[DAVID YETMAN] The great Maya archeological site of Copán, Honduras lies near a town renowned for macaws.

We have accessibility to Copán not often available to outsiders: the uncovering of a hieroglyphic staircase-- [BILL FASH] The inscriptions are giving us the historical background.

[DAVID] --and a tunnel deep inside the pyramids, leading to a recently uncovered mural.

{LATIN GUITAR SWELLS} [ANNOUNCER] Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey, the Gilford Fund, Arch and Laura Brown, and Hugh and Joyce Bell [DAVID YETMAN] Archeologists recognize the ancient town of Copán, in southwestern Hondruas, as the pinnacle of artistic achievement among the great Maya civilizations.

Between the years 431 and 756 A.D., a succession of sixteen kings ruled the region.

They left their legacy carved in stone and described in exquisite detail on the staggeringly complex monuments of the city.

{ELECTRIC GUITAR} The town of Copán Ruinas in Honduras is located only half a kilometer away from the archeological site of Copán.

{CITY AMBIENCE} The Scarlet Macaw was one of the sacred birds of the Mayas and is very important to local people as well.

They provide nesting places safe from predators for the birds and provide feeding platforms as well.

And they are now everywhere.

It is a terrific decoration for the ruins, for the town, and for the very proud people of Copán Ruinas.

{LATIN PERCUSSION SWELLS} Generations of families have worked at the site.

Copán, one of the greatest archeological sites in the world, is one of the two top attractions internationally for the nation of Honduras.

[BILL FASH] This is the grand processional entryway where tens of thousands of people would come in to participate in the public events and ceremonies, the marketplace.

[DAVID] Our visit is possible due to my friend Bill Fash, Harvard professor and long time lead archeologist at Copán.

He knows the site like no other human.

{MACAW CALLS} [BILL] The games on the ball court, the great Circus Maximus, as the early explorers called this area that has seating for about 3000 people to come and see what's going on in the royal precinct here.

We have actual contemporary records for almost all of the 16 rulers and in many cases can associate them with particular buildings.

Fortunately, in Copán, there are hundreds of hieroglyphic inscriptions, and that's one of the reasons why it attracted explorers from very early days.

You have everything like the hieroglyphic stairway with its complete and cyclical of all the rulers from 1 to 15.

But you also have individual portraits such as we have here in the Great Plaza.

It's a really orderly succession that is recorded on a whole series of monuments.

So the inscriptions are giving us the historical background that we can then flesh out with all the archeological data from the households of all of the people in the ancient society.

The inscriptions do tell us a great deal about relations between rival kingdoms, because in the Maya world, they never created a single royal house that could foster the creation of an empire.

So the end of the late classic period was a time of troubles in many ways.

There are all these records of warfare all across the Maya lowlands.

It's everywhere in the eighth century A.D. and continues into the ninth because there were so many powerful people that were not able to accede to a political office.

{LATIN PERCUSSION CONTINUES} {MACAW CALLS} In a place like Copán, we can document that the best farmland was taken up by residences and this forced people to farm the thinner soils higher up on the foothills.

Eventually, that all got covered with residences as well.

As the city became more successful, they can bring in tribute from other places that were farming and feed themselves on that basis rather than what they themselves produced.

As the foothills filled in, and then they had to strip down the higher slopes and there is very thin soil there, it won't last more than a season or two.

So imagine you're in a situation where your city can't feed itself anymore, which is what we believe happened to Copán at one point in time.

{GRINDING CORN} In Copán, by contrast, it wasn't that the population stayed the same.

It was that there was tremendous in-migration it became a victim of its own success.

So many people wanted to be a part of it that it's estimated that someplace between 30 and 40 percent of the population of Copán were people that came from elsewhere.

{UPBEAT LATIN BEATS} [DAVID] For decades I've seen this photograph, this Stela, and here it is.

[BILL] Oh, it's breathtaking.

That's one of the best preserved of really natural likeness of Ruler 13 carved in 731.

It shows him inside the mouth of a cave.

In a mountain.

The mountain is named by the two giant macaws with their long beaks on either side.

Then, come around to the back side of it.

They're very explicit about naming the monument, naming the place where he did a ceremony to celebrate this important anniversary of the creation of when the World Came to Be.

And that's in this glyph here on the left side.

You can see the macaw beak and you can see the wrinkled skin and you can see the eye.

To the right of it is the glyph that reads “witz” which means Mountain.

[DAVE] This is Macaw Mountain.

[BILL] Absolutely.

{UPBEAT MUSIC} This is such an important monument, really important legacy, because it tells the story of the entire kingdom.

