Check out that giant calendar over there
This city was home to the Teotihuacán people, which archaeologists really don't
know a lot about. No one really knows where they went and how they were
destroyed. They left this place totally abandoned. But they did leave us their
city and if you poke around the city and look at the configuration of this huge,
goes for 20 kilometers, city you start to see that they really prioritized keeping
track of time throughout the year. And the technology they used to do that was
their huge pyramids that they constructed, and the sun, the stars, the
mountains. Their entire city was built in order to track the movement of the celestial bodies.
This civilization was able to track time by
keeping track of whenever the sun would rise at the peak of one of these
mountains. They aligned it so that the Sun and the mountains would be a
perfectly aligned clock for them to see what time of year it was.
Today, people come here to this ruin to celebrate the spring equinox, which is an important
time for planting seeds and preparing for the fertility of the land. We don't
know how important the spring equinox was for this ancient civilization, but they
did leave a few clues that suggests that it could have actually
been a really important day.
Tracking the celestial bodies wasn't just about agriculture, it was also about
religious practices and ceremonies. Every year at the same time they would perform
certain rituals that they would offer up to their gods. Sometimes that was
terrible things like human sacrifices, animal sacrifices. And the celestial
bodies helped them know when it was time to do that. This section is the top of
the city, the highest point in this whole valley. You see all these wide open
plazas. And some people theorized that these were meant to be filled with water
when it would rain, so that people could sit up on the surrounding buildings and look
down and see the reflection of the stars. And they would do this so that they
could track the stars and study the constellations, some people theorize that
this is how they were able to understand the stars and construct their city based
on constellations. We really don't know a lot about these people, like where they came
from, what language they spoke, where they went in 600 AD, when they kind of just
disappeared off the archaeological map. But we do know that they cared about
tracking the sun and tracking the stars and their entire city was constructed
and configured in order to be able to do that.
The borders documentaries are
finally launching. Up until now I've been making these dispatches, just little
videos while I've been traveling but all of this has been to build six
documentaries. I'm going to be publishing the first borders documentary on October 17th,
and then publishing weekly thereafter on Tuesdays. The videos are
going to be publishing on Facebook and YouTube and if you don't want to miss
the updates on when they publish you can sign up for the newsletter which I'm
putting the link down in the description. Really excited to share these with you
you should tune back October 17th, to watch the first one.