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UC San Diego archaeologist finds rare jade pendant while researching Maya in Belize

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Not bad for an accidental archaeologist.

Geoffrey Braswell, a UC San Diego anthropology professor, was leading a team digging in a collapsed tomb on a hilltop in southern Belize when they discovered a ceremonial jade pendant that may alter our understanding of the Maya, the ancient empire that flourished from the years 250 to 900 in Mexico and Central America and left behind major accomplishments in architecture, math, writing, agriculture and calendar-making.

The pendant itself is unusual. At 7.4 inches wide and 4.1 inches high, it’s the second largest piece of carved jade from Belize and one of the biggest ever legally excavated anywhere in the Maya area. It’s also the only one with historical text on one side, 30 hieroglyphs that tell a story about the king who wore it, his family, and the rituals he performed to bless his largely agrarian community with favorable weather.

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But where the pendant was found, undisturbed by looters, in a small community miles away from any major cities, could be even more significant for what it reveals about the movement of royalty, about strategic alliances, and about how the Maya tried to adapt as climate instability threatened their empire.

It was, according to Braswell, “like finding the Hope Diamond in Peoria instead of New York.”

He recently wrote two articles for scholarly journals about the pendant, which was unearthed in 2015 and now sits alongside other national treasures in a Belize bank vault.

Braswell, 52, has been at UC San Diego for 13 years. He started his college studies in math but couldn’t see spending the rest of his days pushing numbers around. He took a year off, traveled to Peru and came back excited to study the Inca. Except his school didn’t have anything on the Inca.

They did, however, have some Maya courses.

“I wish I could say I had a plan as a child to do this kind of work, but I’m more of an accidental archaeologist,” he said.

But it wasn’t happenstance that sent him to Nim Li Punit, the excavation site in the Toledo District of Belize. It’s in the foothills of the Maya Mountains, on a ridge near the present-day village of Indian Creek. The ancient settlement, which was probably inhabited from the years 150 to 850, was a distant outpost of the empire, more than 250 miles south of the famous Chichen Itzen in Mexico. That remoteness is what attracted Braswell.

“Frontiers are where everything interesting happens, where new trends develop,” he said.

Chasing the wind

The locals had known about the site for a long time, but archaeologists didn’t pay attention until oil prospectors came across ruins in 1976. A government official named the site Nim Li Punit, which translates as “the Hat is Big,” a reference to the head dress worn by a figure on one of the two-dozen carved limestone columns, or stelae, found there.

Braswell has led two major digs at the site, in 2012 and 2015, in what is known as the Palace Plaza area. His team has excavated two structures, one believed to be a council house and the other a royal residence, both thought to have been in use for four centuries. They’ve also found some of the oldest known pottery pieces in southern Belize.

Outside the royal residence, under a couple of capstones, they found a small collapsed tomb. During a dig there in 2015, Braswell was working alongside a local resident, a modern-day Maya. It was hot, 100 degrees, and humid. They worked slowly, layer by layer, with hand trowels and brushes. The other guy mused out loud about finding a piece of jade, which the Maya even today believe have certain magical powers. Braswell said he wanted to find something with some history written on it.

A few minutes later they unearthed an artifact that fulfilled both wishes: the pendant.

After almost two years of research and consultation with other archaeologists and hieroglyph experts, Braswell believes the pendant would have been worn on a king’s chest during religious ceremonies that involved the burning and scattering of incense. The glyphs on the back show it was first used for that purpose in 672 by a king named Janaab Ohl K’inich.

Two of the limestone stelae from Nim Li Punit have carved figures wearing a similar-looking pendant during scattering rituals. One of those figures was carved almost 50 years after the pendant was first used, the other almost 60 years after. That suggests the pendant was something important and precious, something lasting.

The pendant was carved into the shape of a “T,” which corresponds to the Maya glyph “ik,” meaning wind or breath. There’s also a “T” etched on the front. To Braswell, that indicates it was used in rituals aimed at influencing the god of wind, thought to bring the monsoons so important to crops.

These kinds of artifacts are often buried with royalty, but there was no body in the tomb. Was it designed for another purpose? Braswell thinks the date of the cavern, constructed in around 800, is significant.

At that time, Maya kingdoms in Belize and Guatemala were collapsing. Populations plummeted. Within a generation of the tomb’s dedication, Nim Li Punit and other villages in southern Belize were abandoned.

One theory blames climate instability and its impact on the viability of the food supply. The whole tomb, then, may have been some kind of attempt to change the weather with offerings. Inside it, in addition to the pendant, Braswell’s team found a clay pot, maybe a drum, that has on its front a bird-beaked figure.

It’s a wind god.

Solving a puzzle

In his spare time, Braswell likes reading mystery novels and solving crosswords, which isn’t surprising because archaeology can feel at times like a mystery and a puzzle. “The difference is, you get to construct the narrative, you get to make the puzzle, consistent with the available evidence,” he said.

Part of the puzzle with the jade pendant is how it wound up in Nim Li Punit. It’s a large piece, elaborately carved — the kind of thing scholars would expect to see in a major Maya city, not an outpost. Was it stolen? A spoil of some kind of conquest? A gift? Or did the king bring it with him from somewhere else, establishing a new dynasty?

The hieroglyphs on the back, translated by Braswell’s German research partner, Christian Prager, provide information about the king’s mother and father, including where they were from — not Nim Li Punit. There’s also a suggestion in the writing of ties between the king and Caracol, a large and powerful Maya city that would have been many days’ walk away through rain forests and across mountains.

That has Braswell wondering about previously unknown political alliances and the movement of royalty through the empire.

He hopes to go back to Belize next month under the auspices of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology, a joint venture between UC San Diego’s anthropology department and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He’d like to look for river settlements that may connect Nim Li Punit with ancient Caribbean Sea coastal villages, perhaps revealing something about how the Maya empire evolved, spread, and disappeared.

“We live in a constantly changing world,” Braswell said. “If we want to learn how to adapt to changes in our environment, the past can teach us.”

john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com

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