They were here thousands of years before Columbus. While Paris was still a village, they were carving cities out of the jungle. They played a ball game for life or death. They planned their lives according to the heavens. Their writing is a puzzle we're still learning to decipher. Wow! Look at this. Really something. Now the pace of discovery is quickening. We are finally finding out who they were. Bone? There's a lot of bone. Look. It's a black kind of a... Oh, man! This is really a powerful work of art. They are the people who say that the gods made them from corn. They are the Maya. The year is 1839. The place-western Honduras. An American explorer named John Lloyd Stephens is leading an expedition in search of an abandoned Maya city called Copan. Almost nothing is knows about the Maya Stephens is about to learn more. Draped with a thousand years of tropical growth, the brooding temples and tumbled stones sprawl for miles. Stephens is overwhelmed by a sense of mystery.