Harrowing Jungle Escape Recounted

It seemed like something straight out of Indiana Jones--complete with the daring, award-winning archeologist and the happy ending.

Bootless and weaponless except for one small pocketknife, five archeologists spent two rainy nights in the dense Guatemalan rain forest after escaping local Indians who had attacked them to protest removal of a Maya monument, the leader of the group said Tuesday.

Battered from the encounter with the protesters and sore-footed from the six-mile journey through the thorn-infested forest, the team was ultimately rescued by a passing boat delivering supplies to another archeological site, Peter Mathews of the University of Calgary said Tuesday by phone from Palenque in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas.

Mathews, who had his nose broken by a rifle butt during the attack, and his team was attempting to move the Maya altar to a nearby museum to prevent it from being looted when they were accosted Friday by local residents protesting their actions.

After a daylong confrontation with more than 100 villagers, what had started as a protest turned into the theft of the archeologists’ money and equipment before the badly beaten team was allowed to escape into the night, Mathews said.

Six Cholo Indian workmen hired by the team were also beaten, but they were separated from the archeologists and made their way back to the nearest village Saturday.

“This was not quite the result we expected when we went in there,” Mathews said.

Mathews, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner who specializes in translating Maya glyphs, or writing, has been working for four years at a city called El Cayo on the Mexican shores of the Usumacinta River, which forms part of the border between that country and Guatemala. The city dates from the Classic Maya period, between AD 600 and AD 900.

Two years ago, the team excavated a large stone altar, about 4 feet in diameter and weighing half a ton. The altar is considered very valuable because it is covered with writing that could yield much insight into the Maya culture.

At that time, the team reburied the altar under a layer of fine silt, a plastic covering and two to three tons of rocks to protect it.

Mathews recently received reports that looters had attempted to remove the altar. Even though he had canceled this season’s excavations at El Cayo because of unrest in the region and fighting between the small villages in the area, Mathews decided to go in and transport the stone to a museum in the nearby city of Frontera Corazol.

When the team reached El Cayo last Thursday, he said, it discovered that the altar had, indeed, been uncovered and that there were at least three pick marks on its surface from the attempts to dig it up.

Contrary to preliminary reports, before the archeologists could begin digging the altar out and crating it Friday, they were accosted by residents from a nearby village.

“The very first group that we saw claimed that this was their land, and that they didn’t want anything taken out,” Mathews said.

“They left and other, more bellicose groups came in. By the end of the day, the majority didn’t care much about the monument and the ruins, but about what we had and how much they could get out of us.”

The irate villagers, he said, took all their cash, equipment, cameras, clothes, watches and $900 in travelers checks--which Mathews didn’t sign. “I understand some people have been around town today trying to cash them,” Mathews chuckled.

By about 8 Friday evening, “They stripped us of our boots and told us to get out,” he said. “We fled as fast as we could in the dark to the beach on the river. We got to the beach and were starting to hide when there were shots. We were told to pile up all of our remaining gear on the beach and line up along the edge of the beach. We thought we were going to be shot.”

Instead, they were beaten with rifle butts on the face and body. Mathews, in addition to the broken nose, has gashes on his face, and one of his companions has two broken ribs, he said.

The villagers picked up the gear and left. “We decided to hide in case they came back,” he said. The six workmen fled into the bushes on the Mexican side of the river. “We decided our best chance was to get across the river and hide out,” Mathews said.

Two of the group could not swim, but fortunately they found a dugout canoe.

They spent the next two days in the rain forest walking upriver toward Frontera Corazol. Torrential rains fell both nights, Mathews said, “and we were cold and miserable.” They had nothing to eat during the two days and little water.

“We had two really good bush hands with us, but we never saw anything to eat,” he said. They had to kill an attacking coral snake, he said, but did not eat it. Progress was slow, he added, because their path went up and down ravines with slopes greater than 45 degrees.

On Sunday afternoon, they finally saw a boat heading downriver to take supplies to an archeological expedition at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. The boat rescued them and took them to Piedras Negras, where they were fed and spent the night. They were then taken back to Palenque on Monday.

Mathews said he is going to pay his workers, finish some paperwork, clean up a few loose ends and go home to his family. He has been giving details of the incident to local authorities, but no arrests have been made.

“I won’t be going back to El Cayo for a while,” he said. “It’s far too tense to go in and do anything. We would have to have a very heavily armed escort, and the military won’t want to provoke the situation.”

In contrast to earlier reports, the team was able to rebury the altar Friday during the confrontation with the villagers, he added, so it should be relatively safe for a while.

The others who made the trek with him included Mario Aliphat, an archeologist at the University of the Americas at Cholula, Mexico; Armando Anaya, a graduate student at Calgary; Nazario Magana, who works for the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City and is in charge of the site, and Don Martin Arcos, from the museum in Frontera Corazol.