[Aztlan] Interesting Story on El Mirador

[Elaine Schele]

"Explore Guatemala's ancient Maya metropolis before the crowds come"
By Nadia Sussman for the Mercury News

Nadia Sussman is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.

Posted: 12/13/2008 12:00:00 AM PST

Buried beneath deep jungle growth in Guatemala's northern reaches, the
ancient Maya metropolis of El Mirador is worth the walking. And
walking, and walking some more. Go now for the rare chance to
experience lush tropical forest and have the ancient city — more and
more of which is being uncovered by archeologists every year — largely
to yourself. Soon, both the wilderness and the solitude may be harder
to come by.

El Mirador owes its extraordinary state of preservation to its
remoteness. About 50 miles from the nearest road, a stone's throw from
Mexico, the region is approachable today only by a trek or by
helicopter. But if a coalition of environmentalists, corporate leaders
and politicians has its way, it will soon be a tourist destination,
complete with a narrow-gauge train to carry visitors there. The group
touts large-scale tourism as the only way to stop illegal logging and
encroachment by farmers and ranchers, which has reduced the jungle by
13 percent over the past 21 years.

"The old idea of leaving the forest pretty and green because it's got
orchids and monkeys and parrots . . . — and in the states we get this
romantic vision of this — it won't work," said archaeologist Richard
Hansen, director of the Mirador Basin Project and head archaeologist
at the site. "Because here's a guy, with a little family, they're
starving to death, the kids are hungry, they're crying, and what is he
going to do? He's going to go out, he's going to do whatever it takes
to feed his family. . . . in this case, it's cutting the forest."

Hansen said the region needs an "economic justification to save the
forest.These cities are crucial to that," he said. "Our bet is that
people will come to see this.'' He hopes that in a few years, tourists
will number in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the current
trickle of hikers and celebrities who arrive by helicopter at a cost
of up to $1,000 per seat. His many influential supporters include
Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom and Hollywood celebrities like Mel
Gibson.

Locals and experts are debating how increased tourism will shape
economic development in nearby communities. Hansen wants tourism to
replace all logging, sustainable or not, in the archaeologically rich
area around El Mirador. He said ''the fact this has been opened up for
logging is the equivalent of using the Grand Canyon as a landfill for
Los Angeles" and that earnings from tourism for local communities will
far surpass logging income.

His foundation has raised money to rent land from local cooperatives
in order to prevent most logging. Environmentalists who have spent
more than a decade developing the sustainable forestry model argue
that paying people not to log will undermine years of work teaching
people how to use forest resources responsibly.

In the 1990s, the Guatemalan government granted local towns the right
to sustainably harvest wood and plants from certain areas in exchange
for the opportunity to patrol those tracts of jungle. Many communities
developed successful logging cooperatives, but some allowed their
areas to be razed. Regardless of how the tourism plan turns out, there
is still time to explore the region the old-fashioned way: on foot and
by pack mule.

Before I set off on the two-day jungle trek, Josué Guzmán, a young
archaeologist who also was headed there, warned that the trip would be
60 percent mental, 40 percent physical. After several hours on muddy,
hoof-pocked trails, his meaning became obvious. The mud sucked at our
feet and threatened to pull our boots off. Conversation dwindled.
Darkness fell in the remote wilderness. We pressed on with our head
lamps, this time to Guzman's quiet mantra, "one hour more," arriving
at our bare-bones campsite long after dark. After another, thankfully
drier day of walking, we arrived at our destination.

After two days in the jungle, El Mirador felt surprisingly urban, even
for an abandoned city. Tents occupied the base of the ancient
stone-and-lime architecture, with nearby open-air kitchens serving a
steady diet of beans, rice and tortillas. The jungle that once fully
laid claim to this place has been subtly manicured by the legions of
workers and archaeologists who make this their temporary home each
year.

During the day, workers from surrounding communities steadily picked,
shoveled and brushed away dirt at excavation pits cut into buildings
so thick with overgrowth that they look like hillsides. You can go
from one pit to the next and watch as archaeologists uncover
everything from giant masks on the sides of temples to household
pottery left when the last families took flight.

The largest pyramid, La Danta, exceeds even the pyramids of Egypt in
volume, Hansen said. A climb to the top of the mountainlike edifice
offers views of unbroken jungle canopy gently rising over the peaks of
pyramids in other Mayan cities. The Maya here were gifted engineers
and artists. Along the canals where rainwater collected — the only
source of water in a region without lakes or streams — intricate
reliefs demonstrate the culture's dedication to public art even on
utilitarian structures.

The Maya here also left behind free-standing carved reliefs honoring
dynastic leaders and, a thousand years later, codex-style ceramics
covered with finely wrought hieroglyphs and drawings of mythological
scenes. Today, technology at El Mirador juxtaposes the modern with the
ancient. To store enough rainwater for the dig season, workers have
built underground reservoirs based on ancient Mayan water systems.

At the same time, satellite Internet keeps archaeologists connected to
the outside world. Visitors can see ancient burial tunnels and
towering twin pyramids, the taller one rising 230 feet above the
jungle floor. At a temple known as Structure 34, masks symbolizing the
king Great Fiery Jaguar Paw flank huge, curving white steps.
Underneath the stairs, archaeologists have tunneled to reveal an
earlier facade also decorated with masks whose intricate red-and-black
paint hints at the original colors of the city.

While the monumental structures bear the glyphs and insignia of kings
and deities, they also reveal the traces of the daily lives of common
people. Archaeologists are excavating neighborhoods where families
lived for centuries and often built new houses on top of the old,
until the city's final abandonment around 900.

Archaeologists for decades have been trying to piece together how and
why the Maya collapsed. El Mirador's contribution to the debate is
that it pushes back the origin of the Maya several hundred years
before what had once been assumed to be the society's peak. Now it's
becoming clear that Maya civilization ebbed and flowed several times
over more than 1,200 years.  After three days at El Mirador, I was
loathe to leave. Riding a mule over the ancient causeway on the way
out to give my aching feet a rest, I considered the contradictions.
This is a story of a metropolis that for centuries struggled for
dominance with the surrounding forest. Now both are endangered by
human development. A train may make El Mirador easier to reach some
day, but there's nothing like walking in on your own two feet.