529: The Sculptor People : the ancient mystery and modern theft of the statues of San Agustín
2024-07-30 01:29:21
Colombia Calling is your first stop for everything you ever wanted to know about Colombia. Colombia Calling is hosted by Anglo Canadian transplant to Colombia, Richard McColl and the Newscast is provided by journalist Emily Hart. Tune in for politics, news, reviews, travel and culture stories, all related to Colombia.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Columbia Calling Podcast. I'm Emily Hart and today I'll be speaking to two experts and campaigners on Colombia's San Agustin statues, getting into what they might mean and why they matter, as well as how so many of them ended up not in Colombia and how important it is to get them back here. So in San Agustin, Huila, hundreds of ancient megalithic statues have been found. It's the region's largest collection of pre-Hispanic sculptures and it dates back to the 9th century BC. Some are human-ish figures, but with fangs and wings, others are simian, others some combination of animal and man, some are carved in situ, others onto single rock slabs 15 feet tall.
The statues both invite and totally defy interpretation and theories about them abound, from burial rites, shamans and psychedelic drugs, to aliens. These statues were made by a community known as the Sculptor People, the Pueblo Escultor, who were an enigmatic community we are still trying to decipher. Surprisingly, little is known about the people who created the mounds in which most of the statues were found. What they represent is much debated, as is their purpose. The community also disappeared, moved away or simply stopped sculpting well before the Spanish arrived.
There are competing explanations as to why. Though there are hundreds of statues at archaeological sites around San Agustin, there are statues missing. In the 20th century, European institutions and individuals removed statues from sites. Many ended up in museums in cities like London or Berlin, others in private collections. But the movement to get this cultural patrimony back is gaining momentum.
The current president has taken up the fight and hundreds of artefacts have been returned to Colombia over the last two years. It's a conversation which has been growing across the world, but the clamour from Colombia is starting to be heard. The Colombian government has now officially requested the return of a number of these statues held in Germany. It's a big step for the campaign group to achieve the return of these statues to their place of origin.
There is, of course, also a San Agustin statue in the possession of the British Museum, an institution which has not responded to attempts at communication. So today, on the show, I have David Dellenbach and Martha Keel, who are key to this campaign. They're going to be telling us about the academic and ethical issues around repatriation, as well as digging into the history and lore of the statues themselves.
David is originally from the US, but he has lived in San Agustin since the 1970s. He's author of the book The Statues of the Pueblo Escultor, along with the most complete set of diagrams and studies of the statuary, their measurements, locations and features. Martha Keel is a guide and cultural activist, as well as translator of David's book into Spanish. The two, who are married, have presented the study, as well as an illustrated campaign book about the repatriation of these spiritual and cultural artefacts at Bogota's international book fair, the Filibó. So on this episode, we are going to be talking about the ancient mysteries of the Pueblo Escultor and their megalithic language, as well as about the modern history of plunder and theft, and whether these perplexing statues might one day soon be coming home.
All that to come, but first your headlines for this week. The Columbia Calling podcast is sponsored by Latin News, a leading source of political and economic analysis on Latin America and the Caribbean since 1967. Their flagship publication, the Latin American Weekly Report, provides a behind-the-scenes briefing on all the week's key developments throughout the region. Sign up for a 14-day free trial at latinnews.com. We are also sponsored by BNB Columbia Tours, which is a leading tour operator providing a wonderful range of exclusive, small group shared tours for those over 50, along with customizable private tours to both popular and off-the-map destinations throughout this beautiful and diverse country.
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Guerrilla group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the ELN, have kidnapped 18 people in Arauca, near the border with Venezuela. There are five children among the kidnapped. The ELN and FARC dissident groups are currently fighting for territory along the border, causing an ongoing humanitarian and security crisis, with hundreds of families currently displaced.
The cessation of kidnapping for ransom, which was a long-time practice of the ELN, was a key agreement with the government, now broken on the grounds that the government failed to create a fund to replace the money extorted via these abductions.
Peace negotiations between the ELN and the national government are therefore yet again on the rocks. The government this week accused the ELN of committing numerous acts of war, as well as lies and an arrogant attitude, demanding that the group clarify their intentions regarding peace in order to unfreeze the talks. The ELN, meanwhile, has publicly claimed that the government is failing to comply with their agreements. And the corruption scandal in the Unit for Disaster Risk Management, the UNGRD, continues, as former officials Olmedo López and Sneider Pinilla have pled not guilty to charges of embezzlement, conspiracy to commit a crime, and fraud. They are now seeking a deal with the prosecutor.
The prosecutor has also opened investigations into the Minister of Finance, the former Minister of the Interior, and the current Director of Intelligence. Numerous members of Congress will also be investigated. Former Congressional Presidents Andrés Calle and Iván Náme stand accused of receiving suitcases carrying billions of pesos in cash. The question of whether money and government contracts changed hands in order to bribe congressmen into voting for government reform bills remains unresolved.
And in regional news, uncertainty prevails in Venezuela in the aftermath of the presidential elections held this Sunday, 28th July. Both incumbent Nicolás Maduro and opposition candidate Edmundo González have claimed victory. The National Electoral Commission announced that Maduro had won a third term with just over 51%, around 5 million votes. This despite numerous exit polls which suggested opposition majorities, some showing González with over 65% of the vote. This result was announced by head of the commission, Elvis Amoroso, a close ally of Maduro, with 80% of votes counted.
early on Monday morning. Serious irregularities were reported throughout the country. There are numerous accusations of opposition officials being barred from voting stations or overseeing counting. At some key stations, election officials have refused to hand over the paper tallies to election monitors. Opposition leader, María Corina Machado, was disqualified from running earlier this year.
46 people were arbitrarily detained just this weekend in connection with the elections, according to human rights organisation Foro Penal. At least 23 remain detained. There are now calls from leaders across the world for the publication of detailed results or a recount. The US Secretary of State announced serious concerns. Chile's leader, Gabriel Boric, called the results hard to believe.
The governments of Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay have issued a joint statement demanding a full review of the election results with the presence of independent electoral observers, and requesting an urgent meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States.
Meanwhile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras and Bolivia have congratulated Maduro, as have the leaders of China, Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, the Colombian Foreign Minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo, has announced it is important to clear any doubts about the results. We call for the total vote count, its verification and an independent audit to be carried out as soon as possible. Former Colombian Presidents Ivan Duque and Juan Manuel Santos have rejected the results, describing them as electoral fraud and not credible. Many fear a return to instability and violence in the country if the results are contested.
