Developments in Brief : Undisturbed Ruins of Small Mayan City Could Unlock Ancient Mystery
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Archeologists in Belize have found the undisturbed ruins of a small Mayan city on a Central American banana plantation that was apparently abandoned around AD 900, when the thriving culture mysteriously collapsed.
“It’s remarkable because it’s one of the very few sites that looters haven’t visited first,” said University of Wisconsin archeologist J. Jefferson MacKinnon, who discovered the site. “There’s been absolutely no digging into the site by anyone. You almost never find that anymore.”
The city at its peak may have had a population of 3,000, he said.
MacKinnon, who plans to begin excavations in December, said preliminary surveys indicate that he will find intact tombs, palaces, two ball courts and a 25-foot-high pyramid.
The first structures he plans to excavate are the courts for pok-ta-pok , a game that captive warriors or chiefs were often forced to play in which losers were occasionally decapitated or sacrificed in other ways.
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