Romancing The Stones : On the Roads to Ruins, Uncovering the Mysteries of the Maya

Indiana Jones may have made archeology sexy to moviegoers, but until now, the Mayan sites I’ve visited have been intellectually interesting but woefully short on charisma. Copan, however, is alive and buzzing with romance, a genuine Lost City of the Maya with spooky tunnels and mysterious carvings, blood sacrifices and voices from the dead, parrots and monkeys chattering in the jungle, and young archeologists meeting cute over cold beer at the funky Tunkul Bar after a hot, dusty day in the digs.

Southernmost of the great lowland Mayan centers, Copan lies in the western part of the Central American country of Honduras, adjacent to the Guatemalan border and about 30 miles as the crow would fly (there are no roads) from the edge of El Salvador.

The ruined city is guarded now by five raucous macaws in vivid Carmen Miranda scarlet, green and yellow. The old Mayan roadway leading into the ruins is a cool green path lined with acacia and Spanish cedar trees and humming with yellow butterflies, and the stillness is broken only when a large flock of green parrots dart in and out among the trees, squawking loudly.

It is such a well-mannered jungle that it lulls a stroller into complacency, which doubles the jolt of coming suddenly into the clearing and face-to-face with the vast Great Plaza. To the left are stone pyramids, tall carved columns called stelae, the massive “Acropolis” that overlooks the Copan Valley, and the intricate 100-foot-high hieroglyphic stairway, believed to be the longest continuous inscription in all pre-Columbian America. The magnificent stairway, sadly, has to be covered by a long, unsightly tent of tarpaulin to protect the rapidly-eroding carved pictographs, called glyphs. (Visitors can still view the carvings underneath.)

Because of elaborate records like these, and the work of archeologists such as William L. Fash, a professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University and a primary director of the Copan digs, the mysteries of the Maya are gradually being solved. Fash himself led our group around the ruins, explaining his interpretation of what has been uncovered there. But even casual visitors can pick up fascinating tidbits of information from tour guides at the site.

At the heart of the plaza, the oddly-shaped stone ball court, a flat aisle flanked by two sloped side walls, was designed for a game something like soccer, except that the small rubber ball was not permitted to ever touch the floor. The team of four men might keep the ball in play for 30 minutes or more, hitting it only with hips or thighs, to the cheers of a 3,000-member audience.

This was one game everyone played to win, since losers were sometimes sacrificed. Betting was hot and heavy, with pieces of jade--even houses--staked on the outcome.

Up a steep set of steps, on the back side of the Acropolis, 200 or more workmen and archeologists are excavating in the East and West Courts and in the residence-and-tomb area that was the royal compound. The Maya traditionally buried their dead in or near their houses.

But here in the plaza early on a weekday morning last April, the site is quiet and almost empty. A vacant-eyed carved macaw head, one of 16 once affixed to the walls, stares at the silent ball court. Yellow leaves drift down to the heaps of mossy stones that define the perimeters of outlying buildings. Roots cling to ancient walls and tall ceiba trees with smooth gray cement-like trunks and dangling kapok pods grow from what were once pyramids.

What appear to be hills topped with shade trees are actually buildings erected one on top of another, in as many as seven layers, over a period of 400 years. Here and there a carved death’s head grins out from a tumble of rocks.

A spider monkey swings warily into the plaza and lopes across the grass near a group of young Frenchmen photographing the stelae. One of the men fishes a banana from his backpack and holds it out; the monkey snatches it and flees out of reach, into the shade trees. The monkey, I learn later, is one of a pair brought to the site from the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, in an attempt to recreate the original ambience of Copan. He is called Pancho, but after his mate Panchita died, he took up with a flock of white-tailed deer and turned shy.

Copan is part of a trend among archeological digs to conserve the environment of the site as much as to study the Maya. Instead of ripping away the trees and earth to get into the layers of buildings and tombs, project directors such as Bill Fash are proceeding slowly and carefully to preserve the entire site.

Fash calls the heaps of carved, tagged stones around the digs the G.O.K. (“God Only Knows”) piles, and terms a major project “the Copan Humpty Dumpty Puzzle” because earlier archeologists threw or heaped the stones around randomly while searching for more valuable finds.

