The Washington Post
Archaeologists announced Wednesday that they have found the oldest intact Mayan mural ever seen, a spectacular colored fresco covered with mud in a hidden room buried within a jungle-cloaked pyramid in northern Guatemala’s Peten wilderness.
University of New Hampshire archaeologist William Saturno said he found the mural accidentally during what appeared to be a futile hunt for Mayan stone monuments at a remote site two day’s journey north from the world-famous classical Mayan ruins at Tikal.
"I wandered into a looters’ trench beneath the pyramid, looking for some shade as much as anything," Saturno said. "When I shined my flashlight up at the wall, there it was. I just started laughing."
What he saw was a 4-foot-long swatch of mural depicting the resurrection of the corn god, a scene from Mayan creation myth recorded in murals and literature and on statues and pottery for more than 2,000 years of Meso-American history.
At first glance, Saturno could tell the mural was about 2,000 years old, because the artistic style closely resembled that of Tikal murals rigorously dated at 100 A.D, while amulets and other ornaments matched those on 100 A.D. figures at Kaminaljuyu, a highland site near present-day Guatemala City.
But the Tikal murals were weatherbeaten fragments from exterior surfaces. What Saturno saw was a 3-foot-tall continuous band — immaculately preserved and painted in black, red and "several shades of yellow," he said.
And the workmanship, although hidden beneath stones and other debris, appeared to extend around the top of the entire room. "We’re talking a minimum 18 meters (nearly 60 feet) of mural," he said.
"We’ve seen nothing like this," said Mayan religion and art specialist Karle Taube of the University of California at Riverside. "We didn’t know there was a mural tradition this elaborate, this early."
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