A fraudulent return to power for will be unlikely to facilitate a reversal of economic sanctions or the mass migration of Venezuelan citizens, one in five of whom has left the country. in the last decade. Only around 2% of Venezuelans living outside of the country were allowed to vote in these elections. Three million Venezuelans live in Colombia, only 7,000 were able to vote from the country and only 20% of those eligible did so. 5,000 people travelled back to Venezuela from Colombia for the election.
President Gustavo Petro himself, notably, has yet to make comment on the election or its results. Meanwhile, the Colombian delegation of 89 athletes, along with Petro himself, travelled to Paris last week for the Olympic Games. 60% of the Colombian team are women. this year. From Los Angeles in 1932 to Tokyo in 2020, Colombia has won 34 medals, five gold, 13 silver and 16 bronze.
This year's games hold particular hope for Colombia's women's football team, though the country's most medal-winning sport historically is weightlifting, followed by cycling, particularly BMX racing. Those were your headlines. Let's get into this week's episode of Colombia Calling.
So welcome, Martha and David. It's so great to have you on the show. Let's start from the beginning, because I am, in that way, quite traditional. How did you each first come into contact with this amazing statuary?
Well, I guess I'll answer first, since I.
came into contact with it. first. I was just a wanderer, like so many other travellers back in the early 70s, and my path led me from where I had been in the United States to Colombia after many adventures. By the time I came to Colombia and to San Agustin, I had travelled down through Mexico and Central America, and so my eyes had been eyes wide open, as happens to many people, by all of the amazing ancient vestiges of ancient America that I saw along the way and which I understood not one whit. And along the way, somewhere, someone mentioned to me that if you ever make it to Colombia, there's this place called San Agustin, and I had that written down in a little book.
And so when I came to Colombia, I came to San Agustin, and maybe, as happens to all of us or many of us in our lives, somehow the hook was set in me deeply at that point. And, like everyone else who comes here, I looked at the statues and the sculptures and the underground stone centres and had no idea what I was seeing, and somehow started to become curious enough about it that eventually, the lack of published knowledge that goes along with so many things in Colombia, because of Colombia's political history and because of what Colombia has lived even during my time here, has made it somewhat off limits to students of all different kinds in every imaginable field. And so there was a wide open field here for a complete neophyte like myself, as opposed to the quote-unquote experts having come in from academia somewhere. And so I was forced, rather than being able to just buy the text material, which I would have loved to do, to start to create it myself. And that's how it started with me.
And it took lots of time, lots of years, to finish his work, which was writing or.
drawing the most complete catalogue of statues, with more than 500.. And then I show up. And then I show up in San Agustin and met him, and it was already 25 years ago, and from then on we're totally connected with the statues.
Martha, how did you end up becoming a guide for the for the park then?
Pretty much at the end of my days, of my career, I changed my careers a lot, but in the last five years, after, you know, working with statues and with David in many projects, and I decided that I was kind of ready to be a guide, because I already had studied and joined David in his investigations, and I felt like I was ready. So I took a course, and then I found out that I wasn't ready. I had to start studying. And then I started to study, and now I feel pretty happy with my new career. It's really fun to be able to walk these beautiful areas and archaeological sites and show it to people.
It's the most wonderful thing, engage people with our archaeology and show them. We had such a wonderful stone library that is totally ignored, but it's the greatest stone library in the continent.
I love the expression stone library, because there are so many of these statues. It is almost like an alphabet, a library, a language. But this community, from what I understand, left behind no language markers as such. It's not like the ancient Egyptians, where it's like a, you get a little caption. David, in your book, you talk about the almost unlimited liberty of interpretation available with these statues, which is an expression I just love.
So what do we know, and what can we not know with this library?
Well, I can tell you, digging into what's behind your question, the very idea of the concept of writing has been really revolutionized, even in the last few decades. The idea of what comprises writing has been revolutionized, at least among what might be considered a vanguard of students of such thing. There are people who will tell us now that every culture, every civilization leaves behind its writing on the face of the earth, in the sense of what it does to the face of the earth, so that when we study what bulldozers do, for instance, in the 20th century, and what the vast industrial development has done to the face of the planet in the last century, people with the vanguard tendency that I'm talking about now would tell us that's writing, that's us, we modern people, writing on the face of the earth, who we are. And the students in the future, whatever that might mean, will be able to read our writing, see what we've done to the earth, and understand pieces of our history from studying that. So the idea of writing has vastly expanded from little signs scratched on papyrus to a much wider idea.
And in that same spirit, the people who made these statues in that sense certainly were writing. They were leaving behind a corpus of writing, and it's a mistake to us to say that they didn't have writing, that the only people who had writing in America were the Mayas with their codices, because those are very recognizable forms of writing to the European colonizers who came and took over the cultural development of America. So in that sense, the statues, the sculptures of the Pueblo Escultor, I would definitely consider writing. The fact that we don't know the alphabet simply means that we don't know how to read that writing. That way of thinking led me one day to realize these are texts.
That's what they are. That's what I call them. They're texts. Each one must have an extensive narrative. Were an original, a person from that culture to suddenly stand here with us, and were we able to communicate and ask that person, what does that statue mean?
I'm sure that they could do a lot more than just, say, a guy with big eyes with such and such in his hands. Those are just symbols. Those are just prompts that lead people to understand a much more extensive text. And so if they are texts in that sense, then logically enough they all form a library of which each are the pages. And in that logic lies the desire to have back the ones that have disappeared.
Because pages have been ripped out of our library here, and were one to make an equivalent of some European text from long ago, were we to rip a few pages out of it, that would be a devastating loss. Because the context would then, a key part of the context would be lost. So because of that, each text is essential to us today. And not only, you know,
the guaqueros and the tomb raiding, we're talking about losses, but we're also talking about thefts. And it could be, you think that any of these, you know, missing, stolen elements of these sites could be the Rosetta Stone, so to speak, of this library, a means to understanding.
the context.
Absolutely. To give it a little bit of scale, I wanted to say that I was raised by wonderful people who were extremely Christian, and they were very well versed in the symbology of their Christianity. And had you asked them with a sign of a cross, had you asked them, what does this cross mean? Well, they could have talked for six hours telling you what two little sticks cross each other mean, because all of that backstory is there for those who are versed in the language. And I feel the same way about all of these texts that we have here.
It just so happens that we don't read the language, but that doesn't mean that the language and the story.
isn't there. No, I absolutely believe it is. When you look at these statues, and I will be sharing lots of photos, and, with your permission, David, some of your illustrations, both online, on my substack, wherever this podcast is, so that people can get an idea. There's such a universe, a full, completely thought-out universe, behind these statues. And they both invite and almost completely resist interpretation.
