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Maya Palace Uncovered
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September 8, 2000
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by Angela M.H. Schuster
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Extensive palace found at the Maya site of Cancuén in Guatemala's Petén region
Arthur Demarest, left, and Tomás Barrientos, right, examine the remains of a large Maya palace at Cancuén. (Christopher Talbot, National Geographic Society) |
Archaeologists working deep in the jungle of highland Guatemala have
uncovered the remains of an enormous Maya palace built nearly 1,300 years
ago. Found at the site of Cancuén, which means "Place of Serpents," on the
Río Pasion in the Petén region, the three-story palace covers some 270,000
square feet has more than 170 rooms built around 11 courtyards. Its solid
limestone masonry walls are six feet thick in places. According to
inscriptions, the palace was commissioned by a king, T'ah 'ak' Cha'an, who
reigned in the mid-eighth century.
A preliminary survey of the building, undertaken by Arthur Demarest of
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Tomás Barrientos of the
Universidad del Valle in Guatemala City, has revealed a complex labyrinth of
rooms and passageways, many with 20-foot-high corbel arches. The palace was
surrounded by the houses and workshops of artisans. Adjacent areas had been
paved. |
Click for detailed map. (Bette Duke) |
Cancuén flourished during the Classic Period (A.D. 300-900), reaching its
apogee in the early seventh century, when it controlled much of the southern
Petén. The site prospered from its monopoly of trade in jade, pyrite for
making mirrors, and obsidian for blade production. Withing the workshop area
archaeologists uncovered a 35-pound chunk of jade that artisans had been
chopping away to make amulets and beads and impressive quantities of pyrite.
"Cancuén," says Demarest, "had a distinct advantage in being located at the
Río Pasion's head of navigation, the first place the river's waters are
navigable after it flows out of the highlands; waterfalls and rapids
providing a scenic backdrop to the ancient city."
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An artist's reconstruction of the palace based on recent survey data. (Luis Fernando, National Geographic Society) [LARGER IMAGE] |
"Clearly the city's inhabitants were wealthy," he adds, noting that even
artisans, whose remains have been found under the floors of houses just
south of the palace, had teeth inlaid with jade--a practice generally
reserved for royalty--and had been buried with numerous ceramic figurines and
elaborate headdresses.
The city was ruled by one of the Maya world's oldest dynasties, one that was
established sometime around A.D. 300. The city formed a number of powerful
alliances with neighboring kingdoms in the Late Classic period. Inscriptions
indicate that a lord from Calakmul in Campeche, Mexico, officiated at the
investitures of two Cancuén kings in A.D. 656 and 677, and, according to
Guatemalan epigrapher Federico Fahsen, an inscription at the nearby site of
Petexbatún records a marriage between a Dos Pilas prince known as To K'in
K'awil and a Cancuén princess, Ix Chac K'awil Ix Cancuén Ahau, sometime in the A.D. 730s. "We are just now beginning to work out Cancuén's
relationship to surrounding cities," says Fahsen, cautioning that
decipherments made so far are preliminary. Demarest and his team estimate
that at its height it had a population of several thousand people. The site
was abandoned in the mid-ninth century.
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Left, an altar and fallen stela lay among the remains of the vast Maya city of
Cancuén. [LARGER IMAGE] Right, a Classic period polychrome vase [LARGER IMAGE] (Christopher Talbot, National
Geographic Society) |
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Cancuén was first visited by archaeologists in 1905, but dismissed as a
minor Maya city. In the 1960s it was surveyed by graduate students from
Harvard University who discovered the palace remains. Their sketches and
maps, however, underestimated both the size of the palace and the extent of
the ancient city; its architecture obscured by dense vegetation. To date
Demarest and his team have mapped some three square miles of urban
development. They will return next summer to begin excavation of the palace,
a project they expect to take more than a decade.
The site is at the center of one of the last stands of tropical rain forest
in the Petén, complete with howler monkeys, wooly anteaters, and rare birds. Excavators hope to establish the area surrounding the site as an ecological
preserve.
© 2000 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/online/news/cancuen/ |