The king had been sitting in darkness for more than 1,400 years. Half of his finely carved face was missing when the archaeologists found him, but his elaborate headdress and badges of rank were still whole. He stared, one-eyed, into the dim tunnel the visitors had excavated inside one of the largest monuments in the ancient Maya city of Holmul, located in what is now northeastern Guatemala. Hieroglyphs near the figure spelled out his name: Och Chan Yopaat, or “Storm God Enters the Sky.”
The king is the central figure in a recently discovered sculptural panel that is electrifying archaeologists who study the Maya civilization. Francisco Estrada-Belli of Boston University had been excavating the monument—a rectangular pyramid with a flat top where ceremonies were performed—to glean insights into the politics at play during a particularly tumultuous period of Maya history. Inside the pyramid are the remnants of all the buildings from centuries past that had previously stood on the same spot before bigger temples were constructed on top of them. Estrada-Belli and his team were tunneling through the nested structures, investigating what was left of those earlier monuments, when they hit the base of a staircase. In the summer of 2013 they followed the stairs up the front of a 30-foot-tall temple that had somehow escaped demolition. The magnificent frieze—an expanse of intricately worked plaster 26 feet long by seven feet high—decorated the top of the temple.
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