Archeologists in Mexico have discovered sets of human remains from the early ancestors of the Mayan civilization that could be as much as 7, years old, officials reported on Tuesday.
According to archaeologists at a Mexico City news conference, three sets of human remains were unearthed at the Puyil cave in the Tacotalpa municipality of Tabasco state, located in southern Mexico.
One set reportedly goes as far back as the pre-classical era of the Mayan civilization, putting it at up to 7, years old. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. More about Mexico Mayan civilisation Mexico City. Already subscribed? Those who did study bones typically collected only the most basic information. Tiesler was introducing a field often called taphonomy, which was gaining popularity in Europe at the time, and goes beyond classifying bones by trying to reconstruct the body that once hung from them.
But the practice had never been applied to ancient Mesoamericans. She began looking through Mexican museums at various collections of skulls, which she considered the most interesting parts of the body. Archaeologists who study the Maya assumed that the practice had something to do with religion, but knew little more than that.
Vera Tiesler examines the remains of a person buried in Mexico during early colonial times. Tiesler noticed that certain regions tended to have specific head styles. Over time, that shape became popular, and dominated the late Classic period 1. She, along with others, found a possible reason, based on Maya traditions in colonial times. The ancient Maya saw babies as not-yet human, and at risk of losing their essence through a few points in their skulls, she says.
By shaping the head, the Maya kept the essence in place 2. By the time Tiesler got her PhD in , she was already fleshing out much of ancient Maya culture and soon began excavating royal tombs. She found that their relatively luxurious lifestyle gave them premature osteoporosis, visible in their thinning bones.
Their teeth were barely worn from eating soft, decadent food their whole lives 3. She found that he had a disfigured upper jaw with teeth that were dislodged and had then healed at angles, possibly from a blow to the face during battle, given that he was eager to show it off. The Snakes were a line of kings who moved into the Maya world in and, over years, built the closest thing the Maya ever saw to an empire.
Credit: Alamy. The first of these, Sky Witness, was found in a moderately humble grave, shared with a handful of other elite warriors who died in battle. Tiesler had very little time to inspect him, but found his skull speckled with deep injuries — some on top of previously healed ones. His shield arm was mangled from numerous heavy blows, and he could barely have used it by the time he died, in his early 30s.
All this fits the image in snippets of writing from across the region that describe a brilliant military leader who toppled the ruling city of Tikal and establish the Snakes as the dominant force in the region. When Tiesler and other researchers excavated the king, they found him opulently arrayed in a chamber with a jade mask alongside a young woman and a child sacrificed at the same time. From her studies of his bones, Tiesler found that he was portly, bordering on obese, and in his 50s when he died.
Like Pakal, his teeth showed that he spent his life eating soft food such as tamales and sipping a chocolate and honey drink popular among the elites 4. One carving shows him as a fit man, athletically playing a Mesoamerican ball game. But Tiesler found that Fiery Claw had a painful disease that fused several vertebrae together, meaning the game would have been dangerous to play, and suggesting that the carving was propaganda.
These kinds of details do not change the basic plot line of Maya history, but they do fill out its characters and hint at what their lives were like. Her lab has compiled a database of 12, burials, 6, of which she and her colleagues worked on directly.
Her university alone houses the remains of more than 2, individuals from ancient, colonial and modern times, most of which she had a hand in uncovering. Tiesler enjoys a unique position in Mexican academia.
After centuries of watching antiquities fly north, along with all the credit, the authorities have become reticent to allow foreign archaeologists to do large projects in the Maya area. She pairs this multiculturalism with a ravenous appetite for research and boundless energy. This came in helpful when she dug into her favourite topic: human sacrifice.
A skeleton from early colonial times in Mexico. When Tiesler examined the bones, she found a sternum with deep, clean cut marks in it that showed intentional, almost surgical, placement.
The cuts were horizontal, not likely to have come from battle, and were later found in the same place on other bodies. In sediments dated after A.
D, for example, the researchers found an increase in bones from a river turtle called Dermatemy mawii. It seems the Maya imported them from a place in modern day Mexico called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Turkeys are another example. The birds were likely imported to Ceibal from areas in Mexico, and analyses of the chemistry inside the bones indicates that some of the birds were eating corn.
Even though turkeys were originally raised for their feathers, in Ceibal they were likely finding their way to the table. The story of the animals records the shifting culture. The consistency of these patterns through time was striking, Sharpe says. The decline in shells tracks across the remains of the city, as well as the rise of turkeys hundreds of years later.
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