A team of archaeologists from the University of Texas at San Antonio is conducting an excavation in Belize, while artifacts from UTSA excavations in 2014 and 2019 are in the San Antonio Museum of Art.
A team of archaeologists from the University of Texas at San Antonio has discovered a multitude of artifacts in an ancient cemetery excavated in Belize in 2014, while restored vessels and other pieces discovered there are on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
A cylindrical terracotta vase depicting a jaguar and a coatimundi dating from 650 to 750 AD. C. it is part of the exhibition “Nature, power and Mayan kings” at the San Antonio Museum of Art. It was excavated at the archaeological site of Buenavista del Cayo as a component of ongoing studies conducted through professors and academics at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Archaeologist Christie Kokel Rodríguez, who was conducting an excavation in Belize in 2014, hoping to locate artifacts that could complement his studies of the elaborate processions known to be carried out by the Mayans, discovered a place of royal burial.
“It was just a discovery, something absolutely unexpected,” said Kokel Rodriguez, who at the time had a PhD at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Some of the elements removed from the ground at the Buenavista del Cayo archaeological site and some others in 2019 are now displayed in “Mayan Nature, Power and Rituals,” a small but vital exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Both excavations were part of an ongoing process in the Central American country through a UTSA team led by Professors Jason Yaeger and M. Kathryn Brown in collaboration with the Belize Institute of Archaeology.
“These componnticular burials were excavated as part of a broader curriculum that we want to perceive the progression of political authority and especially divine royalty in this component of the Mayan world,” said Yaeger, who first went to Belize as an undergraduate student in 1990. .
“Nature, strength and Mayan rituals” includes richly decorated vases and vessels, such as seashells and jade jewelry that adorned the frame of a king discovered at the site. There is also a video showing archaeologists in action.
The exhibition, curated through Bernadette Cap, who oversaw the 2014 excavations and is the time for a two-year Mellon conservation fellowship at the museum, also included artifacts from the museum’s collection and less is known about the history of those pieces.
A lid with a monkey-shaped handle, around 450 A. C. D. , is on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art as a component of an exhibit of artifacts from an archaeological site in Belize.
Part of the importance of the exhibition, Yaeger said, is that the provenance of artifacts from the 2014 and 2019 excavations is known, which is not the case in similar exhibits.
“Objects like this are beautiful, they have an aesthetic price. And historically, they’ve also been priced at a price as works of art,” he said. “And so, there’s been a very, very long history of illegal digging and looting. from Mayan sites to download painted vases and jade items and carved shell items for sale in the art market.
“This has decreased a little bit in recent decades, thanks to foreign law and adjustments in museum and other policies, but what it means is that a lot of items like this that we have in museums and personal collections, we don’t know precisely where AND for us, to locate those items in the place where the Maya deposited them. where they were left with splendid care 1,500 years ago, allows us to say much more.
Kokel Rodriguez gained high technology to locate this site in 2014. It made the first exciting discovery thanks to a smooth sensing and telemetry camera, or LiDAR.
Where: San Antonio Museum of Art, two hundred W. Jones Ave.
When: in demonstration until February 27.
Details: Admission to the museum costs between $10 and $20; loose for citizens of Bexar County on Sundays from 10 a. m. to mediodía. samuseum. org.
“Basically, you put a complicated camera on a drone and you fly that drone over your area, and it takes a picture of what the floor looks like if you had to remove and raze all the trees and vegetation,” Kokel Rodriguez said.
“With this new LiDAR data, I saw that there were two mocosy, tiny, tiny, almost miniature pyramids in front of the site’s eastern pyramid, Buenavista del Cayo, where I worked with Dr. Yaeger. We had no concept that those valuable little pyramids, those structures, existed. The plants were so thick that you couldn’t see them if you looked at them directly.
She and the small team she worked with put up a check hole to see what they could find. As they dug, they saw a line of stones, an indicator that they were in something.
“Stone alignments don’t happen on their own,” Cap said.
They to dig.
“The more we started digging around it, we found out it was shaped like a soffin,” Kokel Rodriguez said. “It’s so rare, so we started digging in the middle of this coffin-shaped unit just to locate it empty. “
There were some artifacts, but nothing very exciting, he says. They continued digging and discovered a moment of burial under the first, which was intact and included the frame of a king, as well as the ceramics and jewels with which there was a shell-shaped pendant included the text: “This is the pendant of Naah Utí Káb, king of Komkom. “
Komkom is the call of what is now Buenavista del Cayo.
The condition of the site, which was excavated in raw clay, indicated that the frame had been buried just before the rainy season, Yaeger said.
“When it rains, the clay absorbs a lot of water and swells. That’s what happened with that funeral,” he said. The side walls were pushed inwards, the analogy I’m thinking of is the “Star Wars” waste compactor. , only without the tentacles and things like that . . . This crushing force of the swollen clay broke the ceramic boxes quite a bit and moved the frame a bit.
“What’s fascinating, if you like ‘CSI’ and ‘Bones’ and that sort of thing, is that we can say that it will have to have happened before the frame decomposes a lot because the pelvis moved almost at an angle of forty-five degrees from the frame, and one of the legs rose about 6 or 8 inches.
The 2019 excavations took place in a pyramidal temple.
“This had other disorders due to the weight of all the fabrics that had been placed on the episodes of the structure of the next burial,” Yaeger said. “The Maya would build a temple in the next one. The weight of this upper curtain had caused some displacement of the walls of the tomb, so that some stones had fallen and some of the vessels had been damaged, some were intact, some quite damaged.
A restorer from Guatemala spent about a month rebuilding 4 painted vases.
The exhibit of the exhibit is a loan from the Government of Belize, Yaeger said, and upon closing of the exhibit, they will be returned.
Yaeger and Brown, who are married, have been working at sites in Belize for 15 years, doing study trips with academics over the summer and had to skip 2020 due to the pandemic. To help the Béliziens who would have been hired at the site that year, they introduced a GoFundMe campaign, which raised $25,000 and offered food assistance to 105 families.
This was there for 10 days.
“We were looking to meet our partners at the Belize Institute of Archaeology, our wonderful collaborators and without whom we could not do what we do,” Yaeger said. “So we looked to get to know them, to see how they were.
“And we have more documents that are not worthy of being exhibited but that are scientifically that we seek to organize for export. So we had a lot of little things that we were dealing with.
Because the pandemic is still a problem, they have done any digging.
“When we operate at full capacity, we have 80 local men and women running for us, and taking them in combination to neighborhoods near an excavation ditch, or in the lab where they process materials, just brings all sorts of dangers that we did. I don’t think we’re guilty for introducing ourselves to the local community,” Yaeger said.
The SAMA exhibition has been in the works for some time and Yaeger said he is grateful to other people even though he could see it all.
“I was brought into archaeology because of my fondness for seeking to perceive the ancient Maya,” he said, “and there is nothing more exciting than sharing that through my classes, although I can give public lectures and now through this exhibition. “
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