Category Archives: NORTH AMERICA

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Pre-Hispanic Images Revealed on Early Convent Walls in Mexico

Pre-Hispanic Images Revealed on Early Convent Walls in Mexico

A restoration team that, under the supervision of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), an institution of the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, recovers the posa chapels of the atrium of the Temple and Ex-convent of the Nativity, in Tepoztlán, Morelos, found on the walls of three of them a mural painting from the 16th century, which alludes to an emblem of pre-Hispanic iconography, composed of the symbols of a plume, an axe, a shield or chimalli and a flower stick.

Specialists analyze if the attributes of the image are linked to the patron god Tepoztécatl or to some other deity; Beyond that, they say, it is a historical element that can connect the current population of Tepoztlán with their ancestry. 

This discovery opens the door to a different way of understanding, over time, the transformations of Tepoztecan society.

This revelation is the result of the restoration work in the atrium of the convent complex, which is part of the “First monasteries of the 16th century on the slopes of Popocatépetl”, inscribed on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (Unesco), which are possible thanks to the cooperation agreement between the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Hungary, in matters of cultural heritage affected by the earthquakes of September 2017.

The Mexican company José Morales executes the tasks in the movable property associated with the historic building, which are supervised and coordinated by INAH personnel, through the National Coordination for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (CNPCC) and the INAH Morelos Center.

The coordinator of the associated movable property project, Frida Itzel Mateos González, indicates that the tasks have included historical flattening, mural painting and carved stones and, at present, those corresponding to the attrial walls and access arches, the posh chapels 2, 3 and 4, the open chapel, the atrium cross, the baptismal font and the Plateresque portal of the Temple of the Nativity.

To do this, a delicate mechanical cleaning is carried out with the use of scalpels, so it is a surgical task, and injections of lime and sand to consolidate and repair the painted flattening.

Despite the damage caused by the earthquakes of five years ago, the chapel posed 4 was revealing the clearest pre-Hispanic emblem to the restorers María Regina Pierrelus Díaz de León, Katherine Salas Ramos and Valeria López Mancera, as well as the visual artist Mónica Morales Zuniga.

The layers of lime that covered the mural painting were removed after verifying, through microscopic observation, that there were no subsequent paint layers. What could be seen with the naked eye were parts of the red circle that, initially, they supposed should contain the hagiographical attributes of Marian or Jesus Christ, but it did not.

The team narrates that “as we worked, we discovered a well-preserved red circle. Then we saw some triangles, we thought they corresponded to the crown or splendour of the Virgin Mary, but the feathers of a plume appeared. In the centre we saw a well-defined red fret within a circle, a wand with flowers, and a tepoztli (axe), similar to the one in the Tepoztlán glyph. It was not a Christian representation, but a chimalli (pre-Hispanic shield)”.

The ancient emblem discovered in Chapel 4 was painted freehand in a diluted red, filled with glazes, and then outlined in the same colour. The circle, 11 centimetres thick and just over a meter in diameter, encloses these pre-Hispanic symbols, equal in size to the Marian shield that was also painted in the 16th century in the Posa chapels.

The image, which is repeated, less clearly, in chapels 2 and 3, has generated questions about the reason for the presence of this emblem in such an important place and, even, next to the anagram of the Virgin Mary, and about the relationship between pre-Hispanic culture and Christian worship, a few years after the Spanish invasion.

In search of understanding the meaning of these attributes, an interdisciplinary investigation has been set up involving the restorers Lucía de la Parra de la Lama and Frida Mateos González, the restorers José Morales Zúñiga and Iván Reynoso Pérez, the museologists Alejandro Sabido Sánchez Juárez and Víctor García Noxpango, the ethnohistorian Marcela Tostado Gutiérrez and the archaeologist Laura Ledesma Gallegos.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin

Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologists, alongside partners from Wisconsin’s Native Nations, recovered a 3,000-year-old dugout canoe from Lake Mendota in Madison today, less than one year after their recovery of a 1,200-year-old canoe that drew international attention in November 2021.

Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin

Radiocarbon dating performed on the latest canoe places it in 1000 B.C., making it the oldest ever discovered in the Great Lakes region by roughly 1,000 years.

The 3,000-year-old dugout canoe is carved from a single piece of white oak and measures approximately 14.5 feet in length. It was initially located by Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen during a recreational dive in May of this year.

Discussions about recovering it from the lakebed began immediately following the discovery, in collaboration with Wisconsin’s Native Nations.