Let's talk about who made them. The sculptor, people, the Pueblo Escultor, who were they? And why were they creating these statues, do we think?
And when were they creating these statues? It's hard to answer that question. We had some clues that the archaeologists and the investigations so far have told us. People who inhabited this territory 2,000 years ago, more or less, and they disappeared also, or they stopped doing these activities around 500 years before the first invaders, invasion, came here and registered some of their writings or some of their traces. So we really had a huge hole between they stopping doing their activities, because actually we had evidence that they didn't go anywhere.
Actually, the population grew up after that year, 800, but they just changed. Something happened in the whole continent that made these people change their mind, their activities, but we actually don't know their names. We don't know many other things, just little clues that we can paste together.
It's so fascinating, the specificity of what.
we're left with, which are these amazing statues which were found in the ground. They're not as we found them today.
The idea that they just stopped sculpting at a certain point, the very sculptor people. Is there any idea what kind of an event might have caused a very prolific, artistic,
visionary community to just halt? Yes, it's a good question. Something happened with the weather in the whole continent around that time. that made things change. here.
Even we're pretty contemporary. This culture is contemporary with the Mayas in the Mesoamerican area, and they also change. Something happened over there too, at the same time that making change. I want to think it was something related with the weather, but we're not certain about it, but maybe it's related with that. Societies change.
All human societies change. They transform. Powers also change. Societies move and shift around. Something of that could have happened.
Just to emphasize what Marta is saying, what we've learned is that stone sculpting in America is what stopped about a thousand years into our new era. Not here in our little corner, but everywhere. In the Andes, in Bolivia, in Peru, in Mexico. Really, the great ages of stone carving, as if communication via carving stone pertained to an earlier era of people, that, with whatever societal changes, that language no longer was pertinent. It's really important to understand that.
it's not that something happened to this little group of sculptors here in the Masiso Colombiano. It's something that happened all over the continent. I can tell you that, without understanding the specificity of the links, I can tell you two processes that were growing, that happened to perfectly match with the lessening of importance of stone carving, and that is militarism and urbanism. Urbanism and militarism grow and grow and grow over those five centuries. after this, Pueblo Escultor and many other people throughout America no longer made stone sculpting, so that by the time the Europeans arrived, they found warrior societies everywhere, that they went and were at war with everybody, with people who were very well prepared for war.
Now that just wasn't the case during the time of the Pueblo Escultor. There's no defensive fortifications of any kind. There's no cranial encephalic contusions in the skulls, like we see among a warrior society like the Incas or the Aztecs when we study their skeletons. So we know that the people here were not living in an age of war, and maybe there's something to the sense that this essential, spiritual, deep spiritual communication is lessened and then destroyed by these two twin evils of urbanism and militarism, and obviously what I'm talking about, by extension, is our time, what we're living right now in the world.
No, that's fascinating. The studies that we're now able to do, looking at the skulls, finding that they're not broken. It's fascinating to me the idea that we often have, particularly as Europeans, about what the societies of this region were like, and to find a theory that in fact that was not the case, that this was a peaceful community, who were actually engaged in a deeply spiritual art form that in some way was antithetical to militarism and urbanism, and to find that those things can't reasonably coexist feels instinctively true.
The statues themselves, and again, to engage in a kind of long ekphrastic rant about what they look like, I won't do, because people can find amazing drawings of them online, and I will obviously be sharing the website, which has a lot of David's amazing drawings on them, but they are absolutely extraordinary, and they range so much in features, in size, in shape, in reference.
Martha, I remember when you were showing me around, there were so many times where you say, oh, this sculpture yet again breaks all the rules. This is yet again another exception. There's an amazing, almost an anarchy to them. Many of them are humanistic figures, but a lot of them have fangs or monkey features, wings, phallic imagery, the chacana. They're very symbolic.
What are we looking at here? Is it a supernaturalness, a psychedelicness? The use of medicinal plants was very common in this society, by all accounts. Are these real spiritual visions? I suppose I'm asking a quite simple question, in a very long-winded way, of, what are they?
What are these figures representing?
I'll tell you something that will come mostly from the realm of opinion, but that's the realm that we're in, in this body. I'm glad if anyone is interested in these opinions. You're right. The use of psychotropic substances to access the other world, to access the world where the patrones exist, where the models exist, was something extremely common throughout America and doubtlessly throughout many places of the world, if not universal. We happen to live here in an area which, I don't know if you remember reading about the estrella fluvial, the fluvial star, the star of the hydrographic star, meaning that this Masiso Colombiano, where we live, is the center of the source of water for all this part of the continent.
All of these great rivers are born in a very small area up above us, here in the mountains, to an extraordinary degree. Something similar is true about psychotropic substances. The people who lived here, they didn't have access to one psychotropic substance. They had access to a whole plethora of different psychotropic substances. So what actually was determining their travels in this other world, it might be a little difficult for us to determine, but what's not difficult to determine is that they were experienced psychotropic travelers, at least their spiritual leaders were.
And so if I could just briefly refer to a very important book called The Shaman and the Jaguar by the great European Colombian anthropologist Gerardo Raichel Dolmatov. He wrote a story about a small group of people who lived far, far, far in the eastern reaches of Colombia, in the Amazon, and who, of course, have their own spiritual reality that they embody in their own art, nothing to do with stone sculpture. And their shamans, with whom Raichel Dolmatov worked, explained to him, and many other anthropological, ethnological discoverers have found very similar things, there's nothing unusual about this, that the shamans would take their psychotropic substances, in their case yaje, in their case ayahuasca, and they would fly through the air to a tepui. These tepuis are big stone mountains out in the Orinoco and out in the Amazon that are. that are fantastically interesting geological factors that rise up above the Amazon, like huge maloca.
So maloca is a lodge, and in fact that's what those people told Raichel Dolmatov and many other investigators that found the same thing, that you westerners think that's a big rock, and you and I, Emily, as westerners, we can prove it's a big rock, no doubt, it's just a solid rock, that's as simple as that. But the shamans laugh at that. The shamans lie into what we westerners consider a solid rock, and it's not a solid rock, it's actually a lodge, which is called maloca. here in the Neotropical Forest. Inside that lodge, that vast, gigantic, humongous lodge, live all the essential beings and all the essential knowledge.
