EXPLORING THE JUNGLES OF CENTRAL AMERICA
ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS IN RECENT years within Maya studies took place in 2009. Using an advanced LiDAR system installed in a twin-engine airplane, a team of archaeologists was able to map the hidden Maya city of Caracol in Belize. In only four days, they were able to successfully demonstrate that a large area of what looked like impenetrable jungle actually contained buildings, roads, and other parts of a massive city that was completely hidden by the overgrowth.
The name LiDAR stands for “Light Detection and Ranging.” It is a remote-sensing technology that works like radar but uses light from a laser to produce highly accurate measurements by bouncing the laser beams off the ground and thereby creating three-dimensional images with hundreds of thousands of data points. It usually is used from an airplane and turns out to be especially useful in places like Central America, because it can map through the trees in a jungle or rain forest and provide images of lost temples, buildings, and even cities that are totally overgrown.
The problem at all, or most, of these Maya sites is the forest of trees that grew over them and hid many of them from the outside world for so long. Even today, if the sites are not actively maintained and groomed for the hordes of tourists that visit, the forest would quickly reclaim the ruins. Still other cities remain hidden, which is why as recently as 2014 other research teams have continued to find other Maya cities that were completely overgrown elsewhere in the region. One of the researchers said that “in the jungle, you can be as little as 600 feet from a large site and not even suspect it might be there.” LiDAR can change all of that, for not only can it help locate lost cities, but it can map the ones that we know of in a matter of days or even hours, instead of the weeks and months, or even years, that it usually takes.
It was in the year 1750 that “a party of Spaniards traveling in the interior of Mexico . . . found, in the midst of a vast solitude, ancient stone buildings, the remains of a city.” The Spanish explorers were no doubt stunned to see the huge buildings completely overgrown by vines and with trees growing through what had once been windows. We now know that they had found the Maya site of Palenque.
Although the news spread quickly, little official attention was paid to it. It was not until more than thirty years later, in 1784, that the king of Spain sent another explorer to investigate the rumors. Although additional Spanish expeditions visited the site over the next fifty years, and even though accounts were eventually published in English in 1822 and 1835, still few people noticed. As a result, the discovery of Palenque was overlooked by most of the Western world until 1841, when a US explorer named John Lloyd Stephens published an account of his own travels in the area and introduced it to a broad reading audience, less than a decade before Layard began publishing about the remains he was finding in Mesopotamia.
Stephens was astonished by the lack of attention that had been paid to Palenque before his book Incidents of Travel came out. After describing the initial discovery in 1750 and the subsequent investigations by the Spanish, he noted that “If a like discovery had been made in Italy, Greece, Egypt, or Asia, within the reach of European travel, it would have created an interest not inferior to the discovery of Herculaneum, or Pompeii, or the ruins of Paestum.” His explorations of Central America with Frederick Catherwood, a British artist and architect, changed all that. Their journeys resulted in best-selling travel books, in which they reported on their discovery of several Maya sites, many of them previously unknown.
Stephens and Catherwood were by no means the first outsiders to have visited these sites, of course, and rather than doing much actual excavation, they explored, cleared away trees and underbrush, surveyed, and drew. But because of the accounts that they subsequently published, they brought the ruins of Central America to the attention of the outside world. In the process, they established the beginnings of what we now call New World archaeology. As one scholar has pointed out, all this was done thirty years before Heinrich Schliemann dug at Troy and more than eighty years before Howard Carter discovered King Tut.
Stephens had been trained in Greek and Latin as a very young student. He went to Columbia University when he was just thirteen years old. A lawyer by the time he was twenty, he didn’t practice law for long. Instead, he began traveling across Europe and the Middle East, including Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan. He published an account of his journeys, which quickly became extremely popular, bringing him fame and fortune.
Catherwood was several years older than Stephens, but having formed a friendship, the two men decided to explore Central America together. Specifically, they wanted to search for ruins belonging to the civilization that we now call the Maya. And so, in 1839, they set off from the United States with a goal of visiting three ancient Mesoamerican sites that they had read about—Copán, Palenque, and Uxmal. They got to those and many more—nearly fifty cities, including one called Chichén Itzá—during two separate voyages of exploration.
