Extraordinary Carving Discovered Inside Ancient Maya Pyramid

An enormous stone design by the ancient Mayan civilization that has persisted for centuries locked within a pyramid in Guatemala shows a battle of superpowers in 6th Century Central America, archaeologists have said.

The massive frieze with inscriptions and the vividly coloured painting was found at the Holmul archaeological excavation at a dig in the northeast Peten region of the country. Archaeologists claim that the evidence indicates that the region’s rulers were embroiled in a political clash of the titans between the kings of Kaanul – the Snake Kingdom – and the kings of Tikal.

The frieze, which is eight metres wide and two metres tall and stands along the exterior of a multi-roomed rectangular building, was found in a 20-metre high pyramid built in the 8th Century, in a style typical of the Maya. Much of the building still remains encased under the rubble of the later 20m-high structure. The carving is painted in red, with details in blue, green and yellow.

Francisco Estrada-Belli, director of the Holmul Archaeological Project that made the discovery, said: ‘This is a unique find. It is a beautiful work of art and it tells us so much about the function and meaning of the building, which was what we were looking for.’

The carving depicts human figures in a mythological setting, suggesting they may be deified rulers. It shows three human figures wearing elaborate bird headdresses and jade jewels seated cross-legged over the head of a mountain spirit known as a witz.

A cartouche on the headdress contains glyphs identifying each individual by name. The central figure’s name is the only one that is legible but the inscription says Och Chan Yopaat, meaning ‘the storm god enters the sky.’

Two feathered serpents emerge from the mountain spirit below the main character and form an arch with their bodies. Under each of them is a seated figure of an aged god holding a sign that reads ‘the first tamale.’

In front of the serpents’ mouths are the two additional human figures, also seated on mountain spirit heads. At the bottom of the carving, there are bands of glyphs that reveal the grand frieze was commissioned by the ruler of Naranjo – a superpower kingdom south of Holmul.

In the dedication, king Ajwosaj Chan K’inich claims to have restored the local ruling line and patron deities. The images and glyphic text on the frieze also provide information about political actors in the Maya Lowlands well beyond this small kingdom.

The writing says the ruler, was also referred to as a ‘vassal of the Kaanul king’ the snake lord.

‘When this building was erected, Kanul kings were already on their way to controlling much of the lowlands, except Tikal of course,’ said Estrada-Belli.

Mr Estrada-Belli told NBC News: ‘It’s all a grand scheme of building a Maya empire. Sometimes the Kaanul kings were on top. Sometimes Tikal was on top. But there was nothing chaotic about it.’

According to Alex Tokovinine, a Harvard University Maya epigrapher who worked on the project, the text places the building in the decade of the 590s and provides the first glimpse of the remarkable extent of Ajwosaj’s political and religious authority.

‘It also reveals how a new order was literally imprinted on a broader landscape of local gods and ancestors,’ she said.

At the time, the Tikal kings had established new dynasties and far-reaching alliances with kingdoms throughout the Maya Lowlands, perhaps thanks to a connection with Mesoamerica’s greatest state, Teotihuacan.

Tikal suffered a defeat in the year 562 by the Kanul ‘Snake’ kingdom, which, for the following 180 years, would come to dominate most other Lowland kingdoms. The find came as the team excavated in a tunnel left open by looters. The archaeologists unearthed a tomb associated with the pyramid last year containing an individual accompanied by 28 ceramic vessels and a wooden funerary mask.

It was found in a cavity dug into the stairway leading up to the building and the skeleton of an adult male and his ceramic offering were preserved by large limestone slabs that kept the tomb free of debris.

Intriguingly his incisor and canine teeth had been drilled and filled with jade beads, while two miniature flower-shaped ear spools were also found. The archaeologists said the iconography on the vessels discovered in the tomb bore clear references to the nine lords of the underworld as well as to the aged sun god of the underworld.

There were two sets of nine painted bowls decorated with the water lily motif and nine red-painted plates and one spouted tripod plate decorated with the image of the god of the underworld emerging from a shell.  Because of the unusually high number of vessels and the jade dental decorations, Mr Estrada-Belli believes the individual found may have been a member of the ruling class at Holmul.

