ang="EN">The first post-Spanish conquest mention of Copán was in an early
colonial period letter dated 8 March 1576. The letter was written by Diego
García de Palacio, a member of the Royal Audience of Guatemala, to king Philip
II of Spain. French explorer Jean-Frédéric Waldeck visited the site in the
early 19th century and spent a month there drawing the ruins. Colonel Juan
Galindo lead an expedition to the ruins in 1834 on behalf of the government of
Guatemala and wrote articles about the site for English, French and North
American publications. John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood visited
Copán and included a description, map and detailed drawings in Stephens'
Incidents
of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, published in 1841. The
site was later visited by British archaeologist Alfred Maudslay. Several
expeditions sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University worked at
Copán during the 20th century. The Carnegie Institution also sponsored work at
the site, in conjunction with the government of Honduras.
The Copán buildings suffered significantly from forces of nature in the
centuries between the site's abandonment and the rediscovery of the ruins.
After the abandonment of the city the Copán River gradually changed course,
with a meander destroying the eastern portion of the acropolis (revealing in
the process its archaeological stratigraphy in a large vertical cut) and
apparently washing away various subsidiary architectural groups, including at
least one courtyard and 10 buildings from Group 10L–2. The cut is an important
archaeological feature at the site, with the natural erosion
