Have breakfast or lunch on a Southern Mesoamerican pyramid

Spend the rest of the day, boating on beautiful Lake Burton or hiking in Tallulah Gorge then dining that evening at the Dillard Family Lodge in the beautiful Rabun County, GA,

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

Numerous people over the last few months have asked me when I was going to be giving tours of the spectacular archaeological sites that I have been discovering and studying over the past seven years. I am extremely busy with my professional work. Another problem is that all of the sites except the Nacoochee Mound and Nacoochee Community Center are on private property.

There is very little today to see at the Community Center, except part of what was a three level Mesoamerican ball court stadium in 2017. After I gave a standing only lecture on the ancient history of their land at the Sautee-Nacoochee Community Center, someone in the organization had the bright idea of grading down part of the stadium as a beautification project.

The capital of the Itza Maya people, Itsate, in Sautee-Nacoochee, GA

There IS one huge exception to this problem. The original capital and long time religious center of the Soque People from southern Mexico is still largely intact. It was discovered by Smithsonian Institute Archaeologist, Cyrus Thomas, in 1886 and promptly forgotten. Then called the town of Soquee, it lost most of its commercial buildings long ago. The ruins of the late 19th century town are now in dense, mature hardwood forests.

Beneath those trees are all manner of earthworks, earthen pyramids, stone mounds, stone rings, large oval stone shrines, agricultural terraces and even irrigation canals. It is a massive archaeological zone, only superficially examined by Cyrus Thomas, but revealed by three LIDAR studies in the past decade. Two of those LIDAR scans were carried out by the US Geological Survey and are public property. The latest and most detailed LIDAR scan can be viewed and downloaded from the USGS website.

The third terrace of a stepped pyramid, covering seven acres, extends into the right-of-way of a state highway. On that terrace is the Old Batesville General Store, which built shortly after the American Civil War. In his archaeological report, he calls the store . . . the local post office . . . which cost me about three years of searching for a post office that never existed. It was the custom in the 1800s for rural general stores to maintain US Post Office mail slots for distributing mail. There was no delivery of mail to rural residents.

The Old Batesville General Store is now a country-style restaurant, well-known for its scrumptious Georgia Mountains style breakfasts. The store building is the second oldest business in Habersham County, which was founded in 1818. The restaurant serves sandwich – hamburger lunches. Due to the inability to hire sufficient help for full service dinner menus, it has for the mean time stopped evening meals. They were formerly very popular with the folks living around Lake Burton.

You can access all information that you need for visiting the Old Batesville General Store, including customer reviews and photographs, by Googling their name. It has a five star rating with Google, by the way. The Google Review states that is it an old Maya ceremonial ground.

Not! That was a false statement made by a History Channel program. It is a Soque (Zoque) town site. The Soques originally spoke a very different language than Maya and were the progenitors of the much older, “Olmec” Civilization. They also participated in the Maya Civilization, but are grouped into the Gulf Coast Civilizations by Mexican anthropologists.

Barbara Rush, the owner, lives in a historic house on the second pyramid terrace, above the store. She can tell you some more history about the community.

LIDAR scan and VR images of the Soque Capital