Uncovering the Secrets at Mirador | The Story of God

I got involved with Mirador by invitation from two scholars since I spoke Spanish. They were exploring the swamps surrounding Madrid, and while we were there, they put me in charge of the architecture because of the massive scale of buildings there. I discovered the antiquity of the city was on those big buildings.

The problem was that at the time that I was doing this, the pre-classic were hunters and gatherers. So you can imagine that dilemma. If somebody would have called Gordon Willey at Harvard and said, "There's some student named Anson who says that there were huge pre-classic cities within seventy-two meter high pyramids," he just said, "That guy's fault, that crap," and hung up.

So it took me 20 years to convince my colleagues if this was real, the data was real, that there were massive pre-classic cities centuries before the time of Christ, a thousand years earlier than this stuff. These guys were sophisticated. They were complex, and they told the story of humanity that we've never seen before.

The saga is there's the origins of complexity, the dynamics of complexity, and the collapse of complexity, and that's the whole gamut. We know we can't see our origins; we can only live in the present. We can't see our future, but in the lens of archaeology, you can see the whole gamut.

You can see the beginnings, the things they did that originated their social, economic, and political sophistication. You can see the dynamics of their society maintain that, and you can see what took them to hell. When you look at all those factors, you say, "Oh my gosh, that's humanity."

Then you start looking along our own government, and you say, "Mm-hmm, we're doing some things right, and we're doing some things very, very, very wrong." Because we can see that through the lens of archaeology, which we don't have any other means to detect that.