Today marks a special moment in the Mayan calendar.
It's the spring equinox when the sunrise ushers in
not just a new day but a new cycle of life.
As the sun clears the tree line,
its rays illuminate one of Palenque's most majestic temples.
This is the Temple of the Sun, a most appropriate name.
Just to be here, bathed in light, is a privilege,
a connection that merges spirituality with science in a way
long forgotten by the modern world.
At certain key moments of the year, and this is one of them,
the rising sun does more than illuminate the steps of the temple.
Maya architecture is a repository for ancient knowledge,
linking sky and ground, heaven and earth.
In the process, it often brought the light of the sun
through certain specific alignments into interior spaces,
purposefully designed to receive it.
At the winter solstice, the sun rises over a mountaintop ruin,
shining into the temple through a doorway,
where we might imagine a priest waiting to be bathed in light.
Six months later, on the summer solstice,
and only on that day, the dawn sunlight grazes another pyramid,
before a needle of light strikes an interior corner,
while at both equinoxes, the sun rises above a man-made depression
in the eastern horizon, again shining rays through a doorway
at such a precise angle, that for around 40 minutes,
it dramatically illuminates another inner alcove.
For the Maya, such dazzling displays must have evoked a sense of awe
in all who observed them.
And it's not just a special moment for the ancient Maya.
Palenque is an extremely symbolic site.
Ancestral worship in Palenque was depicted in its architecture
and in its modified landscape.
It connects with the modern-day population.
Mayan culture in Palenque is very much alive.
Maya priest Nicolás López Vázquez
has been performing ceremonies here for decades.
The ritual going on right now represents the spring equinox.
The equinox was very important.
That's why they made the temples.
It is like a connection with the whole planet.
Indeed, this complex seems to have been designed
as an instrument to detect and manifest the wondrous harmony of the universe.
So what was the motive for their intense focus on the heavens?
And how did they acquire their advanced astronomical know-how?
Could we be witnessing a legacy handed down by a far older civilization,
one that left traces of its advanced knowledge
throughout the Americas?
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Dominating the center of Palenque is its most impressive edifice
known as the palace.
And above it looms this intriguing structure,
unique in the Maya world, a multi-storied tower.
Scholars are divided on the purpose of this tower.
The puzzling thing is the roof.
The roof we see today is an entirely modern
and possibly inaccurate reconstruction.
Earlier excavation photographs show the tower in ruins without a roof.
So was it roofed in antiquity?
Indeed, the original tower may have been topped by an observation platform,
which would explain what was found within.
It's significant that there's a room with glyphs
representing perhaps the most important of all planets to the Maya, Venus.
Scholars have confirmed through Mayan texts
that this symbol does indeed represent the brightest planet in the night sky.
Could it be that this tower was built specifically for use by astronomers?
Intuitively, it feels like it was intended for observations of the heavens.
One would not expect a tower designed to observe the skies
to be roofed.
And those Venus glyphs inside the tower
strongly suggest that that's what it was used for.
But of all the celestial bodies in the sky, why Venus?
It may have something to do with one of the Maya's greatest mythological figures.
The gods and goddesses of Maya cosmology often had eerily human characteristics,
sometimes endearing, sometimes terrifying,
sometimes deeply mysterious.
The deity named Kukulkan, who was at one time a man,
not only combined all of these characteristics,
but was also identified with the brightest planet in the heavens.
The tradition says that Kukulkan arrived after a great cataclysm,
accompanied by attendants.
He was a wise teacher who gave instruction in the rule of law
and how to organize a civilization, to cultivate corn,
and how to build great monuments in stone.
Even after his time with them was over,
Kukulkan continued to be worshiped in the heavens,
where he manifested in the form of the planet that we know today as Venus.
Across the Maya world,
there are other representations of Kukulkan.
And at one iconic site, his memory is also connected
to that highly significant moment of the spring equinox.
At Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán, at the temple of Kukulkan,
if we look at that pyramid, what we see normally
is the northern stairway of the pyramid with the large head of a serpent
at the base of the stairway and a kind of blank balustrade
running up the side of it with nothing on it,
but on the spring equinox, as the sun is beginning to set,
the pyramid is so perfectly positioned that shadows cast by its corner
onto that stairway create the form of the body of the serpent,
so the head of the serpent is suddenly completed with
an undulating, waving shadow body of the serpent,
and this is a manifestation of Kukulkan.
In different parts of Mexico, he was known not only as Kukulkan
but perhaps most famously as Quetzalcoatl.
All of these names mean "plumed or feathered serpent."
One might almost imagine that Kukulkan was a traveler
who used a locally-appropriate name wherever he went.
We've met a similar figure in Peru where he was called Viracocha.
In Mesopotamia, he was known as Oannes,
and in Egypt, he was Osiris.
But the stories remain the same.
Powerful figures who appeared after a global cataclysm
and bestowed upon ancient peoples the gifts of civilization.
The identification of their civilizing hero with the planet Venus
might explain one of the Maya's unique obsessions,
tracking that planet's movements in the night sky.
Their studies of Venus are really, really striking.
It is the case that once every roughly 584 days,
Venus will be seen to rise in the same place.
The Maya had an absolutely precise, spot-on estimate
of the… what's called the synodical return of Venus.
And they were able to make the calculation
thanks to one of the Maya's most extraordinary achievements,
one that, like the incredible stonework of ancient Peru
and the ingenious pharmacology of ancient Amazonia,
might be part of a legacy of knowledge handed down from a remote prehistory
by a mysterious predecessor civilization.
Dr. Edwin Barnhart has been mapping and studying Palenque
for over 25 years,
and he's one of very few people in the world
who can read the script of the ancient Maya.
We read these glyphs from top to bottom in double columns.
You read right left, right left to the bottom of the first two,
and then you go to the third and fourth and read down so that's the reading order.
How does the system of numbers that the Maya use
compare with the system of numbers that we use today?
Our system is quite similar.
We have a base-ten system. We call it decimal.
You and I, we can write any number
- into almost infinity using ten digits. - Mm-hmm.
We've got a zero, and then one through nine.
- Yeah. - And when we get to ten,
we put a zero in the ones place and a one in the tens place.
They use base 20.
It's a Morse code-like system of dashes and dots
including a shell glyph representing zero.
A dot means one.
- A bar means five. - Right.
And so when you get three bars and four dots,
- that's 19. - Mm-hmm.
How they'd write 20 is putting a zero there
- and then putting a dot in the 20 place. - Okay.
So it's a positional system of enumeration that allowed them
to do math on a… on a different level.
You know, our system's great.
We can calculate into infinity, but it takes ten symbols.
The Maya pulled the same thing off with only three symbols.
So in that regard,
their system is way more elegant than ours.
Wow.
The Maya not only used zero,
but were acquainted with place numerations
at a time when the Ancient Greeks and Romans,
despite their many achievements, understood neither.
Their system was great. The Romans, they did great things,
but their number system stunk.
- That's why they had to make the abacus. - Yeah.
The Maya's advanced numbering system
wasn't just an elegant way to count.
For their astronomers,
this was the key to calculating and predicting the movements
of heavenly bodies like Venus, the sun, and the moon,
with astounding accuracy.
And that same knowledge of mathematics was also fundamental
to what was arguably their most impressive invention.
By far the most perplexing achievement of the ancient Maya
was their own amazingly precise system for measuring time,
which they incorporated into one of the most complex calendars
in human history.
The calendar, which of course is incredibly complicated.
Could you help to uncomplicate it for me? What is the Mayan calendar all about?
The calendar, its… You know, its solar year is 365 days.
Right. Okay.
The calendar they really care about is 260 days,
but then they have a long count calendar, which is kind of a linear count of time.
The Maya tracked key dates using a combination of three calendars,
each with its own individual purpose.
