00:00.00 kinkella Hello and welcome to the pseudo archeology podcast episode 114 I am your host Dr Andrew Kinkella and tonight on a very special edition of the pseudo archeology podcast your dreams and prayers are answered my friends. As I brag about myself even more than usual and we talk about the maya sinoteses. Okay so why pray tell. Am I talking about the maya sinotes today. Well I'll tell you why this is going down I was listening to the life and ruins podcast and Carlton go over there took some time to talk about his own research. And while I was listening to that I was like wait a minute here's someone focusing on themselves in using their own research on their podcast. Wait a second I can do that too I of course became immediately jealous and realized that I had to steal that idea for myself and make it my own and so that's what I've done my friends today we're gonna go over. 01:32.54 kinkella My own life in ruins in a way my life in the maya sinotes. So I know that you tune in here for pure knowledge right? and not cheap entertainment. So I'm going to. Teach you some stuff today. Okay, this is just going to be pure teaching. It's gonna be serious. There's gonna be no laughing in here and you better be taking notes. Okay, you better not be doing the dishes. Like I know some of you do while you listen into this just be honest, you do it right? You might be driving. Well you need to pull over and take notes because I'm going to drop some knowledge on you. Okay and realize that. Carlton's idea here has unleashed the kraken. Okay, because if you think you've heard me brag before oh friends this is going to be a festival of bragging the likes of which the podcasting world. Has never seen because this is going to start with and you can say it with me so there I was in beize. Okay, this is my granddady story. You guys. 03:06.27 kinkella This is what I did my dissertation on these are the Maya Sinotess so what are sanotess you know, kind of a odd word. You don't hear every day and when you type it into word. It always auto correctcts wrongly. Often to the word d notes as happened to me about 4000000000 times while I was trying to write my dissertation so sinottes are simply sinkholes in the Maya world that are filled with fresh water and. The reason why this happens is the entire maya world the entire Yucatan Peninsula right um from the top the Cancun area all the way down from the Atlantic side. The pacific side. Um, that whole sort of plateau area. 04:03.89 kinkella Actually let us cut that I said something wrong. There. Um, let's start with ah I'll just start with like so that whole area. Um, so that area. Of the Maya world is all limestone right? It's a limestone base the whole yucaten peninsula area and limestone is porous so water over time kind of rots it away very swiss cheese effect and. As that happens as the years of Millennia go by these sinkholes breakdown and they fill with groundwater now I think the term sinkles if you've never seen one. It makes it sound smaller than it really is you guys want to think of these as many lakes. Right? That's how they feel when you come across them. You're kind of walking through the jungle and I have to say when you're walking through the jungle. It's a very small world and what I mean by that is the jungle is so dense that you can't really see. That far in front of you or behind you or up or down really you're just in like this little green wet cave and that's why you can get lost like so quick in the jungle right? And you're just in that and sometimes when you're walking through the jungle you're just in this green. 05:37.50 kinkella Dank salad for hours. But then when you all of a sudden come across a sonate It's just it's open all of a sudden and you just see like the sun. You know it can be very dim in the jungle. It's sunny and there's this big water right there and it's just. Man it is extremely pleasant when you come across one of these in the jungle now as I said these are fresh water and the maya would have used these as sources of fresh water. But oh so much more right? because they're so special and again to give you an idea of size like um, if there's such thing as an average I'd say maybe maybe a hundred feet across maybe a little bit more like so something like three hundred feet across would be pretty big and something like. Oh fifty or sixty feet across would be pretty small. So just to give you guys an idea and in terms of depth. They're all over the place. The shallowest one I ever recorded was like six feet deep the deepest 1 was two hundred and forty feet deep so they're they're sort of. All over the place right in terms of their their size and their shape. It just depends on how the stone rotted away and fell in on itself now how was I intro to this right? Um, how can I say this whole so there I wasn't believe thing this comes back. 07:13.32 kinkella 1997 and I had worked in Belize for 2 years by that point I'd worked there in 93 and 96 my first two years and Lisa Lucero my good friend Lisa was starting her own project in 9097 and I had. And opportunity to be the field director on this brand new