Royals Weren't Only Builders Of Maya Temples

[Bianca]

Yalbac site map, showing positions of temples and other structures.

(Credit:
Courtesy of the Valley of Peace Archaeology Project)








                           Royals Weren't Only Builders Of Maya Temples, Archaeologist Finds






ScienceDaily
(Feb. 26, 2008)

— An intrepid archaeologist is well on her way to dislodging the prevailing assumptions of scholars
about the people who built and used Maya temples.

From the grueling work of analyzing the “attributes,” the nitty-gritty physical details of six temples
in Yalbac, a Maya center in the jungle of central Belize – and a popular target for antiquities looters – primary investigator Lisa Lucero is building her own theories about the politics of temple construction
that began nearly two millennia ago.

Her findings from the fill, the mortar and other remnants of jungle-wrapped structures lead her to
believe that kings weren’t the only people building or sponsoring Late Classic period temples (from
about 550 to 850), the stepped pyramids that rose like beacons out of the southern lowlands as early
as 300 B.C.

“Preliminary results from Yalbac suggest that royals and nonroyals built temples,” said Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois.

In fact, judging by the varieties of construction and materials, any number of different groups – nobles, priests and even commoners – may have built temples, Lucero said, and their temples undoubtedly served their different purposes and gods.

That different groups had the wherewithal – the will, resources and freedom – to build temples suggests to Lucero that “the Maya could choose which temples to worship in and support; they had a voice in who succeeded politically.”

Yalbac’s location on the eastern periphery of the southern Maya lowlands and its distance from regional centers may explain its particular dynamics and its “relative political independence,” Lucero said.

The archaeologist’s new propositions challenge academic thinking on Maya temples. “Maya scholars have basically assumed that rulers built all the temples,” she said. “No one has questioned this, although cross-cultural comparison alone would suggest otherwise."

To be sure, the historic record is largely silent on why the Maya, a complex culture with many mysteries still to unravel, had several temples in any given center, which is why Lucero, among others, believes that archaeologists must seek answers from the buildings themselves and “construct more creative ways to assess what temple attributes can reveal about their non-material qualities.”

While largely unknown – except to looters and loggers – Yalbac is a rich site. In addition to the six temples, it also includes two plazas, a large royal residence or acropolis, and a ball court. Several of the temples are likely royal, three likely residential or memorial. None so far has been cleared of surface debris. Only one of the temples has escaped looting.

Looters, ironically, paved the way for Lucero’s work to map, excavate and analyze Yalbac’s Late Classic period temples. Over the years, thieves have carved nine trenches into the site in their pursuit of priceless booty. These same trenches have become Lucero’s access routes to the temples. Still, in order to reduce additional invasion and damage to the historic site, Belizean authorities restrict her excavation beyond the trenches.

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Some of the evidence she is accumulating is in the tons of fill – cobbles, boulders and stone pebbles, some in the tons of mortar – marl, plaster, and various kinds of loam.

Lucero – either on her own or leading groups of archaeology field school students – has been able to map the Yalbac site, including its structures, looters’ trenches and stelae – upright marker stones, sometimes inscribed, erected by the Maya over the millennia.

Over the years, she has dated ceramics found at Yalbac from about 300 B.C. through A.D. 900; her plaza test pit excavations have exposed floors that date to the same period, “a typical occupation history for Maya centers.”

“We also have placed test units throughout the site to get an idea as to monumental architecture construction histories and functions.”

To date she has taken four New Mexico State University field school classes to Yalbac. She will take her first U. of I. field school class this May for a six-week hands-on course in archaeological survey and excavation. Lucero joined Illinois’ department of anthropology last August, after a decade at NMSU.

The focus this summer will be on profiling the temple looters’ trenches and test excavations. Lucero and 10 undergraduates and two graduate assistants will collect data from the six temples in order to compare temple frequency, size differences, location, layout, accessibility, history of use, construction patterns, surface decoration and ritual deposits.

“We also will expand the trenches to see if the looters missed caches – artifacts consisting of shell, jade, ceramics, lithics, etc. – that may provide clues as to temple function and purpose.”

Lucero doesn’t spend much time worrying about looters.

“While looting is still a problem, the relatively new management of the land-owning company, Yalbac Cattle and Ranch Co., which logs the 200,000 acres they own, have armed patrols that protect the area from illegal poachers, loggers and looters.”

Because Yalbac is directly behind the guardhouse, she said, “the site is very well protected, as are the students and staff.”

“We have been surveying the area for years without any problems,” she said. “Often the loggers show us sites they have found in the process of searching for mahogany, cedar and rosewood.”

Lucero’s latest findings are detailed in the journal Latin American Antiquity in an article titled “Classic Maya Temples, Politics, and the Voice of the People.” Lucero is the leading expert on Yalbac and the sole authorized archaeologist on the site, authorized by the Belize Institute of Archaeology. She has conducted research in the area since 1997, and on the Yalbac site since 2002. The work Lucero is doing will provide the basis for her next book project, an exploration of temples as text.


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Adapted from materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/02/080225134239.htm

[Bobette Weiss]

Awesome thread, Bianca, especially this graph of hidden temples:

[Bianca]

Thank you, Babette.




                                                WELCOME TO ATLANTIS ON LINE!!!

[Bianca]

[Bianca]

[Bianca]

The Maya center of Yalbac, Belize.

Plaza 2 pyramids (2A-F) are likely royal temples, while

Plaza 3 pyramids (#A-C) are perhaps residential or memorial temples.

Temple 1A is a large royal residence, or acropolis with its own plaza, more than 70 feet tall.