It's a king's list of all 16 rulers in Copán.

Ruler nine here, one of the two Jaguar named rulers seated on a Jaguar glyph number eight, ruler six.

And we're going to five.

Number four, we do have monuments for underneath a hieroglyphic stairway.

And then this is the second ruler, the successor to the founder.

He was a very important figure and he's got a feathered cape like a bird himself.

And then he sits on a ruler glyph that shows that he personified kingship for the people of Copán.

These were real people.

We have found buildings that they built with inscriptions that they had carved and their own mortal remains in some cases, including the case of the founder.

It's the only Mesoamerican city where someone has found the actual remains of the founder of a city.

That was meant to be read by someone standing up there to tell the story of the master narrative of the founder going to Teotihuacán, performing a new fire ceremony being transformed, getting new titles, “Sun Faced Lord,” “Blue Green Quetzal Macaw,” “Resplendent Quetzal Macaw.” Three days later, he leaves that temple and begins his walk.

And it takes him here and there all over Mesoamerica for a total of 152 days before he and the scepter that he brought is the symbol of the lightning god of Teotihuacán get to the three mountain place and rest their feet.

This is one of my favorite spots.

[DAVID] Oh, with good reason.

[BILL] You see the whole process right here in one spot.

So over here you can see it's not been excavated, but because they didn't have very much lime for plaster buildings toppled in an earthquake zone like this within a century or two, sending pieces like this tumbling down from the top of the temple.

So Temple 18 here is really important because it tells us about the last years of the kingdom.

The temple itself was toppled and burned, his tomb was looted.

All that were in there were little scraps of bone and broken vessels, some of them of marble pieces and broken pieces of jade.

Some of the lead residences in the valley are burned also.

So it does have the look of very serious social unrest.

This is a pretty grim scene, actually.

He's in a dance pose like this with one foot raised and he's holding a scepter of that lightning god that's so important to everybody.

Got a shield here.

But what's grim is he has these shrunken upside down trophy heads.

In Mesoamerican art, when a head is shown upside down, the individual, whether it's God or human, is dead.

{PERCUSSION MUSIC CONCLUDES} [DAVID] The great Saba Tree is emblematic for most Maya peoples and with good reason.

They provide buttresses that hold them up in high wind.

But more than anything, they're a symbol of strength and resurgence that come each year.

They drop their leaves and they're renewed when the rain comes.

{LATIN BEATS CONTINUE} [BILL] Four social classes and four types of residents.

Absolutely.

This was established early on.

The mounds themselves give us a who's who of ancient Maya society.

If it's a little simple dwelling like that one, then you know that you're dealing with the commoner.

And by the way, we should also mention that this is just the foundation of the house.

The house itself was built of wattle and daub.

It was a perishable materials, and then it had a thatched roof.

So that's the most common kind of house in the Copán Valley.

And in this part of the household, we have what every household needs.

We have a kitchen.

{LATIN GUITAR SWELLS} [DAVID] Well, this is even nicer than the the wealthier peasants.

[BILL] This is what we might think of as upper middle class.

So it's a type three site.

And this individual did have a specialization.

There were eight beautiful sculpture masks on the outside of the building that were all portraits of the God of sculptors.

This fellow was a stone sculptor.

This is really very impressive dress masonry architecture with vaulted roofs and sculpture in the site that was only occupied for 100 years.

So now we're going to the creme de la creme of ancient Maya society.

This is led by an individual who was a member of the Royal Court, and he is one of the last to reside in the longest occupied single site in the Copán Valley.

We're walking up to an ancient terrace that covers over a thousand years of occupations, and we're going toward the residence of this fellow who was a member of the last Kings Court.

He was chosen by the 16th ruler to keep the books of the kingdom.

And that's what the inscription inside of his own household says.

And he's also accompanied on either side of the doorway by images of the God of Writing.

Here we're at another part of this type four site, the upper-most elite compound that was dug in Las Sepulturas.

[DAVID] The high rollers lived here.

[BILL] {LAUGHS} That's right.

The scribe was leading the pack, but he also had people that he brought in from other parts of Mesoamerica.

So this is the residence of some people from Lake Yojoa region.

We know that because in their own burials inside of the biggest structure there, which itself is unique and layout, there are burials, the likes of which are not found anywhere else in Copán, they're stacked one on top of the other and they all have pottery from their homeland.

Copán was a magnet for ethnic groups from all over southeastern Mesoamerica in the Maya area and even farther afield over into the Highlands and in Oaxaca and so forth.

So a lot of people here came for economic opportunities, like in most cities.

