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<< Other Photo Pages >> El Peru - Waka - Ancient Village or Settlement in Guatemala

Submitted by bat400 on Wednesday, 24 July 2013  Page Views: 16919

Multi-periodSite Name: El Peru - Waka Alternative Name: Waka'
Country: Guatemala Type: Ancient Village or Settlement

Latitude: 17.267000N  Longitude: 90.383W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
3
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El Peru - Waka
El Peru - Waka submitted by jackdaw1 : The inscriptions on Stela 44 are revealing fascinating clues. Photo credit: Ministry of Culture, Guatemala (Vote or comment on this photo)
Mayan town in Peten State, Guatemala dating from 100 BC to 800AD. The glyphs for the name have been translated a variety of ways, including "the water place" and "town of the centipede kings."

Important Note: The location given is approximate.

Official website:www.archaeologywaka.org/

Note: An intricately carved stone monument discovered, which tells the story of a sixth-century "Snake Queen", see the latest comment on this page
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El Peru - Waka
El Peru - Waka submitted by Andy B : A ceramic pot found in a burial chamber at the El Peru-Waka archaeological site in Laguna del Tigre National Park in Peten, north of Guatemala City. Archaeologists say a stone jar found at burial chamber in northern Guatemala leads them to believe it is the tomb of a great Maya queen. The team of U.S. and Guatemalan experts led by anthropologist David Freidel has also found other evidence, s... (Vote or comment on this photo)

El Peru - Waka
El Peru - Waka submitted by Andy B : An alabaster jar likely depicting Lady K'abel, found inside her tomb at El Peru Waka in Guatemala. Photo by Olivia Navarro-Farr. Site in Guatemala (Vote or comment on this photo)

El Peru - Waka
El Peru - Waka submitted by Andy B : An excavator cleans a jade piece found in a burial chamber at the El Peru-Waka archaeological site in the Laguna del Tigre National Park in Peten, north of Guatemala City. Photo released in June 2012 by the El Peru-Waka Archaeological Project Site in Guatemala (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"El Peru - Waka" | Login/Create an Account | 9 News and Comments
  
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New Finds dated by Runemage on Monday, 18 September 2017
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The tomb of an ancient 'god-king' has been found at the site of the Mayan city of Waka in northern Guatemala.
Ceramic analysis of artefacts found at the site have been provisionally dated to between 300 and 350 AD.
This included a stunning painted jade mask, which was key to identifying the tomb as belonging to a member of the royal lineage.
It makes it the earliest known royal tomb in the northwestern Petén region of the country.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4884636/Tomb-Mayan-god-king-Guatemala.html#ixzz4t2vRpFog
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Secrets of the Mayan Snake Queen at El Peru-Waka by Andy B on Wednesday, 24 July 2013
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Archaeologists tunneling beneath the main temple of the ancient Maya city of El Peru-Waka in northern Guatemala have discovered an intricately carved stone monument with hieroglyphic text detailing the exploits of a little-known sixth-century princess whose progeny prevailed in a bloody, back-and-forth struggle between two of the civilization's most powerful royal dynasties, Guatemalan cultural officials have announced.

"Great rulers took pleasure in describing adversity as a prelude to ultimate success," said research director David Freidel, PhD, a professor of anthropology in Arts &Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "Here the Snake queen, Lady Ikoom, prevailed in the end."

Freidel said the stone monument, known officially as El Peru Stela 44, offers a wealth of new information about a "dark period" in Maya history, including the names of two previously unknown Maya rulers and the political realities that shaped their legacies.

"The narrative of Stela 44 is full of twists and turns of the kind that are usually found in time of war but rarely detected in Precolumbian archaeology," Freidel said.

"The information in the text provides a new chapter in the history of the ancient kingdom of Waka' and its political relations with the most powerful kingdoms in the Classic period lowland Maya world."

Read more at:
http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/secrets-of-the-mayan-snake-queen-at-el-peruwaka/story-e6frfq80-1226681595691

With thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link
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Interviews with the discoverer of the final resting place of Lady K'abel by Andy B on Thursday, 24 January 2013
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The tomb of a Classical Mayan queen has been discovered in Guatemala, in a remarkable find that sheds new light on the role of women in early Mesoamerican cultures.

To find out more about the queen, known as Lady K'abel, and the findings at the El Peru-Waka archeological site, we spoke with the woman who discovered her tomb: Wooster University archaeologist and assistant professor of anthropology Olivia Navarro-Farr.

Navarro-Farr first began her research at El Peru-Waka in 2003. She was trying to address questions about why there was so much ritual activity surrounding a particular temple at the site, and much to her surprise, she got a very decisive answer: these worshippers were venerating a warrior queen.

