Page 130 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

in length and 2000 feet in width. We climbed the dominant mound, now
heavily overgrown with thick tropical vegetation, and from the summit we
could see for miles across the surrounding countryside. A great many
lesser mounds were also visible and around about were several of the
deep trenches the archaeologist Michael Coe had dug when he had
excavated the site in 1966.
Coe’s team made a number of finds here, which included more than
twenty artificial reservoirs, linked by a highly sophisticated network of
basalt-lined troughs. Part of this system was built into a ridge; when it
was rediscovered water still gushed forth from it during heavy rains, as it
had done for more than 3000 years. The main line of the drainage ran
from east to west. Into it, linked by joints made to an advanced design,
three subsidiary lines were channelled. After surveying the site
5
thoroughly, the archaeologists admitted that they could not understand
the purpose of this elaborate system of sluices and water-works.
6
Nor were they able to come up with an explanation for another enigma.
This was the deliberate burial, along specific alignments, of five of the
massive pieces of sculpture, showing negroid features, now widely
identified as ‘Olmec heads’. These peculiar and apparently ritualistic
graves also yielded more than sixty precious objects and artefacts,
including beautiful instruments made of jade and exquisitely carved
statuettes. Some of the statuettes had been systematically mutilated
before burial.
The way the San Lorenzo sculptures had been interred made it
extremely difficult to fix their true age, even though fragments of
charcoal were found in the same strata as some of the buried objects.
Unlike the sculptures, these charcoal pieces could be carbon-dated. They
were, and produced readings in the range of 1200 BC. This did not mean,
7
however, that the sculptures had been carved in 1200 BC. They could
have been. But they could have originated in a period hundreds or even
thousands of years earlier than that. It was by no means impossible that
these great works of art, with their intrinsic beauty and an indefinable
numinous power, could have been preserved and venerated by many
different cultures before being buried at San Lorenzo. The charcoal
associated with them proved only that the sculptures were at least as old
as 1200 BC; it did not set any upper limit on their antiquity.

La Venta

We left San Lorenzo as the sun was going down, heading for the city of
Villahermosa, more than 150 kilometres to the east in the province of

The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 36.
5
6 The Prehistory of the Americas, p. 268.
7 Ibid., pp. 267-8. The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, p. 55.

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