind in part. One of the reasons why this sort of stuff comes up as sort of. As sort of gendered is that it's oftentimes in connection with other things that are sort of mind altering, I guess so for example, you're talking about sort of technologies. Again, not exactly a technology, but still they had saunas in the jungle. They had saunas and like sweat tents. Like sweat bath? Yeah, like a sweat bath. And it's very much like sort of, you know, things you might find other parts maybe in native North America or something like that. Right, but these are buildings that would have, like, There'd be like a, a box. And you put, you get a bunch of rocks, you heat them up in the box, you stick them in the, you stick them in the hot box, and you pour water basically over the rocks and it just, it fills up this really sort of small enclosed area and you sort of sweat, right? And in these sweat baths, the idea was to throw yourself off balance as much as possible and then basically break you down, sweat everything out and then build you back up again. And so one of the reasons why these things, these images of drugs and such are happening sort of sweat baths is that it's part of that there's a sexual component, too. These things are almost like a Japanese onsen or something, almost like a carnival kind of atmosphere, like around the sweat bath. And you go inside and you have all this sort of party stuff that happens, and then you get out. And the reason why I know enough about it is because there was a person way back in the day, when this is back in the 90s, who was on a field project with me who was actually specializing in sweat baths. And with the help of the Guatemalan government, we restored one of these sweat baths. And we had people, you know, officials from the Guatemalan government would. Came down and we all took sweat baths together.

[Podcast Host]

No way.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Minus all the drugs and this and the sex stuff. Yeah. No, no, no, no, I swear, I swear, I swear. Like, we didn't do that.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

We didn't do that. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Convenient.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, no, but I will tell you this, I'll tell you this, I'll tell you this. We, we had these sweat baths, right? And you get in these, get in these sweat baths. And because you're in your 20s, you know, it's always. And it's. And, and it's men and women, right, taking these sweat baths. You, you, you sort of do these, like, kind of things, like, well, how long can I hang out in there? You know, how long can you hang out, like, in this later? There's that, there's that kind of, that kind of behavior.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you get competitive.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You get, yeah, you get, you get, you get competitive. This is at a site called Piedras Negras There it is. Right. Actually there's a, there's a drawing of it. I just saw it somewhere. I lost it. There it is. There it is. This is a sweat bath right there. Oh, and that's us on the left.

[Podcast Host]

That's.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You go back on the. No, not, no, the actual sweat bath. So left of that drawing, where the drawing was. That's the project. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's you guys.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, I'm not in the photo, but that's us. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's convenient.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

That's us.

[Podcast Host]

That's wild.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. And so you get a bunch of guys and they go in there and it's like, ah. And what happens is you drink a whole bunch of water, you go in, you hang there as long as possible, and you come out. And the jungle's air conditioned for like 20 seconds because it's like blazing hot in there, Right. And you get out, it's like air conditioned for like 20 seconds. And then usually some, some guy will like throw water on you or something like, ah. And you drink a bunch of water and you go back in. That's sort of what it is.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So these sweat baths were, were, were designed as basically places for sort of building, you know, breaking the person down and bring them back up. They were actually healing places for healing. And I don't know how much healing properties it actually would have. Right. But what I would say is that at the time of the conquest, when, you know, the Aztecs do have these as well, when the Spanish come along and then the diseases come along, the first thing that people do is they crowd everybody in the sweat baths. And that just kills huge numbers of people because they go in there and they got smallpox.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, no.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow. And that just basically became like an incubator for this virus to spread.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so the indigenous healing tech, healing stuff, that, that idea basically just destroyed a lot of people.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, no.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's wild.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, tragic, but also so interesting.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I don't think you. I don't know if you can do that anymore today. I mean, we had, we had the government, we had the government of Guatemala with us, like folks from the officials doing this. I don't know if this is nowadays, you know, whatever, 2026, I'm not sure that's okay in 2026, but in 1999, 2000, it was.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And so as far as like the drug use would be done in a place like this historically.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So it would be done outside so you would. So you'd have, like, a walled compound around that, and then all the various things that would be happening. Prostitutes also things outside that would be happening out there. And then when you. When you wanted to sort of go in, you'd go in and sort of come out of that. And the idea was that, like, once you. Once you got out of there, like, you were sort of a new person. And I will say, just from personal experience, yeah, you come out of that. And first of all, you're really tired because you've been sweating. It's just, like, hazy, Right. But you do feel like renewed. And sweat baths were all over the Americas, all over Mesoamerica, and everything from, like, the elites to commoners had sweat baths. Wow. Everybody was doing it.

[Podcast Host]

Now, I want to talk about, like, some of the spiritual technology, you know what I mean? Like ayahuasca and things like that. But before we move on, I wanted to know about some of the other, like, technical elements, about kind of how these things work. So, like, you had mentioned concrete before.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Are there any, like, building structures that you look at? You go, I don't understand how this was built.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's not so much that I don't understand how it's built. So one of the things that you sort of. You wind up doing as an archaeologist is that you're working in these places. And we had this idea that you go to these sites and they're pristine and sort of you excavate these things. That's not how it is. Looting is an enormous problem in the Americas, an enormous problem in Central America. I worked at places where, my first day on the job, like, 80% of the buildings have holes in them because people are looking for whatever. Gold. There's no gold, actually. But they're looking for wealth or anything, anything they can sell. And I don't blame them. I really don't. You know, in some places, you're. You're sort of dealing with really high poverty levels and you're trying to feed your family. So I don't. I don't blame for, like, I would do the same thing, right? But you go to these places and they're. They're. They're not pristine. And so many of the buildings have tunnels in them already, Doug. They have pits dug in them already. And so you can see the profile of the building. You go to the building, you can see exactly, like, how many floors there were, what was inside, like, pretty much the entire cross section. So I don't normally think about, like, how they did this, or at least, you know, technically how they did this. I do sometimes think to myself, you know, how. How did they get people to do this? Right. So how did they. So were they drafted into it? Is it a Corvette labor situation where you have a labor tax? In lots of parts of the Americas, you have a labor tax. Is it slavery? There's a lot of that that I wonder about. Sure. The actual buildings themselves, not so much. I would say this. Before we started, we were talking about stuff in South America and one of the technologies in South America that is a rather amazing one, is you have some, some buildings, they had, they had mortar, but you have some buildings where, you know, way back in the day, you know, SPANISH CONQUISTADORI report. Oh, you can't. You couldn't even put a, a knife blade between these two, these two rocks. Right. Because they fit together so tightly and we. That is an amazing thing. I've. I've been to these places. I've seen sort of these rocks. I've tried it not with a knife, but with a credit card. The.

[Podcast Host]

What's the name of that site?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So the site called Tiwanaku, it's in South America, it's in Bolivia. It's beautiful. Tiwanaku is beautiful. Really spiritual place, actually. Right. And the, the buildings, when you get there, you sort of think, think to yourself, you look at some of the stones, you're like, is this a joke? Like, it looks like it's just modern, like made out of. Looks like something that, you know, just was, was cut with an industrial saw or something. Right. But it's not. And the rocks are organized such that they actually are three dimensional. So there's, there's a, there's a block. Right. But the block will have pieces in it. Yes. Tiwanaku. Yep. That's the Gate of the Sun. I will say the Tiwanaku Gate of the sun is a lot smaller in reality than you think. Yeah, it looks really big. Right. But then you see someone standing next to it, you get there and you're like, oh, this is actual size. Like, it's really small.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. But that is the surprising thing about this is you see these gates and you're like, oh, these amazing. They're like, no, they're actually really small, but you see these blocks and they fit together and they're done three dimensionally. So you have a block and there'll be like knobs on the outside and there'll be another block that's perfectly cut to fit those knobs and they'll lock them together Jenga style, you know. And the reason why the Tiwanaku folks are doing this, ostensibly is because they're trying to earthquake proof their settlements. Some of these buildings are earthquake proof. So they'll move a little bit. So if the ground shakes or anything like that, you know, it'll move a little bit. The Inca actually stole those, stole that idea, essentially. And so we now attribute it to the Inca, that the Inca had stuff like this. But realistically speaking, it was. Tiwanaku had it first. Wow. And that's an amazing thing, sort of having these earthquake proof buildings.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I mean, it's genius.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It is genius. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, what is the most grand structure that you've seen in your travels, specifically in this part of the world?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You mean in South America or Mesoamerica? I can pick. I can do both.

[Podcast Host]

Let's start with Mesoamerica.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay. Start with Mesoamerica. Most grand structure. Oh, it's gotta be Teotihuacan. That's gotta be the archaeological site of Teotihuacan. It's gotta be Pyramid of the Sun. So the Pyramid of the Sun. So Teotihuacan was this. It's not Maya, it's not Aztec. It's actually its own civilization. It's called. Just called Teotihuacan. Right. T E O T I H U

[Podcast Host]

A C A N They're their own people.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, right. Their own people. And Teotihuacan was based in Central Mexico. It was basically about. Right now it's about an hour north of like the episode. There we go. The epicenter of Mexico City. Right. And if you look really carefully, you'll see maybe little dots. Those little dots are people. Oh, Teotihuacan is the largest, you know, for its time, at least in the same, say in the sixth century. It was, it was the. It was the. I think it was the sixth largest city in the world at the time. Nothing compared to. Was enormous. Maybe 125,000 people, something like that. Maybe 150, something like that. Quite large. Yeah. Those little tiny dots are people. Just an amazing. An amazing center. That building, I think pretty much up until the Industrial Revolution was the largest building in the Americas. Like the tallest building in the Americas. It's the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

[Podcast Host]

Really.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's not quite as tall, but it's enormous. You go there, it's like the Death Star or something. It's enormous. So those are people. Yeah, it's so big. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

And this was built around what Time, roughly.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So Teo is. It's early classic, so late pre classic. So think, like, it's starting to be built maybe about, I don't know, 1st century BC collapses roughly around 600, something like that. 650 starts to go downhill. Well, it's already going downhill by 650, but let's just say around there. Wow. But at, you know, in the sixth century, at least, it's the, you know, it's the sixth largest city in the world. You basically have, like some places in the Middle east, obviously, you have Constantinople, place like that. But this is right up there. It's right up there with them. It's huge.

[Podcast Host]

And so from 600 until like the 1800s, it's like the tallest building in the Americas.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's the largest thing.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's. It is massive. You go there, it is massive. And you know, I love Teo. I do. I love the site. Just the amount of labor it would have taken to build something like that is just. It's mind boggling.

[Podcast Host]

They must been building for hundreds of years.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You'd be surprised what people can do. You'd be surprised what people can do when they're either, either when they're. When they're, when they, when they've. They're facing a labor tax or under duress. You'd be surprised. I don't, I don't know what. I don't know how long that would have taken to be built. But it's not. I wouldn't say it's hundreds of years. I'd say it's, you know, sort of. One of the things about mesmerkin centers that I think is really cool that people don't realize is that they're like one of those. Was it matryoska dolls? So each building is like a matryka doll. So it starts off really small. And then the next king or ruler or whoever will build on top of it. They won't destroy it. They'll just build on top of it. And so what you're seeing here in a lot of Mesoamerican centers is like the last phase before it fell apart. So they're just building one on top of another one on top of another one on top of another one. And you get these rulers that are almost competing with their ancestors over this. They're like, oh, this is my. This is my ancestors stuff. I'm gonna. I'm gonna make it bigger, right? So you compete with them, but you outdo them, right? It's like, oh, you honor them. But like, I'm also better.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so there's a lot of that going on.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's interesting. It also I guess helps with the building that you can. You already have a head start.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So that by far is the. And for Mesoamerica, that's the. That's the biggest. That's the most impressive building.

[Podcast Host]

What. What happened to the civilization?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Teotihuacan. So Teotihuacan, another sort of not so common fact about factoid about Teotuhuacan. It's known in academic circles, but it's not. Not so common. And it's actually in the book too is Teotuhacan is. It's almost an imperial power. It, it goes around and it basically starts stomping other parts of Mesoamerica and invading. Invading other. Other places. If it's not invading with military, it's certainly meddling in the affairs of other places. And so Teotuhuacan, at one point, there's some folks from Teotuhuacan that make their way into the Maya area and take over parts of the Maya area actually just like flat out, like take over. And they set up shop there. They install Teotuhakan person from Teotuhakan, that person marries a Maya woman and they start dynasties. And so that's kind of how a lot of the Maya dynasties sort of start. A lot of the later Maya dynasties start. They start that way. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so as that first kind of empire kind of kind of thing in the. In at least in Mesoamerica, I think they make a lot of enemies. I think that they are overstretched. We don't know how Teotihuacan specifically falls, but the end is not good. Like they burn like somebody burns like they burn a good chunk of the city center, it kind of falls apart. And so all the usual suspects. We talk about collapse. It's always. It's all usual suspects. It's usually like, oh, there's some, some pressure from outside. There's some internal revolt. There's environmental problems, you know, population pressure. There's a. All those things are happening to Teotihuacan towards the end, but we don't have a good handle on what happens to them. Wow. Yeah. So that's so the most impressive for South America, for Mesoamerica, I would say, would probably be that for the Maya area, the world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work. Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use. Helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn [e-mail] M365 Copilot Spring Fest is

[Podcast Host]

happening now at Lowe's.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Keep the spotlight on your yard with

[Podcast Host]

stay green premium 2 cubic foot mulch. 5 bags for $10. Plus, when you want more help indoors,

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

get up to 40% off.

[Podcast Host]

Select major appliances that help you supercharge your chores. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Valid to 422 while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowes.com for details.

[Podcast Host]

Mold chopper excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I love Tikal Temple one. I've always loved Tikal Temple one. It's the iconic Maya pyramid for the Classic period. It's super tall, right? It's not nearly as big as this, but it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful pyramid. You're not allowed to go up it. People used to be able to go up this thing and the tourists kept dying. There we go. The tourist kept falling off the thing. Right, right. The stairs are actually, they're almost like walls. They're actually designed so that you're not supposed to go up this thing. Their stairs are like, they're basically just for elites. If you ever go up Maya building, you'll see a Maya building. That's Temple two. No, that's Temple. That's Temple one. There we go. You go up these things. The stairs are really, really steep. And they're designed to be really, really steep. And so the tourists kept falling off of this thing and, and, and so they put up a rope ladder and the tourists still kept falling off of this thing and dying. So then they installed, I think they installed a, a wooden thing in the back of it. And then that didn't work either. So you're not allowed to go up that one anymore. But it's, it's an iconic building. It's like what Maya temples tend to look like. Right. So it's between that and maybe Chichen Itza. You know, I think people know Chichen Itza. You know, the big pyramid there. Of course, that's a pretty common one. But I've always liked Tikal Temple 1.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I mean, it's so beautiful. It's an interesting looking building.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. And the fun part about all these pyramids is that all of that is just rubble inside. There's nothing like. There's burials. There's some burials, but you can't really go in any of that. It's just. It's just a giant pile of rocks with rock face on it. You know, with stone face on it. The only part you can actually go inside is that little tiny piece on the top. That's it. There's just a little tiny room there. And what you do is you go up these stairs, right? And there'll be a. Imagine a crowd. I want you to imagine like, a big crowd there. And they're performance spaces. So you go up to the top of there. You know, you go maybe behind a wall or something. And then when it's time to, like, come out, you're like, you know, and then, like people on the bottom, you do perform some sort of ritual or ceremony on the top, and you're good to go.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

That's what it is. That's what all these places are.

[Podcast Host]

What year roughly, was this being utilized?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

This is. Let's see. It's post. Let's see, post 695. So this is like. Yeah, late seventh, early eighth century, roughly, when this one's sort of being constructed.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. So you'd imagine some type of, like, high priest type person coming out.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's rulers. Yeah, it's mostly rulers and royal family members that are doing this. And you look at those steps. Don't think of the steps as just steps. Think of those. Sometimes those are platforms, too, and those are performance spaces, too. So there's dancers and stuff on them. Like, there's all kinds of stuff that's happening. The other thing that I would say about most of your Maya centers and Mesoamerican centers more generally, is that they're not, you know, the past is not in black and white or in gray and white or brown or something like that. Right. It's in color. Everything's in color. So this would have been painted, you know, and it's painted to clash. It's not like, painted to, like, look nice with the jungle. It's painted, like, you know, bright reds with, like, hematite sparkles in them. So there's like a glitter bomb when you walk past it. You know, it's designed to, like. Or, like, bright white, so it's hard to look at. Just like.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you're not building a giant pyramid to blend in.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, no. You want, like. You want something to clash. And so when you. It would have been an impressive site. You go to. You see these folks on the top of these, like, glitter buildings doing. Doing amazing things. Like, that's an amazing. It's an amazing thing.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's amazing.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. I mean, tell me if I'm completely off on this. I've heard that some of these places, like these, you know, larger civilizations, they cleared so many trees that they actually affected the rain patterns in the region.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's true. Yes, it's true.

