I was apprehensive as I groped for yet another tree root entangled in the jumble of limestone blocks on the steep slope. Two days earlier, from the lofty pyramids of the archeological site of El Mirador, Guatemala, camp manager Bob Greenlee and I had taken compass bearings on our objective the massive Structure 1 of Nakbe. Our expedition had then cut eight and a half miles across a formidable jungle bajo, or seasonal swamp, to the base of a large pyramidal mound. If, when we reached the summit, our compass did not read 314 degrees back to our starting point, then this would not be Nakbe, but some other, unknown site in the tropical forest, forcing w to continue our search through the never-ending canopy of green. As we emerged at the top, we felt a sudden sense of isolation; the momentary escape from the hot, humid, insect-infested forest was a refreshing pause. Our compass readings confirmed that we had reached our goal.
Nakbe was first reported in 1930 by an aerial expedition from the University of Pennsylvania but was not visited by any scholars until archeologist Ian Graham located and mapped a portion of the site in 1962. Graham called it Nakbe, which means "by the road" in Yucatec Maya, a fitting name since a major ancient cause way can be observed extending across the bajo from El Mirador toward the site. My exploratory visit, in 1987, was to expand on my research at El Mirador, then the earliest-known Maya urban settlement. Two years later, in February 1989, a joint expedition sponsored by the Guatemalan Institute of Anthropology and History and the University of California at Los Angeles began systematic excavation and map ping of the site center, using 125 mules to transport supplies and equipment.
The major architecture at Nakbe is divided into two principal clusters of platforms and mounds, one to the west and one to the east. The western group includes Structure 1, which at 150 feet is Nakbe's tallest pyramid, while the eastern group includes the 100-foot-high Structure 59, a massive platform surmounted by three mounds. To date, Nakbe has been probed by more than 150 major excavations, providing a fairly comprehensive sample of this core area.
The excavations include test pits to establish the stratigraphy down to bedrock, tunnels to determine sequences of building and rebuilding, horizontal excavations to reveal the facades of large public architecture and to expose small domestic structures, and narrow and wide trenches to fix the precise location and sequence of artifacts. We have also combed the haphazard trenches left by past looters, who visited the site in search of marketable artifacts. As a result of these excavations, we have located archeological remains dating from 3,000 to 1,000 years ago. The strongest evidence concerns the first 700 years, covering the middle Preclassic period and the beginning of the late Preclassic period.
For many years, the standard view of the Maya
Preclassic was one of relatively primitive groups settled the tropical lowlands
and gradually evolving into civilized chiefdoms. The era of Classic civilization,
represented by the construction of large urban centers with massive architecture,
writing, stone monuments, detailed art, and elaborate social and political
hierarchies, was thought to have begun 1,700 years ago. In the past decade,
however, work at sites such as El Mirador has revealed that the complexities
of civilization actually extended back into the late Preclassic, the period
from 2,300 to 1,700 years ago. Nakbe is now revising our views of the middle
Preclassic, from 3,000 to 2,300 years ago, which at other lowland sites
appears to be represented only by simple village remains.
Based on numerous radiocarbon dates and ceramics from rich deposits throughout the site, we believe that the first inhabitants occupied Nakbe from 3,000 to 2,600 years ago. Why settlers chose this region in the first place has not yet been determined, but they appear to have quickly established a strong agricultural base. Prelimary studies at Texas A&M University by John G. Jones have identified abundant pollen from corn (zea maize) and squash in the early deposits.
The site center has yielded large quantities of middle Preclassic ceramics, currently being analyzed by Donald W. Forsyth of Brigham Young University. The pottery includes the red-on-cream, two color bowls commonly associated with such deposits, as well as incised bowls, narrow-necked jars with coarsely painted bands, and a wide variety of one- color vessels red, cream, or black including tecomates (jars with narrow openings but without necks). We have also found numerous fragments of figurines depicting a wide variety of human and animal forms. Also common are shells through which holes were ground. Many were Strombus shells, a type of artifact unique to the first part of the middle Preclassic at Nakbe, Uaxactun, Tikal, and,other sites where similarly dated deposits are located.
The shells reflect one of the earliest major imports into the interior of northern Guatemala, and I believe they and similar exotic imports, such as obsidian (a volcanic glass from which sharp tools could be fashioned), played an important role in the formation of an increasingly complex society. The demand for these materials, whether for cultural or economic reasons, and the mechanisms of procurement, transportation, and distribution that met that demand, required the development of administrative and governmental organizations at an earlier stage in this region than in areas where those commodities were more readily available.
Fairly direct evidence of developing differences in social and economic status includes human incisors with inlaid disks of jadelike stone, found in deposits dating to about 2,800 years ago. Such dental decorations are known to have been associated with elite status in later Maya periods. We have also found a middle Preclassic ceramic shard with a portion of an incised profile that displays the sloping forehead characteristic of later Maya elite society. This was a frontal cranial deformation that resulted from binding the head in infancy.
The earliest architecture known at Nakbe consists of low walls of carved limestone blocks, two to four courses high. These walls are associated with rich middens and with a large limestone slab apparently used as an altar for community rituals.
Sometime between 2,600 and 2,400 years ago, a massive construction effort was carried out at Nakbe. Tons of rock were quarried and used as fill for platforms and pyramidal structures ranging from three to sixty-five feet high. These constructions established the precincts of much of the eastern and western architectural groups, burying the earlier structures and middens. The construction resembles that of less ancient structures in the Maya lowlands, with one important difference: we have detected no art on the facades. Such art seems to have appeared later, representing an innovation in architectural design and ritual emphasis.
