Story by Tim Newcomb
• 18h • 3 min read
Maya site of Ucanal in Guatemala© jopstock – Getty Images
- The discovery of an early ninth century burning event marks a turning point in Maya rule, archeologists say.
- The find is a rare archaeological pinpointing of a historic turning point.
- Burning Maya artifacts, some a century old at the time, was likely a well-attended public event.
The discovery at the Maya site of Ucanal in Guatemala “marked a public dismantling of an old regime”—a rather pivotal moment in the collapse of rulers and key point in political power that isn’t often shown so clearly from an archeological find, the authors write in a study published in the journal Antiquity.
The event in question occurred at the capital of the K’anwitznal kingdom near a burial site. The bodies and their ornaments—items include a jewel-adorned stone mask, fragments of a greenstone diadem, and jade ornaments—were moved from a tomb to a public burning site, where fire engulfed some of the centuries-old items for all to see.
The new leadership regime welcomed a non-royal leader called Papmalil, and there is little in the written record indicating how he came to power. “Papmalil’s rule was not only seminal because of his possible foreign origins—perhaps breaking the succession of ruling dynasts at the site—but also because his rule shifted political dynamics in the southern Maya lowlands.”
The study’s authors, led by Christina Halperin at the University of Montreal, state that Papmalil appears to have ushered in an era of prosperity. Substantial construction occurred in both the civic-ceremonial core and outer residential zones of the city following the power shift.
That new era may have had a dramatic beginning.
The team said evidence indicates that the human bone and ornaments had once been part of the contents of a Late Classic royal tomb, and the deposit was part of a fire-entering rite that “marked the symbolic and literal destruction of an earlier K’anwitznal dynastic line.”
The authors state that the event “appears to have bene an act of desecration: it was dumped at the edge of a crude wall used as a construction pen and no effort was made to protect the fragmented bones and ornaments from the tomb blocks deposited on top of them as construction fill.” It all likely made for a “dramatic public affair” meant to be charged with emotion. “It could dramatically mark,” they wrote, “the dismantling of an ancient regime.”
Time is DNA 