SITE-SEEING: REPORTS FROM THE FIELD: ALONG THE NAKBE TRAIL

By Mike Reed

Ceramic bowl with thumb indentations at Nakbe.

Some of the most exciting archaeology today is being carried out in the Mirador Basin, on the northern border of Guatemala with Mexico.  There, a vast network of the earliest and largest Maya cities are being investigated, representing a previously unknown flowering of the great Maya civilization, reaching back a full thousand years prior to the rise of the spectacular and celebrated Maya kingdoms of the Classic period.  This corner of Guatemala’s Peten lowlands was overlooked by archaeologists for much of the past century due to its rugged karstic topography, forbidding hydrological conditions, and remoteness from areas of modern human settlement. 

I first ventured into the Mirador Basin in July of 2002, with a small group that spent a week on a 155 kilometer loop trip on the trail system used by the archaeological teams that have been carrying out research for the past decade at some of the larger sites, including El Mirador, Nakbe, Tintal, and la Florida.  The rugged beauty of the primeval tropical forest cover and the sheer scale of immensity of the numerous large and small urban centers that cover nearly all of the rolling uplands throughout the region held us in awe during that unforgettable trek.  Now, three and a half years later I was again in the saddle, negotiating the twists and turns of the jungle trail system to further explore the basin and take a look at the progress that had been made during several years of intensive excavation, stabilization, and restoration at some of the sites since my previous visit. 

On this trip, my friend Dwayne brought along two other members of the Pre-Columbian Society  – Niles and Gaye.  Erik joined us all the way from New Zealand, and Merlina and I came from California.  Dwayne arranged this pack trip with Henry Sanchez, a local tour operator, who organizes and guides trips to archaeological sites in the region.  His father, Juan, 68 years old, and a former chiclero and xatero – gatherer of forest products, came along as our cook.  Having spent most of his life working in the northern forests, he was a valuable source of information on the plants, animals and Maya sites.

In the daylight, this bajo appeared very different than those through which we had slogged during our nighttime swamp ride in the southern part of the Mirador Basin a few days earlier. It was filled with light filtering through the scrubby foliage. There were even splotches of sunshine falling on the trail in places giving it a delightful – even magical quality.  Although we hurried along, it seemed the kind of place that invites one to linger and savor the uniqueness of the strange vegetation in all its bizarre shapes and combinations.  I could not help but imagine such a forest as home to the imaginatively weird supernatural creatures that the ancient Maya believed inhabited this realm and so vividly expressed in their art.

Archaeologist, Richard Hansen, the director of the Mirador Basin Project suggests that the scrub-filled bajos that cover 60 percent of the Mirador Basin today were shallow lakes and marshy bogs, called civals during much of the Preclassic period, (2000 BC to AD 250).  He is convinced that the productivity of the soils and muds of those ancient wetlands are the key to understanding the demographic and urban growth in the Mirador Basin at the time.  Intensive agriculture was carried out on the margins of the lakes and wetlands, as well as in upland fields – all using the organic-rich sediments of the bajos.  However, Hansen suggests that the high population densities and rapid urbanization created great ecological stresses in the region.  He links the silt-clogged bajos encountered there today to the collapse of the Preclassic urban network in the Mirador Basin, which took place around A.D. 150.  Recent analysis of core samples taken from bogs and wetlands around the basin provide strong support for Hansen’s assertion that some kind of ecological catastrophe indeed coincided with the rapid erosion of upland soils into the surrounding basins, burying agricultural works within the bajos under a deep layer mud and clay stripped from upland urban and agricultural zones.

Figure 1. Cival (marshy wetland) near La Florida.

As we crossed a section of bajo, I asked Juan about the economic value of the palo tintos that dominate the bajos today. He answered by cutting a small chunk of wood from a branch and putting it inside of a bottle of water he was carrying. We would see the results later. In books on the history of Central America, the role played by this tree invariably comes up. A more unlikely economic draw for colonial Europeans can hardly be imagined in the spindly palo tinto, hidden in what must have been considered God-forsaken swamps or dry season bajo brambles located far from the Caribbean coast of Central America. But the bright red dye obtained from logwood, as the palo tinto was called by the English in Belize was lucrative enough for logging crews, mostly black slaves to spend long months during the dry season cutting and hauling the wood by mule to the coast for dye extraction and shipment to the textile works of England.