[Podcast Host]

So can you tell me about that? I mean, that's a wild consequence that I don't know if they. They fully calculated.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So there's a National Geographic image of. It's a site called El Mirador, and it's a reconstruction painting. Basically. It has a ruler sort of in the drawing and has, like, all this. All this pavement. That would probably be a good. A good thing to sort of. To sort of go off here. But let's just say that it's, you know, it's. It's the amount of pavement that they're doing in a lot of these places. They're chopping. They're chopping. Not everything, but a lot of the jungle. You know, I. I tell my students sometimes that the jungle is trying to kill me. And it is. It really is. You watch these nature shows and these nature shows, these nature guys are like, oh, like jungle, source of life. Like, look at all this water. I can get, like, okay, chop stuff, whatever, or, you know, and, well, we can go to. We can just go to El Mirador. Look at El Mirador. It'll be there. And. Yeah, so that. That place we see all this forest now, it wouldn't have been there. It just wouldn't have been there. It would have been. It would have been chopped off. The jungle is. Is. Is. Is in many ways, it's hostile. It's. You know, there are. I'll give you an example.

[Podcast Host]

Hey, we're going to take a break really quick because I need to talk to the fellas. All right, if you're a woman, you can skip forward. I don. But, guys, I want to talk about one of the most probably demoralizing things that can ever happen to you. All right? You're in the bathroom, you're brushing your teeth, you look up in the mirror, and suddenly you realize my forehead looks bigger than it did before. Well, the thing with that is that men don't go bald overnight. Right, Christos. Anyway, it's sneaky, okay? It's like, all right, well, the lighting here is a little weird. And then you're like, ah, I just. I just, you know, took a shower. So, of course, you know what I mean? Or maybe my barber just actually pushed it back. And then one day day, someone tags you in a photo and you're like, what is going on? And the worst part is that most guys don't know what actually works. I mean, there's a million oils and, you know, all sorts of things like potions on the Internet basically that are going to claim to help you out. But the reality is there are doctor trusted ingredients that have been trusted for decades. I mean, truly, they've been studied for years. And that's why a lot of guys are using hymns. All right, Hims makes it incredibly simple to get personalized hair loss treatment online. You don't have to go to the doctor, you don't have to take off work, you don't have to drive across town, you don't have to sit in a waiting room thinking like, oh, everyone knows why I'm here. You know what I mean? Through hims, you get access to prescription hair loss treatments with ingredients that actually work, like finasteride, minoxidil, the actual stuff that's going to actually help your hair loss. These are clinically studied ingredients that can stop further hair loss and even regrow hair and as little to three to six months. So it's amazing. And the best part is that's 100% online. You literally just go to the website, do like a little consultation, you explain your situation and a licensed medical provider reviews it. And then if you qualify, they send you treatments directly to your door. No hidden fees, no surprise cost. It's not going to cost you an arm and a leg. You get real treatment designed around your goals. So for simple online access to personalized and affordable care for hair loss, weight loss and more, visit himss.comcamp that's hims h I m s.com camp c a m p for your free online visit hims.com camp featured products include compound drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for full details, restrictions and important safety information. Individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral minoxidil and finasteride. Let's get back to the show.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So one time I'm falling off this pyramid and I get hurt a lot. One of the funny parts about me working in a lot of these places is that I'm not athletic. I have no skill. Like, I have no skills. I have no skills, right? Just like drop me in a hostile, you know, no skills, right? So I get hurt a lot. And so I'm falling off this pyramid and the first I'm trying to like stabilize myself, I'm like, ah. I'm like falling, right? So I grab. I try and grab. The first thing. The first thing I grab is this tree called an ascoba tree. And it's called an ascoba because it has these spines. They're about that long, all poking out of the tree. They have barbs on them, so they break off in your flesh. And the tree itself has fire ants living on it too.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. It's a completely hostile tree. The palms are really good for thatching. They might be good to eat, which is why the tree has maybe evolved all these defenses. But I grab onto this and I'm like, ah. You know, and of course I let go. Cause I'm.

[Podcast Host]

I'm like a human being.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Human being. It's just all like. And so I grab it with my other hand and I grabbed something, and it's a vine, and it's called bayal. It's got spines, too. No. So, like, I got spines in both my hands and I'm falling off this thing. And eventually sort of, I like, you know, I hit a. I hit a tree with my body. And luckily it wasn't in a scopa tree. Anything's pointy. Whatever. But yeah, like, no matter where you look, there's. There's going to be. There's this one kind of tree that. Whatever that chemical substance is, and poison ivy. There's one tree where if you chop it with a machete, it'll actually spurt that stuff out at you. Like, it'll actually just fly out at you.

[Podcast Host]

No way. So you're cutting through the forest or through the jungle, and you're getting blasted with.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So you can kind of almost see why the folks at, like, some of these Maya centers were, like, chopping down everything. So what they do is they chop down a lot. They pave over. They take limestone and they burn it and they make plaster, and they plaster over tons and tons of forest, right?

[Podcast Host]

Like, literally basically just paving it.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Just paving it. Like, just like, we don't want to deal with this, right? So they pay you over it. And the forest that they do keep, they manage it. So they cut down everything that they don't want in the forest, kill everything they don't want, and they leave everything that's there. So the forest that is there a lot of times will have, like, you know, tropical fruits in it that they like. Or, you know, there might be game that they like that's there, right? But they get rid of everything that they don't like. And so we think of the forest as being pristine. It's not. And, yeah, that does alter weather patterns. You know, I was working in the early 2000s, I was working in this place called Sapotibobal. It's today, you know, it's today known as Sepoti Boball. Way back in the day, it was called hi Schweez. Rough translation of that is Jaguar Hill. Right. And I was working in the town there, and the people in the town had gotten there, whatever it was, maybe 20, 30 years. It wasn't an old town 20, 30 years ago. And they had chopped down a whole bunch of forests. And if you talk to the old timers, they would be like, yeah, I remember when it used to rain. Like, I remember the rainy season was getting later and later and later and later. Like, you know, this part of the world. One of the things that makes it difficult to work in is that there's. There's a rainy season and a dry season. And it's not as if there isn't rain in the dry season. It's just there's. You're either dealing with more rain or less rain. Right. And you often have enough water to drink, but either too much water or not enough water for your crops. It's one of those two things almost always, right. You never have, like, perfect, right? Never. And if you chop down a whole bunch of forest, it basically it alters that weather pattern. And so these guys, you talk to them be like, yeah, yeah, I remember, you know, when. When the rain used to start and it was like, you know, may or something. And now it's like starting in, like, June or July.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so. And where I was, the forest was cut down, but it wasn't cut down that bad, I imagine. Yeah, in some places. But, like, ancient deforestation, ancient deforestation. I imagine some of them were just like, I've got no patience with this and just chopping down, chopping down, whatever.

[Podcast Host]

I think my buddy, and I hope I'm not getting it wrong, but Luke Caverns, I was telling you about him. He's a brilliant. Like, he's the best. He's an amazing storyteller, but also just a really interesting researcher and archaeologist that's gone around finding stuff. He's the man. But he was telling me that. I forget which civilization specifically, but there was a site where they had cleared out so many trees that they basically built this massive civilization. But because the weather patterns changed, they were getting less rain, they were growing less crops. They were basically just kind of slowly strangling themselves because There was such little precipitation that the whole society kind of collapsed.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So that's actually one of the things, you know, we talk about the ancient Maya, right? One of the things that always comes up is the collapse, like what happened to them. Right. And I don't know if you're going to get to this later, but we talk about sort of collapse type stuff, right? You kind of go from the, you know, the heights of sort of population and art, culture, society, all that sort of stuff. Really complex society. In some places to crickets. Not everywhere, but in some places it just goes to crickets and it goes to crickets. Maybe 100, 150 years, something like that, right. In some places that collapses, like very fast, right? And in some place that collapse, some places that collapse happens and there's like all kinds of war events where, you know, you see people coming to, you know, coming to kill other, Other, other, other folks. You see these long term rivalries and such, people going back and forth against each other. Right. In other places, it seems more environmental. And so I don't know whether your friend's talking about the. My side of Copan, but that seems to be what's happening there. I used to work there.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, it was in Honduras. Yeah, Copan. I did a. I ran a. I was, I was there for a field school at one point. Running a field school with some friends of mine and. Yeah. And my advisor. And. Yeah. The Copan seems to have actually kind of degraded a bit. They sort of chopped down so much forest that basically you get to a point where the carrying capacity of the land just isn't. It just isn't there anymore. And you start seeing people just like, being like, I, you know, when you can't grow food, it's not like that, you know, society collapses all at once. But people are like, I'm gonna move, right? You know, like, like people don't just really stay around when, like, they're gonna be those people, right? Those people that you see on like the news when like the weather is coming and they're like, I'm never leaving, right? There's gonna be. Those people are always around.

[Podcast Host]

There's Floridians in every society.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes, there are Floridians in every society. Yeah. Yes, there are. Right. So they're going to be those folks, but there's also going to be folks that are just going to be like, you know what? I think I'm going to move to a better place. And so they do.

[Podcast Host]

That's so interesting. Yeah. It's funny because I think sometimes we have this view on history that is very kind of sterile and kind of removed. We're like, oh, these people walked around the forest and ate some fruit and they died. And then maybe there's some rituals in between, but we forget they're real human beings with the same minds as us that are making kind of the same calculations. And there's people that are just like, I'm going to go move. I'm going to get up and leave and go to a different town, or I'm going to walk with my family to a different village. And they're just kind of migrating. It's a. It's an interesting thing to consider.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, it is, it is. It's actually why I wrote that book on the table there. Right. So I just came out with a new book, Blood on the Wind. Right. The reason why I wrote that book in part is because it's about the Maya, but it's character driven. So I wanted to sort of highlight, okay, who are some personalities from that period that participated in this and what did they actually. What they actually like as people. Right. Not like, oh, because we think about these. We think, as you said, you know, we don't tend to think of the people in the past as people. We see them as like, I don't know, we see processes. We see like big patterns and things. And even when you read about individuals, you don't really think about, like, where did they go to the bathroom? Where was the bathroom break? Like, where did. None of that. Right. How are they feeling that day? What did they like? Were they emotionally scarred? None of that stuff. Right. You just sort of like, oh, King X did this, this day. And that's pretty much what you've got. And so in part, I wrote Blood on the Wind because I wanted people to basically be like, to look at this and be like, oh, these are individuals and you know, the people in the past, they were like us, Right. They were also not like us, but they were like, they were like us. They had worse technology. Right. But many, many times they make the same kinds of decisions. And, you know, I wanted to humanize them. That's kind of what it was. You know, you get tired of basically sort of going with process and big, big picture things. It's one of the problems that I think we have in our field.

[Podcast Host]

What are the interesting monotonous details of Maya life?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Monotonous details of life? Well, I would say there's one of the more monotonous details is diet. So we tend to think of, like, Cuisine, like, people like being like, oh, we have all these variety type things, right. The concept of a staple crop and a staple food that people just eat every day is not something that people, People really identify with. You know, I think, you know, there might be some places in the world where that, you know, we have this. Where it's like, oh, I conceive of rice and that's my staple food, and I eat that every day. Right. Or, you know, in Mesoamerica, corn or something like that every day. But in general, even in most, even even in the places where that exists, you still think of like cuisine. And while rulers may have had a fairly varied diet, or at least had sort of feasting diets that were somewhat varied, right. Your average person is, yeah, they're eating some meat. They might be eating some hunted. Hunted meat. And yes, they might have some, some varieties in terms of vegetables and such, but really they're eating a lot of corn. And to me, that's. And they're eating it in different forms. But again, if we look at sort of the hieroglyphs, and I'm a hieroglyph specialist, right? You look at the hieroglyphs, most of what they talk about is drinking gruel. And just the idea, like you work on an archaeological project and oftentimes one of the first things that people sacrifice is food. It's like one of the things to save money. They sacrifice food. And so you eat the same thing over and over and over again. And I've been on projects, including the sort of project in the 90s, my first big project that I was on as a grad student in the 90s, where you're eating gruel every day either for breakfast. Well, definitely for breakfast, but it might be for lunch too, right. And just the thought of that, you know, it's some sort of corn gruel, doesn't seem like the most appetizing, like the Matrix.

[Podcast Host]

Like it was just sort of like this mashed up corn.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes, it's exactly. It's like that. It's like a mashed up. It's a mashed up paste. And it's like, what are you gonna eat today? I guess I'll eat. I guess I'll have some gruel today, you know. And so to this day, like those experiences when I've run projects now, I'm like, very much like, no, we're gonna have good food. I can't stand it. I can't stand it. Right.

[Podcast Host]

It puts you more in touch with the people you're studying.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It Does. I suppose it does, but man, it is really uncomfortable. So, like, you know, like, my wife will like, you know, make oatmeal or something like that. I'm like, no, nope, nope, nope, nope. Not doing it right. So, like, you, you know, so that. This sort of. Anytime I see anything like that in any culture, I'm like, oh, it's kanji. Or oh, it's, it's, it's, it's gruel. I'm just like, please, no, like, I can't, I can't do it.

[Podcast Host]

So the average person every day was just waking up eating this kind of gruel sort of paste thing for sustenance. And that was non stop.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.

[Podcast Host]

That's interesting because in my mind, like, I feel like I romanticize kind of this period in these people where I'm like, oh, they must have been eating this very diet of nuts and berries, and they would go hunt and find a rabbit. And they were. Their gut health was probably amazing.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I mean, there's probably some of that, but there's a whole lot of gruel too.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I guess once you're in a civilization this big.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You know, in the tens to potentially hundreds of thousands of people, like, you just need something to keep it going.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So the site, the site sizes vary pretty, pretty widely. You get a site from, you know, a quote unquote city might range anywhere from about 6,000 people. But there are some places where it's like 130, 140,000 people living in these places. Right. So it's a pretty wide, wide variety on the diet thing. So even funnier, we think about feasts. Right. We're sort of rulers having feasts and things. One of the funnier aspects that we have about feasts, and this is not my work, this is Steve Howson's and others work, is that we think about feasts and these rulers throwing these big parties and things. But if you look at actually, who's actually eating at these feasts, it seems to just be the ruler. So when you get invited to a feast in ancient Maya society, it's basically you have all this abundance around the ruler, and the ruler's sitting there and feasting and things. And it's pretty rare that anybody else is doing anything other than just sitting and watching. And it's really uncomfortable. Yeah, like, that would be a really uncomfortable thing. Like, like imagine like a medieval feast where it's like just the king and they're just like, I'm gonna eat in front of you.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Again, it's consumption. It's like, look at all the stuff I got. And you don't.

[Podcast Host]

That's so funny. It's also the exact opposite of, like, Guatemalans today. Like, you go to your. You go to your, like, Guatemalan friend's house, and they give you unlimited food.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I know. It's unlimited food.

[Podcast Host]

And they're not to start eating till you've eaten two meals already.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, no. It's like. It's. It's. It's all warmth, right? It's all warmth and stuff. It's wonderful. It's wonderful.

[Podcast Host]

But now. But back in the day, the rule

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

was, like, you know, what's up? Just gonna sit here with my food. And. And the thing is, like, it was. It seems to. It was probably rude to actually watch the person chew their food. And so it would have been even more uncomfortable. Like, you get invited to a feast. The ruler's sitting there with all their food, and they're eating, and you have all these people being like, oh, gosh, strange.

[Podcast Host]

You're like a food cuck. All these formalities. You're watching some guy eat, and you're like, all right, I can't watch. And then you look up and you look back down. What an uncomfortable experience.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It would have been. Uncomfortable. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

It's just so interesting. I. I'm curious about these. You. You call them hieroglyphs. Yeah, that term. I'm obviously associated with ancient Egypt, but it would be the same term here.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, so it's the same term here. Hieroglyphs. So the. My head. Hieroglyphs. The. There are. So one of the things that distinguishes Mesoamerica from much of. Well, I think all the rest of the Americas is that they have writing systems. So it's a. It's an urban area, and there are plenty of other urban areas in the Americas, but for Mesoamerica, there's writing systems. Everybody's got writing systems. So the Aztecs have a writing system. The Maya have a writing system. The Olmec have a writing system. Probably start writing. Actually. Zapotechs, Mishtech, they all have writing systems systems. And the Maya writing system, though, is, I would say, the most complete and most complicated writing system that the America's ever produced. And so we know we can read about, I don't know, 85% of the inscriptions thing of that sort now, in part because we had things like a Rosetta stone to help sort of decipher them.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What kind of Rosetta stone was this? Somebody developed, like, Jesuits or something.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

That like, yeah, sort of. There was this real bastard named Diego d' who he was recalled back to Spain for being cruel to the indigenous folks in Yucatan.