It was found in the same area the first canoe was discovered, suggesting that the location of Lake Mendota’s shoreline may have changed over time and could have once been much lower, according to Dr. James Skibo, Wisconsin Historical Society state archaeologist.

“Finding an additional historically significant canoe in Lake Mendota is truly incredible and unlocks invaluable research and educational opportunities to explore the technological, cultural, and stylistic changes that occurred in dugout canoe design over 3,000 years,” said Skibo.

“Since it was located within 100 yards of where the first canoe was found at the bottom of a drop-off in the lakebed, the find has prompted us to research fluctuating water levels and ancient shorelines to explore the possibility that the canoes were near what is now submerged village sites.”

Although it is likely that water transportation dates back to the arrival of Native peoples in this region, this discovery provides the earliest direct evidence.

The 3,000-year-old canoe helps to tell a complete story of the continuum of Native life in Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. Members from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Bad River Tribe were present at the canoe recovery.

“The recovery of this canoe built by our ancestors gives further physical proof that Native people have occupied Teejop (Four Lakes) for millennia, that our ancestral lands are here and we had a developed society of transportation, trade and commerce,” said Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle.

“Every person that harvested and constructed this caašgegu (white oak) into a canoe put a piece of themselves into it. By preserving this canoe, we are honouring those that came before us. We appreciate our partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, working together to preserve part of not only our ancestors’ history but our state’s history.”

Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists, along with skilled volunteers, conducted the excavation and recovery efforts.

The canoe was hand-excavated in preparation for today’s recovery mission and then securely transported to the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison for preservation and storage.

It will be cleaned and cared for by Tribal members and Society staff before being hand-lowered into a large preservation vat also containing the 1,200-year-old canoe discovered in 2021. Together the canoes will undergo a two-year preservation process that will conclude with freeze-drying to remove any remaining water.

“I was amazed when a 1,200-year-old canoe was uncovered last year, but this discovery of a canoe dating back to 1000 B.C. is just extraordinary,” said Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. “This incredible finding provides an opportunity for us to work in concert with Tribal Nations to not only study but celebrate the history of the Indigenous people who’ve called this land home since long before Wisconsin became a state, and I look forward to learning more about this artefact’s origins.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Ancient Mayan Cities are Heavily Contaminated with Mercury

Ancient Mayan Cities are Heavily Contaminated with Mercury

The ancient Maya in Mesoamerica used mercury — predominantly cinnabar, but rarely elemental mercury — for decorative and ceremonial purposes, according to a team of archaeologists from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

A cinnabar-painted vessel from the Maya site of Kaminaljuyu in southern Guatemala.

Mercury is a toxic pollutant that affects human and ecosystem health. Elevated mercury concentrations in the surface systems of our planet are primarily connected with increasing industrialization and urbanization.

Mining and fossil-fuel power generation activities are responsible for at least half of known global mercury emissions today. The cycling of mercury through the environment is driven by modern emissions such as these, but also includes re-mobilized legacy mercury from past anthropogenic activities.

An important example of a multi-millennial record of mercury use is from present-day Mexico and Central America, where the Maya used mercury for many centuries before European contact in the 16th century.

The possible environmental consequence of this long, region-wide preindustrial mercury use is yet to be investigated.

“Mercury pollution in the environment is usually found in contemporary urban areas and industrial landscapes,” said Dr. Duncan Cook, a researcher at the Australian Catholic University.

“Discovering mercury buried deep in soils and sediments in ancient Maya cities is difficult to explain until we begin to consider the archaeology of the region which tells us that the Maya were using mercury for centuries.”

In the new research, Dr. Cook and his colleagues reviewed all data on mercury concentrations in soil and sediments at Maya archaeological sites in lowland Guatemala, Belize, the Yucatan of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras.

They found that at the sites of Chunchumil in today’s Mexico, Marco Gonzales, Chan b’i, and Actuncan in Belize, La Corona, Tikal, Petén Itzá, Piedras Negras, and Cancuén in Guatemala, Palmarejo in Honduras, and Cerén in El Salvador, mercury pollution was detectable everywhere except at Chan b’i.

Concentrations ranged from 0.016 ppm at Actuncan to an extraordinary 17.16 ppm at Tikal. For comparison, the Toxic Effect Threshold (TET) for mercury in sediments is defined as 1 ppm.

“The ancient Maya frequently used cinnabar and mercury-containing paints and powders for decoration,” the researchers said.

