Mayan Queen's Tomb Found In Rain Forest

DALLAS - While excavating an ancient royal palace deep in the Guatemalan rain forest, archaeologists made a rare discovery - the 1,200-year-old tomb and skeleton of a Mayan queen.

Archaeologists announced the find Thursday, and said the woman appears to have been a powerful leader of a city that may have been home to tens of thousands of people at its peak. They found her bones on a raised platform, with evidence of riches scattered around her body.

"We find clues of people's existence in the past all the time, from the garbage they left or the buildings they built. ... But when you actually come face-to-face with human beings, it's a deeply sacred moment for all of us," said David Freidel, an anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University, which sponsored a team of 20 archaeologists excavating the site.

The discovery in the ancient Mayan city of Waka' in northwestern Guatemala was made in February but was not made public until Thursday.

Word of the find comes two days after a Vanderbilt University archaeologist, whose work is supported by the National Geographic Society, publicly described excavation of a little-known Guatamalan site called Cival, which housed as many as 10,000 people at its peak some 2,000 years ago.

Stephen Houston, a Brigham Young University professor specializing in Mayan archaeology and writing who was not involved in the project, called the tomb discovery significant.

The tomb is the first discovered at Laguna del Tigre, Guatemala's largest national park, where SMU began its excavation project in 2002.

The queen's skull and leg bones were missing, probably removed sometime after the body had decomposed to be used as relics. Other than that, the tomb - measuring 11 feet long by 4 feet wide by 6 feet high - was untouched.

The queen is thought to have been 30 to 45 when she died, but archaeologists have uncovered no clues as to her name, dynasty or cause of death.

Freidel, who leads the excavation team with archaeologist Hector Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, said the power the queen held is evident in the 1,600 artifacts found in the tomb - especially the remains of a plated helmet.

Twenty-two jade plaques, each about 2 inches square, appear to have been part of the helmet. Archeologists also found a 4-inch long jade carving depicting the dead of a deity in profile - a type of jewel worn by kings and queens, Freidel said.

Stingray spines found in the tomb were usually used as bloodletting implements - males pierced their genitals in ceremonies that offered their blood to the gods, while women generally placed the spines in their tongues. The ones found in the tomb were placed on the queen's pelvis, Freidel said.

Research suggests that Waka' - called El Peru on present-day maps - was inhabited as early as 500 B.C., but reached its peak between A.D. 400 and A.D. 800. The city was abandoned in the late 800s to 900s.

Freidel's project is working with the Guatemala government and conservation groups to try to protect 230,000 acres of the Laguna del Tigre.

Last year, 100,000 acres of the park were burned as impoverished villagers cleared rain forest for illegal cattle ranching and logging. Freidel says the deforestation threatens habitat for several endangered species, including the scarlet macaw, as well as the area's archaeological resources.

(Article about Cival mentioned in the previous article)

Ancient Mayan community may have been a city

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 2,000 years ago, while Rome was laying waste to Carthage and the Hopewell people were building mounds in Ohio, a grand civilization flourished at a now little-known site in Guatemala called Cival.

"It's very interesting when we reverse some existing ideas. We thought the preclassic Maya were a relatively simple society ... and they were not," Francisco Estrada-Belli, who led the excavation work at the site, said Tuesday. "There was a whole civilization during the preclassic time we are just beginning to recover."

Cival was one of the largest cities of the Preclassic Maya, perhaps housing as many as 10,000 people at its peak, said Estrada-Belli.

Two monumental carved masks and elaborate jade ritual objects have been found in recent excavations of the city's central plaza, according to the Vanderbilt University archaeologist.

Estrada-Belli reported his finds in a news conference arranged by the National Geographic Society, which supported his work and plans to feature the finds in a television broadcast.

He believes Cival could have surpassed nearby Holmul, which rose to prominence nearly a thousand years later in the Classic Maya period.

Classic Maya civilization stems from around A.D. 300, while Cival flourished from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 100, he said. It was then "abandoned under mysterious circumstances, never to be occupied again."

According to Estrada-Belli, the central axis of the main buildings and plaza at Cival is oriented to sunrise at the equinox.

He said the most important find so far turned up in a dank tunnel dug by looters some time in the past.

While he was inspecting the tunnel he reached into a crack in the wall and felt a curved piece of stucco. Digging to it from the other side, he found a well-preserved, giant face of a Maya deity.

The 15- by 9-foot stucco mask had one eye visible and the mouth squared, with snake's fangs in its center.

"The mask's preservation is astounding," Estrada-Belli said. "It's almost as if someone made this yesterday."

Further diggings last month disclosed a second, apparently identical, mask on the other side of a set of stairs. Its eyes appear to be adorned with corn husks, suggesting the Maya maize deity. Ceramics associated with the mask date it to about 150 B.C.

After several seasons of digging, the researchers believe Cival was one of the largest Maya cities of the time.

It has pyramids and a large complex surrounding a central plaza. In front of a long building on the complex's eastern edge, the archaeologists discovered a stela, or inscribed stone slab, dating to 300 B.C., perhaps the earliest such carving ever found in the Maya lowlands.

In a recess in the plaza the team found a red bowl, shells, a jade tube and a hematite fragment. Behind the recess was a cross-shaped depression containing five smashed jars, one on each arm of the cross and one in the center. Under the center jar were 120 pieces of jade, most of them round, polished green and blue jade pebbles. Five jade axes, placed with their blades pointing upward, lay nearby.

Looters had missed the artifacts by inches, he said.

According to Estrada-Belli, this type of offering was part of the ritual when a new king took power.

He said there were remains of a hastily built defensive wall around the city.

"Cival probably was abandoned after a violent attack, probably by a larger power such as Tikal," he said.

"Behind the recess was a cross-shaped depression containing five smashed jars, one on each arm of the cross and one in the center."

The Mayans represented the Earth as a four sided diamond square. Each point on the diamond, like an American baseball field, represented their East, North, West, and South. Each point had its own color (Red, White, Black, and Yellow). In the center of these four points they represented the Earth in Green.

That representation of Earth is almost certainly what the reporter is calling a "cross." Those jars will either be those colors, or what was in the jars will be those colors, though the article doesn't say.

The Mayan also invented a cool board game. Along with the 20,000 miles of paved roads that they built, they like to carve 14 squares into the tiled floors of their noble houses. Then they play with pieces that they wanted to put up for gamble. They moved their pieces one space/square for each time that a piece of corn showed a black side facing up. Since they used four pieces of half-burned corn for their dice, each throw of the corn would send your piece forward from 1 to 5 places (no black showing = 5, 1 black side showing = 1, 2 black sides showing = 2, etc.).

They'd moved their pieces forward, and when they reached the end they started counting at the beginning as if the board was circular. If they landed on their opponent's piece then they "captured" it, and the 2 pieces would move together back towards the player's home side. Once "home," the captured piece was lost to that player.

They would often bet several pieces in any one game, and it could take up to three hours for one player to capture all of his opponent's pieces.

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