The Campeche and Belize Connection

The Mesoamerican influence on Native American cultures in the United States is far more extensive than merely some Chontal Maya traders traveling up major rivers. The ancient Maya structures of eastern Campeche State and western Belize can be found in northern Georgia in the ancestral towns of the Creek People. You can thank some occult employees of National Security Agency contractors for the full story coming to light.

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

Readers are repeatedly reminded that what they encounter in The Americas Revealed is a description of the facts as they are now known, not the ultimate orthodoxy on the ancient heritage of the Americas. Such as been the case through the past 17 years as I stumbled on one amazing discovery after another. One’s education should never stop after departing the classrooms of a university.

Let’s make it clear. In 2010 and 2011, former National Park Service and National Museum of American History director, Roger Kennedy, sent me subsidy checks to finance my on site research in the Early Colonial Period of the Southern Highlands in the United States. I don’t think I ever even told Roger that I had been on a fellowship in Mexico, but it would have been on my resume’ that was submitted for the Architect of the National Capitol selection. Certainly, all of our personal conversations, while I lived in the Shenandoah Valley, centered around Vivi the French Belle, Early American architecture and preserving Civil War battlefields . . . in that order. Ironically, I knew Roger through my friendship with that dynamic husband and wife anthropological team at National Geographic, George and Gene Stuart.

When I first stumbled upon stone ruins at Track Rock Gap in 2011, I assumed that they were the vestiges of a 17th century Sephardic mining village. This was actually a four acre section of stonework and terraces, completely missed by South African archaeologist, Johannes Loubser, when he was asked to survey Track Rock Gap in 2001, while at the same time being employed by the National Security Agency facilities in Atlanta and Augusta, GA.

So, when writing the December 21, 2011 article for my national architecture column in the Examiner on the Track Rock Terrace Complex, I relied on my vivid memories of the spectacular and identical agricultural terrace complexes in Chiapas State and Guatemalan Highlands. Almost all my reference books on Mesoamerican civilization were boxed in a rental storage bin. I was literally homeless. Would you believe that at that point in my life I had NEVER read the daily journal that I kept in Mexico or looked at most of the hundreds of color slides that I took in Campeche, Tabasco and southern Veracruz?

That article should have had maybe 5,000 readers. Instead, it had at least 300 million readers or far more in newspapers of virtually every nation in the world, including Mongolia and Fiji. LOL I now know that some occult, ultra-rightwing employees of a National Security Agency in Georgia manipulated things to make the article go platinum. The occultists thought that they were setting me up to be made a fool by the “learned” archeologists of Georgia.

Guess who took this photograph? Not Ana. She was at Labna’s only public restroom . . . actually a glorified outhouse. Nope, this photo was taken by none over than Linda Schele. Seventeen years later, she and David Stuart, the son of my friends, George and Gene Stuart, would become the first scholars to translate the Maya writing system.

They had no clue that I had traveled extensively in Mexico or was actually part Maya, myself. Their occult counterparts within the Department of Interior then coached their stooges in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and Georgia archaeologists to say the dumb things that they said . . . like that I had never been in Mexico. Every pejorative they uttered actually applied to Loubser. Loubser had never been in Mexico or worked on a Proto-Creek town site prior to Track Rock Gap.

I never intended to spend another minute on Track Rock Gap or the Maya Thang when I wrote that article. However, by March 2012, I realized if I didn’t do something quick, I would never be taken seriously again as an architect. Thus, I began studying online all the new discoveries in Mesoamerica and in the Southeastern United States. I churned out the People of One Fire newsletter to document this research.

So . . . it was not until I moved to this house in 2018 . . . found my Mexican journal and 2500+ color slides in one of the packing boxes from when I moved my things from Virginia in 1995 . . . was I able to fully appreciate what I had experienced in Mexico. It was not until I began digitizing my Mexican slides, was I able to see the details that I had seen in Mexico 50 years earlier . . . but with a much more educated eye. You see, that was the big problem with color slides. You can not see anything smaller than a building unless the slide is projected onto a large screen. The heat from that projector soon destroys the slide.

The Maya Love Hut in the ancient suburbs of Labna . . . identical houses were built two miles from my home after around 575 AD. This style of house was also built along the upper Savannah River. Apparently, these Maya immigrants came up the Atlantic Coast to reach Georgia.

Those magic days in the Puuc Hills

After all these years, I had almost forgotten Ana and the eight magic days that we spent in the Puuc Hills of eastern Campeche and southeastern Yucatan. In anger, I threw away all her love letters, when she informed me in December 1973 that this was goodbye forever. She was engaged to an anthropology professor at Tulane University. The letter that I received from Ana in June 1974 to tell me that she had ended the engagement after she and her fiance’ visited the “Maya Love Hut” in Labna and that she wanted to come live with me in Atlanta, was thrown away, because I was engaged to the future Anti-Wife. NEVER MARRY ON THE “REBOUND!”

The color slides that I took on that romantic journey were never shown to Pre-Columbian Architecture classes at Georgia Tech or to future archaeology classes and historical societies. The 1500+ slides that I took in August and September of 1970 were not developed until I returned to Atlanta in mid-September. Actually, the Kodak lab in Atlanta produced much longer lasting slides than those developed in Mexico City. However, the slides that I took in eastern Campeche, Tabasco and southern Veracruz mainly portrayed lots of houses, mostly earthen pyramids (Indian mounds) and scenes of the natural vegetation. Gringos were primarily interested in seeing large cities, massive stone pyramids and ornate public buildings.

During 2021 and 2022, when I was creating documentary videos on the Maya civilization in Yucatan and Campeche states, I got to see many slides for the first time . . . and in high resolution on a computer monitor. I saw many details that I had missed or simply didn’t know, when I was in Mexico the first time. For example, when I was in Mexico, I didn’t know that archaeologist Robert Wauchope had unearthed the foot prints of OVAL houses identical to the one above IN THE NACOOCHEE VALLEY OF GEORGIA .

As our series on the Upper Chattahoochee and Soque River Basins continues, you will be astounded to how much traditional Chickasaw and Creek architecture is indebted to the indigenous peoples of eastern Campeche, western Belize, Tabasco and southern Veracruz. Our virtual reality journey through time continues.

Be there or else be square!