RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Researchers and archaeologists from the USA, Canada and Mexico have discovered and excavated a long-lost Mayan city. The site is known as Lacanjá Tzeltal, the name of the modern-day Mexican village in which it is located.
It was the capital of the ancient Mayan kingdom of Sak Tz’i, which means “white dog”. The city is believed to have been founded in approximately 750 BC and occupied for 1,000 years. On the site of what was once an important Mesoamerican urban centre, there is now a cattle ranch.
Archaeologists have been searching for this city since 1994, when references to it were discovered at other Mayan sites. Professor Charles Golden, one of those who worked on the excavation which began in June 2018, said that finding Sak Tz’i was analogous to finding France if one was studying medieval Europe and knew that a place called France existed but not where it was. He said it was “a huge piece of the puzzle” for understanding the Mayan world.
The kingdom’s economy was based on agriculture, and fields of crops surrounded the urban centre. Found in the city itself were a pyramid, a royal palace and an enormous, probably ceremonial, square.
Sculptures and decorated panels and inscriptions were also found. These include mythical tales and a story about a flood, as well as records of battles.
The Mayans, along with the later Aztecs, and the South American Incas, were one of the pre-eminent pre-Colombian civilizations. Their origins go back to 2,000 BC in Mexico and they continued to flourish until the Spanish arrival in the early 1500s.
Unlike the Incas or the Aztecs, the Mayan world was not united into one empire, but instead made up of many independent kingdoms and chiefdoms. Sak Tz’i would have been a relatively small state when compared to others. Incredibly, the last of these kingdoms to be defeated by the Spanish was that of Nojpetén, which fell in 1697. The Mayan civilization was essentially concentrated in the Yucatán area of Mexico.
Historians and archaeologists have been deepening their knowledge of Mayan history due to recent discoveries such as this. A little over two years ago over 60,000 Maya ruins were found hidden in the Guatemalan rainforest using Lidar laser technology.
As a result estimates of the population of Mayan civilization at its peak have risen from a usual estimate of around 5 million, to a possible figure of up to 10 or even 15 million.
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