Courtesy of
Dr. Lisa J. Lucero,
Valley of Peace Archaeology
(VOPA) Project

[Bianca]

                                               Archaeologists let looters do some of the work






Posted 2/11/2007
Dan Vergano
USANEWS 

 
 
 
  LEARN MORE



 New Mexico State University: Yalbac: 2001 Report
 
 Wikipedia: Maya civilization
 
 Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
 
 National Geographic News: From Looters, Ancient Maya Altar Rescued
 
 
 

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, goes the old saw. But when you are an archeologist and life gives you looters, often all you can do is make lamentations. Looting afflicts archaeological sites worldwide, from the wide-spread plundering of ancient Sumerian sites in Iraq, to pot-hunters in the American Southwest, to the looting of Inca and other sites in the Peruvian Andes.

However, a few archaeologists have figured out a way to put the looters to work for them, as archaeologist Lisa Lucero of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces demonstrated in a recent talk about her team's study of the ancient Maya ceremonial center at Yalbac in Belize. Visitors to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., may not realize that one of the nation's largest anthropology departments is housed at the museum, but dozens of researchers packed a large seminar room deep in its collections to hear Lucero's talk last week.

The ancient, or classic, low-land Maya are renowned for the pyramid-packed ceremonial centers they left in the jungles of Guatemala, Mexico and Belize, abandoning them sometime before 900 A.D. Although millions of Maya descendants are alive today, and Maya culture continued at sites in the Yucatan after the arrival of the Spaniards in the 1500s, the mystery of that abandonment remains fascinating to scholars.

At Yalbac, Lucero and her colleagues with the Valley of Peace Archaeology Project are faced with unraveling the riddle of three sets of pyramids and other structures surrounding three broad plazas in central Belize, all buried under dirt, vegetation and decay at the site.





Courtesy of Dr. Lisa J. Lucero,
Valley of Peace Archaeology
(VOPA) Project
 
Figurine fragment of God N from a looter's trench, Str. 2F. 

[Bianca]

Courtesy of Dr. Lisa J. Lucero,
Valley of Peace Archaeology
(VOPA) Project
 
The extensive damage caused by looters, as well as architectural features. 









Belize antiquities officials want more information about the archaeological site, but also want as few excavations as possible to limit damage at Yalbac. "So I only have looter's trenches, and I'd rather stick with that than destroy more temples," Lucero says. Making the best of the situation, her team has catalogued the structure and building of the marred temples using the looter's diggings. The trenches are basically open pits gouged into the sides of the pyramids, dug down to the structure's base, and in one case more than 30 yards long.

"Preliminary results support the suggestion that both royals and non-royals built temples for specific gods," Lucero says, based on the different types of items and stone found lining the walls of the looters trenches at five of the six pyramids. Nine temple trenches have been dug by looters at the site, two of them dug since the project started in 2001. They are both deep and large, Lucero says, just filling them in would take the archaeology team an entire field season's work. A few test excavations on the plazas have also helped the team.

Among other findings, Lucero says that although the remains of one palace towers about 50 feet high at Yalbac, it was a secondary center among the Maya from perhaps 300 B.C. to 900 A.D, more a minor league ballfield than a Yankee Stadium.

Maya centers are famous for their public architecture and researchers feel that they understand why the structures were erected in the first place. "It was like a neon light for local farmers," Lucero says, drawing them to each center during the dry season, when reservoirs supplied people's water needs, and ceremonies supplied the entertainment and opportunity for people to trade and mingle.

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But who built what at these centers, Lucero asks? At Yalbac, two distinct sets of pyramids and palaces surround their own plazas (Plaza Two and Plaza Three to the archaeologists), while a royal acropolis, thought to be a palace residence, abuts a third one (Plaza One.) A total of six pyramids, ranging from 25 to 50 feet tall, line the three plazas. All were used in the Late Classic Maya era, from about 600 to 900 A.D. Maya rulers typically erected stone markers, or stelae, celebrating their status at centers, so researchers know that royalty occupied the sites. But the researchers are unsure why kings would go to the trouble of building multiple plazas at a center.

The temple pyramids surrounding each plaza appear to have been built as a group. At Plaza Two, the pyramids are overall more massive than the ones at Plaza Three, using larger stone blocks, better fill material and more "face" stones to decorate the structures, the researchers conclude. Plaza Two was more accessible as well, suggesting it was a more central focus of ceremonies at the center.

At Plaza Two, recovered items include speleothems, stalactite pieces from caves that figure in the Maya origin myth, found at the site of a sacred ball court and a figurine of "God N," a sky god (Maya researchers generally just designate deities by letters to standardize discussion of these little-understood sacred figures). These are items symbolic of royalty.

At Plaza Three, in contrast, the structures appear more residential, with housing wings on some pyramids and human burial remains at others, Lucero says. And a buried, polished jaguar tooth and obsidian lancets found at Plaza Three trenches connote "more earthly purposes," linked to the agricultural cycle, she says.

Overall, the plethora of temples suggest the Maya had choices of which temple to attend and support, a more complex picture of their society than a simple one of farmers led autocratically by their leaders. "Yalbac's six temples could have served as arenas for competition among royals, non-royals and a priesthood for worshippers," Lucero says.

Looters have done researcher's work for them in Maya studies before. Vanderbilt archaeologist Arthur Demarest in 2003 reported the recovery of a Maya altar stone looted from a sacred ball court.

Of course, researchers would prefer to have their sites remain undisturbed, Lucero says. She and her colleagues hope to begin a more thorough survey of Yalbac, starting in 2008, to settle whether their suggestion of a diverse religious life among the Maya can be determined from the temples themselves, and by comparison with temples at other sites. Even though there is a guard at Yalbac, there is concern about more looting there before that work can begin.




Each week, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano combs scholarly journals to present the Science Snapshot, a brief summary of some of the latest findings in scientific research.

For past articles, visit this index page.

 
Posted 2/11/2007 
USA TODAY