[Podcast Host]

If you're getting recalled in the 1500s, you're probably pretty cruel.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You're getting recalled during the Inquisition. Like, it's really bad. You gotta be really bad to get recalled back to Spain for the Inquisition, right? So he gets recalled back to Spain, and as part of his legal defense, he sort of, oh, I wasn't really being bad to them. I was just studying them. And look at all this information that I gathered. And so one of the information things that he gathered was he got this Maya scribe to write down what he thought was the Alphabet in hieroglyphs. Now, the Maya didn't have an Alphabet. They didn't. And so he was asking the scribe. You can imagine him asking the scribe being like, I want you to write down, like, Abe Sede. And the scribe being like, we don't. Okay, I guess. And the tribe, it kind of. Kind of tries to do it right. There's a section of the thing too, that we don't know what he asked the scribe to do. And more recently, we've deciphered what it says on there. And that what it says is, I don't want to. We don't know what he was asked to do, but he wrote down I don't want to on there. K Pop Demon hunters, Haja Boy's breakfast meal and hunt tricks meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

[Podcast Host]

Ba da ba ba ba. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's crunch time at work and you need to bring wings to your workday.

[Podcast Host]

Visit redbull.com gettingitdone and answer a couple

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

questions about your work style to get a Spotify customer customized playlist tuned to your productivity.

[Podcast Host]

Plus, score a can of Red Bull

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

on us while you go from to do to done. And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited, terms apply. Visit the website for more information.

[Podcast Host]

And what is the name of this. This stele? Or like this?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, it's a. It's a. It's a text. It's the Relation of the things of Yucatan. It's by a. By. What do you call it? Dio de Londa. So, yeah, you just look up Diego de Londa, and we still have the original scribes. We do. We have it. We have it in. We have it in the. We have. We have the Spanish. The original Spanish versions. We have English translations of it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Anyway, so. So it's. It's. It's. It's. It's spelled out that way now. Dear Londa, I said he was a real bastard, because he was. He wins his legal case, he gets promoted, because that's how these things work. People always follow up the ladder, Right? So he gets promoted. He becomes bishop of Yucatan.

[Podcast Host]

What?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But then the Catholic Church.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, no, he burns, like, almost all of the indigenous Maya books, has this giant, like, big bonfire. He burns almost everything he can find, gets promoted to be the. To be bishop of Yucatan, and goes on his merry way, but there we go. That's it.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

That Alphabet formed the basis of the. The. The discovery of. Of hieroglyphs, of how to. Actually, that was. That was our Rosetta stone. So even though the sounds were kind of off, they were close enough.

[Podcast Host]

It gives you something.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It gave us something. And even weirder. So. So the Cold War, Right? The Cold War plays in this, too. So there's a. There's a Soviet code breaker who. Who winds up sort of promoting this idea that the. There's a syllabic component to the inscriptions. So there's. Prior to that point, we thought that there was, like. We call logographs. So, like, think of, like, one glyph and equals one word. Right. He basically was saying, well, no, there's actually some that are one glyph per one sound. Right. Anyway, the Soviet code breaker comes up with this, and he. He breaks. He breaks the Maya code, like, the initial Maya. He breaks it. He basically comes up with a couple of words, and he links them to glyphs. And from those. And it links them to pictures, actually. So he's lucky. He looks at a picture. I forget what the animal was, but he looks at a picture. He looks at something next to it. He reasons that it's a caption and decides, oh, I've got a caption here. Awesome. And he kind of goes through it. And because it's the Cold War, people in the west don't want to accept that this is real. And so the scholarship gets held back, and it gets held back for whatever it is. A couple of decades gets held back, and then things thaw in the 70s. And all of a sudden this comes out and people are like, oh, wow. And people build on this and build on it and build on it. And so one of the more ironic things is that there's a Russian American named Tatiana Proskiakov who was also a chain smoker. For some reason, in my mind, she was a chain smoker. Right? She worked. She was at Carnegie and then she was. Then she was at Harvard. Chain smoker. She. She's the person who's responsible for deciphering that there wasn't just calendrical stuff. Yeah, there wasn't just calendrical stuff in the inscriptions, but there were. There was actually history written there. So if you. So we owe that to her. Like, the idea of, like, oh, that there's history written there. That's her. And so you have all these waves of discovery. And so there was a wave of discovery in, like, the 80s. I was part of the wave in the 90s. So it's like straight up 90s, straight out of the 90s. So I was part of that wave in the 90s and have been doing it ever since. It was my first love. If you had to picture, like, what's my first love? And for the Maya stuff, it was glyphs. It always was.

[Podcast Host]

So what can you tell me about this Frazetta stone? When we're looking at this, I know we're trying to put this Alphabet together, but it's not really there. But what can we pull away and be like, okay, like, I see Mickey Mouse down the bottom. That's K, I think.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay, yeah, sure. So looking at these things, what they did was they found. Really, they found real world examples of these on. On. On. On monuments, on sculptures and things. And they basically said, okay, well, if that. If that's a. See that ka. See the. The thing that looks like a comb there? Okay, so, like that. The. Off to the. Let's see. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The sixth one. The sixth one off. Yeah, the. The comb. The comb looking. There we go.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. Remember I said there was a word for cacao? Oh, yes, that's the ka. It's the exact same one. And so what they did was they started plugging in those glyphs in every example they could find and being like, is there another word we can make out of this? And they looked at every dictionary they could find, anything from the colonial period, anything modern, anything of that sort. And basically that's how they did it. They sort of pieced it together. And so between that And. And it turns out that there are logographs. Right? There are plenty of logographs. Combining those two things together, they were able to sort of piece together words. And we've been doing it ever since.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Think of it as like. Like extreme Sudoku. It's kind of what it is. It's like extreme sudoku.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, this one fits, this one fits,

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

but this one doesn't fit. How does this work? It can only be this and this and this.

[Podcast Host]

Right? Oh, but actually, our first one wasn't even the right one because the second one's the right one. So I'm gonna switch it.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So that's what it is. It's. It's. It's. It's. It's extreme Sudoku. And so. So in the 90s, I was a student. I was at Tulane University in New Orleans, actually. I grew up on Long island, but I. Oh, nice. Yeah. But I went to Tulane because I was pre med. And we see how that worked out. It had a really good pre med program. It was like an early acceptance. Right. So I went there and I didn't know anything about Maya stuff or any. I wasn't like. I was like. A lot of little kids, if you meet somebody that's my age and they tell you that they weren't, like, into Indiana Jones and that's not why they became an archaeologist, they're lying. They're lying. Of course we were. We all were. Right? And so, you know, yeah, whatever. I'm like in second grade or something like that. They're good. Yeah. Like, that was my thing. I do this pre med thing and I get to Tulane. And it just so happened they had a really good Latin American studies program, Latin American archeology and anthropology there. And it just so happened they had one of the experts on hieroglyphs there. And so I took a class, and I was like, one of those nerdy kids that, like, would, like, you know, with a blackboard or something, like, practice glyphs in the basement of a building somewhere. That was me. That was me. That was me in my dorm. I was just doing that, like, you know, sort of learning this stuff. And I sort of was at it for years. And towards the end, I did a project on anniversaries and figured out that the Maya celebrated birthdays. Not that they celebrated, like, when the person was born, but like. Like birthdays. Like, this is your second birthday, your third birthday. Like, I figured out that they celebrated birthdays.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, that was me. That was weird.

[Podcast Host]

And how do you find this? How do you discover this.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I looked at patterns. So I looked for like patterns in when the dates were. So I was like, okay, well, when is this person born? Do we see anything after, you know, one year, two year, 10 years, 20 years, things of that sort? And it turned out, yes.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And they do, they do death anniversaries too. So like, oh, when did this person die? Like, oh, the longest death anniversary I think we have is about 200 years. I'm still celebrating this guy's his, you know, birthday afterwards. Right. Which sounds weird, but really, we do that all the time. Yes, it's not that weird. Like president's birthdays and things. We do that.

[Podcast Host]

Or even just like on a casual basis, like you go to like, you know, your grandparents grave, you know, maybe on their birthday, maybe on their death day, but like you go and bring flowers or something.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. And so I think that again, that humanizes them. Right. You sort of see this. And so I looked at that stuff and I just, I fell in love and didn't look back.

[Podcast Host]

That's so cool. What are some of the glyphs you could point me to that either you've worked with or that you just know of that might, for lack of a better word, just blow my mind.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Might have. Blow your mind. Okay. All right. So speaking of Tatiana Proskrikov, if you look at the glyph for birth, it's sih. It's S I Y. Right. It's a glyph for birth. It looks like a frog or like a toad. Right. And one of the things that we're figuring out now is not just what the glyph means, but how the glyph came to look like that. So, like, why did they choose the glyph for birth? Why did they make it a frog or a toad or what have you?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So each of those things. There we go. Yeah, that's it. So a couple years ago. So this is a glyph. It was actually deciphered by Titan Priscury Cough. It was a glyph for birth. It was like one of the first glyphs that was ever deciphered.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's a logograph. So it's, it's one glyph for one word. Right. And we now know that it's an iguana. It's actually supposed to be an iguana. It's not a toad or frog. It's kind of a. It's actually a cryptid. It's actually a toad. A toad. I call it Toaduanos. It's Like a. It's like looking at like a jackalope or something. A lot of these things are kind of combinations, right?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really? It's a fake animal combining two things. Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And I was staring at it for a while and I was wondering myself what all those dots are on the top.

[Podcast Host]

Top.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It had been bothering me for years and I was like, what are those, what are those dots on the top? And I was, I was sitting in a laundromat in Germany. This is like three years ago, sitting in a laundromat in Germany. And I was like waiting for my laundry to be done. And I'm looking through toad stuff and you know, I don't know if you've ever read, you know, to a kid or anything like that. Like you've ever read. The frog and toad are friends. Not serious. Yeah, yeah. So they ride a bike together. Yeah, yeah. And so I was reading the frog and toad friends stuff to my daughter, you know, at various points. And this is like maybe three years ago, reading stuff to her. And it was like, it was at the tail end of that. Like they don't, you know, she's too big for that now. Right. And I'm sitting at the laundromat and I start thinking about it and I'm like, I start googling things and I figure out that those, those things there are actually eggs. If you look at toads. Frogs and toads, frogs lay eggs in like a, like a, like a nest of eggs. Right. Toads lay them in strings. And the toads that lay them in strings in Mesoamerica are these big bufo toads. They're. I think, I think they might not be classified as bufo toads anymore, but they're those. The ones that people like think get you high. If you look, you lick them.

[Podcast Host]

Like those toads. Yeah. Like a big old fat boy.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. I don't. First of all, one who tried that out.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No.

[Podcast Host]

Oh.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

This one's kicking. This was, this was hidden.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

1, 2. It's actually mostly really poisonous. I don't know if it would actually like, don't try this, guys. Like, I think it's just really poisonous.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that's like Cambo or Gambo. I think it's cambo. It's like a. That like it's a poisonous frog that puts you like close to death.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And it's in that near death state that like your brain sort of of endogenously creates dmt and then you hallucinate and then you're like, whoa, I'M high, and it's like, no, you're dying.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, I don't know. I like, I like, like, let's put it this way. You're not gonna get me licking a toad. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna try that. So I don't, you know, I don't know anybody who has. But, yeah, that's just a weird one. Anyway, so I'm looking at these things and I said, oh, they're toad eggs. And I started to sort of come along that Come. Come around to that possibility. And what I found was that basically a lot of these toads and frogs and things, they form part of a category of really sort of fertile animals. Animals that the ancient Maya thought were, like, produced lots and lots of young. And, like, they're all fertile. So they grouped like toads and iguanas, frogs, some snakes, crocodiles, things like this. It produced lots of eggs as, like, super fertile animals. And for whatever reason, they latched onto iguanas and toads and such as the glyph for birth. So that's why it's. That it's a fertile animal.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Right. And so I think what's happening right now is we're actually trying to find the hidden history for each of these glyphs. Like, why did. What was in their minds when they were, like, making this stuff up? Right? And, yeah, I'll admit some of them were probably really, really high. There's really high. Making some of these things up. Right, but why? Right. And so a lot of these glyphs, I think there's a hidden backstory to them, and I think that's where we are right now with the field, is that we're trying to sort of figure out. Okay, well, why did X glyph end up looking like that?

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break real quick because I gotta ask you a question. Are you the type of person that just wakes up in the morning and immediately, like, hits your vape or gets a coffee or throws in a pouch? Because you just want to feel anything at all. Like, you just throughout the day, you're like, okay, coffee pouch. Coffee pouch. Vape. Coffee pouch. I mean, to be honest with you, that was me. Like, I was just going from cold brew to pouch to cold brew to pouch all day. And my heart felt like it was gonna explode. Like, I was just like. Like, felt strung out, like, all day. Truly. I was, like, just kind of anxious, and I didn't even know why. And I was trying to like, eat clean. I was lifting weights. Meanwhile, I was also chemically nuking my nervous system. And that's why I started these Ultra patches. I'll be honest with you, I found these on my own. And then I reached out to the company. I was like, hey, I would love to work with you guys because I love what you guys do. Ultra is amazing because it's nicotine free and caffeine free and it still gives you that focus and energy. Energy. It's really the best. Like, I'm like, okay, there's no nicotine or caffeine. I was like, well, what is it? Well, basically they partnered with neuroscientists to put together a blend of like nootropics and adaptogens to actually help you focus and get energized and kind of, you know, help with that oral fixation. No Diddy without like the jittery crash. So it's got like L theanine, infinity PX alpha, GPC, vitamins B6 and B12. And I'll be honest, they taste great, they make you feel great. And, and I don't know if it's just me or what, but like, I truly feel like I'm more locked in when I'm taking them and there's no crash. And the craziest thing is that, you know, sometimes I'll still use nicotine. It just helps me cut back and I feel way better now. Caffeine and nicotine are going to wreck your resting heart rate. It's going to make you feel anxious if you're taking them all the time. And on top of that, it's going to destroy your sleep. So that was my biggest issues. I felt cracked out, I felt anxious and I wasn't sleeping that good. But ever since I've been taking Ultra, I'm still getting that same little kick. I'm getting that thing to do throughout the day and I just feel better. Better in general. Ultra is absolutely amazing. And if you're interested in checking them out, I have great news. You're going to go to takeultra.com that's T A K-E-Ultra.com and you're going to use the promo code camp and you're going to get 15% off when you use that code. That's takeultra.com and use a code camp for 15 off. And when you check out, they're going to ask where you heard about Ultra. Just please tell them that we sent you over at Camp Cat. It really helps us out a lot. Thank you guys so much. Feel better, sleep better. Get less anxious, but stay locked in. Now let's get back to the show. No glyphs for aliens.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No glyphs for aliens. No, not yet. Not yet. No glistare aliens.

[Podcast Host]

If there's a glyph, you could understand that. You don't know what it is. Is there one that you're like, I wish I could just read this.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

There are, yeah, yeah. So there are parts of some of the glyphs, some of the death glyphs. So there's lots of different death glyphs. And as you said, I'm sort of a debt specialist. Right. So there's a glyph for. There's many different ways that they talk about dying. And one of the reasons why there are so many different glyphs for death is because the ancient Maya, just to sort of blow your mind, didn't believe in one soul. They believed in lots of them and they escaped the body at different times when you die, almost certainly. Right. So there's like one that's kind of residing in your head and another one maybe in your liver, another one maybe in your heart, something like that. We know the Aztecs had this. Where the Aztecs, like, they believe, like when you dilutes a whole bunch of things, right. As a sidebar, there's this one Aztec soul. It's really sad. It lives in your liver and it's, it's, it's like your bile, like your angry, like, soul, whatever. When it, when you die, it actually has to go around and find every piece of you that ever you ever left behind in your life and pick it up. So like toenail clippings and hair and all sorts of stuff. It's kind of a sad soul. It's going to. Walks around. Yeah, it's almost a ghost, right? It's almost like this thing that's like, you know, just like unfinished business kind of, kind of character.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Anyway, so there are these, there are these glyphs, sort of the glyphs for death. And there's a part of one of the glyphs for death that we can't read. And I wish we could. It drives me crazy. It's a glyph. It's a flower. It's almost certainly the, a flower that the Maya equated with death. It was, you know, the flowers that you get in Hawaii, like those, like lei flowers. A. It's a variant of that. It's. It's one of the death flowers, but we don't know the Word for it. And we can't quite. Can't quite get our handle on it.

[Podcast Host]

And you don't know why they associated this flower with death?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I don't. I mean, some of them are rather, rather easy. So like marigolds are rather easy. They. They drive away flies.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so you put. Yeah, so you don't want. You don't want the body to actually. Because it's, it's hot. Right. It's a. You don't want to put a rotten body and have the rotten body basically be covered in flies. Be covered in flies. So you have marold. So that, That's a fairly easy one.

[Podcast Host]

I see.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Why you would want some of these other ones, I have no idea.

[Podcast Host]

So which is. Are any of these. The ones you're talking about?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, some of them are flowers. Yeah, they're. They're. I mean. Yeah, look for. Yeah, it. It. It'd be hard to. It'd be hard to find. It's. It's a. It's a little face. It's. It's a little hard to find. Yeah. Kimi's a really nice one. That'. This, the skull over there. That's a really easy one. That's just, that's just death. Let's just like, it's, you know, we know that one. That's an easy one.

[Podcast Host]

It's such a distinct visual essence.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It is like.

