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  • 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.

Check out that giant calendar over there

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