Artistry of Mayan murals stuns scientists

SAN BARTOLO, Guatemala -- In the sweltering bowels of a ruined Mayan pyramid, a 10-hour drive to the nearest grocery store, archaeologists are painstakingly uncovering 2,000-year-old murals that elaborately depict an early creation mythology.

Though they have been chipping away at the rock face for more than two years, the archaeologists continue to be astonished by the artistic sophistication of the paintings, which predate the Maya's Golden Age by 800 years.

"It's as if you didn't know the existence of the Renaissance," said William Saturno, the University of New Hampshire archaeologist who discovered the murals three years ago. "You know the art of the 19th century and you think it's the high point . . . when suddenly someone stumbles into the Sistine Chapel and looks at the moment where God touches the hand of Adam."

Saturno's find, widely considered the most important development in Mayan archaeology archeology in 50 years, has provided an unprecedented window into the Pre-Classic Maya, the dominant civilization inhabiting southern Mexico and northern Central America from 1,000 BC to 250 AD.

Since the discovery, Saturno's team of Guatemalan and U.S. archaeologists archeologists has uncovered the two standing walls of the murals, which are contained within a partially ruined chamber at the back of a 75-foot pyramid. Mayan builders knocked in the two other walls to allow them to construct another layer, onion-style, on top of the existing structure. But Saturno is optimistic he will be able to piece back together the rest of the murals from rock fragments found inside the chamber.

He also has set up a field school at San Bartolo, inviting six undergraduate students, most from UNH, to join in the excavation work this spring.

The paintings, which Saturno believes are from about 50 BC, have transformed thinking on the Pre-Classic Maya, revealing that they had both an elaborate written language and sophisticated paintings.

"This is a unique view to look on what the late Pre-Classic Maya thought about themselves and their relationship to the world," said Karl Taube, an archaeologist at the University of California at Riverside who is the project's iconographer, responsible for studying the murals' symbols and images. "It's almost like a bible."

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