They have baptized him ‘Minanbe’ (“there is no way”in Yucatecan Mayan) and the truth is that few names would better describe the pre-Columbian site that archaeologists have just discovered in the middle of the Campeche jungle, in Mexico. After traveling kilometers and kilometers using machetes and with the help of quadsunder the scorching sun of the Yucatán, a team of researchers led by the Slovenian Ivan Sprajc has reached a mayan city forgotten that, according to its first observations, must have played a relevant role during the Late Classica period spanning 600 and 900 AD
Then the jungle devoured the settlement for more than a thousand years, a long period of oblivion that has just ended.
What has happened? It is not strange that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico stirred the waters of pre-Columbian archeology with important discoveries. In recent years, however, there have been few as fascinating as the one just presented in Campeche.
And not only because of its reach. The location and intra-history of the discovery of the ancient Mayan city of Minanbé is so surprising that two facts are known to understand its scope: it took more than a decade of work and traveling several kilometers of jungle to reach it.
Why’s that? Because Minanbé was in an inaccessible place. And in this case we can use the word with all of the law. The city was “camouflaged among the jungle tangle of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve,” in words from INAH itself, who remembers that the archaeologists and technical staff of Ivan Šprajc’s team found it so difficult to get there that they decided to name their discovery with two words from the Yucatecan Mayan: mina’an (“there is not”) and bej (“path”). For good connoisseurs there are too many words.
To reach the old settlement, located in Campeche, they had to make their way as best they could. First they traveled along an old forest path, advancing aboard quads. When the jungle became too thick for these vehicles, they had no choice but to advance on foot, clearing brush with the help of machetes and sinking their boots into the mud. “They opened a gap with the edge of a machete for five kilometers,” precise the institute.
How did they know it was there? With the help of technology. Archaeologists identified the ruins thanks to aerial scans made with LiDAR, a tool which allows researchers to identify constructs impossible to observe at first glance through the vegetation. The first clues were actually obtained more than a decade ago.
“In this field season the team once again entered the northern sector of the reserve to carry out a superficial survey of a site west of Chactún, a governing center reported by this same initiative. 13 years ago and for which they had airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data,” explains the INAH. The images showed a settlement of about 15 hectares, but the most complicated task remained and has now finally begun: verifying these indications “at ground level.”
A lot of causality, right? That experts were scarce in that area of Campeche was not a coincidence either. Šprajc, attached to the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been dedicated for decades to the study of the Central Maya Lowlands, “a fossilized archaeological landscape that was the habitat of between nine and eleven million people during the Late Classic period,” recalls the INAH.
The truth is that Šprajc I intuited that the jungle could hide an undiscovered treasure. To begin with, there were no roads leading to the ruins. Not even the dirt trails opened by the logging industry decades ago. And although that complicated the team’s mobility, it was also a “good sign.” “Compared to other places where we have done surface tours, access here was much more difficult. However, in the last three years it is the first site we found intact. “There are no looting coves,” adds the researcher Slovenian. “It was a big surprise.”
What is Minanbe like? If there is another word that defines Minanbé, besides “inaccessible,” it is “promising.” When the team arrived at the site they found “an urban nucleus” with squares, palatial and religious buildings, terraces and hydraulic pipelines. The ‘jewel in the crown’ is a pyramid-shaped temple more than 13 meters high and a style reminiscent of the architecture of Río Becidentified in dozens of sites and which is distinguished, among other things, by the complexes with towers.
The experts stand out especially its masonry and the smooth panels of the dated, a steep staircase and moldings. Vitan Vujanović, one of the participants in the expedition, recognized It was recently the first time that he had the opportunity to record “a more or less well preserved temple and a stele still with glyphs.” One in particular stands out that represents a decapitation scene.
Do we know anything else? Yes. The researchers took hundreds of photographs that have allowed them to create three-dimensional models of 14 altars and stelae, including the piece that shows how one individual wields an ax to decapitate another. These recreations help us decipher the engravings despite the erosion and have shown that this particular stele has a temporal reference that places it in 849 AD.
“It is an important key because we can think that the entire set of monuments or some were erected for that moment of the Terminal Classic, close to the abandonment of the sites in the region, which happened in the 10th century AD,” comment another participant in the project, Octavio Esparza. The monuments have led experts to two other conclusions. First, Minanbé could have been an enclave with some political powernot a minor city. Second, over time groups from outside were able to arrive in the city and deliberately alter some monuments.
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