Journey to Xibalba: A Life in Archaeology

3: The House of Jaguars: Yaxchilan Project

v฀฀ 77฀฀ v Chapter Three THE HOUSE OF JAGUARS Yaxchilan Project Just before dark, a small group of Chol Maya men visited our final campsite before Tenosique. The camp was located seven days downriver from Yaxchilan near the confluence of the Chocol-Ha and Usumacinta rivers and along the northern banks of the smaller tributary. The Maya brought the alarming news that a body had been spotted floating in the Chocol-Ha by one of the village members and that they had come to investigate in order to determine if it was one of their people. They walked downriver without seeing anything and eventually arrived at our campsite. It was then that we realized that Enrico was missing. Tenosique, Tabasco After my adventure into the world of the Maya in Guatemala and Honduras, San Miguel seemed boring. The lure of getting to Yaxchilan and the Usumacinta River became an obsession with me. So I began to research the possibilities of getting there. Preparations for the Yaxchilan project took the better part of a year. First we needed to get permission from Roberto García Moll, the archaeologist in charge. This involved visits to Mexico City and the National Museum of Anthropology and History. Roberto’s office was in the basement. His consent depended upon a proposal and a positive response from the general director of INAH, Professor Gaston García Cantú. Upon my return to San Miguel de Allende, Barbara Dobarganes, the acting director of the Instituto Allende, and I wrote a proposal for 78฀฀ v฀฀ CHAPTER THREE a documentation team to work at the site. Two weeks later we returned to Mexico City and presented it formally to the director of INAH in his office at Cordoba 47. Professor Cantú represented the very best of Mexican executive authority. He received us graciously, and after listening to Barbara and me and discussing the possibilities, he agreed to our proposal and directed us to make a contract between INAH and the Instituto Allende. He made a phone call and sent us down the hall to the office of his administrative secretary, Lic. Eduardo Villa Kamel. They were preparing the contract when we arrived. The next step was to canvas the Instituto Allende campus for students interested in a holistic learning experience and adventure. More students were interested than we were prepared for and with the permission of INAH we extended the program a few months to accommodate most of the interested students in a second group. I arrived on the train from Mexico City with the first group of ten students in Tenosique, Tabasco, in the middle of a wet January night. “Féosique” (meaning Ugly Town), as we decided to call the community , is set on the eastern shore of the Usumacinta River and the northern edge of what were once the great rain forests of Chiapas and the Peten of Guatemala. Much like Peter Mathiessen’s jungle settlement in his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord, the community in 1978 was the jumping-off place for bush pilots, missionaries, jobless drunks, and smugglers of everything from drugs to animals and their skins. It rained for three weeks. We tried all three of the modest hotels in Tenosique during the first week. In the first hotel several students found crab lice in the beds so we changed to another. We spent one night in the second hotel. At two o’clock in the morning Tenosique is asleep. The municipal government shuts down at 5 p.m., leaving a casually uniformed policeman on duty by the front door. By seven the owners locked up the shops, stores, and markets. Two drugstores, a few restaurants, and a number of bars remained open until midnight. After that the town was still. The only lights left on were for the countless drunks trying to find their way home. Many of them didn’t, and their snoring bodies TheHouseofJaguars(YaxchilanProject)฀฀ v฀฀ 79 could be found on almost every street in town. The missionaries were asleep, too, exhausted by their efforts at saving the community. Even the municipal policeman in charge of guarding the courthouse was asleep. It is possible that the smugglers were still up and about, but they were no less startled by what happened than the rest of us. On the second morning, one of the students started to get out of her bed at 2 a.m...