 Hello, and welcome to Ask an Archaeologist. I'm Nico Tripsovich, the host of today's show. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live streamed interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. In this series, UC Berkeley archaeologists and others who work with archaeological materials discuss their research and answer audience questions. For those of you joining us live today, you can post your questions in the live chat box that you'll find adjacent to the YouTube video. Today, we are delighted to be speaking with Esteban Miron Maravan. Welcome, Esteban. Thank you, Nico. It's great to be here. Esteban Miron Maravan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and he has worked in the Maya area within the Palenque region in the Mexican state of Chiapas since 2002. Today, Esteban will be presenting myths and misconceptions about the ancient Maya. So welcome, and once you show us your slides and tell us about your work. Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to share my screen on the PowerPoint just a second. There you go. So I'm going to talk, as Nico said, I'm going to be talking about the myths and misconceptions about the ancient Maya, and there are a lot of them. But first, I'm going to talk a little bit about my own research, which is related, actually, to these topics. So with my PhD dissertation, I am trying to know what would be required from archaeologists to start a proper engagement and collaboration with modern Maya speaking peoples. I want to know what topics and historical times that all people of Chiapas, Mexico would be interested to inquire with the scientific tools of archaeology. I am hoping for a future on which Mayanist and other Mesoamerican archaeology will be done in collaboration and consultation with a collective of indigenous communities, because in our laws and institutions, there is no place for native peoples' involvement in the investigation and managing of the Mexican archaeological heritage. I think Mayanist archaeology can be positively affected by the incorporation of Maya-speaking scholarship, as well as communities' perceptions of place, time, and history. We can surely grow in the depth and complexity of our understanding of the classic Maya, as well as other time horizons. So my research is basically aiming to know what heritage for each oles is, what is their own narration of history about, what are its most important places, and so on. Only then, only knowing that, it would be possible to start a real community-based participatory research program with them. So to answer those interrogations, I had started an endographic project asking these questions to all people around the towns of Palenque, Tumbala, and other places in Northern Chiapas, Mexico, also a little bit of Tabasco as well, the state of Tabasco. I did start to have those conversations in person since the last year, but of course, since the middle of March of 2020, I have been trying to come up with the ideas of how to carry my research from for my dissertation while a pandemic. So during these months of social distancing, I have not been able to travel to Northern Chiapas, so I have been forced to find different ways to engage in the conversations I need to answer the questions of my ethnography. I have discovered a lot of Facebook and WhatsApp groups made to talk and post about Chol identity, language, and culture, and it has been a great discovery for me, something I would never know if it wasn't for this tragic pandemic of COVID-19. So I also started a YouTube channel in Chol language. It's called Archaeology, and it's my nickname in Chol, which means coconut head. And so far, I have had some very good responses, and I am planning to keep it up. So this is my current research, but today I wanted to talk to you about other topics, although they are related by this appropriation and misrepresentation of the history of others, in this case the Maya. So the Mexican state government and its archaeologists are not the only instances in the world that have appropriated the narrative about the history of the Maya peoples. There are in the world many different ideas about them that are harmful misconceptions about their achievements and their past. Many of those ideas are grounded in racist conceptions of people of color. And now that your country, the US, and the whole world is in this process of reckoning and trying to change the systemic racism prevailing in many places, I choose to talk about this subject because I think it's very important to give the proper ancestors of the Maya the credit of building all the stuff we admire today. So I'm gonna start by painting a very broad picture of what the Maya actually are, right? Not what they aren't. So for more than 3000 years, there have been Maya peoples living in the vast and heterogeneous regions that today form the Maya area. Around 6 to 7 million people today speaking one of the 29 languages of the Mayan linguistic family. Their land extends today into five different countries, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and part of Mexico and the southern eastern most part of Mexico. Every time you hear something about the Maya civilization, it actually means