CALGARY—The words Maya and mystery are never far apart when looking at the civilization that dominated Central America for at least seven centuries before collapsing — mysteriously — around AD 900.

Archaeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor, a University of Calgary professor, is currently digging into one of the most intriguing of all those many mysteries, a "lost" city that not only survived being caught between two warring Mayan superpowers but also may have blazed a new path culturally and linguistically.

Working with researchers from Australia and Guatemala, Reese-Taylor co-directs a team excavating the ruins of Naachtun, an ancient city situated at the geographical heart of the Mayan civilization.

The location in northern Guatemala — between the Mayan centres of Tikal and Calakmul, across the border with Mexico — is so remote that Naachtun has been rediscovered twice.

"It's completely unexcavated except for what we've done," says the 47-year-old archaeologist, the latest in a series of top Maya scholars at the university.

"What also makes it different is that a lot of the buildings are still standing. They're not collapsed as at other Maya sites."

Simply reaching the site can involve a 30-kilometre trek by foot and mule when heavy rains make a rudimentary logging road impassable even for all-terrain vehicles. Added problems include lack of potable water, poisonous snakes and predatory grave-robbers.

"The looting has been huge, including several early tombs. The very artifacts that I need to answer many of the mysteries may have been taken away," says Reese-Taylor.

The 40-member team tackled 25 excavations during its first three-month expedition this spring and has only scratched the surface. Researchers estimate that Naachtun has at least 100 public buildings.

Overall, the ancient city probably covered a circular area that stretched a dozen kilometres from side to side and contained as many as 500 buildings for a population of as many as 40,000 people at its height.

Reese-Taylor thinks Naachtun could help fill in some of the blanks about the final collapse of the classic Mayan civilization, which is especially intriguing because the Maya were so advanced.

They charted the heavens, developed the only writing system native to the Americas and mastered mathematics and the calendar — all while the Dark Ages enveloped Europe.

At the height of their civilization in the 8th century, the Mayan heartland in northern Guatemala and the Yucatan was probably the most densely populated region in the world.

As a 1995 exhibition at the Museum of Civilization in Hull declared:

"Without advantage of metal tools, beasts of burden or even the wheel, they were able to construct vast cities with an astonishing degree of architectural perfection and variety. Their legacy in stone, which has survived in a spectacular fashion at places such as Palenque, Tikal, Tulum, Chichen Itza, Copan and Uxmal, lives on, as do the 7 million descendants of the classic Maya civilization."

The Maya actually suffered two major collapses: the first between AD 150 and 200; the second, final one, a century-long decline beginning in roughly AD 800 that emptied many of their great cities.

"There is a high probability that we're going to find out what caused the final collapse," says Reese-Taylor, referring to archaeologists studying Mayan sites in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Mexico.

Researchers generally believe that a combination of three factors — what Reese-Taylor calls "the one-two-three punch" — triggered the decline of many Mayan cities: continual warfare between rival kings, over-exploitation of fragile wetland ecosystems and decades of drought.

The result was famine beginning around AD 750 and mass migrations to the north.

Yet some Mayan cities were still functioning when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century.

The last independent Mayan state did not fall until 1697.

Long before the Spanish assault, the Maya in Naachtun had honed their political survival skills. For nearly three centuries, they thrived despite being in the crossfire of continual warfare between two superpower neighbours: Tikal, 65 kilometres to the south, and Calakmul, 45 kilometres to the north.

These shifting affiliations left their mark culturally as well.

Various buildings display architectural influences from both of the superpowers, but there is also a third style drawn from the region around Rio Bec, a city even farther north.

Those particular buildings appear after AD 630.

Four decades later, Naachtun somehow defeated superpower Calakmul in a war.

"This piggy-in-the-middle may have had a powerful friend in Rio Bec and was able to break through with that help," says Reese-Taylor.

Still more clues about the cultural diversity of the lost city are emerging from the deciphering of hieroglyphics incised into ceremonial stone slabs.

Known as stelae, the slabs commemorate events in the lives of Mayan kings, such a births, deaths and the assumption of office. Naachtun is especially well-endowed, with more than two dozen surviving slabs.

Already there are hints in the chosen symbols or "glyphs" of a mixing of courtly writing style from one region with a vernacular style from another. The archaeologists are busily cataloguing pottery and other artifacts with an eye to gaining further evidence that Naachtun was a cultural and ethnic melting pot.

"What drives me is trying to understand the complexity of the area," says Reese-Taylor.

"How did different languages, different ethnicities, different political systems all pull together to form a coherent region?"

Today's researchers can tackle such over-arching issues only because of decades of previous field work, in which Canadian archaeologists played substantial roles. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, for instance, carried out pioneering investigations at Lamanai, a Mayan city in Belize.

And unlocking the secrets of the writing system with its 600 glyphs is a riveting tale of syllabic detective work, academic feuds and forceful personalities recounted in several books, including Michael Coe's Breaking The Maya Code.

All the accounts credit a key breakthrough to Dave Keeley, now retired from Calgary's archaeology department, and his then-student Peter Mathews.

Now a professor of archaeology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, Mathews is a collaborator in the Naachtun research. The Guatemalan co-director of the project is Martin Rangel, an archaeologist at the University of San Carlos.

The annual budget for the Naachtun research is about $150,000, with the bulk coming from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a federal granting agency.
Additional articles by Peter Calamai