Where the pyramid and several elite residences once stood were toppled walls of cut stone. In its prime, it was dominated by a 45-foot-high pyramid in which members of the royal family might have been entombed.

Spread across 100 acres of tangled vines and lumpy earth were reminders of lost grandeur: giant heaps of rock and rubble that had once been temples, plazas, reception halls and a towering, terraced palace.ĭirectly ahead were the remains of a complex of platforms that had formed the acropolis. Golden approached a barbed wire fence enclosing a pasture, then limboed under it and surveyed the vista beyond: the crumbling ruins of Sak Tz’i’, a Maya settlement at least 2,500 years old.

“We’re coming to what’s left of the Sak Tz’i’ dynasty,” Dr. Only the raucous half-roar, half-bark of howler monkeys pierced the ceaseless mating call of cicadas. CHIAPAS, Mexico - On a bright, buggy morning in early summer, Charles Golden, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, slashed through the knee-high grass of a cattle ranch deep in the Valle de Santo Domingo, a sparsely populated region of thick brush and almost impenetrable jungle.

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