THE fall of the Mayan Civilization left their stuffed-out centres of power and culture to be reclaimed by the jungles of what we now call Guatemala. Tikal, El Mirador, Copan, Tak’alik Ab’aj … so many mighty cities lost for centuries, while lumberjacks and gravediggers kept finding little pieces of them all over the place. Those pieces sustained a booming black market in Mayan artefacts, even after each site was formally discovered and protected.
Huge troves of ceramics, carvings, and funeary jewelery eventually made their way to safety at the National Museum of Mayan Art, Archaeology and Ethnology in Guatemala City. (A vital chunk of sculpted stela, stolen from the Piedras Negras site in the 1960s, was only recently returned there.) But plenty of relics have also wound up in much smaller collections, like the one we come across by chance on a tiny private island in Lake Petén Itzá.
We spy it first from the neighboring island of Flores, which used to be another Mayan settlement known as Noj Petén. Destroyed by the Spanish in the 16th century and later abandoned for some 200 years, Flores is now a brightly painted colonial-style port town lashed to the mainland by a modern concrete causeway. Locals call it “Little Venice” for its prettiness, and proneness to flooding. Certain streets stand half-submerged around the edges of the lake, their lampposts sticking out of the water.
The centre of town is at the top of a hill, in a plaza ringed with fragments from the island’s past life – broken stone tablets inscribed with Mayan heiroglyphics. “But what’s that?” I ask, pointing out across the water to that other little island, where a radio mast rises high over some kind of compound. Our guide Eulogio López Garcia, or “Locho”, tells us that it’s owned by a local family who run the oddest museum of Mayan curios he’s ever seen.
So of course we want to go, and Locho says, “sure”. He does a quick deal with a boatman for a short charter over to the island, the name of which neither of them knows. We are only told when we get there by Magdalena González Galdes, the lovely old lady who meets us on the dock. “We call it Santa Barbara,” she says.
In the distant past, the island was a ceremonial site. Later, it was a municipal wasteground. But she and her late husband bought the place to live on almost 60 years ago, cleaning it up to build a home and a radio station. Radio Petén still broadcasts from her house, playing “a little news and a lot of music”, as Magdalena puts it, from a studio just off the kitchen.
DJ Dalia Jimenez is in there now, responding to live requests via YouTube for Guatemalan pop hits and old marimba favourites. Having raised six kids here, Magdalena is now the island’s only permanent resident, unless you count her cats. “But people are always coming and going,” she says – not least to and from the annex out back, where her husband Emilio, and her son, also named Emilio, made their own museum.
The elder Emilio transmitted to the younger his deep love of reading and keen interest in Guatemala’s indigenous origins, and they both paid close attention to ongoing excavations at nearby Tikal. At the same time, arrowheads and other such finds kept turning up from illegal digs and forest-clearing operations. Many were being sold for cash under the table.
So father and son started buying those bits and pieces, to stop them disappearing out of the country. They duly registered each one with the national Intitute of Anthropology and History (IDAEH), by which means the holder of a given Mayan artifact becomes its authorized custodian. With modest hints of maternal pride Magdalena proceeds to show around us their collection, now stored in what feels like a cluttered garage converted to a treasure room.
Emilio Senior was also into vintage communications tech, so antique telephones and transistor coils stand alongside glass cabinets filled with wooden tribal masks, stone animal totems, flint carvings of the god of corn in profile, obsidian tools that were used to build the Mayan cities of this province. In one display case there’s a well-preserved skull, discovered in nearby Delores, with holes drilled into the teeth for jade ornamentation. “They think this one came from a human sacrifice,” says Magdalena. Her mild, obliging smile is undimmed.
Wandering the ruins of Tikal the next day, I find it that much easier to picture a severed head bouncing down a pyramid of mossy limestone steps at the Temple of the Great Jaguar. Dated to the mid-eighth century, and named for its interior depiction of a king on a throne of jaguar bones, that sepulchural tower now stands as the centrepiece of the site.
