The Future of Petén

We came to northern Guatemala, and slogged through the mud for two days straight, to find out whether there was anything to the claims that archaeology could help save a Rhode Island-size chunk of roadless tropical forest.

The answer, in short, is yes, there’s something to it. But there’s no assurance that the archaeologists’ vision will work out the way they want it to. It all depends on their ability to tell the world about the cultural riches that remain buried beneath the jungle floor, and whether they can make peace with constituencies that have very different ideas about how to promote sustainable development.

El Mirador, as head archaeologist Richard Hansen enthusiastically reminded us yesterday from the top of La Danta pyramid, is a lost city loaded with superlatives:

• The first state-level civilization in the Western Hemisphere
• The largest (by volume) pyramid in the world
• The greatest concentration of Maya sites in the world

Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people constructed this city over 750 years starting about 500 B.C., though occupation started hundreds of years earlier. You can see the whole series of cities, which in antiquity was called Kan, at the project Web site (http://www.miradorbasin.com).

You can also see it from the top of La Danta, which Hansen hastens to explain has more built volume than any other pyramid in the world. From the summit you see an immense sea of green, punctuated by other buried cities on the horizon: Tintal, Nakbe, La Tortuga, Tamazul, El Porvenir, Wakna. Many of them are connected by kilometers-long raised paths as wide as six-lane highways. Several other sites are still unmapped and unexplored. It would be a shame to lose these sites, Hansen says, for the little bit of money that logging, farming and ranching can bring in, especially since other tourist sites, such as Tikal, are leading the way by already providing hundreds of millions in income each year.