THE BEGINNINGS OF MAYA CIVILIZATION

THE BEGINNING OF MAYA CIVILIZATION?

THOUGHARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVELARGELY IGNOREDIT, THERE ARE INDICATIONSTHATTHEPIEDMONTREGIONINSOUTHERN GUATEMALAPLAYEDASEMINALROLEINTHE MAYA’SDEVELOPMENT. ANINVESTIGATION OF CHOCOLÁ, ONE OF THEREGION’SMAJORSITES, COULDDETERMINEJUST HOW INFLUENTIALITWAS.

BY MICHAEL BAWAYA

JERRY RABINOWITZ Women walk down Mound 1 at sunrise in Chocolá. Smoke rises from cooking fires in the homes below. Archaeologists believe that, centuries ago, Mound 1 was part of an area where administrative functions took place.

The most pressing questions about Maya studies are to be answered down here.” “Down here” is the piedmont region of southern Guatemala and archaeologist Jonathan Kaplan is certain that a wealth of information is secreted in the mounds in and around the small, unassuming village of Chocolá.

Approximately 8,000 people live in this impoverished, ramshackle town found in the strikingly beautiful piedmont region that’s silhouetted by towering volcanic peaks. On average, the residents, many of whom descend from the Maya, make $1,500 to $2,000 a year, according to Kaplan, who has received several proposals of marriage from women wanting to escape to the comforts of the U.S. Chocolá has virtually no infrastructure and no formalized political system. The pace of life is slow. People move about languidly in the summer’s heat; they are more likely to be carrying a machete than a cell phone. Countless underfed dogs roam the streets, piles of garbage foul the landscape. “This town is really in crisis mode, like much of the Third World,” says Kaplan. Some of the locals have welcomed him, while others are convinced that, like the invading Spaniards centuries ago, he and his crew are here to dig for gold.

Hundreds of years ago the region seemingly knew better times. A number of archaeologists surmise that Maya culture may have taken shape in the piedmont region. “Most of the examples of the earliest Maya writing appear here,” Kaplan says. The oldest stelae have been found here. “Ethnohistory tells us that the best cacao was grown here,” he adds. It’s believed that Chocolá was part of an extensive trade network. There’s an abundance of water and evidence of prehistoric irrigation. It was, he states, a “breadbasket.”

A CREW OF ROUGHLY 30 PEOPLEIS

working in a clearing in the jungle, an area known as Mound 15. Kaplan, a tall man with close-cropped reddish hair and beard, is raving about an underground canal covered by a series of flat rocks that the crew is excavating. “It’s a big old plumbing system,” he explains. What appears to the untrained eye to be nothing more than a line of flat rocks a few feet below the surface is to Kaplan a marvel of prehistoric engineering and artistry. “Look at this,” he says. “That’s beautiful.”

The canal is remarkable not only for its artistry, but also for what it suggests about the former occupants of Mound 15. “Hydraulics is a really important indicator of complex social organization,” Kaplan notes. “Control and management of water is an indicator of certain kinds of developments in social organization. Generally, it involves some kind of corporate labor to build, to manage, to maintain, so you have to have some kind of a bureaucracy.”

(From left) Federico Paredes Umaña, Felipe Carrillo, Gustavo Camey, and Jonathan Kaplan, look at sherds in the laboratory. A considerable amount of Kaplan’s time is spent explaining his work to Chocolá’s residents. Community leaders Carrillo and Camey support Kaplan’s project.

Mesoamerican trade consisted of cities exporting the raw materials and finished goods that they specialized in. Cities that produced highly desired goods gained power and wealth from trade. Jonathan Kaplan believes that the cacao trade played a crucial role in Chocolá’s development just as obsidian, another product in great demand, played the same role in the development of Kaminaljuyu, the region’s most powerful city.

Adjacent to the canal, workers are excavating what’s believed to be a residential structure. Mound 15 is one of more than a dozen known mounds in an area the archaeologists have named the North Group. They suspect this area was inhabited by Chocolá’s elites. “It’s higher up. They have a view of the site,” Kaplan explains. This was advantageous for self-defense. “The water is cleaner up here,” he adds. The archaeologists have identified two other areas of mounds, the Central and South groups. The Central Group is thought to have been an administrative area. The mounds here are Chocolá’s tallest, and their pyramidal shape indicates religious or public functions. The South Group was apparently the home of the common people.

