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

Conclusions and Future Research

The 1998 field season showed once again why Piedras Negras merits detailed attention. The city and its environs supplied information on chronology, site development, building function and design, ritual topography, craft production and consumption, and residential structures unavailable at other sites in the western Lowlands. Eventually, these finds will be distilled into an account of how Piedras Negras functioned as a pre-industrial, regal-ritual center, why it began, grew, and withered, and how its historical framework explains, or deviates from, material vestiges. In the future, the project will build on prior finds by more extensive excavations of domestic sites and deeper penetration of the Acropolis and other monumental structures, whose difficulty in excavation is exceeded only by their intrinsic importance in understanding dynastic societies of the Classic period. At Piedras Negras, urban planning clearly played a large role in its transformation from isolated groupings to an architecturally integrated center. Survey will fill the many lacunae that remain on regional settlement maps, soil studies will reveal invisible data on ancient land use, and artifact studies will deepen our knowledge of Maya artifact manufacture, use, and discard. Cave studies need to be made by specialists, and areas well to the south, in the great valley defined by the Macabilero stream, will be explored as local, ex-guerrillas vacate the national park. In this area will doubtless occur more evidence of artifactual and settlement boundaries between Piedras Negras and its enduring antagonist, Yaxchilán. Suggestions of divergent Late Classic ceramics to the south will be investigated through such reconnaissance, along with reliable reports of vaulted buildings near the Macabilero. Of the Early Classic dynasty, hinted at fitfully in a few eroded texts, more must be uncovered in the South Group court, along with Preclassic architecture suggested by ceramic discoveries last season (Forsyth and Hruby, 1997:208-209). In silence for a millennium, Piedras Negras will speak eloquently, in future seasons, of a civilization that flourished between mountains and sea.

Previous Page  |  Table of Contents  |  Next Page

Return to top of page