Free Republic

1500-year-old Mayan paint job peeled back Jill Rowbotham | January 23, 2008 MORE secrets of the Mayan civilisation are being revealed via groundbreaking research into paint pigments used on a temple at one of the culture's most significant sites: Copan, in Honduras. Brisbane physical and chemical sciences PhD student Rosemary Goodall used an infrared analysis technique, FTIR-ATR spectral imaging, never before applied in archeology. It revealed a map of the painted surfaces of stucco masks that adorn the corners of the Rosalila temple, built in about AD550. Mrs Goodall found that the Mayans mixed finely ground muscovite mica in their...

The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today. The conventional view has been that food and other goods in Maya cities were distributed through taxation and tributes controlled by the ruling class. Archaeologists suspected that a wide clearing at the center of the ruins of Chunchucmil might have been a market, not a ritual plaza. Rock alignments peeking above the surface seemed to outline the positions of stalls and regular pathways; the rock...

Physicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets At its most glamorous, the life of an experimental high-energy physicist consists of smashing obscure subatomic particles with futuristic-sounding names into each other to uncover truths about the universe—using science's biggest, most expensive toys in exciting locations such as Switzerland or Illinois. But it takes a decade or two to plan and build multibillion-dollar atom smashers. While waiting, what's a thrill-seeking physicist to do? How about using some of the perfectly good, and completely free, subatomic particles that rain down on Earth from space every day to peek inside something really...

Muons Meet the MayaPhysicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets Betsy Mason At its most glamorous, the life of an experimental high-energy physicist consists of smashing obscure subatomic particles with futuristic-sounding names into each other to uncover truths about the universe—using science's biggest, most expensive toys in exciting locations such as Switzerland or Illinois. But it takes a decade or two to plan and build multibillion-dollar atom smashers. While waiting, what's a thrill-seeking physicist to do? SUBATOMIC ARCHAEOLOGY. Physicists plan to use muons generated by cosmic rays to probe the interior of the Pyramid of the Sun at...

Chemical residues found in soil from Mexico's Yucatan peninsula indicate that ancient Mayans traded food in marketplaces, a practice long considered unlikely by archaeologists... [yet] archaeologists have long recognized that the cities were home to more people than the local agricultural capacities could have supported... So for years, archaeologists looked for evidence of advanced farming practices that could have ramped up agricultural capacities beyond what archaeologists can observe, thus sustaining the populations. The idea that Mayans might have imported food and other goods wasn't taken seriously because most archaeologists thought that the Maya elite had a system whereby underlings were...

Rare Maya "Death Vase" Discovered Blake de Pastino National Geographic News Updated December 4, 2007 An extremely rare and intricately carved "death vase" has been discovered in the 1,400-year-old grave of an elite figure with ties to the Maya Empire, scientists say. The vase is the first of its kind to be found in modern times, and its contents are opening a window onto ancient rituals of ancestor worship that included food offerings, chocolate enemas, and hallucinations induced by vomiting, experts say. Archaeologists discovered the vase along with parts of a human skeleton while excavating a small "palace" in northwestern...

Maya rulers' growing demand for animals of symbolic value may have caused a decline in big game, like jaguars, in ancient Latin America, a new study suggests. Faced with environmental problems and doubts about their ability to provide for their followers, the Maya elite may have ordered more hunting of large mammals whose meat, skins, and teeth provided proof of power and status, the study says. Kitty Emery, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has studied 80,000 animal bones found in 25 Maya trash mounds to map the effects of ancient hunting on animal populations over 4,000...

Aventura - ancient Maya city discovered on modern papaya farm in Corozal Friday, 01 June 2007 By Joseph Stamp Romero - Staff Reporter Excavated structure where platform was found. Platform can be seen to the left of the gentleman. Archeologists say they have stumbled on three Mayan foundations, which are part of a large Mayan city called Aventura, dating back to the early Classic Period of the Mayan Civilization. Among the artifacts retrieved are the bones a man and a woman, believed to be 1,800 years old. The Belize National Institute of Archaeology have said that they found what appears...

Political correctness has so disemboweled academic standards that Ph.D. truly means "pile it higher and deeper." Case in point: Alicia Estrada, an assistant professor of Central American studies at California State University, Northridge, Thursday night accused Mel Gibson "of misrepresenting the Mayan culture in the movie" Apocalypto. Estrada, in a superior display of historic ignorance, stated "that representations in the movie that the Mayans engaged in sacrificial ceremonies and had bloodthirsty tendencies were both wrong and racist."Quite to the contrary, archeological evidence of Maya "sacrificial ceremonies" and "bloodthirsty tendencies" are ubiquitous. It all started with the discovery of murals at...

Mr Bush will speak about social justice and equality President George W Bush is in Guatemala for a one-day visit, after a stop in Colombia where he pledged his personal support to its fight against drugs. He will discuss security, trade and immigration with Guatemala's president. This is the fourth stop in Mr Bush's tour of Latin America, which has seen protests at every stage. Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, has used a parallel tour of the region to speak out against what he calls the interference of the "American empire". Mr Chavez started his tour last week in Argentina,...