Having dug several trenches of varying depths, the workers have exposed a number of cobbles that may have been the foundation of the structure as well as what appears to be a floor. Kaplan thinks it’s too big a house for a commoner, which reinforces the notion that the North Group was an elite neighborhood. The shape and layout of the house indicate that it could be from the Early Classic period, around A.D. 400. He assumes the house and the canal are related, though he has no proof of the relationship. In an attempt to obtain proof, he’ll have samples from the house and the canal dated by radiocarbon and by luminescence, a technique that identifies the time a surface was exposed to light and was therefore in use.

If the site is as old as Kaplan suspects—he thinks it could be as early as 1200 B.C. and extending to as late as A.D. 1500—evidence such as the canal would show that Chocolá “was organized in quite complex fashion quite early.” He assumes that the elite possessed “a whole support population to keep the complex organization going.” They didn’t busy themselves with such tasks as laja building. Kaplan, who is trying to determine the level and nature of social organization at Chocolá, wonders aloud as to how the elites managed the lower classes. “I think there’s always coercion mixed with suasion,” he theorizes.

Surprisingly little research has been done in the piedmont region despite the indications that seminal developments occurred here. Archaeologist Karl Sapper visited Chocolá in the early 1900s, but he didn’t excavate the site. The first to do so was Robert Burkitt, who excavated a small portion of the site in the 1920s for the University of

Figurines and sherds recovered by PACH are laid out on a table in the laboratory. All of the artifacts recovered by the project are from the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, approximately 900 B.C. to A.D. 200.

Pennsylvania. Archaeologist E. M. Shook, who first saw the site in the 1940s and conducted a very limited excavation some 30 years later, suggested to Kaplan that he should investigate the site.

Kaplan, who is affiliated with the University of New Mexico and the Museum of New Mexico, studied under the renowned Mesoamericanist Michael D. Coe at Yale. For 10 years he worked at Kaminaljuyu, a major Maya site in what is now Guatemala City.

Kaplan was having difficulties conducting an investigation in Guatemala City, and he thought that if Chocolá, which is roughly three hours by car from Guatemala City, was well preserved, it might yield answers to questions posed by his Kaminaljuyu investigation.

He began the Chocolá Archaeological Project (in Spanish, Proyecto Arqueológico Chocolá, therefore the acronym PACH) in 2000 when, visiting the site for the first time, he conducted preliminary reconnaissance. Kaplan co-directs the project with Juan Antonio Valdés, a prominent Guatemalan archaeologist who has directed investigations at many Maya cities, including Tikal, and written numerous articles and books. They are searching for evidence of the beginnings of the Maya city-state; in

There is reason to believe that Chocolá was once an important city. It is now a small, impoverished, struggling town.

MORE THAN AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT

“This is a research enterprise,” says archaeologist Jonathan Kaplan. “But in order to do the research, I inevitably find myself drawn into issues of salvage archaeology and am therefore dealing with the town and the officials and trying to explain to them the value of this. In order to do the research we have to save what’s here.”

Many of Chocolá’s residents support PACH, showing the archaeologists artifacts and leading them to mounds. But other residents are suspicious of the archaeologists’ intensions. To the latter group, according to Kaplan, the project echoes the European conquest of the Americas. “We’re taking this information,” he states, explaining their thinking. “We’re writing the history. We’re deciding what’s important and what’s not.”

Consequently, Kaplan and Valdés are going to great lengths to prove that PACH’s goal is cooperation, not conquest. “I want to collaborate with the people here so that they’re a full partner in this,” Kaplan says. “They will help determine the meaning of this.”

The archaeologists often meet with townspeople and local politicians to explain their endeavor and win support for it. It could be said that the archaeological project has of necessity given birth to another project—an ambitious public relations/economic development effort. When describing this effort, Kaplan talks of land swapping, museum building, town beautifying. Thus far it’s mostly talk, but he appears determined to walk it.

Many of the mounds are covered by coffee groves, which can damage the archaeological resources beneath the ground. If the farmers build their homes on the mounds, the construction poses a greater threat to these resources. So Kaplan is enlisting the help of politicians to engineer land swaps whereby the farmers exchange their plots for others that don’t threaten the mounds.

In addition to dealing with matters of real estate, he’s also become an economic developer of sorts. He entertains the notion of transforming the town from bedraggled to beautiful by cleaning up the trash. That, with the addition of exposed structures and a museum in which to display the site’s artifacts, could make Chocolá a tourist attraction. In the meantime, PACH likely serves as one of the town’s largest employers, with several dozen workers on the payroll.

