[insects chirping]
[suspenseful music playing]
Ayahuasca is one of the scientific inventions of the Amazon.
It's a powerful visionary brew,
one that's central to Indigenous spirituality and legal here in Peru.
I myself have had many experiences with ayahuasca guided by a shaman.
And I believe its use dates back further than anyone thinks,
especially in the light of the artwork it inspires.
There are incredible visions.
Nine times out of ten,
those are introduced with geometric patterns.
And after these first visions,
many people report encounters with fantastical beings.
Sometimes those entities may be a mixture of an animal and a human being,
so-called therianthrope from the Greek
therion meaning "wild beast" and anthropos meaning "man."
These are very common entities that are encountered.
What intrigues me is that evidence of the use of ayahuasca
and the visions it inspires
can be found not just in the Amazon,
but at many other ancient sites I've explored in South America.
In Cusco, the Inca used the brew during human sacrifices
to aid the victim's passage to the afterlife.
And their patterned, figure-filled artwork
greatly resembles contemporary ayahuasca-inspired art.
[intriguing music playing]
At the pre-Inca site of Tiwanaku in Bolivia,
researchers have identified the objects held by this 1,500-year-old statue
as snuff trays for hallucinogenic powders,
while much Tiwanaku pottery features geometric designs
and fantastical entities, likely inspired by psychedelic visions.
You can see those same visions reflected in traditional Amazonian art too.
What comes to mind is the case of the Tucano,
who, by and large, paint on non-permanent media.
[Dr. Luna] The painting, the malocas, you know, the communal houses.
You see that there is a continuity here.
[intriguing music subsides]
Remember the origin myth of the Tucano that speaks of their great teachers,
the daughter of the sun and her companions?
Interestingly, the story doesn't end
with the departure of those mystical, civilizing heroes.
[intriguing music continues]
According to lore,
after ensuring the land could support the newcomers,
the divine beings left open a channel of communication
for humans to use whenever there was need.
That channel is the brew we know today as ayahuasca.
[birds chirping]
The word ayahuasca means "vine of souls" in Quechua, the Inca language.
But I believe its use vastly predates the Inca.
This is where the issue
of this very ancient rock art becomes interesting.
[Graham] These rock paintings
from the part of the Amazon where the Tucano live today
explore the same themes we see in all ayahuasca-inspired art.
I can't help observing that there are similar and connected patterns.
We see therianthropic beings,
beings that are part animal, part human in form.
[Dr. Luna] Like here?
[Graham] We see geometric patterns.
We see serpents.
To me this is an extraordinary mystery
that… that the same themes keep coming up again and again and again.
And yet these images, indisputably, were created during the last Ice Age.
[intriguing music fades]
It suggests that ayahuasca was being used almost 13,000 years ago.
It's a logical deduction from looking at the art.
Exactly.
[dramatic music playing]
If true, the implications are staggering.
It means those ancient Amazonians may have already mastered
the complex chemistry of ayahuasca
as far back as the Ice Age.
[tense music builds, fades]
[theme song playing]
[theme song ends]
-[thunder rumbling] -[electronic warble]
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] The geometry, the spiraling patterns,
this is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the psychedelic experience.
Those geometric visions may explain another mystery that we encountered
at the very start of our exploration of the Americas.
[intriguing music intensifies]
The immense geoglyphs emerging from the jungle
along the southwestern rim of the Amazon.
I'm struck by the repetition of the geometrical idea,
that we find this again and again, whether the art is modern,
whether it's 13,000 years old, we find it here.
And I can't help wondering whether these geometric earthworks
may also have been influenced by ayahuasca.
[Dr. Luna] Can be. By ayahuasca or other visionary plants.
-[Graham] Other plants. -Because there are many plants.
Behind every, uh, culture you find some visionary plant of some sort.
[intriguing music continues]
[Graham] Those geoglyphs seem to be a manifestation
in three-dimensional form, on an enormous scale,
of precisely the kind of visions that are induced by the consumption
of a substance like ayahuasca,
where the very first things that are seen are geometrical patterns.
[tense music playing]
I think we are seeing a manifestation of the same impulse in different media.
And if the Amazonian geoglyphs were inspired by visionary experiences,
then we have to ask where else that inspiration might have been felt
for one compelling reason.