Who was Lady K'abel?

Lady K'abel ruled the Guatemalan city of El Peru-Waka with her husband, K’inich Bahlam, during the 7th century from 672 to 692, serving as the military governor of the Waka kingdom under the auspices of the House of the Snake King, to which she belonged.

Her official title was "Kaloomte," or Supreme Warrior — which meant that she outranked her husband. Her identification was confirmed by project epigrapher Stanley Guenter in his reading of a series of glyphs inscribed on a small alabaster jar from the tomb.

"She's portrayed on Stela 34 (on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art) wielding a shield and she is accompanied by a dwarf figure, which would have been a member of the Royal Court," says Navarro-Farr.

Read more at
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/science/121010/tomb-mayan-warrior-queen-globalpost-interviews-the-discoverer-the-final
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Profile of Olivia Navarro-Farr and the discovery of a Maya queen's tomb in Guatemala by Andy B on Thursday, 24 January 2013
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It was the offerings heaped among the remains of the ancient Maya building that convinced Olivia Navarro-Farr she had found a sacred place.

There were pieces of household crockery. Bits of ceramic figurines. Carved shells. Handmade whistles. Tool fragments. Jewelry. A grinding stone. A fishing hook. Even shards of human bones. Hundreds of thousands of tokens, accumulating at the structure for more than two centuries, deep in the past. Layers upon layers of simple objects, all precious to their long-dead owners, the citizens of the Maya city that once thrived at this spot in the dense Guatemalan rainforest.

The staggering number and wide range of the tokens reminded Navarro-Farr, an archeologist at the College of Wooster, of the teddy bears, photos and other mementos that mourners lovingly place at modern shrines, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall or the Oklahoma City bombing site. As she and her colleagues returned year after year to dig in the damp jungle, Navarro-Farr grew certain that the relic-strewn building held great ceremonial meaning.
Closeup of jar w bust.JPGView full sizeJuan Carlos Perez, El Peru-Waka Archeological ProjectA close-up view of the alabaster effigy jar, known as a White Soul Flower cache vessel, shows a bust of an elderly woman emerging from a conch shell. The Maya religion holds that the conch shell trumpet is the dwelling place of royal ancestors and gods. The sacred jar is stained red with cinnabar.

Finally, this summer, its significance became clear. Probing beneath a crumbling stone staircase, Navarro-Farr and Guatemalan archeologist Griselda Perez exposed a collapsed, crypt-sized chamber. What they found inside, coupled with a startling clue in the Cleveland Museum of Art, led the team to conclude that they had located the probable tomb of a powerful warrior queen called Lady K'abel, the "Holy Snake Lady" of Seventh-Century Classic Maya Civilization.

Read more at
http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2012/10/college_of_wooster_archeologis.html
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An archaeological smoking gun: the tomb of a Maya warrior queen by davidmorgan on Sunday, 13 January 2013
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Archaeologists in Guatemala believe they may have uncovered the tomb of the 7th-century warrior queen K’abel, one of the great female rulers of Classic Maya civilisation.

The burial was discovered during excavations by a team from Washington University in St Louis investigating the Maya city of El Perú-Waka, about 75km (47 miles) from Tikal.

Interred beneath a series of shrines on the staircase of the site’s main temple, the remains of a mature individual were found surrounded by prestigious grave goods including figurines of gods, ceramic vessels dated to the first half of the 8th century, and large amounts of jade jewellery.

Deterioration of the remains made it hard to say conclusively whether the individual was male or female, but a clue was provided by a large red spiny oyster shell found on their lower torso. Late Classic queens are often depicted wearing such shells as girdle ornaments, while kings are not.

The key find, however, was a small alabaster jar shaped like a white conch with the head and arm of an elderly woman emerging from it. This was inscribed with four glyphs including the titles ‘Lady Waterlily-Hand’, ‘Lady Snake Lord’, and ‘Princess of Calakmul’ – all epithets associated with K’abel.

Considered the greatest ruler of the Late Classic period, K’abel was a member of the imperial Kan (Snake) dynasty. She married a vassal king, K’inich Bahlam II of the Wak (Centipede) kingdom, to help consolidate her father’s empire, and as Kaloomte (‘Supreme Warrior’), she was the Wak kingdom’s military governor, outranking her husband, with whom she ruled for at least 20 years (c.AD 672-692).

Project co-director Professor David Freidel said: ‘She was not only a queen, but a supreme warlord, and that made her the most powerful person in the kingdom during her lifetime.’

