La Corona Is Guatemala Home To A Lost Ancient City Quest For The Lost City Timeline YouTube 1

This stone is a crucial clue to a mystery from the jungles of Central America. Carved over a thousand years ago by the Maya, it was looted from a lost city sometime in the 20th century. Judging by the craftsmanship of the stone, the city it was taken from was a spectacular place. Perhaps rivaling even Tikal, the greatest capital of the Maya. For want of a name, they call this most lost of lost cities Site Q. Explorers have been trying to find it for over 30 years without success. It's somewhere in the jungle that stretches for hundreds of miles beyond the temples of Tikal. There could be hundreds of sites in this jungle and how would you know where to look? How do you know even where to start to look? From what we know of Site Q it's been very badly looted. Will there be anything left to actually identify it as Site Q? The quest for the lost city begins a world away from the jungles of Central America. Dr. Neil Brodie of Cambridge University, an expert on looting in the art world, is leader of the expedition in search of Site Q. Proof that Site Q exists emerged in the 1960s. As if from nowhere, an exquisite set of carved limestone panels appeared on the Western art market. From no known Mayan city, some were covered with enigmatic hieroglyphs. Others depicted players of the mysterious Mayan ball game. To experts, it was clear the panels had once fitted together, decorating a temple stairway. Bought separately by various private collectors and museums, the panels were soon dispersed around the world. This one is now in one of New York's leading museums. The most spectacular of all, depicting a ball player named as Red Turkey, is in the renowned Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. If Neil can find the origin of just one of the panels, he's found the origin of them all. By good fortune, this one panel was recently bequeathed by a private collector to the small Museum of the University of Maine. Neil is coming here because the museum's director, Dr. Stephen Whittington, is keen to help solve the Site Q mystery. These are some of the best executed glyphs on any monuments that you find in the Mayan area. Just imagine how wonderful these all must have looked when they were together in one place, at one site, all in their right positions. Can we possibly turn this over? The underneath of the panel reveals telltale evidence of the looters' handiwork. You can see that it was sliced off of something larger with some sort of saw. The saw blade was only a certain width, and so they could only go a certain distance into the monument from the sides, and then they left something sticking out of the back here, which then they had to come in with a chisel and cut through. The museum director is willing to allow a chip to be cut from his collection's greatest treasure, but only if Neil Brodie's team can bring back stone samples from a plausible location for Site Q. Then, scientific analysis might be able to show where the panel came from. Base cap for the expedition to find Site Q is Flores, near Tikal, the provincial capital of northern Guatemala that once lay at the heart of Mayan territory. Neil has never been to Guatemala before, and is not a Mayan specialist. So to help find Site Q, he's enlisted the help of Mayanist Simone Clifford Yeager and Guatemalan jungle guide Bernie Mittelstadt. The team has various leads to follow. The first is hidden in the catalogue of one of the art galleries that sold the Site Q panels. This was the original sale in 1965, where they first appeared on the market after having been looted. Somewhere in here we have Site Q sculptures, or some of them anyway. At that time in 1965, looting was a problem, but it wasn't really seen to be a problem in the way that it is today. Today, people actually tell lies about where looted material came from for various reasons. Back in 1965, there was no real reason to do that, and so when they come up for sale saying that, you know, they came from somewhere down the valley of the river, there isn't really a lot of reason to doubt that. I mean, that's a piece of evidence. Well, this is a bit of an adventure for me because I've not been to a jungle before. I've been to any jungle, let alone the Guatemalan jungle, so it'll obviously be an adventure. Hundreds of miles long, the Usumacinta River lies in one of Central America's least explored regions. Barely inhabited today, the jungle was once home to great cities in the time of the Maya. The ancient Maya are so interesting to me because they were so incredibly advanced with their times, yet it was all lost. I think it's really just kind of a great intrigue. I think we're going to need an immeasurable amount of luck to find Site Q. There are thousands of cities peppered around the rainforests, and any one of them could be Site Q, but you never know, we could be lucky. Going by what we know, we might assume that there's a site deep in the jungle, some big dealer in a town somewhere hears about it, funds a little expedition out to the site, digs a big hole in it, pulls out the panels, sells