<< Text Pages >> Cara Blanca - Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature in Belize

Submitted by bat400 on Thursday, 13 January 2011  Page Views: 15454

Natural PlacesSite Name: Cara Blanca
Country: Belize Type: Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
Nearest Town: Orange Walk
Latitude: 17.417000N  Longitude: 88.867W
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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Natural Feature in Orangewalk, Belize. A series of pools, caves, and mountains used by the Maya, but not as a settlement. Artefacts indicate a ceremonial use, perhaps associated with a journey to Xibalba - the Mayan Underworld.

Note: Archaeologists dive deep into the lost world of the Maya.
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"Cara Blanca" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Cara Blanca's Maya pools await diving explorers by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 12 January 2011
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Cara Blanca's sacred Maya pools, hidden in the warm hills of Belize, still beckon.

Cobalt blue waters, draped vines and beads of sweat are what you remember from your first visit to these forest cenotes, as the pools are known.

Two years ago, a USA TODAY report filled readers in on researchers' plans to dive deep into the cenotes, surrounded by the ruins of Maya sweat lodges from 800 A.D. And a look at the first dives into the pools this summer was a Top 10 video on National Geographic's website this year.

But it's worth a second look at the ruins there, and not just because winter has fully arrived in the Northern Hemisphere and the fact that the location's average temperature is a balmy 79 degrees.

In fact, the continuing story of exploration at the pools in the northwestern forest of tropical Belize, offers more than warm thoughts. Archaeology doesn't happen overnight and the progress at Cara Blanca has raised more questions so far than answers, says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who heads exploration efforts at the pools, located a few miles from the Maya ruin of Yalbac.

The Classic Maya are famed for the pyramid-topped cities, which were abandoned throughout Central America sometime around 900 A.D. Xibalba (Shee-BAL-buh), the underworld where various evil spirits and the rain god, Chac, could be found, was part of their mythology, a particularly important place for people dependent on rain to water their crops.

"Cenotes were seen as an opening into the underworld by the Classic Maya," Lucero says.

Cenotes at sites such as Mexico's Chichen Itza have yielded sacrificial objects, human bones and the famed "Maya Blue" pigment in sediment layers explored by scholars for a century.

At Cara Blanca's pools, mapped by archaeologist Andrew Kinkella of Moorpark (Calif.) College, Lucero and colleagues such as cave diver Patricia Beddows of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., sought to plumb the depths of the cenotes, looking for similar activities among the Maya of Belize, some 250 miles south of the Yucatan.

A diving team explored the site in May, finding hydrothermal vents, overhanging caves and fossil beds lining the walls of the cenotes. Two divers, Robbie Schmittner and Kim Davidsson, discovered a 90-foot-tall entrance to one cave some 100 feet deep down on the north wall of a pool lined with Maya ruins. The team namedthe cave Actun Ek Nen (Black Mirror Cave), which should give some idea of lighting conditions at that depth. The underwater cave is at least 120 feet wide, 100 feet tall and at least 250 feet long. It may be much longer, as its depth, size and dimness, along with diving equipment limitations, kept the team from exploring the big cave to its full extent.

"But the pools were even deeper than we expected," Lucero says. The very deepest parts of the pools, where sacrificial objects might lay, reside below 180 feet depth, according to findings made by seven deep divers who searched there for two days in mid-July. A diving team will return to the site next year, with some luck, to resume the search.

In the meantime, archaeology at the site has not stood still. "It looks more and more like the Maya intensified ritual activities at the end," Lucero says, around 800-900 A.D., when a long-term drought is thought to have contributed to the collapse of the society at Yalbac and surrounding centers. Sacrifices might have picked up at the pools, she says, "to beg the gods to bring forth rain and to end the long drought. The majority of ceramics date to (that era), and most are water jars!"

The slash-and-burn milpa farming of the Maya, still practiced today throughout Central America, heavily depends on rainfall during a long rainy season that typically starts in May. Although the Maya continued farming at nearby sites in Belize at least until the 1500's, Lucero and other archaeologists suspec

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UI prof's Maya research aims to illuminate commoners by coldrum on Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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UI prof's Maya research aims to illuminate commoners

At the height of Maya classical culture, a drought may have been responsible for the civilization's downturn, which may offer clues to what we may face in a combination of growing population and dwindling resources.

That's part of the reason a University of Illinois anthropology professor, Lisa Lucero, plans to continue to visit Belize's dry season, studying the ultimate in wet – 25 freshwater pools that help her understand Maya culture from the farmer's side as well as the king's.

Lucero notes that the massive temples of Maya civilization have their share of researchers, studying royalty, human sacrifice and the evolution of sport, while she's rare in studying what the little guy did.

As she writes in her book, "Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya Rulers" (University of Texas Press), "the average commoner was an active participant (in rituals) and had some say in the amount of tribute paid as well as to whom. Commoners were willing to contribute surplus (crops) because rulers offset problems that arose as a result of seasonal vagaries – not enough or too much water."

In a part of the world where there's "not a drop of water" for months at a time, in normal years, in addition to other droughts that occur less frequently, the Maya rulers were "classic water managers," Lucero says.

On a hot August day in Urbana that's chilly by Belize standards, Lucero talks about her work, funded by the National Geographic Society and an Arnold O. Beckman Award, in the southern Maya lowlands.

This year, and, she hopes next year, she has worked with divers in the limestone pools of Cara Blanca, or White Face, a reference to the exposed limestone.

Some of the caves may be as much as 200 feet deep, a dangerous challenge for divers. Lucero said divers are concerned about the mixture of gases needed for the depth – they include helium.

But the divers have already been useful, she said, in collecting artifacts such as sacred water jars, and she hopes the core samples they've taken using common plastic plumbing pipe would yield clues to the drought.

