The Basement: Ed Barnhart | Lost Cities, Botflies, and a Magic Number

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hulu Original Series, The Kardashians, is back. Season eight, isn't it great?

AJ Gentile (0:04)

This year has been insane.

SPEAKER_1 (0:07)

Have you dated anyone privately?

Ed Barnhart (0:08)

Let me just say this, I can't control myself.

AJ Gentile (0:13)

What about you?

Ed Barnhart (0:14)

I'm single, I might be ready to mingle. Of course I'm getting more action than Glowy.

AJ Gentile (0:19)

You think I walk around with this smile on my face for nothing?

Ed Barnhart (0:22)

Oh my God.

SPEAKER_1 (0:23)

Season eight premieres October 8th, streaming on Hulu and Hulu One Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

AJ Gentile (0:30)

Today I'm talking with Dr. Ed Barnhart. In 1995, he was a grad student in the jungles of Belize with the mail order map, a machete, and a camp full of colleagues who thought he was chasing nothing. Then his students started screaming his name at the top of a pyramid. He found a lost Maya city. He was 26 When I was 26, I found a lost city too. Atlantic City. I lost it right back at the craps table. Everybody asked Ed about that day. Today we're covering the parts nobody asked about. What happened when the city got handed to someone else? How a round of tequila he wasn't there for got him the job of mapping Palenque, and the beams of light he chased into the temples of Cambodia. And then he told me how he thinks the Inca got those Kuzka walls to fit like that. Not aliens. Acid. The Inca were tripping balls. Kuzka was just a Lucy in a sky with diamonds. But with boulders.

Not that kind.

That one, I'm still turning over. After a conversation, I'll come back and break it all down. Let's go down to the basement.

Dr. Ed Barnhart is here.

Thank you for coming in today.

Ed Barnhart (1:40)

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AJ Gentile (1:42)

Luke Caverns, Luke Reagan turned me on to your work, and I've been obsessed ever since. I really, really enjoy it.

Ed Barnhart (1:48)

I love Luke. Luke has grown so much as an explorer, too. He was just kind of a young guy with stars in his eyes when I first met him. But now, you know, he is my colleague.

AJ Gentile (2:00)

He is legit. He texted me a photo a couple of days ago of him in front of a tiger or something.

Ed Barnhart (2:05)

Oh, my gosh. Maybe I got... I saw one of a flashlight on a lion at night.

AJ Gentile (2:13)

That's the picture.

Ed Barnhart (2:14)

What in the world are you doing? That's unadvisable. Get out of there.

AJ Gentile (2:17)

It's unadvisable.

I want to start with 1994 So you're a grad student. And before you go down, everyone knows your story about finding the lost city. We'll get to that. Did you order the map mail order?

Ed Barnhart (2:39)

I did.

AJ Gentile (2:39)

I did. Tell me about that. Like, where did you find that?

Ed Barnhart (2:43)

It was a place that mostly sold USGS maps. But then it had all over the world.

Every country, you could get their version of USGS maps. So I went to the Belize section and got a bunch of quads that were generally in the area I wanted to be. I actually bought like ten wrong ones and then finally got the right one.

AJ Gentile (3:10)

You got ten wrong ones?

Ed Barnhart (3:12)

Yeah, I misunderstood where I was looking. It said program for Belize, but then it didn't include the southern part that I was in.

Did they? I donated them to the project. The project used them.

AJ Gentile (3:25)

So they assigned you that area first?

Ed Barnhart (3:28)

Yes, my professor basically said, I don't know how he picked it. I guess he picked it because there's just one dirt road running through this huge area of hundreds of thousands of acres. And near mile marker 10, going east, they had found a site called Dos Hombres, and it was only like a kilometer off the road. But he figured this west part is the one heading into Guatemala, nobody's been out there. So he dropped us off at mile marker 11

And I mean, the first day it was just me and this guy, Charles Hargrove, both grad students. That was before the city. But he dropped us off at mile marker 11 and just said, watch your compasses, cut straight west, I'll pick you up at three.

And that went on for a month. Okay.

AJ Gentile (4:24)

So this is a bunch of land that was cleared by Coca-Cola, right? And they donated it back.