Mel Gibson on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2254
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
So it tells you the story is pretty old. And they thought initially it was probably back in the 1300, but this confirmed that it was at least 2,600 years old, something like that.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
In 2009, archaeologist J. Craig Argyle, working under Richard Hansen's excavation of the Central Acropolis at El Mirador, Guatemala, uncovered carved stucco panels depicting the Hero Twins (Hunahpu and Xbalanque), the central figures of the Popol Vuh creation narrative. The surrounding ruins are dated to the Late Preclassic period, roughly 300 BC to AD 150, meaning the frieze is on the order of 1,900 to 2,300 years old, not 2,600 years old as Gibson states. The find was nonetheless historically significant: it showed the Popol Vuh's iconography was established many centuries, not necessarily millennia, before the written Quiche-language manuscript was recorded from oral tradition around the 1550s, undercutting the idea that the story was a colonial-era invention influenced by Spanish priests. No mainstream source describes a prior scholarly estimate placing the myth's origin "in the 1300s"; Hansen's own quoted remarks describe the surprise as the story predating the Spanish arrival by "thousands of years," not a revision from a 1300s estimate. The core discovery Gibson references is real and well documented, but his specific age figure of 2,600 years is inflated relative to the published dating of the find, and the "1300s" prior-estimate detail does not match any documented scholarly timeline.