 Its first mention may be in "A Ladies Ride across Spanish Honduras" published in 1884.Dorothy Popenoe excavated at the Late Classic portion of Cerro Palenque in the 1920s but died before she published the results of her excavations.Doris Stone included her analysis of the materials Popenoe excavated in her Archaeology of the North Coast of Honduras (1941)

In 1979, John S. Henderson began a project authorized by the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia - IHAH) to survey and test more than 2400 square kilometers of the valley, to record all of the archaeological sites within it, and perform a series of excavations to understand the chronology of settlement (who lived where, when).