[Podcast Host]

It's like it's fundamentally doing the same thing that the Egyptians are doing or that, you know, like the, the Indus Valley River. You know, people are. It's like it all kind of is doing the same thing, but it looks so distinct.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, it's. The thing about Maya writing is that it's. It's not made for you, it's not made for me. The Maya writing system, the amount of people who are literate in ancient Maya society, you're talking maybe 1% can read and write really well. I could maybe go up to 10% that can read something or understand something, but not past that. It's designed by and for a really small ruling elite. It's designed to be secretive knowledge. You know, when you think of writing today, we think of it as something that is almost democratizing. It's like, oh, I'm going to print something out and it's going to be really, really efficient. It's an efficient thing. It's like you print something out, you got the information right. This is a writing system that is purpose built to be inefficient. It's designed to be esoteric. It's designed to be somewhat mysterious. And again, that concept of like, I am, I am designing a writing system to be inefficient. I think, I think it throws a lot of people. It's like, oh, like what? What do you mean? It's not designed to be read. Like, it's not designed to be, it's not designed to work.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Interesting.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's designed, purpose built to not work, not work well, fast. Right. And you see that with Egyptians too. Ancient Egyptians, I believe you had somebody, a guest on here, was an ancient Egyptian specialist. Right. At one point. That writing system is not when they first, when they're, when they're coming up with it. It's not designed for everybody to read. It's a really small group of people and over time they come up with hieratic and they, you know, you're writing a little bit faster and things. There may have been a process happening like that for the Maya too. They didn't get, they didn't quite get to that point. But it's, it's designed to really be something that you're not supposed to look at. And so that's, that's why the style is the way that it is. It's, it's, it's designed to really be like. You kind of stare at it for a while.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting crisis. Could you Google just like Maya, like face carving or like, like wall carving? And basically the reason I want to look at this is because this is going to all tie together. But I, I don't do drugs often. Okay. But I, I did mushrooms maybe two years ago and it was the only time. And I, I spoke and consulted with a psilocybin clinical psychologist before doing it because I wanted to do it in the most sort of like. Yeah, well, any of these are perfect.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Actually. I have an idea. You want to see something trippy?

[Podcast Host]

Please.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay. Look up Yash Chilan Lintel 20. 25. Maybe Y A X, C H I, L A n. Then lintel 25.

[Podcast Host]

Nice.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Or 25 or 24. But 25, let's just try witness 20. 25. Go with 24. Sorry, 24. Oh, actually that'll work. Nope, next one. Go 25. Okay, let's see that one there. The British Museum one. That one? Yeah, that one. So if you, if you go to that one and you sort of open that link or open the, yeah, open the link in a new tab or open the image or whatever. Okay, so what we going to. I, I'll tell you what it is, but I was going to Say, this is like, the most trippiest, one of the trippiest things I can think of.

[Podcast Host]

In short, I, I do the whole thing that he basically told me to do, okay? And basically it was like, you know, get food and water, be in nature. Like, don't do so much. Like, do this amount. And again, this is a psychologist that works specifically with people to administer psilocybin for, like, therapeutic purposes. And he gave me a specific playlist, and the playlist came from, like, John Hopkins from their clinical trials with psilocybin. And a lot of the songs sort of have this, like, ambient, Central American, what I would assume as a layperson kind of vibe. There's a lot of, like, flutes and, like, light drums and things like that. And he was like, this is sort of good ambient sound to listen to. So I did. And I don't know why I'm not a good mental visualizer. Like, if I close my eyes, it's just black. Like, I, I think I have, like, aphantasia or something. Like, I can't see stuff that bright. But when I did mushrooms, I could see so clearly in my mind's eye, like, colors and images and for whatever reason. And maybe this is placebo. This is me projecting. This is what I saw. Not literally this, but, like, it was this type of carving and inscription. It was like, it wasn't Egyptian. It wasn't. It was like, specifically, like, petroglyphs that felt like this style. And I was like, that is so strange. And I don't know if it's me sort of retroactively putting it on, but it's like psilocybin is quintessentially a Central American psychedelic. And the fact that this is what I saw, again, I'm, I have nothing to deduce here, but I was like, I wonder if they're doing the same thing and seeing images and kind of recreating the images from these psychedelic experiences.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, I, I, that would not shock me. No, that would not shock me. So in terms of what you see on these sorts of things, very oftentimes when we're looking at sort of this material, you'll. Every once in a while, every once in a while, anyway, you'll see things that look almost distortions, things that look big that shouldn't be big, and things that are small that really shouldn't be small and such. And you do have to wonder to yourself, like, what are they thinking? Like, you know, are they tripping when they're doing this, this specific path panel? It's Part of a triptych. Two of the pieces are in the British Museum. The third piece, I believe, is in Mexico City, and it's from a site called Yaschilan. It was like a door lintel, basically. It would have been above, so it would have been up there somewhere. And looking at it, what you're seeing is on the right, there's a woman. She's got a bowl in her left hand. The bowl has a bunch of items in it. In the bowl, there is a blood letter. There is a whole bunch of blood, a whole bunch of bloody paper. And some of the things that are in there that are kind of like to let you know that there's. She's done a whole bunch of penance and a whole bunch of. She's done a whole bunch of bloodletting. Now, we know from another panel, this is gonna. This is gonna blow your mind a little bit. We know from another panel that the kinds of things that they were doing to sort of to do this bloodletting. In this case, we know that she was almost certainly drawing a thorny rope or string with either McGay spines or potentially pieces of obsidian through her tongue. Like, boom. Like, punctured it through it, like, bloody. There's another triptych, actually has her just like, her mouth is just like. You know. And the triptych, the three pieces are not actually from the same event. Event, but they were arranged in such a way as to tell you kind of a story of, like, this is what normally happens, right? So she's got all this blood, and she's basically let it into this bowl. Now, we know that this, what you're seeing here is actually a conjuring event. They're actually summoning a patron God of the city. So that's what you're watching. You're watching her conjure. Like, that's what she's doing, right? She's actually like magical ritual. Right? We know from other contexts that the folks that are involved in this, it's usually a procreative act. And so there's usually a male, female pair that does this. And in the male pairing, what they do with what the men oftentimes do is they'll. What's the most painful place you could imagine cutting with a knife?

[Podcast Host]

Are you stuck staring at your W2? Are tax refund worries holding you back?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You probably have FOMO.

[Podcast Host]

The fear of messing up the fear fix.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Using TurboTax on Intuit credit Karma.

[Podcast Host]

They find every credit and deduction to help you get every refund dollar. You Deserve or your money back.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's time to overcome your fear of

[Podcast Host]

messing up and get your taxes done. Right. Start filing today in the Credit Karma app. I'm gonna go probably penis.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe balls. Honestly, balls might be worse.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Maybe. I don't know. I don't know now, right? I'm not going to try that. You're not going to get me doing that. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I'll lick a toad before I do that.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so we know for the men's case, for example, they'll take these spines, these big stingray spines from these stingrays, the ones that have barbs on them, and they'll show you at least a guy with one of these stingray spines and a handle. And I've actually found these. Archaeologically found these. And he's actually puncturing the foreskin of his penis with it. Like, boom. You know, and, you know, and then they'll show, like, the blood, like the person's bleeding, whatever, and it's like, ah, you know, and the blood will go in there. Right now they show this. Don't ask me how they figured this out, but I reviewed a paper one time where they actually were sort of playing around with, is this possible? Could be. Could people have done this?

[Podcast Host]

And the answer was, could people have done what specifically?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Taken a stingray spine, punctured a foreskin of a penis and actually, like, that. Would. Would that be like a regular practice? Because these are the. These are. These are like rulers that are doing this. Right. And the reality is, is that those stingray spines will break off in the wound. It's. It's. It's a barbed thing. You can't just, you know, like, little pieces will get. Will break off in it. Sometimes the spines have venom in them for a lot longer than you'd think they would. And so, realistically speaking, in a tropical environment, if you do that, that. And you don't have access to modern medicine, you're probably getting infected. Like, you're probably, you know, and you're the ruler, too. So it's like. Seems like a bad idea.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so one of the things that I found the first time I found one of these. These bloodletter things in the bundle with the. With the actual blood letter were a whole bunch of what looked like really clean surgical pieces of obsidian. Like, little pieces, obsidian. They were nice and clean, you know, that. That you could use to make a clean incision and you wouldn't have to worry about, like, anything like this. Like, the obsidian is actually sharper than surgical steel. It's brittle, which is why you probably don't use it much in surgery, although I've heard of it. But it would make a nice clean incision. And so what we think is happening both on the male end and possibly on this image. So if you scroll down to the woman, what's possibly happening to this person is, remember I said you go up to the top of a pyramid and you perform these rituals and you come out and you're like, what may be happening is they may be cutting themselves, getting the blood on in private, basically getting less blood out and then coming out, like into the window and being like, look what I got, you know? And of course, if you, if you actually think that that's what they did, they'd have the same reaction you did, which is like your jaw drops, like, what are they doing? Right. So realistically speaking, she may not actually be drawing a rope through her tongue. She may be telling people that's what she's doing. It may not actually be. They might, they may not be telling the truth. You have to keep in mind these are political monuments. These are political statements, right? So anyway, so she's got all the stuff going on, right? She's got a skull on her right arm that she's balancing. Almost like she's got her fingers and she's actually wiggling her fingers and she's got the skull on her forearm. It's probably a deceased ancestor.

[Podcast Host]

That's the thing over her bracelet right there.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, yeah. There's like a skull there. Right. There's a little skull there. And if you look at it, there's a little centipede looking thing that's coming out of the top. Top, yes. In her inner headdress is also centipede coming out of her top. Out of. Out of the top of her headdress. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Where's the headdress?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So there's her head right on. On to the right. There's her head. And if you go to the right there. Yeah. There's like a little headdress. Right, I see, yeah. So what she's done is she's got the skull, she's conjuring things. The patron God of the city is almost certainly an ancestor. She is. Then what, what you're supposed to do anyways, you're supposed to burn a. You burn the bowl. You burn the stuff in the bowl. If you go below the snake head on the bottom, so you keep going down, there's another bowl. Maya inscriptions oftentimes will show you things that are happening at this. Like Sequentially, but they'll, they'll just put it all in one because they don't have the room for it. So she's lit that. There's actually smoke that's coming out of it. And then there's snakes. There's. There's a double headed snake that's coming out. So one head of the snake is, is there and it's opened its mouth and there's like a mask coming out of it. You can see like a skull looking mask thing, right? It's not a skull, but there's a mass coming out of it. If you go up, back, all the way up and you follow where that snake's going, it's. He winds off to the left. Keep going up, keep going up, keep going up. It's actually a giant centipede. But okay, so then it's, it's opening its mouth and then this God is popping out of it. And it's the patron God of the city. It's. It's a guy named Akako Chak, which I find funny. It almost sounds Irish. Ochak. Right. He's coming out of the, coming out of the, coming out of the, out of the thing and she's talking to him. Right. She's probably engaged like one. Even if she's only cut her tongue with a surgical knife. She's probably in a lot of pain. The guy is, whoever she was with, her husband was probably in a lot of pain at this point. I've never been in pain, you know, and had pain levels to where I would be tripping like that. But even if I, even if they weren't tripping on that, they probably were tripping on mushrooms and other things too. They probably were. When this is happening. Happening, Right. To make it even cooler, the glyphs here, they're in reverse. This is designed to be looked at with a mirror or a bowl of water. You're supposed to actually be in supernatural space. So whatever you saw in that thing, right. The Maya had this idea that there was, there were mirrors and the mirrors were portals to other worlds and that there were things that were going on on the other side of the mirror like Alice in Wonderland style. And you could access that style stuff. And so that's what this is. It's actually showing you what's on the other side of the mirror. It's really awesome.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Now when you say the other side of the mirror, you mean that they would look at this through a mirror. So they would put a mirror down and it would be on the ceiling they would, that's how they would look at it.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, it would be right side up. But the way that this particular thing was done, they put you in the building and everything was reversed. So you're actually entering. You're supposed to be on the other side of the mirror when you get into the building. And you're actually looking out at the regular world when you look in the, in the, the. In the mirror.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting. Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So as I said, these guys are probably high as, like, they're probably really high.

[Podcast Host]

The mirror thing is so interesting because that shows up a lot, like a lot of different cultures. Like, I mean, John D. Who is, you know, even like the, the queen's, you know, sort of mystical adviser in like 17, 1800, something like that. Like, he had this obsidian mirror that he would like, conjure beings and like, that's how he would. He was doing his stuff or like these sort of like incantation bowls of water that you would kind of like look into. And it's interesting that they kind of of independently also came up with this mirror thing. There's something about mirrors and reflections that sort of invoke the supernatural.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. There's a lot of magic that's going on in the Maya area in the late Classic period. So in about 600 to about 900 or so, there's a lot of magical things that we know about that are happening and interesting.

[Podcast Host]

And so these high pain, really intense acts and behaviors. You would propose that this is maybe a, I guess, some type of vehicle to accessing this supernatural being through intense pain.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's pain plus drugs, essentially. It's what's doing it. There's almost a sense that if it's a sacrifice, it needs to hurt. Right. It needs to actually not just be like, oh, what'd you do? Oh, I gave up chocolate for lent, or something like that. Something like that. No, it's like, no, it actually has to really hurt. Right. And so I think there's that access there now. I should say that it's, it's a bit restrictive. So the way that it worked, at least at this point for these, for these guys, is that the rulers and the sort of the royal family was largely descended from these patron gods. So they essentially had God blood. So when they're shedding blood for these sorts of things, it's because it's already kind of magical God blood that they're using.

[Podcast Host]

It's the blood of the gods.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You need God blood to actually make this stuff work. So your average person can't just be, be like, doing this, they can't just go to their house and, like, you know, it's not going to work. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Because they don't have the divine right. Y. Oh, that's interesting. And now is your theory is that it's ritualistic or that it is because they're actually cutting themselves, they're releasing a ton of cortisol and adrenaline, that they're, you know, hallucinating along with these drugs, or is it kind of both?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I think it's kind of both. I don't know whether, you know, who knows what you see in these kinds of scenarios. Right. But I think they conceptualized those centipedes. There's different kinds of them. There's centipedes, there's snakes, there's things that look like dragons. The general idea is that you want to conjure this God called Kahuil. It's a glottal. You can practice it in the shower or something. QA wheel.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You conjure this God called Kawil. And Kawil is kind of a. Almost like a Hermes kind of character. Right? It's like a messenger, like you. Kind of like a middleman kind of character. And then Hermes sort of. This Kawil character sort of has a snake that has. I can't make this stuff up. Has a snake that's actually his leg. And what you're actually seeing here is actually his. Yeah, there it is. You're actually seeing the snake's head open. So it's actually all going through Kawil. And there's almost a sense that. I think they probably view it as a serpent or a snake because it's something that's long. That's connecting one world to another world that's alive. So they're classifying things like serpents and centipedes and all these sorts of things. So if you want to talk to the dead, for example, like, you need something like a centipede that is like. Almost like bridges that gap between, like, the world of living and the world of dead. And if you. Have you ever seen one of those big, giant centipedes? They're creepy, right? Yeah. They have that. They have that quality to them. Right? Or the millipedes. They have that kind of quality to them.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're very alien looking.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They are alien looking.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They look hot like aliens.

[Podcast Host]

That's so interesting. Yeah, These sort of, like, occult rituals that they sort of partake in. What is the sort of political breakup of, like, the shamans or like the priests that are doing this and sort of the. The monarchs or the leaders that are running and are they in battle with each other?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

There's no difference. So we tend to, like, think of this. This sort of thing is like, oh, there's, like, there's folks and they're doing witchcraft or sorcery or what have you, and that's like. Like somehow, like not sanctioned, not part of the normal society and such. Or they're somehow set apart. Right. Or like, there's a priest class.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that's our. That's our society.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, that's our society. Right. This is a separate class for these guys. No, for these guys, the rulers are the primary. They're like the heads of the religious. They're. It's a. Religious. It's a theocracy on some level. So they're. They're actually the ones that are the prime movers and shakers in a lot of this. Are there priests? Yes. Are there folks that are. That are. That are sort of engaged in this kind of activities? Yes, but. But the leaders of them are the. Are the. Are the rulers and their wives. And. And. And that's. That they're doing all of this themselves.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. So the leaders themselves are actually invoking this.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. One of the characters in that book, she has a really sort of strange career trajectory. She goes from being a. A little girl who is basically being pursued from city to city because they're basically. Her relatives are trying to kill her, and she goes from that to sort of wife. Then she and her husband become usurpers. They start. They usurp a kingdom, they take over a kingdom. Then she becomes a mother, then she becomes a sorcerer, then she becomes a warlord. And she's probably the chief evidence that we have for the Maya practicing total war, where they go in and not just killing, like, not just going in and like, taking out, you know, enemy combatants and things, but like burning villages, burning agricultural fields. She's probably the. You know, she's. She's. She's one of the most brutal. She ends up becoming one of the most brutal rulers that the Maia ever had. But the way that they sort of show her doing this is women are probably not on the battlefield fighting. Instead, she's actually conquering them with magic. So she has other people fighting for her. But whenever they portray her, she's like, as this, like, badass sorceress or sorceress, I guess. So she'll be standing there like the woman that you saw before with a big bowl of bloodletting implements, but she'll be standing on a defeated ruler standing on them. Rulers on the ground, battered and broken up. And then she's just standing on the ground.