them on abroad, and some end up in North America, some disappear, who knows where they are. To try to find Site Q amongst the countless sites along the river, the team is traveling with Dr Nicholas Helmuth, an expert on Mayan art. He believes that Site Q is somewhere out here, though the looters have made it difficult to find the evidence. And now you can go out into sites where literally practically every single mound is gutted. The looters are better organized, they're better funded, and the other thing of course is that archaeologists have to go through their procedure. You can't just dynamite, you know, go through dynamiting buildings. Do you know what happens if archaeologists come across looters in action and they just kind of back off? So it's never happened to me, but I would, you know, say hello and, you know, be as pleasant as you can as you walk backwards, as fast as you can, because people have been killed, people have been shot. When they've got the material out, what do they do with it? I mean, do they trade drop down the river or does it go overland? Most archaeologists are not familiar with the nitty-gritty details because for reasons of public health, we don't want to inquire too deeply. Helmuth is taking the team to Yaxchilán, as the largest Mayan city in the area, its ruins have been well protected from looters. It retains the only known equivalent of the Site Q panels, an intact series of ballgame sculptures which show how Site Q itself may once have looked. Yes, this is exactly the way the explorers would have found it under this type of condition. It's about to get a monsoon here. We're now in the heart of the city and we know we're in the center because the ballcourt is here and the ballcourt was the focal point of Maya civilization, so it's appropriate to be in the middle of the city and all around spectators, thousands and thousands of people would have watched the game taking place here. The game was played with a rubber ball and you would get off and get down on your knee because you had to anchor yourself against the ball, or if you couldn't get down, you had padding here and you weren't allowed to use your fingers. You would try to get it like that and we know this because we have paintings and sculptures showing the game being played. Who played the game? There would have been athletes playing it for just the fun of the sport, but there were other games that were staged as a drama, an actual scripted drama, where the king of the local city would play basically the former enemies who had been captured in battle. They would be dragged back to the city and the king would come out in all his ballgame regalia and he would play them and they would lose and then they would be executed. Merely being decapitated is actually relatively quick and painless compared to some of the other rituals these people did. One such victim of Yaxchilan's great ruler, King Bird Jaguar, was ritually sacrificed here following a ball game on October the 21st, 744 AD. Helmuth believes the style of the sculptures recording the event is a vital clue to the location of Site Q. This is it. There's the row of stones, individual stones, one after the other, just as we imagine the Site Q looked like a thousand years ago. I mean, the iconography on this panel, it's reminiscent of the Chicago panel, isn't it? On the Chicago panel we have Red Turkey, who's one of the ball players, and we have the stairs on the Chicago panel also. Notice how hard the stone is, and that's a characteristic of the entire Usumacinta area. That's why the detail of the hieroglyphs, look at the detail of the clothing. There's his knee pads, he's down on a concrete floor, and there's his outfit. You can even tell it's tied on, that's actually the tie that ties that on. And this detail is only available in this region, because stones in other regions, the stone breaks apart and the detail is lost. The style of the hieroglyphs, the hard stone, the detail, suggests that the Site Q stones had to have come from the river. You don't get this style elsewhere. Within a mile or two of either side of the river in this area, it won't be anywhere else. Although Helmuth is convinced the Site Q panels were looted from somewhere down the Usumacinta, he's got no specific idea of where to look. Since the river is hundreds of miles long, and the jungle is full of ruins, it's a problem to know where to start. But a new day brings a ray of hope. A villager in a tiny settlement called La Tecnica has recently discovered a lost city. It's not much of a lead, but they don't have any better ones to follow. There's just a remote chance the new discovery could be Site Q. An impressive carved stone found there has been brought to the village for safekeeping. English, English. He's kind of drunk, so it's all a bit. He said he can't tell us anything concrete. It's obvious he doesn't want to get into trouble for having it. Trying to get to see the sculpture brings home the frustrations that bedevil the search for Site Q. The stone has been successfully hidden from looters, but no one else is being allowed to see He's basically trying to be very, he's saying