| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Horizons As an early morning chorus of howler monkeys reverberates through the rainforest, I follow archeologists Ed Barnhart and Jim Eckhardt along a well worn path to an obscure corner of Palenque, struggling to keep my footing and keep pace with Barnharts brisk discourse. Its the final week of fieldwork for a three-year effort to find and survey every temple, building, and other structure in this Classic Mayan city. The end result: the most accurate and complete map to any ancient metropolis in Mesoamerica, maybe anywhere. Palenques builders took to heart the modern realtors maxim, "location, location, location." The city spreads out for three kilometers across a kilometer-wide plateau, overlooking an expanse of marshes and floodplains and abutting a lushly forested ridge in lowland Chiapas, Mexico. This scenic, secure location may have fostered the citys creativity in art and architecture. Renowned for spacious temples adorned with stone and stucco sculptures, Palenque served as a western regional capital of Mayan civilization until its mysterious abandonment shortly after a.d. 800. As we make our way westward across creeks and over limestone blocks toward the edge of a fallow cornfield, where two macheteros will slash away with their blades at the tangle of vines and trees that might hide buildings, Barnhart points out mounds of ancient ruins. "Theres one. Theres another," he says. "Its an incredible density of buildings for a community here." In the course of this work, Barnharts become convinced that Palenque was once a thriving city in every sense, a place of residence as much as ritual, organized like a modern urban area. Barnhart believes that besides pointing archeologists toward promising areas for excavation, the new map will help to illuminate the extent of urbanization among the Maya. That will be the topic of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin. About 75 years had passed since the last systematic attempt to map the site when the Florida-based Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies funded Barnhart and his tight-knit team in 1998. The best estimate then for the extent of Palenque totalled 541 structures. As of this June, the Palenque Mapping Project had documented more than 1,450 structures. Theres probably more to find behind and beneath thorny underbrush, plus buildings that will never be known. "Weve got this neat map, and it looks like it must be the whole city, but it absolutely cant be," says Barnhart. "They must have made tons of stuff out of wood." This morning Barnhart wants to visit a low-lying structure found the day before. Invisible from a few feet away, it had escaped detection until a machete blow exposed an immense slab of limestone. "Good God. Look how big those stones are," Barnhart exclaims. That such a humble building consists entirely of huge blocks of stone might indicate that one of the citys several limestone quarries lay upslope. Barnhart wonders whether this could even be a quarry owners abode, displaying a high-quality commodity in its very walls. But any conclusion about the use of this or other structures found by the mappers must await test excavations to search for more revealing refuse or artifacts. To make the map, the team conducted a coarse survey with measuring tape and compass over Palenques mostly rugged, tangled terrain before returning with a precision surveying machine to gather more data and correct any initial errors to within the length of a single building stone. Team members risked venomous snakes and falling from cliffs and temples. The 23,332 data points that represent the dimensions and height of each man-made structure and the spatial relationships between them were compiled into a software program called Foresight, which permits edifices to be viewed in 3-D from any perspective, and then imported into Autocad along with topographic contour lines, rivers, and other features. The project team included Kirk French, who studied how the Maya managed Palenques rich water sources, and archeological artists Heather Hurst and Alonso Mendez, who drew reconstructions of temples and complexes. The artists got their hands dirty exploring newly mapped structures, sometimes squeezing through tight temple passages to visualize better how a building might have looked in its heyday. "Ed maps the footprint [of each building]. I map it from the inside, architecturally," says Hurst. The mappers discovered some of the biggest buildings at Palenque, including a monumental platform known as the Escondido—where houses appear to have been erected atop former public spaces—and a prominent L-shaped structure flanking a broad plaza, which may have served as a marketplace near the floodplain where the Maya grew maize and other crops. But its the density of smaller, private structures arrayed in rows within subdivision-like clusters that impresses Barnhart most. "People arent just making their own houses," he asserts. "Theyre working together to make a community plan, an urban plan." Uphill from Palenques ceremonial center, a recently completed excavation has revealed intriguing details about a little known ruler late in