New finds rewriting the history of Mayans

On the sacred walls and inside the dark passageways of ancient ruins in Guatemala, archaeologists are making discoveries that open expanded vistas of the vibrant Maya civilization in its formative period, a time reaching back more than 1,000 years before its celebrated Classic epoch.

The intriguing finds, including art masterpieces and the earliest known Maya writing, are overturning old ideas of the Preclassic period. It was not a kind of dark age, as once thought, of a culture that emerged and bloomed in Classic times, at places like the spectacular royal ruin at Pelanque beginning about A.D. 250 and extending to its mysterious collapse around 900.

At the derelict ceremonial center of pyramids and wide plazas, a site in remote northeastern Guatemala known as San Bartolo, archaeologists have uncovered the unexpected remains of murals in vivid colors depicting the Maya mythology of creation and kingship.

The murals date to 100 B.C., and nearby, a column of hieroglyphs, a century or two older, attests to an already well-developed writing system.

News of the discoveries, announced in the last six months by an American-Guatemalan team led by Dr. William A. Saturno of the University of New Hampshire, is reverberating through the small community of Mayanists.

They see these and other recent finds as strong evidence for the early origin and remarkable continuity of the culture's concepts of cosmology and possibly governance over more than a Preclassic millennium.

The Classic splendor was no sudden, unanticipated efflorescence.

Coming away from a visit to San Bartolo, Dr. Michael D. Coe, a retired Yale Mayanist who was not involved in the work, called the murals "one of the greatest Maya discoveries of all time."

Dr. Stephen Houston, of Brown, said, "We are entering a golden age of Preclassic study," adding that the discipline of Maya research "will be marked by a time before the discovery of these paintings in the jungle of Guatemala, and a time thereafter." Other experts have already focused new research on Preclassic ruins, some dating at least to 900 B.C., and are reinterpreting finds in light of the San Bartolo evidence.

"San Bartolo has created excitement and momentum for investigations deeper into the Preclassic period," said Dr. Julia Guernsey, a specialist in art history and Maya iconography at the University of Texas. "More attention is being paid to the antecedents of the Classic Maya."