A small team of scientists from SMU and Yale University have made a last-minute discovery that lays several decades of mystery and questioning to rest.
While exploring the La Corona Mayan ruins in the jungles of the Laguna del Tigre National Park in Peten, Guatemala last April, the group’s plan was merely to set up camp for a return mission the following spring. It was a routine visit for future study that resulted in a monumental discovery.
It was the team’s last day in La Corona when Dr. Marcello Canuto, an archaeology professor from Yale who was an investigator on the dig, stepped into a looter’s trench. Upon further exploration, he found an extremely well-preserved hieroglyphic panel that confirms La Corona is also Site Q, a lost but long-rumored Mayan city.
“The discovery . . . makes clear that the long-sought Site Q is not entirely sacked and looted,” Canuto, who is currently working in Guatemala, said in an e-mail interview. “This . . . makes the news for research at the site more pressing and important.”
At first, Canuto felt some anxiety about whether they had time to properly excavate and document the panel. “I was immediately struck with a wave of dread given how little time we actually had to complete the work that this discovery now presented us,” he said. “We would have to clean it, draw its context, photograph it, remove it . . . and all in less than a full work-day’s time.”
However, the team did accomplish the task, and the panel, which was too valuable to be left in place, was removed to a laboratory in Guatemala City. The team chose not to make the announcement of their find until September for fear of drawing looters seeking a profit to the area, according to the group’s epigrapher, Stanley Guenter, who is an SMU graduate student specializing in Mayan writings.
“We held off putting it into the press until we had posted guards in the area,” he said.
Looting remains a problem in the area, and it was what first led to the mystery of Site Q in the 1960s. Mayan artifacts with similar characteristics began appearing in the antiquities market, leading scientists to believe that they must have come from the same unidentified place.
“The collection of looted monuments attributed to Site Q is large,” said Canuto. “Many of the pieces are smallish panels, similar in size and scale to the panels we discovered in April.”
However, some panels, like the Dallas Tablet, which is in Meadows Museum, differ from the other artifacts, according to Canuto.
“Given that we have not found where these looted pieces might have come from at La Corona, we might have to consider the possibility that we have multiple sites in the region from which these monuments were looted,” he said. “Only future intensive research at La Corona will prove this to be true or not.”
SMU anthropology professor David Freidel, who also does work in Guatemala and originally suggested the track of research to Canuto, agrees that Site Q may be comprised of several locations.
“Nobody knows how many sites there may be like this in the vicinity [of La Corona],” he said, adding that the site is very small.
“[But] there’s no question, scientifically, that this is the clincher,” Freidel said.
Guenter, who began teaching himself hieroglyphics at the age of 10, disagrees that Site Q may involve multiple locations. “It’s a small site but seems to be unusually rich in monuments,” he said.
Freidel also believes the site is proof of an ancient royal road stretching from the city of Calakmul, a city that was once rumored to be Site Q, into the Peten.
Site Q was originally postulated by David Stuart in 1997 after investigating La Corona with fellow archaeologist David Graham, though he never published his beliefs.
“We should have made a much bigger emphasis on Stuart,” Freidel said. “I’m sorry about that.”
The research goes on, however, and recovering and protecting Mayan artifacts is not the only aim of the excavation team. It is also vitally important to protect the jungle and wildlife that surround them, according to Freidel.
“The forested eastern side of the park is home to a number of endangered species,” he said, listing scarlet macaws, jaguars, tapirs and peccaries as just a few of the animals inhabiting the area.
After conducting a four-month field study in Guatemala in 2003, Freidel became involved with a push for an effort to preserve the area. This resulted in the K’ante’el (or Precious Forest) Alliance, which works with conservationists and the government of Guatemala to keep the land from “unscrupulous businessmen and cattle ranchers,” said Freidel.
The primary form of agriculture in Guatemala is “slash and burn,” which involves burning large tracts of forest land and then growing crops in the nutrient-rich ash. However, this destroys the land and leaves it useless for years until regrowth of plant life occurs.
“Some of them are just poor people looking for land,” Freidel said. “Others, however, are poor people paid to do this by wealthy cattle owners and other land speculators.” Freidel said that large landowners are already fencing in and farming large areas of the land in the park, hoping that the government will give up and let them develop the land.
“People are buying and selling the land right out from under us,” he said.
Guenter, along with Canuto and two other graduate students from SMU, Damien Marken and Lia Tsesmeli, will be returning to Peten next spring. They will still need to do extensive excavation and research, in addition to further mapping of the area, according to Guenter.
“Site Q can still offer us a great deal more information than what has been culled from looted monuments,” Canuto said.
