Written through Franz Lidz and Meghan Dhaliwal
On a beautiful summer morning in a buggy, Charles Golden, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, cut the grass to the knees of a farm animal ranch at the back of the Santo Domingo Valley, a domain populated by thick brush and an almost impenetrable jungle. half a roar half barking of the howler monkeys pierced the incessant nuptial call of the cicadas. “We are reaching what is left of the Sak Tz’i dynasty,” Golden said.
Golden approached a barbed wire fence surrounding a grass, then slid underneath and walked to the view beyond: the ruined ruins of Sak Tz’i’, a Mayan arrangement at least 2500 years old. reminders of lost grandeur: giant piles of rocks and rubble that had once been temples, squares, reception halls, and a terraced palace.
Just in front were the remains of a complex of platforms that had shaped the acropolis. At its peak, it ruled through a 45-foot-tall pyramid in which members of the royal circle of relatives could have been buried. Where the Pyramid once stood and several elite apartments were walls of inverted masonry. Golden noted that the front of the pyramid’s top likely featured a line of self-supporting relief sculptures, called stelae, most of which were now buried in the rubble or had been cut and pulled out through thieves.
To the southeast, he saw an alley full of stony ground: it was a time-worn ball field, 350 feet long and 16 feet wide with sloping sides. The game, a devout occasion that symbolized regeneration, required players to hold a rubber ball forged in the air only their hips and shoulders. Nearby, in the midst of what had been an organization of ceremonial centers, was a jumble of stones where commoners would have accumulated for public celebrations and kings would have had their court. Golden pointed to the old courtyard, now a puzzle mound. “From this place,” he said, “the rulers of Sak Tz’i’ sought to control their subjects, effectively or not, and engaged in the politics of a landscape over which various kingdoms were fighting for control. “
Small and disjointed, Sak Tz’i’ — White Dog, in the language of ancient Mayan inscriptions — was rarely the ally, rarely the vassal, rarely the enemy of many of the most vital and hard regional actors, adding Piedras Negras today. present-day Guatemala. y Bonampak, Palenque, Toniná and Yaxchilán in the current Chiapas. La dynasty flourished in the classical era of Mayan culture, from 250 to 900 AD, when civilization had its greatest achievements in architecture, engineering, astronomy and mathematics.
For reasons that are still unclear, Sak Tz’i’ and many other settlements were abandoned and entire regions were deserted in the ninth century. Although descendants still live in the area, the vagaries of nature have distorted the walls of the temples, tomb robbers have dismantled the pyramids, and a jungle canopy has concealed squares and sidewalks. Sak Tz’i’ well erased from memory.
Scholars only began searching for evidence of the kingdom in 1994, when epigraphs reading a stele, discovered a century earlier in Guatemala, discovered that a glyph described the capture of a Sak Tz’i’ king in 628 AD.
Three summers ago, a team of researchers and local task forces led by Golden and Andrew Scherer, a bioarchaeologist at Brown University, explored the grass and discovered the remains of dozens of stone stelae, kitchen utensils and the corpse of a middle-aged woman. who had died at least 2,500 years earlier. Radiocarbon dating has indicated that the site, which researchers named Lacanjá Tzeltal in honor of the nearby modern community, probably settled as early as 750 BC. C. y occupied until the end of the classical period. Golden and Scherer established that the farm animal ranch had been, if not the capital, of the Sak Tz’i dynasty.
Simon Martin, a curator at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the project, said the evidence provided by the two researchers and their colleagues obviously showed that Lacanja Tzeltal was the real Sak Tz’i’s’ or at least a dynasty seat for the component of their story.
“The abandoned corpses of the monuments looted from this site correspond to some of those that in the past belonged to Sak Tz’i,” he said, “while the discovery of a new monument commissioned to a leader of Sak Tz’i’ is equally revealing. “
The carnitas delivery man
Golden, 50, and Scherer, 46, have collaborated in the backwaters of historic Mesoamerica since the late 1990s. They were the first archaeologists to document newly discovered fortification systems at the ancient classical Maya sites of Tecolote, in 2003, and Oso. Negro, in 2005, Guatemala.
“The hard work department depends on our experience spaces,” said Golden, who organizes geographic data, mapping and remote sensing with drones. Scherer analyzes human bones and everything that looks like food, isotopes, and burials.