The accounts of these expeditions were published as travel volumes in 1841 and 1843. Within them, Stephens described in detail not only the cities and buildings that they saw, but also the various illnesses that they suffered during their trips. Several times he mentioned the mosquitoes that gave them malaria and the burrowing insects that laid eggs under their toenails, as well as other unpleasant ailments, some of which were life-threatening. It seems amazing, after reading through their firsthand accounts, that they ever made it out of the jungle and back to the United States alive, let alone on two separate occasions.
Stephens was an astute observer—someone who could compare and contrast what he had seen in the Old World with what he was now discovering in the New World. From his previous experiences traveling in the Middle East, he was able to conclude—quite correctly—that cities like Copán and Palenque were not built by Egyptians or survivors of Atlantis, both of which had been suggested previously, but rather by the indigenous people of the area, the Maya.
After comparing and contrasting the pyramids, columns, and sculptures that he saw at Copán to those of the Egyptians, he wrote specifically, “unless I am wrong, we have a conclusion far more interesting and wonderful than that of connecting the buildings of these cities with the Egyptians or any other people. . . . Opposed as is my idea to all previous speculations, I am inclined to think that [the ruins] were constructed by the races who occupied the country at the time of the invasion by the Spaniards, or of some not very distant progenitors.”
He and Catherwood faithfully recorded the hieroglyphics that were engraved on monuments at Copán and elsewhere. Stephens was convinced that, once they were decoded, these hieroglyphics would reveal the history of the Maya. He wrote, “One thing I believe: its history is graven on its monuments. No Champollion has yet brought to them the energies of his inquiring mind. Who shall read them?” He came back to this point again, writing “I cannot help believing that the . . . hieroglyphics will yet be read. . . . For centuries the hieroglyphics of Egypt were inscrutable, and, though not perhaps in our day, I feel persuaded that a key surer than that of the Rosetta stone will be discovered.”
Stephens was referring to Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics by 1823 by studying the trilingual inscription on the Rosetta stone. He was completely correct—when the hieroglyphics engraved on the monuments were finally deciphered, they did turn out to record the history of the Maya, in all its gory detail. It took quite a long time—until just the past few decades in fact—for us to be able to read the inscriptions accurately, but now we know that the Maya were not quite so peaceful as we previously thought and that their history was as full of rivalries and wars as any other ancient civilization.
It took the concerted efforts of a number of individuals to crack the Mayan writing system, including an Englishman named Eric Thompson, a Russian American scholar named Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and a Ukrainian scholar named Yuri Knorosov. Thompson and Knorosov are usually described as bitter rivals, somewhat along the same lines as Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young, when the French and British scholars were racing to see who would decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics first.
Thompson was the grand old man of Mayan hieroglyphic studies, with a major volume published in 1950. Proskouriakoff was the first to show that the hieroglyphics recorded historical dates and events. She was also able to identify specific women in the texts, as opposed to men. But it is now recognized that it was Knorosov, working in Stalinist Russia during the Cold War, who made the ultimate breakthrough in reading the texts, by making use of a manuscript on the Maya left to us by the sixteenth-century CE Spanish bishop Diego de Landa. Although de Landa’s own understanding of Mayan writing was misguided, his manuscript served as an essential key to Knorosov. For that reason, de Landa’s text has been called the Rosetta stone of Mayan hieroglyphs. This is especially ironic since de Landa is generally regarded as the man responsible for destroying most of the known Maya bark-fold books, which is why we have so few left today.
Some of the most recent and significant advances in reading Mayan hieroglyphics have been made in the past few decades by a US scholar named David Stuart. Born in 1965, he is the son of Mayanist George Stuart, who worked for the National Geographic Society for nearly forty years. David had been accompanying his parents to Maya ruins since he was a three-year-old toddler. By the age of eight, he was working on the hieroglyphs. By age ten, he was shadowing and helping the great Maya epigrapher Linda Schele during her work at Palenque.