The explanations of cosmogony, the explanations of cosmology, the explanations of why we paint our baskets like this, and why we harvest our food like this, and why we walk like this, and why we dress like this, and who we are, and where we came from, all those answers can be found via this psychotropic journey inside that maloca, by talking to the essential beings that live there. And the shamans bring back that information for their people to know how to live. I'm pretty sure that that's a model for what went on here. These people here took their psychotropic substances, they went somewhere, it might have not been to a tepui, because all over the world, the other world, the alternate world, can be found in a million different places. In Europe, it was very common to have an image of climbing up a vast axis tree that would lead you up to upper levels, where you would find this other world.
In the Amazon, it was flying through the air into this maloca, into this vast cosmic rock maloca. We don't know about the Pueblo Escultor, where they found the other world, but wherever they found the other world, I feel certain that all of what we see in the statues were the beings and the experiences that they met with there in that other world. And when they came back to this world, they repeated them in stone as a way of enshrining in texts this all-important information for their people about who they are, and what they are, and what are the lines that surround their spiritual reality. That's what I feel is being portrayed in the statues.
And so interesting that you mentioned this regional shift in sculpting, because looking at these sculptures, and from information I've found in your book and been given by Martha as well, the influences reach pretty far north and pretty far south in what here as well, right? Some of the symbolism, there's a bird with a snake in its beak, which is obviously a kind of a regional thread that runs through. So how were these influences reaching the San Agustín Plateau?
I guess the answer would be that. the real question is how did that imagery reach the Mayans, and how did it also reach the Pueblo Escultor, and how did it reach all of the other people who reflect this same knowledge? It implies something previous. It implies something to a large degree unitary, and something far previous. We're now reading about the new discoveries in the Chiribiquete, out in the Colombian Amazon, where many people believe that these primal paintings are not 2,000 or 4,000, or 6,000 or 8,000 years old, they're up to 20,000 years old, these paintings.
Europeans wouldn't be surprised by that, since they have rock paintings in Spain and France that are 40,000 years old. So long, long ago in America, the original models were being created, not in the Andes, not in Mesoamerica, but in somewhere in the vast midst of our continent. that we're now learning was actually the genesis in the center, rather than some strange, marginalized area, as we've kind of believed all through these last few centuries. Somehow those models were created and were spread all around the continent. There's a type of unity in America that the old world can barely comprehend, because in the old world, i.e.
outside of America, there was anything but unity. There are a vast, crisscross, labyrinth of different traditions. Somehow in America, in some essential way, the opposite was true.
So interesting. But one thing I have heard from both of you, in fact, is that this site is actually unique in terms of its numbers, of its representations of women.
Yeah, it's fascinating. It's fascinating how the feminine presence in these cultures here are so strong. There are other places in America where also are female statues and symbols, but you know, this is definitely the most complete site showing really female statues and female features. But I really find out interesting how those symbols go through the whole continent. The symbols like the jaguar and the serpent, how the serpent is present in the north and in the south and in Mesoamerica, and how that language was really shared during these different space and times.
And we don't know how and where it came from and what's the beginning, but those symbols are so much there. And like the symbol of the serpent linked with the female is really amazing to me, and how it goes up to the north and we find characters like Guadalupe in Mexico, which is a female deity. It's really amazing, totally marked with the serpent symbol and her skirt is a serpent wave, really beautiful. And then we can transpass those symbols to here, where we find also, again, these symbols with the same content of meaning, right? Linking the female with the serpent and the jaguar, the symbols and the traces of the jaguar too here, then were present, where?
In Olmec, in the Amazon jungle, everywhere the jaguar has been also putting their seeds in the world. So it's very, very fascinating. that connection that we actually can trace. And that's one of the ways to interpret these symbols, is going to these other places in America and South America, Central America, North America, even up there in North America, we find this symbology, that trace and weigh together a whole new vision of the Americans being really connected. So we see imagery among the Olmecs.
that a thousand years later is reflected among the carvings of the Pueblo Escultor, and then, five centuries after that, is reflected among the Aztecs in Mexico. There was a long period of time when experts in America were trying to trace migrations. If this thing existed in one place and then it existed in another place, it must be that people picked up all their stuff and trekked and walked and boated and got to the other place and then somehow imposed their views and their images on these people in another place who, for some reason, had nothing to say until that moment and then they had something to say. All of this type of thinking is kind of ridiculous to many people now, because we can see that there's a unity that precedes all of this. So that language exists a thousand years before our era in the Gulf Coast of Mexico, and that language is then reflected a thousand years later here in the Masiso Colombiano, on another continent.
But there's no longer any reason to think that somebody picked up their stuff and picked up their whole family and picked up their whole tribe and walked through the jungle and walked through the mountains and got here and then decided to do the same thing ten centuries later here. It's kind of a new way of thinking to realize that the language exists among everyone all through the continent, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, in some way long before it's manifested in this way and that way and the other way. And so it's a different way of thinking of the migration of ideas is not a migration, as we think, of migrations of people. It's something that suffused American reality and that found many different expressions at many different times in history. that obviously we can see those relations because it's reflecting central thoughts and themes and beliefs.
You know, the difference of it, I think also, you know, the snake in Christian European psychic, you know, symbology has a sort of moralized, symbolic weight. In sort of early modern bestiaries, animals are always given by Christian thinkers and educators an ethical quality of temperance or peacefulness. They are used anthropomorphically in order to teach us some quality. And the snake is mistrusted for, you know, obvious biblical reasons, which do have a link with, you know, the first woman but is not feminized in this way. So the idea that the snake invokes femininity is fascinating and quite alien to a European.
cultural mind. For the history of the world, if we go back to Chiri Bhikheti, if we go back to ancient India, or ancient Asia, or long before Europe, if we look at those megalithic cultures in the north of Europe, they weren't living this moralism of these religions that have now taken over most of the world. So naturally, we think that those messages somehow are missing in what we see in America. But actually, what we see in America is probably much more allied to what the world lived all through its ages in terms of spirituality. And these religions from the Mideast, as we call it, that grew and took over much of the world in the last couple thousand years, seem to be the norm when they're not at all.
But in your book, you talk about the.
statues embodying a static vision, which is so interesting because it hadn't occurred to me looking at them. But as soon as I read it, I thought, gosh, this is exactly true. They seem to be paused or posed in some way. And later in the book, you refer to a mythical, ever-present other now, which seems to relate to this idea of static time, or an understanding of time itself that is different to ours, being expressed through these statues.
