Mesoamerica

And, you know, Rome has this hidden empire and it's in Iran, which was once the Persian empire.

And then also their hidden empire is in Mesoamerica and the Italian flag.

That is the cabal, by the way.

Yeah, it is the cabal.

So there's a lot of portrayals of indigenous people as very stoic and humorless, and that image has been applied to the past.

So there are certainly many very serious images that come out of Mesoamerica.

I don't mean to imply that, you know, one of the most famous images of Maya art is the Lentil series that's from Yash Chilan, including Lentil 24, which shows a woman bringing a rope through her tongue to facilitate bloodletting.

So obviously not a cute image, very serious.

There's a story about a rabbit stealing a god's clothes.

That is a very funny story.

Ancient Mesoamericans laughed and they told jokes and they were silly.

And unfortunately, there's been very little attention paid to that side of Mesoamerican culture.

55 Mesoamerican underworld scenes found in Hidalgo, Mexico archaeologist Alfonso Torres Rodríguez has revealed a recurring encounter with the Lord of the Underworld appearing at least 55 times in Hidalgo rock art in the region north of Mexico City.

Spread across 25 sites and mostly dated between 350 to 750 AD, the scenes demonstrate how ancient communities imagined death as a meeting between people, ancestors, and supernatural powers.

The same story might still find resonance during healing rituals around the present-day Otomi shamans.

Their differences suggest complementary forces.

One brother is masculine, martial, solar, and military, while the other is feminine, sacrificial, lunar, and agricultural.

That balance recalls the wider Mesoamerican habit of expressing whole systems through paired opposites, as seen in the hero twins' descent into Shabalba in the Popol Vuh.

The most provocative analogy goes into the present.

There is an otomi body, or healer, found in the mountains of Mexico, whose belief is that in order to connect with the supernatural or other world, one must possess duality of the soul or double heart.

And, you know, Rome has this hidden empire and it's in Iran, which was once the Persian empire.

And then also their hidden empire is in Mesoamerica and the Italian flag.

That is the cabal, by the way.

Yeah, it is the cabal.

with a particular focus on how people in indigenous communities were still using cacao.

And I edited a book called Chocolate in Mesoamerica, which contains some of this research I've done.

Honestly, there's so much more that I need to publish.

And I was for a while working on a documentary.

Oh, how exciting.

Yes, we'll see what we can do to be supportive of making more of that available.

I mean, so many people have learned from Chocolate in Mesoamerica and your other work, and it's very exciting to be in conversation about all of this.

Dr. Sampek, how about you? What drew you into studying this topic?

Here the city is clearer than the rulers, and ordinary life was more international than the old image of an isolated ceremonial city would suggest.

Archaeologists have identified neighborhoods associated with migrants from Oaxaca and other regions of Mesoamerica.

Different ceramic traditions, burial practices, architectural details, and isotope studies all point toward movement into the city.

People came here from elsewhere and in some cases seem to have preserved elements of their regional identity after arriving.

The problem is that Teotihuacan really is skewed away from true north in a repeated and measurable way.

Two closely related orientation groups appear again and again, around 15.5 and 16.5 degrees clockwise, from the cardinal directions.

Ivan Sprich has argued that the Pyramid of the Sun and the Ciudadela were positioned to mark particular sunrise and sunset dates, producing intervals that fit Mesoamerican calendrical counting.

The builders knew where north was.

And, uh, but, you know, he...

Ex- for a guy who's looking for Mesoamerican gold, this is...

And his eyes do go wide from it and his mustache bristles a little bit.

And, and where did you find this? Here, in this nameless temple?

we

don't are ancient We don't we have no idea what was going back on in the Spain ancient world when the Spanish got to Mesoamerica they destroyed the Mayan libraries and Think of the history we lost there.

I know.

That's just disgusting.