Getting there was half the battle. Archaeologists hacked through about 5 kilometres of jungle to reach an ancient Maya city in Mexico that had stayed hidden for more than 1,000 years.
The city, called Minanbé, was found in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche, at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula. Excavation leader Ivan Šprajc said no old logging paths lead to the site, unlike others in the jungle.
“It was very difficult to access,” Šprajc said in a translated statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH.
Researchers named the site Minanbé, combining Yucatec Mayan words that roughly mean “there is no road”.
Šprajc said the site’s remoteness helped preserve it, and described it as the first intact, seemingly unlooted ancient city his team has found in three years.
“It’s a unique, unprecedented finding,” INAH archaeologist Lino Espinoza Garcia told Agence France-Presse.
After studying an aerial LiDAR scan of the site’s roughly 16-hectare area, archaeologists Atasta Flores Esquivel, Israel Chato López, Quintín Hernández Gómez and Vitan Vujanović examined it on the ground. They found urban plazas surrounded by palaces, religious buildings and terraces flanked by water channels.
The team also found a large platform made of flagstone and limestone, decorated with lines or figures and circular stones.
“It’s a very particular structure,” INAH archaeologist Alberto Vázquez told AFP. “We don’t have any records so far of a correlation with other (ancient) sites.”
Researchers found a carved stone measuring nearly 1.5 metres across and more than 1.8 metres tall, showing what may be a religious scene involving two figures.
“They have a bowl and are receiving something; we think it’s a liquid,” Espinoza Garcia told AFP. “Obviously, in that context, it’s a divine liquid; we think it would be water.”
Minanbé’s tallest structure was a temple pyramid more than 12 metres tall. Vujanović said in the INAH statement it was built in the Río Bec style, and that the temple includes a stela with uneroded symbols, the first he has found.
In total, researchers found 14 stelae and altars at the site, which INAH said suggests Minanbé was an important city during the Late Classic period, between 600 and 900 C.E.
The team took hundreds of photos of the monuments and sent them to epigraphist Octavio Esparza Olguín. He said one stela shows a figure decapitating another with a knife or axe and carries the date 849 C.E., which probably means the carved monuments were made around that time.
Researchers also found round and rectangular altars. One carries a carving of a ruler wearing a feathered headdress, a decorated chest, bracelets and necklaces. An engraved Maya calendrical element suggests that altar dates to the late seventh century, making it the oldest monument found at Minanbé.
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