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Search for the Lost Cave People
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Program Overview
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The Maya are often credited with inventing the first complex writing
system on the American continent, but recent archeology shows that a
little-known people called the Zoque developed a sophisticated
script long before the Maya. Who were the Zoque? Were they
responsible for such technological advances as a calendrical system
and sophisticated numerical systems?
Some 300 caves carved into canyon walls in the Rio la Venta Gorge,
located in the Chiapas jungle in Central America, may hold some
answers. The relative inaccessibility and extreme dryness of the
caves have preserved clothes, rope, and wooden
implements—artifacts that rarely survive in Central America.
NOVA follows a team of archeologists as they uncover artifacts that
could reveal new understandings about the Zoque and their place in
Mesoamerican history.
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