The archaeologists worked in the shadow of towering Maya ruins, piercing the floor of a structure they had searched years before.
Below, they found an even more ancient chamber, still holding a body and the treasures it was buried with: a rare mosaic death mask and jadeite jewelry, shells from the Pacific and elaborate designs on pottery and bone.
It was the 1,700-year-old tomb of a Maya ruler — the first ever found at Caracol, the largest Maya site in Belize — and it held clues to a Mesoamerican world where cities contended with one another from hundreds of miles apart.
“They’ve found a very early ruler, so that’s very important, and he’s claimed to be the founder of a dynasty,” said Gary Feinman, an archaeologist at Field Museum of Chicago who was not involved in the excavation. “That’s a major find.”
Arlen Chase, one of the archaeologists working at Caracol, was among the first to enter the tomb. “As soon as we saw the chamber, we knew we had something,” he said.
From the style of ceramic vessels, he knew the tomb was exceptionally old. From the red cinnabar all around, he knew it was for someone of very high status.
But it was the mosaic mask, in pieces of jadeite off to the side, that made him realize just how unusual the tomb was. “Oh my God, this is much more important than I thought it was,” he remembers thinking.
With each discovery he called Diane Chase, an archaeologist with whom he has been working at Caracol for four decades.
“I kept saying, ‘Do you want me to come down?’” she said. “And he kept saying no. And then, eventually he said yes.” (The Chases will celebrate 50 years of marriage in August.)
Diane Chase hurried from their base at the University of Houston to take stock of the discoveries.
The Maya ruler, they determined, had grown old for his time, living long enough to lose all his teeth and for bone to grow over his jaw.
“We’ve never found anyone that we could identify as a ruler at Caracol before, so that in itself was amazing,” Diane Chase said. And “double wow,” she said, the ruler could be identified as the founder of a dynasty.
The ruler had been interred not just with the mask but three sets of jadeite ear flares, an extraordinary luxury for the Maya elite, and a variety of ceramic vessels. They showed the Maya god of traders, a hummingbird and a ruler holding a spear, with supplicants making offerings to him. Vessels depicted a monkey, an owl, and the heads of coatimundi — mammals sometimes described as raccoons crossed with lemurs.
“It’s stuff that we’ve never seen before,” Arlen Chase said of some of the designs.
Through hieroglyphics, the archaeologists identified the ruler as Te K’ab Chak, who took the throne in A.D. 331. He ruled Caracol as it was growing into a larger city, the Chases said, but centuries before its peak as a regional power with an estimated 100,000 people. Like other Maya cities, it had been abandoned by about A.D. 900.
The discovery “adds a whole new dimension” to the site, said Melissa Badillo, the director of Belize’s Institute of Archaeology, a longtime working partner of the Chases. “This is the first of its kind in that it’s a ruler, a founder, somebody so old, and in so good a condition, to be honest, because the humidity doesn’t lend itself well to preservation.”
For the Chases, the discovery was thrilling also because of how the artifacts related to other finds over the years. “Without this tomb, we wouldn’t have any idea as to how everything tied together,” Arlen Chase said.
Some of the artifacts found in the tomb closely resemble those at two other Caracol burials, dating around A.D. 350, the Chases said. One of those also held cremated human remains, blades of green obsidian from central Mexico and a projectile for an atlatl — used to throw spears — the sort of object often associated with Teotihuacán, an ancient metropolis nearly 750 miles to the north. Cremation was a practice of high-status Teotihuacán but not of the Maya elite.
The evidence, the Chases argue, suggests that the early Maya had relations with the people of central Mexico decades earlier than previously thought, despite the great geographic distances between their cities. It is likely to have taken more than 150 days to walk from Teotihuacán to Caracol in the days of Te K’ab Chak. Even today it takes nearly 24 hours by car.
The artifacts show that these cities were not just aware of one another but also interacting, perhaps with envoys at the highest levels of society, the Chases said — a sign of what they called a “globalized” ancient world of trade and diplomacy.
That conclusion fits with other research showing that the Maya built societies with complicated political relationships, experts said, although some expressed caution about extrapolating from the artifacts until they could learn more.
“This was a very dynamic, political world,” Dr. Feinman said. “They have evidence of some kind of connection to Teotihuacán in central Mexico, but what the mechanism of that connection is — a person? ideas? — it’s harder to say. Their interpretations may be right, but I would say I’d like to see it spelled out in an article before I could say more.”
Rosemary Joyce, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, also said that she wanted to learn more.
DNA and isotope testing, which the Chases hope to do, could reveal more about the lives of the interred people, and more detail about the ceramic vessels could help determine if they were imported or local imitations, Dr. Joyce said.
The Chases believe the that the artifacts indicate prolonged Maya relations with Teotihuacán decades before A.D. 378, a moment often called the “entrada,” which some archaeologists believe signals the arrival of central Mexicans into the southern lowlands.
When exactly all these cities were interacting, and how and where, will almost certainly be a matter of intense debate among archaeologists, in part because the degree of precision that dating technology can offer is limited.
“People who have money in this game at Tikal will try to argue that it’s not earlier than 378,” Dr. Joyce said, calling the argument “kind of a fool’s quest, because you can’t get down to that close of a date.”
The Chases have anticipated such debates.
“There’s a lot more to the story that’s going to take us longer to unravel,” Diane Chase said. There will be “basically a ceramic argument,” Arlen Chase said.
But Dr. Joyce said that she agreed with their portrayal of a complex Mesoamerican world.
“It’s much more likely that Teotihuacán would be seeking relations with many places,” she said, rather than a scenario in which someone from central Mexico reached a single Maya city and “suddenly everything changed.”
Dr. Badillo said that the Belizean authorities hoped to showcase some of the artifacts at Caracol, and that the site should become more accessible with the completion of a new road. She also said that she expected that the Chases, “based on their track record,” would be back to the site again soon.
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