I'm Dr. Ed Barnhart.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Mayan Support.

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@BillWrenMusic asks, Why did the Mayans tie boards

to their babies' heads?

The Maya put boards on their babies' heads

to shape their skull.

Babies' heads are very soft,

and they put those boards on there

so it would elongate towards the top.

We believe that what they were trying to do is

make the skull look more like a husk of corn,

because the Maya, of course, were corn people.

Only elite people were allowed

to squeeze their baby's heads this way,

and in public, a head on an adult

that looked, like, more pointed,

that meant, overtly, that that person was of high status.

I've always thought to myself

there must have been Maya peasant people

who were squeezing their kids' head on the sly

and just saying, I don't know, he just grew like that.

He looks like he's going places, doesn't he?

@SSJsergio says,

I appreciate the indigenous representation

in Black Panther, but Kukulkan, a literal Mayan deity,

taking a big L from a 19-year-old girl?

Well, come on, he could have taken her.

He let her go.

That's what heroes really do.

Kukulkan is the Maya word for Quetzalcoatl,

or the feathered serpent, and his costuming was straight on,

but Kukulkan was known not just for his power,

but for his wisdom, his grace, and his good governance.

This character was right on the money,

and I can say that my Maya friends liked him very much,

so he hit the mark with real Maya people as well.

@asstronic asks, Why did the Mayans

make their calendar look like an OREO?

Right off the bat, that's not even the Mayan calendar.

That's the Aztec calendar stone,

also called the Aztec cosmology stone.

The Maya also had that 260-day calendar

that we see on the Aztec calendar OREO.

Now, you might be wondering, Why 260 days?

260 days is nine months.

It's the human gestation period.

It's our first cycle from conception to birth.

No other civilization on the planet did this,

and I think it's a particularly beautiful

and unique-to-humans cycle.

The Maya did make the most elaborate calendar system

in the ancient world.

They used typically five different cycles

just to tell you what day it is.

They tell us the lunar cycle.

They were definitely obsessed with time.

One of the original archeologists in the area,

Jay Eric Thompson, said

they're just esoteric time worshipers

because, clearly, the texts were mostly

about cycles of time.

@nick_bluhm asks, What was the first ever clothing trend?

Maybe Mayan sandals.

I bet those shits were hot back in the day.

Well, they did make some pretty cool sandals, it's true.

We can see them on ceramic vessels like this.

This guy right here,

they've got this nice treatment on the top.

His whole wardrobe is great.

He's got a jade skirt.

It's got this hatch pattern, they wear tunics.

The Maya had style.

@SuperPowerArmor asks, Anyone else pissed

that the Mayans were wrong

and the world didn't end in 2012?

Ah, not me personally. I like still being here.

It turns out that the Maya are talking about a start day

of their calendar at the year 3,114 BC,

specifically, August 13th.

They say it's the last day of the third creation

and the beginning of the fourth creation.

So if we do the math,

and like the odometer in your car,

the last time the calendar switched and reset,

we move our odometer forward from 3,114 BC,

and we get to the year 2012,

specifically, December 21st.

That's where we get that 2012 thing.

For people like myself that pour through texts

related to the Maya calendar,

there are a few key texts that make it clear

it's not going to be in 2012.

It's going to be in the year 4,772.

@TigerWoodsSuck asks, How are the Maya

and the Aztecs alike?

Well, the Maya and the Aztec do share a lot of similarities.

The Aztecs were an empire.

The Maya were independent city states.

The Aztecs were very much focused on conquest,

warfare and sacrifice.

The Maya really didn't do that much sacrificing.

They did auto sacrificing.

The kings would actually blood let themselves in public

as an act of protection of the people

and to please the gods.

@DoGsMoveSilent asks, What did the Maya do for fun?

They had a sport they adored.

We just call it the Maya ball game.

Some people call it pok-a-tok.

We can thank the Maya for making rubber,

but they didn't make it for elastic in their underwear.

They made it to play the game.

They made balls just like this.

I made this ball out of the latex from rubber trees

and the sulfur from morning glory seeds.

They would use balls much bigger than this,

and they built actual sports courts.

From above, they kinda looked like a capital I.

So they had a lane running down the middle of them,

and there was a center line,

and then two out-of-bounds places,

and teams would face off at the center line

and bounce these hard kind of giant super balls

up on a sloping wall back and forth,

kind of like tennis goes, or volleyball.

Trick was they could not touch it

with their hands or their feet.

