Pod notes: Steven & Evan Strong: Forgotten Origins, Out-of-Place-Artifacts, Australia

In May 2022, a copper-alloy seal bearing early Chinese inscriptions was discovered near Tortilla Flats, Northern Territory, Australia. Preliminary metallurgical and epigraphic analyses suggest the object predates any known modern or colonial Chinese presence in the region. The artefact, associated with Daoist deity worship, may indicate ancient maritime connections between Asia and northern Australia. Dated to 2000 years ago.

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/steven-evan-strong-forgotten-origins-out-of-place-artifacts-australia--69855540

Piedras Negras is one of the most extraordinary—and inaccessible—Maya sites along the course of the Usumacinta River. Reaching it requires a 4–5 hour boat journey from the small village of Frontera Corozal, navigating treacherous rapids and dozens of miles of pristine rainforest.

The art and architecture of Piedras Negras rank among the finest in the entire Maya world. And yet, the site lies almost completely forgotten and abandoned, a casualty of the long Guatemalan civil war and of the dangers posed for decades by drug and migrant traffickers along the fragile Mexico–Guatemala border. Most of its grand structures have been swallowed by the jungle, choked by massive trees, after only a handful of brief excavation campaigns—first by the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s, and later by Brigham Young University in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Today, only the exceptional reconstruction drawings made in the 1930s by Russian-American archaeologist Tatiana Proskouriakoff help us imagine what this sprawling Maya metropolis once looked like: towering temples and pyramids, all painted red, rising above a bend of the Usumacinta River through the dense forest canopy.
Dozens of altars, stelae, and carved stone monuments were recovered from Piedras Negras and now grace some of the world’s most important museums and private collections. Only the largest or most damaged monuments were left behind to decay in the jungle. Among them is the remarkable Altar 1—a massive circular altar bearing some of the earliest recorded dates in the Maya calendar, and one of the very few surviving monuments to record August 13, 3114 BCE as the beginning of Maya time.

Piedras Negras gained international notoriety in the 1930s when American psychic Edgar Cayce identified it as the location of one of the legendary Atlantean Halls of Records—vast repositories of knowledge supposedly sealed before the cataclysm of 11,600 years ago.

Intriguingly, evidence uncovered during multiple exploration campaigns strongly points to the existence of a vast natural cave system beneath the site, which may explain its ancient name, Yo’k’ib — “The Great Entrance.” Three pyramids in particular—O-13, K-5, and J-29—appear to be connected by underground tunnels. In addition, in 2004 a gigantic dry cenote—the largest in all of Guatemala—was discovered just one mile south of the site’s core. Measuring over 120 meters wide and more than 200 meters deep, this immense abyss may correspond to the “Well of Heaven” mentioned in several Piedras Negras inscriptions, a sacred place associated with Maya creation myths and the beginning of the calendar. It may also connect to a still-unexplored cave system beneath the site—perhaps even linked to the legendary Hall of Records itself.

I am currently working on a full documentary of our expedition to this extraordinary place.
Stay tuned.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/373226076066741/permalink/25648346244794709/

Pod notes: The Lost Science of Acoustic Medicine with John Stuart Reid. These are the hieroglyphs that appear over the sarcophagus as the sound frequency was modulated.

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/special-edition-john-stuart-reid-the-lost-science-of-acoustic-medicine--69700623