By the time Stuart received his PhD in 1995, he had already published thirteen articles and monographs. He is still the youngest person and one of the few archaeologists ever to be awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, which he received when he was only eighteen. He’s also one of the only people to have won both a MacArthur and a Guggenheim fellowship.
He is probably best known to the general public, however, for a book that he wrote in 2011, during the media frenzy about the supposed Maya prediction that the world would end in 2012 when the current Maya five-thousand-year calendrical cycle completed. He successfully showed that the Maya had not, in fact, been trying to predict when the world was going to end, but rather were simply placing a specific king’s reign into a larger context or cycle of time.
It is thanks to all these individuals, and a handful of others, that John Lloyd Stephens’s prediction came true. Mayan hieroglyphics have finally been deciphered, and the history of Copán and other Maya cities is indeed, as Stephens put it, “graven on its monuments.”
We now know that at Copán, for instance, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Honduras, the Maya listed the names of sixteen of their rulers, covering a period of about four centuries, from 427 CE until a little after 810 CE. They are carved on Altar Q, a fairly small box-shaped stone, six feet wide by six feet long and standing four feet tall, with the rulers depicted four to a side. The founding king of this dynasty was a man known as “Great Sun Green Quetzal-Macaw.” Although the site was primarily occupied from about 200–900 CE, these four centuries seem to have been the high point of its existence.
We also know, both from studies of the inscriptions found at various sites and the excavations of those sites themselves, much more about the rise and fall of the Maya. Archaeologists split the history of the Maya into several main periods. The earliest attempts at agriculture and the first villages date to the Archaic period, before 2000 BCE. The Preclassic period lasted from about 2000 BCE to 300 CE, with cities arising by about 750 BCE, and the Classic period stretched from approximately 300 CE to 900 CE. The Terminal Classic period, which saw the collapse of the complex cities of the Maya, makes up the last part of the Classic period, in about 800–900 CE, though the dates vary in different areas. It was followed by the Postclassic period, from about 900 CE until the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century CE.
Copán, which flourished during the Classic period, was one of the three cities that John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood initially went looking for in November 1839. (They found all three cities.) Stephens claims to have purchased the entire site of Copán from its local owners for the relatively paltry sum of fifty dollars and thought seriously about how to ship all its monuments home, though he ended up simply having Catherwood draw them instead. However, the original contract has recently been found, and it seems that Stephens didn’t really purchase the ancient site, but instead only leased it for a period of three years, which was far more time than Catherwood needed to draw the monuments.
Stephens and Catherwood spent a total of thirteen days at Copán, during which time they found fourteen inscribed standing stones. These are usually called stelae (stele, in the singular), the Greek word used by archaeologists to refer to an upright standing stone that has an inscription. Catherwood drew all the stelae they found at Copán, as well as Altar Q. Stephens had an inkling of what was depicted on Altar Q, for he describes the sixteen individuals pictured and mentions his suspicion that the hieroglyphics on which they were seated probably gave their name and office, which indeed they do. He was also quite correct in suggesting that the hieroglyphics on the altar “beyond doubt record some event in the history of the mysterious people who once inhabited the city.”
Stephens and Catherwood cleared the undergrowth from other ruins at Copán, including the Temple of the Hieroglyphic Stairway and the Sacred Ball Court. The Hieroglyphic Stairway has sixty-three stairs climbing seventy-five feet up to the top of the temple, with at least twenty-two hundred hieroglyphs decorating its length. It is one of the longest Mayan texts known and appears to be a dynastic record. It was started by the unlucky thirteenth king of Copán, who was later captured in battle and beheaded while fighting a rival kingdom. It was doubled in length and completed by the fifteenth ruler in the eighth century CE, who also turned it into an odd bilingual text. The right-hand column contains Maya hieroglyphs, and the left-hand column has strange “Teotihuacán hieroglyphs” that seem to have no real meaning and are apparently more decorative than anything else.