They had to use their hips or their chest.

Some versions of the ball court also had rings

on either side, and if you get it through the ring,

that's it, game over.

So 3,500 years ago is when this game began.

By the time they got to the Aztecs,

each Aztec city had their own football team,

like the Chiefs or the Dallas Cowboys.

Sometimes when two cities were arguing,

instead of going to war, they could settle it

through a ball game.

They had big crowds that would watch,

and especially rich people would be able to sit up close

and it was their job to throw out things like treasures,

jewelry, things that were gifts to the winning team.

If a rich person tried to sneak out

just before the game ended, the team had the right

to run them down, tackle them,

and take their jewelry off of them.

It's not true

that the winners of the Maya ball game were sacrificed.

You'd have a pretty hard time coming up with good players.

@TERISWEST asks, So who got sacrificed to the Mayan gods?

It was mostly people that were warriors captured

in some sort of ceremonial battle.

They'd go to these little wars

that were kind of elites against elites.

They'd stab 'em in the leg

and they'd drag 'em back to sacrifice 'em

up on top of a temple.

The Aztecs sacrificed almost anybody.

@MDVnaseer asks, Did a young schoolboy

really find a lost Mayan city or just a field?

A boy in Canada, about 16 years old,

was using maps and Maya codices,

and he identified what he believed to be a Maya city.

Now, in that case, it was not actually

what he believed it to be, but there is real potential

for finding Maya cities, and with now the advent of lidar,

wow, we are finding them faster than ever.

Google Earth gets refreshed all the time,

and as people move out into these jungle areas

and cut down the trees,

all of a sudden they reveal these temples.

What I tend to look for are irregular

or unnatural geometric shapes or arrangements.

Maya pyramids are usually arranged

in groups around plazas, so if you see a hill

with a square in front of it

and two other square hills around it,

that's a good chance that that's actually manmade.

The city I found in Belize,

which I named Maax Na, was back in the 1990s,

so I didn't have the pleasure

of all of this great new technology.

I used a topography map, looked at the area,

and said to myself, If I was a Maya,

where would I wanna live?

So I looked for the tallest mountain in the area.

When I found that, I saw two little mountains

right next to it, and I said right off the bat,

in my apartment in Austin, Texas,

If I was a Maya, I would build a city there.

And two years later, after hacking out there

with a crew and machetes, I was right.

There I was, standing on top of a 70-foot-tall pyramid,

looking down into a plaza with a ball court.

It was something that I really just didn't ever think

was gonna happen to me 'cause I was only 25,

and this was supposed to be my life goal.

In some ways, I stood on top of that temple and said,

Well, God, what am I gonna do now?

@waywardjim asks, So, for at least the Mayans,

money really did grow on trees?

You're referring to cacao, of course, chocolate beans,

and yes, the Maya did use them as a, at least, standard

in their barter system.

They're easy to dry and transport, they're small.

By the time the Aztecs were using it as a currency,

there was also a counterfeit ring.

There were people that were making little seeds

out of ceramics and making them look like

they were chocolate beans,

when really they were counterfeit,

and there were Aztec police who would walk around the market

looking for counterfeiters

and bust them with their ceramic beans.

Chocolate was the drink of the elite.

It was a pleasure.

It was something that they frothed up,

they put chili pepper in it, never sugar.

It was a spicy drink.

It was only grown in the Maya area.

It was something about that tropical forest

that allowed cacao, chocolate to grow.

@oslaywemua asks, Timeline period for Mayan civilization?

You could actually take it back to 10,000 years,

but something that we pretty much

all conservatively agree would be 2000 years.

So that really starts the Maya world.

So then we get to 200 CE, it's current era.

That's when we really get classic Maya civilization.

They start building their giant cities

in the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Tikal gets built.

So the classic goes on for a full 400 years.

We have dynasties of kings,

we have fully elaborated hieroglyphs,

and them telling us their history,

carving it into monuments.

That goes on all the way to about 800 CE,

and that begins a very short period

we call the terminal classic, the transitional.

Everybody's moving around, cities are being abandoned,

new ones are starting up, but it settles out

into the final period, and the post-class period goes

from about 900 all the way up

to the moment of Spanish contact,

somewhere around 1500, maybe even a little earlier.

@Jp_Njirp asks, What's the difference

between Mayan and Egyptian pyramids?

For one thing, the pyramid standing in Giza Plateau

is the tallest pyramid on the planet.

It's 150 meters tall.

