La Danta Pyramid, Mirador, Guatemala

What an amazing and very significant discovery! This one dates to two to three centuries before the common era. Interestingly enough, "renegade" writers decades ago reported on the thousands of pyramids and city ruins all over Central and South America. They were labeled as "crackpots" by mainstream scholars and scientists.

The largest pyramid, La Danta, exceeds even the pyramids of Egypt in volume, Hansen says. A climb to the top of the mountainlike edifice, offers views of unbroken jungle canopy gently rising over the peaks of pyramids in other Maya cities.

The Maya here were gifted engineers and artists. Along the canals where rainwater collected — the only source of water in a region without lakes or streams — intricate reliefs demonstrate the culture's dedication to public art even on utilitarian structures. The Maya here also left behind freestanding carved reliefs honoring dynastic leaders, and a thousand years later, codex-style ceramics.

While the monumental structures bear the glyphs and insignias of kings and deities, they also reveal the traces of the daily lives of common people. Archeologists are excavating neighborhoods where families lived for centuries, and often built new houses on top of the old, until the city's final abandonment around A.D. 900.

Archaeologists for decades have been trying to piece together how and why the Maya collapsed. El Mirador's contribution to the debate is that it pushes back the origin of the Maya several hundred years before what had once been assumed to be the society's peak. Now it's becoming clear that Maya civilization ebbed and flowed several times over more than 1,200 years.

El Mirador is about four miles south of the Mexican border in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, home to thousands of animal species, including jaguars, tapirs and the scarlet macaw. The reserve was created in 1990 to protect a vast — and shrinking — tropical forest ecosystem and more than a dozen ancient Maya cities shrouded within.

I'm very much interested in the findings of the Popo Vuh, or Popol Vuh, literally the "Book of the Community." The word popol is Maya and means "together," "reunion," or "common house." Popol na is the "house of the community where they assemble to discuss things of the republic," says the Diccionario de Motul. Pop is a Quiché verb which means "to gather," "to join," "to crowd," according to Ximénez; and popol is a thing belonging to the municipal council, "communal," or "national."

For this reason Ximénez interprets Popol Vuh as Book of the Community or of the Council. Vuh or uúh is "book," "paper," or "rag" and is derived from the Maya búun or úun, which means at the same time both paper and book, and finally the tree, the bark of which was used in making paper in ancient times, and which the Nahua call amatl, commonly known in Guatemala as amatle (Ficus cotinifolia). Note that in many words the n from the Maya is changed to j or h in Quiché. Na, "house" in Maya, is changed to ha, or ja; húun or úun, "book" in Maya, becomes vuh or úuh in Quiché.

The discovery of the Popol Vuh is significant because it will not be tainted by the Catholic dogma brought in by the Spanish. Again, an earlier generation had dismissed all notions of a New World civilization thriving much earlier than the "time of Christ," as they tended to frame practically everything.

"The most marvelous ancient city every discovered in the world as we know it."

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