Ancient Burials Shattering Old Ideas : Archeology: Discovery of Cave of the Glowing Skulls in Honduras indicates complex societies formed in the region far earlier than was believed.
The unexpected discovery of a cave filled with jewel-like skeletons in the Mosquitia rain forest of Honduras has jolted archeologists’ ideas about the timing and organization of the first societies in Central America.
The first carbon dates from artifacts in the Cave of the Glowing Skulls show that the cave, and presumably an unexcavated nearby village, date from 1000 B.C., long before anyone had thought cities and society had developed in the region.
The new results, released last week by researchers from George Washington University, promise to help overturn the conventional wisdom that broad areas of Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama were cultural backwaters owing their progress to ideas and technology that trickled down from the more powerful Mayan empire.
Instead, new findings make it clear that the region developed a rich social and cultural life of its own, independent of the well-known Mayan and Olmec societies, said archeologist Rosemary Joyce of UC Berkeley. Rather than being poor country cousins of these more powerful cultures, she said, the early Hondurans developed a highly stable culture that in many ways was much more attuned to the local environment.
“It now seems likely that the emergence of complex societies was broad-based, occurring many times in many places rather than happening one time and spreading outward,” said archeologist John Hoopes of the University of Kansas.
Equally important, the new results refute the long-cherished idea that early Meso-American societies were based primarily on the cultivation of corn, which archeologists often refer to as maize.
To the shock of archeologists investigating the site, the radiocarbon studies indicate that this mysterious, unidentified people ate virtually no corn, a finding that is forcing scientists to re-examine their ideas about the agricultural developments that stimulated the formation of early societies.
The new discoveries, said George Washington University archeologist James E. Brady, who led the recent expedition, “provide a fabulous opportunity to get an idea of what communities looked like in this formative period when civilizations were just coalescing.”
Brady’s discovery is also important because so little is known about the early history of Honduras.
“It has been kind of a blank in our archeological map of Central America,” said Canadian archeologist Paul Healy of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. “There’s no question that (the findings are) significant because the area is so poorly known.”
The cavern was discovered last year by two Americans and two Hondurans exploring the Cueva de Rio Talgua (the Cave of the Talgua River) near the farm town of Catacamas, about 100 miles northeast of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. They discovered an opening about 30 feet up the wall of a back chamber of the two-mile-deep cave.
Climbing through the opening, they eventually stumbled across a chamber filled with hundreds of bones and skulls that, reflected in the interlopers’ lanterns, seemed to glow with a fierce light of their own. Subsequent studies showed that water in the cave had coated the bones with a fine layer of calcite that reflected light almost like diamonds.
In September, Brady led an expedition into the cave that discovered 23 deposits of human skeletons, at least 20 of which contained multiple bodies. The vast majority of these seemed to be bundle burials, in which groups of bones are wrapped and brought to the cave after the flesh had been removed elsewhere.
The bones were painted red and it appeared that a red mineral pigment was sprinkled on the ground where the bones were placed. Brady estimates that because only 100 to 200 individuals were buried in the cave, they represented the elite of a nearby village. That conclusion was bolstered by the discovery of about 20 pieces of ceremonial pottery accompanying some of the deposits, two large, thin-walled marble bowls and jade jewelry on at least one skeleton.
A survey of the site also revealed the presence of more than 100 mounds covering the remains of a community that stretched at least half a mile. Pottery shards from the mounds are identical to those from the cave, suggesting that they were contemporaneous.
Radiocarbon dates of charcoal associated with the pottery showed that one sample dates from about 800 B.C., while the second dates to 980 B.C.
“That makes them among the earliest pottery we have found anywhere in South and Central America,” Hoopes said.
Because of the high degree of preservation produced by the calcite covering, Brady was able to obtain bone protein from two skeletons. Studies by chemist David McJunkin of the University of Wisconsin--using well-established radioisotopic techniques--showed that neither individual consumed significant quantities of maize.
Theories about the establishment of civilizations in the region have emphasized that the extensive number of people required for growing maize forced individuals to live together in cities. The new finding “suggests that dependence on maize was not necessarily a requirement for the emergence of a complex society,” he said.