a lot of different human groups with a shared linguistic origin, but very different from each other, both through time and across space. All this land you're seeing in the map here of the Maya area. There never was a Maya empire, a city is unfortunately frequent to hear or read. The ancient Maya during the classic period, which is a time between the years 100 and 900 of the current era, and it's a time when they built the most famous archaeological sites and monuments that we know today. They were never a single political entity. The Maya lowlands were populated by hundreds of city-states independent to one another and often cooperating or in open conflict and competition with each other. This famous period ended with a profound political change, which has often been called collapse, and that takes us to the first misconception or myth I want to talk now. The Maya never disappeared. That's one very important idea that I want to convey today. We archaeologists often use terms and we're not fully aware of the consequences of them. For example, the word collapse. It has made a lot of people think that as if the ancient Maya totally disappeared from existence, many people think that even when many people think that even when they visit an archaeological site full of Maya people surrounded by their language and culture. Some Maya scholars from Guatemala and Yucatan have called how problematic is that. The fact that the ancient Maya choose to have a different government system without sacred rulers and a huge court of priests and bureaucrats producing art and magnificent sites doesn't mean they vanished. They simply stopped living in the majority of the big cities that were powerful at that time and went to other places to live. So we're seeing here an example of one of the few places where there was actually a turmoil. And as I was saying a little bit before, we cannot think of the Maya as a whole thing, as a whole entity. It is many different regions with many different cultures within it. But there was some places in which there was a turmoil and a lot of conflict at the time of the end of the classic. Like this site in the Peteshvatun region where you can see the archaeologists excavating there saw very clearly that at some point everyone concentrated in what it was the plaza of a settlement to defend themselves because there was a lot of war. But this example is not the rule for the whole Maya area. There were many things happening at different times. It was a whole process and without a single cause, we cannot say as it is often heard as well that droughts or political pressure, we cannot weigh on any factor. It's probably a process and multifactorial what meant to stop using those big cities. It is also usual to find people that think that the history of the native populations had a definite end when they were invaded by Europeans. And again, this is completely false. It actually is a way to invisibilize the struggles and adaptations indigenous communities all over the Americas have endured. So to prepare this video, I was wondering on the dark corners of the internet. And it has come to my attention that a lot of people think that the Maya went away to outer space or even to another dimension only to come back in 2012 when many people think that the Maya prophesied about the end of the world or the change of a cosmic era or something like that. And this is of course again false. There is no evidence that any Maya thought of the end of the world in that date. And this myth tends to combine astic ideas about the succession of four world ages with one of the calendar systems of the ancient Maya. Actually, the cartoon I am sharing with you is doing the same mistake. The stone calendar that the guy on the left is holding is actually an astic image. It's not Maya. And the Maya didn't have that conception, although they were not completely unaware of the possibility of the end of the world because there are some Maya texts that actually talk about the end of the world, just not without any date. And this particular calendar that I am talking about which December 21st, 2012 is an important date. It's a system that started to count the days and cycles from a creation date on the year 3,114 before the current era. That's in August of that year. And the December 21st, 2012, it was just the end of the 13 Bakhtun and the beginning of the 14th. Bakhtun is a period of 144,000 days. So there's a truck coming just right next to a street. So I hope you don't get a lot of nice. So in a way, it was just like Y2K. Remember 20 years ago, everyone and the trash is collecting. Can you hear the bell? Can you hear it? Oh yeah. That's a trash in Mexico City. So it was just like Y2K. Everyone expected a lot of things and it was just the change of one number in the calendar. The apocalyptic ideas actually are more akin to Western Christian spectrum of conception of life and universe than actual Maya conceptions. And of course, this myth was dismissed quickly after the fact that we still exist and we have a world today. But the set of extravagant cosmic ideas about the Maya still prevail today. And unfortunately, they are more popular than ever. And that takes us to the most harmful