Thursday 20 July 2017


History of Mayans lost to looters

IT looked like an odd shaped hill in the jungle, until the looters' tunnels came into view. At the end of the biggest tunnel there was a hollow chamber, the ceiling burnt black by the thieves' fiery torches, in what was once a Mayan pyramid.

Had the looters not been first, the room might have contained the skeleton of a Mayan king or Shaman priest, decked out in jade jewellery, with bowls and pots laid out beside him.

The bowls would have been painted with drawings and hieroglyphics, intended to remind the spirit of the dead lord of what he had done in his life with the directions to resurrection. But the treasures had been carried away, leaving only limestone walls.

This is Las Milpas in Belize, in the ninth century a great Mayan city but long since reclaimed by the jungle. The archaeologists were beaten to the site by many years.

The Mayan civilisation is enjoying a boom in popularity, as visitors from the US and Europe join organised tours, tracing the most important sites: Palenque in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala and Copan in Honduras. As the international appetite for Mayan culture grows, however, so does the demand for artefacts and so does the lucrative illegal trade.

Satellite images show that there could be up to 4,000 sites that archaeologists have not yet found. But the likelihood is that the looters have already been there - Mayan jade figurines fetch tens of thousands of pounds on the international art market.

Stelae, man-high stone tablets, once adorned the Mayan cities, telling of the deeds of the Mayan kings. They are prized by collectors but normally too big to move, so looters use chain saws to cut off the carved facings or slice them into smaller chunks that will then become coffee tables for the rich in the US, Europe and Japan.

With the stelae goes the history of the city. In front of the stelae was usually a circular altar, also carved, and often depicting a man bound and bleeding - one of the sacrificial victims that the Mayan gods demanded.

In Belize and Guatemala, the looting of Mayan sites has become a lucrative illegal trade, second only to drugs, and has attracted the same criminal organisations.

The authorities have few resources to devote to the problem. In Belize, the police rely on archaeologists to investigate thefts. In Guatemala, there is a dedicated 17-strong section, the Police Patrimonial and Environmental section.

The section head, Victor Manuel Salazar, said: "There have been cases we have been told to drop, either because top politicians and senior figures were involved, or foreign diplomats, so our arrest record is not good."

"Don" Valentino Castillo, a wizened old Mayan, has worked at the site of Caracol in Belize for more than 30 years. "The looters come in many forms," he said. He once saw a group of seven looters, armed to the teeth and wearing the uniform of Leftist guerrillas. The Guatemalan civil war was over, and the demobilised rebels had no other way of making a living.

Then there are those he calls the legal looters - the foreign archaeological parties. They are supposed to turn over everything they find to the Archaeological Commission but when a tomb is found they sometimes send away the workers.

The Mayan civilisation disappeared in the 11th century but scholars have been unable to explain why, offering a range of theories including drought, rebellion and disease.

On a tour of the vault at the Archaeology Department in Belize, Mr Thompson pointed out hundreds of beautifully-painted vases, jade artefacts and inscribed bowls. Looted without context to their origins, their fate makes it ever less likely that the secrets of Mayan society, and what happened to it, will ever be revealed.

  • Remains of an advanced civilisation, including pyramids and an irrigation system, have been found in Peru, dating back to 2627BC.

    Archaeologists claimed that the discovery of the city of Caral overturned accepted theories that urban civilisation in the Americas developed around 1500BC.


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