Having some time to myself while our camp was set up and the lunch prepared, I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the sacred precinct of Nakbe, which is far smaller than that of El Mirador.  I quickly deposited my bags at the foot of a tree where the hammocks were being hung and climbed the path onto the platform containing the main plaza and principal pyramid complex of the city.  Erik soon joined me and we climbed to the summit of Structure 1, Nakbe’s tallest pyramid.  Structure 1 has a triad temple group set atop its huge truncated pyramid base. The center temple is the highest and faces the main plaza, with the two smaller flanking temples facing each other.  Erik and I stood on the summit enjoying the breeze and the view.  Around us stretched a great ocean of tropical forest that covers the northern Peten of Guatemala and the southern part of the Mexican state of Campeche.   This wilderness is the last remaining large tract of uninhabited tropical forest in Central America.  During the past forty years it is estimated that up to seventy percent of Guatemala’s Peten forest has been deforested.  Despite the huge loss of tropical forest that once covered the Maya Lowlands in Guatemala, Mexico and Belize, the remaining forest appears as an endless expanse from the tops of the tall pyramids of the Mirador Basin.

We had only that afternoon to explore Nakbe, so after lunch we lost no time preparing ourselves for the grand tour.  Leaving Juan to tend to things at our camp, we made our way to the guard station where we were asked to sign the register of visitors.  I was surprised to find that we were only the third group to visit Nakbe in more than six months.  In contrast, El Mirador is increasing in popularity among travelers willing to do something different, and get away from the crowded archaeological sites like Tikal. 

For most, the Mirador Basin trek is roughing it, although people’s experiences range from the easy and delightful camping adventure, where one only has to bear the long mule ride or hike, to the trip from hell, where what goes wrong will go wrong.   In this humid and dimly-lit forest wilderness, full of mosquitoes, ticks and poisonous snakes, a side trip from the trail into the forest to relieve yourself could be the last time you are seen alive – so they say.  Most visitors are content to make the strenuous one hundred forty kilometer round trip to spend a day exploring El Mirador without having to endure the extra three hours each way to see Nakbe.  However, they are missing a gem of a Maya site.  Nakbe is nothing less than enchanting.

Figure 2. Guard house with tomato patch at Nakbe.

With much to see, we hurried along a well-maintained trail that crossed the great platform of Nakbe’s West Group, then turned to the southeast away from the sacred precinct.  The trail was wide and the terrain even, with beautiful forest cover and no large structures.  From the scanty details on the site map I carried, I assumed that we were crossing a residential part of the city or an area of upland gardens and field agriculture.  I recalled seeing sections of this zone on other maps with several rectangular areas marked as agricultural fields.  Although not marked on the map I was carrying, I knew that the broad ridge we were traversing precipitously descended into a bajo a few hundred meters south of the sacred precinct.  Along the margins of the bajo wetland agriculture fields were said to have been found.  I asked a guard if I might be able to go down to the bajo to check out these wetland fields, but he replied that the bajo area was overgrown and the wetland fields hard to identify. 

Along our route, we passed several openings in the ground, identified by the guards as chultuns – storage chambers the Maya excavated directly into the limestone bedrock which were used for food and water storage.  Chultuns were used extensively throughout the Maya lowlands during ancient times and were not difficult to excavate into the soft limestone bedrock using locally obtained tools.  After a short distance, we turned onto another trail leading to a small area of exposed bedrock.  Pausing on the trail to remove my camera from its case, I hurried to the clearing to find two of the guards removing what looked like a limestone manhole cover that fit perfectly over a vertical shaft excavated into the bedrock.  Peering into the round shaft, I could make out a platform about two meters below, with several steps descending into the darkness.  Erik, Niles and I volunteered to accompany one of the guards into the chamber.  The others would not consider entering a hole in the ground in the jungle.  Knowing the kinds of creatures one might encounter in such places, I could hardly blame them. 