misconception that I want to talk about today. The idea that the ancient Maya were not capable of constructing with high precision or carry very heavy stones or doing amazing stuff and that they had to be helped by beings from outer space. So this specific idea of the ancient aliens was popularized by a series of books written in the 60s of the last century. But it has roots in older notions that are at least in part archaeologists' thought. In the beginning of our discipline, early professional archaeologists thought that there were somehow high cultures that spread civilization throughout the world. Unfortunately, implying that there are somehow lesser cultures in need of help. That theoretical assumption is called diffusionism. And although archaeologists don't use it anymore, a big part of the public stuck with those ideas interpreting the past of the colonized world and always thinking that people of color were incapable of being good astronomers or great builders. And the classic site of Palenque, as you're seeing in the images there, is a common target of this kind of hypothesis, of fabulous hypothesis. A famous example is this archophagus lid of a ruler called K'inich Hana Pakal, a ruler from the 7th century in this city state of the kingdom of Bakal and its capital, Palenque. Believe, you can see the depiction on the right and it represents a complex image of K'inich Hana Pakal ascending to the sky levels of the universe after having descended to the underworld with his death. From him, there is a tree directing the path upward, and this tree connects the cosmic planes that the ancient Maya thought composed the universe. Some people see in this image a depiction of an astronaut in a starship somehow. And although it could be kind of a good science fiction kind of because not great, epigraphist and iconographist know very well what this image is about, and it does have anything to do with the spaceship. They often talk about the little thing he has close to his nose as a breathing machine or something like that, and that's a depiction actually a very clear depiction of the pichane of his last breath. So everything there has perfect, well, has sense to what we know the ancient Maya thought of death and the death of a sacred ruler, and it has perfect sense without the need to add any more spice to it. There is plenty to talk about without changing our worldview, without implying beings from outer space. And there are some television shows that hold these views. Ancient Aliens on History Channel has been on air for more than a decade, and it has increased its popularity and it has reached the whole world with those dangerous ideas which question the legitimacy of human involvement in archaeological features. A survey made by Chapman University in 2018, through some very worrying results, more than 40% of Americans believe in the possibility of ancient aliens influencing the archaeological cultures of the world. That's a lot of people. And it might sound innocent to play with the idea that of aliens visiting cities and doing cool stuff, but it really is not. The disbelief that ancient people of color were capable of complex engineering is basically racist. It undermines the intellect of non-European cultures as if someone needs to question the capability of those ancient cultures. I don't have credit for this image for I think memes are usually stolen. It has a stand there, but I love that meme. So the fact that these ideas are very popular is basically our fault as archaeologists. We have been very bad at sharing our knowledge. As a collective, we have abandoned our duty of educating the public and engaging discussions outside our academic forums and publications. Although there are great exceptions, of course, but in general, we are pretty bad at sharing our knowledge. It's not unusual to find conspiracy-driven people believing that we archaeologists hide things from the public to maintain powerful secrets. And although it makes us look cool and interesting, there is nothing further from the truth. And I invite everyone to contact their local museum, their nearest historical society, their nearest anthropology department, and other archaeologists working anywhere to ask about the human past. Most of us are not horrible people and we are glad to answer questions. To me, it's something that is very important to clarify is that not all people that believe in ancient aliens are racist. It might be the case that they have a genuine interest in the human past. So that is why it's so important to engage with the public and share what we know and how we know it from the archaeological record. To me, the idea that ancient societies were capable of amazing constructions, astronomical observations and even predictions, huge monuments and so on. It's far more interesting than to think that everything complex in antiquity was caused by the influence of non-humans visiting earthlings. Although less mysterious or mystic, the past is more complex than that. And it is an amazing adventure to work on tangling it from the ball of yarn of the countless threads of histories that make the world. So I'm going to stop there and see if there are any questions. I would love to answer