“Everyone wants to dig, but nobody wants to pay for the restoration of these things,” he says. “But governments don’t want people to dig into a site and then leave it.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, according to Fash, archeologists dug things up and then left them out to decay. Some of the greatest treasures of Copan were taken out in the 19th Century and reside in the London’s British Museum and at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in Cambridge. One sculpture from Copan’s hieroglyphic stairway, now in the Peabody, he says, “is so well preserved it takes my breath away.” Today, of course, none of the artifacts is permitted to leave Honduras.

People have been digging at the Copan site since American writer/explorer John Lloyd Stephens and his English companion, artist Frederick Catherwood, came upon the lost city in 1839. Curious about what lay buried there, Stephens arranged to purchase the remaining three years of a lease held by a local farmer.

“I paid $50 for Copan,” he wrote in his classic 1841 travel book “Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.” “I offered that sum, for which Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool; if I had offered more, he would probably have considered me something worse.”

Stephens was enthralled with Copan’s carved figures. “I leaned over with breathless anxiety while the Indians worked, and an eye, an ear, a foot, or a hand was disentombed; and when the machete rang against the chiseled stone, I pushed the Indians away and cleared out the loose earth with my hands.”

Today, Bill Fash characterizes Copan as a dying forest. His cause is to save it by removing the rapidly eroding brilliant carvings to an on-site museum, then replacing the objects with precise replicas. He estimates that preserving the hieroglyphic stairway alone would cost about $1 million. Since 1977, when Fash first started overseeing his excavation project, the government of Honduras and private contributors have spent some $4 million.

Fash credits much of the puzzle-solving to his wife Barbara, who is the Copan project artist. He calls her “the old bionic eye” for her ability to see exactly which fragment of stone fits where in the gigantic puzzle. With the aid of photographs, the Fashes have matched fragments of carvings at Copan with other fragments excavated in the 1890s and housed in the Peabody Museum collection at Harvard.

While drawing the carved details of the last stele, dating from AD 822 and depicting the 16th king and a pretender to the throne, Barbara observed that the carving had never been finished. It looked, she says, as if the artisans had walked away one day--”in the middle of a sentence”--and never came back. This, the Fashes believe, was when the Copan dynasty ended.

But Mayan people continued to live here another century or two, and even long afterward pilgrims would come to make offerings, bury their dead and play ball on the stone court.

“It’s wrong to say the civilization collapsed; it just changed,” Fash says. “There are still 6 million Maya out there in the world.”

He rattles off their accomplishments. “The Maya gave us chocolate, beans, avocados, tomatoes, turkey, pineapples. They gave us rubber, the most developed writing system in the New World, the calendar. Arts and architecture. The Maya noted lunar and solar eclipses, could predict the appearance of Venus and calculate movements of the planets.” He shakes his head ruefully. “It was thought at one time they had no written language . . . (but) the Spanish burned books that they said contained only lies and superstitions of the devil.”

During my visit to the digs, professors and students working in the digs came from colleges such as Tulane, Northern Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania. Two of them, Jennifer Briggs and Geoffrey Braswell, Tulane students from New Orleans, had fallen in love over a rum-and-Coke at the Tunkul Bar and planned to marry. “But we’re not going to do anything weird, like getting married on top of a pyramid,” Briggs joked. Instead, the couple plans to honeymoon in American Samoa, the setting for Margaret Mead’s 1928 classic of anthropology “Coming of Age in Samoa.”

“For a Maya site, Copan is great,” the 31-year-old Briggs says enthusiastically. “The weather is pleasant, there are no mosquitoes and archeology is great work. If you do it right, people call you Doctor instead of Yo.”

Outside the Tunkul Bar, a boy named Manuel, who looks about 8 years old, is selling clumsy necklaces of bright-colored nuts and berries with carved Mayan heads as pendants. When I refuse them, he cheerfully says his only words of English with a hopeful smile, “Maybe tomorrow.”

Our group of five began the journey in San Pedro Sula, second largest city in Honduras. While the city’s economy is dominated by bananas, this town on the Colonel Sanders trail is chockablock with fried-chicken takeouts (Honduras leads the world in per capita consumption of fried chicken, I am told) and surrounded by what appear to be the Coca-Cola Mountains, distinguished by a giant replica of the familiar bottle perched atop one hill, a huge red-and-white Coke can on another.

A bright yellow van from Maya Tropic Tours picked us up at the San Pedro Sula airport and drove us to the Grand Hotel Sula for breakfast before the bumpy, three-hour drive to Copan. En route, our driver-guide, Luis Cruz, made impromptu stops to search out wild howler monkeys. They eluded us, but we paused to photograph Honduran cowboys and some vultures perched on tree limbs.