That staticness is actually reflecting a deep spirituality about the fact that there is this other now, that other world that I referred to before, in which, among all the other laws that bind us here in this world, time is not a binding law of that other world. Actually, the origins of stone sculpture in America, if we look at the Gulf Coast of Mexico stone carvings, and if we look at the stone carvings in Chavin de Huantar and in Sechín in Peru, we see relief carvings, not full-rounded carvings. Relief carvings come first in general terms in America, and relief carvings are wonderful panels that allow for movement and action and narrative. So there's all kinds of narrative, and whether we understand the narrative or not, we can see actions going on. People are moving, people are doing things in all these early relief sculptures.
Now, there aren't any relief sculptures here. These are full-rounded statues in the Pueblo Escultor, so that would theoretically be a later phase of stone sculpture, but the difference is that the image is not engaged in action, and if we look at 20 and 50 and 100 and 200 and 300 and 400 statues here, you'll keep seeing the same thing. Action is not being portrayed. There's a being that is emanating, whatever that being is emanating, and that's what's happening in the sculptures. here.
There's not action taking place. There's a very important exception. There's a very important exception, which is the statue, which there are two copies of the sculpture, which we call the feline procreator.
The feline procreator. But you refer to it as a cosmic copulation, I think. Am I going to get that? I've got the book right here. Is that what you said?
My memory's not gone yet.
That idea actually also comes from Rachel Dolmatov, who wrote about this long ago and recognized in the statues here the fact that this same image existed also in two cases among the Olmecs, and other students have then talked about this, and it's been discussed back and forth. But this cosmic copulation is shown us by the Olmecs a thousand years before the Pueblo Escultor, and then it's repeated here. I feel we should just pause to explain.
to a listener quite what it is. we're talking about. A large feline creature. I'm worried about what sort of language it's appropriate to use on this podcast to describe this particular sexual position. I might leave it to you, guys.
Maybe you could describe it.
The large supernatural feline is on top of and behind a kneeling human female whose four limbs are on the ground, and that they are engaged in copulation. And we understand that this copulation is not a copulation between two human beings. It's between two spiritual elements. The woman represents, I would say, and many others would say, the female element that is in the earth. She is the Pachamama.
And the feline is the male element that embodies the opposite, the realm up above the earth, whatever one might conceive of that to be. And so this cosmic copulation is not just between two beings. It's between two realms which come together and somehow fertilize reality, out of which then issue life and beings and human beings and plants and the world, etc. All of this is reflected over and over and over again in many American mythologies, in words, in stories that we hear that anthropologists have recovered from all over. That's why one imagines that that's what we're seeing here.
Children from this copulation come out and are supernatural, but for part of what we are as a humanity. Because this kind of symbols or mythology goes all over the world, where we mix with humans, and humans mix with animals, and we achieve these powers. It's something very, very interesting that's happening in our minds as humans. And here, we had also a model for that.
I find it more plausible. There's so many origin stories about the planet. In every culture, they have one. But the idea that life begins with sex. And Martha, you said something really interesting to me about sexuality in this culture, and how you've read it in the statues, that sexuality is a kind of spiritual, playful element of what you're seeing in these sculptures.
There's no shame or fear around it.
Yeah, that also takes us to Rachel Dolmatov, who also took a big while to study the indigenous and the Baupest regions here, and found out that pretty much religious and spirituality and sexuality were all on the same level. And for ancient people, indigenous people, sexuality is the center. And now, in places and symbols and things like water, and some animals, and some plants are pretty linked with sexuality and fertility and life. So they were pretty central in their lives. And many of these sex things come to become spiritual and religious events.
I love it. I love to imagine that. And also all these taboos that we had, and limitations and morals that we had for sexuality, obviously, for these ancient people were totally different. And probably, sexuality play a very important role in their lives and their communities.
It's just the case that all of this comes through a fog to us today, because that fog was brought by medieval Europeans. Just as they destroyed the ancient narratives of America, they also destroyed the ancient views of sexuality of the Americas. And we have no choice but to try to peer through that fog to see what we're really seeing in the spirituality and in the sexuality of the ancient people. Not an easy task. And talking of religion, these statues,
when you go and visit them, they're extraordinary. They're out of the ground. You phrase it really interestingly in the book, you talk about how we have made them monuments. We have erected them out in the sun, and that is not how they were found. And this community buried all of these statues.
Why? Why do we think they did that? What was the function of creating these beautiful and often enormous works of art, and then putting them in?
the soil? Because the mother deserves it, because the mother is the one to tribute, and we were offering these symbols to her, because we have an obligation to her to tribute it. And in exchange, we get all what we get, you know, the water, the plants, all this beauty and bounty of the nature. And in exchange, we give them her tributes. And those are tributes, and those are what we call here in the indigenous language, pagamentos, payments.
Then we do it and acquire some responsibilities, because that's what we do. We give, but also we acquire responsibilities to take care of the environment, of nature. You know, it's an exchange deal. Not only, you know, we have these concepts. I don't like to use the word sacrifice, because it will take us somewhere else, but more offering, more giving.
Because we got this responsibility, and we got our mother to feed. Our mother needs to be feeding. It's very interesting when you walk with indigenous groups, with indigenous people, with indigenous paths, they're always giving things to the mother. A little rock, a little beans, a little bit of panela. You know, you walk with them, a little bit of panela for the mother, because that was the sense.
That's why it was underground. It wasn't above ground, because it wasn't made to give it to the sun or given to the winds. It was made to be given to the mother as the bones of the Pachamama, because the rocks, the stones, are the bones of the Pachamama, and you carve those bones and give it back to her. That's the way to do it. So, I'm burying it.
I'm burying it, and do what we did is just because we're applying our modern mind, and we believe in. these are pieces of art, these are monuments, and we need to see it. And now, just to think about the fact that they need to go back and recuperate their context, and their meaning. It's something crazy that we can even imagine to go and bury the statues back, but that would be the ideal thing. If we really want to recreate their intentions and their context, if we want to really preserve these things for the future and preserve the context and the meaning,
we have to bury them back. It's worth emphasizing, it's worth underlining, Emily, what you just said, which is so important, because even the people who come to our territory and visit, very few of them, even upon leaving, comprehend that all of the sculptures were placed under the ground by their makers. If you had walked around this area in the time of the Pueblo Escultor, you would have seen no sculptures at all. I don't make many friends among the institutionality by calling this archaeological park and other sites here, which I call them, which is, they are museums to the sacking of America. They're actually museums of ourselves, because we put them all up above the ground as monuments, which is what we somehow feel comfortable doing, instead of putting them under the ground where their creators placed them, so that people who come and visit today could actually be visiting a museum to the Pueblo Escultor and not a museum to the 20th century archaeologists, which is basically what we have now.