The tallest Maya pyramid is about 68 meters tall,

so only a third of that size.

For the Egyptians, they built those pyramids,

from the beginning, purpose built as tombs.

The Maya, the kings would use the temple in life,

and then when they died, the temple would be retrofitted,

dug into and their tomb would be put inside.

When it comes to who built the most pyramids,

the Maya excel virtually everyone on the planet.

We have seen all of the Egyptian pyramids.

There's about 140 of them.

We're not gonna find anymore.

The Maya built thousands of pyramids,

and there are definitely thousands more

hiding under the jungle.

So if one culture owns the name

and the right to pyramid builder,

it's the Maya, not the Egyptians.

@RKingwood asks, What tools did the Maya use?

The Maya were not a metal using culture.

None of their tools were made of metal.

When it came to building things like their temples,

tools were made of chert.

We also call that flint.

It's a harder stone, and they would shape that into axes,

and those axes could cut the softer limestone

into whatever shape they wanted.

For finer cutting, they used obsidian.

Obsidian is a volcanic glass.

It never gets dull.

I have taken pieces of obsidian

out of an excavation and cut my finger on the glass.

It lasts forever and it's very, very sharp.

@FGEleven33 asks, Do you believe

the aliens helped out the Aztecs and the Mayan empire?

No, if they did, we'd have all sorts of evidence

of cooler technologies than stone and temples.

I really feel like a question along those lines

is just, once again, disparaging the abilities

of people that were not originated in Western society.

So no, I think they did it on their own.

@androidsPharaoh asks, King Pakal

as an ancient alien astronout?

King Pakal's sarcophagus lid shows a man tilting back,

surrounded by glyphs and symbols.

What do you see when you look at that?

Well, I definitely don't see an alien spaceship.

What I see is King Pakal at his moment of death,

falling down the world tree into the skeletal jaws

of the underworld where he will go down,

and then eventually, he will rise up

to meet his ancestors and the gods in the sky.

Pakal was the most important king

in the history of the city of Palenque.

He became king at the age of 12.

He died at the venerable age of 80,

but he brought that city back to its height.

His sarcophagus is honoring the greatest king

in the history of Palenque, and it is not a spaceship.

@dperry913 asks, In your opinion,

what is the best Mayan ruin, Palenque?

Palenque is definitely my favorite Maya ruin,

and it's because I spent so much time there.

I spent three years of my life

making a map of the site.

Anything in orange is a building

that we've actually excavated or investigated.

All the buildings in gray, archeology has never touched.

So you can see how little of this city

we've actually excavated.

There were probably less than 10,000 people living there

at any one point, but despite that small population,

it was the height of Maya scientific

and artistic knowledge.

Engineering, they made a kind of corbel arch

and a kind of cement that was stronger

than anywhere else in the Maya world.

One of the great buildings of this site is the palace.

It has a three-story tower.

Nowhere else in the Maya world ever attempted such a tower,

and in a testimony to how well they made,

it's still standing today.

That city was abandoned 1200 years ago,

and yet the tower lasted through all those rainy seasons.

It has not settled more than two centimeters in 1000 years.

@rosssandilands asks, Did any indigenous peoples

in North America have any type of writing

like the Mayan people developed?

Yes, there were certainly other writing scripts,

especially in Mesoamerica,

the Zapotecs, the Olmecs,

but no one did it like the Maya.

The distinguishing characteristic of Mayan writing

is that it reflects the spoken word.

There are actually symbols that mean sounds.

This is one section of one page

of one of our four surviving Maya books.

Their writing system was one of only four

in the entire history of the world

that was an original writing system.

We have Mesopotamian, which is cuneiform.

We have Egyptian, Chinese script.

Those are our four, but the Maya distinguished themselves

in all of the Americas as the only civilization

that did it on this side of the world.

Each one of these glyphs is a word,

and it's broken up, usually, into syllables.

The first symbol here that kind of looks like a comb,

that's the word ooh.

Here, these top say Ma, this says Ka,

so they're both vowel syllable combinations.

So ooh-ma-ka spells oomak, which is his burial.

This is the death god.

These are telling us whether it's a good day

or a bad day to do something.

Is it a good day to plant my corn

or is it a bad day?

And this first glyph here that says, Ooh mak, his burial,

that's a kind of a Maya colloquialism

to say, No, it's a bad day to do that.

And the bars and dots here are the different days.

These are day names, and they take a long strip of bark

off of a tree and then they fold it like an accordion.