A hundred shades of green covered the hillsides and valleys as we neared Copan. There were fields of tobacco and coffee, trees with hanging vines long enough to star in a Tarzan film, bright, red-ruffled hibiscus, blooming cacao trees, and pink-flowering trees called macaelizo . The fields are divided by living fence posts: live branches stuck into the rich earth that sprout leaves and eventually form rows of shade trees. Oxcarts creak past ancient daub-and-wattle houses, and men amble along the roadway casually carrying razor-sharp machetes held across the back of their necks with a hand resting on either end.

Cruz doubles as courier for the archeologists because there is no telephone or reliable mail service in Copan. He takes messages and mail in and out on the two or three trips a week he makes with his tourists.

In Copan, we stayed overnight at the 15-room Marina Hotel, distinguished during our visit as the only lodging in the village that had hot water. Our big, high-ceilinged room was dimly lit by two bare electric light bulbs, one in the bedroom ceiling and the other above the shower in the rudimentary bathroom. Reading at night is out of the question.

A louvered, screened window overlooks the kitchen courtyard, where the pots began clattering around 5:30 in the morning, and a child recited the multiplication tables in an endless monotone. There were two double beds and a painted dark brown wooden wardrobe with a hanging rack narrower than its coat hangers, and a small electric fan we plugged in when the electricity was working.

In the screened dining room, we were served simple, tasty dishes like grilled chicken, tacos, mashed beans and thick, chewy tortillas.

In the late afternoon, when the electrical power was out all over the village (it seemed to be a routine occurrence), we sat in the courtyard sipping cold Honduran beer while Luis strummed a guitar and sang softly, more to himself than to us. Later, the owner of the guitar, Tony Rios, who operates the two gift shops at the ruins, arrived to join in on the music. A lanky man with a big straw hat and a missing front tooth, Rios says he has learned five languages by taking mail-order courses: “I tell people from Los Angeles that I speak English with a California accent because my correspondence language school was based in L.A.”

There’s a fascinating cast of characters at Copan: Americans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, German and Dutch tourists, American embassy personnel on holiday--even some ancient Maya who turn up now and again. One is 18 Rabbit, the 13th ruler of Copan, whose reign ended abruptly in 738 A.D. when he was decapitated by a minor king from nearby Quirigua. Eighteen Rabbit sent a message not long ago to the team excavating a building that may turn out to be his tomb.

Bill Fash tells the story: “One of our longtime employees, a man named Napoleon, came to me one morning and said, ‘I had this dream where 18 Rabbit came to me and said, “You’d better tell those archeologists that 18 Rabbit is not my real name.” And he was really angry, boss.’ ”

The Maya consider dreams direct communications from their ancestors. In the days when Copan was a mighty city, in the temples kings conversed with gods and ancestors during a trance called a “vision quest,” then came outside and announced the revelations to the waiting populace.

Fash admits the translation of the name could be wrong, since there are 2,000 or so carved signs, each with its own phonetic value. The 18 comes from a carving with three dots, each representing the number 1, and three bars, each standing for the number 5, in conjunction with the carved head of a rodent, perhaps more precisely a pocket gopher than a rabbit, he admits. But the drawing also reads phonetically as the syllable “ba,” which means rabbit in several surviving Mayan languages. Whatever his precise name, the king was the greatest patron of the arts the Maya ever produced, and the carvings at Copan created during his reign are considered by many to be the best in the Americas.

It was 18 Rabbit’s son, Smoke Shell, who erected the hieroglyphic stairway, a comprehensive and proud encyclopedia of Copan history with 2,000 glyphs carved on 1,250 glyph blocks.

On the West Court, behind the Acropolis, stands the Jaguar Altar, where the 16 kings of Copan are carved in relief and where 15 jaguars were once sacrificed in a single ceremony. The first king, Great Sun Lord Quetzal Macaw, is depicted with eye symbols that look like round goggles over his eyes. Workers in the restoration lab call him “the Ray-Ban king.”

Behind the altar, Temple 16 is slowly being uncovered. The archeologists on site have clues that lead them to hope it may turn out to be the burial place of all the kings. Tunnels under this structure lead past a facade with carvings of gods and a giant crocodile with the earth symbol on his back and water symbols below him. The original tunnels were not dug by the Maya but by earlier archeologists.