So you have to engage in a leap of imagination to visit the sites here and place all the things back underground in your imagination, if you want to be in contact with the world that was left by the Pueblo Escultor. It has to do with putting them all back under the ground again to reaffirm the payments that were made, the pagamentos that were made by the ancient people for very well-founded spiritual reasons that had to do with maintaining the harmony and the equilibrium of the medio ambiente that surrounds us. If anybody hasn't noticed, by the way, and I don't think there's anyone who hasn't noticed that the world right now is falling apart and the equilibrium is greatly broken today, and so this aim of putting them back into the ground wouldn't just be to recreate their original authenticity, it would be to reaffirm the spiritual proposition that was entailed by their creation and their burying in the ground. again. I'd love to briefly touch on the first.
people who pulled them out of the ground, who were not archaeologists, but who were huaqueros, tomb raiders.
And the huaqueros and their effect on the archaeology of Colombia in so many places.
has been so remarkable. I love to talk about huaqueros, because somebody taught them and somebody showed them why they had to huaquear and why they had to go underground, get the stuff, and sell it to somebody who wanted to buy it. And that's the origins of huaquería. Because before the invasion in Colombia, there wasn't that activity going on. Actually, indigenous groups like the NASA and Tierra Adentro, they don't do that.
They still don't do that. They believe that that stuff underground don't belong to them, it belongs to somebody else, and you have to leave it alone.
And the decision of the Banco de la República, the central bank, to buy archaeological gold, to what extent did that drive this kind of desperation to rip the earth open and actually break a lot of these statues? They were not in themselves deemed what was valuable during the first round of huaquería, of tomb raiding, because these people were looking for gold. So there are statues all over the park that have been broken, not by the millennia that they have been existent, but by men in the last couple of centuries. An interesting book by Simon Posada, which I would recommend to anybody who has a bit of Spanish, about huaqueros, but more particularly relating to gold. He actually talks also about this idea of taking the raw material from the earth, and of turning it into an art object, and of returning it to the earth as a form of tribute to Pachamama.
I think he's talking more specifically about slightly higher Andes than we are in San Agustín, but it's a really interesting book and it overlaps with a lot of these issues. The missingness of so much heritage in Colombia, not just lost during the huaqueros years.
How many statues that should be in San Agustín are not currently in San Agustín? Do we?
even know?
No one can know the answer to that question, because huaqueros takes place in the dark, behind the backs of institutionality, even if institutionality is often involved in it. It's a hidden thing, and the huaqueros around here, like anywhere else, is also a hidden thing. People who find riches, if they're motivated by avarice and by paranoia, they're not going to tell anybody about it. I personally, during the 80s and 90s, saw dozens and dozens of statues that had been unearthed and that were on their way out. They were being shipped to the black market, and what the black market means is rich people.
Rich people all around the world are the market for huaqueros, not poor Colombian campesinos who dig things up and sell them. It's the rich people who want them in every imaginable city in Colombia and in the rest of the world. That's the motor of the huaqueros. So what's going on is being driven by these modern-day market forces, and it makes it impossible to answer your question. If I have 500 and some statues in my register that I've seen and drawn, then, given the fact that, I mean, long before I came here, there was huaqueros for generations and generations, and now I've seen what I've seen during my decades.
here, there must be, certainly, conservatively, many hundreds of statues that were ripped out of the ground and disappeared from here, and rich people have them in their hidden collections that they only share with other rich and privileged people all around the world, and people like myself will never see any of those things, plus which we also ask the other question, how many of them are still in the ground? These are questions that we can ask, but we can't answer, but we can imagine that answer, once again, is quite a few. So if I saw 500, well, everyone can do their own math as to what they believe, but certainly the answer is many hundreds. Objects which are cultural heritage,
which are sacred, which are art, hidden in the collections of rich people is one thing, but there are also museums in Europe who brazenly display their objects that they have, and I want to talk about the Berlin Museum phenomenon, particularly, because that's a process that I know you guys are really involved in, and also because it's one where we might have calls for optimism in the return?
There's an estimated 35 statues from San Agustin currently.
in the Berlin Museum, is that right? Correct.
133 lithic objects. they have been identified, because besides the statues, there were other objects like tools, and also he broke a few statues, so as a whole is one, but you broke it, there are two objects. It's a sad story. Extraordinary. So how did those statues get to Berlin?
1913, Konrad Preuss came here, he first went to Mexico, and then in Mexico. he couldn't get stuff, because Mexico has been always ahead in legislations and protection for their archaeology, so he came to Colombia, of course, where things were a little looser, and he was a doctor, he was an ethnologist, and blue eyes, and very respectful from the government point of view, and the government didn't do much to stop him from being a huaquero, another huaquero with titles, but he did practice, actually the huaqueria, he excavated so many statues and so many elements in such a short time that he wouldn't call anything close to archaeology, it's more close to huaqueria, what he practiced, and in a few months he took those 35 statues and a lot of other objects, and can you imagine the travels and the odyssey of carrying the stuff from here, the Colombian massifs, to Barranquilla, eventually, a few years later, everything got to Barranquilla, and after the war he was able to leave the country and, little by little, send the stuff to.
Europe. He was a functionary of the museum, he himself came to America with the idea of enriching the museum, not enriching himself in mind, so there wasn't any transference, he was very happy to get them back and to install them in his museum. What has been, then, the process?
of repatriation? How did this process begin and where are we now? In 2012, when we published?
our book, you know, we decided that it was about time to start doing this uncomfortable pushing to our government of telling, come on, go, do your job, go and ask for our statues back, and you need to do your job, and ask the German people to give this stuff back, and that was the beginning in 2012,. and really we did a lot of pushing, we had done a lot of pushing, pressure from our community, pressure from legal, legal pressure with a judicial process, and also a global pressure, because this, really, this topic has been growing everywhere. we are asking, come on, let's decolonize these countries and let's try to give back what they need to get, their stuff, but it really nothing happened here in our country until this year, this year and last year, when the political will really aligned to our judicial win, because we are on a process, high court here, and they also support us, but the political will came with Petro, which I love it, because Petro is piedra, and he is a piedra, he really wants these piedras, and he really put their repatriation as a political fight, he called it the recovery of our identity, and at this point, every time he goes out, he brings pre-Colombian articles back to our country, the National Museum right now is full, they're renting the storage units to put all the stuff Petro has bringing back, telling us 600 elements have been repatriated, yeah, it's pretty amazing, it's the first time that something like that happens in Colombia. People who aren't familiar.
