storey is joined by archaeologist dolph widmer. both are from the university of houston. as they seek the roots of maya leadership, storey and widmer are inspired by a single basic question. did some of the earliest people here gain more power and prestige than others ? storey: we actually know very little about the earliest inhabitants of the copan valley. what we do know is that there were very few of them because there are not very many archaeological sites from an early period. keach: the archaeologists believe that as early as the eleventh century b.c., a few hundred people farmed here. according to their model, the first settlers were organized as a tribe. with plenty of land, no one person held an economic advantage over anyone else. to test their model, widmer and storey follow guide arturo sandoval to the limestone caves of copan. storey: all we know about the caves surrounding the copan valley is that some of them were explored in the 1890s by an archaeologist named gordon. and in some of them he found what he thought was very early pottery and some human skelet