Raiders of the Lost Past with Janina Ramirez

Summer, 1939...

a golden age of exploration and archaeology is coming to an end.

It was an era that saw adventurers set out to explore the remotest

corners of the globe, in search of clues to unlock our ancient past.

And it was during that last summer of peace,

as the world stood on the precipice of a war that threatened

to end civilisation itself,

that three extraordinary treasures were discovered,

treasures that would radically change our understanding

of the origins and diversity of human culture...

That made this stone the oldest dateable artwork

ever found in the Americas.

And bring us closer to our distant past.

You scared me!

In this series, I'll be on the trail of a cast of

remarkable archaeologists, each a product of their era,

from a self-taught amateur...

Everybody's pressuring him to get to the treasure.

To a pair of charismatic adventurers...

We have come upon the hiding place of a unique group

of early American heroic sculpture.

And an academic driven by a dark political agenda.

But here in writing, he's acknowledging this figure.

They're fascinating tales of intuition, eccentricity and luck.

I can't believe it, another lost colossal head!

Each show how archaeology was enlisted into the promotion

of very different worldviews...

and yet each is a powerful reminder of our shared humanity.

To me, it is just an astonishing work of art.

In this episode, I've come to Mexico, where just before

the outbreak of war, stunning examples of Mesoamerican art

began to emerge from the jungle.

Who was the enigmatic man portrayed here?

And when was it made?

These remarkable colossal heads heralded the discovery

of a lost world.

We are talking a city, that is enough for a city? A major city.

That is amazing.

It was a culture that turned out to be larger and more magnificent

than anyone could have imagined.

Nothing like this had ever been found in the Americas before.

These were the vestiges of an entire civilisation...

a civilisation that today takes its place among the very oldest

found anywhere in the world.

Hola!

Muchas gracias. Right, in here?

Agh, it's wobbly!

My starting point is the state of Veracruz.

I'm following in the footsteps of two of America's greatest pre-war

archaeologists - husband-and-wife team Matthew and Marion Stirling.

In 1939, as Europe hunkered down to war,

American explorers were still free to set out to make new discoveries.

And the Stirlings made the biggest find imaginable...

an entire ancient civilisation, called the Olmec.

They built the very first pyramids, palaces and planned cities

for which Central America is now so famous.

Over 3,000 years ago, at the same time as ancient Egypt,

the Olmecs flourished here.

And, for some, they are the mother culture of Mesoamerica

from which the more famous Mayans and Aztecs are later descended.

But, incredibly, when Matthew and Marion arrived here

at the end of the 1930s, no-one even knew the Olmec culture

had ever existed.

It was all still hidden, waiting to be revealed.

The Stirlings had first been lured to Mexico by the tantalising story

of a 19th-century workman who'd uncovered a mysterious giant stone

head buried deep in the jungle.

If the stories were true, if the colossal head was still there,

Matthew Stirling was convinced that such an unusual sculpture

had to be part of a much larger archaeological site,

and that it was well worth investigating further.

And if there WAS a bigger discovery to be made,

Matthew Stirling was certainly the man to do it.

By the time he arrived in Mexico, Stirling was already

an esteemed archaeologist.

As a child in California, he'd spent time digging up Native American

arrowheads in the desert.

And by his late 20s, he was leading huge expeditions to study

remote tribes in Papua New Guinea,

rising to become chief of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology.

16 years his junior, as a girl, Marian was outgoing and adventurous.

Her father had always told her she should have been a boy.

But like many girls back then, she trained as a secretary.

When a chance to work with Matthew Stirling came up,

she looked up the word "ethnology", thought it sounded exciting,

and jumped in.

They fell in love, and married in 1933.

Not content to live in Matthew's shadow, by the time they came

to Mexico in 1939, Marion had made herself indispensable in the field.

This is remote backcountry, this part of Mexico.

If you follow us on this trip, don't look for road markings.

Through long sections you will see no people,

and often you will find the roads little more than trails.

After an epic journey, culminating in an eight-hour trek on horseback,

the Stirlings' inaugural expedition finally arrived at the small

Mexican village of Tres Zapotes,

where it was said the giant head had been seen.

Retracing their journey, even today, it's a remote place for me

to get to, never mind 80 years ago.

