Mysterious altar found in ancient Mayan city contains bodies – and wasn’t made by the Maya

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Archaeologists working in an ancient Mayan city have unearthed a mysterious 1,700-year-old altar whose bright decorations and grim contents may hold the key to unraveling the complex geopolitics of the time.

Despite finding the altar in Tikal, a ruined Mayan city situated in modern Guatemala, archaeologists believe it wasn’t decorated by Mayans. Instead, they say it was the work of artists trained 630 miles away in Teotihuacan – a powerful city close to modern-day Mexico City that exerted a strong influence over the region.

Before this discovery, which was published on Tuesday in the journal Antiquity, archaeologists already knew that the two cultures interacted, though the nature of the relationship was disputed.

But the ornately decorated altar, with two bodies buried beneath, confirms that “wealthy leaders from Teotihuacan came to Tikal and created replicas of ritual facilities that would have existed in their home city,” said co-author Stephen Houston, a professor at Brown University who specializes in Mayan culture.

“It shows Teotihuacan left a heavy imprint there,” he added in a statement.

Houston and his co-authors from the US and Guatemala began excavating the site in 2019, after scans of the area revealed structures under what they previously thought was a natural hill.

As they investigated, they discovered this altar, which still bears the faint outlines of a person wearing a feathered headdress on each panel and traces of bright red, black and yellow paints. Such a design resembles other representations of a deity known as the “Storm God,” more common in Teotihuacan than Mayan art.

Two bodies were buried underneath the altar – one probably an adult male and the other a small child aged between 2 and 4 years old, who was buried in a seated position much more commonly seen in Teotihuacan than in Tikal.

The bodies of three other infants were discovered around the altar, buried in a similar way to other infant graves in Teotihuacan. The authors didn’t specify what caused their deaths.

These cultural practices point toward the increasing Teotihuacan influence in Tikal, the researchers said in their paper.

And the fact that these buildings were subsequently buried and never built on again “probably speaks to the complicated feelings (the Maya) had about Teotihuacan,” said co-author Andrew Scherer, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at Brown.

“The Maya regularly buried buildings and rebuilt on top of them,” he said in a statement. “But here, they buried the altar and surrounding buildings and just left them, even though this would have been prime real estate centuries later. They treated it almost like a memorial or a radioactive zone.”

This latest discovery uncovers another layer of the complicated relationship between the two cultures that recent research has revealed.

In the 1960s, researchers found a stone bearing an inscription that described a conflict between the Maya and Teotihuacan, and learnt that “around AD 378, Teotihuacan was essentially decapitating a kingdom,” Houston said.

“They removed the king and replaced him with a quisling, a puppet king who proved a useful local instrument to Teotihuacan.”

This altar was probably built at a similar time to the coup, Scherer said, which eventually propelled the Mayan kingdom to its most powerful point, before it declined around 900 AD.

The findings of this excavation show “a tale as old as time,” Houston added, referring to empires sparring and competing for cultural influence.

“Everyone knows what happened to the Aztec civilization after the Spanish arrived … These powers of central Mexico reached into the Maya world because they saw it as a place of extraordinary wealth, of special feathers from tropical birds, jade and chocolate,” he said. “As far as Teotihuacan was concerned, it was the land of milk and honey.”

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