Their sacred calendar was a repeating cycle of 20 groups
consisting of 13 days apiece, totaling 260 days.
A second calendar tracked the solar year,
but was composed of 18 groups, each of 20 days,
with another five to complete a 365-day year, just like ours.
When used in tandem,
these two calendars gave a unique name to every single day
across a 52-year period before then starting over.
But what made the Mayan system truly unique was their third calendar,
the so-called long count,
which tracked much greater periods of time.
Tell me more about the long count calendar.
What is it? How does it work?
What's it intended to achieve?
It's certainly the most interesting one because the Maya are very cyclical,
but it's the only calendar they have that's a linear calendar.
It can go backwards and forwards in time in a straight line into, towards infinity.
The symbols of the long count measure the passage
not just of years, decades, or centuries, but entire millennia,
reaching deep into both the past and the future.
Is it the case that most of what we can now read in the… in the Maya script
has to do with the calendar?
Here's a perfect example that when we look at this page,
everything that you see with bars and dots and these,
this is all calendrical information.
On the whole,
two-thirds of the entire Maya corpus of writing are calendar glyphs.
One explanation for this obsession
is that the ancient Maya believed the world went through recurring cycles
of creation and destruction…
…and that they were living in the fourth such cycle,
quite similar to the ancient Hopi
who believed they too were living in the fourth world.
But unlike them,
the Maya were able to put specific dates to their cycles,
all tracked using the long count.
What's this one about here?
That's a beautiful image,
one of the few that very specifically tells us
what the date was at the start of the fourth creation.
- It says 13-0-0-0-0. - Right.
And then the very next day, this resets. And this would be 0-0-0-0-1.
Right. So putting that into our dating system today?
- 3114 B.C., August 13th. - Right.
And that's the beginning of the age of the world in which we now live.
Right. And the idea, like,
- why did it start at 3114 B.C.? - Yeah.
That's one that the best minds, for a century now…
- Yeah. - …have failed to sufficiently answer.
Yeah. I… I have to say, I find that date quite fascinating in itself,
um, since many ancient civilizations, if we follow the archaeological record,
had an extraordinary beginning at around that time.
In Ancient Egypt around 3000 B.C.
- Sumer, similar sort of period. Right. Asia as well.
It's like the world was waking up at that time,
and the Maya picked that date.
It is very interesting.
When do you think the system began?
How far back can we trace the origins of this incredible set of calculations?
You know, it's a difficult question. I've pondered that a lot.
And I… I like to say that by the time somebody carved it in stone,
that wasn't their first attempt.
Right. And what's the oldest date that you… that you've found?
There's a couple of them. There's one that goes back 33,000 years.
Another leads us to a specific date
that has us go back very exactly five million years.
- Five million years into the past. - Yeah. And… and you can do the math.
I think that its intention is to make a statement
about the never-ending nature of time.
Alongside these dates,
one key player in the drama of the night sky
keeps appearing in the texts, Venus,
that same planet associated with the Mayan deity, Kukulkan.
So Venus is integrated into the overall Mayan calendrical system.
They track it again and again.
There's actually 104 different groups
- of five Venus cycles… - Yeah.
…that they put together so that you could actually track Venus
- and it would be right. - Right.
The Maya were obsessed with the cosmos, and the Maya were obsessed with time.
These two issues are fundamental to… to Mayan culture.
These two obsessions reveal that the Maya had and enumerated
a deep understanding of our planet's vast antiquity.
So they were able to do what modern computer software is doing.
- Yes. - How could they do that?
I think that they were among
the ancient world's greatest mathematicians.
- They just kept cranking the numbers. - Yeah.
They're doing calculations of millions of days.
Fascinating.
If they're using dates like that, you have to ask yourself,
"Why would they need to do that?"
- I think-- - It's all speculation.
When we archaeologists take a hard look in the mirror,
- basically it's all speculation. We-- - Yeah.
We are working on theories. Very few facts in my field.
Yeah.
