Tomb Raiders Threaten Mayan City's History

At the famed Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, you can sit in the cafe, have a slice of basil pesto quiche, and gaze up at stunning evidence of the looting of the ancient world.

The dining room is dominated by an 8-foot-tall carved limestone monument, or stela, of a Mayan king.

"He's shown in all his regalia, with an elaborate headdress, various ornaments hanging from his belt and jade belt pendants," says Timothy Potts, the Oxford-educated director of the Kimbell. "It's so rich. It's so lively. It's a tapestry; every square inch is covered with something."

Despite his obvious admiration for the stela, Potts says that it was likely looted from its original site in the 1960s, taken out of Guatemala and sold.

So how did this stela get from the jungles of Central America to a Forth Worth art museum?

El Peru-Waka

In Guatemala's Peten Province, not far from the Mexican border, is the archaeological site of the Mayan city El Peru-Waka, which means literally "centipede place with water in it." The city of about 4,000 people flourished between 100 B.C. and A.D. 800, with plazas and pyramids and orchards. It was ruled by the dynasty of the Centipede Kings.

Now, all that's left of the limestone structures are great mounds covered with vegetation. In the trees, militias of howler monkeys defend their real estate.

Read the full story here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10416454

Aztec Offerings Found in Bottom of Mexico Lake

Artifacts of wood sit in a bucket in an archaeological site in the crater of the extinct Nevado de Toluca volcano. Archaeologists have found wooden lightning bolts that Aztecs offered to their rain god Tlaloc at the lake. Credit: Marco Ugarte/AP

MEXICO CITY — Archaeologists diving into a lake in the crater of a snowcapped volcano found wooden scepters shaped like lightning bolts that match 500-year-old descriptions by Spanish priests and conquerors writing about offerings to the Aztec rain god.

The lightning bolts — along with cones of copal incense and obsidian knives — were found during scuba-diving expeditions in one of the twin lakes of the extinct Nevado de Toluca volcano, at more than 13,800 feet above sea level.

Scientists must still conduct tests to determine the age of the findings, but the writings after the Spanish conquest in 1521 have led them to believe the offerings were left in the frigid lake west of Mexico City more than 500 years ago.

Lightning bolt scepters “were used by Aztec priests when they were doing rites associated with the god Tlaloc,” said Johan Reinhard, an anthropologist and explorer-in-residence for National Geographic Society who took part in more dives Thursday at the Lake of the Moon. “We think it is pretty clear that the Aztecs considered this one of the more important places of Tlaloc.”

Read the full story here: http://www.livescience.com/history/070527_ap_aztec_artifacts.html

Aztec Math Decoded, Reveals Woes of Ancient Tax Time

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

April 3, 2008

Today's tax codes are complicated, but the ancient Aztecs likely shared your pain.

To measure tracts of taxable land, Aztec mathematicians had to develop their own specialized arithmetic, which has only now been decoded.

By reading Aztec records from the city-state of Tepetlaoztoc, a pair of scientists recently figured out the complicated equations and fractions that officials once used to determine the size of land on which tributes were paid.

Two ancient codices, written from A.D. 1540 to 1544, survive from Tepetlaoztoc. They record each household and its number of members, the amount of land owned, and soil types such as stony, sandy, or "yellow earth."

"The ancient texts were extremely detailed and well organized, because landowners often had to pay tribute according to the value of their holdings," said co-author Maria del Carmen Jorge y Jorge at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, Mexico.

The Aztecs recorded only the total area of each parcel and the length of the four sides of its perimeter, Jorge y Jorge explained.

Officials calculated the size of each parcel using a series of five algorithms—including one also employed by the ancient Sumerians—she added.

Read the full story here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080403-aztec-math.html

Ancient Seeds Sow Debate Over Sunflower-Farming Origins

Scott Norris
for National Geographic News

April 28, 2008

Sunflowers were grown as a domesticated crop in Mexico more than 2,000 years ago, according to a new study. The new findings run counter to a theory that sunflower farming began in what is now the U.S. East and then trickled south into Mexico.

Plant remains discovered in a dry cave suggest that farmers in Mexico were cultivating sunflower strains with large seeds by around 300 B.C.

A 2001 study by the same team had found evidence of Mexican sunflower domestication as early as 2600 B.C., but that finding was controversial.

A Smithsonian Institution expert on early agriculture has argued that the remains described by the team in 2001 had been incorrectly identified as sunflowers.

Eastern U.S. Origins

Sunflowers were a cultivated food crop in what is now the eastern United States 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, most experts agree.

But did sunflower farming spread south from eastern North America to Mexico and beyond? Or did ancient Mexicans develop sunflower farming on their own?

The latest evidence supports an independent origin for Mexican sunflower farming, said study leader David Lentz of the University of Cincinnati.

Read the full story here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080428-sunflowers-mexico.html