with what lies behind and below the major museums that they visit would barely give credence to their eyes were they able to see it, we've all seen museums, we've even seen vast museums like there are in England and in France and in other places, that you can't even see everything that they have displayed, but believe me, having seen what's in the storerooms of major museums, people would not believe it, it's beyond the bounds of credibility, anything that you see displayed, that item, they have 17 items just exactly like it down in their storerooms, maybe just a little less pretty, a little more dinged, but you know, the avarice to have things and have things and keep things and possess things is so strong that academia hasn't been able to resist it, and so they didn't come to America and steal one of something, they came to America and stole everything imaginable that they could get their hands on, and it's all sitting in storerooms around or underneath those major museums, so it's much more absurd than most people think when they just look at the vast collections and say, shouldn't this stuff be returned to the people from whom it was stolen? Well, not only is the answer to that yes, but there's a whole bunch more stuff that should go with it. All of the riches in these museums are the fruits of a really terrible era that we live through and that we try our best to forget, in which everything, not just from America, but from around the world, outside of the power core of these last few centuries, which is, say, Europe and North America, was stolen, everything that anyone could get their hands on was stolen, and it's all stuffed into museums in the United States and in Europe, and also the same thing goes on within countries. In Bogota, there are museums stuffed with things that were taken from all around the different corners of Colombia, so we've got this real problem that everything's been taken by those with powers, and it's not a stretch for me to think that, yes, it should all be returned, and fortunately, fortuitously, we've come to the age where we have amazing possibilities of exhibiting things. We have virtual possibilities, we have the possibilities of replicas, we have the possibilities of sharing without stealing and taking treasure to other places in the world.
So I think the people in Europe and North America should start to wrap their heads around the idea that all of these things need to be returned, not because we need to find a balance point, but because it was all stolen, it's not yours, and you can share in it, not by owning it, by possessing it, by keeping it from the people of those countries, but by sharing the information about it and the replication of it while returning these things that your forebears stole. I think it sounds like a stretch, but maybe in the future it won't be a stretch.
The debate has grown enormously. Just, I would say, in the last two, three years, there's now a really serious public debate. I'm from London. The British Museum has been at the centre of a lot of this, quite rightly. There's a very serious public debate about to what extent countries should still have these objects.
But the boards of these museums are very reluctant to give up, you know, a lot of the time the way they make money, but a lot of the time they justify their own existence also with these objects. So what's different about the Berlin case?
This case in Berlin started with our pressure, real, truly pressure, and then the judicial pressure. The Quimbaya collection also has a pressure, and it's moving, but the gold topic is another topic, because it's very, very difficult, that conversation with the Spaniards. But the Berlin process is ahead, and unfortunately the England process, it hasn't really even started. We wrote a couple of letters, because we do want that statue too. It has a horrible story, and it needs to be back.
But yeah, I know, I know, we have big challenges with England, but come on, the pressure is on, and things are changing, and they need to change, because the pressure just can go as a point, and then minds got to be changed, and things have to be changed, and I think it's an evolutionary process that is going to affect everywhere, and eventually.
things have to be restored. For whatever reasons, France and Germany have been the leaders of this process. The leaders of France and Germany, Merkel and Macron to begin with, have been, for whatever the reasons might be, the people who have understood that these calls from around the world to give back what you stole have to be addressed. They can't just be ignored generation after generation. The counter example is England and Spain.
England and Spain are holding the line and pretending that nothing ever happened, that everything was fine, that they're really doing a service to the people of the world, and whatever their arguments might be. It's also probably fair to say that the history in the 20th century of Germany, which we all understand how scarring it was for the Germans, let's say we can imagine how scarring it's been to the Germans, have given rise to generations of Germans with their eyes more open than others, who are able to look at this and say, look, here's another thing that the world is going to hate us for, and we can get ahead of the game here, and not have to be hated for what Preuss did a century ago.
So if there was historical guilt, you'd think the English would have some.
And yet, I don't see a lot of it around.
You would think the people from the United States might have some too.
What's next in Germany? How do we get these statues? on a boat, or a plane, however, statues?
travel these days? Well, this is a really great question, because we are trying to have this negotiation. Well, the government is having the diplomatic negotiations, but we are definitely with intention to keep our pressure, and what we have done in the last two years is to use art and culture to build our appropriation, local appropriation and pressure for the Germans and the government, our government. So we are trying to open in, to invite artists to participate, to participate, evoking the statues in Berlin, evoking this in different ways, with music, with art, with theater, with paintings, with drawings, going to schools, and talk to the children, and say, hey, come on, write a letter to these people, because they had our stuff, and maybe your voice is going to be here. So we're doing that, building that pressure with art and with cultural expressions to make our voice be here, and that's something that come out with very, very powerful, and with support in Berlin, in Germany, too.
It's a group of, lots of Colombians live in Europe, and there is a group of artists that want to do art, so some kind of art to make their voices be.
here. It's a really shocking situation, and it's an offensive situation for us here, of course, but German authorities have actually come here to our town to ask the question, does anybody here actually care about these things? I mean, do these things mean anything to anyone now, or is it just those couple weirdos who are saying that we should give these statues back? And so this idea that Marc is talking about, of art, and of convoking people to express how they feel, is a way of answering the German call to express whether these things matter to anybody or not. Now, it's really very much in the spirit of Conrad Preuss a century ago, who certainly must have come here, and as he was stealing these things, he must have said, nobody here cares about this stuff.
anyway. What does it matter? And so in a way, we can see that that spirit kind of lives on. A century later, these people, and by extension, the European museums, are kind of thinking, hey, it's a modern world there now. They all ride motorcycles now.
They all have jobs now. They all watch whatever it is they watch on television now. Maybe nobody cares about that stuff anymore, much like Conrad Preuss must have thought a century ago. And so our efforts, in a way, are to try to show, not just convince, but to show European people that each person in their own way, and this is what reflects that almost unlimited power of expression and creativity that we were talking about before, each person looks at these things in their own way now, but the fact that they matter to vast numbers of people around here is something that.
can be evidenced. It's fascinating. And again, not to continually rag on my own dear country, but there is ample evidence, for example, that the Parthenon statues, brackets, Elgin marbles, are much desired by the Greeks. We have numerous diplomatic incidents regarding those statues, and they just won't let up. There's not even the excuse of that question being in the air.
regarding the Parthenon statues. It's abundantly clear that they do matter. There are certain arguments which will be harder to win. The statue that's in the British Museum is in its digital.
catalogue, and I've looked it up. That's an important point that you're bringing up. If I may add my smearing of England just a little, I'll just smear it. Do you like putting jam on bread?
