Stephen Houston “(The sun) was an icon which they linked very deliberately to royal lines, royal identity, and royal power. The site is known for one of the very few carved wooden lintels with hieroglyphic text to have survived from pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. The excavation of the El Zotz site became more important last year, when it was named one of the World Monuments Fund’s 67 international cultural heritage sites at risk. Houston says that at one time most of the temple would have been covered in ornate stuccos and that it is possible much of it has survived. A sanctuary was eventually built on top of the tomb to offer protection to the space. The previously discovered tomb sits just beneath the main platform. Renderings indicate that a large solid platform made up the base of the pyramid, which consisted of two or three narrower terraces with the temple sitting at the top. Houston is using those images, as well as hundreds of color photographs taken during the excavation, to create drawings of the building. To get a better idea of what the building would have looked like in its original form, Houston is working with a team from the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) at the University of Arkansas, which uses photogrammetric techniques to create 3-D images of the stuccos. There are several sections, including whole sides, an area of the roof, and the base still to be excavated. The archaeologists have only been able to clear narrow tunnels around the building to get a look at the masks and other carvings. While excavating the tomb in 2009, Houston and his team discovered a small portion of the carvings peeking out from looter’s tunnels that had been dug several decades earlier. The Maya later built additional levels on top of the original structure, which helped to preserve the stuccos, but this also makes excavation more difficult. Houston says the team is still in the beginning stages of the temple’s excavation, with more than 70 percent still to be uncovered. This latest discovery was made public earlier today during a press conference in Guatemala City, hosted by the Instituto de Antropologia e Historia de Guatemala, which authorized the work. “The stuccos provide unprecedented insight into how the Maya conceived of the heavens, how they thought of the sun, and how the sun itself would have been grafted onto the identity of kings and the dynasties that would follow them.” “The Diablo Pyramid is one of the most ambitiously decorated buildings in ancient America,” Houston says. Houston says that through this find, much of it pristinely preserved, researchers are gaining a significant amount of new information about the Maya civilization. The structure was likely built after the tomb to venerate the leader buried there. Dating to about 350 to 400 A.D., the temple sits just behind the previously discovered royal tomb, atop the Diablo Pyramid. The team began uncovering the temple, called the Temple of the Night Sun, in 2009. #Zotz racing series#The ornately decorated structure is topped by a temple covered in a series of masks depicting different phases of the sun, as well as deeply modeled and vibrantly painted stucco throughout. A team of archaeologists led by Brown University’s Stephen Houston has uncovered a pyramid, part of the Maya archaeological site at El Zotz, Guatemala.
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