TEGUCIGALPA – A Honduran man who was digging a deep hole in the backyard of his house uncovered bones and shards of vessels some 4,000 years old, the press reported Feb. 12.
The regional director of the Honduran Anthropology and History Institute, or IHAH, Aldo Zelaya, said that experts from the institution set out last week to retrieve all of the remains.
The discovery was made by Andres García, a resident of the poor Cerrito Lindo neighborhood in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. García told media outlets that after several days working to build a septic tank, he had dug down several meters “when I found a skeleton intact and part of a clay pot.”
Zelaya said that the bones were about 3.6 meters underground and could be those of a slender man of medium height.
He estimated the age of the remains “at possibly some 3,000 to 4,000” years old and added that the person could have belonged to an ancient Protolenca tribe, a mixture of Mayas, Lencas and Payas, that inhabited the Puerto Escondido area, now an archaeological reserve.
Experts at the institute will undertake more excavations to dig up the skeleton completely, since the only part uncovered is from the pelvis to the legs, he said.
They will also look for other objects that could be buried with the bones, in addition to the between 12 and 20 shards of earthenware pots found by García.
The discovery has attracted a number of curiosity-seekers to García’s humble abode.