[DAVID] This hole in the ground is pretty clearly important.

[BILL] It█s really a vaulted masonry tomb of the individuals laid to rest there, who we believe lived in a vaulted masonry building just above.

[DAVID] So it's actually shaped like this.

[BILL] That's correct.

[DAVID] If you're inside looking out.

[BILL] Yes-- [DAVID] That takes some engineering to build.

[BILL] Oh, yes.

[LATIN PERCUSSION] This is the storage area on a need-to-see basis of the researchers who have found these materials over the years.

So among all of these pieces are many that actually were associated with the longest lived king in the city's history.

This was our friend, Ruler 12, Smoke Jaguar, who was buried underneath the first hieroglyphic stairway.

And he decided to create a set of images of all of his royal ancestors and that's what we see here.

These were on lids on top of incense burners, and these are effigies of his ancestors, including the famous K█inich Yax K█uk█ Mo█, who you see with the same lightning god goggles that he had on Altar Q.

He's the only king who ever wears goggles and the most diagnostic of the rest of them is this fellow here.

[DAVID] He's only got two teeth.

[BILL] {LAUGHS} Yeah, they're showing his age because Ruler 12 was 93 years old when he passed on.

{LATIN GUITAR BEGINS} [KARINA GARCIA] {IN SPANISH} Bueno, estoy trabajando en el registro de las esculturas-- [TRANSLATION] Right now, I'm working on the Copán Valley Sculpture Registry {SPEAKING SPANISH} And right here, we can see a photo of each one with its registration number.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} During the first expeditions in the 1930s, the nomenclature began with letters, but now we do it digitally.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} ...de manera digital.

Esta es una bodega-- [TRANSLATION] This is the warehouse where we store all the pieces found in the Copán Valley.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} Right here we have a huge, complete “incensario” or incense burner.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} This bat is another one of our most beautiful pieces {SPEAKING SPANISH} These are the ones that go out to exhibitions abroad {SPEAKING SPANISH} So far we have more than 33,000 registered pieces, but they're all from the first expeditions in the 1970s and 80s.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} [DAVID] The collection here of sculptures is unlike anywhere else in the Americas.

There are more here and and of higher quality than any other archeological site.

The number of artisans that had to be talented enough to create these over the centuries is is almost beyond belief.

And they could do all of this with no steel tools.

{LATIN GUITAR SWELLS} [BILL] Really wonderful to have a place where all of this can be stored together so the future generations will not only have access to it for esthetic purposes, but also for study.

[DAVID] And the material is Flint?

[BILL] This is Flint, and this is really very difficult to work.

Each one of these is a true masterwork.

The Maya believed that lightning from the sky was fire, that when it hit the earth, caused the Earth to turn into fire stone.

And so these are the product of lightning striking the earth.

{UPBEAT GUITAR BEGINS} We're coming into one of our longest tunnels that runs north south.

We like to have crosscutting tunnels east, west, north, south.

None of them can surpass the tomb of Ruler 12, which is where we're headed right now.

Really impressive chamber, eight meters long and over a meter and a half wide with three elevated stones.

So inside of the chamber, with these three very large slabs that he was laid to rest on with all of his finery, including a beautiful jade necklace and a very long walking stick as a 93 year old one can appreciate.

And there were spondylus shells, just beautiful things and all kinds of vessels that had food offerings so that he would have plenty to eat in the afterlife.

And perhaps the most intriguing thing were 50 paint pots that contained red cinnabar paint.

And presumably he was very fond of painting things.

{MUSIC CONCLUDES} And this is a panel that was meant to be appreciated and to be instantly recognizable as the name of the founder of the dynasty.

So it's two words and their necks are intertwined.

The bird on the left has the crest of the Quetzal, has a red breast like the male Quetzal, that has green tail feathers.

There is also a sun god face in the beak of each of the two birds.

“Kuk” is the name of the Quetzal bird over here with this beautiful crest and this very interesting slit eye and then {unintelligible}.

The last part of the name is our friend, the macaw here with this foot beak and the Sun God face the red neck, and then coming down to the blue, green and yellow feathers.

[ADELSO CANAN] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] Here, there are geological faults.

So the buildings were in ruins.

But as we excavated, we could see their forms from platforms and terraces to the stucco floors.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} [KARINA] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] The collapse was quite strong.

For those of us who work here, that structure is pretty important because that's where we extracted the largest part of the sculpture that we can register.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} [ADELSO] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] The amount of sculptures we were able to find on the surface was really impressive.

