Strange clues in a Maya temple reveal a fiery political drama

The mysterious discovery in Guatemala of burned human remains and thousands of rich but ruined ornaments—supposedly what’s left of a Maya city’s royal rulers—may be rare and direct archaeological evidence for political regime change more than a millennium ago, according to a new study published today in the journal Antiquity.

The strange deposit at the archaeological site of Ucanal, the heart of a lowland kingdom called K’anwitznal by its inhabitants, suggests the city was the scene in the early A.D. 800s of a public ceremony where the tomb of previous rulers was desecrated, their corpses burned, and the remains dumped in the fill of a newly expanded pyramid.

The event coincides with the advent of a new ruler in K’anwitznal named Papmalil, who seems to have enjoyed a prosperous reign at a time when many other Maya kingdoms were in crisis—a period referred to as the Maya collapse.

But the Maya collapse wasn’t complete, explains Christina Halperin, an archaeologist at University of Montreal and the director of the Ucanal Archaeological Project, which has studied the ruins there for the last 10 years.

“There are a number of [Maya] political dynasties that are falling apart, but not all of them,” Halperin says. “We see problems in some areas and some sites are abandoned. But other sites continue or have a period of prosperity afterwards, which was the case at Ucanal.”

Unceremonious dumping

The new study by Halperin and her colleagues describes their discovery of the burned human remains and fragments of valuable ornaments, including a jade mask of the type usually placed in Maya royal tombs, amid the ruins of what was once a pyramidal temple at K’anwitznal.

The site is just flat earth today, but the deposit was found beneath buried limestone blocks used to build a new upper level of the pyramid, which would have been more than 150 feet high at the time.

Unlike some Maya ritual deposits commonly found in pyramid construction, however, this one seems to have been unceremoniously dumped.

“It wasn’t put in an urn, it wasn’t carefully laid down, and it was scattered by stone blocks that were thrown in,” Halperin says. “We interpreted this as destructive… it didn’t seem at all to signify that this was reverential.”

A ‘fire-entering rite’

The deposit contained the remains of four bodies, which the researchers think were those of members of royal family buried in the same tomb over the course of a century or more; more than 1,500 fragments of jade pendants, plaques, mosaics, and pieces of obsidian; and more than 10,000 burned beads made from marine shells—an extraordinary treasure, but typical of a hoard buried with dead Maya royalty, Halperin explains. (The researchers have not yet found the tomb where the bodies came from.))

The evidence points to a “fire-entering rite,” or och-i k’ak’ t-u-muk-il in the classic Mayan language, which means “the fire entered his/her tomb.” Fire-entering rites were not infrequent in the Maya world, Halperin notes, and seem to have derived from their ritual use of flame and smoke: “Think of it in terms of burning incense,” she says. “Burning is a way to transform and to reach out to the supernatural realm, so it’s kind of like a cleansing process.”

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Some fire-entering rites were a way to venerate the dead, perhaps to solidify a new rule by associating it with the reign of the entombed rulers. But the rite at K’anwitznal seems to have been an act of desecration to dishonor the old rulers and to emphasize the change to a new regime.

Evidence from the surviving fragments of human bone show parts of the fire were hotter than 1470 degrees Fahrenheit, which indicates the conflagration must have been very large and very public. There is also evidence of public cremations at other Maya sites around this time, so such an act “wouldn’t have been unheard of,” Halperin says.

That the remains were then dumped as construction fill is a sign the ceremony was intended to show the old regime was gone, and that a new regime had arrived—a rare example of political regime change being visible in the archaeological record, she says.

Benign ruler or despot?

Despite the dramatic regime change, it seems Papmalil was a rather benign ruler amid the chaos of the ninth-century Maya world. Many public buildings were renovated and new construction projects were undertaken at K’anwitznal after his reign, including new homes, a system of canals, and a huge new ball court—the equivalent today of both a stadium and a cathedral.

Papmalil also ruled not as a Maya king, but as an ochk’in kaloomte’, the title of a military leader or high noble; and he established new alliances amid the changing politics of the southern Maya lowlands, an area that stretched across what are now Belize and the northern parts of Guatemala. Importantly, portrayals of Papmalil show him exchanging gifts with the rulers of nearby states while seated or standing beside them, rather than looming over them.

“This is a big change, because you mostly see imagery of Maya rulers who are perched up on one side and much bigger in scale than the people they’re interacting with,” Halperin says. But Papmalil seems to have treated other rulers as his equal: “There are a number of images of him in which he is the same size and scale…  and this type of imagery begins in the ninth century and continues,” she notes.

Brown University anthropologist Stephen Houston, an expert on the Maya who wasn’t involved in the latest study, says the mysterious deposit is clearly linked to royalty.

“This article exemplifies how we should interpret unusual remains,” he says, noting that the researchers link the deposit to both the “fire-entering” practice described by the Maya, and to rise of an exalted person—Papmalil—in historical records.

University of Texas at Austin Archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer Thomas Garrison, who also wasn’t involved in the study, adds that the discovery of the deposit at Ucanal is remarkable.

“To be able to recognize something like this in the complexity of building fill, instead of it being a formal burial, is a technical achievement in itself,” he says. “And I think the argument for it being connected to this specific shift in power is very coherent.”