New-Found Site in Jungle May Be First Mayan City

A UCLA archeologist has identified what is apparently the earliest major center of Mayan civilization yet found, a discovery that extends the era of Mayan cities back four centuries into a period that was thought to be dominated by simple village life.

The extensive stone monuments and temples in the newly discovered city of Nakbe, in the dense tropical forest of northern Guatemala, show “that the advances which created the most sophisticated pre-Columbian society in the New World may have occurred much earlier than was previously assumed,” said UCLA’s Richard Hansen.

The discovery will shed new light on why the Maya “accomplished things no other tropical forest society accomplished in the New World,” Hansen said.

The excavations at Nakbe, announced Monday by UCLA, are “of extraordinary importance to our understanding of the origin of Mayan civilization,” said anthropologist David Friedel of Southern Methodist University.

The new findings follow on the heels of surprising reports this summer by anthropologist Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University that the Mayan society--previously believed to be one of history’s most peaceful civilizations--collapsed in the 9th Century AD as the result of internecine warfare.

These new discoveries from the beginning and end of Mayan civilization, Friedel added, are “revealing with breathtaking clarity not only their (the Maya’s) vision of the world, but the breadth and complexity of their political organization.”

The new find dates from a period when the Maya were transforming themselves from a centuries-old rural agrarian society to a more sophisticated and complex urban society. Researchers are particularly interested in the factors that led to this transformation because it sheds light on the more general question of how societies are formed.

Although they are not yet sure, the researchers believe that urbanization arose as a mechanism to counter the innate hostility of the environment, to promote trade, and to consolidate religious and political ideologies.

Nakbe lies in the isolated central department (state) of Peten in Guatemala, about 350 miles from Guatemala City. The site was first identified as a potential location of advanced Mayan civilization in 1930 by archeologists performing an aerial survey of the region. But no significant work occurred at the site until the UCLA team carried out its excavations from February through April of this year.

That delay arose primarily as a result of the site’s isolation. Nakbe “is three days on foot from the nearest road,” Hansen said. “We used 123 mules to transport our stuff in, then kept 14 mules hauling water and supplies for the three months we were there. They had to cross swamps and wade through muck up to their bellies. It’s hard to appreciate the problem if you haven’t been through it.”

But he noted that the isolation probably protected the site from looting.

Their excavations revealed thousands of artifacts, tombs and temple structures, some ranging from 40 to 65 feet in height. Other buildings on the site, which have not yet been excavated, are estimated to be as tall as 150 feet, which would rival pyramids from the more modern Mayan city of Tikal.

The excavated buildings date from 600 to 400 BC, in the so-called middle Pre-Classic period. Previously, the most advanced structures from this period to be discovered were crude villages with low stone platforms measuring from three to six feet tall. Hansen has not yet dated the taller pyramids.

The researchers also dug up more than 65,000 potsherds, ceramics, human and animal figurines, seashells and obsidian and stone tools, which should reveal many details about everyday life in this first Mayan city.

They also found an artifact that may prove to be one of the most significant Mayan sculptures ever discovered, a 10-foot-high fragmented slab of intricately carved limestone erected by Pre-Classic Mayan rulers. It depicts two individuals in royal clothing facing each other. One has his hand extended, pointing to a deity between them. Hansen believes the stone slab commemorates an important historical event whose nature he plans to discuss in a forthcoming publication.

Hansen and his colleagues also found the remnants of an even earlier village below Nakbe, filled with soil and rubble.

“The construction appears to have preserved the village below,” Hansen said in a telephone interview from his home in Rupert, Ida. “It’s almost like finding a Mayan version of Pompeii,” the Neapolitan city preserved intact when it was buried by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

The construction of Nakbe must have been an enormous task, Hansen said. “All of the building materials had to be hauled to the location, rock by rock and basket by basket, by hundreds of Mayan workers to construct the massive platforms and buildings.”

Even drinking water was a problem. During their excavations, the UCLA team members had to haul water nearly four miles to the site on mules. “The Maya didn’t have mules or beasts of burden to do that with,” Hansen said. That lack led them to develop systems to collect rainwater from the roofs of temples and other buildings and channel it into storage facilities.

Another problem that must have impeded construction, Hansen said, is that the city was surrounded by swamps. “In order to maintain local trade and exchange, they had to construct causeways . . . large, rubble-filled constructions up to two yards high and 20 yards wide,” he said.

That construction would have allowed them access to neighboring farmlands and would have consolidated political authority.

The Maya were unique, Hansen said, because “they were able to achieve the greatest level of sophistication in the face of a very hostile environment.” What researchers are trying to determine, he added, “is why they became sophisticated all of a sudden.”

The very hostility of the environment may have been a major civilizing influence, Hansen speculated. “It was so difficult to live there that it required centralized authority to maintain logistics and the life style they desired.”

Another clue to the civilizing influences was the large amount of seashells and obsidian discovered at Nakbe, all of which had to be imported from elsewhere. Hansen and others speculate that centralized authority was established in part to carry out such imports in exchange for a variety of goods, including food, chocolate, cotton textiles, forest products, medicines and jaguar pelts.

“Seashells are very important to Maya public ceremonial life,” said SMU’s Friedel. “Great conch shells were used to fashion trumpets that were blown to declare the presence of the gods. Small shells were used as little bells and tinklers sewn onto the clothes of the elite for public ceremonies.” Eventually the shells were also used as a form of money.

Obsidian, he added, “was highly prized for ritual bloodletting and was a sacred material for all the people of meso-America.”

“Another factor, which we are hot on the trail of, is the role of religious ideology as an impetus in developing huge cities,” Hansen said. The early leaders “had a huge control of labor to build these enormous buildings, and it appears from our excavations that the sole purpose was ideological. It’s not funerary; we don’t find burials like in later periods.”

The buildings did not necessarily serve as churches either, he said. “I’m more inclined to think that these buildings were constructed with the idea of consolidating the authority of an emerging elite and tying that into religious theology. That fits very well with what we know of later Maya mythology, where the king became divine and had divine ancestry.”

Hansen speculates that it was sometime during the era of Nakbe’s construction that the authority of kings stopped being earned by achievement and started being passed down from fathers to sons.

But solving these riddles, he said, “will take years and years of investigation.”