Maya Up Against a Wall

Wiliam Saturno’s search was shaping up to be a disaster. What should have been a five-hour trip had become a three-day journey through the rain forest.

His hired guides had drastically underestimated how much time it would take to reach their destination. Now the food and water were gone. The situation looked downright scary. Then Saturno and his befuddled crew stumbled onto the ruins of an early Mayan ceremonial site in northeastern Guatemala.

The site, San Bartolo, had been previously unknown to archaeologists, though not unknown to looters, who had dug numerous tunnels around a central plaza complex. Saturno didn’t see any of the carved stone monuments he was looking for, so he decided to duck into one of the tunnels. There he happened upon a phenomenon far more extraordinary than any statue: the oldest intact mural of any early Mayan society. Superbly detailed and richly colored, the mural was exceptionally preserved. “I started laughing at the sheer improbability of the situation,” recalls Saturno, a researcher at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He announced the find in March.

The entire site is a treasure, but its crown jewel is the 1,900-year-old mural. The panel covers about four feet, but only the 10 percent that was uncovered by looters is visible. “We know so little about Mayan wall painting for this time period that we exponentially expand our data set with every inch we analyze,” Saturno says. Prior to this discovery, only a few fragments from murals dating from the early Maya (400 B.C. to A.D. 250) had been found. From the mural’s exquisite craftsmanship, Saturno and his colleagues deduce that it must have been painted by a group of artists trained for the task and supported by the state or by members of the court who had sufficient wealth to commission such a work.

The mural has also yielded news about ancient Mayan legends and religion.“We now know,” says Saturno, “that mythology that was important in the16th century was equally important in the first century,” which establishes a degree of cultural continuity. The pivotal figure in the one scene that has been uncovered so far is the corn god attended by two women, apparently goddesses, and a young male, probably the god’s son.

According to Karl Taube, an anthropologist at the University of California at Riverside,whom Saturno recently invited to help interpret the mural, the scene establishes the importance of maize inMayan culture even at this early date. The kneeling woman is reminiscent of the later classic Mayan wind god, and the other woman seems to be shadowed by a rain cloud. Taubes speculates that painters created a metaphor of wind and rain assisting the growth of maize.

Saturno expects more surprises: “They represent a watershed moment in the study of early Mayan civilization, perhaps holding clues to its very origins.”

Published in Discover’s Year in Science 2002

• No related posts.