How similar these earthworks are to geometrical earthworks
in North America, in the state of Ohio.
[dramatic music playing]
They're called the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks,
attributed to a civilization known today as the Hopewell culture
that thrived in the Great Lakes region around 2,000 years ago.
Massive ditches and embankments in precise geometrical array.
You could really transpose the earthworks of the Amazon
to the earthworks of Ohio or vice versa.
And yet they appear to have been created by completely unconnected cultures.
This is where I simply cannot accept coincidence as an explanation.
I think that when we see an idea cropping up again and again
in widely-separated geographical locations,
what we're looking at is an inheritance of ideas
that was passed down and that manifests in different periods of time.
But the idea is what is truly ancient,
not necessarily the structure that we're looking at.
[dramatic music subsides]
Unlike their Amazonian counterparts, where research is only just beginning…
[dramatic music intensifies]
…the earthworks in Ohio have been studied for more than a century.
And we know they're more than just intriguing geometrical shapes.
Many of Ohio's earthworks, including the effigy of Serpent Mound,
feature precise alignments to specific solstices and equinoxes.
[birds chirping]
But remarkably, in some cases,
they were built to align directly
with even more complex lunar cycles as well.
[intriguing music playing]
It's one of the curiosities of the ancient world
that there was a very intense interest in what was going on in the heavens.
[intriguing music intensifies]
These astounding feats of astronomical observation
were made by ancient Americans some 2,000 years ago,
perhaps far earlier,
and can also be found in other North American mound structures.
At sites like the 1,000-year-old Cahokia
and 3,000-year-old Poverty Point,
itself purposefully positioned due north of another site,
Lower Jackson Mound, which dates back 5,000 years.
Who knows what astronomy might lie encoded
waiting to be discovered
in those recently-revealed Amazonian geoglyphs?
We know that human beings were in America for tens of thousands of years.
Surely there should be openness to the possibility that there was time
to develop a culture, to develop sophisticated knowledge of the heavens,
and to express that in monuments.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] Could this detailed astronomical knowledge
be evidence that the lost civilization of the Ice Age I'm seeking
left a legacy of ideas in other parts of North America as well?
[suspenseful music builds]
[suspenseful music intensifies]
1,300 miles from Ohio…
[suspenseful music continues]
…in the northwest corner of New Mexico,
I've arrived at a high-altitude cold desert
carved up by towering mesas and buttes.
[suspenseful music subsides]
The Badlands of the southwestern United States
are a realm of harsh extremes and breathtaking vistas,
intersected by ancient canyons
with near-vertical sandstone cliffs on both sides.
[intriguing music playing]
You might think that the desolate setting of these Badlands
would be ill-suited to any large-scale construction project,
either now or in ancient times.
But you'd be wrong.
This canyon is home to some of the most important archaeological sites
in North America.
[intriguing music intensifies]
Dozens of ancient man-made structures
are scattered for miles across the valley floor,
from small freestanding chambers
to massive so-called great houses.
This is Chaco Canyon.
[intriguing music builds, fades]
[Graham] Despite more than a century of research,
the ancient structures that we see here in Chaco Canyon remain enigmatic.
Their origins and even their function are still hotly debated.
[tense music playing]
At the heart of the mystery in the center of the canyon…
is the most imposing great house of them all.
[tense music intensifies]
The name of this place is Pueblo Bonito, meaning "beautiful town."
Rising to a height of several stories,
it's a labyrinth of rooms, corridors,
and vast, circular, semi-subterranean enclosures.
Even today, centuries after all work here ceased,
it strikes the eye forcefully.
[tense music continues]
Pueblo Bonito is a huge construction project.
Hundreds of rooms have been mapped,
many mysteriously built with no obvious way in or out.
Archaeologists have worked here for decades
and made many significant discoveries.
Yet it still confounds interpretation.
[tense music fades]
But one thing we can be fairly certain of
is how Pueblo Bonito would have looked in its prime.
[intriguing music playing]
The compound was a huge semicircle
with straight walls facing the canyon floor.
Rectangular buildings were stacked around the curve, four stories tall,
creating as many as 800 rooms,
all surrounding a plaza divided by a central wall
with multiple circular, semi-subterranean structures on each side.
[music fades]
So who were its builders?
