Jungle finding opens “new chapter” in Maya history

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="5">Jungle finding opens “new chapter” in Maya history</font></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Arial"> March 30</font><font face="Arial"><font size="1">, 2005<br> Special to World Science<br> </font> <br> </font> <font face="Arial" size="2"><b>Team reports finding earliest known portrait of Maya woman<br> <br> Researchers say they have found the earliest known portrait of a woman that the Maya carved into stone, showing that women held “positions of authority” very early in Maya history, either as queens or patron deities. <br> <br> The Maya are a Native American people inhabiting southeast Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, whose ancient civilization reached its height around a.d. 300–900.<br> <br> The portrait was found earlier this year in Guatemala at the site of Naachtun, a Maya city located some 90 kilometres through dense jungle north of the more famous Maya city of Tikal, the researchers said. <br> <br> The woman’s face, carved on a stone monument called a stela [STEE-la] – and in an artistic style never before seen – suggests women played significant roles in early Maya politics, they added.<br> <br> “I’ve worked in the Maya area a long time and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Kathryn Reese-Taylor of the University of Calgary, director of the project. <br> <br> “We have images of queens, who ruled both singly and with their husbands or sons, depicted on stelae later in Maya history beginning in the early 6th century AD. But this stela is completely unique in style and likely dates to the 4th century AD.” <br> <br> The woman could be a figure from Maya history, the archaeologists said, but the are also tantalized by the possibility she might be a mythical figure. <br> <br> Hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Late Classic period (600-900 AD) mention female deities, but none have ever been discovered on a stela, they noted. <br> <br> “If this is a patron deity, then it is extremely rare,” Reese-Taylor said. “When hieroglyphic texts do mention women, it is usually in the context of being either someone’s mother or someone’s wife.” <br> <br> The stela is two metres (2.2 yards) high; its width is half that distance; and its depth, in turn, is half of its width, the researchers explained.<br> <br> The Maya buried it in an ancient building after their city was attacked and the inscriptions on the stela were hacked off by the invading forces, they asserted. The burial was a reverential act meant to honour the individual whose image was carved on the monument. An infant’s burial accompanied the stela. <br> <br> “This represents an extraordinary event in the history of Naachtun and we were really lucky to find it,” Reese-Taylor said. <br> <br> Julia Guernsey of the University of Texas at Austin, said the gender of the figure portrayed on the stela is surely significant. <br> <br> “If this individual was, indeed, a historical woman, it means that her portrait pre-dates other known stela representations of powerful women in the Classic Maya Lowlands by over a hundred years. It also means that we may need to re-evaluate the role and status of women within Early Classic Maya political dynamics,” Guernsey said. <br> <br> “The other fascinating aspect of the image, in my opinion, is its formal representation, or style. The fact that the body of the figure is completely absent and attention is focused on the head and headdress alone is very interesting and unusual.” <br> <br> Reese-Taylor and her team first began fieldwork in Naachtun in 2002 and are undertaking the first scientific excavations of the site. The university’s Martin Rangel actually discovered the stela peeking out from a looter’s trench at the end of the 2004 season, the researchers said, and excavated it in the spring of 2005.</b></font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2">* * *</font> </p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051206_mayafrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font> </p> <p> </b> </p> </center> </td> </tr> </table> </body>