Scientists Uncover Ancient Mayan City
G U A T E M A L A C I T Y, Guatemala, Sept. 8, 2000 -- Scientists and looters ignored the ruin for nearly a century because it appeared devoid of temples andburial sites that might yield valuable treasures and artifacts.
They had no idea what they were missing.
Underneath the jungle curtain of mud and dense foliage was asprawling lost city called “Cancuen,” (can-ku-win), one of themost important commercial centers of the Mayan world for more than1,200 years.
Cancuen has been rediscovered by Guatemalan and Americanscientists working deep in the country’s northern jungles. Theybelieve it will take 10 years to fully unearth the city, whichdates to 400 B.C.
Giant Palace and Marketplace
It is buttressed by a 270,000-square-foot Mayan palace. Withthree floors — each 66 feet high — and 170 rooms, it is among themost grandiose Mayan structures ever discovered, the NationalGeographic Society announced today.
The society is a chief sponsor of the Cancuen excavationproject.
“We started off working with what we thought was a smallpalace, part of a small Mayan settlement,” said Arthur Demerest, aVanderbilt University archaeologist and head of the Cancuenproject. “What we found was a palace 20 times as large as we wereexpecting and an important Mayan marketplace that had beenforgotten for almost 100 years.”
Built in the shadow of the hulking palace, the 5-square-milecity featured a crowded rectangular layout of heavy stone walls, 11spacious stone-tiled patios and buildings with cubbyhole-like roomsand thick, multileveled roofs.
While Demerest said scientists aren’t sure how many Mayanmerchants traded in Cancuen, the city is thought to have attractedthousands from nearby highland settlements, including thesprawling, majestic city of Tikal, 85 miles to the northeast.
A Trading Mecca
Cancuen, an ancient Maya word meaning “Place of the Serpent,”became a key trading post because of the sprawling River Passion inwhat is known today as southern Peten, Guatemala’s northernmostprovince, Demerest said.
First discovered in 1905 by Austrian explorer Tobert Maler,scientists and looters ignored the site for years.
“A city that was built only for commercial purposes and not forreligious ones seemed uninteresting to a lot of academics andworthless to a lot of looters,” Demerest said, adding that thecity is now overrun with such jungle-dwelling animals as howlermonkeys.
Cancuen lacked the breathtaking temples that dominate Tikal andother Mayan sites because its inhabitants worshipped and buriedtheir dead in surrounding highland areas.
“All of the fantastic temples you see at other sites are aneffort to copy the altitude of the highlands that surroundedCancuen,” said Demerest, who explained that being close to the heavenswas the cornerstone of Mayan religious practices. “In Cancuen theyhad the real thing.”
Though work at the site has been suspended until next springbecause of the rainy season, scientists have already recovereddozens of artifacts in nearby mountain caves.
Guided by Hieroglyphics
Cancuen remained shrouded by jungle until 1967, when a group ofHarvard graduate students returned to the city for less than a weekand brought back crude sketches of what they thought was waiting tobe discovered there.
Demerest and scientists from Guatemala City’s ValleyUniversity were drawn back to the area in April becausehieroglyphics inscribed in artifacts recovered in Tikal and DosPilas, the ancient Maya’s largest commercial center, made referenceto a marketplace called Cancuen and its powerful fourth-centuryB.C. ruler, Tah Chan Wi, or “Celestial Fire.”
Frederico Fahsen, the foremost Guatemalan authority ondeciphering Mayan hieroglyphics and the Cancuen project’sco-director, said the Cancuen ruler married his daughter to theking of Dos Pilas, 55 miles to the northeast, to establishrelationships with surrounding settlements rather than go to warwith them.
“Mayan cities had been in constant war, with theirconstructions dedicated to the gods and the heavens,” Fahsen said.“Here we have exactly the opposite.”