Investigations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala: 1998 Field Season

Between Mountains and Sea: Investigations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala
Stephen D. Houston, Héctor Escobedo, Perry Hardin, Richard Terry, David Webster, Mark Child, Charles Golden, Kitty Emery, and David Stuart

Calendar of the 1998 Field Season

In March, 1998, a small team led by Charles Golden penetrated to the remote and heavily looted site of La Pasadita, in the southern part of the BYU/del Valle concession. The ruin, famous to epigraphers because of its murals, lintels, and connection to the dynastic polity of Yaxchilán, was reported first by Ian Graham in 1971. It proved exceptionally difficult to relocate. Harder still were the logistics of working at the site, which involved transport by river to a land route accessible only by foot and mule train. Contrary to published maps, the area around La Pasadita consisted of extremely broken, occasionally swampy (and demonstrably malarial) terrain. Ancient settlement clustered on hilltops, with small terraces and small mounds sparsely scattered on lower slopes some 20-50 m. below. The discarded remains of military rations and reports of intense battles during the height of civil conflicts in Guatemala lent weight to persistent rumors of land mines in the area. The tenuous logistics and likely danger of ordinance explosion made sustained work impossible, although Golden and his crew stayed for two weeks to map structures, recover and record additional pieces of the murals, and document the caves with cultural material that are abundant in the area. Tragically, the building that housed the murals, Structure 1, had collapsed a few years before Golden’s visit. Most buildings and platforms in the area bore testimony to savage, persistent looting. At least ten graves, including three crypts in a building adjacent to Structure 1, lay open to view when Golden’s party visited La Pasadita.

By late March camp construction began anew at Piedras Negras, seventy-five laborers and cooks arrived by river, and operations commenced in a variety of locations. Escobedo cleared the base and northern side of Pyramid O-13’s massive stairway – or rather, what remained of it, since J. Alden Mason had destroyed much of the stairway and the central core of the building in his excavations of the early 1930s. Where undisturbed by University Museum excavations, O-13 proved to be in an extraordinary state of preservation (Figure 1). Child continued his sweatbath excavations by trenching axially in P-7, S-19, S-4, and S-2, while Christian Wells trenched Structure F-2, a building of unusual, peaked form in a grouping of terraces and partly standing architecture skirting the north side of the Northwest Group Plaza. To provide a fuller portrait of the area near Child’s sweatbath excavations, Mónica Urquizú supervised slot trenches in a double-patio group focused on Structure S-11, excavated in part by Escobedo in 1997. Nancy Monterroso directed work in the small court near Structure R-20, quickly discovering a dense concentration of burials along a north-south orientation. These were of such complexity and number of interments that they occupied her attention for the remainder of the season. Lilian Garrido, Isabel Aguirre, and Ernesto Arredondo placed test pits in areas incompletely examined in the 1997 field season. Their work concentrated respectively on the West Group Plaza, the N/O "barrio" of small buildings wedged between the river and West Group Plaza, and the G/K sector on the hill behind Pyramid K-5.

Jennifer Kirker and Amy Kovak systematically surveyed a 3-4 sq. km. region composed of three survey blocks to the east, south, and northwest of Piedras Negras proper. Their primary aim was to document patterns of settlement form, density, and distribution both on the near-periphery of the main site and in more distant, rural zones. Two other goals were to locate visible agro-engineering features and to test the usefulness of GPS systems in rugged topography under high forest. Eighty-five sites, ranging from a ceremonial precinct just south of Piedras Negras to small, single mounds, were located and mapped. Most were near-periphery sites within about 1 km. of Piedras Negras, but some were recorded as much as 3.2 km. to the northeast around the outlying subsidiary center of El Porvenir. It proved possible to obtain GPS fxes in almost all cases despite the vegetation cover. Kirker, along with Timothy Murtha, later completed 27 test excavations in 19 sites, or 22% of the total located this year. Small residential terraces are common, but no traces of extensive agricultural terracing or other agro-engineering features were encountered.