And why did they go to such immense lengths
to create this extraordinary edifice?
-[suspenseful music playing] -[eagle screeching]
[Graham] Nathan Hatfield,
officially designated as Chaco Canyon's Chief of Interpretation,
has spent nearly a decade studying the structures here.
Tell us about the place that we're standing in.
This structure was the largest building in North America
up until the mid-19th century.
[Graham] Archaeologists couldn't carbon date the stone itself.
But using the highly accurate tree-ring method of dating
on its wooden beams,
they were able to determine various phases of construction.
[suspenseful music continues]
This was not built in a single moment.
This was built over a period of a couple of centuries.
So if we look at that oldest part of Pueblo Bonito,
what sort of numbers are we talking about?
It was built starting around 850.
-That's 850 AD? -[Nathan] 850 AD.
[Graham] Yeah.
[Nathan] And construction was ongoing for
at least 200 years, maybe a little bit longer.
[Graham] This was before the area was settled
by the modern-day Pueblo peoples…
like the Hopi, the Zuni, and the Acoma.
[intriguing music playing]
[Nathan] Pueblo Bonito was built by
what we call the ancestral Pueblo people.
-For reasons unknown to us… -[Graham] Yeah.
[Nathan] …they selected Chaco Canyon to be the center of their culture.
And Pueblo Bonito would become the largest building
in this cultural center.
[dramatic music plays]
[Graham] A cultural center that, as well as Pueblo Bonito,
featured more than a dozen other great houses.
Why did they build all these structures here in Chaco Canyon?
[Graham] Was there a permanent established residential population here?
[Nathan] No. Archaeologists did not see
the evidence to support a huge population.
[intriguing music continues]
[Graham] So if these great houses weren't actually built to house people,
what was their purpose?
[intriguing music builds]
Within the ruins, archaeologists found more than a hundred ritual burials…
along with pottery featuring spectacular geometric patterns
and artifacts known to come from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.
We find that enormous efforts were gone to…
to create it as a kind of center of the world.
[intriguing music continues]
As the evidence has come in, it's become clear that
it seems to have been a center of pilgrimage,
where people would come from all directions,
drawn to the magic of the place.
It clearly is a sacred place of some sort.
[somber music playing]
In that light, the circular structures we find
within nearly all of Chaco's buildings make more sense.
The Hopi, descendants of the ancestral Puebloans,
call such structures kivas.
[Graham] Tell me about the kivas.
What is your understanding of what they were and are?
It's generally agreed upon that a kiva was a ceremonial space.
There are features that are pretty common.
There's the bench.
Within the larger great kivas, you see floor vaults.
Most of them have some kind of wood-burning fireplace.
[Graham] For the Hopi and Pueblo peoples today,
the kiva is a spiritual and political space
in which they gather to perform sacred rituals.
[Graham] So it's an ongoing cultural tradition?
-And they're used for ceremony? -Yes. Yes.
[Graham] Ceremonies that, then and now,
feature the consumption of a special form of tobacco.
North of Chaco in Utah,
archaeologists studying an ancient man-made hearth
found seeds from the hallucinogenic species
coyote tobacco.
The seeds were carbon-dated to 12,300 years ago,
suggesting humans were using tobacco here
as far back as the Ice Age.
It's likely that such hallucinogenic plants
were still in use thousands of years later in ceremonies here at Chaco…
just as shamans of the Amazon use ayahuasca.
[fire crackling]
[tense music playing]
Is it possible that these shamanistic traditions,
thousands of miles apart,
are the legacy of a single, more ancient belief system
that left traces of itself across the Americas?
To explore the mysteries of these kivas further,
I'm headed to the canyon rim, about half a mile south of Pueblo Bonito,
to the grandest kiva of them all…
[tense music builds]
…Casa Rinconada.
[uptempo tense music playing]
Unlike the vast majority of Chaco's kivas,
Casa Rinconada stands apart from any other extensive building.
Inside the sunken enclosure,
T-shaped doorways are positioned in the walls,
openings that face almost perfectly north and south.
As time-lapse photos show, directly above the doorway,
the night sky revolves around the north star Polaris.
[uptempo tense music builds]
There's something strangely familiar about Casa Rinconada.
It reminds me of the Ice Age megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe
in far-off Turkey.