The day before we arrived, one of the workmen in the East Court area had made an important find, an exquisitely carved jade figure about four inches high, covered with red pigment and sandwiched between two large seashells. Fash believes the figure is probably a portrait of an early ruler.

We had spent a full afternoon and a full morning exploring the ruins of Copan. Now, as we check out of the Hotel Marina and head toward the bright yellow van and the long ride back down to San Pedro Sula, little Manuel materializes by the doorway, his eyes bright with hope. I buy two of his clunky necklaces without even haggling.

GUIDEBOOK

Copan, Honduras

Getting there: Flying to Central America from Los Angeles often means departing around midnight and arriving in the late morning after several stops. Continental Airlines flies daily from LAX via Houston to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with a change of planes in Houston. TACA, the Salvadoran national airline, also flies to San Pedro Sula via San Salvador or Guatemala City, where you change planes. LACSA, the Costa Rican national carrier, offers direct service from Los Angeles with two interim stops, but no plane change. American flies to San Pedro Sula from Miami. SAHSA, the Honduran national airline, flies to San Pedro Sula daily from Houston and Miami with connecting service on to the island of Roatan.

You can take a public bus from San Pedro Sula to Copan, but it is necessary to change buses in the market town of La Entrada. The ride will take 4 to 5 hours because of frequent stops along the way, and the road is quite rough in spots.

Copan tours: A three-day, two-night Copan package can be added on to a Roatan holiday (see accompanying story, L10) or booked from San Pedro Sula, the nearest air gateway, both with Maya Tropic Tours, Gran Hotel Sula, P.O. Box 480, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, C.A.; telephone 011-504-52-2405 or fax 011-504-52-5401.

The price for the add-on package from Roatan is $181 per person, double occupancy, which includes breakfast at the Gran Hotel Sula, transfers to and from Copan, lodging and all meals in Copan, entrance fees to the ruins, and an overnight and breakfast at Gran Hotel Sula on the return; it does not include air fare. A two-day, one-night package from San Pedro Sula costs $132 per person (if booked by two or three people) and includes transfers to and from Copan, lodging and all meals in Copan, and entrance fees to the ruins.

When to go: The best season to visit Copan is during winter and spring before the summer rainy season begins in May. The best times to visit the ruins are on weekdays, early morning and late afternoon. Weekends are often thronged with groups of Honduran school children, for whom this is a mandatory field trip.

Where to stay in San Pedro Sula: Because of plane connections, it will very likely be necessary to overnight at least once in San Pedro Sula. The Gran Hotel Sula (reservations (800) 275-3123, or direct dial 011-504-52-9999; doubles $90) is quite comfortable and centrally located by the cathedral, plaza and pedestrian shopping streets. The nine-story, 125-room hotel is air conditioned and has color TV with cable, CNN.

Out on the edge of town is the pretty pink Copantl Hotel and Club, a 205-room resort with tennis, casino, pool and disco. Rooms have color TV and air conditioning. It’s practical only if you have a car or don’t mind taking a taxi to and from town. Double rooms start at $95. For information/reservations, call their U.S. booking agent in Texas: (800) 328-8897.

Where to stay in Copan: The large, basic rooms at the colonial-style Hotel Marina are now being remodeled, but a swimming pool and some rooms are now open in a new annex that will make the hotel the most expensive place in town. All rooms will eventually have air-conditioning, private baths and hot water. Rates $70 per night.

Scheduled to open in February is Ma Drugada, an old-fashioned adobe house formerly used as housing for the archeologists, with 18 rooms, all with private bath and hot water, rustic decor and 12-foot ceilings with ceiling fans, $20 a night. It is adjacent to the Tunkul Bar. Book through Maya Tropic Tours, above.

Hotel Brisas de Copan is clean but a bit simpler and without hot water for around $10 a night, double.

Precautions: When we visited, local people advised against driving from Copan across the border into Guatemala to the Maya ruins at Quirigua because of sporadic episodes of cars being stopped by bandits. In any case, based on a 1990 visit, Quirigua is much less rewarding than Copan.

For more information: The government of Honduras does not maintain a tourism information office in the United States. Contact the individual hotels, tour companies or airlines for information.

HONDURA’S RESORT ISLAND: Roatan is a diver’s paradise and treasure trove of Caribbean pirate ore, L10.