ROCK HILL — If you have some time off during the holiday break, you have the opportunity to watch a Winthrop University professor accomplish what the Conquistadors couldn't: finding the lost Mayan Empire city of the White Jaguar.
Or you can sit in the same room with said instructor in January and watch how it played out.
Archaeology professor Brent Woodfill teamed up with the exploration unit from Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" last spring for a search of the lost Mayan city Sak B'alam in southern Mexico. The hourlong episode "Lost City of the White Jaguar" premiered Nov. 29, 2023, and is also available on streaming services Max and Paramount+.
Winthrop is preparing for a public showing of the "Expedition Unknown" episode on campus in January, Woodfill said, though no firm date has been set. Woodfill will be part of a question-and-answer session afterward.
Host and archeologist Josh Gates has been traveling worldwide for 12 seasons of the show, exploring legends and ancient civilizations.
"Josh and his whole crew take this seriously," Woodfill said. "They're trying to do good science and make something accessible to the public. They're more interested in getting it right than presenting easy answers."
The subject of the episode itself hadn't been an easy one for anyone to answer. Sak B'alam has two stints of eluding people who searched for it. In the 16th century, it was a Mayan refuge created after the Spanish invasion. It was secluded enough to prevent the Conquistadors from finding it for 120 years. From there, the city was abandoned, and few to no records of it were available.
Woodfill attempted to find the city in 2019 but could not do so in a 2½-week venture. The pandemic delayed his return. In Woodfill's trip with "Expedition Unknown" this year, though, he's 99 percent sure they were able to locate where the city had once stood, thanks to drone technology and a recently unearthed map.
"We're hoping to go back next year," he said.
Digging into history was one of Woodfill's earliest passions as a child. A dinosaur book was the first type of book he read, and reread, to the point of memorization. That passion transitioned to archaeology by the time he was 10 years old.
"I discovered Pompeii and was blown away that you could dig up people and cities," he said.
Woodfill, who joined Winthrop's staff in 2018, teaches archaeology, ethnography, forensic anthropology, linguistic anthropology, environmental justice, non-Western economics and sacred places. Away from the classroom, Woodfill has made several trips to central America and Mexico for his Mayan research. He's written two books on the subject, “War in the Land of True Peace: The Fight for Maya Sacred Places” in 2019 and “Ritual and Trade in the Pasión-Verapaz Region, Guatemala” in 2010, and is working on a third.
In the episode, the narration tells of the Mayan Empire's advancements, describing them as rivaling those in the New World. That type of acknowledgement was one reason Woodfill said he respects the program.
"The greater universe has a lot of documentaries that are more interested in belittling indigenous people by showing anyone who is not White needed alien intervention," he said. "I did not want to be associated with one of those shows. I asked people I trust about ("Expedition Unknown"), and they said they do a good job."