it could be small, it could be big. We don't know, there's an infinite number of possibilities. You know, the actual monument is here in this building. It's apparently behind that door, that locked door over there. So in effect, what we're looking for is right here. The guy that's got the key or the permission isn't here, he's out in his house. Rebuffed at the village and with no time to investigate every site along the river, the team still hope to put the Usumacinta theory to the test. Scientists can now pinpoint where the two stones come from the same place. But these samples are only bedrock and are unlikely to persuade the museum director in Maine to allow a chip to be cut from his Site Q panel. Neil and Simone's investigation now needs to head in another direction. They decide to pick the brains of a colleague Simone used to excavate with, American archaeologist Dr Richard Hansen. He's working on a Mayan tomb, drawing on years of experience of trying to make sense of sites ravaged by looters. Hey Richard, you guys finally found us. How are you? I'm really good, how are you? Great. Nice to see you. Good to see you. Oh dear. Putting that down on us. Good to see you. Hi, I'm Neil Brody. Richard Hansen. Neil, how are you? Great. Looks like a deep one. It is, they went down this, you know, broke through a floor right here and down through there. They just massacred it. But they didn't find anything, no tomb, just damaged the building. Any idea when it was looted? I'd say we're probably looking at 15 to 20 years since this building was looted. A cultural monument created by human beings thousands of years ago and ending up. A pile of rubble. What we're here for, we're on a related quest really, we're looking for Site Q. Site Q is a great problem. That's a wonderful problem. Site Q is something that's been puzzling everybody for about 20, 30 years now. Yeah. I've got this map here. I mean, do you have any ideas of your own where we might find Site Q? The problem in this area here, there's sites that we have no record or knowledge of. We need more archaeologists in the area actually doing the groundwork and exploring and discovering these things and recording the kind of damage where it comes from. We can say without a doubt that the Site Q panels didn't come from this building. You know, I know that. That's one of the things we can't eliminate. So as you do that research and we do the analysis, we know what's possible and what's not possible as far as the potential Site Q. Wherever the site is, the panels came from extensive excavations, extensive looting, and that's why we need to study the looting. It's a tragedy of unprecedented proportions to have these extracted from their context. Richard Hansen knows of a lost city called La Corona, which was recently discovered in a remote and virtually trackless jungle far from the Ussama Center. Already there are claims it could be Site Q. At last, the team have a specific site to investigate, if they can get there. It's important to find Site Q. We need to know where it is on the ground because we want to recreate Mayan history. Can you imagine trying to recreate European history in the future if we didn't know where Berlin, Paris and London were? And it's the same now with the Maya. We need to know where Site Q was. Until recently, Mayan writing seemed to be an uncrackable code. Even today, only a handful of experts can decipher the glyphs on the Site Q panels. In 1997, when Harvard professor David Stewart trekked to the lost city of La Corona, he became the first person in over a thousand years to read the writing on its stones. A single glyph he saw there may hold the key to the Site Q mystery. The afternoon that I arrived at La Corona for the first time, as we were walking along the trail, we came upon a monument that had been sawn by looters. I leaned down and I looked at this inscription on this monument and I saw a name, a hieroglyph that jumped out at me and it was the name Red Turkey. When I saw the name Red Turkey, I just exclaimed and despite being covered in sweat, dirty, muddy, bug-bitten, I was ecstatic because it was a signal. Even before we had arrived at La Corona, that this may be the place, this may be the Site Q that we had been looking for. Stewart was excited because the name Red Turkey is known from only one other Mayan inscription. It's the name of the ball player on the Site Q panel in the Art Institute of Chicago. Well, Red Turkey's name wasn't the only clue. As we continued our explorations and we came across the big plaza there, we realized that the looters had been messing around with a very low building that seemed to have had a staircase. Just the state of exhaustion we were in, or at least I was in, I didn't think about the possibility of maybe taking a sample of the stone near that possible stairway and maybe comparing it to Site Q blocks we know from collections. We also didn't have permission to do that, but I had always wanted to get that sample. The Guatemalan government has now granted permission for Neil and Simone to sample the stones at La Corona. An official archaeologist, Sergio Eric Castilla, has been