Clues to a Maya connection with Chattahoochee Georgia

During its century of stewardship of the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia, the US Forest Service has followed a consistent policy of allowing vegetation to overgrow and destroy its many ancient stone ruins, while concealing their existence from the public.

The excuse for concealing a very important part of America’s heritage is that looters might damage the stacked stone ruins. Incalculably more damage has been done to the stone structures by vegetation and logging machinery.

Incredibly, in the 1970’s, the USFS cleared the lower slopes of the Track Rock Terrace Complex of its native trees then replaced them with hybrid pines that were more marketable . . . in the process, destroying Pre-Columbian walls and earthworks.

Throughout most of the 1800’s and into the 1940’s, Track Rock Gap functioned as a public park and a commons for grazing livestock. Generations of families, young lovers and playful teenagers went up there to picnic, court and spark.

Then, over local protest, the administers of the US Forest Service closed the Track Rock open range and immediately, trees began to sprout up in the mountainside meadows.

In reality, from its inception, there has been relatively little demand for the beautiful native hardwoods of the Chattahoochee National Forest. Its usage today is almost entirely outdoor recreation, yet the USFS treats Track Rock Gap as cropland for growing trees.

The obsolete policies of the US Forest Service compose just one of many obstacles facing historic preservationists, wishing to elevate the stone ruins at Track Rock Gap and nearby Fort Mountain to the status of easily accessible archaeological sites.

Do you recall in The Shenandoah Chronicles that many brave FBI agents were involved in the fight to block the flow of drug cartels and drug profits into the Shenandoah Valley?

Several were murdered, including probably, my longtime lady friend, Susan Karlson. The same thing was going on in the Southern Appalachians.

Track Rock is located in the Track Rock Gap Archaeological Area (9Un367) in the Brasstown Ranger District of the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia.

This 52-acre (210,000 m²) area contains preserved petroglyphs of ancient Native American origin that resemble animal and bird tracks, crosses, circles and human footprints.

The textbooks will tell you that the Mayan people thrived in Central America from about 250 to 900 A.D., building magnificent temples in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and southern Mexico.

But could they possibly have left stone ruins in the mountains of North Georgia? Richard Thornton thinks so. He says he’s an architect and urban planner by training, but has been hired to research the history of native people in and around Georgia since 2003.

On Examiner.com, he wrote about an 1,100-year-old archeological site near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, that he said is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540.

Thornton, who said he is Georgia Creek Indian by birth, told how he studied under Roman Pina-Chan, a leading Mexican archeologist who happens to be of Mayan origin.

Pina-Chan, he said, noted many cultural connections between archeological sites in Georgia and Mayan sites in Central America.

Some of Thornton’s conclusions about the Mayan connection to the southern U.S., he said, are based on oral history. There are place names in Georgia and North Carolina, he said, that are very similar to Mayan words.

Words like Mako and Kukulkan, are of Mayan origin, and will be recognized by scholars of Mayan history. The ruins near Brasstown Bald, also include mounds and irrigation terraces similar to those found at Mayan settlements in Central America.

While there are many, many compelling parallels between Central American and North American indigenous mythologies, wrote one, that does not mean there was direct evidence that the post-Classic Period Collapse Maya emigrated all the way to Georgia.

Williams stood his ground against Thornton’s suggestion that Brasstown Bald has any Mayan roots. The sites are certainly those of Native Americans of prehistoric Georgia. Wild theories are not new, but the web simply spreads them faster than ever.

ABC Flash Point News 2023.