some provoking questions. Yeah, great. Well, thank you, Esteban. Absolutely. Thank you for presenting this information and these issues. And it's true. The archaeologists, professional archaeologists have given a lot of the media space over to these popularizers of these misconceptions about the past. And it's really underestimates the creativity and the technical ability of other peoples. I mean, it's given it away, essentially, to the aliens or magical ideas. It seems like a lot of this comes from a time, from before people were able to read the epigraphy, right? So like these interpretations of, for example, the Pakal's lid, those epigraphs weren't readable to the extent they are today. It's pretty recent, yeah. Right. So there's a lot of sort of creative layers read into it that can now be deciphered. Something else that comes to mind is today now, recent studies with LIDAR in the Maya area have demonstrated how big the settlements actually were, right? It's even more impressive in terms of civil engineering and the ability to feed that many people in a forest garden. To manage waterways and legumes and not just hydraulics, many, many stuff and the density of population. There are many things that are going to change thanks to LIDAR archaeology in the near future. Have you noted any, have there been some reinterpretations of the phenomenon of the so-called collapse or the decline with this new information from LIDAR? I mean that basically it means the populations were higher than previously thought. Yes. Well, the first fact that struck everyone was the amount of people we were missing in our food surveys of the land. We were missing a lot, a lot of people. And not about the end of the classic or the so-called collapse, but it has thrown very important information about the beginning of the Maya. A recent investigation in the Usumasinta River, in the middle Usumasinta River by Takeshi Inomata has revealed huge volumes of earthworks that were completely unnoticed before because they are so big that they just look like land if you walk around them. And that pushed a little bit back the beginning of the Maya culture. And again, I want to warn the Maya culture as an archaeological thing is nothing that in antiquity people said, I am a Maya. It's a construction made from today and from outside the Maya. So, but yeah, LIDAR technology is showing amazing new data and stuff. Interesting. Yeah, on the growth of the cities particularly. Yes, yes. Great. Well, we are getting some questions from YouTube. Maybe I can present some of these to you. One question involves your involvement with indigenous communities. How has it been for you to talk to the different groups? As an outsider yourself, what are the challenges you have faced? Well, yes. And it has been a process for me. I have been my whole professional life, what would you call a traditional archaeologist, just more interested in ceramic fragments or shirts than people around me. So, this is kind of a new interest for me and a new realization that I need to do that. And of course, it has its difficult times on which I, I don't know, I have to explain the negligence I have gone through by not involving anyone. And there is people willing to listen and there is people not willing to listen. And it's a process. It's a process. I am hoping to strengthen my dialogues with them and to have a proper feedback that in the future can be used to involve more modern Maya in the investigation of their past. But I cannot say I haven't done anything for them or that I have a meaningful relation. I am building a relation for the future to work with them and to know what would be the subjects they are interested in. Yeah, it's a follow-up question. How do you envision your research having an impact on the social and political context of those groups today? Well, personally, I envision my personal research is going to be, I hope, is going to be directed by each old and other Maya, modern Maya voices. I hope, I really hope to achieve that without reappropriating what they think or and what they say and just and to have a real collaboration. But as I am saying, it's a process and it's going to be a long-term process. And basically, we have to change the law in Mexico for for giving room to that kind of involvement because there is no bureaucratically, there is no possibility of that and we have to change that. And that is going to take some years. To empower local communities. To empower and to make us archaeologists to look for the people and to get interest in not just in the stones and shards but the people surrounding them. It's very important to not detach ourselves from our social realities because we can be used from, you can be used as a legitimizing power for extractive projects and many other things that are in ways harmful for communities. Right, or they can lose access to their traditional lands. Yes, impacts. Here's another question. Is there any evidence or indication in the Maya regions of a notion of separation of church and quote, church and state, the way there was in South Asia or parts of East Asia? So that is religious versus political authorities? Well, yeah, it's it's great here. And actually, Palenque is a very