Investigations at Piedras Negras, Guatemala: 1999 Field Season

Among the River Kings: Archaeological Research at Piedras Negras, Guatemala
Stephen D. Houston, Héctor Escobedo, Richard Terry, David Webster, George Veni, and Kitty F. Emery

Introduction

Piedras Negras is the largest city of Classic Maya date in the Usumacinta drainage. Its existence, and the rich record of its sculptures and buildings, led to intensive fieldwork by the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, in the 1930s (Satterthwaite, 1943), and, more recently, to three years of investigations by the Piedras Negras Project of Brigham Young University and the Universidad del Valle (Houston et al., 1998a; 1999). During the spring of 1999, the Project completed its third field season, conducting 23 operations in a wide variety of locations. The goals of this fieldwork addressed a number of questions: When did the city as a concentrated settlement begin, and when did it end? Was its collapse a rapid one, provoked by attacks from its enemy, Yaxchilán? What was the complete sequence of its palaces? Did such facilities have quarters for servants and places for mundane activities such as food production? Does monumental architecture, especially of a mortuary nature, change considerably at the inception of the Late Classic period? What would intensive excavations in the near-periphery reveal about the supporting landscape of Piedras Negras? Are earlier maps of the city reliable and complete? And what can soil chemistry tell us about subsurface remains and ancient activities? Most of these questions were at least partly resolved in the 1999 field season at Piedras Negras.

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