Archaeologists have discovered a well-preserved Maya stela—a stone tablet—from the site of El Achiotal that dates to the fifth century.
“This stela portrays an early king during one of the more poorly understood periods of ancient Maya history,” says Marcello A. Canuto, director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University and co-director of the excavations at El Achiotal.
Canuto and other researchers with the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project in Guatemala discovered the second known reference to the so-called “end date” of the Maya calendar in 2012.
Pristine Hieroglyphic Panels
Researchers including graduate student Luke Auld-Thomas uncovered a shrine built by the ancient Maya that contained fragments of the broken stela. Epigrapher David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin estimates the stela’s date to be Nov. 22, A.D. 418, a time of great political upheaval in the central Maya area.
