Posted on 09/25/2011 6:27:22 AM PDT by Renfield
Reeking of decay and packed with bowls of human fingers, a partly burned baby, and gem-studded teeth—among other artifacts—a newfound Maya king's tomb sounds like an overripe episode of Tales From the Crypt.
But the tightly sealed, 1,600-year-old burial chamber, found under a jungle-covered Guatemalan pyramid, is as rich with archaeological gold as it is with oddities, say researchers who announced the discovery Friday.
"This thing was like Fort Knox," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who led the excavation in the ancient, overgrown Maya town of El Zotz.
Alternating layers of flat stones and mud preserved human bones, wood carvings, textiles, and other organic material to a surprising degree—offering a rare opportunity to advance Maya archaeology, experts say.
"Since [the artifacts] appear in a royal tomb, they may provide direct insights in the political economy of the divine kings that likely involved tribute and gifts," Vanderbilt University anthropologist Markus Eberl, who was not involved in the project, said via email.
Excavation leader Houston added, "we're looking at a glimpse of lost art forms."
Fingers, Teeth, and a Taste of Things to Come
The researchers found grisly deposits even before they reached the Maya tomb.
Almost every layer of mud above the tomb contained blood-red pottery filled with human fingers and teeth wrapped in decayed organic material—perhaps leaves.
The fingers and teeth were "perhaps a kind of food or symbolic meal offering," Houston speculated. "Sacred breads in [Mexico's] Yucatán are wrapped in such materials today."
In another bowl above the circa A.D. 350 to 400 tomb, the team found a partly burned baby. The bowls closest to the burial chamber were arranged like the Maya cosmos—the four cardinal compass points plus the center of world.
(Related: "Ancient Maya Royal Tomb Discovered in Guatemala.")
Dancing King and Child Sacrifices
"The chill of the morgue" and "a faint odor of decay" tempered the euphoria of the find when the team finally entered the tomb itself on May 29, Houston said.
Breaking though a side wall of the small tomb, excavators uncovered the remains of six children—a rarity among Maya burials. Nearby was an obsidian blade covered in a red residue that "may be blood," Houston said.
The arrangement suggests the children, some of them infants, may have been ritually sacrificed as the king was laid to rest. (Read about Maya rituals of sacrifice and worship.)
Why the children would have been killed is a mystery, said team member Andrew Scherer, a Brown University anthropologist.
But the youth of the victims hints that their value as sacrifices may have lain in their being, to Maya eyes, on the verge of personhood, Scherer said.
Dig leader Houston added, "[The fact] that at least four appear not to have been able yet fully to speak or walk may put them at that threshold of human existence."
The role of the king in his own burial may be slightly clearer.
The team found bell-like ornaments made of shells and "clappers" made of dog teeth, which were likely placed around the king's waist and legs, Houston said.
The same accessories are seen on performers in a ritual dance depicted in Maya art, suggesting that the king may have been "cast" as a dancer in the ceremony leading to his interment—despite the arthritic joints that give away his apparently advanced age.
(Take a Maya quiz.)
Turtle King Tomb a "Gold Mine"
His teeth embedded with jewels, the buried king, Houston suspects, was the founder of a dynasty at El Zotz, in what's now the Petén region (satellite map) of Guatemala.
According to the partially deciphered hieroglyphics on the tomb walls, his name translates to perhaps Red Turtle or Great Turtle. More information about him may be gleaned from further study of hieroglyphics from the tomb, Houston said.
A small state with no more than a few thousand people, El Zotz lay to the west of Tikal, once among the biggest and most powerful Maya centers (interactive map of the Maya Empire).
The neighboring settlements, though, probably weren't best of friends. El Zotz was likely "supported by the enemies of Tikal in a way to keep a check on Tikal's territorial ambitions," Houston said.
More details on the nature of that relationship—and on El Zotz and Maya life in general—may await decoding in the turtle king's tomb. The excavation team's next steps include residue analysis as well as continued analysis, and reconstruction, of the tomb's textiles and other artifacts.
