A newly discovered stone panel at the Classic Period Maya (AD 250-900) center of La Corona in Guatemala has confirmed the identification of that site as the long-sought Maya center once only known as "Site Q".
During the 1960s, between 30 and 35 stone panels carved with Maya hieroglyphic symbols became known to scholars. The panels had apparently been looted from an unknown classic period Maya capital city and acquired by museums all over the world. The panels were of high quality limestone and contained references to a previously unidentified city marked with a snakehead glyph emblem. Peter Mathews, then a Yale graduate student and now at LaTrobe University, gave the unidentified Maya city the name of Site Q (short for 'Site ¿Que?' or 'which site?' in Spanish). Several of the glyphs on the panels illustrate athletes, ball players of the ancient Mesoamerican ball game in which players bet their lives. One athlete in particular is named on at least two panels; his name translates to Red or Great Turkey, and he appears on this panel from Site Q now in the Chicago Art Institute.
Mystery of Site Q
The location of Site Q has been one of the great mysteries for scholars of the Maya civilization. Because it seemed unlikely that a Maya capital city would go undiscovered for so long, candidates for Site Q included the known sites of Calakmul and El Peru, also called Waka. But neither really fit the bill, for stylistic reasons: the steles and glyph panels recovered from Calakmul and El Peru simply did not compare well enough to the mysterious looted panels. There was clearly a connection between Calakmul and Site Q, but it didn't appear that they were one and the same. In 1996, a previously unknown Maya capital named La Corona was discovered in the jungles of the Peten peninsula, near RÃo San Pedro in northern Guatemala in the Laguna del Tigre region. La Corona had been severely looted, but scholars began to think that it was possible that the site represented Site Q.
A Crown of Five Temples
The La Corona site, as reported in Archaeology magazine when it was discovered in 1996, was called that because it had a row of five temples that looked like a crown to researchers Ian Graham and David Stuart of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Although La Corona has experienced extensive looting, enough of the site remains to identify a main plaza about half the size of a football field. Two tall structures and an acropolis make up most of the intact portion of the site. The west side of the plaza has mounds and two Maya altars, one of which is inscribed with the date May 2, AD 636, the 20th anniversary of the ascension of one of Maya rulers of Calakmul. Although there are no ballcourts, a typical feature of Maya cities, there are ballplayers illustrated on the stele, including one called Red or Great Turkey-the same Red or Great Turkey mentioned on the looted stele now at the Art Institute.
The Right Text
In 1997, researchers were excited but cautious about identifying La Corona with Site Q. Over the next few years, David Stuart demonstrated the correlation between La Corona and the Site Q panels after he conducted petrographic analysis that suggested a common quarry for a plain stone block at La Corona and at least one Site Q monument in the collections of the Hudson Museum in Maine. In 2005, a team of researchers working at La Corona, including Marcello Canuto of Yale University, confirmed that La Corona is Site Q. A panel found in place at La Corona is carved with over 140 hieroglyphic symbols and is thus one of the longest Mayan texts found in Guatemala in recent decades. More importantly, "This panel exactly mirrors the style, size, subject matter, and historical chronology of the Site Q texts," reports Canuto.
In addition to Canuto, the team includes David Freidel, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University. Other researchers include a mapping team of Damien Marken and Lia Tsesmeli, and epigrapher Stanley Guenter, all of Southern Methodist University. The study was supported by the National Geographic Society, the El Perú-Waka' Archaeological Project directed by David Freidel and Héctor Escobedo, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Sources
This site description is part of the Guide to the Maya Civilization and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
This article was written based primarily on news reports from Yale University, and the following articles in Archaeology magazine:
Angela M.H. Shuster. 1997. The Search for Site Q. Archaeology 50(5):42-45.
Ian Graham. 1997. Mission to La Corona. Archaeology 50(5):46.
Images courtesy Roan McNab; thanks to Marcello Canuto and David Friedel with assistance on this article; any mistakes are mine.
