Preliminary Initial Report on the 2004 A.R.E. Piedras Negras' Expedition

by Dr. Greg Little

On April 19, 2004 my wife Lora and I left for Guatemala on an officially sanctioned A.R.E.-sponsored expedition to Piedras Negras, Guatemala, the site of Edgar Cayce's third Hall of Records. The book, the "Lost Hall of Records," by John Van Auken and Lora Little contains background on the site as well as the background from the Cayce readings, which indicated that Piedras Negras was the location of an Atlantean Hall of Records placed there around 10,000 B.C. We returned to Memphis on April 29.

The major written reports on our findings will be published in the ARE newsletter "Ancient Mysteries" in September 2004 and also in a "Venture Inward" article. Lora is writing both of those reports. In addition, we will be presenting our findings at the annual Ancient Mysteries conference at Virginia Beach on October 22-24. At the conference we will show a brief 20-minute video presentation (on DVD) of the expedition and make a longer DVD available. These venues will present the most important findings from the expedition and only a brief summary will be presented here.

Summary

We began at Guatemala City and visited the National Archaeological Museum. Before arrival we had paid a $1020 fee to videotape at the museum and also obtain a license to produce a documentary using footage from the museum and at Piedras Negras. Making film for public showing (or mass media) is illegal without obtaining such a permit. We noticed a few people (Americans, unfortunately) in tour groups at the museum sneaking some video shots of some things, but the museum staff and the government are strict. The museum staff we very helpful and appreciative of our efforts to conform to their laws and regulations.

At the museum we spent the day with a Guatemalan archaeologist who has done extensive work at Piedras Negras. He was amazingly open and not only answered all our questions, but he gave us details of all the most recent digs at Piedras Negras as well as revealing the ideas and hypotheses held by various archaeologists who have an inordinate interest in Piedras Negras. In brief, archaeologists appear to believe that Piedras Negras conceals something very important and perhaps astonishing. In addition, while April 2004 has seen numerous sensationalized media reports detailing archaeological finds in the Maya lands, the most intriguing and important finds, made at a site in Guatemala's Peten Region,have been undisclosed. These discoveries show that the Maya were in the region far earlier than previously believed. Archaeologists fear that looters would destroy the site, so no information has been released to the media. In addition, at the museum we viewed and filmed a series of incredible artifacts that have been recovered from Piedras Negras.

Another interesting "find" at the museum related to an artifact that was recovered at Uxmal back in the 1800s. In the late 1800s, the Bureau of Ethnology reported on the discovery of a "Star of David" engraved on what has been assumed to be a sun disk at Uxmal. But no other similar finds had supposedly been made, so the artifact was essentially "forgotten" and pushed out of mind by mainstream archaeologists. However, on display in the museum is another Star of David that was recovered in Tikal a few years ago. The intricate engraving is on a circular shell. It is quite impressive.

One other interesting "discovery" at the museum is noteworthy. Over 70 years ago Edgar Cayce stated that the first people in South America entered the continent from the "South Pacific" as long ago as 50,000 B.C. American archaeologists have long held that such ideas are preposterous and impossible and our book "Ancient South America" relates the differences between the beliefs of North and South American archaeologists. An educational display in the Guatemala museum shows the first people entering the Americas from the South Pacific—just as Cayce stated. After viewing hundreds of such displays in North American museums (still depicting the "First Americans" entering from Siberia in 9500 B.C.) the "official" Guatemalan archaeological display seems to show they are more interested in discovering the truth about ancient America than maintaining academic dogma.

To Flores, Tikal, & Piedras Negras

We utilized "Maya Expeditions" as our "travel agency" to make the arrangements for our trip and serve as guides. The staff of Maya Expeditions (aka Copper Canyon Adventures) had also accompanied Scott Milburn on his brief, ARE-funded trip to Piedras Negras in the late 1990s, as well as on a brief tour Scott and a group of ARE members took there a few years ago.