“This mercury could then have leached from patios, floor areas, walls, and ceramics, and subsequently spread into the soil and water.”

“For the Maya, objects could contain ch’ulel, or soul-force, which resided in blood,” said University of Cincinnati’s Professor Nicholas Dunning.

“Hence, the brilliant red pigment of cinnabar was an invaluable and sacred substance, but unbeknownst to them it was also deadly and its legacy persists in soils and sediments around ancient Maya sites.”

As mercury is rare in the limestone that underlies much of the Maya region, the authors speculate that elemental mercury and cinnabar found at Maya sites could have been originally mined from known deposits on the northern and southern confines of the ancient Maya world, and imported to the cities by traders.

All this mercury would have posed a health hazard for the ancient Maya: for example, the effects of chronic mercury poisoning include damage to the central nervous system, kidneys, and liver, and cause tremors, impaired vision and hearing, paralysis, and mental health problems.

It’s perhaps significant that one of the last Maya rulers of Tikal, Dark Sun, who ruled around 810 CE, is depicted in frescoes as pathologically obese.

Obesity is a known effect of metabolic syndrome, which can be caused by chronic mercury poisoning.

“We conclude that even the ancient Maya, who barely used metals, caused mercury concentrations to be greatly elevated in their environment,” said the University of Texas at Austin’s Professor Tim Beach.

“This result is yet more evidence that just like we live today in the ‘Anthropocene,’ there also was a ‘Maya anthropocene’ or ‘Mayacene.’ Metal contamination seems to have been an effect of human activity through history.”

The team’s paper was published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

BELIZE, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists unearth a 1,000-year-old Maya settlement in central Belize

Archaeologists unearth a 1,000-year-old Maya settlement in central Belize

A site first highlighted by a farming community in Belize is enabling archaeologists to piece together what life was like for Mayans living centuries ago.

Archaeologists unearth a 1,000-year-old Maya settlement in central Belize
Anthropology graduate students Rachel Gill and Yifan Wang study the remains of an ancient Maya neighbourhood in central Belize. This is an aerial photo of the archaeological site facing east. The white smudges are ancestral Maya mounds.

Modern archaeology is less often about finding big monuments and more about understanding how people lived. For anthropology graduate students Rachel Gill and Yifan Wang, that’s exactly what this site means.

“We stand in the open fields of Spanish Lookout, a modernized Mennonite farming community in Central Belize, looking at what remains of ancestral Maya homes after years of ploughing,” the two archaeologists write for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“White mounds, the remnants of these houses, pock the landscape as far as the eye can see, a stark reminder of what existed more than 1,000 years ago. The collapsed buildings look like smudges on an aerial photograph, but as archaeologists, we get to see them up close. With enough excavation and interpretation, we can eventually make sense of how these dwellings functioned in the deep human past,” they add.

Of course, analyzing an archaeological site first starts with finding it. These days, this is rarely done by going out and digging and hoping for the best — archaeologists have an array of remote sensing tools at their disposal that allow them to peer through the thick jungle and sometimes, even catch a glimpse of what might lie underneath the surface.

But when you have the site in your sights, you still have to analyze it, and this is what Gill and Wang are working on.

Oftentimes, us laypeople at least, focus too much on the imposing structures and cool artefacts found at archaeological sites. But if you want to truly understand a culture like the Maya, you have to look deeper.

Incised ceramic sherds were excavated from an ancestral Maya building.

The mundane realities of many Mayans aren’t captured in the imposing Maya pyramids or their worshipping complex, but they can be captured in things like pots and tools.

At the Maya site, the two archaeologists are looking at a collection of domestic vessels found for cooking, serving, and storage. The shapes and styles of this pottery enable the archaeologists to date it — one particular neighbourhood was dated to 250-600 AD. In addition, they found several agricultural tools made from chert — an uncrystallized rock with similar chemistry to quartz.

The houses in this neighbourhood would have had walls and plastered floors, as well as several vessels they would have used regularly. Regular Mayans would have used the chert tools to grind maize into flour. They complimented their diets by hunting animals in the forest.

Grinding tools typical of ancestral Maya farmsteads include, from left, a metate fragment, a round stone and a mano fragment. Metates and manos were used to grind maize.

But not everything is clear. For instance, one Maya building uses uniform stones and a different type of plaster than the others, and it’s not exactly clear why.