sent with a map of the site from David Stewart. How you doing? Fine, this is Neil Brody. Okay, nice meeting you. How was your journey? Oh well, pretty good. I got the drawings that Stewart sent you. Oh great, the package is great. I've been waiting for this. Do you have some help for Neil? Yeah, I hope so, anyway. It's the only existing map. Ah, that's the ruinas de la Corona, mosquito infested lagoons. Yeah, this is obviously the main area with the plaza and stuff. Maybe these were like residential buildings or who knows. They'll be covered in jungle as well, this one says. Then he has this and these are fragments they found at La Corona with the red turkey glyph. The journey to La Corona will be tough. The team may have a map of the site, but how to get there? It's in barely charted jungle, home only to a few hardy forest dwellers known as Chicleros. The team's guide, Bernie Mittelstedt, seizes a gap in the weather to head for La Corona. It's a bit discomforting to find on this large-scale map of the area. It's just unrelieved green. There's no roads, no settlements, no nothing. So we've heard from Bernie. He knows a lady who knows some Chicleros who actually know where La Corona is and may be prepared to guide us there. I'm very excited about going to La Corona. It's a place where very few people have been before, only some local gum cutters and David Stewart. It's in the deepest, darkest jungle, so who knows what we're going to find. La Corona lies 60 miles to the northeast of the Usumacinta River. After taking 12 hours to cover 150 miles from Flores, the team reaches the last settlement before they must penetrate uninhabited territory. We are in Huachatón, a tiny village in the middle of the jungle. This is the last frontier. Tiny place, no more than 600 people. But from 1950 to 1980, you can reach the town only by plane. There's no road connecting to any other place. Before the road was built, the village airstrip was used for secretly flying out looted Mayan antiquities. The official cargo was chicle, or chewing gum. Today the local chicle contractor is Neria Herrera. It's the first resin straight from the chicle, the base gum, and she says it hasn't got any flavor when you taste it at all. No smell, it's just chewy. Yeah, the chicle trees are spread all around the Petén Jungle. Chicleros have to go and look for them, go right through the jungle. And that's the reason they discover new places. The chicleros work really hard and, you know, comparatively they don't earn very much money. And when you compare it to how much they can earn by picking up, you know, looting, digging a trench, picking up some polychrome pots and selling them on, it's just no contest really. Neria's museum exhibits artworks that were discarded by looters as not being worth their while to send abroad for sale. So a lot of this was left behind by looters or, you know, yeah. Is it like the leftovers? Yeah. For the looting. That's incredible. If the Site Q sculptures came from La Corona, there's every chance they were flown out of this village by the looters. Neria Herrera agrees to display pictures of the panels in case any of the locals know anything. Lots of people come and go, chicleros, that might have some information and might know where these stones come from. And they'll know of a name that isn't just Site Q but actually a name, whether it be La Corona or somewhere else. Bernie has never been to La Corona before. Neria has given directions to find the Catalan brothers, two chicleros who know the way to La Corona. They came across it whilst collecting chewing gum. Without their local knowledge, the team don't stand a chance of finding their way there. He's warning us about the rain and the mosquitoes. And they know the site, they know it well and how to get there. They know exactly the place. So we're not going to get lost in the jungle. No, they've never been lost. These people are amazing. It's like a massive pancake batter. The recent heavy rain has Bernie worried. Even if the vehicles manage to make it through the mud, in a few days' time they may not make it back. If the raining starts, we have more problems with softer mud and we have more slippery road and, like, I don't know what's ahead. I'm sure we'll get there in the end. I'd take a few days longer than we thought. The four-wheel drives have got as far as they can. From here on in, the team will have to walk to La Corona. But it's getting late. On the final stretch of the journey to La Corona, Bernie and the rest of the team must depend heavily on the Catalan brothers. For the next part of the trip, follow, especially from Mariano, any advice around some trees because there's some poison tree. The insects are very, very nasty. You have some vipers here. And the problem is keep your eyes on the ground because the vipers, especially ferdelans, and in Maya the name is chalpat, are more or less the same snake, are very aggressive and looks exactly the same colour of the ground. The size doesn't matter. They kill you if it's two feet long than a metre long. We're moving along here along what people have shown me is a mule track. I'm not too convinced