There, similarly sunken, circular, kiva-like chambers
feature T-shaped pillars,
which too are aligned to specific points in the heavens.
But how could these ancient structures,
so widely separated by geography and time,
have any connection?
It's tempting to speculate.
And the origin myth of the Hopi offers a possible clue.
The Hopi believe that we're living in the fourth world,
that there have been three previous emergences
from some sort of underground realm.
[suspenseful music playing]
According to Hopi legend, after creating the first living creatures,
the sun spirit ordered his messenger, Spider Grandmother,
to guide these ever-evolving life forms through the first two worlds.
[creatures howling]
In the third world,
she showed early humans how to weave and make pottery
and taught them good from evil.
[indistinct chatter]
[Graham] Still, some turned to wicked ways.
[arguing indistinctly]
[Graham] Displeased, the sun spirit ordered
those of good heart to move on.
They ascended a great reed to an opening in the sky.
There, Spider Grandmother helped them emerge into their new home,
the fourth world, where their descendants still live today.
The Hopi hold sacred an unusual geological feature
in the Grand Canyon,
believing it to be the literal emergence point of myth.
They call it Sipapu.
No one is allowed near it,
but symbolically, it's replicated throughout the Hopi world.
[suspenseful music fades]
In Puebloan culture, a hole in the floor of the kiva is also known as a sipapu,
and this is seen as the place from which the ancients emerged from a previous world
that had been destroyed into the world that we live in today.
And this is where I want to make a comparison
that might seem very extreme.
I'm just wondering whether it all goes back to a time
when it was necessary for people to take shelter underground.
And we know that there was such a time around 12,800 years ago
at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
Although still debated,
many scientists believe that the Earth-shaking cataclysms
and floods of that time were caused by cosmic impacts and airbursts
as the Earth passed through the debris trail
of a disintegrating comet.
[intriguing music playing]
If the enemy was danger from the sky,
if we're looking at impacts from a fragmenting giant comet,
uh, then underground structures make a great deal of sense.
That deep ancient connection is not a direct connection.
It's a stored memory in oral tradition
that there was a time when our ancestors had to emerge
from beneath the ground to come out into a new world
that had been swept clean in a cataclysm and to repopulate that new world.
[intriguing music fades]
Let me be clear.
I don't doubt that this spectacular kiva dates from around 1,000 years ago,
but I suspect that its builders incorporated within it
a legacy of knowledge and ideas that are far, far older.
Much like another idea we see demonstrated again and again
at all these ancient American sites,
the importance of astronomical and geometrical knowledge.
[suspenseful music playing]
At Pueblo Bonito, the whole structure is perfectly aligned
to the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west,
showing its builders understood their place on the planet.
What's more, on the equinox, something magical happens.
The sun rises and sets perfectly in line with the west side of the southern wall.
[Nathan] It wasn't just some random accident.
It was so well-thought-out.
And what's, I think, appealing to people about that
is that it's the same sky that we can see today.
-Yes. -We can still see the alignments.
[suspenseful music continues]
I've heard that there were functionaries called sun priests here in the past.
Is that right?
They were the sun watchers, the sun priests.
They were people dedicated to the architecture.
There were people dedicated to watching the sky.
Yeah.
What were the main celestial events that they were tracking?
Summer solstice, winter solstice, equinoxes, when the sun rises due east?
That ties back to the agriculture.
[Graham] Right.
Having that calendar on the landscape is critical for survival.
And the fact that they were able to do that
with these monumental structures,
I think it all goes back to their ability to find success with farming.
[Graham] It's an argument I've heard before,
but there's a problem with assuming
all this effort had to do only with farming.
[suspenseful music continues]
Around 90 miles north of Chaco Canyon stands a distinctive sandstone ridge
topped by two pinnacles known as Chimney Rock and Companion Rock.
Near them, we find a Chacoan great house complete with two kivas.
It turns out that that whole structure was placed there
in a very precise alignment
to allow observation of a lunar event that only occurs once every 18.6 years,
and that is the extreme northern standstill of the moon.
It's when the rising and setting moon
reaches its most northerly point in the night sky
before appearing to rise and set further south
as part of a recurring cycle.
The moon rises between Chimney Rock and Companion Rock
only at that time and at no other time.