Like many movie-lovers I first saw it as a kid, its upper tiers poking through dense forest on an alien planet in Star Wars. (George Lucas came to film scenes at Tikal for its otherworldly affect.) And like many contemporary visitors who know little about the ancient Mayans, I’m more inclined to fixate on their habit of human sacrifice than their knack for uncanny design.
Locho is familiar with the common misconceptions, and he tells me that practice was not as routine as I might think. The high priests of this culture only offered hot blood to the gods when they felt they had to. Founded at a distance from Lake Petén and its adjoining rivers, this city was especially suceptible to drought. This made their god of water most important to appease, and another highlight of Tikal’s main plaza is a monumental carving of his face.
It’s a short walk through the complex to the next plaza, where a discrete set of ruins is known by the classically evocative name of “The Lost World”. There we follow behind a tour group climbing the staircase on a protective scaffold laid over its Great Pyramid. From the top we see sunbeams flare off the hot stones, and surrounding temples seem to float over the jungle – a view so stirring as to quiet the Dutch guy who’s been trying to chat up a local woman in bad Spanish. And the hush provokes an atavistic shiver, as human voices drop away to amplify the throaty squawks of toucans, and the distant screams of howler monkeys.
For all the crowds passing through what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre, in a vast National Park, the animals far outnumber us today, and the place belongs to them. I’m trying to imagine the last men and women who abandoned this city some 1,200 years ago. Their were crops failing, their system collapsing, their people disappearing from the Earth.
Except they didn’t, or not quite. Locho reminds me that their descendants account for some 60% of the present Guatemalan population, comprising 22 ethnic groups with their own tribal bloodlines. His mother was a Maya of the K’iche people, and spoke their language before Spanish, but never talked much about her heritage. “None of her generation did.”
Locho himself only learned about indigenous history while studying to be a guide. Having since visited Tikal many times, he wants to show us to another, older city named Uaxactún, set so much deeper into the national park that few bother to venture that far. At the end of a long, rough road we find the place deserted, and having it to ourselves adds a certain tomb-raiding frission. Tarantulas scarper for their holes as we approach. Bats fly toward our faces from the darkened doorway of what Locho tells us used to be a residential palace.
Jaguars might well be watching from the trees; Locho says he spotted two in his torchbeam before dawn last week. To the Maya those creatures signified nobility, ferocity, and the darkness of night. Their likenesses are sculpted into The Temple of Masks, now believed to be the first astronomical observatory ever built by that culture, circa 800 BCE. Its subtemples were apparently configured to track the solstices and equinoxes, the cycles of Venus, the celestial trajectories. “The stars must have been so much clearer then too,” says Locho.
The sky today is more obstructed by trees, but seasonal rituals of the Mayan calendar have lately been revived on this site, “and they are not just for show,” as Locho puts it. “The culture is still alive.” There is such a thing as a local community too, a village perched so close to the ruins as to share the same name.
Uaxactún, meaning “eight stones”, was bestowed on the ancient city by intrepid American archaeologist Sylvanus Morley, who is credited with its rediscovery in 1916. (Its original name is believed to have been Siaan Ka’an, or “born from heaven”.) But Morley only learned of the location from a neighbouring encampment of gum-tree workers, who had seen the jungle take strange shapes where it grew over those old Mayan geometries.
Gum-extraction is not the industry it was then, and the grass has since covered that camp too. Today there are boys playing football on a field that used to be an airstrip for landing men and equipment at this outpost. Most of those labourers were Mayans, says Locho, hired for their strong and silent dispositions, and they too must be considered ancestral figures in this village. The current residents are actively involved in preserving the ruins on their doorstep, hosting talks and workshops on native tradition through various initiatives that earned them a nomination from the United Nations for “Best Tourism Village” of 2024.
On the long drive back out of Tikal National Park, we pass many more warps and distortions in the forest, where roots and vines suggest the silhouette of something else. Locho tell us any one of those weird contours might yield another tower or chamber or altar from a long-lost metropolis. Archaeologists would love to explore them all if they were granted the access and resources, while most people who live around here would rather they gave it a rest. “We can’t keep digging up everything if we want to protect nature at the same time.”
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