myself. But if SiteQ does lie at the end of this track, the SiteQ panels must have come out along this track on the back of mules. So it wasn't just a case of petty pilfering. It must have been pretty organised. Well, it's not surprising really that no one's found SiteQ before. I mean, we've been going for about two hours now and it's just been jungle, jungle, more jungle. We're not too sure how much further we have to go. Just hope we don't walk straight past us. No wonder La Corona stayed lost so long. If the Chiclero guides didn't say this was it, the team would never have guessed. It's hard to believe that we're actually in an archaeological site because it looks exactly the same as all the rest of the jungle. After a day of foot slogging, La Corona seems a long way from the comforts of Cambridge. Only the prospect that it might be SiteQ makes the hardships seem worthwhile. It would be fantastic if we could conclusively prove that the SiteQ panels came from La Corona and I guess it would give us some kind of notoriety in archaeological circles. Day two at La Corona. Thanks to their map, the team has some chance of finding the inscribed stone which suggests this may be the fabled lost city of the Maya, SiteQ. So the reason we're here is because David Stewart identified a glyph on this stele right here, which is the same as the glyph on the Chicago panel which identifies the ball player as a guy called Red Turkey. So I think we should go and have a look at that. It's kind of funny to think we walked straight past it and we didn't even notice it. Everything's just completely covered in jungle. According to the map, Red Turkey's stone or stela lies en route to La Corona's main plaza. Apparently only fragments remain after the best part of the stela was cut up and carried off by looters. You can see the glyphs over there. Oh, look at this. Look at here. Wow, there's four glyphs here and another one here. Do you think we'll be able to find the Red Turkey glyph on this? It's so covered with lichen, it's difficult. After more than a thousand years, the Maya glyphs have almost worn away. Move a little bit, you see the bill of the turkey here in the shade? Here, it's the bill. This is the Chicago panel. This glyph right there. Yeah, here's the glyph. Well, this glyph could be anything to me. So it's amazing to think that Dave Stewart came all the way through this jungle and found this one stone which is literally a needle in a very large haystack and then found the glyph of Red Turkey on it. And we reckon the rest of this will have been removed by the robbers. Or is inside. Because this one looks like they pull it out from the looter trench. Shall we go and have a look in the actual trench then? Okay. See how high it is here? It's about the size of a mountain here, isn't it? Shows something. Well, it's gone down about six feet. Probably the profile of the building here. The depth of the trench shows the scale of the looters' work. There's so little left, it's difficult to imagine what the city looked like in Mayan times. They destroy everything, all the evidence. Well, you can see here they've got entire floors here which have been, you know, each floor would contain a history, wouldn't it? Exactly. How they excavated, you'd be able to find out what people have been doing there, what this was used for. Dates. The construction sequence. Yeah, it's just been smashed through. Somewhere, deeper still in the jungle, lies the plaza, the central square where a ceremonial staircase may have stood. And if this is Site Q, it would have been decorated with the mysterious ball player panels. It's probably this one. We just came around the back of it. Uh-huh, we are. We're actually in the middle of the plaza. We are in a corner of the plaza. But you can't see a thing. Finally, huh? It's here. What's up behind it? It's this huge temple on the top here. You think it's some view from the top? Watch here. With luck, from the top of the pyramid, there'll be a vantage point and a chance for the team to get their bearings. Wow. My god, they've completely gutted it. And they cut completely the structure. Just chopped it right in half. But the view from the temple pyramid reveals no ceremonial staircase, just total destruction. It's probably a whole team just camped out here. For a while. Yeah. Weeks of work. Especially what they find inside. Yeah, who knows? It's a frustrating end to a long day. The team spirits sink with the sun. Horrible. I just had a pretty horrible day. You did. What happened? Thousands of mosquitoes. Millions. They're everywhere, I think. Ah, but they liked us. Yeah. They like us. Yes, we're very popular with them. A little bit, but was it worth it? Yeah, we couldn't really see much. But we didn't find any particularly useful information regarding the Psyche Cube sculptures. And then we're going to go out again tomorrow and, fortunately, brave the jungle for a second time. It's the problem with looted material though, because all you find is big holes in the ground. Really? Yes, I mean, you have your pieces and you think, where did that come from? And you think it's like a jigsaw. You think you can bring the piece back to where it came from and fit it in, and you solve the problem. But you don't, all you find is a big hole in the ground. Eager to find out how looters operate, Neil questions the Chicleros. So, in this area, most of the looting, is it carried out by the Chicleros, or is it all the more organized groups? No. He says, basically, it's organized groups. And how many, I mean, we've been out there today. We saw those big trenches. I mean, how many people do you think it would take to dig those trenches? 