In Guatemala, "the find of a lifetime"

WASHINGTON — Archaeologists have uncovered an elegantly painted, 30-foot-long mural in a ceremonial chamber beneath a Guatemalan jungle pyramid, providing new evidence that Mayan civilization was in full flower more than 2,000 years ago.

Archaeologist William Saturno, of the University of New Hampshire and Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said Tuesday the San Bartolo site, in Guatemala's Peten wilderness, is "the find of a lifetime," depicting the Mayan creation myth and the crowning of a king in vivid color on a plaster wall as if "parts of it ... were painted yesterday."

The Mayans dominated southern Mexico and parts of Central America for some 1,500 years, building advanced civilizations, until the Spanish conquered them 500 years ago. Millions of Mayan Indians still live in the region.

The western wall of the underground room, from around 100 B.C., depicts the Mayan creation myth and the coronation of a king, with more colors and elaborate brushwork than had ever been seen in Mayan artwork.

"It was like discovering the Sistine Chapel if you didn't know there had been a Renaissance," Saturno said in a teleconference Tuesday. "It's like knowing only modern art and then stumbling on the finger of God touching the hand of Adam."

The painting is the oldest intact mural ever found in Meso-America, dating to the Mayan "pre-Classic" period about 150 B.C. But the subject matter has the same breadth of mythology and cultural complexity as that displayed at "Classical" Mayan sites nearly 500 years later.

"This verifies what we had long suspected — that Mayan civilization had crystallized by the time" the San Bartolo site arose, said University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Robert Sharer, author of "The Ancient Maya." "The institution of divine kingship is in place — the imagery is consistent with later times. It's a terrific find."

Saturno discovered San Bartolo in 2001 when he took refuge from the tropical heat by ducking into a looters' trench cut into the back of a jungle-covered pyramid in northern Guatemala, near the Mexican border. He found himself inside a chamber choked with landfill. But the north wall revealed a four-foot swath of beautifully preserved mural depicting the resurrection of the Corn God, a scene from Mayan creation myth.

"As spectacular as this was," Saturno said during a teleconference, "we knew that the west wall was more than twice its length and was the centerpiece of the ancient room."

And so it proved. The 30 feet of west wall mural shows the son of the Corn God establishing land, water and air, and paradise in the east where the sun rises. The next section shows the Corn God's coronation, followed by death and resurrection.

The last section shows the coronation of a Maya king, claiming his crown in the company of the gods. While the north wall was painted in black, red, yellow and pink, the west wall added several shades of blue, white, flesh tones and dark and light gray: "The murals were painted at the same time, but there's more than one artistic hand," Saturno said. National Geographic magazine is profiling San Bartolo next month.

Saturno said the story told by the murals and the presence of a nearby royal burial demonstrate a fully developed Mayan political hierarchy in a relatively small place at a time when the area was probably dominated by the large city of El Mirador some 60 miles away.

Monica Pellecer, a Guatemalan archeologist working with Saturno on the expedition, excavated the earliest known burial site of Mayan kings a mile from the mural this year.

She discovered the bones of a man wearing a jade plaque around his neck, a symbol of Mayan royalty. The bones, from 150 B.C., are surrounded by seven vessels, including a frog-shaped bowl and a vase with the image of the Mayan rain god Chac.

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from Reuters