On a bright, buggy morning in early summer, Charles Golden, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, slashed through the knee-high grass of a cattle ranch deep in the Valle de Santo Domingo. The loud half-roar, half-bark of howler monkeys were the only ones who could hear the call of the cicadas. Dr. Golden said that they are going to what's left of the dynasty.
The ruins of a Maya settlement at least 2,500 years old can be seen beyond a barbed wire fence. There were reminders of lost grandeur: giant heaps of rock and rubble that used to be temples, plazas, reception halls and a huge palace.
The acropolis consisted of a complex of platforms. It was dominated by a pyramid that may have killed members of the royal family. Walls of cut stone were torn down where the pyramid used to stand. Most of the free-standing relief sculptures at the entrance to the pyramid were either hacked off or buried in the debris.
The alley was 350 feet long and 16 feet wide and had sloping sides. The game required players to hold a rubber ball aloft with only their hips and shoulders. Commoners would have gathered for public ceremonies and kings would have held court in a row of stones nearby. The courtyard is now a mound. He said that the rulers of the Sak Tz'i sought to command their subjects and engage with the politics of the landscape over which they struggled for control.
The White Dog, in the language of ancient Maya inscriptions, was an ally and foe of several of the largest and most powerful players in the region. When the civilization counted its greatest achievements in architecture, engineering, astronomy and mathematics, the dynasty flourished.
Hundreds of settlements were abandoned and entire regions were left deserted during the ninth century. Although descendants still live in the region, the jungle canopy hides plazas and causeways. The memory of Sak Tz'i' was wiped clean.
In 1994, scholars began searching for physical evidence of the realm after learning that a glyph described the capture of a king.
Three summers ago, a team of researchers and local work crews led by Dr. Golden discovered the remains of dozens of stone stelae, cooking tools and the corpse of a middle-aged woman who had died. The site was colonized by 750 B.C. and occupied until the end of the Classic period. The cattle ranch was the capital of the dynasty.
Simon Martin, a curator at the Penn Museum of the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the project, said that the evidence provided by the two researchers and their colleagues made a strong case.
While the discovery of a new monument commissioned by a Sak Tz'i ruler is equally telling, the carcasses of looted monuments at this site match some of them.
Since the late 1990s, Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer have been working together. They were the first to document new fortifications at the Late Classic Maya sites of Tecolote and Oso Negro.
The divisions of labor come down to the areas of expertise, according to Dr. Golden. The human bones are analyzed by Dr. Scherer.
He was enamored with the artifacts in the Oriental Institute Museum when he was a child. He couldn't be in the same room with the mummies. The Ishtar Gate was one of the pieces that I was enamored with. I was amazed to see fragments from places I'd heard about.
The most important lesson that Dr. Golden learned was as a summer intern at an excavation in Belize. A small ridged tube was pulled from the ground by him while he was digging a test pit. He was certain that it was a pre-Columbian bead. He showed the object to his supervisor and he said someone must have dropped it. Is it macaroni and cheese? The would-be Louis Leakey returned to his pit.
His hair is pulled into a ponytail and he has a beard that covers his chin. When he was in college, he did a field study at an ancient Native American camp. He was taught how to build wigwams by Ojibwe elders.
The Maya culture is the only one in the ancient Americas with a written history that goes back into the first millennium. The names of the kings and queens who ruled the places we study are known.
One of their former research assistants told them about the Lacanj Tzeltal ruins. A graduate student from the University of Pennsylvania was scouting out archaeological digs near the Guatemalan border in order to write a thesis. There is a carnitas stand on the side of the road in the small rainforest town of Nuevo Taniperla. The vendor tried to flag him down.
The doctor drove by the stand again. The vendor was trying to get his attention. The man stopped to chat. The vendor told the doctor that he wanted an archaeologist to look at the stone. He told me that the stone had a Maya calendar and other glyph carvings.
A friend of the vendor showed Dr. Schroder a photo on his cellphone that showed a small wall panel with pictures of ancient Egyptian gods. There was a dancing figure in a headdress with an ax in his hand. The limestone slab was found on the property of a cattle rancher who lived 25 miles away.
Dr. Golden and Dr. Stone figurines and sculptures can be seen in private collections. The vases and other ceramic objects are almost always ancient, while the stone sculptures are usually made for tourists. When someone says, "Come see my pre-Columbian sculpture," we tend to think of a souvenir.
The photo that was sent to them showed a monument with the glyph of the Sak Tz'i dynasty. Permission to dig on the property took four years. The research team used drones and planes to fly over the site in order to see the land and archaeology beneath. Around 750 A.D., the settlement had as many as 1000 inhabitants.
The dig was delayed for two years because of the coronaviruses. The work was preventative maintenance. Fernando Godos, a Mexican anthropologist, and a local crew were hired to reinforce the stone walls of the acropolis in order to keep them from collapsing.
