La Jornada: Thousand-year-old Mayan city discovered

Campeche, Camp., Mexican and Slovenian archaeologists led by Ivan Šprajc, located inside the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Campeche, a Mayan city more than a thousand years old, it is a monumental site that had its peak in the Late-Terminal Classic period, which they called Minanbé, which in Mayan means “there is no road.”

Official information released by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) indicates that in the northern sector of the reserve, a superficial survey was carried out of a site in the west of Chactún, a governing center reported 13 years ago and for which they had airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data.

“The archaeologists and workers from the Constitución community who participated in the exploration opened a gap with a machete along 5 kilometers to advance on ATVs and then walk a similar distance under the sun,” says the INAH statement.

The archaeologists Atasta Flores Esquivel, Israel Chato López, Quintín Hernández Gómez and Vitan Vujanović carried out the reconnaissance of the place, going from the LiDAR images, which showed a settlement of 15 hectares under the forest layer, to the ground-level verification of an urban center, with squares surrounded by palatial and religious buildings, terraces and wetlands with hydraulic channels.

The INAH reports that one of the tallest structures, a pyramidal temple that exceeds 13 meters in height, has characteristics of the Río Bec style, such as fine masonry or smooth panels on the façade, a steep staircase and moldings on the top. This is “the first time I have recorded a more or less well-preserved temple, and a stele still with glyphs,” Vujanović details.

Stela 1 also stands out, which has a decapitation scene engraved, the first monolith that the team was able to notice, in addition to 14 monuments, some of these with iconographic elements and hieroglyphic texts.

With this discovery, Ivan Šprajc, attached to the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, concludes three decades of his project dedicated to the recognition of the Central Maya Lowlands, a fossilized archaeological landscape that was the habitat of between 9 and 11 million people during the Late Classic period (600 and 900).

Quintín Hernández, another of the archaeologists who collaborates with Špraj, recalls that when they explored the northern part of the site, they found a series of monuments in a row, of which those at the southern end of the road, which connects the central and northeastern sectors, were freed to carry out their photogrammetric survey.

The specialist highlights that in the upper part of Stela 1, where a character appears wielding a knife or ax to decapitate an individual, a calendar sign is observed with the registration of the date 5 ajaw (year 849). “This is key because we can think that the entire set of monuments or some of them were erected at that time of the Terminal Classic, close to the abandonment of the sites in the region in the 10th century.”

Round altars and a rectangular one were also found in Minanbé. As can be seen from its disposition, several were intentionally altered.