Danger in the Ruins
At first glance, one wouldn't take Freidel for an action figure. Long walks through the jungle and a camp diet heavy on rice, black beans, and thick, handmade corn tortillas keep the 58-year-old Harvard grad in fairly trim shape. But with his longish bangs, beard (the camp only has makeshift showers and no hot water), wire-rimmed glasses, and slightly hangdog look, the celebrity he most resembles is a middle-aged, high-IQ version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo . His evening guitar solos of '60s folk music and penchant for long, eye-crossingly detailed lectures about obscure Maya deities only add to his mild-mannered-professor aura. But as Freidel's last day on the site--known in Spanish as "El Peru" and in Maya as "Waka'" --shows, modern archaeologists are at least as brave as any Hollywood version.
After the hole is opened up in the ceiling of the crypt, graduate student Jennifer Piehl steps into a harness the workers have jury-rigged out of thick yellow nylon rope. (Fellow grad student Michelle Rich, who is running the mound excavation, jokingly calls the harness the "rope diaper.") They thread the rope through a pulley attached to a tripod made from fallen logs. Piehl, a 32-year-old Tulane University graduate student, is lowered into the tomb. She wryly complains that her slight build and childhood training as a gymnast usually win her these contortionist, ghoulish assignments. But her mind quickly turns to the pressing business: "How the hell are we going to do this?"
The crypt ceiling is only about 4 feet above the floor, and there is no place to put her feet that might not crush some hidden artifact. Unhooking herself, Piehl wedges her feet against the walls and crouches. She carefully measures the closest bowl and shouts up the numbers so staff carpenter Fidelino Diaz can build a wooden crate. Then, she starts shooting photographs of every 30 centimeters or so to create a map of the tomb.
Meanwhile, a dozen machine-gun-toting soldiers and park rangers have marched up the mound. In Spanish, Freidel tells the guards that they have just discovered a tomb containing the skeletons and adornments of royal women who died around A.D. 350-400. Back then, this forest was mostly cropland, planted with orchards of fruit trees, corn, beans, and squash. They would have been standing atop a pyramid near the center of a 16-square-kilometer city of 10,000. The green mounds and hills seen from this vista hide the ruins of at least 700 buildings and walls. The freshwater marshes in the area were probably lakes, part of a river system that connected this city to the other major cities of a great Maya empire as sophisticated as anything in Europe at that time. Freidel asks the officers for help protecting the tomb while the archaeologists work, noting that by law, everything discovered here will eventually go to Guatemala's national museum.
Telling them about the discovery is a risk in this nation where 37 percent of the population live on less than $2 a day. Already, many of Waka's steles--4-to-5-feet-tall limestone slabs carved with hieroglyphics telling of important events--have been sawn into pieces and carted off by thieves. That has created huge gaps in the historical record about how this great city grew and why it was mysteriously abandoned in about A.D. 950. And that's not all. Freidel has found hundreds of trenches dug by looters (including some just a few months old). Not surprising, perhaps, bowls not quite as nice as the ones in the crypt were recently valued by Sotheby's at about $10,000 apiece; the auction house says that some of the bowls Freidel has found could go for five times that much.
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