This morning we walked up to the entrance of the San Augustin Archaeological Park and then spent a few hours exploring the park. There are several groups of statues and burial sites at this location and a museum. There also other parts of the park with a lot more that we didn’t see today. We will explore them in the coming days.
First we visited the excellent museum which has several smaller pieces. Many of them had been stolen over the years and then in the last few years recovered. One of the things the descriptions stressed is that over the last century archaeologists have proposed many theories about the people who created these statues but they are all just theories. They know very little about these people. They do know that the statues were created over more than 2000 years prior to the Spanish arrival.
When Duke was here in 1980 he was on horseback tour of several sites with a guide. They came upon a man plowing with a horse drawn stick plow. He had just turned up a small statue very similar to the ones above.
After the museum we walked through the jungle to six other sites where the carvings and burial sites are still in place.
After a rest at our hotel we went into the town of San Augustin and explored a bit.
We had an excellent dinner at a small restaurant about half way between town and our hotel. We started with fried plantains with garlic.
Then we each had steak fixed in different ways. Unfortunately you can’t really see Duke in this picture but you get the idea.
I have a lot of pictures which aren’t posted in the blog. I upload them to a iCloud shared photo stream. Let me know if you would like to be added as a viewer of the photo stream.
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