This is a really important case to us, in part because of what you just mentioned. The English are now trying to escape pressure by loaning it out to other countries. This statue is not just any statue. It's an important statue to us. They probably wouldn't recognize that.
But the story, just in case there's anyone listening to this story in England, I really want this to be understood. The English came here before Preuss. They came here in 1899 on what they called the British Museum. They gathered, which is to say stole, in my terms, a vast amount of stuff which unfortunately we will never know anything, because here's what the British did. They picked up that one statue.
It's very heavy, unlike most of the other stuff. They sent it via shipping on the Magdalena River, just like Preuss did 15 years later. They sent it up to the Caribbean coast and thus eventually got it shipped back to England. There it's been in the British Museum for more than a century. But everything else that they took, they took it over the Páramo, up above us here, over the mountains, down to the other side.
The Pacific Ocean's actually much closer. They got it to the Patia River. They loaded it on a boat in the Patia River, along with all their notes of their expedition, all their lists of what they'd stolen, and all the stolen stuff itself. They sent it on this boat, which promptly sank. The British Museum sank, took from here a huge lot, or a small lot, or a lot that we'll never even know of, items that had been put in the ground by the ancient people here as part of their spiritual conversation with the powers that be.
And they sunk it in the Patia River, never to be seen again, along with all their notes about their own expedition. So, because of that, the only thing that got back to England was this one statue bearing the sad story, let's say, in some hidden spiritual sense. Because of that, it's really essential that people in England get the word to their authorities that that statue should be an item of shame for England to have there, because it carries with it the story of this destruction that they carried out here, which has now been buried in history. But in some sense, still is painful. The fact that they now are using that statue to loan around to all different countries, to keep it trotting around the globe, if you consider its original spiritual value, that's even more painful.
The British, of course, like the Germans and like everyone else, they don't ever talk to anyone around here. They talk to governmental authorities. And really, that, if I may, that opens an even more important point. It's people from Bogota who are communicating and negotiating with the Germans. But those statues in Berlin, they're not from Bogota.
They're not from some upper elite class of functionaries and bureaucrats, who are the people that the Germans are talking to and who the English are not talking to. They were from here. They were from the people of this town. And so more important is the revolution in the validation of the claims of the people from communities and from ethnic groups, and from pueblos and from rural people who feel themselves to be the guardians of all around the world, I'm sure, of these items that are stolen. It's not just a question of their governments.
It's a question of now that we bring the things back, we need to empower local people to have a say in what the significance of these things is and what they will be in the future. It's a greater revolution than just returning things from museums. We can do lots of quite abstract discussions.
about ownership and heritage and justice, all of which are important, but fairly abstract. What are the effects of bringing an object back to where it should be for the people of that area?
We need to recreate the intention for which these things were made. We totally lost it, and we lost the context, and the archaeologists haven't really been paying attention to the intention of these objects when they were created. The real reason to me to bring the statues back is to do that, to recreate as much as possible with the tools. we have a place where they can be balanced, where they can be recreated, and we can evoke these ancient people with the tools we have. We have a few tools.
We can do it. We can do the best possible to respect these ancient people's will and try to evoke their meaning when they were doing it. So, in that sense, we can reimagine. Reimagination is what we want. to use, the word reimagination, because we need to reimagine every single thing and start thinking from the past to the present, but also understanding that these elements are alive, and they're connected with us, and the territory, and how we can reestablish that connection and that balance in a good way,
the best way we can do. There's another aspect to this question that has to do with the modern political reality that we live, which I think is equally important, or perhaps in some ways, in some modern ways, more important. Colombia, as you know well, has gone through an incredibly dark period. The world understands that Colombia has gone through a dark period of civil strife and violence that lasted almost all through the 20th century. The people who make it through the dark periods learn to stay out of the line of fire and shut up, and that, unfortunately, is very useful to the powers that be, because the powers that be, in every country, love a submissive, docile, shut-up population, because then they can just make their own decisions and not have to face the thorny problem of what the mass of the people of their country actually want for their own future.
So that's where we are in Colombia. We're in a situation where we're trying to learn to have voices again. All over country, all over Colombia, people are trying to learn how I can speak up and be a part of the Bali body politic without being in the line of fire, without being in personal danger. And so I think this whole effort that we're carrying on here in another way is an effort to try, those of us in our own local arena here, to raise our voices and have our voices be respected and have the experience of respectfully and intelligently using our voices and having effects come from them. That's why we need those statues to come back, because this effort has not come from the governmental authorities.
The governmental authorities have fought against it tooth and nail for more than a decade against our small group here. At the end of the day, we need to triumph, not just to have the statues back, but to look at each other and say, look, in peace and with intelligence, when we raise our voices, we can have an effect. We can now have an effect on many other things that might be more important than bringing statues back. That's another thing that's going on here, and that's one of the reasons why there's so much.
at stake in bringing these statues back. This is a long conversation. There's a lot to say and explore, but it's really wonderful that you put the eyes on this topic, that we really care, we as a community, because that's another thing that maybe we are trying to do too, and it's to place our voices in a level that we are connected with the territory, and we are connected in many different ways, not only physically connected, but also spiritually.
The language that's expressed in the statues might be opaque to us today, but that doesn't mean that in the future people with new insights are going to understand all kinds of new things. I kind of imagine myself sometimes as a little child, mostly blind, crawling around on the ground with some little blocks of wood, and I've noticed that these little blocks of woods happen to have some letters on them, and in playing with them enough, I've found that if you put some of these letters together, you can make a word, and it might be that my efforts are pretty pathetic. I've just learned a few words. Maybe I've even learned a phrase or two, but I consider that to be a worthwhile return for my efforts, because if I make a couple words, and there are many other people out there trying to put a couple words together about the ancient American knowledge, about the ancient American spirituality, if we in our generation make a few words and even learn a couple of phrases, the people who come after us are going to have a couple of phrases to work with, and they're going to be able to put a couple of phrases together, and someday they're going to say, look, here's an entire thought. Maybe that's a good use of this wonderful moment in the sun that we've been given.
I absolutely agree. Thank you guys so much for coming on. This has been completely fascinating.
Thank you, Emily.
I will link the book, the website, as many images as I'm allowed to on all our platforms online so that people can get access to even more of your amazing work. But for now, thank you so much for joining me. It's been amazing.
Thank you very much, and let us also give some kudos to your amazing work. You've been a discovery for us, and I'm really happy that you took the time to talk with us. Thank you.
Thank you.
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