William Booth, "Whispers From a Maya Tomb: In a mystery of the past, a warning for the future." Washington Post National Weekly Edition, p. 10, 6/10-16, 1991. Dos Pilas, Guatemala-In an isolated jungle clearing here, archaeologists are excavating the tomb of a pivotal Maya overlord whose lust for blood and land may have plunged an entire civili- zation into war and ecological disaster 1,200 years ago. Racing against the coming rainy season and rearing armed looters, Vanderbilt University Prof. Arthur Demarest and an international team of researchers have uncovered the jade-be- decked skeleton of a robust man in his forties believed to be the long-sought "Ruler 2." A king with a hunger for political hegemony, the still un- named Ruler 2, Demarest suspects, may have profoundly altered the way the Mayas fought their wars and thus brought about the collapse of the New World's most advanced and enigmatic ancient civilization. Demarest's ideas are controversial and still unproved. Yet this season's fieldwork has uncovered growing evidence that the Mayas descended into an era of violence so widespread it led to what one scholar calls, "complete social chaos." Even Demarest's critics now agree he is unearthing evidence that the Maya world became extremely violent before it collapsed. "It was medieval. It was worse than medieval," Demarest says at his camp at the ruins of Dos Pilas, where 30 scholars work on one of the most ambitious Maya digs ever attempted. "The whole region was gripped by endemic warfare far mor destructive than anything we had ever imagined." Tunneling down from the top of an eroded pyramid at Dos Pilas, through 30 feet of dangerously loose rubble, the archaeol- ogists and their Guatemalan tunnelistas discovered the tomb in April. After punching through a sidewall of the dirt-filled crypt, the researchers ran into a virtual cocoon of chert, fine- grained, tough rock, and the razor-sharp chips of a volcanic glass called obsidian. Obsidian and chert are two traditional marks of a royal burial in the Maya world. Another clue to the presence of the tomb was Stella 8, a limestone obelisk which says that the king is buried in the plaza. Energized by the rush of discovery and the music of Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, Demarest and his Guatemalan colleague Hector Escobedo have been digging late into the night, exposing the yellowed skeleton with the help of dental picks and sable brushes. In addition to a headdress and jade beads, the two in May discovered a pink Spondylus seashell resting in the ruler's lap. Such shells were used in the bloodletting rituals pursued by Maya royalty, including almost certainly Ruler 2. On special occa- sions, the nobility would run spiked ropes through their tongues or would lance their penises with stingray spines. The blood loss may have produced the hallucinations sought by the royals, who bled to nourish the gods and probably to mesmerize their people. In seeking their visions, the Maya royals also employed hallucinogenic enemas made from toad secretions. The tomb of Ruler 2 also contains more important, though less gruesome, objects. The dead king, whose reign is chronicled in Maya inscriptions but whose name is still unclear, is sur- rounded by beautifully preserved feasting trays covered with icons and hieroglyphs. It is the glyphs that make Demarest's eyes pop, for the symbols may help the scholars crack one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the Maya civilization suddenly collapse. From Vanderbilt Prof. Steven Houston's reading of icons and hieroglyphs on limestone obelisks, polychrome pots and ceremonial staircases, Demarest and his colleagues have concluded that Ruler 2 and his successorsDreferred to as Ruler 3 and Ruler 4Dwere driven to greatly expand their territory in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., perhaps to control trade routes for exotic items such as obsidian, jade, shells and feathers. At its height, Kingdom of Dos Pilas covered about 1,500 square miles and included several major centers, making it the largest in the Maya world. Yet the rulers could not maintain their control. The center did not hold. Somehow over a period of 50 years, according to the dates in the hieroglyphs, the region broke into cities. The picture Demarest paints is hellish, with great ceremoni- al centers converted into fortresses surrounded by deep moats and hastily constructed ramparts, where shallow graves dot the landscape and farmers had to defend their fields. "As their hegemony crumbled, it all went to pieces," says Maya scholar David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "It was anarchy. It became the total chaos that is the aftermath of war. It was a Lebanon." Until Ruler 2 ascended the throne, war was waged mainly by nobles to take a few key captives. These unfortunates were dragged throughout the kingdom from city to city, often for years, where they were bled and tortured before the crowds. Such scenes of torture and ridicule are preserved in sculpture and on carved monuments, complete with the dates of public displays of bloodletting. Bloodletting was dome by both captors and cap- tives, though there is evidence that captives eventually were decapitated. Where Maya warfare was once limited to noblemen, Demarest and his allies now maintain that "a domino effect" of widespread violence ultimately engulfed the entire civilization, which