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By Franz Lidz
Photographs through Meghan Dhaliwal
CHIAPAS, Mexico — On a sunny, ox-filled morning in early summer, Charles Golden, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, cut grass to his knees at a ranch of farm animals deep in the Santo Domingo Valley, a region populated by thick, nearly impenetrable undergrowth. forest. Only the half-roaring, half-barking hoarse of the howler monkeys pierced the incessant bridal call of the cicadas. “We are reaching what is left of the Sak Tz’i dynasty,” Dr. Golden said.
Dr. Golden approached a barbed wire fence surrounding a grassland, then slid underneath and toured the view beyond: the ruined ruins of Sak Tz’i’, a Mayan arrangement at least 2500 years old. the land were reminders of lost grandeur: giant piles of rocks and rubble that had once been temples, squares, reception halls, and an imposing 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 maximum 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 stolen by 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 dominate 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, Tonina and Yaxchilan in the present 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 temples, tomb robbers have dismantled the pyramids, and a thick jungle canopy has hidden squares and sidewalks. Sak Tz’i’ was well erased from memory.
Scholars only began searching for physical evidence of the kingdom in 1994, when epigraphs reading a stele, discovered a century before an excavation 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 groups of local painters led by Dr. 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 man. elderly woman who died at least 2,500 years earlier. Radiocarbon dating 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. , Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer established that the farm animal ranch had been a—if not the—capital of the Sak Tz’i dynasty.
Simon Martin, curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum who was not involved in the project, said the evidence provided by the two researchers and their colleagues strongly supported that Lacanja Tzeltal was the genuine Sak Tz’i or at least a seat of the dynasty as a component of its history.
“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. “
Dr. Golden, 50, and Dr. Scherer, 46, have been participating in the backwaters of historic Mesoamerica since the late 1990s. They were the first archaeologists to document fortification systems recently discovered at the ancient classical Maya sites of Tecolote. , in 2003, and Oso Negro, in 2005, both in Guatemala.
“The hard work department comes down to our experience spaces,” said Dr. Golden, who lives up to organizing geographic data, mapping and remote sensing with drones. Scherer analyzes human bones and everything related to food, isotopes and burials.
Tall, neat and funny, Dr. 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.
Dr. 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. He was digging a control pit when he took out a small striatum. grinding tube. ” I was sure it was a pre-Columbian ornamental pearl,” he said. Smiling proudly, he showed the object to his supervisor, who turned it around in his hands and replied: this at lunch. They are macaroni and Kraft cheese. The so-called Louis Leakey slipped to his wiser control bench.
Dr. Scherer is smaller and stockier, with his hair pulled back into a ponytail and a beard that splashes his chin with gray hair. examine at a 2000-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 attracted to the Mayan culture because it is 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 their enemies and allies were, when they went to war, when they were born and died,” Dr. Scherer said.
He and Dr. Golden were informed about the lifestyles of the ruins of Lacanjá Tzeltal through one of their former study assistants. a thesis topic. Driving through the small rainforest of the town of New Taniperla, Dr. Schroder, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Florida, walked past a roadside carnitas stand. The merchant tried to report it, but Dr. Schroder, a vegetarian, continued.
Soon after, Dr. Schroder passed in front of the booth again. Once again, the distributor tried to get their attention. This time, Schroder stopped to chat. ” The merchant said he had a friend with a stone who asked an archaeologist to examine it,” Recalls Dr. Schroder. “I asked him to explain and he explained that the stone had an engraving. with the Mayan calendar and other glyphs. “
Later that night, a friend of the salesman showed Dr. Schroder a photo on a mobile phone that, while grainy, obviously showed a small wall panel illustrated with hieroglyphs. In a lower corner, a dancing figure dressed in a ceremonial headdress, brandishing an awl. in his right hand and a club in his left. Jacinto Gomez Sanchez, a farm animal rancher who lived 25 miles away, had unearthed the limestone slab from the rubble of his estate several years earlier.
Dr. Schroder contacted Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer. “We periodically receive requests to look at stone figurines and sculptures in personal collections,” Dr. Scherer said. “While vases and other ceramic items are almost ancient, stone sculptures are regularly 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.
