National Geographic: Lost Kingdoms of the Maya Page #5

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Okay. Oh, this is nice. Arlen.

This is real nice.

We've definitely got a royal tomb here

Ordinary people were usually buried

under the floors of their houses.

The vessels are nice

and they're in good shape.

The elite were placed in tombs.

This polychrome over here

is in better shape on the back

than the front side.

What about the bone?

Bone? There's a lot of bone.

There are at least two individuals

whose heads are to the south.

They're in pretty good shape.

Someone else's legs are up

in this corner.

It doesn't go with either one

of the first two individuals.

It's not the man

and the possible woman.

It's somebody different.

It wasn't uncommon for the Maya

to bury more than one family member

in the same space.

I like to think of it more like

a family mausoleum

where grandpa may have died

and you place him inside first.

Grandma dies. You put her inside too.

A number of years pass and maybe

the son or daughter dies.

You might move grandpa to the side

a little bit, grandma too,

and stick the son in.

And a little bit further along

a few more people in the family die

and eventually the mausoleum has quite

a lot of bone material inside.

This one's got a ring...

For archeologists,

tombs are like time capsules.

The objects buried with the dead

sometimes yield precise dates and names.

These help to fill out

our picture of

how the ancient Maya lived.

...in the lab it should pop out.

And sometimes what they find

is simply beautiful.

Like the tombs at Caracol,

the buildings of Copan contain

their share of buried history.

But finding it has often been an

elusive undertaking.

Honduran archeologist Ricardo Agurcia

has been working at Copan since 1978.

My primary interest was finding out

what happened to these people.

It's something that's part

of my heritage too.

It's something that's part

of my country.

And I grew up I mean

I wasn't very young

when I came to these ruins

the first time.

But it impacted me and it was

a fascinating issue-question that

you were always thinking about.

What happened to these people?

Who were they?

How did they do the things they did?

For the past four years

Agurcia has been excavating

a temple pyramid

that may tell us more about how

the people of Copan lived.

Temple 16 is a typical royal structure

in terms of its construction.

And there in lies

the archeologists' challenge.

For the Maya,

certain spaces were sacred,

so they built their temples one

on top of another.

Workers would collapse the upper levels

of an existing structure,

encase what was left with heavy fill,

and build a new structure around it.

As Agurcia's crew remove the fill,

they create a labyrinth of tunnels.

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