good example because there are a lot of texts, epigraphical texts that show how embedded the religious authority and the political authorities is where entangled together. The legitimacy of the rulers and the dynasties in Palenque and other Ahauleis or kingdoms back then was completely based on assumptions of kinship with the deities, with local deities. And the dynasty of Palenque traced its origins all the way to the beginning of what the ancient Maya think was the beginning of the universe. So it's very clear, it's very clear that power came from religious representations and religious authority and cosmic ability to rule legitimacy. So they were not separated at all. So another question, a contemporary issue I keep hearing about is low literacy rates that today's Chiapas populations have little proficiency in Spanish or English, let alone English, any comments? Well, yeah, Chiapas, sorry, Chiapas, unfortunately, is one of the Mexican states with worse numbers in education and in economic numbers in general. There is a lot of poverty and marginalization. The state has a lot of issues there. And you can see it's for Mexico, it's kind of a remote land, although it's for them, it's the center of the universe, but for Mexico, it's remote and forgotten. And yes, well, I'm not really worried on their efficiency on English. I am more worried about that they are not even be, they are not be even taught to write in their language, in the school language. The Mexican state tends to Spanishized its population, although we don't have an official language and all 68 indigenous languages in here are recognized as native. The state that is in charge of the education tends to Latinize the indigenous populations and that's very dangerous because they are losing an opportunity to write and to communicate in their own language. Although there are many people pushing for the contrary. And now, again with the pandemic, there is a lot of internet efforts to educate on how to write tol and actually that inspired me to make my tol YouTube channel. So when you're working in the field, do you employ a number of local, you know, young, perhaps young archaeologists in training or is there an opportunity, is there a path for people interested in archaeology to pursue this kind of work? Well, yeah, we do in the field where hire some amount of, in this case, in the case of Palenque, they are almost always old people to help us in the excavations. Unfortunately, that kind of model of working for us has prevented them in participating meaningfully in our investigation, in the design of our investigation. And we kind of, as a general rule, because there are exemptions, we kind of see them as just as a workforce. And that is simply wrong. And I am trying to change that. There are, I know of three tol professional archaeologists that have done their bachelor's degree. And unfortunately, there is, it is not easy for a tol. They don't have the same opportunities as a Chilango Mexican like me to get educated and to have access to opportunities to go to universities and not working and instead of studying. So yeah, there's a systemic breach that we need to work with, because it's bad. Yeah, I mean, is it possible to get a Lee Sensei Artura without moving to Mexico City? You can study archaeology in Chiapas, two of the three archaeologists of the Chola archaeologists I know studied there in Chiapas, in the State University in Chiapas. But yes, in general, we are a very centralized country. And yeah, almost all the resources are around here in where I am in Mexico City. Well, it looks like we've run out of time. But I wanted to thank you and conclude by saying that, that, you know, to thank Stevan, Maldavan, Miro Maldavan. And thank you to the listeners and the viewers who sent in questions. And I'd like to invite our viewers to our next talk, which will be on July 14th at noon with Lisa Maher. And she's going to be speaking to us. The second half of the presentation she started to give us, she gave us last visit was on, so she was speaking previously about her work in Jordan. Now she's going to speak about her work in Cyprus because she ran out of time with all the questions we had about Jordan. So she'll be talking about her work in Paleolithic Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. And I wanted to remind people that there's a comment field and so we can follow up on questions and discussion. And Stevan, you've indicated you'll be willing to field some of these questions. Yeah, I'm going to hang up in the comment section for the next while. And if anyone has more questions or if someone wants to ask me anything in my Twitter account, there is the data and I am all for answering whatever questions you have. Great, thank you, Stevan. We'll put a link to his Twitter handle in the description below. Thank you very much, Nico. It was great to see you and it was great to be here. Yeah, thank you for clarifying and eliminating some of these misconceptions about the ancient Maya. Yeah. And oh, one more thing, there's a feedback form on our series, Ask an Archaeologist. So viewers, if you'd like to provide us some feedback, please do fill out the form. The link is below in the description.