I have a theory, which is also, admittedly, speculative.
The Mayan calendar feels to me like an out-of-place artifact.
It feels to me like a legacy that the Maya have received
from a culture that really did need these enormous numbers…
A lost civilization that passed on its knowledge
of the cyclical nature of time,
encoding it in myths and spiritual traditions
that would, many thousands of years later,
manifest spectacularly in the enigmatic machinery
of the Mayan calendar.
But to what end?
I suggest the answer has everything to do
with the Mayan concept of the impermanence of world ages.
I sometimes think of the Mayan calendar as a computer for calculating
not the end of the world, but the end of an age.
The Mayan calendar envisages repeated destructions
and re-makings of the world.
Repeated world ages come and go.
It was never correct that the Maya imagined
the world would end on December 21st, A.D. 2012.
But they do see an episode of great turbulence and change,
uh, taking place at around our time.
Certainly, the end of an age is predicted for roughly the 80-year period
from about 2000 to 2080, somewhere in that period.
And it's curious that actually that is our experience of the world today.
We're living in a time of chaos, of unpredictability, of change.
Could the Mayan calendar's timing for the end of our current age be accurate?
Perhaps we should be gazing up at the heavens,
tracking the stars and planets as they did…
…in case another world-changing apocalypse is imminent.
But there was more to the Maya's interest in the heavens than predicting the future.
There's evidence right here at Palenque that Dr. Barnhart wants to show me.
This view out here, there's a perfect place
where you can see the horizon.
On the southwestern edge of a plaza across from the Temple of the Sun,
Dr. Barnhart is taking me to another powerful edifice
known as the Temple of the Foliated Cross.
It dates from around A.D. 692.
Inside on the back wall, a curious carved mural awaits us.
Scholars now believe it addresses
the great central mystery of Maya religion,
the mystery of what happens to us after death.
We are standing in front of an extraordinary mural,
which is quite difficult for me to interpret.
Tell me what you make of it. What's it all about?
Well, it's obviously so complex.
The iconography is everywhere on this.
Mm-hmm.
There's the foliated cross because of this foliation coming out.
Mm-hmm.
We also have our two figures on either side.
The mural shows the deceased Lord Pakal on the right,
the original founder and ruler of Palenque,
his eyes closed and dressed in burial clothes,
and what's assumed to be his son and successor, Kan Bahlam, on the left.
Here's Kan Bahlam's face.
His portrait is everywhere in the city. We know exactly that is him.
- Yeah. - We recognize him.
But he's big and tall.
- Kan Bahlam. - Yeah.
I always… I think about him.
We have such a wonderful, rich history of his life.
Yeah.
We know that his dad was the most famous king of this city.
And he was named heir-designate at age six.
But his dad didn't die until 80.
So he spent his entire life, until 48, to be the king.
- Right. - And I think he was incredibly trained
in mathematics, architecture, astronomy,
- but also religion, mythology. - Mm-hmm.
This group, the three magnificent temples, is his showcase.
This guy probably planned this for 30 years of his life.
- Mm-hmm. - Finally, he got to build it.
And it's the height of Maya scientific achievement.
- Yeah. - There's numerology.
There's mathematics. There's astronomy.
The message of the mural is that the deeds and rituals performed by the son
are essential if the father is to triumph
in the afterlife journey that now confronts him.
Separating them is an icon of the greatest significance.
Here's our world tree.
That's the sun god's face in the middle of it.
But the tree is also the path between this world and the other world.
In some contexts, it's the Milky Way.
Is the role that the Milky Way plays a… a kind of path of souls?
It's an afterlife journey in some sense?
Yes. The things that these two individuals are interacting with
is the conduit between this world and the other.
Right.
The notion of a leap to the heavens to the Milky Way
and… and a journey that is made after death
is very strong amongst the Maya.
What's remarkable is how widespread this notion is.
This Milky Way symbolism as a… as a path of souls is found
not just amongst the Maya,
but… but amongst many other cultures in North America.