The Ball Court is one of the best examples of its kind ever found at a Maya site, although the rules of the game are still debated. Some say it was played somewhat like soccer. One way to win was by getting the ball through a small ring, but the game ended if the ball touched either the ground or anyone’s hands. And although the winners were often treated as heroes, some scholars have argued that the losers were sometimes put to death. Ball courts are found throughout Mesoamerica and were even exported to the US Southwest.
Since Stephens and Catherwood were at the site for less than two weeks, it was left to others to continue the exploration and excavations of Copán. Among them were a well-known amateur archaeologist named Alfred Maudslay, who arrived in the 1880s, and then a team from the Carnegie Institution in the mid-1930s.
After a break in their travels, Stephens and Catherwood went in search of Palenque in April 1840. Along the way, they had a chance to visit a site lost in the Guatemalan rain forest that was probably what we now know to be the major site of Tikal. Although they had heard rumors of its existence, and Stephens had figured out that they could allocate ten days to get there, map it, and get back, they opted instead to head for Palenque without further delay and thus missed visiting the site, which was left for others to discover.
Temple of the Grand Jaguar (Temple 1), Tikal
No doubt they later regretted this decision, especially after the announcement less than a decade later, in 1848, that Tikal had been located, right where they thought it would be. Had they gone when they had the opportunity to do so, they would have received credit for finding one of the largest Maya cities in the region, where as many as one hundred thousand Maya may have once lived. Other archaeologists and explorers came through soon afterward, but it was more than a century before the University of Pennsylvania conducted the first large archaeological project at the site, from 1956–1970.
Approximately three thousand buildings are still visible at the site, although many are still covered by the tropical forest. They include temples and palaces, dating to the Classic period of 200–900 CE, with most built during the final three centuries. George Stuart, the National Geographic archaeologist, estimated that there may be another ten thousand buildings from earlier periods still to be found at Tikal. It is now a national park, in addition to being named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
There are six temple pyramids at Tikal, including Temple 1, called the Temple of the Grand Jaguar. Within the temple, the tomb of the great Maya ruler who built it was found in 1962. His name is frequently translated as Lord Chocolate. He ruled Tikal for fifty-two years, on either side of 700 CE. Within his grave were found pieces of jade, shell ornaments, and ceramic vessels originally filled with food and drink. There were also some unusual carved bones, with scenes that appear to be from a Maya creation story. In addition to all the buildings, ten reservoirs also were found at the site, which provided the city with its drinking water.
Stephens and Catherwood were by no means the first Europeans to look for Palenque, of course. Their entire journey to the region had been sparked by the brief accounts that they had read about that lost city, which had been translated into English from reports filed by various Spanish explorers. Several of the reports attributed the massive ruins to the Egyptians, but at least one—written by the explorer Dupaix, who had also been to Copán during his explorations—concluded that Palenque had been built by people from Atlantis. Such hypotheses began from the erroneous assumption that the poor Maya natives living in small villages nearby could not possibly be the descendants of the same folks who built these magnificent structures; they must have been built by a people known to the Europeans, that is, Egyptians, Romans, Atlanteans, and the like. Stephens was going against such opinions when he declared that Palenque, and the other ruins, had been built by the indigenous Maya, seeing no reason to involve people from elsewhere.
After a difficult journey, Stephens and Catherwood finally reached Palenque, in southern Mexico, in May 1840. They were able to spend three weeks at the site, clearing away the trees and jungle growth in order to draw the standing monuments and buildings, including the so-called Palace, the Temple of the Cross, and the large ball court.
