Discovery
The site was first reported by a native logger named Rosa Mai, who came across its remains in 1937 while searching for mahogany hardwood trees to exploit. Mai reported the site to the archaeological commission for British Honduras, today Belize. In 1938 the archaeological commissioner, A. H. Anderson visited the site for two weeks along with a colleague H. B. Jex. They conducted preliminary surveys, noted 9 carved monuments, took notes on the structures of the A Group Plaza, and undertook limited excavations in two locations. A. H. Anderson and Linton Satterthwaite later discovered 40 stone monuments. It was Anderson who gave the site its name —from the Spanish: caracol "snail, shell", but more generally meaning spiral- or volute-shaped— apparently on account of the winding access road that led to the site.
Read more about this topic: Caracol
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)