This building also has fewer artefacts and seems to be “cleaner” than the others. This suggests it would have been not a residential, but a community building. What type of community building, however, is not clear. It could have been a meeting place, a ritual site, or maybe even a recreation centre, but it’s not clear yet.

“We also partially exposed a substantial platform mound that had four structures at its summit. The structures surrounded a plaza or courtyard. It is clear that an elite family lived here. This mound would have been secluded, sectioned off from the rest of the neighbourhood, like the large house at the end of a cul-de-sac where, if you were lucky, you got invited for a pool party, much different from the community building,” the archaeologists explain.

Unfortunately, agriculture is also affecting some of the findings. As local farmers worked the land generation after generation, they dislodged and damaged some of the artefacts and structures. But nevertheless, the signs of the local community are still there. After over a thousand years, their houses, their streets, and the places where they would gather can still tell us stories if we know how to read them.

“The ghosts of those who lived on the land before walk between us, using what remains of their homes to whisper, ‘Remember me.’,” the archaeologists concluded.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Traces of Native American Village Found in Florida

Traces of Native American Village Found in Florida

An archaeological bonanza is being unearthed in St. Augustine. This dig is revealing that a Native American village could be bigger — or at least in a different place — than previously imagined. 

That same site would later become one of the state’s first commercial orange groves. Some people may be familiar with the site on Bridge Street, where an old blue house stands crumbling and vegetation has taken over. 

However, in the last few months, the house has been sold and is being restored. 

According to a First Coast News report, St. Augustine city archaeologist Andrea White and her colleagues have found pottery and postholes from Palica, a Native American village, under a nineteenth-century house in St. Augustine’s Lincolnville neighbourhood.

What most people these days don’t see are the archaeologists on the site. They’ve been working in the backyard and even under the house. 

“It’s one of the first opportunities any archaeologists have had to work at this location,” said Andrea White, St. Augustine City Archaeologist.

She and St. Augustine Research and Collections Archaeologist Katherine Sims, along with some archaeology volunteers, have been carefully studying the site.

The house restoration and archaeological dig are revealing some surprises. One of those surprises is the mission site of the Native American village called Palica.

“It was only mapped once,” Sims said. 

That was in the 1700s. 

Later, archaeologists compiled maps and thought Palica was elsewhere in St. Augustine’s Lincolnville neighbourhood.

“When we started this project, we didn’t anticipate finding deposits from Palica on this property,” Sims said. “Once we started work, we immediately realized there is definitely Palica material here! Yes, it was a huge surprise.”

Before the house was built, Native Americans lived here on a Catholic mission site in the early 1700s. Archaeologists have found pottery, but the big find was under the floor of the house where archaeologists found post holes. 

Those are basically evidence of a Native American building, and that’s a big deal.

“These all date to Palica,” White said. “We are 100 per cent confident about the age of these. We’re really excited!”

Archaeologists believe the Palica mission was abandoned in the mid-1700s and 50 to 100 years later, the first part of this house was built. It was part of the Yallaha plantation which was one of Florida’s first commercial orange groves.

Some of the original structure is still part of the house. That original portion date to the early 1800s. The house is being restored, but old parts are being salvaged such as roof shingles that are stamped “Florida” on the underside from the 1800s.

Because the house was built a couple of feet above the ground, the house became a protector of the archaeological artefacts on the ground.

“What’s great about a historic structure is that normally people don’t’ go built something under a house, so it helps preserve everything,” White said.

That includes another surprise under the floor. Archaeologists found a donkey burial, estimated to be from the late 1700s before the house was built.

Laid with respect, not just tossed into the ground, it’s easy to think the animal was possibly someone’s hard-working farm animal during the land’s agricultural time period. 

And so this house and this land are still relinquishing secrets about a story hundreds of years old.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Eerie ‘yellow brick road’ to Atlantis was discovered atop an ancient undersea mountain

Eerie ‘yellow brick road’ to Atlantis was discovered atop an ancient undersea mountain

A team of marine biologists realized they definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore after discovering what appeared to be a yellow brick road on top of an undersea mountain near Hawaii.

“The yellow brick road?” a scientist mused in a YouTube video of the discovery.

Others remarked that the rocks were reminiscent of a very different fictional world: “It’s the road to Atlantis,” one researcher said. 

The yellow rocks, divided from each other at neat 90-degree angles, form a narrow strip and look like they were carved and arranged by human hands.  However, the seemingly paved roadway was simply the natural result of ancient volcanic activity thousands of feet below the water’s surface, the researchers said in a description below the video.