Tall, sublime and funny, Golden was born in Chicago and, in his youth, captivated through the artifacts of the Oriental Institute Museum. “I was terrified of mummies, I couldn’t even be in the same room as them,” he said. “But I also dazzled through the pieces of Bathroughlon’s Ishtar Gate and the other relics of Mesopotamia. It is amazing to see genuine fragments that I had heard of in the Bible.
Golden studied archaeology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but the most important lesson he learned, he said, was as a summer intern at an excavation in Belize in 1993. Digging a control pit, he pulled out a small fluted tube from the “I was sure it was a pre-Columbian ornamental pearl,” he said. Smiling proudly, he showed it to his supervisor, who turned it over in his hands and said, “Someone must have dropped it over lunch. They are macaroni and cheese from Kraft. The so-called Louis Leakey returned to his hole, wiser.
Scherer is smaller and stockier, with a ponytail and a beard that splashes his chin with gray hair. He grew up in central Minnesota and hit the archaeology virus at the university, Hamline University in St. Paul, doing a cashier’s exam in a 2,000 year. old Native American camp. The course was co-led by Ojibwe elders, who taught him how to cut flint, tann skins and build Indian tents.
The two researchers were drawn to the Mayan culture, that of the ancient Americas whose written history dates back to the first millennium. “We know the names of the kings and queens who ruled the places we studied, who were their enemies and allies, when they went to war, when they were born and died,” Scherer said.
Scherer and Golden became aware of the lifestyles of the Tzeltal ruins of Lacanjá through one of their former study assistants. In 2014, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Whittaker Schroder was studying archaeological excavations near the Guatemalan border for a thesis topic. Driving through the small rainforest of the town of New Taniperla, Schroder, now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida, passed by a roadside carnitas stand. The trafficker tried to point it out, but Schroder, a vegetarian, continued.
Soon after, he walked past the stall. Again, the merchant tried to get his attention. This time, Schroder stopped. ” The shopkeeper said he had a friend with a stone that he asked an archaeologist to examine,” he recalls. I asked him to explain and he explained that the stone had an engraving with the Mayan calendar and other glyphs. “
That night, a friend of the salesman showed Schroder a mobile phone photo that, grainy, obviously showed a small wall panel illustrated with hieroglyphs. In one corner was a dancing figure dressed in a ceremonial hairstyle, brandishing an awl in her right hand and club in her left. Jacinto Gomez Sanchez, a farm animal rancher who lived 25 miles away, had unearthed the limestone slab in his assets many years earlier.
Schroder contacted Golden and Scherer. ” We periodically receive requests to look at figurines and stone sculptures in personal collections,” Scherer said. “While vases and other ceramic items are almost ancient, stone sculptures are fashion items made for tourists. So when someone says, “Come see my pre-Columbian sculpture,” we tend to assume that we’re going to look at a forgery souvenir.
To the amazement of the two Mayans, the photo they were sent by SMS showed a life-size monument with glyphs from the Sak Tz’i’ dynasty. It took them another 4 years to negotiate permission to excavate the property. In 2019, the study team flew drones and aircraft on top of which it was supplied with a detection tool called LIDAR, which it can see through the forest canopy to visualize the land and archaeology below. Researchers have estimated that at its peak, around 750 AD, the colony reached 1,000 inhabitants.
In June of this year, following a two-year delay due to the coronavirus, Golden, Scherer and their team returned to the site. Much of the paintings were kept preventively. As the stone walls of the acropolis were in danger of collapsing, Mexican anthropologist Fernando Godos and a local team were recruited to stabilize the crumbling masonry.
Remains of low walls surround parts of the excavation site, especially near the palace, which is uncommon in other kingdoms in the region; in general, those walls were built on the outskirts. One of the goals of the upcoming season of studies is to find out if the walls were built in the last days of the dynasty, as Scherer believes, or if they were part of the original construction, or at least modification, of half the site of the Classic period. Defense turns out to have been the greatest fear in Lacanjá Tzeltal, a densely populated castle surrounded by streams and steep embankments. Stone barricades probably reinforced with wooden palisades.
A defunct dynasty
The Maya, with their incredibly precise calendars, complicated hieroglyphs, highly productive agricultural system, and ability to expect celestial phenomena such as eclipses, were arguably the most enlightened culture in the New World. They built sumptuous colonies without the wheel, steel equipment, or beasts of burden.
