Czech and Slovak archaeologists discover ancient Mayan city in Guatemala
Czech and Slovak archaeologists have announced a major discovery. An expedition to the Guatemalan jungle, which took place last summer, discovered the remains of a Mayan city, which is almost three thousand years old. I discussed the discovery, which could shed more light on the rise and fall of one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with one of the members of the team, archaeologist Sara Polak:
“I think the most important thing is to put the discovery into context. A Czechoslovakian expedition has been going to the area of Petén, which is a northern Guatemalan jungle, for approximately 15 years, so there was already a kind of a rich understanding of the area.
“Obviously, as you get talking with the locals, who are also working on the local digging site, you get a hunch that there might be something else in the jungle, which in many ways was the centre of the Maya civilization in the pre-classical period.
“However, we needed to make sure, because the jungle is very dense and walking around with machetes is something that was done at the end of the twentieth century.
“We needed to be more efficient in exploring the quadrant of the jungle, which belongs to us and which is roughly 1200 square kilometres and obviously walking around it is pretty tough.”
So how did you discover the city?
“We used LiDAR, which has been used in archaeology for a long time. It's like throwing a tennis ball against the wall. Imagine that the wall is the canopy of the trees and the time it takes for it to return back to you, which is the laser signal, is how you count how far away the ground is. And with that you are able to detect any kind of changes in the surface.
“You scan the jungle this way to get a very rough 3D image of the ground. On top of that you need to use AI, including computer vision and machine learning, to be able to simulate the rest of the structures where the LiDAR did not manage to get through the canopy of the trees.
“Only then you might be able to identify structures which look like cities, but it could also be pretty much anything man-made, so you still have to go and double-check what you are actually looking at. That's where the humans come in, the human archaeologists, who organise an expedition and check it out.”
Can you tell us more about the city itself? Because it was not just an ordinary city, it was quite a developed city, judging even by today's standards…
“Absolutely. Maya civilization is an incredibly enigmatic and complex one and archaeology is kind of fascinated by its collapse, which is in many ways almost mysterious.
“The amazing thing about this city is that it's from roughly 850 BC, which is the kind of middle pre-classical period. So it's not as grand as other cities in the area, but it's incredibly important. Because by the time the Maya were getting organized and centralised, this was already a full-blown city.
“It has seven districts, but on top of that, there's a lot of satellites that we haven't yet had a chance to explore. So there's a big chance of the settlement expanding much further than that.
“We found palaces, we found pyramids, evidence of ritual astronomical observatories and some amazing archaeological finds as well, which we’ll be publishing in due course. So it really is a proper, developed city where you can see elite and agricultural structures. It's really quite phenomenal.”
You have named the city Yax Balam or First Jaguar. Can you tell us why?
“Yes. Yax Balam, or Jaguar, was very important in the Maya cosmology. The reason why we called it that is because of the twin myth of the Maya, where the jaguar was one of the original twins at the very beginning of the Maya civilization.
“It was very cunning, very clever, but also primordial, like Adam and Eve, if you like. We also named it that way because the city is so old, and it is so unique in that regard. We thought that it was fitting to give it this kind of primeval name.
“Also, we were actually visited by a real-life jaguar when we were excavating. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I didn't have a chance to see the jaguar because I was just processing ceramics in the camp.
“But a few colleagues of mine were actually visited by him during the day, which is not common, because jaguars usually come out during the night. So the fact that we actually saw the jaguar and he was quite angry that we were invading his territory, that gave it a bit of a symbolism.”
Are you planning to return to Guatemala in the near future?
“Absolutely. I mean, with archaeology, money is always a problem, but thanks to the Neuron Foundation, we hope to secure also the next round of funding for the next expedition, which will be hopefully in 2025. It would be crazy to make a discovery like this and then not come back.
“This year, 2024, will be dedicated to processing everything. Because we're at only the very beginning. We found a city, which is great, but there's so much more to discover. So with my home institution, the Faculty of Information Technology at CTU in Prague, we hope to digitalize some of the artefacts that we took pictures of.
“We also hope to create some more nuanced 3D visualizations so that we can also popularize the finds. We will be analysing the ceramics. So a lot of preparations will happen this year and then hopefully next year we'll be back.”
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