Page 138 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 18

Conspicuous Strangers

Matthew Stirling, the American archaeologist who excavated La Venta in
the 1940s, made a number of spectacular discoveries there. The most
spectacular of all was the Stele of the Bearded Man.
The plan of the ancient Olmec site, as I have said, lay along an axis
pointing 8° west of north. At the southern end of this axis, 100 feet tall,
loomed the fluted cone of the great pyramid. Next to it, at ground level,
was what looked like a curb about a foot high enclosing a spacious
rectangular area one-quarter the size of an average city block. When the
archaeologists began to uncover this curb they found, to their surprise,
that it consisted of the upper parts of a wall of columns. Further
excavation through the undisturbed layers of stratification that had
accumulated revealed that the columns were ten feet tall. There were
more than 600 of them and they had been set together so closely that
they formed a near-impregnable stockade. Hewn out of solid basalt and
transported to La Venta from quarries more than sixty miles distant, the
columns weighed approximately two tons each.
Why all this trouble? What had the stockade been built to contain?
Even before excavation began, the tip of a massive chunk of rock had
been visible jutting out of the ground in the centre of the enclosed area,
about four feet higher than the illusory ‘curb’ and leaning steeply
forward. It was covered with carvings. These extended down, out of sight,
beneath the layers of soil that filled the ancient stockade to a height of
about nine feet.
Stirling and his team worked for two days to free the great rock. When
exposed it proved to be an imposing stele fourteen feet high, seven feet
wide and almost three feet thick. The carvings showed an encounter
between two tall men, both dressed in elaborate robes and wearing
elegant shoes with turned-up toes. Either erosion or deliberate mutilation
(quite commonly practised on Olmec monuments) had resulted in the
complete defacement of one of the figures. The other was intact. It so
obviously depicted a Caucasian male with a high-bridged nose and a
long, flowing beard that the bemused archaeologists promptly christened
it ‘Uncle Sam’.
1
I walked slowly around the twenty-ton stele, remembering as I did so
that it had lain buried in the earth for more than 3000 years. Only in the
brief half century or so since Stirling’s excavations had it seen the light of
day again. What would its fate be now? Would it stand here for another

1 Fair Gods and Stone Faces, p. 144.

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