Joachim Rittstieg

Joachim Rittstieg (23 February 1937, in Berlin – 27 May 2014, in Rendsburg) was a secondary school mathematics teacher who had travelled in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, and had studied the Mayan calendar system as a 40-year hobby.

Biography Rittstieg began learning a Low German dialect during World War II at the age of six, when his family returned to the Angeln region of Schleswig-Holstein. Most historians identify Angeln as the homeland of the Angles who settled England in the post-Roman period, but Rittstieg declares his Angeliter Platt dialect to be closely related to Old Norse. and learned about the Aztec city of Aztlán. The following year he met three Maya priests, with whom he conversed in Zuyua Than; he made the outlandish, unsupported claim that this non-Indo-European Mayan language is somehow similar to his native Low German dialect. which details many of his extraordinary claims.

After reading a German translation of the Poetic Edda, he came upon the original Old Norse version on the Internet, which he said he could understand 70 percent of because of its similarity to his Angeliter Platt dialect. which he believed sank into Lake Izabal, Guatemala as a result of an earthquake that, he declared, coincided with a solar eclipse occurring on 14 September 1224. He declared that discovering the supposed lost tablets would at least equal in significance Heinrich Schliemann's rediscovery of Troy and Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Rittstieg also postulated an imagined 470-year contract between Vikings and Mesoamericans, who supposedly killed the Vikings after blaming them for the destruction of the Toltec capital Tollan.

Until his death Rittstieg lived in Borgstedt, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.

Accompanying him were reporter Tim Thorer, who previously covered the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull and had interviewed former Palermo mayor and determined Mafia opponent Leoluca Orlando; reporter Jürgen Helfricht, who previously took part in South African and Zambian expeditions; photographer Holm Röhner, who previously travelled to the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, Russia and Bulgaria; videographer Claas Weinmann, who covered the largely peaceful 2011 Egyptian revolution from Cairo; and diving instructor Steffen Haufe, who has conducted previous underwater expeditions exploring shipwrecks.