14 DAY TRIAL // Last year, scientists from Bonn and Mexico started to uncover and map the walls of a very ancient Mayan city, called Uxul, and in the process they discovered huge water reservoirs.
These big pools are called 'aguadas' and they are “about 100m square”, said Iken Paap, who directs the project with Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube and the Mexican archaeologist Antonio Benavides Castillo.
Uxul is the Mayan term for saying “at the end”, and the city was named like this in 1934, when exhausted and sick after a long expedition through the jungles of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Karl Ruppert and John H. Denison from the Carnegie Institution of Washington finally discovered it.
The name fits perfectly to the city as even today it is far from obvious to get to it, and Dr Iken Paap even said that “you can only get to the ruins via 120 km of jungle paths clear across the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, far from modern roads and settlements.”
The German-Mexican excavation team realized just how hard the conditions were when they had to stay in the jungle for three whole months, in order to explore the Mayan city.
Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube said: “This Spring for the first time we found tombs that had not been destroyed by grave robbers in their search for ceramics and jade jewelry.
“We are hoping that this and new studies on the drinking water system and history of vegetation will provide us with new insights into the living situation of the population of this Mayan city.”
These enormous pools have the same role as today's water towers, they served to store drinking water, and the Mayans had a very special way of sealing them.
Young scholar Nicolaus Seefeld said that they “conducted a trial dig in the center of one of the water reservoirs” and they “found that the bottom, which is at a depth of two meters, was covered with ceramic shards – probably from plates – practically without any gaps.”
This could have been a very efficient way of sealing the aguadas, but it certainly was a lot of work, because the aguadas in Uxul were each the size of ten Olympic-size pools.
These pools had to sustain the lives of nearly 2000 people for the three months of the dry season, and scientists believe that there might have been more artificial lakes at the time.
Excavations revealed that the city was not “at the end of the world”, nor isolated as today, during its glory days in the Classical period – 250 to 900 AD.
It was a city located in a very dense populated area, between the big Mayan cities of El Mirador to the south and Calakmul to the northeast, and it had trade connections as far as today's southern Guatemala and the Central Mexican Plateau.
Researchers found inscriptions that showed that around 630 AD, the city was annexed to Calakmul, a city nearly 26 km away, and started wandering about the implications that this had over the Mayans, their trade connections and their everyday life.
Uxul was settled for several epochs of the Mayan culture, the Bonn scholars concluded after analyzing the dig and its settlement layers.
“This year, we were able to excavate a sequence of layers that was over three meters deep, ranging probably from the late Pre- to the End- or Post-Classical periods,” says Iken Paap, cited by AlphaGalileo.