[Podcast Host]

What is that? How do we find that?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

That would be from the site of Naranjo. That's N A R A N J, O. And look up lady six. Guys, I think it's Steela 20. Is it 23? I'm not sure if it's still a 23, but it's. Yeah. There are images of her just standing on people.

[Podcast Host]

And is. Does that sort of connote something to the audience, to the people, like, oh, this is who our leader is? Or is that her way of kind of saying, like, I'm fighting too, but just not with, you know, arrows?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Oh, there she is on the. On the right. The drawing. The drawing. No, no, no, the. The. Sorry, the black and white line drawing all the way down. Yep, that's it. That's her. She's standing. She's like. She's standing right on top of that guy.

[Podcast Host]

And that guy is someone that they would know as the bad guy that was a rebel.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So she put down a rebellion. You'd almost hear, like, you rebel scum. Like, she's like. She, like. Yeah, stomps him. It actually provides his name on him. He actually has his name written on him.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, so his name is on there. So we know exactly who it is.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

We know who it is. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And how do we know she's a sorcerer?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Based off this image, she's holding all the bloodletting implements in her. In her arms.

[Podcast Host]

Did you zoom in on that?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

She's actually holding the bowl with all the stuff in it. It actually says. There's actually glyphs in it that basically talk about her. Basically it being basically on fire, essentially.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

There's fire entering happening on that, in that bowl. It's. It's. Yeah. And so another cool thing about her is that she's. She's actually one of the only, I think maybe one of two women in my ancient Maya history, in all of ancient Maya history who called themselves a king. Not a queen, A king. King. So she was. Yeah, she was pretty. She was pretty badass.

[Podcast Host]

And what. Like, that's so interesting. She's kind of like, bending the gender role.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

And is that basically to like, invoke, like, hey, the kings have more status and I want the most status. Like, I'm running this whole thing, basically.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. I mean, she ruled for almost, I think, 50 years. Like, she was. She. She had. She basically had a kid. She used. Women weren't really allowed to Exceed to office very often as their own ruler at a site. Right. So she, in her case she was, she was, she was widowed and her son became Kane. Once her son becomes king, she goes to, starts making war in his name. Right. But he's like five years old. Yeah. So it's like she's the king. Yeah, she's a king.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

But she doesn't want to be called like a widow or the queen or anything like that. So she starts calling herself the king, but of the place that she used to come from, which is a strange, strange way to do it. So she's like, oh, I'm not gonna, you're not gonna let me be king here, here. But I'm just going to call myself king from like I'm still a king and I'm from that area.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So she just, yeah, she kind of bends the rules a little bit. She starts calling herself. She has these titles. Like one of these titles is called Kalomte, which means basically the, well the little translation is Tree splitter. And that's a long explanation. But the connotation is basically I pay tribute to nobody. Like I don't, I am the one. I don't vouch for anybody. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. She's like Heisenberg, that's awesome.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

She's like, that's it. I'm like, no one. Like there's nothing else. Like I don't, I don't, I don't listen to anything anybody. It's mine, you know?

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so, so yeah, she's one of these characters that like sort of becomes a sorceress and then becomes this warlord and is just ruling over this play for forever.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a pretty cool trajectory. It's really rare trajectory for a woman. It's. It's almost like, I don't know, almost Disney esque or something. Like if you're listening, like this is totally like one of those like origin story things.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You know, she's a sorceress and then becomes a warlord lord. I mean. Wow. And now I'm looking like at like her outfit.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Y.

[Podcast Host]

So if we scroll down just a little bit, Christos, there's like a, like there seems to be like these things over like her womb. Is that significant?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes. In terms of what. So that's a shark over Shark head.

[Podcast Host]

The genital part?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, that's a shark head.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. I don't know what that says really, but it's a shark head, right?

[Podcast Host]

No way. Yeah, that is Fascinating.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so I think, you know, I think if we look at. If we. You know, if you look at these characters, you've got kind of this, like, shark. Yeah. Shark. Jaguar. Like things, like predatory things over her womb, you know. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Is that basically invoking, like, my. My seed. Like my child is a shark or is a jaguar is of the gods.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, most. Most men will wear things like that over their genitalia. So she's sort of taking on that male role. She's got a jade skirt as well. It's a skirt, and it has little jade beads that are sewn into it. So she's a woman, and she's very unabashedly a woman. But she's scary.

[Podcast Host]

Pulling all these male characters, pulling all

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

these male characteristics and just scary. She has all this sort of stuff on her. Her top. Actually, it's unclear from the drawing. At least it's not clear what she's wearing on top.

[Podcast Host]

Seems like she's topless.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

This. It almost seems like that the Maya were very. I don't think she is. The Maya were very, very conservative in terms of dress for women. So it's unclear exactly what's going on there could be erosion. You know, the drawing is a drawing.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

If she is topless, she's certainly covered. And they would never. At least, you know, women. Topless women from in the Maya area are usually associated with, like, either small erotic pots. Pots. Like, they create. They create what is effectively porn within the Maya civilization. But for ceramic pots, they're, like, little things that are designed to be owned by private individuals. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, they do.

[Podcast Host]

There's, like, a shame around it as well.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Nudity and shame do go together in ancient my civilization.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So you might get sort of examples of sort of in that case. Or you might get figurines where they're talking about, like, female captives that are. They're gonna be bare breast, but generally not on a monument. You wouldn't. You wouldn't get that. Especially not a ruler. So I'm wary of. I'm wary of it.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What's up, people? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to give a shout out to the good folks at Dylan Optics. I mean, for the longest time, I've been wanting a sunglass partner, and I'm so glad that it's a great sunglass brand. All right. If you've ever seen me on stage, ever, or just on this podcast with my hair down, I always have sunglasses. I use them to keep my hair back. But now with Dylan Optics, I can also use them them on my eyes because I swear, when I put these things on, life was in hd. All right. They've got this patented matte lens technology that kills internal reflections. My least favorite thing is when you're putting on glasses, you can like, see glare on the side. And these are amazing. There's no glare, no weird, like, seeing your own face thing. When the sun hits it just right, it is a clean, crisp vision. The founder is the most American dude ever. He was literally in the Air Force, and then after he started experimenting with lenses because he did the, like, the sunglasses that he had and literally was baking the lenses in his mom's oven. I mean, that's America. And now they design and manufacture by hand, and they've got these matte lenses and stabilized resolution lenses that adjust to light and make everything a little sharper. So if you want sunglasses that actually make you see better, that look great and also rock with us over here at the campsite, you're going to go to Dylan optics dot com. That's D I L L O N optics dot com. And if you use the promo code Camp C A M P, you're going to save 10% off, off. So go check it out. Thank you, Dylan Optics, for making this possible. And let's get back to the show. What can you tell me about ayahuasca? We're talking a lot about, of course, you know, sorcery and magic and these kind of occult things. But ayahuasca seems like almost literally a bridge to the cosmos.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You know, I don't really know much about it. Never done it. Not. Not from my part of the world where I work in. Right. So it's not. It's not something I know a lot much about.

[Podcast Host]

Was it utilized by the Maya?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Not as such. I think, as I said, they had other drugs.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You mentioned tobacco, you mentioned mushrooms.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Mushrooms, yeah, Lots of different types of mushrooms. When we see the Maya doing shrooms, they usually. It's usually bunches of shrooms. So they're not just holding like one shroom. They usually got like a fistful of them and they're just like. Like they're just downing them.

[Podcast Host]

Does it seem ritualized?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, it actually seems like they're having a party. Like, it seems like, you know, I think there is a religious component to it. Like drawing a hard line between religion and politics doesn't work for the Maya. So I think being able to do that, I think is very, very difficult to sort of to make that to make that leap. But in the context that we see them having mushrooms, it's usually a mushroom party. And. And there are occasionally things that look like. Even in the image that looks like they're tripping. So, like, they'll be chewing on it. There's a famous pot. I forget what the name is, but we call it There Are Rabbits pot, basically.

[Podcast Host]

There are rabbits.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So it's an image of one of the Maya creator deities. And the Maya creator deity is sitting there with a bunch of mushrooms. And the thing you have to understand about Maya religiosity is that that the gods for ancient Maya gods, they're fallible. They are not omniscient. They make all kinds of mistakes. They do all kinds of human like things, and everything blends into everything else. So there's the creator God. And the creator God is sitting there and he's chewing on all these. Chewing on all these mushrooms, right? And he has these visitors bringing him gifts. And one of the visitors is really, really upset because he gets there and that's a different rat pot. But yeah, bunnies in general are actually like tricksters for the Maya. Like any bunny pot you see that's almost. Is always gonna be humor. Like it's supposed to be funny, right? And there's this guy and he's got this. He's chewing on these things. And the guest is really upset. And the guest actually just says, like, they have captions like a cartoon. The guest actually just says, like, there's too many rabbits. And you see all these rabbits, like, popping into existence on the pot, like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's probably because the. The ruler is actually like, the greater deity is actually high. Like he's like sitting there, like, tripping and like. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And do you think, like, is the implication that the creator deity is like, oh, I've created too many rabbits, or like.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, the implication is, I think that the guest. The guest is bringing. Supposed to be bringing gifts. Like, oh, look at these. Yeah, there it is. There it is. Yeah. See, there's a rabbits on the bottom. So he's sitting there. That's the. That's the stack of mushrooms he's eating. It's not just one, it's a whole bunch of of them. And he's got one of those mirrors too. So he's actually staring into a mirror while he's actually getting high. Probably looking at human beings on the other side of that mirror, right? Like actual human beings on the other side of the mirror. And all these rabbits are just popping into Existence. And that one guest is just like, I brought you this. And. Yeah. Like, you. What are you doing?

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And where's the little. The little thought bubble? Is it. And this one is on the other side.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's on another side of the pot, unfortunately.

[Podcast Host]

That is so funny.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Most pots have these little, like, thought bubbles, essentially. They'll say stuff. And it's really in those. Those. Those little captions that you really kind of get a sense of, like, the feel of, like, oh, like, here's a human. Here's a human aspect of things. Because it's not like, oh, I did this on a certain date or things of that sort. It's. It's sort of humor. Right? And. And it's. It's. It's. It's people talking and saying things, you know, and I think that's really an important thing to sort of. Sort of highlight. You know, I think one of the problems that we have have as a. As a. As a field, I think, and just academics more generally is that we don't talk to the general public enough. We don't. We don't. We don't address the general public. We don't really talk about all these things. We sort of. We sit in our sort of little things. We publish books and such, but the books aren't really intended for a larger audience. Right. It's actually another reason why I wrote the book. I was like, I just. I just want people to, like. Instead of, like, talking about Caesar all the time or Ramses, like, I just like somebody to, like, know who. Like this woman lady six guy. I'd like somebody to know who lady six guy is. Like, wouldn't that be nice?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And so I think it humanizes them. And we don't talk enough to people. Right. And I think it's always bothered me that we don't engage with the general public, because the problem is, is that when you don't engage the general public and you're an academic, the public will engage with you regardless, and you'll. They'll find other people to sort of engage with the material. So, you know, the ancient aliens guy or like the. You know, that sort of the. That stuff that you get on your feed late at night and things that pop up on your feed, like, oh, like, it's written, you know, popular. Popular. Popular writers writing these little blog posts and things.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, the awesome stuff.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And it's. No, it is awesome. It is awesome. And we should be getting out there and being like, no, like, look at all this awesome stuff. You should see this.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And instead we don't. And I think that's a, that's a, that's a big problem for us. I think it's, it's something that, you know, you, you find, you find situations where people are, you have the public engaging or other people engaging with the material that are not academics. Right. And they might engage with in ways that you don't like. But if you don't say anything and you don't do anything like what are you gonna, what do you expect? Right.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, of course.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So that's just something that I think it's, it's always bothered me.

[Podcast Host]

I wonder if there's moments for you as an academic where you're seeing things and it's, you know, someone talking about like aliens building pyramids or something like that where you're like, okay, this is obviously not true, but yet the reality of some of these things are actually more interesting than what this person is letting on. And I mean, we've talked about a bunch of them so far. But I'm curious, is there something that's underlying where you're like, if you guys knew how crazy this was, this piece of technology, this inscription, this building, this ritual, you guys would be like, oh, this is way more interesting than aliens.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I mean, I think there are lots of things and we've talked about sort of all the drugs and things. I think that's sort of a really strange thing, right. About the mind that you don't really notice. I think all the supernatural stuff, God's being able to stare at you from behind mirrors is really kind of an amazing thing. I think that people keeping track of their ancestors for 200 years, I think that's something that also to me is interesting. We have this sense of ancestors in the U.S. but I think a lot of our genealogies are pretty shallow. And the idea that people are keeping track of these guys over long term, long periods of time I think is really interesting. And keeping grudges for really long periods of time.

[Podcast Host]

Oh really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So you'll get these wars that'll happen, happen, including, including the one in the book, you get these wars and they'll happen for really long periods of time and people will, will keep these grudges. So for example, the Maya were an honor based society. If you think about like feudal Japan or medieval Iceland, actually they probably the best example is medieval Iceland. But you think about these two things. You think honor based society, like especially Japan, you think, oh, this is honor based society. Like, oh, you, you know, you did this this I'm now dishonored. I must. You know, the Maya had the same thing. People don't know this, but they did. And so they'll keep track of these things. And the fights that will go on between individuals, between families might go on for 50 years, 100 years in some cases. I said about 200 years, when people are sort of doing this and the fights take place not just in regular space, but in terms of all the sorcery stuff will take place in supernatural space. So you'll find people, including the lady six guy, right? She'll conjure up things that are basically personified diseases, what the Spaniards might have called demons. She'll conjure up these things and then stick them on their enemies. And you'll get into these scenarios where these rulers will summon one and then summon another one, almost like Pokemon, and they'll go after each other. And you'll actually have images of these things fighting on ceramics of, like, you know, I don't know, flaming, skeletal, flying creature versus, like, I don't know, owl with a head attached to it, you know, fighting each other. Right. And I think, you know, if people saw that and knew about that, like, you know that, you know, that you have these kinds of supernatural battles taking place. To me, that's a lot more interesting than the alien stuff. Why? Because the alien stuff can be dismissed pretty easily. People talk about pyramids, for example, and they say, oh, like, how did they build them? A pyramid is basically just a giant pile of rocks. That's all it is. Like, you want to build a. You want to make something tall, and you don't have, you know, technology wise, you don't have this modern technology. Build a pile of rocks, put some stone face on it and call it a day. Right? I'm not saying that the, you know, Egyptian pyramids didn't take ingenuity. They did did, right? They screwed up a lot, Right? So I don't. I don't remember if I don't remember this being in the podcast or not. I wasn't. I don't remember this part of this. Right. For the Egyptian one. But, like, there are pyramids where they build it and they're going up and they're like, oh, no, we screwed up. We can't keep going up. So we'll just kind of round off the top and, like, call it a day, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And you see that fallibility in the building of a lot of these structures. And so you can dismiss all that alien stuff pretty easily. Whereas, like, the actual truth part, I think you really. It's. It's.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, there's somebody to reckon with at the very least to say, like, well, this is definitely real.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Why did they do it this way? What did they believe was happening? What were they interfacing with that gave them these images? Was it drugs? Was it some other type of, you know, ritual thing? Was it a story? Yeah, I think it raises a lot of questions. Yeah, I'm curious about. About child sacrifice. This is something that comes up specifically with the Aztecs. And I've heard kind of a few different sides of this where it's like, okay, well, it almost certainly happened in some capacity. And then I've heard other people suggest that, oh, this, These. A lot of these stories of child sacrifice are aggrandized from Spanish colonists that go there and, you know, kind of embellish these stories for their own political agenda. So I'm curious, what can you say about ritualized child sacrifice?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay, no, I can go there. Like, no, I have these conversations, like, all the time, weirdly enough. So first of all, I guess when you hear about these sort of things, are these, like, friends of yours that are, like, fighting and stuff, like, over this, or like, people fighting and stuff? Okay, so this might make them feel better. Actually, they're both right. Both sides are right. So in some cases, it is. It is aggrandized by the Spanish. It is sort of made it much larger. I mean, the number of people that they're talking about, not even just child sacrifice, but just general sacrifice for the Aztecs, seem almost impossible to do. You read the history of the conquest when they're talking about the Aztecs sort of sacrificing people. I mean, you would have to just be sitting there. Like, don't their arms get tired and they're just sitting there? Like, how many individual folks can you kill and then throw off a pyramid in a given day? It's just like.

[Podcast Host]

Like, you know, like, what are the numbers that they're throwing out from these records?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Like, thousands. Like, just at a certain point, it's like, you can't. You simply can't.