This is the kind of knowledge that has to be handed down
generation to generation.
You don't just notice it once
and then build a structure to memorialize it.
[suspenseful music fades]
It speaks to an ancient intellectual endeavor
to understand the cosmos that surrounds us,
and that cosmos is full of motion and changes,
and the long-term observation of those motions and changes
requires a really dedicated effort,
in many cases over thousands of years.
[wind howling]
Once researchers started looking for lunar alignments
in the buildings in Chaco Canyon,
all sorts of remarkable examples were found.
[intriguing music playing]
When the moon reaches its extreme southern standstill in winter,
again once every 18.6 years,
it rises in a line through three great houses six miles apart
with Pueblo Bonito at its middle.
And 9.3 years later, at the halfway point in this cycle,
the summer moon rises in a line across a large structure
just east of Pueblo Bonito to another one 11 miles to the southwest…
while that same setting moon shines across one great house,
again through Pueblo Bonito,
more than 17 miles beyond the canyon to yet another great house.
And one thing is certain.
The 18.6-year lunar cycle has no influence whatsoever
on the growing of crops.
Why, therefore, did the ancient Puebloans
go to such lengths to mark it in their architecture?
[intriguing music fades]
That speaks eloquently to the fact that no economic purpose was involved,
that this was about the celebration
of the connection between heaven and earth.
[wind howling]
What's now clear is that all these Chacoan structures combine
to form a ritual calendar laid out upon the Earth…
[intriguing music playing]
…in a canyon that may have been chosen for this very purpose
as a terrestrial counterpart to the Milky Way.
[intriguing music subsides]
But the connections with the cosmos, sky and ground, as above, so below,
that were so important to Chaco culture
aren't limited to its vast building complexes.
About five miles southeast of central Chaco…
I'm heading up from the canyon floor
in search of something intriguing that adorns these rugged canyon walls.
Ancient works of art carved into the living rock.
[intriguing music continues]
These are precious records, stories in stone
that have been continually revised, altered, and added to
over who knows how many thousands of years.
There are human figures that appear to be dancing
and playing musical instruments.
[intriguing music intensifies]
Spirals and serpents coil along the canyon walls,
which also feature strange creatures and geometric forms,
much like those that appear in artwork of the Amazon,
possibly inspired by psychedelics.
Whichever part of the world you're in and whichever period of history it is,
once you come to the cave art and the petroglyphs and the rock art,
you find again and again exactly the same visuals
that you find with the ayahuasca experience
and other psychedelics being repeated.
[uptempo tense music playing]
As well as these visionary elements,
Chacoan rock art reflects the same focus on astronomy found in its architecture.
This image has been interpreted as an eclipse,
the sun darkened by the moon, while its corona flares outwards.
And this, a supernova,
now known to have been visible in the daytime sky
during the ancestral Puebloan period in AD 1054.
Why create such imagery in such a hard-to-reach location
unless there was a compelling reason to do so?
[dramatic music playing]
In the absence of any apparent economic, strategic, or political motive,
it follows that some higher purpose must have been involved.
It seems to me more and more obvious
that Chaco Canyon is a ritualized landscape
and that its origins can't be limited to a mere thousand or so years ago,
but must go back much further,
perhaps even as far back as the last Ice Age.
[music intensifies, fades]
To your knowledge, how far back in the past can we trace
any kind of human presence here in Chaco Canyon?
You've probably heard very recently in White Sands National Monument--
23,000-year-old footprints in White Sands.
-[Nathan] And that's not that far away. -[Graham] No.
So it's quite likely that people would have been in Chaco Canyon
maybe even…
maybe even 10,000 years before any building was constructed.
[intriguing music playing]
I think they were
observing the landscape and the sky for generations
-before they decided to build. -[Graham] Yeah.
Chaco Canyon bears the fingerprints
of a culture of highly-sophisticated astronomers.
Their intense focus on the regular cycles of sun, moon, and stars
and on the wider majesty of the cosmos
wasn't just an idiosyncratic quirk of their own.
It was shared in the same way,
using eerily similar symbolism, art, and architectural alignments
by many other ancient cultures all around the world.
[intriguing music continues]
The way Malta's megalithic Temple of Mnajdra is precisely aligned
to capture the equinoxes and the solstices.
