Lost city revealed
Hidden for centuries, the ancient Maya city of Holtun, or Head of
Stone, is finally coming into focus. Three-dimensional mapping has
'erased' centuries of jungle growth, revealing the rough contours of
nearly a hundred buildings, according to research presented earlier this
month.
Archaeologist Brigitte Kovacevich in a looters’ tunnel inside
the pyramid at the Head of Stone site |
Though it's long been known to locals that something - something big
- is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it's only now that
archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone
was.
Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year,
the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a
seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball
court, several stone residences, and other structures.
The maya Denver?
Some of the stone houses, said study leader Brigitte Kovacevich, may
have doubled as burial chambers for the city's early kings.
"Oftentimes archaeologists are looking at the biggest pyramids or
temples to find the tombs of early kings, but during this Late-Middle
Preclassic period"-roughly 600 B.C. to 300 B.C.-"the king is not the
centre of the universe yet, so he's probably still being buried in the
household," said Kovacevich, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas.
"That may be why so many Preclassic kings have been missed" by
archaeologists, who expected to find the rulers' burials at grand
temples, she added.
The findings at Head of Stone-named for giant masks found at the
site-could shed light on how "secondary" Maya centres were organized and
what daily life was like for Maya living outside of the larger
metropolitan areas such as Tikal, about 35 kilometres to the north,
according to Kathryn Reese-Taylor, a Preclassic Maya specialist at
Canada's University of Calgary.
Head of Stone, which has never been excavated, "was not a New York or
Los Angeles, but it wa2s definitely a Denver or Atlanta," said
Reese-Taylor, who called the new mapping study "incredibly significant."
Buried pyramid
From about 600 BC to AD 900, Head of Stone - which is about a
kilometre long and 0.5 kilometres wide - was a bustling midsize Maya
centre, home to about 2,000 permanent residents.
But today its structures are buried under several feet of earth and
plant material and are nearly invisible to the untrained eyed.
Even Head of Stone's three-pointed pyramid - once one of the city's
most impressive buildings - "just looks like a mountain enveloped in
forest," said study leader Kovacevich, who presented the findings at a
meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento,
California.
Jungle thick as thieves
Head of Stone is so well hidden, in fact, that archaeologists didn't
learn of it until the early 1990s, and only because they were following
the trails of looters who had discovered the site first - perhaps after
farmers had attempted to clear the area, according to Kovacevich.
For thieves, the main attractions were massive stucco masks measuring
up to ten feet (three meters) tall. Uncovered as looters dug tunnels
into the buried city, the heads once adorned some of Head of Stone's
most important buildings.
The temple, Kovacevich said, "would have had these really fabulously,
elaborately painted stucco masks flanking the two sides of the stairway
that represented human figures, snarling jaguars," and other forms.
During the Preclassic period, Head of Stone's important public
buildings would have been painted primarily in blood reds, bright
whites, and mustard yellows, the University of Calgary's Reese-Taylor
said. Murals of geometric patterns or scenes from myth or daily life
would have covered some of the buildings, she added.
Lost city
The researchers, though, are directing their gaze downward. This
summer they hope to begin excavating residential structures and the
observatory, as well as to possibly remove the undergrowth from the main
temple. And, by using ground-penetrating radar, they hope to bring Head
of Stone into even sharper relief.
By seeing through soil the way the previous mapping project saw
through trees and brush, radar should reveal not just the rounded shapes
of the city but the hard outlines of the buildings themselves.
National Geographic News
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