Perry Hardin and Jacob Parnell supplemented such reconnaissance by exploring valleys to the northwest of Piedras Negras. They also took numerous soil samples for processing by Terry at BYU.  In the site core, Christian Wells moved his crew to a set of low, unexplored mounds squeezed between the South Group Plaza and the arroyo that ends in the beach used now (and doubtless anciently) by boats visiting Piedras Negras. This research had several objectives: to determine whether the area contained Preclassic deposits such as those in the Plaza nearby (it did not); but, even more important, to start extensive clearance of domestic architecture, a feature barely studied at Piedras Negras or, for that matter, anywhere in the western Maya Lowlands. Using a total station, Nate Currit mapped all excavations from the 1997 and 1998 field seasons. To our dismay, he showed that the University Museum map, excellent in some respects, suffered from large horizontal errors somewhere along the East Group Plaza, an error suspected by University Museum researchers (Satterthwaite, 1943:21). Architecture in the Acropolis area needed to be moved 20 m. to the northeast; buildings near the South Group Plaza lay, according to Currit’s measurements, some 20 m. to the southeast.

By mid-season excavations began in earnest in the Acropolis, particularly in the courtyards. This approach necessitated less disturbance of standing masonry and promised deeper soundings in areas without heavy overburden. Golden deepened and extended trenches in Court 3, exposing earlier building levels and establishing articulations between architecture ringing (and underlying) the court. In Court 2 Houston and Urquizú cleaned a north-south trench left by the University Museum, simultaneously probing an opening cut by looters through the back of Structure J-10.  By the end of the season, the team had moved to Court 1, invited by a massive, leveled platform (J-7) left undisturbed by the University Museum. This platform had two further attractions: it permitted study of the joins between Court 1, its defining palace rooms, and Pyramid J-4; and it corresponded symmetrically to J-5, where the Museum had found Burial 5 in the 1930s. Pyramid O-13 consumed most of Escobedo’s attention in 1998. With Carlos Alvarado, he stripped the back of the structure, cleared rooms on the summit, trenched to bedrock the 5 m. pit left by J. Alden Mason from the University Museum expedition, and ended by tunneling the axis. The loose rubble core of the pyramid had defeated an earlier tunnel by Escobedo to the side of the O-13 stairway. Determined to improve safety, Escobedo searched for, and found, a layer of structurally stable, sterile clay, which his workers proceeded to tunnel after inserting roof supports. Directly overhead lay a chocolate-colored clay with sporadic Early Classic sherds. After 13 m. this clay proved unstable, drying and then scaling from the walls. Terminating this operation for safety reasons, Escobedo cleared the rest of Burial 13 and established its relation to an unusual dressed-stone pavement that had been penetrated by the Maya to burn this burial a few years after its interment (Houston et al., 1998:19). All monumental excavation at Piedras Negras suffered from the difficulty, often insuperable, of digging into loose rubble.

A contractual obligation of our permit was the consolidation of endangered buildings. After consideration of several alternatives, the project targeted the P-7 sweatbath (Child, 1997). Twelve masons, working in teams of two, master and apprentice side-by-side, selected and shaped the thin flagstones distinctive of late masonry at the site, removed deep tree roots that had infiltrated the body of the structure, excavated remaining room debris, sifted and graded soil of decomposed plaster from the building, and experimented with several grades of cement to reproduce the dense pointing of the original. An industrial pump and ½ km. of reinforced hose brought water to the sweatbath, since project masons required at least 150 gallons a day. After a month’s work, the masons succeeded in consolidating the central room of the sweatbath, roof piers, northeast door, room benches, and the sluice (desagüe) leading from the inner sweatroom. Our policy was to consolidate masonry still in place or recently fallen, and not to engage in plausible, but still speculative reconstruction. The masons also provided Child with an unusual opportunity to gauge the energetics of construction at Piedras Negras. Steel axes, not chert adzes, were used in shaping stone, but this could not have been radically different from ancient results, since the flagstones took their shape largely from bedding planes in local rock. With water, stone, and cement in place, masons took approximately one day to build 1 cubic m. of wall, two days for 1 sq. m. of vaulting. They noted that much of the stone came from the river bank, some 500 m. away, the same location where local artisans extracted the poor-quality, white chert employed for tools at Piedras Negras. Our masons also proved helpful in preparing a cist in Structure J-23 for the ashes of Tatiana Proskouriakoff. On Easter Sunday (non-Orthodox calendar) project members respectfully buried her remains. Not only Proskouriakoff was interred: by the end of the season, all pits and trenches, including some left open by the University Museum, were backfilled in accordance with the requirements of our permit.

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