Among the structures that they uncovered was one that we now call the Temple of the Inscriptions, which stood on top of an eighty-foot-tall stone pyramid. The temple is justifiably famous for the three huge tablets with more than six hundred hieroglyphics on them, the second-longest inscription known from the Maya world. Stephens was certain that the hieroglyphics were identical in nature to the ones they had seen at Copán, and so he had Catherwood copy them exactly, in case a future scholar could decipher them, which is precisely what eventually happened.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The description that Stephens gave of what they had to do first, in order for Catherwood to produce his drawings, gives us some idea of the effort involved. He says, “When we first saw them, [the tablets] were covered with a thick coat of green moss, and it was necessary to wash and scrape them, clear the lines with a stick, and scrub them thoroughly. . . . On account of the darkness of the corridor from the thick shade of the trees growing before it, it was necessary to burn candles or torches, and to throw a strong light upon the stones while Mr. Catherwood was drawing.”
Unbeknownst to them, the eighty-foot-tall pyramid on which the Temple of the Inscriptions stood also served as the burial place for Lord Pacal, who ruled at Palenque for almost seventy years, from 615 to 683 CE. Like King Tut in Egypt almost two thousand years earlier, Pacal also came to the throne as a child; but unlike Tut, he lived and ruled to a ripe old age. Pacal’s tomb was not found until 1952, more than a century after Stephens and Catherwood had explored the site, and exactly thirty years after Howard Carter had discovered Tut’s tomb.
It was a Mexican archaeologist named Alberto Ruz Lhuillier who discovered the tomb. He became curious about a stone slab in the floor of the Temple of the Inscriptions, at the very top of the pyramid. The slab had a double row of circular depressions with stone plugs in them, which he figured were meant to help remove the slab. He did exactly that, revealing a stairway completely filled with rubble, which led down into the supporting pyramid. It took his team several years to clear the long stairwell and reach the bottom eighty feet below where they had started, where they found Pacal’s tomb. Essentially, the tomb is at ground level, but inside the pyramid. It is now thought that the tomb was built first and then the pyramid was constructed around it.
Pacal himself was laid to rest within a limestone coffin or sarcophagus that is thirteen feet long. It has a complicated carving on its lid depicting Pacal descending to the underworld. At first the archaeologists didn’t realize that the lid covered a sarcophagus. They thought the whole structure was a solid stone altar, with the carving on the top of the altar. It was only when they drilled a small exploratory hole in the stone that they realized it was hollow, not solid.
Within the sarcophagus, in which Pacal’s skeleton rested undisturbed, a jade mask was found still on his face, where it had been placed thirteen hundred years ago. An amazing number of other jade objects also were found, including necklaces, ear ornaments, a diadem and a ring, pectorals, wristlets, two statuettes, and a belt. The skeletons of six other people, who had apparently been sacrificed in order to accompany Pacal into the afterlife, were found with his body.
In 1987 Palenque was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has been a magnet for more recent explorers and archaeologists as well, including discoveries of new buildings and burials from 1993 to 2000. Among the discoveries is the so-called Red Queen, who was found in 1994 with a tremendous cache of grave goods within an elaborate chamber in Temple XIII. This temple is close to Pacal’s burial pyramid and it has been suggested that the Red Queen may have been Pacal’s wife, who died about ten years before he did. The Palenque Mapping Project was also busy at the site during 1998–2000, surveying and mapping the buildings, including some that were still hidden in the forest.
From Palenque, Stephens and Catherwood continued to the third site on their list, called Uxmal. Soon thereafter, though, they called a halt to their explorations because Catherwood became quite ill. They had both suffered terribly during the journey, with recurring bouts of malaria for each of them. They had been gone for ten months and it was time to go home to New York. Although this involved another series of adventures, including almost dying on the ship sailing for home, they returned to the United States in July 1840, and Stephens promptly published a two-volume set of their adventures, complete with illustrations by Catherwood. It appeared in June 1841. By that December, twenty thousand copies had been sold, at the relatively affordable price of five dollars for the two-volume set.
Soon they made plans to return for a second time to the Yucatán region, leaving in October 1841, just four months after the release of their book. This time they were gone for eight months, eventually returning to the United States in June 1842, and with the volumes describing this second voyage appearing by February 1843.