For example, at least six large stucco panels and grotesque masks covered the upper facades in the final versions of Nakbe's Structure 1 and eighty-foot-high Structure 27, which were enlarged and remodeled about 2,300 years ago, at the beginning of the late Preclassic period. The panels depict large earspools (circular jade ornaments placed in the earlobes), droplet shapes most often found on the chin or forehead of masks, and trefoils (trident like appendages). The masks depict monsters with an exaggerated upper lip or snoutlike projection. In the case of Structure 27, large scrolls extended down and away from the open mouth of one mask we uncovered. These panels and masks may be the earliest yet found in the lowlands, a conclusion based on associated ceramics and the fact that the underlying Iimestone was laboriously carved prior to the application of stucco. At other sites, only the stucco was molded to form the images, an apparent shortcut.
As in other examples in this region, the panels
and masks at Nakbe flank the upper stairway of a characteristic design known
as a triadic structure. This is a pyramidal platform with three small buildings
on top arranged around a central stairway. Two of the buildings are placed
on opposite sides, facing each other, and a third, larger one, in between
and set back. At Nakbe, the masks and panels flank a stairway that had thirteen
steps, which probably represented the thirteen levels of the Maya heavens.
The architectural art suggests the early crystallization of religious beliefs
that pervaded nearly a millennium of later Maya culture.
In the region of northern Guatemala where El Mirador, Nakbe, and similar sites are located, labor was mobilized for construction (usually of triadic structures) on a size and scale unparalleled at any other time in the entire Maya area. Consisting of more than 380,000 cubic yards of mud and stone, the Tigre pyramid at El Mirador, for example, is larger than the combined mass of Classic Tikal's Temple 1, Temple 2, Great Plaza, and entire North Acropolis. Perhaps the major means by which the ruling elite achieved this great social control was by manipulating a sophisticated religious ideology. The masks and panels that ornament the triadic structures are related to mythological deities, whose identities can be determined from later hieroglyphic texts. They do not refer to rulers or other historical figures, such as those commonly depicted on Classic carved stelae.
Major public architecture at Nakbe may have also served a practical purpose as a water-collecting facility. Northern Guatemala typically has about four months of dry season, from January through April, when water must be conserved and rationed. At present we have no water source at the site and are forced to supply our camp by transporting water on mule back from three and a half miles away. We have discovered what may be drainage systems that channeled water from several structures to serve the middle Preclassic inhabitants. Overcoming the lack of a local water source, as well as other specific environmental obstacles, to meet the needs of an expanding population may have been an additional element demanding the formation of effective government in the region.
One of the most unusual discoveries at Nakbe emerged from excavations around a small mound in the site's eastern group of architecture. We found forty-five fragments of an eleven-foot-high limestone monument, Nakbe Stela 1, which had been smashed in antiquity. When pieced together, the jigsaw puzzle revealed a carved scene, apparently duplicated on both sides of the monument, depicting two individuals who stand face to face and are dressed in regal costumes of a very early style. One of the two is pointing upward with an index finger to a disembodied profile head, which in turn is faintly joined to the headdress of the other.
I am convinced that the scene is a representation of a myth that we know of from the Popol Vuh, a Quiche Maya text transcribed by a Dominican friar in about 1702. Possibly what is commemorated here is a ritual enactment of that myth by actual, historical personages. In any case, the two figures appear to portray the supernatural twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who were conceived when their mother was spit upon by the severed head of their father, Hun Hunahpu. Their father and his brother had been sacrificed after losing a ball game to the evil lords of the Underworld, and the twins ultimately avenged their father's death.
On Nakbe Stela 1, the figure that I identify as Xbalanque is pointing toward his father's severed head, apparently indicating the source of his divine lineage. The connection between the head and the headdress of the other twin, Hunalpu, is proper since he assumed his father's name. While using the accounts of a colonial text such as the Popol Vuh to reconstruct past mythological beliefs is highly speculative, the detailed iconographic clues found in the headdresses and regal costumes support this interpretation.
The form and style of this stela are definitely Preclassic, but the dating is difficult since the monument was installed on a small late Classic platform about 1,300 years ago (and sometime afterward, it was deliberately smashed). But an altar stone located immediately to the east of Stela 1 was sealed below a floor that dates to the latter part of the middle Preclassic. If Stela 1 was associated with that altar (in typical Maya fashion), then the sculpture probably dates to about 2,400 years ago. Further excavations around the altar are expected to clarify this issue.
The extreme antiquity of Nakbe and other sites, such as Guiro, El Mirador, and Tintal in northern Guatemala, allows a glimpse of a poorly known period in the early formation of complex Maya society. At El Mirador and Guiro, for example, we have recently discovered some of the earliest hieroglyphic texts in the Maya lowlands. These texts, possibly 1,950 to 2,050 years old, have yet to be deciphered. In addition, we have discovered a pattern in the placement of the Preclassic royal tombs that were looted at Guiro and Tintal. With this knowledge, we hope to uncover unloosed tombs in Nakbe and El Mirador.
While we have found at least some remains from nearly every period of Maya society at Nakbe, the site was never a major center after the beginning of the late Preclassic period. I had initially hoped to find remains of occupation from about 2,300 to 1,850 years ago, to further understand the nearby late Preclassic center of El Mirador. The last construction phases of the largest pyramids at Nakbe date to the beginning of this period, and the two sites were even joined by a causeway. But late Preclassic artifacts have proved sparse throughout the site of Nakbe, perhaps because the settlement was rapidly eclipsed by the rise of El Mirador. Nakbe remained virtually abandoned for a thousand years, until some late Classic Maya reoccupied the site. These people established small communities in and around the ruins and left some fine examples of Classic ceramics, but they built no monuments of their own.
I believe the spectacular rise of El Mirador was related to that site's better supply of water and especially to its more defensible position. The important public architecture at El Mirador was constructed on the brink of a steep escarpment, which provided protection to the settlement's northern and western flanks, while the ea