15 to 20 days of work, three or four people. They're so far out in the jungle here that even if it was only two or three men working, they could work solidly for a month and nobody would bother them. No one would even know they were here. Exactly. Day three at La Corona. The team head for the plaza again, determined that this time they will find the staircase where the Site Q panels may have come from. Beautiful baby. Yeah, he's beautiful. He's not poisonous? No. I don't think so. Would you take a photo of him and me? Is he in my face? Oh my god, he's somewhere. That's a nice. Incredible to think this was once a city center. Where are we now? We are in this position. If we are right, we are entering somewhere here. Probably we are here or here. So which way are we off now? This is the one we want to go, fine. You are going this direction? It's north. No, this is north. North is on the map, it's right here. And we're heading for this mound here. This one? Yeah, because that's... It's over there. Yeah, that's where David Stewart reckons the staircase is. Ah, okay. The panels might have come from. This is what the team has come all this way for. If they can locate David Stewart's staircase, they'll be able to take a sample of stone and perhaps compare it later to the Site Q panel in Maine. Isn't it? It's not very impressive, is it? It's not what I thought, no. There must be a big hive around here. Look at the blocks. I have to say, the way we find it today, it's pretty hard to imagine that this was once a hieroglyphic stairway. Yeah, it doesn't look like it. Just a big pile of dirt and rubble. David Stewart thought that the actual ball player panels would be a centrepiece at the top of the staircase. And then to each side, you'd have the glyphic panels arranged, so you get a complete run of the carved panels at the top of the staircase, which came down. I mean, these carved pieces look the right dimensions. 430. Neil compares the stone's measurements to those of the panel in Maine. The Maine one was 440 millimetres by 266. This is 430 by 250. That's a pretty good match, isn't it, really? I'd say. But the real test is going to be in the sampling. By special permission of the Guatemalan government, a stone sample from what could be the source of the Site Q sculptures is at last on its way for scientific analysis. With the expedition's mission accomplished, Bernie is impatient to escape the jungle before it rains again. The last day in Guatemala. In a final effort to pinpoint Site Q, the team returns to Tikal to take more stone samples from an archaeological warehouse. The sculptures kept here were rescued from various remote sites to protect them from looters. It's an ideal place to sample stones from a wide variety of sites. The Guatemalan authorities hope tests will allow Neil and Simone to locate Site Q at last. Now that the team has successfully gathered so many samples, the museum director in Maine has agreed to allow a section to be cut from the Site Q panel. It's an unprecedented step. For the first time ever, the sample from Site Q is available for analysis. It could crack a mystery that has endured for over 30 years. One month later, the stone analysis has produced exciting results. To hear the news, David Stewart has flown the Atlantic. These are the three sets of samples we took. These were taken in La Corona, these were taken in the warehouse at Tikal, and these were taken around the Usumacinta River area. The samples were compared to the Site Q panel in Maine by geologists at Manchester University. At 50 times magnification, the pattern of grains within the Site Q panel looks like this. None of the samples from the storehouse at Tikal match the Site Q panel. Nor do any of the samples the team brought back from the Usumacinta River. I would say, well, I don't really think it's the Usumacinta River area. I don't really think it's over by Tikal. I think, you know, La Corona, we're in that area. I think I'd be happy with that. Four stone samples were taken from different areas of La Corona. Three differ significantly from the Site Q panel in Maine. But one is a close match. Remarkably, it comes from the very stone Well, the results of the testing the stone and the chemistry of the stone are, for me, really exciting. Before taking the stone samples, I was willing to bet that Site Q was 95% sure to be La Corona. I felt there was enough evidence from the hieroglyphs at La Corona that linked to the text from Site Q to really make that more than just a good possibility. Now, bringing together all of this evidence makes me virtually certain, personally, that La Corona is Site Q.