all but disappeared from the souther lowlands of Guatemala around 800 A.D. Demarest's contention that warfare led to the demise of the Maya is still tentative. Many pieces of the puzzle are missing or open to conflicting interpretations. There is currently a vigorous debate, even in Demarest's own camp, over whether warfare led to ecological collapse or whether environmental strains of overpopulation and soil depletion came first and led to warfare. This season however, Demarest says the evidence has begun to bolster the case of widespread war as the triggering factor, at least in the Kingdom of Dos Pilas. For example, archaeologists working at Dos Pilas and sur- rounding sites have found miles of what Demarest calls "defensive ramparts." Unlike other retaining walls, built for ceremony or for drainage, excavations this year show the ramparts were built late in the city's history and appear to be hastily constructed, thrown together with loose rock or cut stone pulled off the ceremonial pyramids and temples themselves, an act Demarest says he believes was the work of a desperate people. At the ruins at nearby Punta de Chimino, Guatemalan archae- ologist Claudia Wooley is excavating moats and walls constructed to protect the center. The most dramatic is a seasonally inun- dated moat cut 30 feet into bedrock and edged by a 30-foot-high wall of loose rock. Based on excavations this season, Wooley says that building the moat-and-wall system would have required three times as much labor as building the entire city of Punta de Chimino. Wooley says she believes turning such attention to defense, and away from productive and peaceful activities such as farming and temple building, illustrates how war came to dominate the entire culture. The archaeologists also have found about 70 broken lance points along the outside of walls, which Demarest sees as evi- dence of a battle fought in the twilight of Maya civilization. "My critics say the walls may have been ceremonial or symbolic," Demarest says. "Symbolic, hell. They were used for defense." Moreover, at Dos Pilas, Vanderbilt researcher Joel Palka is unearthing evidence that the population withdrew into the city center, previously used only for ceremony, and built houses there. The entire central plaza is carpeted with pebbled floor- ing and cornerstones. It appears the houses were built virtually on top of each other. The archaeologist says such a settlement pattern is highly unusual for the Mayas and suggests that people were gathered in the city center for protection. Such evidence of intense warfare, Demarest contends, could have led to ecological collapse. The soils of the rain forest are shallow, and in many areas, poor in nutrients. If warfare spread across the land, Demarest thinks it could have pushed an already stressed and perhaps overextended population over the edge, especially in a setting where ordinary farmers for the first time had to defend their cornfields and settlements against outside attackers, and perhaps from each other. Indeed, other researchers such as T. Patrick Culbert of the University of Arizona have found evidence that the Maya popula- tions grew too large to be sustained by the land and that several years of droughtDor perhaps even Demarest's version of war- fareDcould have brought collapse. Near the ruins of Punta de Chimino, researchers Tom Killion of Boston University and Nick Dunning of the University of Cincinnati are uncovering terraced fields worked by the Mayas. Such intensive agriculture would have preserved the soil from rapid erosion and supported large populations. Killion and Dunning also are finding tantalizing evidence that the Maya populations were far more dense than settlements in the region today, with clusters of buildings every few hundred feet. The two estimate that as many as 15,000 people lived in an area populated today by just a few hundred Guatemalans. "There are signs that the Maya were playing a dangerous game, with rising populations and limited carrying capacity," Dunning says. "It looks like they lost the game." In the rise and fall of the ancient Maya, Demarest and his co-workers see a sweeping political and environmental drama, a sort of morality play that runs backward and forward in time, explaining the past and perhaps foretelling the future. For if the Mayas' ever-escalating cycle of violence contrib- uted to an environmental collapse, as Demarest maintains, there may be lessons for today. The researchers fear the modern descendants of the Mayas, who are now swarming into the Petexbatun region around Dos Pilas, may be about to repeat history. A visitor driving to the ruins of Dos Pilas crosses a surreal landscape of smoldering forest. Much of it has been burned over the past three years by Indians speaking Mayan dialects, who are pouring out of their homeland in the highlands of Guatemala and settling in the Petexbatun lowlands, where they pursue a style of slash-and-burn agriculture that environmental experts say cannot long be sustained. Concerned over the destruction, the U.S. Agency for Interna- tional Development has taken the unusual step of helping fund Demarest's excavations in the hope that a better understanding of Maya practices, both good and bad, might help Guatemalans today. The National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities and several private companies also have contribut- ed to the dig. BOOTH-01.ART