It showed us that this is a very important place.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] The site has a strong archeological connection to my Chortí heritage and ancestry.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} [KARINA] {SPEAKING SPANISH} [TRANSLATION] I was born in Copán.

I'm Copaneca, 100%, a Copaneca who is very proud of her cultural heritage.

{SPEAKING SPANISH} {MUSIC SWELLS} [BILL] So this is one of the largest ball courts in Mesoamerica, also one of the most beautifully decorated.

They wanted to have everyone celebrate the natural cycles, so they had the symbol of the sun, this beautiful Scarlett Macaw that you see all over the ruins.

There were eight of them on each of these buildings, and they symbolized the movement of the sun, east-west, through these two beautiful arches.

And we're standing right in the center of the universe.

And and they're concerned about the north south access too And so far as you know, the movement of the heavenly bodies and the game did have a very strong agricultural component.

Some of the floor markers show rituals designed to have the maize sprout, and it's thought that it could actually sprout out of the ball court, which is a symbolic representation of the cleft in the mountains where maize was born.

This hieroglyphic stairway constitutes the longest hieroglyphic inscription in the New World bar none, not just among the Maya.

Any place.

It's got over 1200 glyph blocks within which there are glyphic elements that come up to 2400 or so telling the entire history of this kingdom from the founder all the way to the 15th king who's shown at the base of it.

So we have this record of orderly dynastic succession, one king to the next to the next.

All in numbered sequence from the founder who looms very large in the entire narrative.

The hieroglyphic stairway was the reason that Copán was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO way back in 1980.

It's actually one of the first archeological sites to bring that distinction.

It's such a signally important monument, not just for Copán, but for humanity.

It needs to be protected.

So we do all of these archeological tunnels here at Copán and liken it to arthroscopic surgery.

[DAVID] My, this is the base of the temple we're going under.

[BILL] Yes, absolutely.

[DAVID] Oh my gosh.

[BILL] We're going down to ground zero, if you will.

This is at the time of the founding of the dynasty.

And this other temple has the very first stela in Copán.

The base of it is still in situ right here.

And it has the name of the founder and the place where he came from.

There's the middle section of the Stela over there.

That glyph happens to say that ruler too, was the son of the founder.

And over here is the top of the steel of the real mother lode of information on this side of the stela we're looking at in the count of the days, this is the number nine rendered in a beautiful way.

And then this is the period for 400 years.

Tunnel system is very extensive.

It goes underneath a great deal of the Acropolis and tells us about the life and times of all of the succeeding rulers that were building immense building complexes and accomplishing great feats as the successors to the founder of Copán.

But in the tunnels, we uncovered all of these earlier buildings, one built on top of the next, on top of the next.

So here we were fortunate enough to find the layer of the onion that's just before the final hieroglyphic stairway.

So my archeologist colleague Cecia Flores is digging at the limit of the first hieroglyphic stairway.

[DAVID] Where she is now is where the original staircase.

[BILL] That█s exactly right.

[LUKE HOLLIS] Over four kilometers of tunnels in total, now, we've mapped in this 3D scan.

This is the Web viewer that we use for looking at all of the 3D scans that we've created with LIDAR.

And so this tunnel system here allows anyone now with an Internet connection to go walk through any of the places that you've seen today.

[BILL] So the Institute of Anthropology is just tremendously interested in this because they want this to be something that every Honduran school kid can access, which they'll be able to do as soon as they get a web connection.

And all the schools, of course, are getting online.

So this way they'll be able to travel Copán and its deepest secrets without leaving the classroom.

{HOPEFUL GUITAR PICKING} [DAVID] The Mayas of Copán gave us the greatest contributions of Maya, artistry and Maya writing.

The history they provided us, of those 400 years of Maya ascendancy are incomparable in the history of the world.

After 400 years, things began to fall apart.

The reasons for that collapse are something that we can learn from because we face the same problems in our world now.

{MUSIC CONCLUDES} Join us next time, In The Americas with me, David Yetman.

More than a thousand years ago, an indigenous people of southern Mexico developed a new small empire with enormous artistic creativity and able to build monumental architecture.

Today, only two small towns remain.

They retain their ancient artistic creations, and their language is alive and well.

{SPEAKING NATIVE LANGUAGE} [BILL] So at a eye level, they have actually the earliest part of the inscription that was part of the funerary temple of the the 12th ruler who we see right here with his puma headdress.

And this story is that of events in his lifetime and then his burial, and then the rituals that were performed then, and then another ritual that was performed seven years later.

And the archeological record corroborates this.

[ANNOUNCER] Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey, the Gilford Fund, Arch and Laura Brown, and Hugh and Joyce Bell