So it's easy to imagine their delight when they quickly located

a large stone crown, projecting from the soil.

The legend appeared to be true.

What they uncovered was unlike anything they'd seen before...

a single colossal stone head buried deep in the ground.

The Stirlings didn't know it yet, but they'd taken the first step

in discovering the lost civilisation of the Olmec.

And here he is - a six-foot-high, eight-tonne colossal head,

carved from a single boulder of volcanic basalt rock.

Nothing like this had ever been found in the Americas before.

The nearest equivalent would be the monumental figures of ancient Egypt.

But when the Stirlings excavated the head, there was no torso attached.

Instead it was sat on a foundation of unworked stone,

which suggests that - from its very inception - it was intended as

an intimidating, powerful portrait.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, excavating the head from the jungle

was incredibly tough.

The Stirlings were hit by three tropical rainstorms

which filled the ditch around the head with water.

Draining it was a two-day job every time.

You really get a sense of the individual here!

He's quite severe-looking, he has this furrow in his brow

as if he's contemplating.

You've got this broad nose, strong lips and wide chiselled jaw,

all framed by this helmet with the straps coming round,

suggesting authority.

Matthew Stirling described this as one of the major art objects

of the New World, exceptional for the realism of its treatment.

But who was the enigmatic man portrayed here?

What does he represent?

Who created this?

And when was it made?

The Stirlings were determined to make their mark on history

by solving these mysteries.

But there was little to go on,

because the colossal stone head bore little resemblance to the monuments

of any known Mesoamerican cultures.

When the Spanish conquistadors first landed on the coast of Mexico

in 1519, they overthrew the Aztec empire that had dominated

the region for 200 years.

And before the Aztecs were the Mayans,

who reigned supreme from around 250 to 900 AD.

But earlier than this?

The archaeological consensus in the 1930s was that nothing resembling

a major civilisation had previously existed in Mesoamerica.

But what the Stirlings found next would change everything.

Matthew had realised that the colossal head was in fact surrounded

by a series of mysterious mounds.

And so the Stirlings quickly assembled a large crew of local workers,

and began to excavate.

The discovery of this monument - Stela C - was, I think, probably

the point at which the Stirlings felt they had hit the jackpot.

This was so significant because it gave a date.

What you can see in this central band here are lines and dots

that relate to the Mayan calendar, known as the Long Count calendar,

each line and each dot creating a date, working backwards.

Now, Marion worked out that it gave a date of around 478AD.

This was significant, it put it at the height of what was then thought

to be the earliest civilisation in the Americas - the Mayans.

But, infuriatingly, the top half of the monument was broken off,

frustrating the Stirlings' attempts to calculate an accurate date.

Matthew was convinced that he could make out one more circle

right here at the crack.

He went back, interrogated it again and again.

Is it there? Is it not?

It's really hard to make out.

And Marion had another go at calculating the date

with that circle taken into account,

The date she came up with...?

31 BC.

That made this stone the oldest dateable artwork

ever found in the Americas.

The dating of 31 BC meant this was a culture too old

to be classed as Mayan, and yet

it was sophisticated enough to use calendars.

It was tantalising evidence that a previously unknown

advanced culture had existed here at the very same time

that ancient Rome was becoming a superpower.

But as the Stirlings returned home to report the exciting news

of a possible lost civilisation, they found a modern world

being dragged into the abyss.

The rise of the Nazis in Europe was something Matthew and Marion

had seen first-hand.

When attending the 1936 Olympics together in Berlin,

they'd been shocked by the crowd's frenzied response to Hitler,

and the ominous display of German power.

And when the Second World War erupted in September 1939,

it came just a few weeks after reports of the Stirlings' finds

were first published, inevitably overshadowing

the scale of their discoveries.

But, in fact, their finds were even more significant

than they themselves realised.

Time would tell that the date this stela suggests,

31 BC, was, in fact, conservative.

The Olmec culture that this stone came out of...

was significantly older.

The Stirlings had opened a new chapter in the story of the Americas.

Despite the outbreak of war in Europe and the threat

that America might be dragged in too, it wasn't long before

the scale of the Stirlings' discoveries was realised.

And so when they returned to Tres Zapotes again in 1940,