Chiapas, Mexico

Scherer and Golden began archaeological research in Chiapas in 2011 as codirectors of the Proyecto Paisaje Arqueológico Busilja-Chocolja (PABC). Godos joined PABC in Chiapas in 2022. PABC’s initial work was at sites near the contemporary community of Nueva Esperanza, which was largely settled by people of mestizo ancestry and whose families migrated to the area from other parts of Mexico in the past 50 years or so. The town is located within the ancient Maya kingdom of Pepe’tuun (La Mar), and the site of Budsilha is on the outskirts of Nueva Esperanza (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Map of the southern Maya lowlands (top) and detail of the Usumacinta River region (bottom) showing archaeological sites mentioned in this essay (map by Charles Golden). (Color online)

When PABC began its work, residents of Nueva Esperanza had only a passing interest in the nearby ruins. They do not identify with the ancient Maya in any sort of ancestor–descendant relationship. However, because their town is located in the middle of the tourist route between Palenque in the north and Yaxchilan and Bonampak to the south, residents are keenly aware of the great public interest in ancient Maya culture; in general, they view the excavation and analysis of burials as just one part of the broader effort to study the ancient Maya.

At Nueva Esperanza, there was little interest in the final disposition of excavated materials. Thus, we turned all artifacts and human remains over to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia’s (INAH) repository at Palenque, and the ceramics were sent to Socorro Jimenez’s laboratory at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán for further analysis.

The community of Agua Cristalina is located on the road to Nueva Esperanza and was settled even more recently by people who migrated from the nearby community of San Antonio La Sombra, located in the neighboring valley to the west. Agua Cristalina is primarily occupied by Ch’ol speakers. Early in PABC’s history, Scherer and Golden visited the town to see whether there was interest in working with archaeologists. At that time, there was not. Indeed, residents in many of the area’s communities are generally distrustful of outsiders for a variety of reasons. In part, there is a concern that archaeological research might undermine community claims to land ownership or exacerbate fraught relationships with the national government; these relationships are still shaped by the Zapatista movement. Among Indigenous communities of the area, there is also a sense that foreigners, who include Mexican nationals from other parts of the country (particularly Mexico City), are strangers who undertake unusual activities (like archaeology) that do not resonate culturally or economically. Thus, to work in rural Chiapas, it is necessary to spend time developing trust with local communities, a process that takes years, if not decades.

Beginning in 2018, PABC embarked on fieldwork at the archaeological site of Lacanja Tzeltal, collaborating with residents of the local community of the same name, as well as people from neighboring Cintalapa (Golden et al. Reference Golden, Scherer, Houston, Schroder, Morell-Hart, Jiménez Álvarez and Van Kollias2020). The people of Lacanja Tzeltal and Cintalapa speak Tzeltal as their primary language and are descended from those who migrated to the area in the 1960s from communities near Ocosingo in the highlands. Early in that collaboration, Scherer and Golden asked their collaborators what they thought about the ruins and were told that they were likely made by the Aztecs. This is not so much a case of mistaken identity as a reflection of the nation-building project in Mexico, which generally centers Aztec civilization as the forebearer of the modern Mexican state.

Moreover, this view relates to broader Tzeltal perspectives about the ancient past—that it was fundamentally strange and was occupied by very different sorts of beings. Scherer mentioned the attribution of ancient Lacanja Tzeltal as “Aztec” in an email to the ethnographer Pedro Pitarch (personal communication 2018), who observed that this perspective is common from his experience working with the Tzeltal: “There is a sociological and ontological break between past people (lost generations) and today’s humanity. The ‘ancient’ become spirits, like aluxes [spirits/sprites] in Yucatan.” Indeed, over the years of our work in the area, both Indigenous and mestizo peoples reported seeing lights within archaeological ruins at night, which they attribute to the supernatural powers that still inhabit these places. In no instance did PABC’s interlocutors understand these entities to be the spirits of ancestors. Rather, they are the supernatural residues of the ancient Aztecs or Maya, both of whom are understood as beings from a deep past who, during their time, were capable of great supernatural feats. Their power is evidenced by the construction of pyramids and the carving of massive stones into stelae and other forms of sculpture. People also note that, for unknown reasons, these ancient beings retreated into the earth before the coming of modern people.