Last June, after a two-year delay due to the coronavirus, Dr. Golden, Dr. Scherer and their team returned to the site to continue excavations. Much of the paints were preventive maintenance. 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; usually, 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 Dr. 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.
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,” Dr. 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,” Dr. 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 hint at the history of civilization to a universal flood. The long-count calendar recorded the days that had passed since the mythical date of the beginning of the Mayan creation, August 11, 3,114 B. C.
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,” Dr. 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, at most under the canopy of trees, in which it could hide. A 2003 article in the journal Latin American Antiquity triangulated the geographical coordinates of the colony. , but computer style is just that: a style that needed confirmation.
There have been false starts. Plan de Ayutla in Chiapas, a beautiful site rediscovered in the mid-1990s, roughly in the right position and housed an impressive collection of temples and the largest ball court in the area. Although the Mayan text fragments in Plan de Ayutla did not provide any names for the position, the site seemed likely a competitor to Sak Tz’i’. “Unfortunately, there has never been any glyphic evidence linking the Ayutla Plan to the Kingdom of Sak Tz’i,” Dr. Golden said.
At 46, Mr. Gomez is physically 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 pueblo. de Lacanjá Tzeltal in 1962.
Mr. Gomez remembers frolicking through the rubble of Sak Tz’i’ as a child. His father and grandfather instilled in him a desire to protect the monuments and sculptures on the property. “They remind me of my legacy,” Mr. Gómez. Il ten years ago, when looters threatened to sneak into the night to steal borrowed relics, consulted archaeologists about the wall panel and hired the carnitas merchant as an intermediary.
In June, under the waning sun of an afternoon in Chiapas, M. Gómez invited Dr. Scherer to tour the external facilities where the most valuable relics were stored. He showed tools, clay pots, slingshot stones, molars, a jaguar-head stucco. When he pulled out a magnificently carved flint spearhead, Dr. Scherer smiled familiarly.
In 2019, during the excavation of the ball field, Dr. Scherer had unearthed a stone altar. Under the altar, he discovered the tip of the spear, as well as obsidian leaves, thorny oyster shells, and fragments of green stone. In Mayan cosmology, Dr. Scherer explained, flint evokes war and the sun or 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, Dr. Golden created a three-dimensional style and demonstrated 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. “
Dr. Scherer claimed that while other Mayan settlements also have mythical accounts of creation, the story recorded in the site’s Lacanja Tzeltal pill and may just be an allegory of its construction. atmosphere,” he said. The domain is teeming with streams and waterfalls and common flooding. “
The glyphs also highlight the lives of dynastic rulers such as the delightfully named K’ab Kante’, adding when they died, how they were commemorated, and in what cases their successors came to the throne. In one glyph, the ruler Sak Tz’ i’ looks like the dancing Yopaat, a deity related to violent tropical storms. The punch in his right hand is lightning, the snake-footed deity K’awiil; on his left, he carries 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.
Dr. Martin called Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer’s findings a major breakthrough in our Classic period Maya politics and culture. “Such discoveries repair the now lifeless ruined history and, at least metaphorically, repopulate them with long-dead rulers, nobles, warriors, artisans, merchants, farmers and the entire social matrix of ancient Mayan society,” he said.
Scott Hutson, an archaeologist at the University of Kentucky who was not involved in the research, noted that before the location of sak Tz’i was determined, “archaeologists knew that their leaders were engaged in high-risk diplomacy, which resulted in wars. “Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer’s maps, he added, “bring a concrete and poignant character to this narrative, apparently that the site was smaller than the maximum of its competition and, in a sense, above its weight. “
At Lacanja Tzeltal, Dr. Golden stood on a pile of stones under an excavation tent and evoked the heyday of the kingdom of Sak Tz’i’. The dust in the air reflected the afternoon sunlight and the silence of the site seemed to echo. The lost colony, Dr. Golden said, had been like assembling a map of medieval Europe from ancient documents and not knowing where Burgundy is going. “Essentially, we have placed Burgundy,” he said. It’s an essential piece of the puzzle. “
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