Or how the axis of the great Temple of Karnak in Egypt
targets the winter solstice sunrise.
Or the precision with which the central tower
of Angkor Wat in Cambodia
aligns to the rising sun on the equinoxes.
There seems to have been a worldwide architectural project
to reproduce the harmony and directions of the heavens
in monuments on the ground to bring heaven down to earth.
[intriguing music subsides]
But how far back does this seemingly global human project go?
[intriguing music intensifies]
There are clues
in one of ancient America's most accomplished civilizations
that once dominated what is now southern Mexico and Central America.
The Maya.
The Maya to me are one of the most fascinating cultures
of the ancient world
and a culture filled with mystery and contradiction.
Many descendants of the Maya still live here today
in the spectacular landscapes of Chiapas and the Yucatán Peninsula.
[intriguing music continues]
Here, long before the Incas and the Pueblo culture of Chaco,
the Maya civilization thrived.
It was a culture that expressed its genius in many ways,
notably through magnificent feats of architecture.
[intriguing music intensifies]
Surrounded by dense lowland rainforest,
this is the Mayan sacred realm of Palenque.
[intriguing music builds, fades]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] Palenque is an absolutely breathtaking place.
With its awe-inspiring architecture and engineering,
it has all the hallmarks of a classic Mayan site.
Soaring pyramids,
a ceremonial ball court,
a looming palace,
and temples filled with intriguing imagery.
The Maya are probably best known for their incredible architecture,
for the amazing complexes of pyramids that they created,
typically step pyramids, and the beautiful elegance of the design
and the high precision of the workmanship.
That immediately tells us that we're dealing with an advanced culture.
[dramatic music playing]
[Graham] Maya expert and guide Mildred Lucas Garcia
has devoted more than a decade
to understanding Palenque better.
When did work begin here?
How long was this site occupied?
The city's foundation started in the year 200 BC,
and it was abandoned over the 900s AD.
Right.
When I look at this incredible site, these huge pyramids,
beautifully constructed, beautifully designed,
it's clear that this was the work of very skillful people,
and that they must have had some kind of plan from the beginning.
But tell me, how did they do it?
[Mildred] We know that there were quarries nearby.
That's why they decided to build the city here
because they had all the natural resources,
they had all the limestone in this area,
they had the water,
and this was a very strategic area to build the city.
But how… how they built that, that's unknown.
-We don't know. -It's still a mystery.
-It's still a mystery. Mm-hmm. -Yeah. Yeah.
Why did the Maya build pyramids?
Here in Palenque, we see a lot of… a lot of pyramids.
[Mildred] The pyramids, not only for the Mayas,
but for the ancient cultures,
represented the holy mountains.
Here in Palenque, they built such big structures
to represent these holy mountains.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Graham] Mountains played an important role
in the belief system of the Maya as symbols of the source of creation.
But it appears that there may have been more to the Maya's epic building project,
especially here at Palenque.
[Mildred] In Palenque, some of the buildings were designed
following the astronomical observations.
Wow.
[Mildred] There's three buildings known as the Group of the Crosses
that were used as an astronomical observation area.
[Graham] Right.
[Mildred] These buildings were perfectly aligned
with the summer solstice…
-Yeah. -…and with the spring equinox.
[suspenseful music continues]
Clearly, highly-skilled astronomers were involved in the creation
of the whole complex.
Yes, it's true.
[intriguing music playing]
[Graham] But why would they go to so much trouble
to align these massive structures
to solstices and equinoxes?
Given these incredible alignments, one thing is clear.
If you want to know what Palenque is really all about,
you have to look not only at its architecture,
but also at the sky.
[intriguing music intensifies]
[intriguing music builds]
I've come to the Temple of the Sun at a special moment on a special day,
dawn on the spring equinox,
when the sun rises precisely due east and sets precisely due west
in a manifestation of cosmic harmony.
Here at the Temple of the Sun, that sunrise creates a unique spectacle,
one still celebrated today by the local community.
[Nicolás in Spanish] The spring equinox, it is important
for the spirituality of the Maya.
Right here where we are is the most important place.
[blowing conch]
[Graham in English] And I have a front row seat for it.
[intriguing music ends]
[closing theme playing]
[closing theme ends]