Then they'll paint that

with limestone paste and stucco.

They open the whole thing up,

and maybe a book is 10 feet long.

They flip it over and they read the whole other side,

and then they accordion it up

and they put it back in their bags.

@TrishKing6 asks, What does Mayan sound like?

We have the great benefit

of having millions of Maya people

still speaking their language on the planet.

The biggest of those language groups is Yucatec Maya,

and there are about 5 million people that speak Yucatec.

If you wanted to hear a good example of it,

I'd recommend the somewhat dubious movie Apocalypto.

Here's some of it right here.

[leader speaking Yucatec]

They actually made the effort

to have the actor speak actual Maya.

There are a number of sounds that they'll make

that have a stop at the end of it.

TZ apostrophe, and that's tz.

[warrior speaking Yucatec]

The word in Yucatec Maya for fire is k'ak',

and that's K-'-A-K-'.

One thing that Apocalypto overdid was the human sacrifice.

That was really the Aztecs thing.

When the Maya met the Aztec,

yes, they got a little bit more into the human sacrifice,

but the scenes of people being killed one after another

on top of Maya temples,

that's not how the Maya rolled.

@RatLabMuseum asks, How did the ancient Maya

build such large cities far away from lakes or rivers?

Tikal is a great example.

There are no rivers near Tikal,

but what they did is they quarried

for all the stone they needed to build the city.

The quarries became reservoirs.

They lined them with stucco,

so they were like giant swimming pools.

The plazas between the temples,

they canted them just one degree.

So with every rain that fell,

all of those plazas funneled water into their reservoirs.

Tikal kings loved to put water lilies in their headdresses.

A way that the Maya have always detected

whether water is fresh enough is water lilies.

Water lilies are a very fragile plant.

If the water is polluted, they don't grow there.

So if there's water lilies on the surface, it's pure water.

When I made the map of Palenque,

I could see that there was a sewer system running

through the neighborhoods.

They crisscrossed it using gravity.

Probably also had makeshift toilets,

getting fresh water from above,

and sending the gray water down below

and into the larger river system,

well away from the city.

@itsroblaw wants to know,

Bro, how did the Mayans figure out the stars, like, how?

Most ancient astronomy is, what we call, horizon based.

A priest would stand in a single spot every night

and watch what rose and set, what day it rose and set,

and where along the horizon it set.

If he did that again and again and again,

he starts recognizing the cycles

of planets, the moon and the sun.

An astronomer could spend his entire life recording cycles

and then hand that data to the next generation.

And after just a few generations, they got darn good at it.

The ancient Maya also oriented their buildings

to interact with the cycles of the sun.

The most famous of those is El Castillo in Chichén Itzá.

Chichén Itzá has this big in the middle,

and it's oriented just right, so that on equinox,

as the sun sets, the shadow of its terraces

cast onto the balustrade of one of its staircases.

The shadows look like an undulating body of a snake

going down the staircase.

@softuch25 asks, Anyone out here in X land

understand Mayan math?

I do, yeah.

The Maya had only three symbols.

They had a dot, meaning one,

they had a bar, meaning five,

and then they had the all-important zero,

like a shell for zero, but they could also use a flower.

So if you wanted to write the number seven,

you'd use two dots, one, one,

and then a five.

Let's say we want to add

the numbers three plus five,

so that would be eight in the way we'd write it.

But that eight has nothing to do with the three and five.

But watch when you do that in Maya.

If I take three, which is three dots,

and I add five, which is a bar,

it becomes a bar with three dots over it.

It's this actual symbol plus this actual symbol

equals the symbol for eight.

The Maya managed to make a more elegant mathematical system

than the one the western world is so proud of.

@mz_bri_ana asks, But where the [beep] did the Mayans go?

The Maya are actually still here.

By my count, there's about 15 million Maya

still on the planet.

Yes, at contact, they were persecuted.

Their culture, in many ways, ended,

and 12 infectious diseases wiped out probably 90% of them,

but their communities continued,

and they've grown over the last 500 years.

In fact, many of the Maya people live right here

in the United States.

At your convenience store on your corner,

if that nice little Mexican woman

is under the height of five two, she's probably a Maya.

There's a big misunderstanding

about the disappearance of the Maya.

About 700 years earlier,

when classic-period Maya abandoned their cities,

they moved out.

They didn't die off, they didn't disappear,

they weren't picked up by aliens.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for joining me in Maya Support.

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