Figure 3. Nakbe guards opening the stone cover of a chultun.

The guard dropped into the shaft with a flashlight, and pronounced the chamber safe to enter.  I was assisted by the others in lowering myself down to the small platform, where I quickly turned on my flashlight and stepped down into a spacious rectangular chamber with room for six foot tall Niles to easily stand.  Aside from a small pile of stone blocks, the chamber was empty.  Several enormous cockroaches rested on the walls, as well as a number of large cave spiders, looking threatening enough for most to choose not to enter the chultun.  The four of us marveled at the condition of the chultun, which was still in good condition more than two thousand years after its abandonment.  Only the few steps leading from the chamber up to the little platform looked worse for the wear. 

Leaving the chultun, we soon arrived at a wide causeway, a “sacbe” in Yucatec Maya, connecting Nakbe’s East Group with a small plaza atop an escarpment that overlooks the bajo just south of the core area.  Causeways were important ceremonial avenues, along which elaborately staged processions would ritually link architectural groups that were strung out along ridges or separated from site cores across expansive bajos.  The irregular and random nature of the karstic topography in the lowlands played a significant role in the layout of many Maya cities, as their populations and most activities were confined to the upland ridges.  With most of the land covered by marshes and shallow lakes, the dispersal of urban populations within their own sites must have been considerable, making transportation and communication all the more difficult.  Thus, causeways connecting near and far-flung groupings of cities were important for functional as well as ceremonial reasons.

The causeway took us directly north to Nakbe’s East Group, a compact set of platforms where excavations have revealed some of Nakbe’s earliest constructions.  Entering the East Group from the south, we encountered a pyramid on the left and a small plaza to the right.  In the center of the little plaza were the remains of a ballcourt dating from the Late Middle Preclassic, 500 to 400 BC, making it the earliest-known ballcourt in the lowlands.  We could clearly make out the central playing alley and sloping sides, which still contain the stone blocks in place.  Excavations indicated that the ballcourt had been rebuilt several times in the Preclassic, then crudely resurfaced one thousand years later during the Late Classic period, likely by members of one of the small communities, like the Codex Group, living in the long-abandoned city.

Figure 4. Upper "hanging" plaza and one of a trio of temples on Structure 59 at Nakbe.

Returning to our camp, we found that it was getting close to sunset, so Erik and I again headed up onto the platform of the West Group’s main plaza.  Along the path to the stairway of Structure 1, we stopped at a copal tree that had been pointed out earlier by a guard.  I wanted to collect some of the dried resin of the copal to demonstrate to my middle school history students the burning of the sacred copal incense, which is still used throughout the Maya regions today.  To my delight, attached to the bark and on the ground around the tree were small clumps of the dried resin which I collected and stored in a plastic bag.  Then Erik and I made our way up the steep path which follows the main stairway up Structure 1.  From the top, the view of the heavily forested bajos and ridges, bathed in the rich tones of the setting sun was majestic.  The low ridges between Nakbe and El Mirador were outlined by their own shadows.  To the northeast, La Danta glowed in the alpenglow of the sunset.

That evening at dinner, Juan brought out the bottle containing the piece of palo tinto that had been soaking in water all day.  The water was a deep red – the logwood dye that brought English loggers into bajos like the ones through we had passed. At the meal, the tubers from the guards’ garden had been added, each contributing its own distinctive starchy consistency and flavor.  The guards also came over, laden with ancient pots and a large plate which they proudly displayed before us. One of the pots was rounded on the bottom with a band of thumb impressions around the outside, which appeared to cover a seam that joined the grey-colored clay of its lower half to the reddish clay above.  We marveled about how the thumb prints enabled us to identify with the bowl’s maker across such a span of time. 

Figure 5.  Ceramic bowl with thumb indentations at Nakbe.

