Ed Barnhart

Barnhart recalls that at the University of Colorado Boulder he was introduced to the Maya in Payson Sheets’s class; as a freshman he spent his last hundred dollars to join a field school in Honduras, where he met his future mentor Linda Schele.⁠[1]

His involvement in MayaMayaMaya is a 3D modeling, animation, effects and rendering application now developed by Autodesk; first released by Alias|Wavefront in 1998, it is widely used by film, television and game studios.Open the full entry studies began in 1990 as an archaeological intern at the ruins of Copan, Honduras.⁠[2]

From 1992 to 1995 he studied art, iconography and epigraphy under Linda Schele at the University of Texas at Austin, while working across Texas as a contract archaeologist.⁠[3]

From 1994 he worked as a surveyor and UT field school instructor in the rainforest of northwestern Belize; after finding numerous small villages he discovered Ma’ax Na (“Monkey House”), a major Classic Maya center, and mapped more than 600 structures there between 1995 and 1997.⁠[2]

In January 1996 he returned to Copan to help a University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry excavation; he received his master’s degree that May and taught at Southwest Texas State University from September until 1998.⁠[3]

The first season of the Palenque Mapping Project, sponsored by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, ran from February to August 1998; the team surveyed the center and several surrounding groups with a Topcon EDM and found two uncarved fallen stelae, a small quarry and a canal system in Group J.⁠[4]

In 1999 he described the effort as the largest survey of Palenque since Franz Blom’s in 1923; 541 structures had been known before the project began, and by June 1999 the team had identified more than 750.⁠[5]

The project was completed in August 2000; over 18 months it recorded 1,478 structures across 220 hectares, compared with 329 on the previous 1983 map, and the new map, built from more than 24,500 data points, showed the city to be over four times more densely settled than previously understood.⁠[6]

In December 2001 he received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin with the dissertation The Palenque Mapping Project: Settlement and Urbanism at an Ancient Maya City, supervised by Brian Stross; it argues that Palenque had an extremely high settlement density and one of the most extensive public works systems the Maya ever built.⁠[7]

After graduating he and colleagues established the Maya Exploration Center to continue and share their research; it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to research and education on ancient civilizations of the Americas whose scope has since expanded beyond the Maya.⁠[8]

He also created a private company, Ancient Explorations, through which he runs public educational tours each year, and through Mayan Calendar, LLC he produces an annual wall calendar giving Maya dates.⁠[8]

With Alonso Mendez, Christopher Powell and Carol Karasik he wrote a paper recording four years of observations of sunlight patterns inside Palenque’s Temple of the Sun at solstices, equinoxes and zenith and nadir passages, and proposing that the temple’s proportions correspond to its astronomical alignments.⁠[9]

In January 2009 the Pennsylvania College of Technology announced that he would lecture there on February 9 on “December 23, 2012: The End of Maya Time?”, explaining how Maya calendars work and the hieroglyphic texts that discuss time continuing beyond 2012; he held that the date was significant but not apocalyptic.⁠[10]

Interviewed in February 2012 before a lecture at the Denver Art Museum, he said the Maya had left no doomsday prophecies and predicted that December 21, 2012, would pass like any other day.⁠[1]

In July 2014 Oxbow Books published Archaeoastronomy and the Maya, a 176-page volume he co-edited with Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos; he wrote the foreword and co-authored the chapter on the Temple of the Sun.⁠[11]

Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed, released in March 2015, comprises 48 half-hour lectures on Mesoamerican history and culture, focusing on the Maya and the Aztecs.⁠[12]

Lost Worlds of South America, a lecture series he recorded for The Great Courses, has 24 lectures on early South American cultures from the Andes to the desert and Amazon regions.⁠[13]

Recorded Books issued an audio edition in December 2015; Library Journal described the lecturer as a learned scholar with respect for the region’s diverse cultures.⁠[14]

In April 2018 he spoke at Minnesota State University, Mankato, on how the Tarascan empire resisted Aztec expansion and on his view that ancient Peruvians worshiped a single deity.⁠[15]

His course Ancient Civilizations of North America has 24 lectures covering sites such as Poverty Point, Cahokia and Chaco Canyon; its audio edition was released on Audible on June 22, 2018.⁠[16][17]

In 2020 he launched the ArchaeoEd podcast on the ancient civilizations of the Americas, with a new episode on the first of each month.⁠[18]

On September 30, 2024, he appeared on episode 446 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing lost civilizations, the first humans in the Americas, pyramids, shamanism, Graham HancockGraham HancockGraham Hancock is a British author and former journalist who since the 1990s has published books such as Fingerprints of the Gods arguing that a lost civilization existed at the end of the last Ice Age and was destroyed in a global cataclysm, and who presents the Netflix docuseries Ancient Apocalypse; archaeologists, including the Society for American Archaeology, have criticized the claim, and he has long publicly rebutted his critics.Open the full entry, the Maya calendar, flood myths, and the Aztec and Inca empires.⁠[19]

He states that in May 2024 he answered questions about the Maya for WIRED’s Tech Support series, a video viewed more than 2.6 million times.⁠[20]

His course The Olmecs: Mesoamerica’s Mysterious First Civilization has 12 lectures covering Olmec sites such as San Lorenzo and La Venta; its audio edition was released on Audible on July 21, 2025.⁠[21][22]

The Great Courses describes him as holding a PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and having led dozens of student groups through Mexico, Central America, South America, Southeast Asia and Europe.⁠[23]

He also released Exploring the Mayan World, an eight-episode travel series that takes viewers to Maya sites in Yucatán, beginning and ending in Mérida.⁠[24]

ArchaeoEd is produced at his home in Boulder, Colorado; he told the story of mapping Palenque in a ten-part series, and in October 2026 released season 8, episode 2, The Mixtecs.⁠[25]

Personal website: Public link: https://archaeoed.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@archaeoedpodcast (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Maya Exploration Center: Official website: https://www.mayaexploration.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]