for December 7, 2024
This was the first day visiting a site. I wanted to get something down before, like the stucco of the Maya it all gets washed away in my mind. As I write this it is the evening December 12th. So much has happened. My Oura ring has told me I have easily reached my step count goal every day.
Our first site was Xpubil. Not on the itinerary I had. In fact, many of the sites weren’t on my itinerary. We had to be nimble and switch as events warranted it. Yesterday, we failed to go to our second site because we couldn’t find a way to get to it, even though we knew where it was on the map.
The Mayan Railroad is being built and it is a huge project. Double tracks encircling much of the Yucatan. Every site that it visits is getting a new huge entrance and makeover.
In Calakmul, we were the first visitors to their new museum. The President of Mexico comes this weekend, but we saw it first.
Because David Stuart is our tour expert and is the world’s leading authority on the Mayan glyphs, and because everybody in the Mayan world of archaeology knows him, and because he’s the person who figured out their hieroglyphs – we get to see some pretty special things. Doors were opened to us that are typically closed to the public. David was asked on this tour to look at some recently discovered artifacts and to give his opinion as to what they were and what they meant. We were shown unpublished objects and in some cases not allowed to photograph them for fear that their existence would get out in the world before the official announcements. This is all par for the course for David.
So let me reconstruct the tour so far, we have one more day to go and I’m not sure what site we will see. I can say this. It’s not the one on my itinerary. Or, if it is, what I heard is way different than what I see spelled.
Dec 7 – Xpubil
Dec 8 – Calakmul
Dec 9 – Calakmul
Dec 10 – Balamcú
– Chicanna
Dec 11 – Hormiguero
– Chakabakan (Caobas) – not foud
Dec 12 – Dzibanche
– K’inichna
– projects associated K’inichna but under construction
The two biggest sites, and best known, are Calakmul and Dzibanche. Dzibanche was known, but its size was not, until recent discoveries and LIDAR showed how huge it is. Much is still waiting to be uncovered there. Calakmul has been known since 1932. It has over 140 stelae (stone monoliths). Due to the poor quality of the limestone most are unreadable, but they nonetheless are impressive. Four or six will be standing in front of a temple. Many are square as opposed to rectangular and thus they seem more like soldiers. Silent sentinels standing guard for centuries. Tipping a bit and often in juxtaposition to one another. They remind me of the moai of Rapanui (Easter Island).
I am drawn back in my mind to early pictures of such stelae discovered in the early Twentieth Century and photographed with glass plate cameras in black and white. The stone lends itself to black and white because that is its primary coloring.
It was a biologist who was led to this place in `32. I wonder if he was as stunned as Henri Mouhot was when he first glanced upon Angkor almost one hundred years before?
By the 1930s the “Lost Cities” genre was fading perhaps as a literary genre, but it was alive and well in Hollywood. King Solomon’s Mines came out as a movie in 1937 based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel. (and then again as a movie in 1985. Haggard also did a story about the Maya, The People of The Mist.
The theme of lost civilizations and undiscovered cities has never really gone away. Not in books, or movies, or explorers’ hearts be they six or sixty.
Calakmul evokes that feeling for me. The silent sentinels – askew but standing. Battered by time but unbowed. The old soldiers still at their stations. Remembering the glory and awaiting its return.
Waiting. Quietly waiting.
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