I stirred in my hammock at 4:00 the next morning, as Juan prepared the morning fire and moved cooking pots around in the darkness.  It always seemed like I had barely fallen asleep when Juan would start rustling around in the camp kitchen.  This was another travel day and we had a considerable distance to cover as we began heading back in the direction of Carmelita where we had begun the trek only four days before.  We would cover the majority of the 70 kilometers today, making a lunch stop at the unexcavated site of Wakna at my request.  On such days our morning routine was carried out mostly in the dark using our flashlights around our hammocks and candles as we drank coffee and ate breakfast.  While we ate, our personal gear and the supplies were stowed in burlap sacks and strapped to the mules.  The mules always headed down the trail before us, the mule skinner having been given instructions to meet us at a certain place, usually the next campsite.
 
An hour after daybreak, we left the camp on foot, walking the short distance to the Codex Group.  Whatever the reason for the existence of this elite community, living on the margin of the long-abandoned city, the exquisitely painted Codex-style ceramics produced there were prized by Maya kings and are considered artistic treasures today.  Codex-style ceramics are renowned for their courtly and mythical scenes painted in fine black lines over a cream-colored base – some of the most vivid and stirring artistic expression found on Maya pottery.  (See Endnote.)

The remains of the Codex Group form a compact collection of palace-type structures set around small rectangular courtyards.  Most of the buildings are linear mounds of rubble today, but the excavation and restoration of palace structures and a small temple around one of the courtyards reveal typical architectural patterns of the Late Classic.  The rear wall of the temple extends to the top of the room, exposing its vaulted ceiling and making it one of the most intact standing structures at Nakbe.  Behind the temple, a collection of thin poles lent weak support to the precarious-looking rear wall.

In an adjoining mound, a looter’s trench exposed the rear wall of a structure faced with finely masoned stonework.  The looters had broken through the wall and hollowed out a small chamber, bisected by a layer of thick plaster – the floor of a room.  In the rubble beneath the floor was a pair of small rectangular burial niches made from large flat stones.  These sub-floor niches were commonly used by the Maya elite to inter the bones of revered ancestors.  Ceramic vessels were often placed with the bones as offerings to the ancestor’s spirit, and beautifully decorated vases and plates are what the looters were after.  It goes without saying that the two niches were empty, save a lone tarantula that claimed the entire space as its own. 

Leaving Nakbe, most of the day was spent riding and walking through some of the most magnificent tropical forest scenery one can imagine.  This trail was mostly dry and we made good progress.  At various times, after riding for a while, I found it refreshing to climb out of the saddle and give my legs a good workout.  I sometimes joined Erik, or Dwayne, or Niles in snippets of conversation as we maintained a fast pace to keep up with the mule train.  The day was delightful for forest travel as we raced along in the cool shade of the high canopy.  At times, I experienced moments of exhilaration, gazing out from my saddle perch and absorbing the primeval setting of giant tree trunks climbing the gentle slopes of the uplands above an open forest floor carpeted with green ferns, with shafts of sunlight occasionally penetrating through the canopy to the forest floor. 

In the early afternoon we arrived at a signpost attached to a tree indicating the side trail to the site of Wakna.  I had arranged with Henry to make Wakna our lunch stop, which would give us the opportunity to take a short walk through the site’s core area and check out some of its architectural complexes.  I didn’t know much about Wakna, and found very little in my internet searches, but I recalled attending a talk by Richard Hansen a few years before, in which he excitedly described Wakna as a major discovery of a huge city, and mentioned finding some murals in a tomb there.  What we found was a largely unexcavated site with a concentration of very large pyramids and other structures, all of which were hard to make out through the dense forest cover blanketing everything, including the plazas.  I had finally arrived at the kind of “lost jungle-covered city” that everyone associates with the ancient Maya, but rarely encounter. 