The highlight of this second journey was their exploration of the site of Chichén Itzá, near the tip of the Yucatán peninsula. They spent eighteen days there, hiring local workers to help them remove the trees, underbrush, and other debris from a number of buildings at the site, including the Temple of the Jaguars, the Temple of the Warriors, the Pyramid of Kukulkan, and the Platform of Venus. The stairway at Kukulkan, also known as El Castillo, is formed in such a way that the shadow of a giant serpent can be seen at the spring equinox; it is visited by thousands of tourists each year.
Some of these, such as the Temple of the Jaguars and the Temple of the Warriors, contain murals and scenes depicting the conquest of this area by the Toltecs, led by Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. The Toltecs were a group of newcomers who arrived from Mexico during the last two centuries of occupation at the site, around 1000–1200 CE. The murals indicate that the invaders first arrived by sea and beat the Maya defenders, who came out to meet them in canoes. They then fought a great battle against those same Maya and defeated them again.
At the site is also an astronomical observatory; a long stone “skull rack” featuring a number of skulls carved in stone, undoubtedly to simulate real ones; and a huge ball court, which is the largest in Mesoamerica and which Stephens described at length. Many of these structures date from the time of the Toltec occupation at the site, replacing or built in addition to the earlier Maya structures, for Chichén Itzá flourished later than most of the other Maya sites, reaching its peak in 800–1200 CE, partly because of the arrival of the Toltecs during the midpoint of the period.
Although Stephens and Catherwood visited the site in 1841–1842, and Maudslay came to see it in 1886, it wasn’t until Edward Thompson came to the site in 1895 that Chichén Itzá began to be explored systematically. Thompson’s excavations covered a period of thirty years. It then took almost another century before it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.
Thompson’s excavations included dredging one of the cenotes at the site. For those readers who were unfamiliar with cenotes, Stephens gave a good definition in his book, describing them as “immense circular holes, from sixty to two hundred feet in diameter, with broken, rocky, perpendicular sides from fifty to one hundred feet deep, and having at the bottom a great body of water.” There were two at Chichén Itzá, of which he says one was “the largest and wildest we had seen.” He describes it as being in the middle of a thick forest, with a “mysterious influence” pervading it. He was well aware of the tradition that human victims had been thrown into it and identified one building right on the edge as “perhaps the place from which the victims were thrown into the dark well beneath.”
During the dredging and exploration of this cenote by Thompson and others, human remains were indeed found, including the skeletons of at least fifty victims—young women, men, and a number of children. Objects of jade and gold disks also were found, as were copper bells and other items. It is clear that sacrifices of many kinds were made at this cenote over the years. The sacrifices were not just by the Maya, for many of the objects are of later Toltec manufacture.
There are numerous other Maya cities, both large and small, that we could also describe, but these four—Copán, Tikal, Palenque, and Chichén Itzá—are fairly representative overall. Although we now know a lot about the Maya and their civilization, what is still a mystery is why it came to an end just after 900 CE, with all or most of the great sites abandoned and subsequently overgrown and lost to the rest of the world. A favorite suggestion has been that they were unable to deal with a century-long drought—that is, climate change—but this is by no means certain. Numerous other hypotheses also have been put forward, including explanations that involve overpopulation and deforestation. But there may not even be a single answer, and it would take an entire book to discuss the various possibilities for the collapse of the Maya. The one thing that is clear at the moment is that, for this mystery to be resolved once and for all, more investigation—and quite possibly more excavation—is definitely needed.
What we can say, though, is that the discovery of the Maya represents the first detection of a previously unknown civilization by archaeologists in the New World. The Spanish already knew about the Inca and the Aztecs, but the Maya were unfamiliar to the general public until the explorations by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. Their publications challenged the assumption that Native Americans were simply poor villagers deserving of conquest by more advanced Europeans and that they were incapable of achievements along the lines of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Subsequent investigations have resulted in the successful translation of their extensive written records and have shown that they were as complex (and bloody) politically, militarily, and culturally as the better-known civilizations of the Old World.