Jade-filled burial places. Ages-old ball courts. Bloodletting routines. Check out Chiapas to experience the ruins and tricks of the ancients.
Released November 22, 2023
8 minutes checked out
Lost Cities Revealed with Albert Linpremieres on National Geographic Channel and Disney+ November 23.
The ancient Maya grew for some 3,000 years and developed a huge tradition that still influences popular culture, from animated series to computer game. Their stepped stone pyramids and glyph sculpted temple walls can be discovered in Guatemala Belizeand Mexicohome to the popular websites of Tulum, Chichén Itzáand the Uxmal pyramids.
The lower understood, lower trafficked Maya settlements and praise websites of Chiapas– Mexico’s southernmost state– are likewise worth finding for their mix of archaeology and nature.
The most popular and biggest of them, Palenqueis the focus of the very first episode of Season 2 of”Lost Cities Revealed with Albert Lin,” which premieres on the National Geographic Channel and Disney+ November 23. In it, the researcher and National Geographic Explorer Albert Lin usages high tech techniques to explore the storied website.
“Palenque is where Maya archaeology started, from that very first look of glyphs and pyramids in the jungle,” states Lin, describing the website’s rediscovery by 18th-century Spanish explorers.
Here’s how to dive into this prominent history in the middle of the mountains and jungles of Chiapas.
An ancient temple and trade path
Maya society prospered at Palenque in between the 5th and 9th centuries A.D., powered by the website’s place on a business path in between main Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula. Traders shuttled in flint and obsidian from Guatemala and “craftsmens had the ability to design stucco in an extremely sophisticated stylistic way,” states archaeologist Carlos Miguel Varela Sherrer, field chief of the website.
Today, a lot of visitors reach the contemporary city of Palenque by air from Mexico City (1 hour 40 minutes) or Cancún before taking a 15-minute drive through ceiba tree-shaded foothills to the UNESCO World Heritage-recognized websiteNumerous Maya structures– numerous yet to be excavated– sprawl over 3,700 acres of tropical jungle.
The website’s main location, which worked as a domestic, governmental, and spiritual center, is controlled by the remarkable Temple of the Inscriptions, a 75-foot-tall, stepped limestone pyramid. This stone homage to the area’s most well-known ancient ruler, Pakal the Great (615-683 A.D.), was excavated in between 1949 and 1954. His jade death mask is now shown at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropologyhowever the Palenque Site Museum holds a reproduction of it and the burial chamber.
The burial place below the pyramid, near to the general public to avoid damage, has actually stone walls sculpted with elegant reliefs of Pakal, his household, and the underworld, along with a massive sarcophagus made from a single piece of stone.
“The within appear like a crystal cavern due to the fact that the limestone has actually dripped calcite into little stalactites,” states Lin, who went into the burial place and utilized lidar (light detection and varying) to explore it on the program. “All along the walls you see engravings, the origin story of Palenque.”
(See the Maya underworld in Belize– if you attempt)
Palenque likewise holds more than 1,500 other Maya structures, consisting of the Cross Group, a trio of temples constructed at various elevations, probably implied to represent the sky, the Earth, and the underworld. Its “El Templo de la Calavera” (The Temple of the Skull) has a relief of a human skull sculpted at its base. The ruins of a main palace, believed to be Pakal’s, have a four-story stone tower in addition to indoor pipes and a steam bath.
“The area has a great deal of stone, which permitted special architectural work,” states Varela.
A Maya path through Chiapas
Beyond Palenque, you can follow the Maya trade path through Chiapas. Eighty miles south, the city-state of Toniná was populated from the very first to 16th centuries A.D. by Palenque’s ancestral opponents. They put up the highest extant pyramid in the Americas in the 14th century A.D., the 1,049-foot-high “Acropolis.”
It’s the anchor of a website where temple-pyramids are organized on earthen balconies high above a main plaza where Mayas played pelotaa type of handball. Current historical research studies presume that individuals of Toniná integrated the ashes of their departed rulers with rubber to make pelota balls.
(Discover Maya history on Mexico’s very first long-distance path.
A three-hour drive west, the ruins of Yaxchilán skirt the banks of the Usumacinta River (the natural border in between Mexico and Guatemala). You’ll most likely come across more howler monkeys than travelers amidst the elaborately sculpted stelae and temples where the “Jaguar” clan grew from 500 to 700 A.D.
A five-hour drive east from Yaxchilán, Bonampak holds falling apart structures such as the Temple of the Murals, where vibrant frescoes of Maya court life embellish the walls. Scenes illustrating routine bloodletting in addition to parades of artists mean an intricate culture that interests us to this day.
Mexican reporter Erick Pinedo is a previous editor at the Latin American edition of National GeographicFollow him on Instagram
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