TWO ANCIENT MAYA CITIES REDISCOVERED IN THE YUCATAN In the Yucatan, archaeologists have rediscovered two ancient Maya cities, one of which features a stone façade with an entrance that depicts an earth monster opening its jaws! In Campeche, Mexico archaeologists have rediscovered two massive ancient Maya cities in the Yucatan that were hidden by dense vegetation. called Lagunita and Tamchen are just a few miles from Chactun, an ancient city discovered by the same team in 2013. Found in the south-eastern part of the Mexican state of Campeche, in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula, the cities were hidden in thick vegetation and hardly accessible. The researchers found the sites after examining aerial photography of the area. In the Yucatan jungle areas can be as little as 600 feet from a large site and not even suspect it might be there could be small mounds are all over the place, but they give you no idea about where an urban centre might be. Both sites feature plazas surrounded by palace-like buildings, as well as pyramids, one of which reaches 65 feet high, and ball courts. At Lagunita, the team recovered a badly eroded stele inscribed with the date November 29, A.D. 711 and a façade depicting an earth monster opening its jaws. No other site has so far been located in this area, which extends over some 1800 square miles, between the so-called Rio Bec and Chenes regions, both known for their characteristic architectural styles fashioned during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, around 600 - 1000 A.D. The site was actually visited in the 1970s by the American archaeologist Eric Von Euw, who documented the façade and other stone monuments with yet unpublished drawings. The monster-mouth facade turned to be one of the best preserved examples of this type of doorways, which are common in the Late-Terminal Classic Rio Bec architectural style, in the nearby region to the south. The doorway represents a Maya earth deity related with fertility. These doorways symbolize the entrance to a cave and, in general, to the watery underworld, place of mythological origin of maize and abode of ancestors However, the exact location of the city, referred to as Lagunita by Von Euw, remained lost. All the attempts at relocating it failed. Indeed, more than 30 chultuns were found at the site. These are bottle-shaped underground chambers, largely intended for collecting rainwater. Several chultuns were unusually deep, going down as far as 13 meters. Like in Laguinita, plazas were surrounded by large buildings. These include the remains of an acropolis supporting a courtyard with three temples on its sides. A pyramid temple with a rather well preserved sanctuary on top and a stela and an altar at its base was also unearthed. Tamchen appears to have been contemporaneous with Lagunita, although there is evidence for its settlement history going back to the Late Preclassic, between300 B.C. and 250 A.D. Both cities open new questions about the diversity of Maya culture, the role of that largely unexplored area in the lowland Maya history, and its relations with other polities.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 21:10:58 +0000
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