Archaeologist Anne Kraemer is conducting a limited ethnographic survey to gauge people’s opinion of PACH. “What I’m looking at is seeing how the community is affected by archaeology and how this project is affecting the community,” she says. “This project is different than a lot of projects that come into Guatemala.”

For the most part, the responses are favorable, though some people are concerned that PACH, and the jobs it’s brought, will suddenly end. “These people want jobs and money,” Kraemer observes. “They’re very excited about the project.” —Michael Bawaya

Approximately 200 people attended a town meeting during which PACH staff explained the importance of their project.

fact, they are searching for the origins of Maya civilization itself. Kaplan and Valdés have a five-year agreement with the Guatemalan government (the standard agreement is one year) and the cooperation of a local agricultural collective to conduct archaeological research on its land.

“We don’t know where Chocolá stops,” says Valdés. He’s conducting a regional survey to help determine the site’s length and breadth. In 2003 the PACH crew, trying to define the site’s dimensions, mapped 65 mounds, the highest of which were approximately 75 feet. They also identified a great network of natural springs manmade irrigation systems distributed throughout the site. Thirty-eight monuments were recovered or located, creating a Chocolá sculptural corpus that reveals the level of artisanship as well as communal beliefs and social/political organization. Previously, only one monument had been identified. The crew also located many lithic and ceramic scatters.

A large percentage of the recovered ceramics dates to the Middle Preclassic period (900–600 B.C.). The dates are determined by comparing them to similar ceramics that have been dated. “There are not too many hard dates in this region,” notes Federico Paredes Umaña, referring to dates produced by methods such as radiocarbon and luminescence testing. “You can date by relative dating, but you need some hard dates to begin with.” The small, bare-bones lab is

the very picture of low technology. The sherds are cleaned, bagged, and tagged here, and then sent to Guatemala City for analysis of their style, color, and contents.

Paredes Umaña, who directs the work at PACH’s laboratory, is busy creating a classification system, known as a typology, that will cover Chocolá’s ceramics, sculptures, and architecture. Upon creating the typology, he can then compare it with those of sites in the nearby highlands and the Pacific coast to better inform researchers as to Chocolá’s, and the region’s, occupation dates.

BRANDISHING A MACHETE, KAPLAN

is leading several other archaeologists through a cornfield in the South Group. The corn stalks are perhaps eight feet high and so dense that it’s virtually impossible to see beyond them. They stumble through the cornfield and then come upon a narrow trail that leads through a coffee grove. They periodically check each other’s backs for stinging caterpillars. There are several types of these, the worst of which, a fat brown one, will “make you sick as a dog for about 24 hours,” Kaplan warns.

Numerous sherds litter the trail. Kaplan and Valdés examine a pile of rocks presumably made by a farmer clearing the grove. Kaplan points to a flat stone that he surmises was once part of a structure. The archaeologists suspect that common people once resided here. They collect samples of the sherds to take back to the lab.

Kaplan gets in his small pickup truck, on loan from an archaeologist friend, and drives off toward Area 35, another section of the South Group where his crew is working. He drives slowly along the dirt road, swerving to avoid

Dave Monsees operates a gradiometer in a cornfield that apparently was once a residential area. The archaeologists are hoping to find a midden here that will help them to date the site.

This very large storage pot of unrecognizable style was found in a ritual deposit almost exactly below the center of a structure on Mound 15. It was set beneath three large cobbles that probably had symbolic significance. The pot was surrounded by five more cobbles that presumably represented the five sacred directions: the four cardinal directions and verticality. big rocks and deep ruts. He curses at the sudden thumps of undetected rocks pounding the truck’s underside. Though Chocolá is a large site being investigated by a large crew, PACH doesn’t own a single vehicle to transport the workers from place to place. Money is tight. “We’re just barely scraping by,” he says. He estimates that PACH’s operating expenses are about $15,000 a month, approximately one third of what he could easily spend to conduct a thorough investigation.

Area 35 is a series of low house mounds now covered by corn and coffee beans. “We think it’s a common residential area as well as a workshop area,” says Kaplan. Dave Monsees is

pacing through the cornfield, closely checking the readings from his gradiometer, a remote sensing machine. Monsees, a retired National Institutes of Health official, is searching for underground disturbances that could be archaeological resources. There are indications that this was a heavily populated area and consequently Kaplan hopes to find a midden here. “More people, more trash,” he says matter-of-factly. An intact midden would be immensely helpful in developing a chronological occupation of the site.