[Podcast Host]

You're doing one a minute for 24 hours.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Who can do that? Like, you can't. Right. I mean, what do you have? Like, a line of people? Like, just a whole bunch of lay people, and they're all standing there, like, dispatching. I find that very hard to believe. On the flip side, in terms of sacrifice, including child sacrifice. Yeah, there are examples of it, and there are examples that are really bad. Had. There's one underneath The Temple of Mayor in Mexico City. Tana, the Aztec capital. Same place. Yeah. They were children. I believe they were drowned. They were sort of offerings to Tlaloc and they were drowned. You know, the way the Aztecs believed in things, you. The afterlife was where you, like how you died. That's where you went. That was the afterlife you went to. So if you drowned, you went to the watery afterlife, right? You went to the sort of. It was ruled by a character named Plog, right. It was like kind of a rain, agricultural kind of, kind of deity. Right. And the afterlife that you would go to, in that case, they have murals of it. It doesn't look that bad. Like, it looks like people are cavorting around, playing games and stuff, right. In terms of child sacrifice, so it does exist. And human sacrifice more generally in. In the az. For the Aztecs, you know, if you like to do use a spinal tap reference, you know, like the Aztecs always take everything to 11. Like everything. It doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it's always extreme. You know, it's actually one of the reasons why the Aztecs collapsed and why the Spanish were so successful is that people hated the Aztecs. Like, even the Aztecs hated the Aztecs. Like, like most of the Aztecs in the Aztec Empire hated the Aztecs.

[Podcast Host]

Like, they're pretty brutal.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They hated them. Yeah, they hated them. It's a sort of state sponsored militaristic religion. Expansionist. Yeah. Lots. Lots of death, right? Lots of, lots of math. Mass death. Death. And so you go and you sort of, you know, you create this religion around this. One of the best ways to die if you're in the Aztecs is in battle, right? You get to go and hang out with the sun God, who's the tutelary deity for them, right. If you're a man, that's how you die. And that's how you get. That's how you get to the Sun God. If you're a woman and you die and you die in childbirth, you go to the same paradise. And the reason why is because you've died producing either either a warrior, a potential warrior, or you die producing a potential producer of warriors. So you go to the same afterlife, right? And it's like that for all of the various deaths. So, you know, we talk about sort of child sacrifice. It's really the manner of the death that determines where they go, not so much the fact that they're infants, although there might be a point where the infant's not really considered a full human being yet. So you might go someplace else. Right. If you think about the Aztecs, though, you know, if you had to imagine what the worst possible death is for a militaristic, in your face society, what do you think it would be?

[Podcast Host]

The worst death?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

The worst possible death for a society where basically you're. You're encouraging people to go off and die in battle. Like, what's the worst one?

[Podcast Host]

I mean, probably like deserting or like leaving or something like that. I would like if, if everyone's going into battle, you run the other way.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I don't know about that.

[Podcast Host]

Being like a prisoner of war, maybe like being captured.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Pow. Is actually not that bad because you're dying. You're still dying for the state. Granted, you're dying for somebody else's state, but you're dying for the state.

[Podcast Host]

Would you have a guess, Christos, Taking your own life.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Actually, that's not as bad. It does happen. There is a special. There is a specific place where you go for that.

[Podcast Host]

And Japanese culture.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, it's not that bad. No, the worst one is actually dying in bed, surrounded by dying a quiet death. That's the worst one because it means nobody picked you. You, you're like the last kid at dodgeball. It's like, you know, you have this idea of like all these various gods sort of determining your death. Like, oh, you drowned, oh, you died by fire, things of that sort. Death, death in bed is like, nobody picked you. You were doing like, you were doing nothing.

[Podcast Host]

You were a dork.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. You just died. Right.

[Podcast Host]

You weren't in battle, you weren't swimming, you didn't even get captured, you didn't even kill yourself.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No. Like, you just, you just flat out just died. Right. You just gave up. Right. And so we don't know how much of that's actually like state rhetoric or whether it's actually real. Like, I'm pretty sure that people weren't just killing themselves at the very end being like, I need to go someplace else. Right. So it may not necessarily be that that's real, but that's sort of the Aztec kind of state rhetoric. And so when we look at sort of sacrifice or even child sacrifice and such, you have to sort of. You have to sort of draw a line, kind of realize that you're dealing with, you know, a state rhetoric versus, like what actually is happening on the ground. Again, remember, people hated these guys. Guys, even the Aztecs hated these guys. And so some of this stuff might not be practiced on a, you know, outside of sort of like official context. Right. So you have that if you're talking Maya some other places they did practice human sacrifice. They did not on the level that the Aztecs did. Not even close. Right. You do have the people that killed human sacrifice wise are usually going to be for the Maya at least they're going to be elites. They'll be petty elites generally unless it's a king and if it's a king you might get ransomed, you might not get ransomed but usually it's going to be petty elites. The people that don't get killed generally are going to be like Farmer Ted. Why there's no glory in killing Farmer Ted in front of a crowd. It's like what do you got? I got this farmer. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like this.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. What doesn't make any sense, right? I'm not saying there aren't people that are everyday people that are dying. They certain they certainly are. They're probably sadly considered collateral damage. Right. So your everyday per. You know your person's going to die that way for child sacrifice. Since you asked me specific a child sacrifice. It does exist. So there's a cave called Midnight Terror Cave. Really evocative name. I think it's in. I think it's in Belize where it kind of looks like there were some kids that were trafficked there from far away. They did sort of isotopes on the bones and determined that they actually weren't local children that were being killed and they were basically thrown in this cave. So it does happen.

[Podcast Host]

Do you know why I get so many headaches every month?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

[Podcast Host]

Botox Onobotulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. Migraine it's not for Those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month, prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more.

[Podcast Host]

Ever feel like your brain just won't click? Onnit Alpha Brain is a daily supplement engineered to support memory, memory focus and mental speed. Made with science backed ingredients on it, Alpha Brain helps you lock in, tune out distractions and stay sharp. See what your brain can really do. Visit onnit.com and shop Alpha Brain to unlock your next level. That's O N N I T.com.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It seems to be part of again, part of this whole offering thing. One of the things that we know about sort of ancient Maya death and Mesoamerican death more generally is that the main food that gods eat is usually people. It's usually people or people substitutes. You know one of the reasons my latest book was called Blood on the Wind was because the thing that sort of attracted gods to sort of eat people and in many ways as a substitute for human blood was actually copal. It was a kind of incense and you'd burn this so that the gods would kind of be attracted to it and they would eat it. And it was kind of a substitute for actually killing people, right? It's like, okay, well here's some blood and we're going to burn this and it's like blood and it's going to be on the wind and then you know, things are going to eat this. Why sacrifice the child? I can't get inside the mind. I don't know why you would, you know, why, why they did that in Midnight Terror Cave. But what I would say is that these are probably offerings to specific gods. They're situational offerings. Specific gods.

[Podcast Host]

How do we know they were sacrificed? Not just kids that died that they threw into this case.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So that's a really good question. So figuring out, yeah, I know, pretty creepy looking cave. Figuring out sacrifice is really difficult. There's a woman named Vera Tisler, a wonderful archaeologist in, based out of Yucatan in Mexico, University of Yucatan, who has spent a good, good chunk of her career actually figuring this out. Like she looks at you know, knife marks on bodies and things and like, okay, what is associated with what kind of sacrifice? You know, decapitation, what have you. Right. And what she's found is that like the knives in this period, from this period we're getting into really sort of the weeds here aren't really sharp enough or strong enough to actually go through like punch through a rib cage. So you typically have to go under the rib cage if you're going to take Out a hard. You can't, like, you can't just punch through, right? You have to go into the rib cage. And so she spent a lot of time like figuring out, okay, well, what happens when you do that with a knife? Life will it, you know, what kinds of marks will it leave. Right. And so that's one thing that we could sort of sort of, sort of view in terms of the kind of sort of knowledge of how this sort of stuff is done. In reality, though, the difference between sacrifice and murder is really difficult to sort of to determine. Right. So there's a difference between like, I've killed this person, right, and you've got sort of forensics and you'd be like, oh, this person's killed, killed. And like sacrifice. Like I've, you know, I did it with. I did it in a ritual, right. So it's hard, hard to tell. I can't in my mind figure out how they got, how they got the stuff in Midnight Terror Cave. But what I would say is that child sacrifice in the Maya area was dying out as over the course of the Classic period. So if you look at like the central area where like Tikal was sort of central paten, they give that up, up sort of early classic wise, I think. And it's really in the western part of the Batin, actually at Pierre's Negress, where I used to work, where that sort of persists. It's almost like the guys in the central Batin, like, did this and they were like, at a certain point they were like, no, this is bad, we shouldn't do this. And we. They stop. They actually stop doing it. And the ones in the west, they must have like, looked at the folks in the west and been like, oh, those guys, like, those guys are crazy. Don't go, don't go west guys. Like, how about like, you know, to stay away from those guys. Those guys creep me out. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Wow. Now, I mean, to. Gods eat humans.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They do, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

In, in this culture, yeah, they do. So if you wanted to be like a God, would you not want to take a bite of a human? Were there any of these people that were like eating like the hearts or like eating the livers of humans to like gain power?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

We don't know. Sort of funny story, I was talking about my wife earlier. You know, the first fight I ever got. Got into with her, the first fight. And before we were married, before we were even a couple, the absolute first fight was actually over this issue. I don't exactly know how this fight started, but Like, I came home from class one day and it was like that. Like, we were talking about it and it was like, no, you can't. She won the fight. I lost. It was fine. You know, like, you know, how do you. How do you prove this? You know, I actually got into a fight with Vera Teasler and another woman. Actually, I think it must have been in Madrid. We were at a conference, and we got into a fight over this, too. It's very hard to prove. It's really hard to prove.

[Podcast Host]

Well, what was your wife's position here?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You can't prove it.

[Podcast Host]

And your position is, well, but.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, but sometimes there are images of it, and you can sort of see that there are these people carrying around these bowls of human body parts and things, right? But as I've sort of gotten into this more and more and more, what you find are bowls that are offerings. But the offerings tend to be to gods. They tend to be to supernatural beings. Now, there is this idea in ancient Maya culture and actually most mass American cultures, that it's not that you just put on a mask or wear an image of a God and you, like, you know, like, you impersonate the God, it's that you actually become that God for that period. So you put on the mask or whatever, and then you just are. So, like, you want to be the sun God. Like, you put on all this sort of stuff and you're not impersonating it. You actually are the maze God, for all intents and purposes, is. That's you. But proving it, it's really hard.

[Podcast Host]

What would be one of these images you would look at and be like, well, this seems like there's some cannibalism going on.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, so there's. There's all these images of these beings called y beings. W A H, y beings, Right? And these y beings are personified diseases and all kinds of other ailments. They're basically dark magic. And they're things that, you know, these kings would use to stick on each other. And sometimes they're carrying these bowls. They'll carry like. Like, here's a bunch of eyes, you know, here's a plate of eyes and things of that sort. Right. The reason I lost the fight is that I couldn't produce one that was like, you know, like, I couldn't. Like, I couldn't produce one. There isn't. There aren't any. There aren't any. And so I don't know what you would need to actually prove that they're actually eating people. It's the Same thing for the Aztecs and such. People talk about it and I think there's a little bit better evidence for the Aztecs than there is for the Maya on this. But again, most of it is Spanish chroniclers, most of it is people that are post conquest talking about this stuff. There isn't like a passage that says like, I ate this person. Right. We used to think there was crazily enough. So, so Maya names, ancient Maya royal names, they are really evocative. And at a certain point we figured out that these Maya names that they were there, they were names that they actually took when they became king, not names that they were born with. Right. And so, for example, during this war I was talking about, there's this one guy named Balachan Qawil, which means Qawil, the God Kawil is hammering in the sky. So he's producing thunder. There's this God and he's producing thunder in the sky. Right. His enemy when he becomes king is Hasao Chan Kawil, the God Kahwil is clearing. This guy storms over. Right. These are like people with rivalries, like basically like taking names to like dig as digs at each other. Right. Anyway, one of the names that we used to think was evidence of cannibalism was a name that meant we used to think it was like, this person is eat. It was a mistranslation. And when we retranslated and figured it out, the name was roughly translates as sun God is eating hearts in the sky. Now one, that's a metal name.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I mean, fire, like big fan,

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

like sun God's eating hearts in the sky. Right. Two, no mother is going to name, like, they don't like, who are you? Oh, your sun God's eating hearts in the sky. That's not really a name that people give their kids. Right. And so most of the names that we thought were like cannibalism type names have evaporated. They've become basically just names of, of people that were basically rulers that wanted to provide metal names for themselves. So that's kind of what it is.

[Podcast Host]

I see.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I'm like, I'm, I'm so badass, I'm eating hearts in the sky. Or like I'm, you know, I've got tentacles, you know, like, stuff like, stuff like that.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So it's not, unfortunately there's not, there's no, there's no proof.

[Podcast Host]

What's up, guys? We're going to take a break because I want to talk to you about something, something that happens in your late 20s, early 30s, that no one tells you that. Basically your ability to handle a night out drinking with the boys completely changes, bro. When I was 22, I could go out on like a Thursday, sleep three hours, wake up, go to work, then go to the gym, feel completely normal, and then do it again the same day. Like, I felt un invincible. And now I have like two glasses of wine and the next morning I wake up and I'm like, what did I do do? And the craziest part is I can actually like see it now. Like, I literally will wear like a whoop. And I can see my sleep score that night and be like, oh, I had two beers. So now I'm have like a 5% recovery. My body's trying to recover from alcohol in a bunch of different ways. Not just dehydration. I mean, it affects, you know, brain chemistry and your liver has to process everything you drink. And that is why I started using Cheers Restore. Now, Cheers Restore is unbelievable. I'm not even the biggest drinker and this, this absolutely has saved me on multiple occasions. All right, this is an after alcohol aid that's designed specifically to support your liver and your brain after drinking. So the key ingredient is something called dhm, which researchers started studying for how it interacts with alcohol in the body. Cheers was actually invented by a student at Princeton, and now it's everywhere. I mean, it's been on Shark Tank, 50 million doses, 30,000 stores. It also has thousands of five star reviews on Amazon and is been backed by doctors and PhDs and clinicians and all this stuff. And the idea is very simple. You're a normal adult, you're having a couple drinks, all right, Cheers helps support your body so that you feel way better the next morning. And all you do is you take three capsules after your last drink or before bed. And obviously this isn't for like the insane, you know, college nights. All right, if you have like 12 tequila shots, I don't know what to tell you, but if you're a responsible adult, having a couple drinks at a wedding, it's going to make a huge difference. And honestly, for me, the biggest thing is that, that, you know, I just wake up feeling like a functional person that's still able to get stuff done. I'm able to recover better and I'm still able to have fun with the boys at night. So same night out, but a way better morning. And that is with Cheers. So for a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order when they go to cheershealth.com. And they use the code camp. So you just go to Cheers Health, use the code camp and you're going to get 20% off. And after your purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about Cheers. Cheers. Please tell them it was from the good people over at camp. Gagged on it really helps us. It keeps the fire burning. It keeps the lights on. Thank you guys so much. Cheers has been amazing. I can't handle the uneasiness of the next day. And Cheers makes it all possible. Now let's get back to the show. Now, Chris, just wanted me to bring up your spear throwing demonstration.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What is this?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So, okay, so funny story. So I've been doing it for 21 years. The spear thrower in Mesoamerica was called the atlatl, which is sometimes called atlatl. Right. The original words, atlatl, and it means. The word ATL in Nahuatl, which is the language of the Aztecs, means water. So it's water. Water. And what it was used for at the time of the conquest was two things. One was for spearfishing, so like a. Basically like a harpoon or something, you know. And the other was for battle, for a weapon of war. They were using it in battle. And if you ever have thrown one of these things or sort of. If. So. Do you have a dog?

[Podcast Host]

My parents do back home, not in the city.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Tennis ball thrower. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah, Those things are awesome.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They are, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you can launch.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. Tennis ball thrower. Sad. Descendant of the spear thrower. That's what it is. It's the exact same principle. You just put, don't do this. Do not try this at home. They put a spear on the other end of it. And basically it does the exact same thing. So it produces sort of this gives you like an extra limb with a bigger arm, you know, just to throw. To throw. Right. And so I've been doing this for 21 years. It was for a long time, sort of the symbol of Central Mexican dominance. When the Teotihuacanos came in and went into the my area, they brought these things with them. If you had to point out one weapon from Mexico that would like symbolize Mexico in pre. In the pre Columbian times, it would be the spear thrower. Like that is like, oh, folks from central Mexico are here.

[Podcast Host]

Can we get a picture of the. The atlatl.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, it's. That's what it is. It's like, oh, they're here. Right? And what it does. Yep, there it is.