"This," Houston said, "could be a veritable gold mine of information."
Given the number of new arrivals that was a death rate to equal the worst Indian death rates.
Recall, at the time of initial settlement (1609) Virginia was just now at the end of nearly half a century of semi-arid conditions within which was a 17 year drought sufficient to have driven EVERYONE to live above the Fall Line. Those conductions always presage a major hanta virus outbreak once the drought breaks and the grasslands return.
Other historians have noted a similar period up the coast in the decade prior to the 1646-48 die-offs.
It was not the case that white folks just stood around and watched Indians died. Everybody died. The whites had backup resources in Europe. The Indians didn't.
Mann's estimate of 25 million is far too low. The agricultural base extant in the Americas at the time of first contact was far too large for such a small population.
Even if the Indians had had superior technology and were discovering Europe and Africa, they'd still died off in the Americas ~ as they had been doing for thousands of years.
Apocalypto was my first thought when I read the article. What Mel Gibson did in that movie is brilliant, and the way he marketed it was really sly. He sold it with the insinuation that its message is about anti-imperialism. This was during the whole Iraq war hubbub. But then, at the very end, in literally the last scene, the movie delivers its real payload when the Spanish galleons are seen pulling up to shore — and the thought that you can’t help but think is “It’s going to be okay, Western Civilization has arrived”.
There are videos of MEChA Hispanics who want to establish "Aztlan" in the U.S. "occupied" Southwest. They compare the Mayans to the Ancient Greeks and claim that we derived all our knowledge from them.
There are some history writers who would agree; 25 million is probably on the low side. I agree, climate changes moved or wiped out large numbers.
If these estimates are correct, central and south America had a larger and healthier population than most of Europe.
It would be interesting to see a graph showing the European and native populations from 1510-1800.
When practicing ritual child sacrifice and cannibalism, it’s always good etiquitte to use a finger bowl.
Why do archeologists always try to bend old civilizations into modern times? “The children did not reach personhood” Is this another way of saying very late term abortion? Maybe the Mayans had great respect for children and it was the highest form of sacrifice to the gods. Think of the slaughtered calf. If they had no respect for children would it not have been like offering leftovers to the gods?
There is an interesting book, “1491 New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann, which discusses the pre-Columbian populations in considerable detail.
A Democratic Party Fund Raiser.
I’m reading it now.
Finished “1493” about a month ago.
Still, much of their base culture survives in meso-America. We see it in beheadings along the border.
Blood lust.
The Ancient Greeks were pretty brutal.
You can, if the guy at the morgue doesn't pry it out and tell the police it was missing when he came in...
Grave robbing is an old profession, and once the box is closed, who's gonna know? (Not sanctioning it, just saying...)
Heads on pikes, drawing and quartering, impalement, crucifixion along the Apian Way...such are the tools of terror which can keep a resistant population cowering in their hovels rather than fighting in the streets. No one wants to end up like that, so they tend to be quiet--until the killing gets out of hand.
How many political adversaries (and their entire clans) have been sold into slavery or slaughtered, only to have the reason painted as a sacrifice to some God or otherwise whitewashed?
No gold was found when opened?
Dig leader Houston added, "[The fact] that at least four appear not to have been able yet fully to speak or walk may put them at that threshold of human existence."
Professor Peter Singer, pick up the white discourtesy phone...
You and me both. I thought of that all the way through the article.
"You are going to believe people who know when the world was going to end are the same people who ate still beating hearts ripped out of their captured conquests, sacrificed thousands of people by throwing them down the stairs of their temples, sacrificed infants to their sun god, had no technology, no written language, were basically savages and you are concerned they know when it all is going to end"
"Okey Dokey....it's a free world..."
Two pieces of flamebait:
“Too bad that noble civilization was overrun by the eeeeeeeeeeeeevil white Spaniards.”
“So...were they the Jaredites? or the Lamanites? or some other ancient Jooooooooooooooooooos?”
For years, Western historians thought they were the “Lost Tribes” of Israel.
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