The El Perú-Waka Regional Archaeological Project has been working on the site since 2003. This year’s excavation set out to clear and define the architecture of the main temple’s stairway, and to establish its phases of construction. The team were also interested to find out why the temple had continued to be venerated following the fall of the dynasty. Professor Friedel said with this discovery, they might now understand the likely reason: K’abel was buried there.

‘It was a strong working hypothesis that the burial was K’abel’s tomb,’ he said. ‘Nothing is ever proven in archaeology as we are working with circumstantial evidence, but this is as close to a smoking gun as we can get.’

He added: ‘It is possible that this was a later queen who had the item as an heirloom from K’abel, but until we find a candidate for K’abel that is better, this is an especially good one.’
http://www.world-archaeology.com/news/an-archaeological-smoking-gun-the-tomb-of-a-maya-warrior-queen-2/

Submitted by coldrum.
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Tomb of Maya queen K’abel discovered in Guatemala by davidmorgan on Friday, 05 October 2012
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Archaeologists in Guatemala have discovered the tomb of Lady K’abel, a seventh-century Maya Holy Snake Lord considered one of the great queens of Classic Maya civilization.

The tomb was discovered during excavations of the royal Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ in northwestern Petén, Guatemala, by a team of archaeologists led by Washington University in St. Louis’ David Freidel, co-director of the expedition.

A small, carved alabaster jar found in the burial chamber caused the archaeologists to conclude the tomb was that of Lady K’abel.

The white jar is carved as a conch shell, with a head and arm of an aged woman emerging from the opening. The depiction of the woman, mature with a lined face and a strand of hair in front of her ear, and four glyphs carved into the jar, point to the jar as belonging to K’abel.

Based on this and other evidence, including ceramic vessels found in the tomb and stela (large stone slab) carvings on the outside, the tomb is likely that of K’abel, says Freidel, PhD, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences and Maya scholar.

Freidel says the discovery is significant not only because the tomb is that of a notable historical figure in Maya history, but also because the newly uncovered tomb is a rare situation in which Maya archaeological and historical records meet.

“The Classic Maya civilization is the only ‘classical’ archaeological field in the New World — in the sense that like archaeology in Ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia or China, there is both an archaeological material record and an historical record based on texts and images,” Freidel says.

For more, see http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/24167.aspx

Submitted by bat400.
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Resurrecting the Maize King, Figurines from a Maya tomb bring a royal funeral to life by Andy B on Sunday, 10 October 2010
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For two weeks we had been tunnelling beneath the surface of the acropolis hill at the ancient Maya city of Waká in Guatemala's Petén rainforest. It was the spring of 2006, and we knew that under the surface of the acropolis was a virtual layer cake of earlier structures. The acropolis had been one of the city's enduring spiritual centers before it was abandoned around A.D. 820. A large pyramid and several buildings still stand there today.

We were at the bottom of a shaft we had dug the previous spring, working our way up the stairs of a buried building when we encountered a stone wall. Over five days a team led by Field Director Michelle Rich removed the wall and cleared away the dirt behind it. Gradually, it became clear that the wall was part of a tomb whose roof had collapsed. Inside were the remains of an unnamed king who had died in the early seventh century A.D., and was buried with an intriguing array of artifacts.

The variety of luxury items in the tomb is a testament to the kingdom's wealth—intricately carved and painted bones, miniature mosaics of shell and agate, a carved jade talisman, a serpentine figurine already more than a thousand years old when it was placed in the tomb, mirrors faced with pyrite crystals—but the most intriguing find was a carefully arranged set of 23 ceramic figurines between four and nine inches tall wearing the elaborate costumes of Maya nobility.

Unfortunately, most whole Maya figurines that have been available for study were looted from archaeological sites and therefore provide few clues about when they were made or what ritual function they might have served. This collection gave us our first opportunity to study a royal funeral and ritual of resurrection.


More, with images at
http://www.archaeology.org/1009/etc/maya.html
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Cooling US market for Mayan artifacts sends looters elsewhere by bat400 on Thursday, 31 May 2007
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This and the previous comment were submitted by coldrum --

They say the world's second oldest profession is tomb raiding.

In the jungles of northern Guatemala — where the lowland Maya created stunning jewelry, ceramics and reliefs — there was no one better than Ramon Peralta. He was a huechero — a tomb looter.
"If an archaeologist leaves a site, the looters are going to come because he knows it's an interesting site. 'Oh, that's where the gringos went! Man, it has to be an important site. There has to be something there,'" Peralta says.

Like a computer hacker who goes to work for Microsoft, Peralta quit looting five years ago and now serves as a guide for the Wildlife Conservation Society in the vast Peten Province.
"This is never gonna end, never gonna end. Forget it. Peten is huge and anywhere you go in Peten, you'll find monticulos and ruins and other sites, and it's just always going to continue," Peralta says.