[Podcast Host]

Is.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, you kind of throw it right? You can, you sort of use it to throw it. So why do I do it with my class? There's a few reasons why I do it with my class. This is from Intro Archaeology. So I just did this last Friday. That's why I actually couldn't. Like I was prep, prepping for I just did this last Friday. Right. What you do with it is there's two reasons to do it. One, it's just damn cool. Like sometimes you just got to learn stuff just because it's fun, just because it's awesome. There's no other reason. Just joy learning, learning. I'm sorry but sometimes you just need to like have fun, right? So there's that. Two. And I don't tell them this, but it's a team building exercise. So you give everybody like at the beginning of the semester a collective exercise they have fun at. And it's a baseline that you can then draw on for the rest of the class. There's a very strategic reason for why I do it right when I do it. Third reason is to sort of teach people about how sort of ancient technologies work, works, how you know, how those technologies work. And it's a really simple, really simple sort of technology. But when you see it in action, you see someone throw one of these things, it is like the Matrix. You mentioned the Matrix before. We reference in the 90s, like we're in the 90s environment. It's like the Matrix. It looks impossible, right? And you know, it starts about 40,000 years ago. We do it in a unit in the class. We're talking about sort of the, you know, the birth of human creativity and that sort of stuff. And this is one of those things that sort of really gives human beings a significant edge in hunting. Right? Because you can now you can hunt a mammoth or something and not have to worry about it stomping you and dying, right? So like you walk up to a mouth like eh, what's going to happen? Like it's going to die right? Now granted you can't just throw one of these things at a mammoth and like critical hit it in the eye like just dies.

[Podcast Host]

You got to track them for a while.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So you could throw a whole bunch of these things at a mammoth or some other creature and hope for the best and it dies. Right. Or you could actually just hunt it and track it. And so this is something that plays to human beings early strengths, which is just walking we're good at. If you have a dog, like you can't, may not be able to outrun the dog in a burst of speed. But you can probably out walk the dog at a certain point. The dog is just gonna be like, I can't take this anymore. Please stop.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, human beings are faster than every animal at distance, right?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

We're great. Like, we just walk, right? Just walk and die. So place to those strengths. And so I do it sort of for that early unit to kind of illustrate that, you know, that this is how human beings. Sort of one of the early survival tools for human being. But I also do it to sort of link it towards the end of the class when I start talking about Mesoamerican civilizations, because the Aztecs, the Tetius had it, then the Maya got it, the Aztecs had it. Like it was a main weapon, right? And so, funny thing, on Friday, they almost hit me. No, almost hit me. Yeah. So what happens is I go out. There's a. I do it usually in my Aztec class. I do it in my intro archaeology class. I actually even do it occasionally in my Maya class class. Occasionally. I did it this past fall with the president of Middlebury College. Like, he saw. He saw one in my office and was like, what's that? And I told him what it was. He's like, can I try? I'm like, yeah, sure. You know, it's fine. He's like, okay, we'll try this, you know, and so, right. Somewhere there's an Instagram post of the Middlebury president with me and him, like, you know, throwing spears and stuff, right? He decided he wanted to post it all. And I learned, you know, looking at it, it's one of those things that it's really fun. I take the points off so that nobody, like, gets hurt, you know, like that. You know, I don't need lawsuits and things. It. It flies about the speed of a Frisbee roughly. And. And on a, On a. On a level open field or something like that, it's pretty easy to dodge. Like, it's not. You see it coming and so you can just step out of the way. It's not, Not. Not so hard, right? And so he wasn't in any, in any danger, but at one point, like, he wanted to go out onto the field and like, like, you know, go pick up some of the spears and things. And he didn't mind if they. The students throw it, right? And I'm like, no, no, no, don't do it. He backed off for a while. Eventually the guy, he's like, okay, I'm going, gonna. Yeah, I'll go out There. And so, like, he goes out there, and I turn around to my students, and I'm like, don't you hit him. Don't you hit him. You hit him, we're gonna have a problem. Like, don't you do it right? And so. And of course, they didn't, you know, Anyway, on Friday. So fast forward. I did it again on Friday, and I'm in Vermont, and there's about a foot and a half of snow on the ground still in Vermont. And I learned that it's much harder to dodge one of these things in a foot and a half of snow than it is with a field and such. And so I'm sitting there, and I see this thing and it's coming at me, and I go to, like, go to dodge, but I'm a foot and a half down and I'm stuck. And so, you know, I had two choices. It's either get hit in the head or the chest with a spear. Granted, it probably wouldn't kill me, but would hurt.

[Podcast Host]

Or.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And I wouldn't be here today. Or just fall over. And so I just fell over. And so it wasn't dignified, but I'm. I'm like, all right, I guess I give up. And I just fell over, and it was fine. It was about a foot away.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It was about a foot away.

[Podcast Host]

That would have been a poetic way for you to go out, though, you

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

know, it wouldn't have been bad. I'd rather go out that way than, like, I mean, maybe I'm laying in your bed. I'm with the Aztecs on this. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You can't be laying in your bed like an Aztec loser.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, I don't want to.

[Podcast Host]

You gotta get hit with an atlatl in the head.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, something like that, you know, so. Yeah, but it's a really fun exercise. It's. I want to launch one of these things. It's really badass. There's. There's. There are training at levels. So, like, up on the left there, you can actually see that. Yes. The Three Rivers Archery. I buy it from a guy named. It's a Thunderbird Outlaw. It's an upstate New York. But it's basically. Yeah. Same. Same kinds of things. I used to, you know, before I had a kid, I would, like, build these things, and it was like, kit.

[Podcast Host]

But, like, can we get a video on these crystals?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I would love to see, like, with a kit. Like, you can't. Like, you just. I don't have the time. I don't have the time. Like, I can't be fletching my arrows. I can't do that. Right. What time is second? You think about sort of having a kid is like, I think, do you have a. Do you have a. So like, how old?

[Podcast Host]

17 months. Yeah. Still. Still a little baby. I still got time. I have many more.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Any of it like.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

My general feeling on this is like, like, with a kid, it's like people say, oh, the time passes really fast, and it does. Right. But the days are forever.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Days are long. The years are short.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Ever. Right. Yeah, There you go. The days are forever. And so I don't have time to do that stuff anymore. I used to have time, but I don't have to do it anymore. There are these training atlatls with, like, little things on that this guy's using. What is he using? Oh, he's using a regular one. He's not using a training atlatl, so that's good. The regular ones, they're just a lot more visceral. Visceral. They're angry. I usually do a barbaric yelp when I. When I'm throwing one of these things, you know, because it's much more visceral. And again, you know, close range like that, it's flying pretty fast. Um, I, you know, I generally do it at long range with these guys, so I. So they don't actually, like, hit me. And what's fun about them is that you can get really good fairly, fairly fast. It doesn't take that long to. To get good.

[Podcast Host]

You can rapid fire them. It seems like if you got 10 spears on you.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, well, the Aztecs didn't. You know, the Aztecs had the bow and arrow. And the bow and arrow almost everywhere else in the world. When you get a bow and arrow like, it, you know, the, the, the. The. The ATL dies. Like, people are like, what is this? I can, I can use bow and arrow, but the Aztecs don't use it for that. So the way they do it is they'll throw it. They might carry a stack of them. They have a club or something too, right? So they'll throw a stack of them and they'll throw it at a crowd. And if you throw a dart at a crowd, and I always joke like this with my students. You know, if you throw a dart at a crowd, I, I don't throw it at them hard, but I kind of throw it at the ground. Right. They. They. They'll divide up. Right? And then you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it Again, right. So it's like you're picking off the herd. It's like you're hunting, and that's what they're doing. The Aztecs are hunting people. You'll throw it, and you'll throw it at a group. You isolate one person. The purpose of Aztec warfare, Mesoamerican warfare, all this sort of stuff, is not to kill in battle. It's to actually capture in battle and then either take back home and ransom or kill there. That's the whole point. It's not mass casualties, it's not mass death. Sure, deaths will happen, but that's not the point.

[Podcast Host]

You're on ransom.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So the. A lot of the reason why the Aztecs are using it, a lot of folks in Mesmer are still using it even after the bow and arrow, is that they want to be able to capture people and bring it him back. And you can't do that with a bow and arrow. It's too lethal.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So you want something that will actually, like, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you can dodge it.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You want somebody like, who cool dodge it. You actually want them to, because you want them to run off somewhere and you can get them, you know, you can hunt them, you can run them down.

[Podcast Host]

Wow, that's.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

That's what it is. Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

The Aztecs are pretty brutal like that. I mean, they're such an interesting group.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They are really interesting.

[Podcast Host]

My buddy Luke was telling me the story that the Aztecs, like, kind of like their genesis is like they're sort of like this, like, wandering sort of warrior tribe. They kind of like move into the. What is it? Tenochitlon, and they like, set up. And then there's this whole, like, betrayal with the princess.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's all true.

[Podcast Host]

That is one of the most remarkable stories.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, at least it's how the Aztecs tell it. So one of the things that happens

[Podcast Host]

that's good enough for me.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, one of the things that happens with the Aztecs is when they get into the. When they get into the basin of Mexico, they essentially destroy a lot of the indigenous history that's there and then rewrite, rewrite history according to their needs. So they do. They do the standard conqueror thing where it's like history is written by the victim. They kind of massage things a little bit. So it's unclear how much of this is true. I think a lot of it is, but, you know, the general storyline is. Yeah, you go, they're wandering. They come from someplace in northwestern Mexico. The language, family that's there. It's called the UTO Aztecan language family. And the reason why it's called UTO Aztecan is because the language is more or less. The family extends up into what's today Utah. From Utah all the way down into northwestern Mexico. Right. People have been trying to find out where the origin of the Aztecs was for forever. They've not found it in Utah or any place like that. Right. There are, you know, in. You know, way back in the. In the battle days of archeology, people were sort of had these fanciful ideas of where the Aztecs were from. So, for example, there's a. The Aztec origin point is called Aztlan. Right. There's an Aztlan archeological site. I think it's in. Is it in Wisconsin? The Aztecs are not from Wisconsin. You know, like, I don't know. Not from there. Right. They're probably from northwestern Mexico. They are probably a hunting and gathering tribe, one of many. They were called the Mexica. There are lots of Nahua speaking folks that are later. That would later become Aztecs that are wandering into the basin of Mexico. And one group is called the Mexica, and they wander into the basin of Mexico. They're actually one of the. So the story goes, they're one of the last to arrive. They get to the lake in where Mexico City is today. Much of the lake has been drained since, but they get to this. It was a lake at that point, and they find this. They find this part of the lake. They're given basically this little territory of land after some time to sort of work. It's a garbage territory. It's in the middle of like. It's like a swampy area. And they build it up, and then from there they kind of form this empire.

[Podcast Host]

This is where they see the eagle with the snake.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Eagle with the snake, yeah. They're wandering around for a while and they sort of see this. It's why the Mexican flag actually has the eagle and snake on. It's because that's. That's. That's the Aztec myth or the Mexican myth.

[Podcast Host]

And is it true that they get this land because they kind of broker a deal with the people there to, like, be kind of protectors and like, work it and help out.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Supposedly they start off as mercs, so they start off as mercenaries working for other. Other people that are much more. Much more established than they are. And many of the people that are already established speak the same language. They're other wanderers from wherever they came from. And yeah, at a certain Point, they betray, betray the people that they were supposedly working for. They form what's called the Triple Alliance. They ally with other cities in the base basin of Mexico. They formed the Triple Alliance. The Aztec Empire was never called the Aztec Empire. It was called the Triple alliance and

[Podcast Host]

they called it that in their native language at that time.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, it was called the Triple Alliance. And the Triple alliance then goes about and just starts basically conquering place after place after place after place. And they just are stomping and they've kind of stalled. At the time of the conquest, I would say they're facing some revolts, internal, some internal sort of unrest. At that point, had the Spanish not arrived, maybe they would have continued, been able to continue. But as I said, people really hated these guys.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you feel less bad. I mean just like in brief, and you can correct some of the gaps here if I miss any of it, but basically the Aztecs are basically setting up like a, a marriage ceremony and a strategic alliance with the people nearby. And what is the people group that they're doing this with? Do you know the name?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, Kakan is, is, is, is the place you're talking about the, the marriage where they, they take the flesh off the woman and everything. And you talk about that one.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's the most insane story ever.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, yeah, they have a, there's a festival. They cut, they, they, they, they kill her, take her flesh off and they wear it and yeah, that's, that's a bad, that's a bad.

[Podcast Host]

And they're basically like, hey, we're going to do this marriage so bring like, bring the bride over and like we'll marry her to like our prince. And then you know, the, all the families come over to witness the ceremony and then instead of a ceremony, they see the prince wearing the flesh of the bride and then he's like actually sneak attack and then they kill all of them and then they take over the city and they just rule the whole area.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well, there's a wed, there is a red wedding kind of thing that's happening there. I mean the mythology around it sort of differs from place to place, but yeah, I mean the general sort of idea is yeah, they sort of do all this sort of stuff and I guess, yeah, you don't feel as sorry for the Aztecs, the Mexica. At least once you sort of hear about how the rest of the folks didn't like them. But that said, you know, we think about sort of the Spanish conquistadores and such taking over a basin of new Mexico and taking out the Aztecs. The Spanish didn't take out the Aztecs. The Aztecs took out the Aztecs. If you look at like even among the triple alliance, one of the main members of the triple alliance, Texcoco actually defects to the Spanish. If you look at like the, how the Aztecs, you know how the Aztec empire sort of the collapse happens. They, you have the Spanish arrive and they get there and there's like what, like a couple hundred of them, a couple hundred mark going to do anything, anything. You look at what they actually have, their equipment look at. If you look at Spanish conquistador tactics and tools that they have at the time, it's really bad. You know, they're not really, you might imagine them like wearing these like shiny armor and like helmets and things in 9,000 degree weather that doesn't work. They very quickly. The ones who are wealthy enough to even have them probably shed most of them because you're in a can basically in the heat, heat. So most of them are wearing padded armor just like the Aztecs are. Their guns are terrible. They don't even have that many of them, but their guns are terrible. They have some war dogs, they have

[Podcast Host]

some horses, but they're outnumbered.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I mean they're outnumbered by like thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Like this ancient Aztec city is maybe 100,000.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, it's more, more than 100,000 and

[Podcast Host]

it's how many Spanish con 200. So like what are we talking about?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So, so maybe they up their numbers at a certain point a little bit more, but not, not much.

[Podcast Host]

And of course disease, we can get to that.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Well yeah, we get to that. But the initial things, right, so when you hear about sort of the Spanish marching on 10 of Silan, they do march on the capital, but they march with themselves and like tens of thousands of indigenous warriors with them. So it's not like the, it's not like the Aztecs, you know, like the Spanish are far, far outnumbered and they have way more indigenous allies than you would normally think, right. And yeah, disease. They get there in 1519 and they still get spanked. So the Aztecs basically, you know, you know, trapped them in the palace and forced them to flee and they, they let them go. And had the Aztecs actually had the, had the imperial forces at least pursued the Spanish and actually killed them, that would have been the end. But they didn't, they figured oh, these guys are beaten, they run out of the city city. They chase them for a while and they're like ah, like they're probably going to die, you know, because they think, oh, we've beaten them. And unfortunately, disease by that point had hit the. Had hit the capital. And you know, between 1519 and 1521, you get like 50% of the population of the city gets decimated. And if you kill 50% of the population of a city indiscriminately, some of them are going to be warriors. Yes. But some are going to be people that like, were taking care of like walking water and like food and sewage and all sorts of other things. And so it compounds all these problems that they have. And even then the, the Aztecs in the capital city, even in 1521, when the Spanish finally do come over and take them out, they hold out for months in that city. So there's some tough bastards like in that city, like really tough. But the conquest. Yeah, the conquest is basically, it's, it's in. It's basically pitting indigenous peoples against other indigenous peoples. That's what it is. And it's like that just about everywhere with a Spanish land. It's not like they have an overwhelming force or anything like that. The Spanish basically just take them out piecemeal.