Absolutely. It's one of those Pan-American ideas.
It really is.
From the tip of Chile up to Alaska,
native thought is that the Milky Way is the path of souls
from this world to the other one.
The dead follow it, and the power that shamans have,
- they can walk it. - Right.
But it's… it's fascinating that it's in every single culture
that we can get information about about the Milky Way.
It reminds me of how the Apurinã of Brazil view the Amazonian geoglyphs
as if they were sacred portals to the afterlife.
- In the Amazon, it's still very alive. - Yeah.
Here in the Maya world, it's still very much alive.
Yeah. So it's like there's a remote common ancestor to this idea.
I believe so.
I think that these core identity ideas came over with the first people.
And that's why we find them amongst so many cultures,
even though those cultures, for example, in southern Chile
and the far north of North America, are not in contact with one another.
They're still expressing the same ideas because it's the same inheritance.
Absolutely. And I think there's more than just the Milky Way.
There's a couple of different things that are those core principles.
One of them is that the Maya have a great love
of the concepts of shamanism, transformation.
Yeah.
There's no doubt that Mayan culture was a shamanistic culture.
I think that the idea of the journey of the soul after death
results ultimately from shamanistic experiences.
Is it a coincidence that many of the other Indigenous cultures
of the Americas,
and indeed many ancient cultures all around the world,
preserved an almost identical vision of the afterlife journey of the soul?
Or are we confronted here by some underlying connection,
a powerful, all-pervading belief system
that was inherited by many later civilizations
from a lost civilization of prehistory?
The work that you've shared has been very exciting.
And when we see archaeological examples of…
of the knowledge of the sky and the stars,
as we look back on it, I feel like it is older than we think.
Yeah.
And you connect this idea to a shamanistic point of view.
Yes, absolutely.
All shamanistic cultures are very interested in the stars.
But at a certain point, that interest in the stars can become a religion.
Can you dig a little bit into that for me?
Shamanism is a system to investigate the mystery of death.
What happens to us when we die?
This notion that the soul leaves the body, leaps up to the heavens.
It was about the journey of the soul after death.
It seems like in our stories and our own journey,
as we grow up, there's this fact of death.
There's the end.
Yeah. It's the essence of everything.
It's a kind of morbid subject to discuss,
but it's fundamental for all human beings.
We're all… we're all facing that moment.
Classically, it's described as a driving force for our actions.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm going to die, so I will do something.
Yeah. And that's… that's exactly what the shamanistic teachings are saying,
uh, is that we had better use this opportunity of life well.
Yeah. I think that is the challenge that's before us.
Because that idea is found all around the world,
very… very specifically the leap to the Milky Way.
I don't think that could have happened by accident.
I think it's… I think it's something that's been passed on
from an ancestor culture.
Yeah.
But when was it passed on?
Just how far back can we trace this shamanistic tradition
of measuring and tracking objects in the heavens?
The answers just might lie at one of the first places I visited
on my journey through the Americas,
deep in the Amazon rainforest at the ancient site of Serra Do Paituna.
The stone was used as a canvas, uh, for extraordinary art,
and that art itself needs to be deciphered.
It needs to be better understood.
In an attempt to do just that,
archaeologist Dr. Christopher Davis became intrigued by
this prominent grid image full of symbols.
Now, talk to me about what we're looking at here
and what you make of it. What's your analysis of this?
It's the largest single painted image at this site.
- There's 49 total boxes. - Yeah.
One of the first difficulties was trying to figure out
should we, you know, look at this
from the left to the right or right to the left.
It seems the ancient painters left a clue.
Here you can see this snake image here.
That's fascinating. So there is an image of a snake there.
Right here in yellow.
Mmm. So almost having the snake there is telling us how to read it.
Exactly. The pattern that pops out to me
is when this grid is read
in a sinusoidal pattern starting at the bottom.
In a sinusoidal pattern,
the boxes read up one column, then down the next,
then up again, like that snake.
