SAN BARTOLO, Guatemala -- In the sweltering bowels of a ruined Mayan pyramid, archeologists 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 archeologists continue to be astonished by the artistic sophistication of the paintings, which predate the Maya's Golden Age by 800 years.

The find, widely considered the most important development in Mayan 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, the team of Guatemalan and US 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. William Saturno, the University of New Hampshire archeologist who discovered the murals three years ago, is optimistic he will be able to piece back together the rest of the murals from rock fragments found inside the chamber.

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 archeologist 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."

The compositions are quite complex, Taube said, and each figure is unique, both in costume and facial expression. The painters were obviously quite experienced. They could not correct their mistakes because the paint is permanent, and they made few of them, even in the fine detail of the images depicting plumes of breath and spouts of blood.

Previously, the earliest known Mayan murals were discovered in 1946 at Bonampak, in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. They date to 796 AD, at the height of the Classic Period. Unlike the Bonampak murals, which depict daily palace life, the scenes at San Bartolo act out different episodes of the supernatural creation myth. They include a scene of the maize god, accompanied by scantily clad maidens and warriors, emerging from a mythical "flower mountain." In another scene, four bloody babies are catapulted out of a water gourd to the farthest corners of the Earth.

Taube has managed to decipher many of the images by comparing them with the "Popol Vuh," a Mayan text written 1,600 years later. "It's really exciting to see the ideology full-fledged, and the `Popol Vuh' being spelled out on the wall in San Bartolo at 50 BC," said Mary Miller, a specialist on early Mesoamerican art at Yale University who has only seen photos of the murals. "We didn't know that all this was in place -- the compositional complexity, the ability to render the human figure."

The existence of sophisticated murals at a relatively small city like San Bartolo was also a surprise, leading Saturno and other experts to conclude that such murals must have decorated pyramids throughout the Pre-Classic world. The murals not only provide a codex of ancient Mayan mythology, but also a key to deciphering early Mayan language. So far, Saturno has uncovered 16 hieroglyphs, more than twice those previously found on shards of pottery and stone slabs. The glyphs also are the first discovered on a fixed site during the Pre-Classic period.

"San Bartolo is going to be the place where we can connect the glyphs with the scenery," said David Stuart, a Harvard archeologist who is in charge of decoding the hieroglyphs found at the site. To his surprise, Stuart, who recently returned from a month in San Bartolo, said the early glyphs might even be more complicated than those found during the Classic Period. But he won't know for sure until he learns how to read them. So far, he has deciphered only one of the glyphs, which means "lord" and forms part of a caption next to a scene depicting a king's coronation.

For now, the murals are likely to remain off limits to the public, to keep them safe from looters and fluctuating humidity levels. San Bartolo is too remote to make it viable as a tourist attraction, even if the Guatemalan government had the money to build access roads, develop the site, and provide adequate security. But painted replicas soon may be on display at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and in Guatemala City.

[News source: Boston Globe]