Unusual for the region's bygone kingdoms, low walls surround parts of the excavation site, particularly near the palace. One goal of the next season of research is to determine if the walls were hastily built in the last days of the dynasty or if they were part of the original construction. There is a densely packed stronghold hemmed in by arroyos and steep riverbanks. The wooden palisades may have been reinforced by the stone barricades.
The Maya, with their precise calendars, hieroglyphs, highly productive agricultural system and ability to predict eclipses, were the most enlightened culture of the New World. They didn't use the wheel, metal tools or beasts of burden.
The Maya were the Greeks of the ancient Americas. Even though there were profound political divisions, they built an advanced civilization.
Beyond modern borders, the Maya society extended northward into the Yucatn Peninsula, east into Belize and south through the western part of El Salvadoran and Honduran. The Maya were a patchwork of city-states.
The United States and the Soviet Union had huge kingdoms in the central lowlands. Our team deals with a lot of smaller realms involved in their own sort of political alliances that break down and become conflicts at a really small scale. The history of civilization can be found in the inscriptions on the monuments. The days that had passed since the start of the Maya creation were tracked by the Long Count calendar.
The landscape of the ancient Maya contains ruins whose names are unknown to scholars and where many of the locations of which are now lost are mentioned in hieroglyphs. The pursuit of its identity has been pursued by scholars for over 30 years. What's the reason? The most important of the remaining political actors was Tz'i'.
The most famous mention of the society, aside from stone inscriptions found in museums and private collections, appeared in lintels over doorways at Bonampak, in which the captives are defeated and humiliated.
Although it was narrowed down to a location in eastern Chiapas, it still left hundreds of square miles under tree cover, which it could hide. A computer model that required confirmation was used to triangulate the settlement's geographical coordinates.
False starts occurred. An impressive collection of temples and the largest ball court in the region were found at Plan de Ayutla, which was rediscovered in the mid 1990s. The site appeared to be a likely contender for the place, even though there was no name for it. There has never been any glyphic evidence to link Plan de Ayutla to the kingdom.
Mr. Gomez has a smile with silver in it and he has a firm stare. He and his family live on a cattle ranch. The village of Lacanj Tzeltal was founded in 1962.
Mr. Gomez remembers playing in the rubble as a kid. The monuments and sculptures on the property were instilled in him by his fathers and grandfathers. Mr. Gomez said they reminded him of his heritage. When looters were planning to steal relics, he enlisted the carnitas dealer as a go-between.
Mr. Gomez showed Dr. Scherer around the off-site facility where the most prized relics were kept. There were tools, clay pots, sling stones, grinding stones and a stucco jaguar head. He beamed when he saw the carved flint spear point.
The stone altar was found in the ball court. The spear point, obsidian blades, spiny oyster shells, and fragments of greenstone were found beneath the altar. Dr. Scherer explained that obsidian meant darkness and sacrifice in the Maya. Oyster shells and greenstone were seen as a sign of rebirth in the sea.
The glyph depicted two bound, prostrated captives and the pincers of a monstrous centipede and was created by Dr. Golden.
The 2-by-4-foot wall panel that was the gem of the recovered antiquities was recently dated to 800 A.D. A translation of the inscription by Stephen Houston, an anthropologist at Brown University, revealed tales of battles, rituals, a legendary flood and a mythical water serpent.
The story recorded on the Lacanja Tzeltal tablet is unique to the site and could be an allegory for the construction of the settlement. He said that the stories touched on the community's relationship to the natural environment. The area is frequently flooded.
When each ruler died, how they were remembered and under what circumstances their successors came to the throne are some of the highlights of the glyphs. The ruler of the Sak Tz'i' is depicted in aglyph as the dancing Yopaat. He has an ax in his right hand and a stone club in his left. The missing panel is believed to feature a prisoner of war kneeling in prayer.
Dr. Martin said the findings of Dr. Golden and Dr. Scherer were a major advancement in our understanding of Classic period Maya politics and culture. He said that such discoveries restore history to now lifeless ruins and that they repopulated them with long-dead rulers, nobles, warriors, artisans, merchants, farmers and the whole social matrix of ancient Maya society.
Scott Hutson, an Archeologist at the University of Kentucky who was not involved in the research, said that before the location of Sak Tz'i was pinned down, "archaeologists knew that its rulers engaged in high-stakes diplomacy, sometimes resulting in warfare with powerful neighbors He said that the maps showed that the site was smaller than most of its competitors.
Dr. Golden was standing under an excavation tent at Lacanj Tzeltal. Dust in the air caught the sun's light and the silence of the site echoed. It was like assembling a map of medieval Europe from historical documents and not knowing where Burgundy should go. He said that they had found Burgundy. That is a critical part of the puzzle.
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