Collapse of civilisations linked to monsoon changes 11:13 04 January 2007 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic The downfall of the one of the greatest Chinese dynasties may have been catalysed by severe changes in climate. The same climate changes may have simultaneously led to the end of the Maya civilisation depicted in Mel Gibson's new film Apocalypto. So says Gerald Haug of the GeoForschungsZentrum in Germany and colleagues, who studied geological records of monsoons over the past 16,000 years. They have found a startling correlation between climate extremes and the fall of two great civilisations: the Tang dynasty in China...

Some descendants of the Maya tribes depicted in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto have denounced the movie as racist and not representative of their ancient culture. In an interview with Reuters, Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said, "Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue." Lucio Yaxon, described by Reuters as a 23-year-old Mayan human rights activist, added, "Basically, the director is saying the Mayans are savages." Today's (Thursday) Los Angeles Times noted that...

Ancient Canoe Found by Wichita State University Professor on Belize Research Dig WICHITA, Kan., Oct. 10 (AScribe Newswire) -- An ancient canoe -- more than likely the oldest canoe ever uncovered in Mesoamerica -- was discovered this summer in a cliff-top cave in Belize by an excavation team being led by Wichita State University archaeologist Keith Prufer. Prufer estimates that the canoe very likely dates to 200 to 800 AD, based on previous findings in the area. Carbon testing is currently being wrapped up to confirm that the canoe is indeed the oldest found in Mesoamerica, the geographical region from...

Madrid, Aug 26 (EFE).- The decline of the Maya civilization began some 1,100 year ago when millions of Indians working on the contruction of tall pyramidal temples and palaces learned that their kings weren't gods, Spanish anthropologist Andres Ciudad told EFE. The collapse of this culture with its brilliant mathematicians, astronomers and engineers, came when monarchs stopped being immortal in the eyes of their subjects, said Ciudad, who is deputy dean of the Faculty of Geography and History at Madrid's Universidad Complutense. The inhabitants of Mayan lands, which extended through much of what is now Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Honduras...

Guatemala City, Aug 22 (EFE).- Fourteen Guatemalan Indians were publicly flogged, forced to kneel on bottle caps and shorn of their hair after being convicted by a traditional assembly of various offenses, local media reported Tuesday. The so-called "Maya punishment," provided for in traditional codes acknowledged by the modern nation-state, was applied Monday in the northwestern town of Nahuala, community leader Pascual Ixmata told the press. The 14 accused - four of them women - were whipped and forced to kneel on bottle caps, and their hair was cut off. The male miscreants, who were charged with sniffing glue, also...

Climate and the Collapse of Maya CivilizationA series of multi-year droughts helped to doom an ancient culture Larry C. Peterson, Gerald H. Haug With their magnificent architecture and sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, the Maya boasted one of the great cultures of the ancient world. Although they had not discovered the wheel and were without metal tools, the Maya constructed massive pyramids, temples and monuments of hewn stone both in large cities and in smaller ceremonial centers throughout the lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, which covers parts of what are now southern Mexico and Guatemala and essentially all of...

"The Maya are the only pre-Columbian culture whose texts have been preserved up to our time in the thousands. They reveal the Maya to have been a people like all others. In the 7th and 8th centuries AD, the area was the most populous in the world and the city-states waged wars against each other," says Kettunen. Kettunen explains that there are quite human reasons why the idealised image of the Maya arose. An early authority on Maya studies, the British archaeologist Eric Thompson had experienced two world wars. "He wanted to believe that the world had had at least...

Could the small tomb, designated KV63, hold a royal mummy, perhaps that of Tutankhamen's widow or even his mother? ...Otto Schaden, the man who found them, leads the American team. He believes they may have located the mummy of Tutankhamen's widow, Ankhesenamen, after traces of her name were found on the seal of one urn. The secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, thinks the final coffins may contain the remains of the pharaoh's mother, whose identity is unknown, and not the wife of Tutankhamen, the boy king who died at age 18.

On the sacred walls and inside the dark passageways of ancient ruins in Guatemala, archaeologists are making discoveries that open expanded vistas of the vibrant Maya civilization in its formative period, a time reaching back more than 1,000 years before its celebrated Classic epoch. The intriguing finds, including art masterpieces and the earliest known Maya writing, are overturning old ideas of the Preclassic period. It was not a kind of dark age, as once thought, of a culture that emerged and bloomed in Classic times, at places like the spectacular royal ruin at Palenque beginning about A.D. 250 and extending...

EL PERU WAKA, Guatemala (Reuters) - Archeologists outsmarted tomb raiders to unearth a major Maya Indian royal burial site in the Guatemalan jungle, discovering jade jewelry and a jaguar pelt from more than 1,500 years ago. The tomb, found by archeologist Hector Escobedo last week, contains a king of the El Peru Waka city, now in ruins and covered in thick rainforest teeming with spider monkeys. He may have been the dynastic founder of the city, on major Mayan trade routes that could have stretched from the city of Tikal in Guatemala up through Mexico. "If this is indeed the...