Scientists return to cenote excavation in Belize

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I've commented before on the incredible pace of discovery in the Maya world. Archaeologists, epigraphers, and other scientists have been producing breakthroughs in our understanding of the Maya for many decades. Well, that does not happen without research on the ground. Lisa J. Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, just posted a "Notes from the Field" update in The New York Times, "A Year Later, Ready to Dive Again," about her studies of ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize.

She has been working in a 200-foot-deep cenote at Cara Blanca, near Valley of Peace village. The dig is in the vicinity of the remarkable Banana Bank Lodge. Her team had discovered bones of an extinct giant sloth called Eremotherium, radiocarbon dated to "anywhere from 9,000 to 39,000 years ago." But, she writes, "I am most interested in ancient Maya offerings, particularly those that date to a certain time period (about A.D. 800 to 900) when increasing evidence shows that a series of multiyear droughts, perhaps as many as eight, struck the Maya area."

LINK: "A Year Later, Ready to Dive Again,"