But to what end?
When he looked to the west,
Dr. Davis noticed a natural notch in this rocky pillar nearby.
If you're standing right in front, in the background to your right
there's a rock window that the sun, as it passes over here and sets,
eventually it intersects that rock window.
So I believe that they were possibly taking a tally of the sun.
Dr. Davis calls this tally a sunset capture tracker,
an ingenious way to record the sun's movements over time,
one created more than 13,000 years ago during the last Ice Age.
But how does it work?
I see X marks, and I see single lines as well.
- These Xs, these are all together. - Yeah.
And if you read up and down this way,
eventually you get all of these single lines together.
These single vertical lines go together, and then you go back to the Xs.
These single vertical lines are the boxes
that I think coincide with the sun capturing.
And that time is sometime around what would've been the winter solstice.
How clever can you get? That's amazing.
It's not just the grid.
Dr. Davis believes that nearly all of the prehistoric art here tracks the sun.
There's a lot of concentric circles and other images
that appear to be the sun.
And they specifically are pointed to the winter solstice,
and they wrap all the way around to the summer solstice.
More art, facing due west, marks the equinoxes.
So again, it shows this almost obsessive focus
with the key moments of the solar year.
Yes, absolutely.
What we have here may well be the earliest evidence yet found
anywhere in the Americas
of humans keeping tallies of celestial events.
So in a way, this whole thing is kind of a huge machine
for tracking the passage of time?
I believe so. I believe it's like an almanac
that's written in pictures.
This speaks to a scientific mindset amongst the artists themselves,
as though they're observing particular incidents
and moments in the sky…
and getting to grips with the science of time
and thus the ability to predict what would happen
at particular dates in the future.
So it was a kind of scientific project for them?
Absolutely, yeah.
The art itself looks very shamanistic to me.
That's just my personal impression.
Do you think shamans were at work here?
It's possible.
They carried several occupations, scientists, doctors, all sorts of things.
Yeah.
They usually do carry sacred knowledge,
things like the movement of the stars.
Do you see that spread widely across the Americas?
Yeah.
The knowledge of using astronomy in this way is found throughout here.
So the Maya…
and other cultures seem to be using this.
In the American Southwest, we had chiefs who were sun watchers.
So all of this lore does seem to go back far in time…
- Yeah. - …uh, to some deep understanding
that had spread throughout much of the Americas.
This obsession with the heavens is just one of many recurring themes
I've encountered again and again all across the Americas…
…ideas that play a central role in my 30-year quest
for a forgotten episode in human history.
The question is, where did these ideas come from?
For me, these are indications of a remote common source,
that these ideas have filtered down through many different human cultures,
but the ideas themselves have remained relatively intact.
Unless it's some just extraordinary, unbelievable coincidence,
we are looking at a legacy which has been handed down
from the remotest antiquity and has been preserved
and passed on and developed
by multiple different cultures all around the Americas.
A legacy perhaps left by a seafaring people
capable of crossing oceans as wide as the Pacific
thousands of years before scholars accept such voyages were possible.
A culture that understood how to harness the power of plants
to create mind-enhancing visions
of geometric patterns and encounters with fantastical beings,
visions of such great importance they would become the basis of their art.
And a culture that shared its knowledge
of how to create technologically-advanced structures,
whether built in stone
or made from the body of the earth herself,
structures with great spiritual meaning,
designed to bind ground to sky,
celebrating the soul's journey into the afterlife.
In fact, I would suggest these common religious
and spiritual motifs that are found all around the world
are amongst the best evidence for a lost civilization of prehistory…
…that we're ever going to find.
Oh my God. We're taking on every childhood misconception
of the story of… of the world.
The story of the peopling of the Americas is changing,
and I'll give credit to science for that.
It's scientific archaeology that is… that is unveiling this new information.
What I'm saying is that old ideas are being pushed aside.
It's very clear that stuff just keeps on getting older.
What new evidence will come to light next?