By Susan Hutchinson on 12/23/2011 02:52 PM
Mayan people inhabited the Georgia mountains near Blairsville, Ga., according to Richard Thornton, a professional architect and self-styled Native American historian.
Thanks to Thornton, his story of the discovery of Mayan ruins in Northern Georgia has been circulating on the Internet. But is it true?
This week, Thorton posted his story headlined
"Massive 1,100+ year old Maya site discovered in Georgia's mountains" in The Examiner.com:
Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times...
The name of Brasstown Bald Mountain is itself, strong evidence of a Maya presence. A Cherokee village near the mountain was named Itsa-ye, when Protestant missionaries arrived in the 1820s. The missionaries mistranslated “Itsaye” to mean “brass.” They added “town” and soon the village was known as Brasstown. Itsa-ye, when translated into English, means “Place of the Itza (Maya)...
Those with experiences at Maya town sites instantly recognized that the Track Rock stone structures were identical in form to numerous agricultural terrace sites in Chiapas, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. Johannes Loubser’s radiocarbon dates exactly matched the diaspora from the Maya lands and the sudden appearance of large towns with Mesoamerican characteristics in Georgia, Alabama and southeastern Tennessee. Track Rock Gap was the “missing link” that archaeologists and architects had been seeking since 1841...”
Thornton's ideas generated scorn from Mark Williams, a geologist with the University of Georgia who led a group studying the site in question. Williams
reacted this week, saying, “The Maya connection to legitimate Georgia archaeology is a wild and unsubstantiated guess on the part of the Thornton fellow. No archaeologists will defend this flight of fancy.”
A peer-reviewed journal
Early Georgia, published a
paper in Spring 2010 by Johannes (Jannie) Loubser (Stratum Unlimited, LLC) and Douglas Frink (Worcester State College) which details excavations done on the site, which were halted as soon as grave sites were discovered, the holes filled and the rocks replaced in accordance with current federal guidelines. This paper makes no clear assertion on the origin of the stone piles, aside from dating them "almost certainly prehistoric." There was (at that time) no clear answer on the builders of the structures.
UGA scientist Dr. B. T. Thomas of the Department of Environmental Science was more supportive when contacted for a
Rawstory.com article. Thomas indicated that, "while it is unlikely that the Mayan people migrated en masse from Central America to settle in what is now the United States, he refused to characterize Thornton’s conclusions as 'wrong,' stating that it is entirely possible that some Mayans and their descendants migrated north, bringing Mayan building and agricultural techniques to the Southeastern U.S. as they integrated with the existing indigenous people there."
Thornton's book on Archaeological Site 9UN367 describes what he sees as evidence of the immigration of Mesoamerican refugees to North America. The book, entitled,
Itsapa . . . the Itza Mayas in North America. will be available in early January 2012. Meanwhile, Amazon.com carries
Thornton's "Ancient Roots" series.
Read the full article
*************************************************************
My two cents is - I would not be at all surprised.
The people who became the Maya came from SOMEWHERE, after all. According to current prevailing theories, they came across the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age and travelled by foot, OR they came by boat - take your pick on current speculation: they came from Siberia following ice-floes and travelled all the way down the coast of North America to Central America and/or to South America, OR they came by boat from Japan or thereabouts and ended up in Peru and travelled around from there, OR they came from Europe and landed in the southeastern United States or - ???.
By whatever means of travel the people whose descendants became the Maya eventually got to where they got, I don't think it's beyind comprehension to think that they must have had some legends and stories about their where they came from. Has anyone really paid any attention to them? I'm pretty sure we still don't know as much as we think we know!
How's this for a working theory: The Maya knew all about the lands to the north -- the southwest US, Texas and the southeast. Why would some of them have travelled there? Who knows. Why does man travel anywhere? If there are not any compelling reasons that we can identify such as DROUGHT, CLIMATE CHANGE, WAR, NATURAL DISASTERS, OVERPOPULATION, etc etc., then it comes down to Itchy Feet. We've got a bug to explore, to discover, and sooner or later it bursts out and we just - go.
Isn't it time academia took off its blinders and acknowledged that "ordinary" people (uneducated by their lights) have a hell of a lot of information available at their fingertips these days, and make use of it to pursue their interests!
Maybe your reaction is due to other incidents of premature dismissal of unorthodox theories from established academics, but your aspersions here on academia appear unwarranted since the negative reaction is mainly from Mark Williams, though that researcher does appear to be respected among his peers and has a personal stake in the evidence pertaining to this theory.
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing is bunk and Mark Williams is very well respected in our field. This is about as much evidence for Mayans in Georgia as there is for aliens in ancient Egypt on the show Ancient Aliens on the History channel.
ReplyDeleteI'm perfectly willing to believe that a site was found in Georgia, but it seems much more likely that it belonged to the Mississippian culture rather than the Mayans. They had a sophisticates society with large cities, and inhabited Georgia during the period in question. What's more, they were known for building stepped pyramids that at first glance look very much like Mayan structures.
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year! It seems obvious that there is SOMETHING on that mound in Georgia, and it has nothing to do with little green or grey people with slanty eyes illegally immigrating from other planets.
ReplyDeleteI don't know anything about the Mississippian Culture. Did they build structures similar to the Maya (that most people think of when they here the term) approximately 1100 years ago? My memory isn't so good anymore, but I confess to not having heard of any North American culture that actually built anything resembling a step pyramid. If the Mississippian culture did this, can you please point me in the right direction with a link or two?
I'm not round read on the subject by any means; what knowledge I have is about mounds built by various Native American cultures that were extremely sophisticated,but are distinctly different from Mayan architecture.
If I were an archaeologist or anthropologist, I would not be so hasty to throw dirt on a new hypothesis and evidence put forward that purports to support it. Are we really so SURE about anything, after all, when it comes to the peopling of America? I think not. It wasn't so long ago that Clovis was thought to be the end-all and be-all for the FIRST evidence of man in the new world. THAT conclusion turned out to be wrong.
And so it goes. I think it will be very interesting to see what crops up over the next 30 years, as DNA studies are refined and new studies are undertaken, and old digs are revisited with "new eyes" and new technology. I certainly intend to live at least that much longer, and if this blog is still going then I'll be going "nanny nanny booo booo" to the researchers who thought they had a "definitive" answer to -- anything.