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.