the citys history. San Franciscos Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, directed by Academy Research Associate Merle Greene Robertson, was invited by the director of Mexicos Instituto Nacional de Antropolog"a y Historia to undertake the work. Robertson has systematically documented Palenques art and architecture since the early 1960s. Her team, co-led by archeologist Alfonso Morales, focused on the Cross Group, a cluster of a half-dozen ornate temples that in Mayan times was dominated on the south end by the broad, imposing stairway of Temple XIX. The team targeted that structure, enclosed by forest and covered with a mound of dirt, for a major excavation that began two years ago. They didnt have to penetrate far into the overlying dirt before turning up some remarkable finds. While digging a test trench across the center of the temple, the team encountered a stucco panel attached to one of the piers that had supported the ceiling. The panel depicted a Mayan king—later identified as Kinich Ahkal Mo Nahb III—and still bore brilliant washes of red and blue pigment. The tip of his nose had been chipped off some time in the past during a ritual act of disfigurement. Further digging along an adjacent surface of the pier revealed the base of a delicately carved low relief in pink limestone showing the feet of three figures. This was all that remained in place of an amazing panel—one of Palenques true treasures—that would have faced anyone entering the temple but had been wrenched from its prominent position. As the archeologists cleared more debris and expanded outward from the trench, they found other pieces of the limestone panel discarded about the temple in another apparent act of desecration. The assembled pieces form the full figure of Ahkal Mo Nahb, grimacing with a furrowed brow and penetrating gaze, as he stands straddled by his kneeling uncle and another man. In March 1999, near the east end of Temple XIX, the group made its next major find: a nine-by-five-foot limestone platform throne carved on three sides with costumed figures and some 200 hieroglyphs that related Ahkal Mo Nahbs rise to power in a.d. 721. Construction of the temple began soon afterward. Someone had broken into the throne and vandalized its symbolic cache, leaving behind ceramic fragments, obsidian artifacts, a few human bones, a mirror, and a sliver of jade. Translations of glyphs on the panel and throne by epigrapher David Stuart reveal that Ahkal Mo Nahb was a grandson of Pacal the Great, who ruled Palenque for nearly seven decades. "We have determined from the inscriptions that this ruler, who was not considered to be important, turns out to be one of the major rulers of Palenque," says Morales. Palenques rulers generally gained their royal privilege through their fathers, but Ahkals father, who himself never ruled, died when the boy was only two years old. It remains unclear how Ahkal managed to assume power, but his ascension followed a ten-year hiatus of leadership after the previous ruler, Kan-Hok Chitam I, had been captured by the nearby city of Tonina and was sacrificed to destabilize Palenque. Perhaps Temple XIX marks an architectural attempt by Ahkal Mo Nahb to establish control and erect a monument to himself. Even by Palenques standards for innovative architecture, Temple XIX displays vaulting ambition. Instead of occupying a typical and more stable position at the front of the temple, the piers took the place of a load-bearing wall in the center, which made a more airy interior. But the burden of excess weight on the central piers created still-visible stress fractures. At some point in the past, both the facade and the ceiling in the southwest corner collapsed. A retaining wall on the western exterior indicates that someone tried to shore up and salvage the building. When this temple was built, Palenque may have faced a severe shortage of wood that was burned to prepare stucco used for mortar. Builders substituted a weaker yellow soil. Lack of wood could also explain the switch to stone relief carving or the temples floor of bare, stucco-less stone. Pollen analysis of soil samples from the floor might confirm the extent of deforestation at the time the temple was in use. A roof had been erected over Temple XIX two weeks before my visit. Workmen were constructing a side staircase from the roofstones and other rubble that will permit tourists to enter the temple and observe first-class replicas of the throne and stucco portrait (the originals will be safely housed in the museum at the site), without adding wear to the original stairway and floor. But Temple XIX may not have yielded all its secrets yet. Based on the spacing of its central piers, Morales suspects that a tomb lies beneath the floor. Two smaller, adjoining temples each harbor tombs, so Morales says, "Its a good bet." With the discovery of Pacals royal tomb at this site almost a half century ago, Palenque proved that Mayan temples could serve as funerary monuments much like Egyptian pyramids. And the latest work there whets the appetite to know what still lies buried. Blake Edgar is Senior Editor of California Wild. |
Fall 2000
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