While working with the communities at Lacanja Tzeltal and Cintalapa, one delicate matter that arose was the final disposition of excavated materials. At Lacanja Tzeltal, the local landowner felt it important that any significant objects be returned to the community. PABC is presently working with him and INAH to establish a formal museum and repository within the community. Among the materials that the Tzeltal landowner intends to display are the remains of a woman who lived during the Middle Preclassic period (1000–400 BC) that PABC excavated in 2019. Her remains are among the oldest excavated in the area.

After seven years of fieldwork at Lacanja Tzeltal, interlocutors from the nearby communities no longer view the site as connected to the Aztec. That shift came about by sharing readings of the site’s hieroglyphic texts, which include words that are still used in Tzeltal today. The local collaborators increasingly see a closer connection to the Maya of the first millennium AD, although they still do not speak of them in terms of ancestors. Language is crucial to how the Maya of today think about relatedness (Christenson Reference Christenson and Sasche2006), and our collaborators from Lacanja Tzeltal note how they are growing apart from Tzeltal speakers from their ancestral community in the highlands as their own language has begun to deviate.

In 2024, Scherer, Golden, and Godos began a new collaboration with Agua Cristalina, the same Ch’ol community that they tried and failed to establish a connection with more than a decade ago. In the spring of that year, one of their long-standing local research collaborators from neighboring Nueva Esperanza sent Scherer, Golden, and Godos photos of a badly damaged structural platform at Agua Cristalina. The damage was done by local residents as they extracted stone for sale for modern house construction. The collaborator who sent the photos reported that people stopped extracting the stone when they encountered human remains. Scherer, Golden, and Godos were eventually put in touch with the local landowner from Agua Cristalina, with whom they arranged to document and repair the damage to the ancient structure. From those efforts, a rapport was established, leading to a wider collaboration with the community that led to archaeological fieldwork at Agua Cristalina in 2024 and 2025.

Ongoing work at Agua Cristalina highlights the complexities around working with human remains in Chiapas. Many people report having objects in their own collections, such as artifacts they found inside caves or burials that they encountered while mining stone for modern construction. On one hand, we are concerned about the damage being done to the archaeological sites and the burials they contain. On the other hand, we recognize that these communities are economically vulnerable and that archaeological sites provide sources of funding in terms of building materials. The situation is further complicated in that, from a western genealogical sense, the Indigenous inhabitants of these communities, whether Ch’ol, Tzeltal, or Southern Lacandon, are all potential descendants of the precolonial Maya people who occupied the area in the first millennium AD, even if they do not perceive themselves to be descendants.

La Técnica Agropecuaria, Peten, Guatemala

From 2006 to 2010 and again in 2016 and 2017, Scherer and Golden, then codirectors of the Proyecto Regional Arqueológico Sierra del Lacandon (PRASL), collaborated with the community of La Técnica Agropecuaria, located on the southern edge of the Sierra del Lacandon National Park in Peten, Guatemala. That collaboration first began with the excavation of the Preclassic period (450 BC–AD 350) site of La Técnica (located underneath the modern community of the same name) and the Late Classic period (AD 650–800) site of El Kinel, located in the community’s agricultural fields (Golden and Scherer Reference Golden and Scherer2006; Scherer et al. Reference Scherer, Golden, Lucía Arroyave Prera, Pérez Robles and Wrobel2014). Research then continued to the north, first at El Porvenir and then at the major Classic period center of Piedras Negras. Under the same research permit, Omar Alcover-Firpi and Monica Urquizu carried out archaeological work at the Late Preclassic fortress of Macabilero (Alcover Firpi Reference Alcover Firpi2020).

