Ancient Panamanian Road, Tunnel, Pottery and Wall.
The Workers Who Dug the Panama Canal Found Paved Roads 40 Feet Below the Jungle Floor
In 1908, a Barbadian laborer named Clement Harewood was digging 40 feet below the jungle surface in the Culebra Cut when his shovel hit a floor made of fitted stone blocks — interlocking, worn smooth by centuries of use, extending in every direction.
His foreman told him to keep digging. By morning, the section had been blasted with 44,000 tons of dynamite. He wasn't the only one. A Martinican driller found a smooth-walled passage running straight through the clay in 1907. An American steam shovel operator brought up a piece of dark stone with a cemented underside from 45 feet down in 1910. French surveyors in the 1880s annotated "ancient masonry" on their geological maps at depths of 10 to 15 meters.
The Panama Canal was the most destructive excavation in human history — 240 million cubic yards of earth removed from a landscape inhabited for at least 3,000 years. No archaeological oversight existed during construction. 15,000 Caribbean laborers died building it. Anything found in the ground that wasn't rock or clay was blasted, buried, or ignored.
The Coclé built gold-working cities. The Cueva built agricultural settlements with organized road systems. Pre-Columbian ridged fields dating to 1350 BCE have been documented across Panama. These civilizations built permanent infrastructure — roads, plazas, drainage systems. Infrastructure that was buried under centuries of jungle growth. When canal workers cut through 40 feet of that sediment, they cut through 3,000 years of human history.
Nobody was watching. The pottery shards found during the 2014 expansion proved it — pre-Columbian artifacts survived a century underwater. What did the original construction destroy?
The stone floor is still down there. Under Gatun Lake. Under 85 feet of water. Under a century of sediment. And the journal that documented it is crumbling in a drawer in Kingston.
(Scroll to 10:53 in the video, Ancient horizontal tunnel at a depth of 35 feet described as smooth as glass. )
(Scroll to 12:30, A smooth solid dark flat stone on one-side roughly 2 feet across at a depth of 40 plus feet.)
(Scroll to as early as 13:58, Ancient Masonary found at depths between 10 and 15 metres)
(Scroll to 15:42, An ancient constructed dark stone wall fitted without mortar)
(Scroll to 18:21, More untold stories)
(Scroll to 18:58, Pre-Columbian Panamanian Pottery Vases)
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