The Discovery

The site was first discovered by a 19th century traveler, Simeon Habel. Habel passed through the volcanic highlands of the provinces of Ahuachapán and Sonsonate in western El Salvador. Near the Town of Apaneca, on a level area between several peaks, Habel came across three massive stone monuments. Unfortunately , Habel's discovery was quickly forgotten , buried beneath heavy deposition and covered by the Finca's dense coffee trees. The great monuments were left to slumber for nearly a century" (Demarest, Arthur, "The Archaeology of Santa Leticia and the Rise of the Maya Civilization" 1986, 6).

In 1964 , a young man on vacation from military service in Germany with the U.S Army Paratroopers, was visiting his father and came upon the outcropping of a rock on which he sat so as to rest for a while. As he chatted with a local folk he noticed that the stone had a thick coverage of moss and underneath the remains of what seemed to be the carved relief of a forehead. He suddenly realized that he was sitting on an ancient monument.

However, he kept this to himself, returned to Germany to finish his military service, and in the month of October of 1965, returned to live at Finca Santa Leticia. He began excavations that same month and found the first of the potbellied figures (which according to the calculations of Demarest was estimated at 14,000 pounds) . He then began making a series of ever widening concentric circles until he came upon the second monument(according to Demarest 21,000 pounds). Ricardo Valdivieso was dumbfounded and tremendously excited by his discovery.

He then drew an imaginary line through the center of the two monuments, measured the distance and extended this imaginary line to the same distance that he found between the first two monuments. All the monuments were facing to the West, so therefore, the imaginary line ran North to South, so he extended the  line to the South from monument two and to the north from monument one . This is the way he discovered monument three(19,000 pounds), at the exact same distance of monument two.

By this time Ricardo had made contact with his friend Stanley Boggs, a famous Salvadorean Archaeologist who at the time was head of the National Museum, "David J. Guzman". Together they excavated Santa Leticia Site for many years in which all of the findings were donated to the Salvadoran Museum by the Valdivieso Family.

 
During the illness and death of Ricardo Valdivieso Menéndez, Ricardo and Mauricio's father, the excavations were stopped at Santa Leticia. However, in 1977, Stanley Boggs asked permission of the Valdivieso brothers to invite other archaeologists to continue and help with the excavation.

Obviously, the Valdivieso's, Rick and Maurice happily agreed to the idea. Thus, in 1977 , appeared in El Salvador the young archaeologist, Arthur Demarest , who began the studies and excavation of Santa Leticia backed by the administration of the Cultural Patrimony of El Salvador, the Danforth Foundation, the Owens Fund of the Peabody Museum, and the Department of Anthropology of Harvard University.