A millennium has passed, but the massacre is still chilling: a king and queen of ancient Cancuen, more than 30 nobles and pregnant women, are overwhelmed by their attackers and murdered with spears and axes.
Deep in Guatemala’s Peten rainforest, the ruins of the sprawling palace in the old royal city have revealed skeletons and the last-minute panic that overtook Cancuen before it was overcome by marauders.
“The king and queen and their nobles apparently were gathered together and slain en masse, many by lance thrusts to the neck or head,” said Arthur Demarest, one of the lead archaeologists of the team that excavated the grim site in Guatemala and its long-hidden story.
“In the years preceding the royal massacre, warfare had spread across this western region of the ancient Maya world. It seems to have suddenly reached Cancuen at about 800 AD,” Demarest, Ingram professor of anthropology at the United States’s Vanderbilt University, said.
The king and queen’s skeletons, 32 Maya nobles’ remains and more than a dozen other skeletons were discovered in a sacred cistern at the site and north of the palace by a team of Guatemalan and US archaeologists led by Demarest.
The team said the grisly massacre records a critical moment at the beginning of the mysterious collapse of the “great ancient civilisation”.
As the team, which also called upon Guatemalan forensic and DNA experts, carefully excavated the palace, they also began to piece together what had occurred at the rare site around 800 AD.
The discoveries of unfinished defensive walls, scattered spearheads, abandoned palace constructions and the skeletons with spear and axe wounds showed them the kingdom was attacked and ruthlessly ransacked, researchers said.
The revelation of the massacre at the palace was made by accident as Guatemalan archaeologists Sylvia Alvarado and Tomas Barrientos were examining the sacred palace reservoir and realised that its 90-square-metre cistern was filled with thousands of human bones and precious artefacts.
Rich kingdom
The Cancuen kingdom was one of the richest Maya city-states due to it strategic location at the start of the Pasion River, a key ancient trade route, according to researchers.
According to Demarest, the site marks the gateway between the Classic Maya civilisation of the lowland jungles of Mexico and northern Guatemala and the volcanic highlands and coasts to the south.
It was once an imposing and lavish royal settlement: the palace and its grounds covered an area of almost six football fields and were once decorated with hundreds of huge stucco sculptures.
However, its defenders failed to fight off the murderous onslaught that appeared to show no mercy against women or even children.
“The bones show men, women and children of all ages have been slain,” Demarest said.
And archaeologists found the fetuses carried by two mothers still preserved in the wet mud that later filled the ancient stone reservoir.
“The robust bones, cranial deformation and fine adornments, including jades, jaguar-fang necklaces and Pacific coast shells, indicate that all were nobles from the ancient palace, possibly even the extended royal family,” the team said in a statement of the other skeletal remains.
The site’s discovery will be covered in a US television show, Explorer: Last Days of the Maya, which will air on the National Geographic Channel on November 27. — AFP