Bodies found in ancient Mayan City: What a mysterious altar reveals about the culture from 1,700 years ago
A new discovery tells of a turbulent episode in the Mayan city of Tikal according to the researchers who unearthed an ancient altar that wasn’t Mayan.
Little by little researchers are unraveling the mysteries of the Maya culture of Central America. A new discovery unearthed by an international team of archeologists in the heart of modern-day Guatemala has put another piece in the puzzle revealing a turbulent period of time of the ancient Maya city of Tikal.
An altar was found buried under what was thought to be a natural hill just steps away from the city’s center. However, it was put there by people from another civilization whose homeland was some 630 miles away in Teotihuacan, outside modern-day Mexico City.
Central Mexican “Storm God” depicted on altar with bodies buried underneath
Researchers base their belief that the 1,700 year old altar wasn’t the work of Maya craftsman on decorations still visible on four painted panels. The red, black and yellow paintings represent the central Mexican deity known as the “Storm God” and appears to be the work of a highly skilled artist trained in Teotihuacan.
Furthermore, the archeologists discovered two bodies underneath the altar. One is most likely an adult male with a dart point made of green obsidian. The other a 2–4-year-old child interred in a seated position. There were also three infants buried adjacent to the altar.
The dart material and design are distinct to Teotihuacan said Andrew Scherer of Brown University, one of the co-authors of a recently published paper in Antiquity on the find. Additionally, the way the children were interred are all similar to burials discovered at Teotihuacan. All of this provides strong evidence that it wasn’t the work of those in Tikal.
“What the altar confirms is that wealthy leaders from Teotihuacan came to Tikal and created replicas of ritual facilities that would have existed in their home city,” explained Scherer. “It shows Teotihuacan left a heavy imprint there.”
“An extraordinary period of turbulence at Tikal”
It has been known for some time that the two cultures interacted for centuries before the altar was built around the late 300s AD. This coincides with when “Teotihuacan was essentially decapitating a kingdom,” said another co-author of the research paper, Stephen Houston of Brown University, according to text on a stone discovered in the 1960s describing a conflict between the Maya and Teotihuacan.
“They removed the king and replaced him with a quisling, a puppet king who proved a useful local instrument to Teotihuacan,” explained Houston. The altar makes it “increasingly clear that this was an extraordinary period of turbulence at Tikal,” he added.
Cementing the research team’s theory that Teotihuacan had a lasting and even scarring impact on Tikal is that the Maya buried the altar and the surrounding area and then left it alone. This despite the site being “prime real estate” in the city even as it expanded in following years as it rose to greater prominence while Teotihuacan began declining around 600 AD.
Scherer explained that “the Maya regularly buried buildings and rebuilt on top of them.” But in the case of this particular spot in the city the Mayas “treated it almost like a memorial or a radioactive zone,” he said.
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