“At the summit of Nootka Seamount, the team spotted a ‘dried lake bed’ formation, now IDed as a fractured flow of hyaloclastite rock (a volcanic rock formed in high-energy eruptions where many rock fragments settle to the seabed),” the researchers wrote.

Eerie 'yellow brick road' to Atlantis was discovered atop an ancient undersea mountain

The remarkably brick-like divisions between the rocks are likely the coincidental result of heating and cooling stresses from multiple volcanic eruptions over millions of years, the team added.

The researchers took a detour down this eerie undersea road while piloting a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) around the Papahānaumokuakea Marine National Monument, a protected conservation area encompassing about 582,578 square miles (1,508,870 square kilometres) of the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii.

The expedition is part of the Ocean Exploration Trust’s Nautilus Exploration Program and aims to investigate the ancient seamounts near Liliʻuokalani Ridge, at the monument’s western edge.

One of the team’s main goals is to collect geological samples from the area’s seamounts — underwater mountains formed by volcanic activity — to better understand their ages and origins.

Learning this may also yield new insights into the formation of the Hawaiian Islands, the researchers wrote on the Nautilus website. The team will also collect microbial samples, to study what kinds of oddball organisms have managed to thrive near the deep, underwater volcanoes of the Pacific.

“Our exploration of this never-before-surveyed area is helping researchers take a deeper look at life on and within the rocky slopes of these deep, ancient seamounts,” the researchers added.

Previous expeditions aboard the Nautilus research vessel have turned up plenty of unnerving marine oddities. During a 2018 excursion to the Papahānaumokuakea Marine National Monument, researchers were dumbfounded by a wriggling, googly-eyed creature that seemed to change shape while in front of the camera.

Researchers later identified the creature as a gulper eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides), an incredibly big-mouthed fish that can unhinge its massive jaw to swallow prey even larger than itself.

The researchers controlling the ROV during that expedition also responded to the strange sight before them with a cultural reference.

“Looks like a Muppet,” one researcher said.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

36,000-year-old Meat of a Mummified Bison was used for a Stew

36,000-year-old Meat of a Mummified Bison was used for a Stew

One Night in 1984,  A handful of lucky guests gathered at the Alaska home of palaeontologist Dale Guthrie to eat stew crafted from a once-in-a-lifetime delicacy: the neck meat of an ancient, recently-discovered bison nicknamed Blue Babe.

The dinner party fit Alaska tradition: Since state law bans the buying, bartering, and selling of game meats, you can’t find local favourites such as caribou stew at restaurants. Those dishes are enjoyed when hunters host a gathering. But their meat source is usually the moose population—not a preserved piece of biological history.

Blue Babe had been discovered just five years earlier by gold miners, who noticed that a hydraulic mining hose melted part of the gunk that had kept the bison frozen. They reported their findings to the nearby University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Concerned that it would decompose, Guthrie—then a professor and researcher at the university—opted to dig out Blue Babe immediately. But the icy, impenetrable surroundings made that challenging. So he cut off what he could, refroze it, and waited for the head and neck to thaw.

Archaeology curator Josh Reuther and University of Arizona’s François B. Lanoë draw a sample from Blue Babe for the ongoing redating project.

Soon, Guthrie and his team had Blue Babe on campus and started learning more about the ancient animal. They knew that it had perished about 36,000 years ago, thanks to radiocarbon dating. (Though new research shows that Blue Babe is at least 50,000 years old, according to the university’s Curator of Archaeology, Josh Reuther.) Tooth marks and claw marks also suggested that the bison was killed by an ancestor of the lion, the Panthera leoatrox.

Blue Babe froze rapidly following its death—perhaps the result of a wintertime demise. Researchers were amazed to find that Blue Babe had frozen so well that its muscle tissue retained a texture, not unlike beef jerky. Its fatty skin and bone marrow remained intact, too, even after thousands of years. So why not try eating part of it?

It had been done before. “All of us working on this thing had heard the tales of the Russians [who] excavated things like bison and mammoth in the Far North [that] were frozen enough to eat,” Guthrie says of several infamous meals. “So we decided, ‘You know what we can do? Make a meal using this bison.’”

Guthrie decided to host the special dinner when taxidermist Eirik Granqvist completed his work on Blue Babe and the late Björn Kurtén was in town to give a guest lecture. “Making neck steak didn’t sound like a very good idea,” Guthrie recalls. “But you know, what we could do is put a lot of vegetables and spices, and it wouldn’t be too bad.”