project it was going to be the valley of peace archeology project and I was really excited. I was really looking forward to it and the setup was there was one hundred and Twenty Square miles of Beliesian Jungle that had almost no archeological research. Done and man when I think back to those days I feel so fortunate that I was able to have that experience I mean 120 square miles and you just get to try and find something you know this is this is movie time. You know, kind of stuff and just as the years went by I just think back it was it really was an amazing thing to experience. But anyway it was hard to figure out where to start and as we started our project as we kind of looked for sites in this miles and miles and miles of jungle. We had gotten this map of the area and at the top at the northern portion. There was a string of 25 sinottes all in a row right? because of a geologic fault basically now the sinottes if we want to get real sciencey in terms of the. 08:47.14 kinkella Sinotes' in our survey area. Some of them are called scarp foot springs the geologic term. Basically you have this fault and the water kind of comes out in in that fault the sinotes still form in vaguely the same way. But the the fault kind of adds to it and then there are other sinotes in the area that are more. Very classically round sanotess like you think of now we had only seen these on the map right? We we had hadn't visited them and it was a big thing. We're like dude we got to get out there because this has this is like There's almost no roads in that area and this is miles and miles of walking so Lisa and I and 2 of the belizeion staff. The people who we hired in Belize that the 4 of us went out to find what was later numbered as pool one. Numbered all the pools just as I came across them. So if you look at a map of the area. The pools are sort of numbered all weird. It's it's because they're numbered based on. Historically you know pool number one is the first one found pool number 2 is the second 1 found and so on. But. Just getting out there and we had a couple fits and starts and then finally when we made it I was so bowled over and so impressed by just the sheer awesomeness of it. The beauty of it I mean just this deep blue in the middle of the jungle I had just. 10:20.50 kinkella About started my master's program and I asked Lisa I'm like Lisa can I do these sinotes can I do this pull 1 this sinote for my master's my master's thesis and she's like yeah sure that sounds great. So I was like elated I'm like here we go here's my project and then starting in 97 for the next three years the summers in 1998 and 1999 I studied pool 1 right? The sin outte pool one I um. Visited a couple of the otherottas but everything was focused on pool one I did my very first diving there with one of the other students Anna she and I did the very first dive in pool one and 9098 and I was able to wrap up my thesis data. Collection by the end of the 9099 season and then I put that together I put it out my whole big idea of using that to get a community college job didn't work at all and then I was like hey maybe I need a ph d so. Back to Belize in 2001 and then in 2001 2 3 4 5 not six seven and eight all those summers I worked in that area expanding on pool one and exploring. 11:49.15 kinkella Basically the other twenty four sinot days there ended up being like two and a half that I didn't get to but I went to all the others and as I spent those days and weeks and months in the jungle walking from soote's to sinote experiencing the jungle I really thought a lot. About how the ancient maya used the sinottes and both my masters and my dissertation were on how the ancient maya related to these sinnotes right? Some sinotte you could tell were used for ritual purposes and how do you tell that. Based on there may have been a water shrine type building built right next to them where you could literally do ritual right at the edge of the pool and there were a handful of pools that had stuff like that many of the other pools didn't some of the other pools were just simply use for water. Makes sense and I'm sure that some of the pools were used for both. You know sometimes they were for ritual purposes. Sometimes it was just because hey you need fresh water and this is a great source I was also. Looking at how these pools were related to the other maya sites in the area too like which sites kind of had jurisdiction over them if that makes sense ah which sites would have had people maybe walk out to them in sort of a ritual pilgrimage of some manner so I had a lot to look at right. 13:19.86 kinkella And it was ah those summers really are the defining experience of my archeological life. 13:30.69 kinkella And I know that the study of the sinotes the writing about them. The diving in them the doing the archeology around their banks that is the thing that will be chiseled on my archeological tombstone and I'm totally. Totally fine with that right? The pools of Carra Blanca. That's the name of the area Carra Blaca means white face now when we return the history of the sinottas. In terms of how the ancient maya used them.