From Guatemala City we flew to Flores and visited nearby Tikal. From there, we went by car on a 4-hour drive over rugged roads to the Usumacinta River. Rainforest jungle is being burned almost everywhere and the smoke from the fires fills the sky. At the river, we took a 5-hour ride on a small boat down the river to Piedras Negras. Five others accompanied us on the boat: 2 guides from Maya Expeditions, a boat captain, a boat helper, and a cook. We were dropped off at the main entrance to the site with the two guides while the others went about two more miles downstream to make camp. For the next six exhausting hours, we walked through the densely covered ruins examining numerous structures as well as familiarizing ourselves with the massive layout of the city. We walked several miles out of the site through jungle arriving at our riverside campsite only 45 minutes before dark.

We spent the next two exhausting days combing the many areas of the site briefly investigating a gigantic, dry cenote with walls several hundred feet deep. It was discovered less than three years ago via satellite imaging. We crawled around the steep sides of the site's main Acropolis (the apex of the mountain covered with stone buildings and pyramids) looking for a collapsed building, which we believed could have the remains of older buildings under its ruins. Our guides had never been to that area of Piedras Negras, a location where few people have visited, and no excavations have ever occurred there. We actually found the collapsed stone building, and moving several stone blocks from an area of the structure revealed older structures beneath it. As I removed layers of stones, I counted three distinct building layers before I encountered a much older structure with stones that I couldn't move. We suspect that this building hides an entrance into a tunnel and chambers deep within the mountain...and our conversation with the Guatemalan archaeologist revealed that he, and other archaeologists, believe the same thing.

We made a careful look at one of the most enigmatic pyramids at Piedras Negras, a structure seldom visited by those few who make the trek to the site—it is simply too difficult to get to and has had little attention—until very recently. Based on something we were told by the Guatemalan archaeologist about the pyramid we subsequently found solid evidence that a tunnel or cave system is present at Piedras Negras. This was a sensational find, and we believe that the ARE could play a pivotal role in discovering the tunnel complex at Piedras Negras. Lora's articles and our presentation at the October conference will detail this find.

We also entered numerous caves at the site and found at least a dozen more that we didn't feel were necessary or safe to enter. (These caves were found despite official reports on Piedras Negras relating that only a handful of small caves were there.) A few of these caves are fairly deep—30-60 feet. We also investigated numerous petroglyphs, carvings, and stele found all over the site. Significantly, we discovered that stone spheres (polished stone balls) have been uncovered at Piedras Negras. They are similar to ones uncovered in Costa Rica. The ones we saw were a foot to two feet in diameter. (Most of those at Costa Rica were the same size, but the large ones at Costa Rica have garnered the most attention.) Since less than 1/1000 of 1% of the site has been investigated, there are, no doubt, many more stone spheres to be found at Piedras Negras as well as countless other artifacts.

While cutting a path around the steep side of the Acropolis, in an area of dense jungle growth, we could occasionally see the outer layer of fitted stone blocks that formed the impressive, steep walls of the mountain when it was adapted as a building platform. I found a beautiful slab of carved white stone with a perfect hole bored through it at an angle. The hole was about two inches in diameter. Curious stones, building blocks, and artifacts are strewn everywhere.

The trip was extremely exhausting and very hot and humid. Piedras Negras remains much like it was when it was first "discovered" in the 1800s. Some rugged "trails" are established at the site, but only to the areas where recent excavations have been undertaken and the typical places the few visitors to Piedras Negras go. The vast bulk of the site remains under jungle and even the guides who go to the site don't go to most of the structures—there simply isn't time to make way to them without staying at the location for several days.

There are numerous other significant details of the trip we will relate, but as stated at the beginning of this report, we are saving these for the articles and the conference. We took about 8 hours of digital video footage taking along two different videos. One of these was a high-end "movie" quality video. We anticipated having the high humidity ruin the footage as well as possibly destroying the cameras' delicate electronics. We had expected the same "tragedy" the prior year during our expeditions to Andros filming on salt water. Lots of salt-water spray did get on our digital camera then, but thankfully the camera never failed. At Piedras Negras, the cameras were drenched in sweat and constant high humidity. But they worked perfectly—and still do. Our luck holds.