Archaeologist Ed Barnhart has spent decades mapping ruins swallowed by jungle. On the Shawn Ryan Show, he tells a short story from a river trip in the Amazon that still seems to bother him. It is about a ruined town, a riverboat captain, and an explanation Barnhart himself calls "something strange."
Clip: Viral Podcast Shorts YouTube Short from the full source linked below.
Everything below comes from Barnhart's own telling in the Short. The captain's explanation is an anecdote passed along in conversation, not a documented history, and the clip treats it that way too.
Day three on the Black River
Barnhart sets the scene simply. It was "about day three going up the Black River" when the boat stopped at a ruined city. He describes "European brick-built houses and things," except that the houses had "trees coming out of them."
He says they walked down the street. That detail matters, because it means this was not a glimpse from the water. He was standing in it.
What the captain told him
The riverboat captain, Barnhart says, explained the place in two lines. "This was going to be Manaus," the captain told him. "And this was where the rubber industry started."
Then, by the captain's account, the jungle "just swallowed this place," and the people decided to "move down river to Manaus." In other words, the ruin was not Manaus itself. As the captain framed it, it was a settlement that might have become the big city before everyone left and went downstream.
The clip never gives the ruined town a name, and neither does Barnhart. He does not say how old the houses were, when people left, or how far upriver the stop was.
"They say it was ants"
Barnhart remembers asking the obvious question: "What ended it?"
The answer, he says, was "something strange." The captain told him, "they say it was ants." Barnhart recalls reacting with disbelief that ants could have taken over a whole city. "That's what he said to me," he adds, as if he still can't quite believe it either.
He doesn't present the ant story as proven. What he describes next is his own experience of the area: "the ants there are huge, and the army ants just swarm." Then comes the line that ends the Short: "that environment scared me, and I like the jungle."
Coming from someone whose career has been spent in rainforest ruins, that is an unusual admission.
The Manaus connection
The captain's story leans on a real city. Manaus is the capital of Brazil's Amazonas state, near the Rio Negro (the name means "black river" in Portuguese). As BBC Culture reports, it became known as the "Paris of the Tropics" during the late 19th-century rubber boom. Its Teatro Amazonas opera house opened in 1896. The boom collapsed once rubber plantations in Asia undercut the Amazon trade.
That history explains why a captain on the river might link old brick ruins to rubber money. It does not confirm his specific claims, though. The clip offers no evidence that this town was planned as Manaus or that rubber started there, and it offers none that ants drove people out. Barnhart repeats the story because it struck him as strange, and in the clip the captain is the only source for it.
Who is Ed Barnhart?
Dr. Edwin Barnhart directs the Maya Exploration Center. The center's staff page says he is a Fellow of the Explorers Club, discovered the Maya ruins of Ma'ax Na in Belize and directed the Palenque Mapping Project. The show's episode page describes the wider conversation as covering ancient civilizations and the use of LiDAR to find lost cities under the jungle.
Related reading
- Royce Williams on the 263 holes in his jet, from the Shawn Ryan Show
- Byron Boots on self-driving RC cars that learned to drift, from the Shawn Ryan Show
- Frank Wright's enlistment story, from the Shawn Ryan Show
FAQ
What did the riverboat captain tell Ed Barnhart?
That a ruined town of brick houses on the river "was going to be Manaus," that the rubber industry started there, and that the jungle swallowed it before people moved downriver to Manaus.
Did ants really take over an Amazon city?
That is the captain's account, passed on by Barnhart: "they say it was ants." The clip offers it as a strange anecdote, not as established history.
Is the abandoned city Manaus?
No. In the captain's telling, the ruin was meant to become Manaus, but people left and moved downriver to the city that exists today. The clip doesn't name the ruined town.
Why did the place scare Ed Barnhart?
He says the ants there are huge and army ants swarm, and that the environment scared him even though he likes the jungle.