The reason it will continue — not just in Guatemala, but in China, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nigeria and Mali, to name just a few countries — is because of the demand, says Richard Leventhal, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading voice in the movement to curtail the trade in looted antiquities.
"I think the connection must be made that the people are looting to look for spectacular objects because there is an art market that will gobble them up and sell them around the world to private dealers and to museums," Leventhal says.

The modern world has made the sacking of archaeological sites even easier — with containerized shipping, overnight mail, Internet auctions and email.


In the United States, the looting of the Iraq Museum helped draw attention to the scope of the illegal trade in antiquities. The FBI responded by creating a rapid deployment Art Crime Team. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has begun training its inspectors, though a senior agent guesses they only catch 5 percent of what's smuggled into the country. What's more, the federal government has signed bilateral agreements with 11 countries that allow it to seize and repatriate stolen antiquities at the border.

But the most effective measure has been targeting the marketplace, says Roger Atwood, a journalist who wrote a book on the subject titled Stealing History. "If we are talking about this as a law enforcement issue, the most sensible way to deal with it is to deal with it at the buyer end where it's much more concentrated. At the supply end, it's much more diffused and difficult to control," Atwood said.

The buyers — auction houses, dealers, collectors and museums — have been feeling the pressure particularly from Italy.


In this new climate, every relic has to have a paper trail or it's considered pillage — an assumption that some see as overreacting.

Torkom Demirjian, the Turkish-born owner of Ariadne Galleries, sits in the parlor of his elegant townhouse/gallery on the Upper East Side of New York. His left elbow rests casually on a fifth-century Byzantine pillar. He's tired of dealers and their customers getting blamed for somehow encouraging the destruction of archaeological sites.
"Americans who buy them, they don't buy these things to destroy or to cause harm. You love something, you protect it. So the issue is, is it good or bad for a work of art to come to America, as opposed to going elsewhere or going nowhere?"

The sad reality, Demirjian and other experts said, is that the crackdown on illegal antiquities in [the United States] has had an unintended consequence. It has diverted the spoils of tomb raiding from the United States to markets in Europe and Japan, where enforcement is more lax.

For more, see the National Public Radio article.
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Tomb Raiders Threaten Mayan City's History by bat400 on Thursday, 31 May 2007
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At the famed Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, you can sit in the cafe, have a slice of basil pesto quiche, and gaze up at stunning evidence of the looting of the ancient world. The dining room is dominated by an 8-foot-tall carved limestone monument, or stela, of a Mayan king.

"He's shown in all his regalia, with an elaborate headdress, various ornaments hanging from his belt and jade belt pendants," says Timothy Potts, the Oxford-educated director of the Kimbell. "It's so rich. It's so lively. It's a tapestry; every square inch is covered with something."
Despite his obvious admiration for the stela, Potts says that it was likely looted from its original site in the 1960s, taken out of Guatemala and sold.

So how did this stela get from the jungles of Central America to a Forth Worth art museum?



El Peru-Waka

In Guatemala's Peten Province, not far from the Mexican border, is the archaeological site of the Mayan city El Peru-Waka, which means literally "centipede place with water in it." The city of about 4,000 people flourished between 100 B.C. and A.D. 800, with plazas and pyramids and orchards. It was ruled by the dynasty of the Centipede Kings. Now, all that's left of the limestone structures are great mounds covered with vegetation. In the trees, militias of howler monkeys defend their real estate.

Dr. David Freidel, a Mayan archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, has been trying to protect this site. For five years, Freidel has been coming to El Peru-Waka, trying to decipher the hieroglyphics that tell us who the ruler-priests were, who their queens and enemies were, how they worshipped, and why they fell.

"When looters dig into mounds, they destroy history," Freidel says. "When you lose that history, you often cannot replace it."

Looters generally look for tombs, five of which have been found at Waka by Freidel and his Guatemalan colleague, archaeologist Hector Escobedo. Three of the burial chambers are royal — filled with beautiful painted ceramics, and objects of jade, obsidian and onyx.

Word has gotten out about the tombs' treasures, and Freidel has had to hire his own guards. "Despair and poverty drive the system," Freidel says. "Everybody's on survival mode. If I left, they would definitely loot it to pieces."

He is fortunate to share his camp with a garrison of Guatemalan soldiers. The army moved in because of the cocaine traffickers active in the area; they appreciate the Petén's isolation and proximity to Mexico.

For more, including the story of the Mayan carving in the Fort Worth museum, see the
National Public Radio story.
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