[Podcast Host]

Right. And is it a deliberate attempt to, you know, basically massacre all these people or is it like, hey, these people are like, kind of hostile. We sort of want these resources and these people are willing to help us do it. We have a strategic alignment. So let's go ahead.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They don't even know what they're doing. The he don't even know what they're doing at this point point. There are points where like Cortez, for example, for the Aztecs is he has a bounty on his head from the governor in Cuba. He's not supposed to be doing what he's doing. He's just gone rogue.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, really?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah, he's not even. No, they're supposed to be doing like a trading mission. They're not supposed to be doing all this conquest stuff. And it goes in many parts of the Americas, it goes from basically being like trade mission and such to just personal greedy Spanish. Spanish, you know, Spanish conquistadores who want something and they decide to convince a bunch of small group people to basically do what they want. It's like basically, you know, expedition treasure hunting stuff. So it doesn't start off that way. And there's no reason that the indigenous folks who were there, Aztecs or Maya and such, had any reason to believe that the Spanish were actually there to stay or really do anything. It's only in hindsight that we see this, but no. And it's really piecemeal. So like the Maya, for example, the last Maya stronghold, one of the last Maya strongholds, is a place called Tayasal. If you go to Tikal today, if you want to go see Tikal, you have to fly into a. You know, you have to go to a place called Flores, which is an island city in the middle of Patan. There's a lake there. Right. Tayasal is right outside that lake. It's the largest lake in Guatemala. It's Lake Patan Itza. Right. That kingdom doesn't fall until 1697. In 1697, there were undergraduates at Harvard getting degrees. So if you think about how much time it actually takes, it's quite a long period of time.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So the conquest is not something that's piecemeal. It's not something that happens all at once, Death Star style. It happens very, very, very slowly. And one could argue that the conquest is still happening today. Today that, you know, there are groups of Maya, for example, the La Condones, who were never formally conquered or, you know, territorially annexed, any of that sort. They just kind of withdrew further and further and further into the forest. And what the Spanish conquistadores are not accomplish. Didn't accomplish with arms like tourism is. Is. Is. Is accomplishing today. People are sort of like, you know, gradually, like, you know, okay, indigenous languages are disappearing because people are like, it's not advantageous for me economically to learn this. You know, if I have to learn two languages, it's going to be Spanish and English. English. And you see these indigenous languages going. So you could argue the conquest is still happening. We just. We just don't notice it, but it is. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I heard that the disease spread so quickly that by the time, like, Pizarro was going into Central America, the disease had preceded him.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. So Pizarro. Pizarro goes. You know, he's. He's in. I think he's in. He starts off in Panama, and he goes from Panama south and he goes to. He goes to sort of South American coast. And that guy had. Could have had a really cush life. He could have. Like, he didn't need to do what he was doing. He was. He was a fairly high off, fairly high official. He was. He was wealthy enough. He was. He was fine even in Panama, he decides to go on these little expeditions and things. By the time he actually makes it to the Inca, I think it's the second time. Yeah. Disease had already made its way. It had already killed the Inca emperor in South America. America. There was a civil war that had happened because of the. Because there was this succession war. And the guy who was. Who had won the succession war was actually marching on his way back to Cusco when Pizarro basically does the equivalent of jump out of the bushes and take him captive.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So. And even then, Pizarro was not no great mastermind. He was really, really lucky and just really, really ballsy. He just like, you know, at a wapa, I think at that point, had. Was it 100,000 troops with him? And the Spanish had like, what, 100, 200 guys. It was really, again, another tiny group of people, Atahuapa, you know, they think he's a God or he's sort of semi divine. He thinks he's invulnerable. He's like, what are these guys going to do? Pizarro invites him to a party, like to like, talk to him, and Atahuapa says yes. He still takes 10,000 guards with him, but doesn't arm them. And instead of sort of meeting him, Pizarro sets up an ambush, you know, sets up snipers basically, and causes enough chaos when the guy arrives to take the prison, take the emperor hostage. And because the emperor is kind of a God or godlike, people listen to him. And that's kind of how the Inca empire falls. It's not, you know, it's not. It's not like sort of a big military conquest where they beat a huge. There's a huge battle or anything like that.

[Podcast Host]

So by taking him hostage, why didn't his guards just start beating him up? Because 10,000 unarmed guys should probably take out 200 armed guys.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They should, they should. At least, according to reports. At least. Least Pizarro had some cannons and they didn't know what to do. Like, they had no response to cannons, and so they just killed a whole mess of them. And by that point, people didn't know, like, how much ammunition. There's no concept of ammunition or what they've got. It's confusing. If you've never seen, you know, if you've never seen cannons before or firearms before, it's. It's a scary thing. So they just kind of like scatter, like, ah. And by that point, they've got the emperor and they've got the emperor and like, tell them to stop, you know, and they stop. It's a hostage thing.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And then do they kill the emperor first?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

They get the emperor to sort of make all these decrees to give them gold and after, you know, in exchange for being a hostage and yeah, eventually they do just kill him.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's the same playbook that the Spanish did with the Aztecs. Like they take the emperor hostage and eventually. Eventually kill him. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Do they ever take these people back to Spain?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No. Well, there are examples where people get taken back to Spain or seem to be taken back to Spain, but no, not the high ranking folks, no. Interesting.

[Podcast Host]

Now one of my favorite movies ever growing up was the Road to El Dorado.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe my favorite movie ever.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Okay.

[Podcast Host]

Which is obviously a, a fictitious animated film about these two guys and their quest for this lost city of gold.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And people constantly talk about the lost city of gold. Where is this lost city of gold? Because there's many accounts from these conistors that talk about, about, you know, we're going down the Amazon river and there are these massive golden cities. And it seems like, at least according to, from my Googles, they haven't really been found.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What can you say to that?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So they're not going to the city of gold myth may derive from. There were some, there were some indigenous groups that I think, I want to say the leader would like put gold dust on themselves and it sort of made it seem like there was some gold in this. In South America that, in Central and South America that was out there, you know, the city of gold stuff, at least for Mesoamerica, is never going to be found, I don't think.

[Podcast Host]

Are there cities of gold?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

No, no, probably not. Probably not. I don't. I hate to, to. I hate to hedge, but probably not. So the reason why for Central America there isn't going to be generally, at least for mesomarker there's not going to be is for Mesoamerica they don't really like gold. It's okay. But gold is not the most precious substance. For ancient Mesoamerican Saudis, it's not. It's jade. And the reason it's jade is because jade is very, very hard to work. And it's pretty, it's warm to the touch. You know, if you sort of hold it for a while, it gets warm. Right. It's a pretty stone. Shiny people like shiny things, but it's really about labor. If you think about the Americas, the Americas doesn't have. There's no real beast of burden at all. There's no wheel other than for children's toys because there are no beasts of burden to pull said wheels. My wife's always like, what about the wheelbarrow? And I have no answer to that. No one's ever found an ancient wheelbarrow, so I don't know what to do about that. Right. But there's no wheels, there's no wheeled vehicles, and there's no beast of burden. The metal, there's no real metal tools. You get some things that are like bronze in South America. But generally speaking, for most of Mesoamerican prehistory, you don't really get bronze right towards the end a little bit. And so because there's none of that, it means that there's a premium placed on human labor, on like how much labor you can throw at a problem. So how many warm bodies can you throw at a problem? And so things are largely solved by throwing warm bodies at a problem. So you see these pyramids, every single pyramid that you see, every block, block is cut with human hands, brought there by human labor. There's nothing else, right. And so I think for Central America at least, they value that jade because it represents labor. It's like, oh, you've had to spend a bajillion hours making this. Imagine someone with some tara pitch on something, right? A string or something, and it's like, just start cutting here. What do I want you to do? I want you to spend weeks sanding this down to make a nice carving. Just sitting there sanding. And then after you do all of that, you know what I'm going to ask you to do? You're going to put that in the ground, you're going to put that in a burial and no one's ever going to see it and it's going to be mine. Ha ha ha. Right again, it's part of that whole labor thing, like drinking the. It's part of that whole ethos, right? So for gold, the Aztecs and some of the other folks in Central America, it was okay. It was like second tier wealth. Gold and silver was kind of second tier wealth. I believe the Aztec word for it. I can't remember what the Aztec word for it, but it's something like starship. It's like, it's basically, it's excrement of stars. It's nice and it's shiny, but it's okay. For South America, like lower Central America and South America, they have a much richer tradition of metallurgy there. Much longer you want to find good metallurgy. That's where the good metallurgy stuff is. That's where like the really good gold working is, where a lot of that, a lot of that really amazing stuff is. So Are there lost cities of gold? Probably not. Just because looting wise, people would have gone crazy for that. Like, that would have been like one of the first things to go. Are there lost cities? Yes, there absolutely are. One of the sort of really romantic things about being an archaeologist is that but especially in a place like central South America is that you can still kind of go out, hack and slash and find things. It's an amazing experience. Lidar of course, has changed things somewhat. It's made things a bit more visible. You can peel away the canopy, right. People think lidar is this magical solution and I suppose it is. But the same technology that's used in lidar is used pretty much in every car nowadays, every modern car. So all that driver assist stuff, that's what that is, that's just lidar are same stuff, it's just lasers. So it's changed things somewhat, but it's also really, I think made the process of discovering sites a bit easier. Certainly. But you can still go and find these things. That said, it's really good at finding straight lines and straight sort of raised areas below the ground surface. You can do that. It's really sort of good at that. But yeah, there's ways more, there's way more.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, in terms of lost cities or lost civilizations, are there any that you feel like there's evidence that are pointing towards like, oh, people have talked about this place and we have records about this place, but no one can seem to find where it is.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yes. So new things are being found almost every year. These are things that show up on your Google feed late at like 2 in the morning or something. Like, you know, farmed, you know, amazing city. That's kind of the stuff that gets found. I mean, I used to work at a place again, that place, Jaguar Hill, that was a lost city. We were looking at Peter Snyder's, my first graduate project, like with the sweat bath and all that stuff. We didn't know where it was. We were looking for that thing. We couldn't find it. Right, couldn't find it. Fast forward, years later we were looking at some glyphs and the glyphs started showing up and saying, oh, this is, you know, we started to figure out, okay, well this is where, this is where the city is. One of my advisors at the time, Dave Stewart, figured out that Jaguar Hill was this place. He didn't need lidar. He just was looking at, reading and looking at inscriptions and being like, oh, this is where that is. I think there's really nothing like going and finding Something like this and being like, oh, it's, you know, this is a. You're reading something, you know, you uncover something and no one's read this for 2000 years or whatever it is, you know, and you being the first person to read it, there's no feeling like that in the world. Like being like, oh my God, you know, like it's something new. Right. Whether it's something mundane, like they were born. Okay, great. Right. Or like some like, you know, magical incantation, there's nothing like that. You're sort of reading and you're like, oh my God. Like, you know, or like finding the, you know, finding a whistle on the ground, like, what do you think I do?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you got to blow it.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

You got to blow it. You got to blow it. Right? You got to blow it, you know, or anything like that, you know, so you find these things and you're just like, my God. And so I think there are going to be sites that will be found that are, that are new, that are out there. If I had to point where they're going to be, they're going to be in dense forest. So places where people either haven't gone or don't want to go. So places that are like hyper dangerous, they're going to be places there. Sure. As I said, you know, I've been places, I worked on projects where like, you know, the site was landmines and we didn't know it. Right. Or I've worked on places where it's like, as I said, I think I told you before we started this today, places where you've had to evacuate, where it's like, oh, there are people coming to kill us. So those kinds of places. Yeah. In those regions there's going to be those places where you'll find this, if I had to say, like a big untapped area right now, it probably wouldn't be Mesoamerica. It'd probably be sort of lower Central America or Amazon. That's, that's where, that's. That. That's ground zero for that sort of thing.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the experiences you've had with like cartels or narcos? Basically trying to figure out what you guys are doing.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So I tend to avoid all that stuff or I try to avoid it as much as I can. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Prudent.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It's prudent. I've been in situations where, like, for example, that site I was talking about, suppot to point a ball, used to work there. I was working there in the early 2000s. And at that point, the cartels in Mexico were being pretty heavily policed by the folks in Mexico. And so what was happening is you had sort of cartel activity moving across the border from Mexico into Guatemala. And the area that I was in was like kind of ground zero for a lot of that stuff happening where people were moving in. There were in our archeologists who were working in like, deep inside that territory. Territory. The area that I was in was not in the territory yet. And so we made the decision, in accordance with the Guatemalan government to take a couple of the stele that were at the site that I was at and move those things off site into basically to the Guatemala City Museum, where they still are, install replicas at the site and such. Right. And the reason why we did that is because we thought when a cartel moves into an area, usually what happens is if it's an archaeological site, probably the first thing to go is going to be big burials, so looting those pyramids. Right. It's the first thing that happens even to this day.

[Podcast Host]

Oh yeah, the cartel will just pull up and if they see something cool,

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

they'll just take it. Or if the cartel takes over the site. Yeah, sure. Or they'll actually take the monuments, the sculptured monuments, and they'll saw them down. So what you do is you don't want to move like a big stone. So they'll saw the face of off, they'll saw it into pieces and they'll load into trucks and take it. And then it'll get sold on the art market and it'll go into like some, probably European or American, you know, private possession. It'll be a coffee table or something. That's probably what will happen to it. Right. And so we thought that was going to potentially happen, happen to us. And so we, the site that I was working at were like, okay, well, we're going to have to evacuate this stuff out of here. So we, we, we, we sort of got some money together and we, we sort of moved those things to Guatemala City. And it turned out that the cartel actually didn't take over the site that we were at, luckily, but they did take over the site next door. Right, right down the way. And they did destroy the heck out of it. I just, I wasn't working there at the time, so I, we, we couldn't save it. But that's just what it is. And you know, we, you get these experiences with, with, with, with looting. And it's not just cartels. It's like everybody, as I said, people I don't blame looters. Like, people really want to feed their families. And if you. If you're working for, you know, if you have work, steady work for six months out of a year and you need to feed your family, you'll do whatever, and people will do whatever. So I don't blame them at all. I blame sort of, you know, people who are sort of, you know, the middlemen and such. The folks that are, like, selling these things to art houses. The folks that are like, laundering this stuff because this stuff gets laundered. It's like money laundering stuff gets laundered. I blame them, right? But I've been in situations. Like, there was this one time where I was in this village and this ice cream truck rolls up, like the da, da, da. You know, like the. And they find out that I'm an archaeologist. And the guy's like, he's like, you want to come back? It's like he opens up the back of his ice cream truck and there's a. This is. This is Steela back there. This piece of steel back there. He's like, you want to see? You want to see it? You want to see it? And I'm like, not really. Not really. Like, like, you know, I'm like, this is, like, going to, like, I don't know. Like, I prefer not to die. Like, no, I don't know. I don't know. It's like, do you want to see it? Do you want to. Is this a setup? I don't know what this is. You know, Is this a setup? And so I'm like, no, I don't really. He's like, you want to buy it? I'm like, no, I don't want to buy it. It, you know, but that's the kind of level at which the looting has happened. I didn't actually see it. He had it in his back and his truck, and he's like, lifting up, and I'm like, no, no, no, man. Like, I just. No, I just. How about. How about. How about no? Like, I don't. I don't really want to do this, right? I mean, I told people about it. I told this sort of the authorities about what was happening, you know. But the problem is, is that at least in those days, nobody's policing this stuff. And if you are policing this stuff, nobody's really doing all that much.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, they can pick your fish to fry.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah. Pick a fish to fry, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Usually what happens is the authorities, sort of the antiquities authorities, you know, usually try to create arrangements with. With. With locals and populations and things to, like, be able to see this material and to sort of take photos of it and at least have some sort of record of it, because they know they can't. You can't just like, like, arrest everybody. Like, you can't. You can't do that. Like, you can't. Like, you go to a town or whatever and like, if everybody's got a piece of something, you can't just be like, oh, you know, it's also like,

[Podcast Host]

what is the law about, like, finding some old stuff?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

There isn't. And it is.

[Podcast Host]

It is garbage town. Technically.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Technically, yes. Technically it is. No, technically, it is an old pot

[Podcast Host]

from 2,000 years ago. Like, it's just a. It's an old thing.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

It is. I mean, where they tend to police more is in sort of the export of this stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

So, like, you don't. It can't leave the country, you know, and that was sort of the, you know. You know, people have this image of, like, archaeologists, like, taking stuff out of country, and it's largely Indiana Jones. Right. Taking stuff out of country and such and bringing it to museums in the west or what have you. That is something that did happen. It has been illegal for a really long time.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

And, you know, you're not supposed to. To really take anything out at all. And even when we sort of want to take out something to sort of test it, sort of, say, radiocarbon or something like that, like, you have to get, like, there's a huge amount of paperwork that you have to do to sort of get, get, get through that just to take out the pieces of carbon so that stuff stays in house and should stay in house. That's how it's supposed to be.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. Dr. Fitzsimmons, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. This is a fantastic. Of course, your book Blood on the Wind.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Is available right now, and I really, I'm excited to take a look at it because it really seems like it is a very tangible human experience for a period of history that I think most Americans probably don't learn a ton about that we don't know a ton about. And I think this is like a really great forward foray to understanding the period and the people that actually lived it. So I'm excited to jump into this. This is really cool. Cool. Anything else you want to tell the people, any places they can find you?

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Just. I mean, I'm the only archaeologist at Middlebury College, so it's. It's easy. It's really easy. To find me. Like, it's just. It's just, you know, I don't know if I'm the only archaeologist in town, but I might be. I might be. It's only a town of 8,000 people, so I don't really know. I might be right.

[Podcast Host]

You're also the only guy walking around with an atlatl.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

I'm the only guy walking around, yeah. You'll see me. Like, I'm very oftentimes seen around CAT campus, either with an atlatl or with, like, boxes of skulls or things of that sort. Plastic skulls. I don't do real human stuff. We don't do that on campus or anything like that. But, yeah, check out the book. As I said, part of the reason I wrote it was because I wanted people to actually sort of learn the names of folks. So there's like pronunciation guides in this thing and such. You know, learn about somebody that's not Caesar, and that's really the main thing.

[Podcast Host]

Well, thank you so much.

[Dr. James Fitzsimmons]

Thank you. Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it.