Gradiometry is “cheaper and faster” than doing test excavations, Monsees says. He’s been interested in archaeology since junior high. He became interested in gra-

Juan Antonio Valdes, the co-director of PACH, studies portions of the underground canal system on Mound 15. Chocolá gets plenty of rain, and the archaeologists surmise that the canal diverted water to the structure for domestic use, and it also diverted excess water away from the structure in order to protect the cobble and earth architecture. Archaeologist Federico Paredes Umaña did this drawing of a Chocolá monument. PACH has recovered or located 38 monuments. These monuments inform the archaeologists about the Maya’s artistic abilities as well as their social and political organization.

diometry when, while working as a volunteer on a project in Italy, he noticed that the gradiometer operator was in great demand by the archaeologists. Monsees saw his chance. He spent $22,500 on a gradiometer and took a class to learn how to operate it. Now he works for hire on projects in the U.S. and abroad. “I can do archaeology and have fun for the rest of my life,” he states.

Monsees’s wife, Caroline, who is also working at the site, shows Kaplan an obsidian core she’s found. Chocolá’s former residents utilized large amounts of obsidian. “It’s called the steel of the New World,” Kaplan says of the hard but brittle volcanic glass. “It was so widely used, it had so many purposes.”

He believes that Chocolá obtained its obsidian from Kaminaljuyu in exchange for cacao. There are four themes guiding Kaplan’s research, one of which is that the city, with its abundance of water and rich volcanic topsoil, produced large amounts of high quality cacao that played a vital role in its development. According to Valdés, ethnohistorical historical accounts state that the best cacao came from the Chocolá region.

Ethnohistoric accounts from shortly after the Spanish conquest state that Mesoamerican trade consisted of cities exporting the raw materials and finished goods that they specialized in. Therefore Kaminaljuyu, which controlled large obsidian fields, traded it to Chocolá and nearby Abaj Takalik for their cacao. The greater the desire for a product—cacao and obsidian were in demand throughout Mesoamerica—the greater the power of the city producing the product.

PACH’s three other themes are: 1) Interaction between the Olmec, a culture that predates the Maya, and proto-Maya people; 2) How and why urbanism developed so early in this region; 3) Core-periphery relationships between the region’s dominant and secondary cities.

The Olmec-proto-Maya mingling may have resulted in important advancements. “The two groups exchanged material goods and also ideologies and intellectual innovations,” he observes. “There was something that happened that was very, very dynamic down here.” As for the development of urbanism, Chocolá was constructed on a hill that afforded views of the surrounding land and people. The elite occupied the highest ground in the north, and possibly used their vantage point to control the movement of the lower class. The crew has mapped more than 80 mounds arranged in plaza groups on a north-south axis. Chocolá may have been a ceremonial center from which astronomical observations were made. There are caves to the east of Chocolá where rituals were, and still are, performed. In examining core-periphery relationships, the archaeologists are analyzing how the southern area’s largest city, Kaminaljuyu, interacted with great secondary cities such as Chocolá.

This curious monument is found in the neighboring town of Santo Tomas de Leon. The torso is part of a monument taken from Chocolá. Someone affixed a mismatched head to the torso. PACH lab technician Victor Gomez holds a small ceramic vessel that was recovered near the canal on Mound 15. The film container next to the vessel holds a sample that will be used to obtain a radiocarbon date.

Kaplan will not go so far as to say the germination of Maya culture occurred exclusively in this region. He mentions other large, early cities in the northern Petén jungles, such as Tikal, that were involved in “synergistic processes” contributing to this development. But he argues that the “core elements of Classic Maya civilization” are here in the Southern Maya Zone. “Everything we dig up here, everything we find is basically new,” he states. “So it’s going to contribute a huge amount of information to understanding Mesoamerican civilization in general if we do this properly.”

Doing it properly, among other things, means engaging the people who now occupy Chocolá. Toward that end an old Toyota minivan with a loudspeaker on its roof cruises the streets to announce a town meeting PACH is hosting. Kaplan, Valdés, and other crew members later address the crowd of perhaps 200, informing them of the project’s ambitions and accomplishments. They emphasize their purpose is to share resources, not to take them. But figuratively speaking, the archaeologists believe they are indeed digging for gold.