The modern community of La Técnica was settled in the mid-twentieth century by migrants from the highlands of Guatemala, most of whom do not identify as Indigenous. Of the Indigenous people at La Técnica, most are Q’eqchi speakers whose origins are to the south in the Alta Verapaz. In that sense, the case of La Técnica is similar to that of Nueva Esperanza: residents of the community do not articulate an ancestor–descendant relationship to the precolonial Maya. Nevertheless, they are interested in the local archaeology not only for the economic opportunities that come from the area’s tourism but also because of their own sense of stewardship and a desire to promote the local cultural patrimony. Residents of La Técnica, like most communities across the Peten, are highly sensitive to the extractive nature of archaeology, in which it is common for excavated materials to be transported for study and curation in facilities in faraway Guatemala City.

Trying to balance obligations to local and national interests, PRASL, after the 2008 field season, helped establish a community museum that exhibits artifacts that the project excavated at El Kinel and La Tecnica, alongside a sculptural monument featuring the king from nearby Yaxchilan that community members found while building a road through El Kinel. At the time, community representatives expressed a desire to display human remains from the burials that PRASL had excavated. However, Scherer and Golden were reluctant to arrange their display, in part because of their own concerns around the exhibition of human remains stemming from their training in the United States. In retrospect, they question that decision because it ran counter to the principle of placing local stakeholder interests first. For that reason, Scherer and Golden helped facilitate a relationship between the community and the national government (the Instituto de Antropología e Historia). An agreement was made, in which all the materials excavated by Alcover-Firpi and Uriquizú at Macabilero, including the human remains, were brought to a community repository at La Técnica for permanent curation in 2021.

Tikal, Peten, Guatemala

Although relatively small sites like El Kinel and Macabilero draw little national attention, Tikal, a UNESCO world heritage site, is iconic and arguably Guatemala’s most important archaeological site in terms of its national cultural patrimony. At present, Román-Ramirez is the director of the Proyecto Arqueológico Sur de Tikal (PAST), and Scherer participates in that project as a bioarchaeological consultant. The excavation and study of human remains have been a highly publicized aspect of the research at Tikal since the earliest projects of the 1950s to the present. A 2021 article in Guatemala’s Prensa Libre newspaper details some of PAST’s research at Tikal and features a photograph of Burial 3, a complex deposit that contained human remains, among a wide range of other materials (Martínez Reference Martínez2021).

The case of Tikal highlights many of the complexities around the excavation and analysis of human remains in Guatemala. As with La Técnica, there are few nearby communities that identify as Indigenous, with some notable exceptions around the Peten Lakes. Instead, most of the country’s modern-day Indigenous communities are in the highlands, and their ancestral connections are to more recent precolonial sites of the Late Postclassic period (AD 1200–1521). Nevertheless, the situation is evolving, with increased Indigenous access to the sites of the Peten made possible not only by improved in-country transportation but also the migration in recent decades of more Q’eqchi, K’iche’, and Kaqchikel peoples to the area. With these changes, some major Maya sites, like Tikal, are increasingly viewed as sacred centers by Indigenous people from throughout Guatemala, and modern altars have been built for ceremonies in front of its major pyramids (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Contemporary altar in front of Tikal Temple V (photo by Andrew Scherer, 2025). (Color online)

In 2008 the Guatemalan congress passed a quite broad law known as the Ley de Lugares Sagrados y Científicos de Guatemala, which was submitted by the Comisión de los Pueblos Indígenas del Congreso de Guatemala. Its main objective is the creation of a Council of Sacred Sites, which would primarily decide which landscapes, places, objects, or contexts could be considered sacred. This bill does not directly mention human remains, but it does suggest that, if a fortuitous or scientific discovery is made, the council members would decide what measures to take; for example, whether to excavate, where to relocate any important finds, and whether to allow certain types of analysis. Unfortunately, this law has not been discussed since it was introduced in Congress in 2008, and to date, the state has expressed little interest in enforcing it.

One factor affecting archaeological practice in Guatemala, as compared to Mexico or the United States, is that many of its archaeologists, Román-Ramirez included, identify as mestizo: they acknowledge their own Indigenous ancestry but do not speak an Indigenous language and have grown up following Western cultural traditions. This situation is changing, however. In recent years, there are more Guatemalans training as archaeologists who identify as Indigenous, having been raised in Indigenous communities and speaking Mayan languages.