Who discovered that the Maya built the ruins?

Who built the ruins

In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, a New York lawyer, and Frederick Catherwood, an English architect who drew, travelled by mule into Central America looking for cities almost nobody in their country had heard of. At Copán, in Honduras, they found pyramids, staircases and stone figures covered by jungle; Stephens bought the whole site for fifty dollars, because nobody knew what to do with it.

In those years many Europeans believed the Americans could not have built such things, and talked of Egyptians, Phoenicians and lost tribes of Israel. Stephens wrote that there was nothing in those ruins that the ancestors of the people living next to them could not have made. He was right, and it took almost a century to be accepted.

• In 1839 Stephens and Catherwood travelled from New York to Central America; at Copán Stephens bought the whole site for fifty dollars.
• Many Europeans then believed Americans could not have built the ruins; Stephens wrote that the ancestors of the people living beside them could have made everything there, and it took almost a century for this to be accepted.
• Stephens's 1841 book sold very well and created the interest in Maya archaeology; Catherwood later lost most of his original drawings in a fire in New York.

Stephens compró el sitio entero por cincuenta dólares, porque nadie sabía qué hacer con él.

Stephens bought the whole site for fifty dollars, because nobody knew what to do with it.

Stephens escribió que no había nada en aquellas ruinas que no pudieran haber hecho los antepasados de la gente que vivía al lado.

Stephens wrote that there was nothing in those ruins that could not have been made by the ancestors of the people living next to them.

Tenía razón, y tardó casi un siglo en aceptarse.

He was right, and it took almost a century to be accepted.