Eirik Granqvist working on the taxidermy of Blue Babe.

To make the stew for roughly eight people, Guthrie cut off a small part of the bison’s neck, where the meat had frozen while fresh. “When it thawed, it gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom,” he once wrote.

They then added a generous amount of garlic and onions, along with carrots and potatoes, to the aged meat. Couple that with wine, and it became a full-fledged dinner.

Guthrie, who is a hunter, says he wasn’t deterred by the thousands of years the bison had aged, nor the prospect of getting sick. “That would take a very special kind of microorganism [to make me sick],” he says. “And I eat frozen meat all the time, of animals that I kill or my neighbours kill. And they do get kind of old after three years in the freezer.”

Blue Babe is on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

Thankfully, everyone present lived to tell the tale (and the bison remains on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North). The Blue Babe stew wasn’t unpalatable, either, according to Guthrie. “It tasted a little bit like what I would have expected, with a little bit of wringing of mud,” he says. “But it wasn’t that bad. Not so bad that we couldn’t each have a bowl.” He can’t remember if anyone present had seconds, though.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize

1,300-Year-Old Corn God Statue Shows How the Maya Worshipped Maize
The depiction of a young Maya maize god is consistent with other portrayals of beheaded Maya deities.

While excavating a section of the ancient Maya city of Palenque last summer, archaeologists in Mexico were surprised to see the tip of a large nose emerging from underneath the dirt.

As they carefully brushed away more debris at El Palacio, nostrils, a chin and the parted lips of a half-open mouth appeared.

Now, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has revealed that the ancient face was part of a 1,300-year-old stucco head depicting a young Hun Hunahpu, the Maya’s maize god.

The find is the first of its kind at the Palenque archaeological site, which is located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“The discovery of the deposit allows us to understand how the ancient Maya of Palenque constantly revived the mythical passage on the birth, death and resurrection of the maize god,” Arnoldo González Cruz, an archaeologist who was part of the find, says in a statement.

The face emerged from an archaeological dig in Mexico. National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)

The nine-inch-tall head had an east-west orientation that archaeologists believe represents the emergence of the maize plant at dawn, per INAH. They say Palenque’s Maya residents likely placed the large stone sculpture over a pond to symbolize the entrance to the underworld.

The sculpture was intended to depict a beheaded figure, echoing other Maya art depicting various headless gods.

Maize, or corn, was not only an important source of food for the Maya—it also played a fundamental role in their beliefs. According to the Popol Vuh, the Maya’s K’iche’-language creation story, gods created humans out of yellow and white corn.

As such, the Maya worshipped Hun Hunahpu, whom they believed was decapitated every fall around harvest time, then reborn the following spring at the start of the new growing season, as Ariella Marsden reports for the Jerusalem Post. Because of this pattern, the Maya also associated Hun Hunahpu with the cycle of human life and the changing seasons.

First domesticated about 9,000 years ago in what is now Mexico, maize played an important role in both Mesoamerican culture and the history of archaeology. As author Charles C. Mann writes in Maize for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn, cobs of ancient maize discovered in New Mexico “were among the first archaeological finds ever carbon-dated.”

The head of a young Maya maize god was made of stucco and buried in a pond archaeologists think was once used for stargazing.

Archaeologists dated the stucco statue to the Late Classic Period of roughly 700 to 850 B.C.E. They believe it represents a youthful maize god because of the figure’s “tonsured,” partially-shaven haircut, which looks like ripe maize. This depiction of the deity was common at the time, per the Dallas Museum of Art, and symbolized “mature and fertile” corn.

When they first built the maize god’s pond, the Maya likely peered into it to study the reflection of the night sky. Later, researchers say, they symbolically shuttered the pond by breaking down some of the stucco and filling it in with shells, carved bone fragments, pieces of ceramics, obsidian arrowheads, beads, vegetables and the remains of animals, including quail, river turtles, whitefish and dog.

They topped the pond with a limestone slab, then surrounded it with three short walls and filled everything in with loose stones and soil.

Because it was preserved in a humid environment for such a long time, the divine head must now undergo a drying process, undertaken by INAH’s National Coordination for the Cultural Heritage Conservation, to preserve it. After more than a thousand years underground, the stone sculpture is being reborn—just like the beloved deity it depicts.