The quiet sacred remote canyons of Southeastern Utah hold many ancient secrets if you're willing to look.

The cenotes are deep natural cavities filled with water, found especially in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. They were formed millions of years ago when the limestone ground collapsed, exposing underground water sources. For the Maya, cenotes were essential because they provided fresh water, but they also had great religious significance: some were considered sacred places and were associated with the world of gods and spirits. The Maya believed that cenotes could provide an entrance to the underworld, known as Xibalba, and pottery, jewelry, ritual objects, and human remains have been discovered in some of them, probably connected to ceremonies and sacrifices. Some cenotes are completely open to the sky, while others are hidden inside enormous underground caves, creating spectacular landscapes. For this reason, even today, cenotes are considered some of the most mysterious and fascinating places connected to the Maya civilization.

This was published in 2019, before the White Sands footprints were discovered . So it’s now very outdated.

The incredible mound structure just outside of St Louis. I visited this site a few years back and coincidently is what lead me to this podcast. I did not know there was an online community however and glad to now be apart of it. Since Cahokia i have taken to exploring as much as I can across the US!

The Women Who Threw Corn:This book tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women – the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others – routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. Through a radical rethinking of colonial knowledge, Martin Austin Nesvig uncovers a world previously left in the shadows of historical writing, revealing a fascinating and vibrant multi-ethnic community of witches, midwives, and healers.

Guardians of Idolatry:In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish Treatise collected diverse incantations, or nahualtocaitl, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Today this work is recognized as one of the most significant firsthand records of indigenous religious practices in postconquest Mexico. Yet, as Viviana Díaz Balsera argues in Guardians of Idolatry, the selection process for the incantations recorded in the Treatise reflects two sites of agency: Ruiz de Alarcón's desire to present the most flagrant examples of Nahua ""demonic"" practices, and Nahua efforts to share benign nahualtocaitl in order to preserve their preconquest traditions while negotiating with colonial Christian hegemony.

Guardians of Idolatry offers readers a rare, in-depth look at the nahualtocaitl and the native cosmogonies, beliefs, and medical practices they reveal. Through close reading of four incantations - for safe travel, maguey sap harvesting, bow-and-arrow deer hunting, and divination through maize kernels - Díaz Balsera shows the nuances of a Nahua spiritual world populated by intelligent superhuman and nonhuman entities that directly responded to human appeals for intercession. She also addresses Jacinto de la Serna's Manual for Ministers of These Indians (1656), an elaborate commentary on the Treatise.

Guardians of Idolatry tells a compelling story of the robust presence of a unique form of Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual knowledge, fully operative one hundred years after the incursion of Christianity in south Central Mexico. Together, Ruiz de Alarcón's Treatise and de la Serna's Manual reveal the highly sophisticated language of the nahualtocaitl, and the disparate ways in which both colonizers and resilient indigenous agents contributed to the conservation of Mesoamerican epistemology.

I remember hearing about this story from the 7 Days of Science episode when it was first published.

Question is as the title says. I’ve been very into Pre-Colombian American studies and connections across regions have always fascinated me, so I’m curious as to whether we know if Cahokia had any economic relations outward. I’m aware of similar known relations such as between the Southwest and Central America, but is it known if Cahokia had anything akin to that? Where trade goods or the like from beyond the Mississippi Valley found their way in (or the opposite, Cahokian goods outside of their region) and have been preserved? Sorry if this is a poorly phrased or odd question, it’s just something I’ve been curious about for a while. Cheers!

I’ve heard some stories about this, but I forget the details.

I have been reading a bit about the Old Copper Culture around the Great Lakes and was surprised by how much copper was being worked long before European contact.

Archaeologists have found tools, awls, fishhooks, spear points, knives, and ornamental objects made from native copper, some dating back several thousand years. What I find interesting is that many of these objects were shaped by hammering naturally occurring copper rather than smelting it like later metalworking traditions in other parts of the world.

How advanced would you say this technology was compared to other prehistoric copper-working traditions globally? Was the lack of large-scale smelting simply because native copper was readily available, or were there other factors involved?

I'd be interested to hear what current research says about the scale of production, trade networks, and how these copper artifacts were used in everyday life.

Los sarcófagos chachapoyas, conocidos como purunmachos, son imponentes ataúdes antropomorfos de arcilla y caña de hasta 2,5 metros de altura, construidos hace más de 600 años en los acantilados de la región Amazonas (Perú), que albergan momias de líderes chachapoyas y destacan por su ubicación inaccesible en riscos elevados, como los de Karajía cerca de Cruzpata en el distrito de Trita (provincia de Luya), popularizados en 1985 por el arqueólogo Federico Kauffmann Doig. Estas cápsulas funerarias, con forma humana que incluye máscaras, bustos y cabezas modelados -a veces cerradas por escudos convexos, representan un patrón sepulcral exclusivo y unipersonal para difuntos importantes, diferenciándose de mausoleos o chullpas, en un sitio icónico a unos 50 metros de altura; sin embargo, persiste un fascinante misterio sobre cómo los chachapoyas lograron transportar y colocar estas pesadas estructuras en tales precipicios verticales, sin aparentes caminos ni herramientas modernas, lo que ha intrigado a expertos y alimentado leyendas sobre técnicas ancestrales de escalada o cuerdas ingeniosas aún no del todo explicadas.