So far, divers have explored eight of 25 known pools.

In the sediment that falls constantly to the pool floor, Lucero hopes to find a record of hundreds of years. Minute evidence can speak loudly, she says; for instance, a plethora of grass pollens could indicate that the jungles' trees had died off for a period.

In the pools and in nearby trenches, Lucero's team has found everything from water jars to a bone from an ancient giant sloth, a species that died off 10,000 years ago. If the sloth was brought down by a hunter, it could help date the entry of humans into the lands that became Maya.

The caves and sinkholes, called cenotes, were portals to the underworld, Lucero said.

Maya structures are found near at least two of them. There, pools would have been sacred entrances to the depths, the source of life through water and earth.

The Mayas needed a reliable source of water for massive farms that fed the temples. Lucero said the Cara Blanca pools have a constant depth, fed from subterranean sources.

When the Mayas were hit with drought somewhere between 800 and 900 A.D., the pools would have been especially important as life-givers.

The water jars she found could have been offerings to the rain god or some other god, asking for an end to the drought, she said.

Ironically, the water may not have been very healthful to drink.

Northwestern University's Patricia Beddows, one of the divers as well as a hydrologist, found the water in the largest pool was full of minerals that could have led to kidney stones.

h

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Scientists to explore sacred Maya pools by bat400 on Sunday, 04 October 2009
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Similar article (see comment 1) submitted by coldrum --

A University of Illinois archaeologist says she will lead a team that will be the first to explore the sacred pools of the southern Mayan lowlands in Belize. Professor Lisa Lucero said she will lead a team of expert divers, a geochemist and an archaeologist in the expedition, funded by the National Geographic Society, to investigate the cultural significance and environmental history and condition of three of the 23 pools of Cara Blanca, in central Belize.

The groundwater-filled sinkholes in limestone bedrock, called cenotes, were treated as sacred sites by the Maya, Lucero said. The cenotes vary in depth from approximately 15 feet to more than 165 feet.

"Any openings in the earth were considered portals to the underworld, into which the ancient Maya left offerings," she said. "We know from ethnographic accounts that Maya collected sacred water from these sacred places, mostly from caves," Lucero said, noting the Maya also left elaborate offerings in the lakes and pools.

Patricia Beddows, a lecturer of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University and an expert diver, will explore the geochemistry and hydrology of the pools in Belize.

For more, see http://www.upi.com/Science_News
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Archaeologists dive deep into the lost world of the Maya by bat400 on Tuesday, 28 July 2009
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Submitted by coldrum ---

Machete chops echo and leaves rustle underfoot when the vines clear, revealing cobalt-blue water in a cliff-sided pool. Hidden beneath the dry-season forest, these waters, the blue cenotes (cen-NO-tays) of Cara Blanca, represent a mystery for scholars, one left by the ancient Maya. What lies within these sacred wells?


"Cenotes were portals to the underworld, Xibalba, for the Maya," says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a tour of the pools in May. "Offerings, artifacts — they would have left something there for the gods. We would expect to find something."

But the gods of Xibalba (shee-BALL-buh) won't yield their offerings so easily.

The secrets of the ancient Maya, whose Central American population centers were mysteriously abandoned more than a millennium ago, have long intrigued scientists. Why did such a complex culture disappear?
Lucero and her colleagues are among those trying to understand this lost world. They have been searching the 6-mile-long Cara Blanca site for ruins since 1998, working each year primarily in May and June, before the rainy season.

A team of world-class cave divers assembled by Lucero and geologist Patricia Beddows of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., intend to descend into the depths of three of Cara Blanca's 23 pools next year. Hazards the divers will face include trees, caves and crocodiles, not to mention 160-foot depths. "Cenotes bell outward underground, like caves. You can't treat them like there is clear water over your head. The waters are sulfur-rich. Hydrogen sulfide can make divers sick if they push it, which has happened," Beddows says. "And there is the depth problem." Dives in very deep waters put divers at risk of serious health problems, especially if they surface too quickly.

Plumbing the blue depths

The ancient Maya lived in Central America's lowland forests for thousands of years, starting around 300 B.C. to build a culture of widespread centers marked by pyramids and temples and, stone carvings suggest, ruled by a caste of boastful chiefs. The Maya abandoned these centers around A.D. 900, a mysterious "collapse" ascribed by scholars to warfare, drought, overpopulation and environmental degradation, or a combination of each.

Spanish conquistadors met Maya descendants still living near centers in Mexico's Yucatán in the 1500s, and today some 6 million Maya still live in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and elsewhere. "The Maya didn't go away, but their rulers did," Lucero says.

In 1904, Harvard's Peabody Museum archaeologist Edward Thompson dredged the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá in Mexico's Yucatán. He found masks, jade, images of the rain god Chak and human bones. Later dives at Guatemalan lakes near Maya ruins found similar offerings.

Cara Blanca ("White Face," named after the cliffs above the pools) is itself a mystery to Lucero and her colleagues. Despite the cenotes' year-round water supply, they occupy a no-man's-land between two ancient Maya settlements, the midsized center called Yalbac and a smaller one that's called, in scientist-speak, M195. The smaller settlement is dominated by a 36-foot-high pyramid. The simple answer might be that the cenotes' salty water is undrinkable. Or it might have been sacred. Or both.

In a survey last year led by archaeologist Andrew Kinkella of Moorpark (Calif.) College, field researchers mapped Cara Blanca's swath of forest encompassing the pools and determined that only a few structures once lined one pool and one large structure existed between two of the cenotes that the explorers think hold the most promise as sources of artifacts.

"We think they were sweat lodges," Kinkella says, places of purification before offerings were made to the pools. "Sweat lodges are important places in many Native American traditions. Have you ever been in one? It's not a day at the sauna. It's an intense experience. Yo

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