Impressive Water Purification System Found at Ancient Maya City

For fundamental human life, water is necessary. Yet polluted water can also spread lethal viruses that can kill whole communities. Safe, clean water offers humanity one of its best chances to thrive.

Many ancient cultures purified their rivers, including the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans. Water treatment methods are also mentioned in Sanskrit texts dating from 2,000 BCE. Now, archaeologists have also discovered the Mayan of South America – and their water filtration mechanism was amazingly effective.

In a reservoir in what was once the major Maya city of Tikal, the ruins of which crumble in a rainforest in present-day Guatemala, archaeologists have found zeolite and quartz – minerals that are not local to the area, and which are both effective at helping remove contaminants such as microbes, heavy metals, and nitrogen compounds from water.

So effective, in fact, that they are both used in water filtration systems today.

“What’s interesting is this system would still be effective today, and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago,” said anthropologist Kenneth Barnett Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati.

Zeolite, in particular, is interesting. It’s a natural crystalline compound of silicon and aluminium, linked via shared oxygen atoms to form an open crystal lattice. It has excellent absorption and ion exchange properties, which makes it very effective at filtering water.

But, although the ancient Greeks and Romans used it as a pozzolan – an ingredient for cement – in aquatic structures such as bridges and aqueducts, archaeologists thought that zeolite hadn’t been used for water filtration until around the beginning of the 20th century.

“The apparent zeolite filtration system at Tikal’s Corriental reservoir is the oldest known example of water purification in the Western Hemisphere,” the authors wrote, “and the oldest known use of zeolite for decontaminating drinking water in the world.”

The ability to have clean water was of deep importance to the Maya, and of great concern, particularly to Tikal. The city’s only water source was 10 reservoirs. Given the large population, and the highly variable climate that went through periods of seasonal drought, their drinking water was prone to contamination from both microbes and cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, a pigment the Maya used heavily.

It stands to reason that they had some means of keeping the water clean. So Tankersley and his team went to investigate. They studied three of the largest reservoirs in the ancient city, as well as a local sinkhole as a control for mineral composition.

The discovery was made in the Corriental reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the residents of Tikal, and one of the largest drinking water reservoirs in use by the Maya for over a thousand years. Mixed in among the sediment at the bottom of the reservoir, the team found what they were looking for: zeolite and coarse quartz sand.

The zeolite was found only in the Corriental reservoir. There’s no way it could have just happened to be there when the reservoir was dug.

In fact, the team believes that the mineral was quarried from a site some 30 kilometres (18 miles) northeast of Tikal. There, volcanic rock forms an aquifer known to produce exceptionally clear water. University of Cincinnati geographer Nicholas Dunning was familiar with the area after previously conducting fieldwork there.

“It was an exposed, weathered volcanic tuff of quartz grains and zeolite. It was bleeding water at a good rate,” Dunning said. “Workers refilled their water bottles with it. It was locally famous for how clean and sweet the water was.”

The team compared the Corriental quartz and zeolite from material taken from the aquifer and found that the two were a very close match. They also used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the sediment and dated it to between 2,185 and 965 years ago.

It’s impossible to know exactly how the filtration system worked, but putting together the evidence, the team believes that it has a pretty good picture.

“The filtration system was likely held behind dry-laid stone walls with the zeolites and macrocrystalline sand-sized quartz crystals further constrained with woven petate (woven reed or palm fibre matting) or other perishable porous material positioned just upstream of, or within the reservoir ingresses, which were periodically ejected into the reservoir during flash floods caused by tropical cyclones,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

And it seems to have worked. Mercury deposits, likely from cinnabar contamination, had previously been found in several other Tikal reservoirs. Not a trace of it could be detected in Corriental.

“The ancient Maya lived in a tropical environment and had to be innovators. This is a remarkable innovation,” Tankersley said.

“A lot of people look at Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere as not having the same engineering or technological muscle of places like Greece, Rome, India, or China. But when it comes to water management, the Maya were millennia ahead.”

Lasers Reveal 60,000 Ancient Maya Structures in Guatemala

Researchers have identified more than 60,000 previously unknown structures in northern Guatemala after extensive aerial LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) surveys.