“The Maya were the Greeks of the ancient Americas,” Martin said. “They built a complex civilization despite, or perhaps even because of, deep political divisions, with more than a hundred competing kingdoms. “
Mayan society extended beyond borders, from northern Guatemala to the Yucatan Peninsula, eastern Belize, and southern western ends of El Salvador and Honduras. Never politically unified, the Maya of the classical era were a hodgepodge of city-states.
“There are great kingdoms in the central lowlands, such as Tikal and Calakmul, the United States and the Soviet Union of their time,” Scherer said. “Our team deals with much smaller spaces concerned with their own kind of political alliances that break down and turn into conflicts on a very small localized scale. “Inscriptions on the monuments of those colonies suggest that the history of civilization dates back to a universal flood. The Long Count calendar recorded the days since the mythical start date of the Mayan creation, August 11. , 3114 BC
The landscape of the ancient Maya is dotted with ruins whose names are unknown to scholars and whose hieroglyphic inscriptions mention dozens of places whose places have now been lost. “researchers for about three decades,” Martin said. Why?Because Sak Tz’i’ is the vital maxim of the remaining “homeless” political actors.
The society’s highest mention, in addition to the stone inscriptions discovered in museums and personal collections, was imprinted on the lintels above the gates of Bonampak, depicting the defeated and humiliated Sak Tz’i’ captives.
References to Sak Tz’i’ helped diminish its location in eastern Chiapas, but still left many square kilometers in which it could hide. — a style that needed confirmation.
There have been false starts. Plan de Ayutla in Chiapas, a magnificent site rediscovered in the mid-1990s, roughly in the right position and contained an impressive collection of temples and the largest ball court in the area. The mayan text fragments in Plan de Ayutla did not provide any names, however, the site seemed to be a more likely competitor to Sak Tz’i’. “Unfortunately, there has never been any glyphic evidence linking the Ayutla Plan to the Kingdom of Sak Tz’i,” Golden said.
Grass
Gomez, 46, is strong and cheerful, with a silver smile and, if necessary, a resolute look. He lives on his ranch with his wife, 4 young men and the spider monkey, Pancho. His grandfather helped discover the village of Lacanjá Tzeltal in 1962.
Gomez remembers frolicking through the rubble of Sak Tz’i’ as a child. His father and grandfather instilled in him the desire to protect the monuments and sculptures of the building. Ten years ago, when looters threatened to sneak into the night to steal borrowed relics, he consulted archaeologists about the wall panel and hired the carnitas merchant as an intermediary.
In June, Gomez gave Scherer a tour of the external facilities in which the most valuable relics were stored. He showed tools, clay pots, slingshot stones, molars, a stucco jaguar head. When he showed a superbly carved flint spearhead, Scherer radiated familiarity.
In 2019, during the excavation of the ball field, Scherer excavated a stone altar. Below, he discovered the tip of the spear, obsidian leaves, spiny oyster shells, and green stone fragments. In Mayan cosmology, he explained, flint connotes war. and the sun or the sky; obsidian, darkness and sacrifice. Oyster shells and green stone were synonymous with life, energy and sun being reborn in the sea.
Although the altar was severely eroded, Golden created a three-dimensional style and showed that his glyph depicted two bound and prostrate captives and the claws of a monstrous centipede, a trend the Maya used to mark an underground or underground scene.
The jewel of the recovered antiquities was the 2- to 4-foot wall panel, recently dated to 775 AD. C. , which had triggered the excavations. A translation of the inscription by Stephen Houston, an anthropologist at Brown University, revealed accounts of battles, rituals, a mythical flood and a water serpent described in poetic verses as “bright sky, bright earth. “
Scherer said that while other Mayan settlements also have mythical accounts of creation, the story of Lacanjá’s tzeltal pill is unique to the site and may be just an allegory of its construction. said. ” The domain is full of streams and waterfalls and common flooding. “
The glyphs also highlight the lives of dynastic rulers such as K’ab Kante’. In one glyph, the ruler Sak Tz’i’ appears as the dancing Yopaat, a deity related to violent storms. The punch in his right hand is lightning. bolt, the snake-footed deity K’awiil; to his left is a “manopla”, a stone club used in ritual fights. It is presumed that the missing sign represented a prisoner of war, kneeling in supplication in Yopaat.
Martin called Golden and Scherer’s findings a major breakthrough in our Classic period Mayan politics and culture. “Such discoveries repair the now lifeless ruined history and, at least metaphorically, repopulate them with rulers, nobles, warriors, artisans, long dead. “merchants, farmers and the entire social matrix of ancient Mayan society,” he said.
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