ATHENS | On a recent December morning, Mack Jones hiked a trail bordering the lake at Sandy Creek Park in Athens before he ventured off the path and up a forested ridge. There he showed a group following him a series of mysterious stone terrace walls and rock piles.
“It’s hidden in plain sight, and it’s been that way for the 30 years the park has been here,” Jones said. “No one has messed with it and maybe they won’t.”
Jones believes those numerous rock piles — and especially the stone wall terraces lacing the hillside — might constitute evidence that the ancient Mayans once established a village here in Georgia
“Maybe it’s not as crazy as it seems,” said Jones, who has spent much time photographing and mapping the stone works as he sought to document the site in hopes that one day archaeologists will launch an investigation.
The History Channel’s “American Unearthed” on Friday evening addressed the question on whether the Mayans established villages in North Georgia. The program keyed on a site in Towns County known as Track Rock.
The show’s producer, geologist Scott Wolter of Minneapolis, heard about the sites in Georgia, but was told by several Georgia archaeologists “that there was nothing to the Track Rock site. They knew for a fact that no Mayan immigrants ever came to the Southeast,” he said in a statement.
One Georgian that the History Channel producers interviewed is Richard Thornton, an architect and city planner, who has studied the Track Rock ruins, a large series of about 150 terraces. Thornton, a Dahlonega resident who is of Creek Indian ancestry, spent time in Mexico studying the ancient Indian cultures.
Thornton provided the show with information on what he has found at Track Rock, which he considers “an important archeological zone.”
The show producers were told about the site at Sandy Creek Park, but Thornton said he doesn’t know if they found time to visit.
“It looks very similar to Track Rock in many ways, but until you get archeologists in there doing radiocarbon dating and tests, we won’t know for sure if there is a Mayan presence,” Thornton said.
The program also presented DNA evidence gathered from people in the region, Thornton said. Some of the Creek Indians in the region of Track Rock provided DNA samples and tests revealed the presence of both Mayan DNA and DNA from people of South America.
Thornton’s published works on Track Rock opened Jones’ eyes to the possibility a Mayan connection to the Sandy Creek site.
Thornton’s illustrations “showed the mounds of rocks and terracing and it looks like what I’m seeing at Sandy Creek. I call it getting my eyes right,” said Jones, a graphic artist who lives in Athens.
Once Jones felt like the terraces and rock piles might have historical importance, he pondered what he should do. He contacted officials with the park and archeologists at the University of Georgia.
“Nobody was getting back in touch with me, so I wrote Thornton and he wrote me back,” Jones said. “I told him it was his illustrations that made me see this out here.”