Their findings show that the region’s pre-Columbian civilization was “far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed,” according to National Geographic.

Scientists mapped more than 800 square miles of Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve and uncovered an extensive network of previously-unknown structures, quarries, farmland, and roads.

Based on the data, researchers believe that the region supported an advanced civilization on par with that of ancient Greece or China, rather than a series of isolated city-states.

Tulane University archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli says that the surveys reveal that the region was far more densely populated than previously thought: “it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there,” even in areas that were thought to be uninhabitable.

Archaeologists will now study the data to refine their understandings of the region’s inhabitants. The surveys found more than just ancient structures: they found evidence of pits from modern-day looters.

LiDAR mapping has proven to be a useful tool for archaeologists in recent years, who have used the technology to penetrate the dense rainforests of South America to reveal human-made structures that have long been hidden.

Aircraft-mounted LiDAR sensors shoot lasers into the ground, which bounce back once they hit an object. While the lasers hit tree leaves and vegetation, they also hit the ground.

Once scientists peel back the forest canopy and underbrush, they’re left with detailed images of the ground.

Last year, author Douglas Preston detailed an expedition to Honduras in his book The Lost City of the Monkey God, where archaeologists used LiDAR to uncover a pair of ancient cities in the middle of an impenetrable rainforest.

The survey comes from The Foundation for Maya Cultural and Natural Heritage (PACUNAM), a Guatemalan nonprofit organization dedicated to historical preservation, archaeological research, environmental conservation, and sustainable economic development.

This project is just the first phase of a three-year project that’s expected to survey 5,000 square miles of the region.

According to Ars Technica, researchers on the project will be submitting their findings to papers soon, but they will be revealing some of their work in an upcoming National Geographic special.

Grave of the king who laid foundations for Mayan civilization in 700 B.C. unearthed

This is the extraordinary grave of an ancient king credited with laying the foundations for the Mayan civilization more than 2,000 years ago, which has been discovered by archaeologists in Guatemala.

Researchers said they uncovered the grave of King K’utz Chman, a priest who is believed to have reigned around 700 B.C., at the Tak’alik Ab’aj dig in Retalhuleu, in the south-west of the country.

Packed with jade jewels and other artefacts, it is the oldest royal Mayan burial ground ever found.

‘He was the big chief,’ government archaeologist Miguel Orrego said. ‘The ruler who bridged the gaps between Olmec (pre-Mayan) and Mayan cultures and initiated the slow transition to Mayan rule.’

Historians believe he was the first leader to introduce elements that would define Mayan culture, such as building pyramids instead of square structures and carving sculptures that profiled royal families.

Guatemala is studded with ruins from the ancient Mayan civilization, which thrived between A.D. 250 and 800 and extended from modern-day Honduras to central Mexico. The Olmec Empire began to fade around 400 B.C. while Mayans grew in number and wrested control of trade routes.

Inside the grave, the team found glistening jade jewels including a necklace with a pendant carved in the shape of a vulture’s head, a symbol that represented power and high economic status, and that was given to respected elder men.

This symbol gives this burial greater importance,’ Mr. Orrego said. ‘This glyph says he (is) one of the earliest rulers of Tak’alik Ab’aj.’

Scientists found the grave last year, but it has taken until now for experts to verify it belonged to K’utz Chman.

Although no human remains were found at the site, the carbon-dated artefacts suggest that the king was buried between 770 to 510 B.C.

‘The richness of the artifacts tells us he was an important and powerful religious leader,’ archaeologist Christa Schieber said. ‘He was very likely the person who began to make the changes in the system and transition into the Mayan world.’

Experts said the array of jade articles in the tomb could provide clues about production and trade.

Susan Gillespie, an archaeologist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the excavation, spoke about the find.

She said older tombs have been found from ruling circles at the Mayan site of Copan in Honduras as well as in southern Mexico, where the pre-Mayan Olmec culture flourished.

Olmec influences are present in the area around Tak’alik Ab’aj, indicating possible links.

She said that because it is near a jadeite production center, the find could shed light on early techniques and trade in the stone, which was considered by the Maya to have sacred properties.