Danger in the Ruins
Then, in a scene that even Piehl admits "is sooo Indiana Jones," the crate, handmade of a local, rusty, red-colored wood, is loaded up on two poles. The local workers, with short, powerful, copper-colored bodies, and 2-foot-long machetes dangling from their belts, heft the poles onto their shoulders. They carry the crate, Ark of the Covenant-style, down the steep, treacherous path to the four-wheel-drive pickup waiting on the road to the camp. The workers laugh as they slip down the narrow jungle path, lined with palm trees bristling with 2-inch thorns that can break off in the skin and quickly become infected. Miraculously, everybody manages to arrive at the road unharmed. There are wide grins as the workers and archaeologists pile into the back of the truck, which creeps back to camp.
Over a dinner of rice, beans, and tortillas, the archaeologists turn to the less obvious dangers of the site. The mosquitoes that breed in the marsh next to their sleeping tents and lab buildings not only carry diseases like malaria but, occasionally, the eggs of the botfly. When deposited in human flesh, the larvae eat an air hole and then keep chomping away at the host's flesh until ready to pupate. A vigorous debate ensues over the best way to remove the botfly. One person swears that dangling a piece of raw meat over the air hole will lure the worm out. Another says that covering the air hole with electrical tape will suffocate it.
Shoptalk. After dinner, the cooks, diggers, and tradesmen crowd into the screened-in laboratory building to watch the opening of the crate. As Freidel declares the bowl a masterpiece, one of the students translates into Spanish. Because Piehl and Rich can find no evidence of disease or trauma in the bones, Freidel theorizes the two young women, one of whom was pregnant, were royal family members sacrificed as a part of a ritual to bring back a king or other very high figure. This discovery would then further debunk the old stereotype of the Maya as a peaceful, star-gazing civilization. Archaeologists have in recent years discovered plenty of evidence of self-mutilation and human sacrifice by the Maya. "The Maya were not a peaceful people," says Freidel, but they were no more bloodthirsty than any other civilization, he adds, citing bloody sacrifices and massacres perpetrated by everyone from the ancient Greeks to our own contemporaries.
The aim of these lectures is not only to educate the local Maya descendents about their own history but to give them the knowledge they'll need to take paying tourists here. Since he started excavating in 2003, Freidel has traveled to four of the poor farming communities around the park, making sure to hire at least a few workers (at above-market wages) from each. There is no way the two private guards Freidel pays can possibly defend 16 square kilometers of ruins. His only hope, he says, is that "the local people will defend the site because it is a source of income for them."
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