We ate our lunches amid the sawdust of a field camp under construction for upcoming excavations.  At this time, however, the camp and ruins were deserted.  After lunch Juan led us a short distance into the center of the city, which caught us by surprise when we found ourselves suddenly in the midst of huge structures, their tops lost from view by the trees covering their steep slopes.  Erik and I quickly climbed up the closest structure which proved to be more difficult than anticipated with the tangles of roots and branches blocking our way.  Descending, we caught up with the group at the base of another steep structure.  Juan was pointing out a looter’s tunnel barely wide enough to allow a person to crawl into its darkness.  Remembering my brief but painful encounter with a hornet’s nest at Tintal a few years back, I was not inclined to get on my belly again for a peek inside.  But the entrance was fascinating enough, with several layers of thick plaster floor warped downward toward the tunnel entrance under the tremendous weight of the rubble directly above, and looking like a cross-section of a geological anticline exposed in a road cut.  Directly over the tunnel’s entrance, a huge rectangular block of masonry protected the tunnel’s entrance from the load.  The looters obviously knew where to dig their tunnel. 

Figure 6. Tree-covered E-Group pyramid at Wakna.

Across the plaza I could make out an unusually long structure with a moderately high, flat summit.  Curious about what it could be, Juan, Erik and I left the group, picked our way through the tangles of trees in the plaza, and climbed up the steep slope of the structure, exploring its long summit.  Initially thinking it to be a palace, I was surprised to find only a few evenly spaced mounds on top.  Months later, viewing a map of Wakna’s center, I realized that the tall pyramid and the long structure on the plaza were an E-Group, dating from the Middle Preclassic – probably the largest ever found.

We continued the long day’s journey through the forest, spending the night at a makeshift chiclero camp at the site of Caracol, and arrived at Carmelita by noon the next day, bringing to a close another memorable trek into the Mirador Basin.  Returning home, I found it difficult to explain in any satisfactory way the grandeur of the Mirador Basin.  Describing immense ruined cities and their architectural complexes, and interesting events of the trip was not a problem.  However, try as I might, I have found it impossible to convey the experience of the Mirador Basin to those who have not been there. 

Endnote:

One notable set of 11 Codex-style vessels, the “Dynastic Vases,” lists the names and accession dates of 19 early kings of the Kaan (Snake) dynasty, a royal lineage that challenged the kings of Tikal for domination of much of the lowlands during the Classic period.  The Kaan dynasty is identified with the huge site of Calakmul, just 35 kilometers north of El Mirador.  However, their presence at Calakmul is considered problematic because of the absence of the Kaan title on Calakmul monuments prior to AD 623.  Recently, evidence linking Kaan kings to the site of Dzibanche, in southern Quintana Roo during the 5th and 6th centuries has come forth, creating a new direction of inquiry to resolving the question of the origin of the Kaan dynasty.

In 2004, Mirador Basin Project epigrapher, Stanley Guenter suggested that the 19 Kaan kings on the Codex-style Dynastic Vases are a record of 19 rulers, who governed at Nakbe and El Mirador until the abrupt abandonment of much of the region around AD 150.  As speculative as this idea is, Richard Hansen is convinced that the Kaan dynasty originated in the Mirador Basin.  He points out that references to Kaan lords in the written record at sites within the Mirador Basin provide evidence for this assertion.  The name of one Kaan king in particular, Great Jaguar Paw, listed on the Dynastic Vases, appears in the giant masks flanking the central stairway of Structure 34, in the Tigre Complex at El Mirador.  In this case, the mask’s ear spools are giant jaguar claws. Guenter’s suggested scenario, arrived at by transposing the Calendar Round accession dates on the Dynastic Vases to dates in the Preclassic, places the accession of the Kaan dynasty founder, Skywalker at Nakbe in 393 BC, a date that fits neatly with the archaeological evidence for the restoration of political and economic stability in the Mirador Basin following a period of decline.  Recent environmental and archaeological evidence indicate a period of political collapse and partial abandonment in the Mirador Basin and other lowland regions around 400 BC, a date which marks the end of the Middle Preclassic period.  If Guenter is correct, the rise of the Kaan rulers in the Mirador Basin set the stage for more than 500 years of unrivaled growth, prosperity and power for this early state, an unmatched achievement among Maya dynasties.

Figure 7. Group at end of the trip at Carmelita. Author is in front center.

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