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CHAPTER 1
A Fortress in Heaven
Researching the Long Term at El Zotz, Guatemala
Stephen Houston, Thomas G. Garrison, and Edwin Román
Every Maya city in the Classic period has modest settlement in the vicinity, blended with the center into a single surface. The relations between the two, the large poised against the small, remain a central concern of Maya archaeology: were the interactions constant, collaborative, and amiable, or did they follow a path of inconstancy, exploitation, and antagonism? To a notable extent, too, the nature of a larger city and its region requires attention to boundaries. Frontiers and edges are where interactions took place. On them, near them, hostilities flared; flow occurred in people and resources. To examine a boundary is to evaluate its porosity, to ask about control of land and the varied intensity of efforts to ease or impede movement. As a product of boundaries, the Maya kingdom of El Zotz, Guatemala, compels such inquiries. Six seasons of fieldwork, as reported in this book, help to answer them.
As a city and a polity, El Zotz exists because of, even despite, its position near the large dynastic capital of Tikal (figure 1.1). In the central Peten of Guatemala, Tikal is the ineluctable giant. It is mentioned, copied, fought, exalted, and deliberately ignored by other kingdoms near by or farther afield (Martin and Grube 2008:24–53). After decades of research, perhaps the most extensive at any Maya site, Tikal also offers a vast body of comparative evidence for El Zotz, along with growing understanding of a key conflict during the Classic period (e.g., Haviland 2014, on modest remains at Tikal). This was the sustained, often violent competition between Tikal and Calakmul, a power of yet larger size to the north, in Campeche, Mexico (Carrasco Vargas and Cordeiro Baqueiro 2012). In this light, research at El Zotz poses oblique questions about Tikal's western frontier, building on similar research of high intensity and duration at the sites of Uaxactun, to the north of Tikal, and Yaxha, a prominent, lakeside city to the southeast (e.g., A. L. Smith 1950; R. Smith 1955; also Gámez 2013; Kovác and Arredondo 2011). To study El Zotz is to ponder Tikal and its other neighbors (Beach et al. 2015:278–279). No isolate, Tikal needs equal framing against El Zotz. Few areas in the neotropical New World offer comparable detail on the tumult of kingdoms and their frontiers; few projects draw regionally on such density of excavation, survey, ecological reconstruction, and history, or on such well-attested lengths of time and solid study of artifacts.
The comparatively small size of El Zotz offers a decided advantage to research. Among its other relevant traits are its limited history of research, its proximity to Tikal athwart a crucial valley, and the savage looting and broad, international dispersal of its thieved material. This destruction is irremediable, yet some evidence of value comes from addressing it. The mapping by Pennsylvania State University of a wall or set of ditches between Tikal and El Zotz confirmed that the Maya sought definition between the two polities (Webster et al. 2004:figure 25). From these assembled data came, after a planning trip in 2004, a mapping project, sponsored by Brown University and the Instituto de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala (IDAEH), that took to the field for short-term reconnaissance and recording of looter pits in 2006 and 2007. This was followed by more intensive seasons, from 2008 to 2011, of deeper excavation and regional survey. Just as Tikal and Uaxactun had great antiquity, the area of El Zotz now attests to over two millennia of Maya occupation. At times the city was populous, at others leaving only a faint footprint of dedicated visits or low ebb of settlement among the ruins. Earlier hints of agricultural clearance from pollen profiles pushes occupation back at least another millennium (Beach et al., chapter 7, this volume). Only at regional scale, with work by several sub-projects, can long-term developments reveal their sequence.
The Valley of Good Views
El Zotz perches on an elevation to the northern side of the Buenavista Valley (N17.23265 W-89.82425), a feature some 3 km across (figure 1.2). The valley runs for 30 km or so from the area of Tikal to the western flatlands around the San Pedro Martír River. That direction leads eventually to the Tabasco plains and the Gulf of Mexico. During colonial times, the camino real to Mérida hugged the edge of this opening on its way from Flores to points north (Jones 1998:map 3). Today, the northerly route coincides in part with the all-weather road passing toward Carmelita in the northern Peten. It serves also as the turnoff to the San Miguel la Palotada Biotope reserve that holds El Zotz. The Buenavista Valley is anomalous for the Peten. Only one other east–west passage of comparable size exists, and that is the south shore of Lake Peten Itza, an area well-populated with substantial ancient settlement, from Ixlu to Tayasal and the fortified peninsula of Nixtun-Ch'ich' (Pugh et al. 2016). The valley, with El Zotz situated halfway through it, represents one of the few routes by which the eastern side of the Maya Lowlands communicated readily with the west and vice versa. Other routes are possible but beset by broken karst and uplands. El Zotz has another attribute. To the north runs a valley (see figure 3.1) funneling contact with the so-called Mirador Basin (in fact an upland plateau) and its cluster of large Preclassic cities and scattered Classic settlement (Hansen et al. 2008).
Explored in 2015, another such valley exists approximately 8 km west of El Zotz. Similar in some respects to El Zotz is a site at the mouth of that valley. Our team labeled it "La Brisanta" after the local vegetation, a resilient grass. This ancient community proved to be substantial, with plain stelae and altars, copious quantities of Terminal Classic ceramics spilling out of looter trenches, at least two elevated palace areas, and a scattering of mound groups exposed by removal of the local forest. To the north, 5 km from La Brisanta, lies another site, called "Tikalito" because of its relatively large size and fancied similarity to the temples of Tikal. Tikalito consists of two elevated buildings, one a multiroomed palace with lateral rooms, some still standing. Across an elevated court is a massive platform raised on an outcropping of bedrock. The settlement sits outside the biotope park and, as a result, has been swept by occasional fires from agriculture. Dense regrowth stymies any easy mapping of its core or perimeter. Tikalito is also within an area of disputed ownership. Just prior to our visit, one owner, a purported drug capo, had been gunned down and his property markers removed with a chainsaw. But, in the long term, work at La Brisanta and Tikalito would pay a strong dividend. In 2015, survey near El Zotz by Omar Alcover Firpi of Brown University confirmed a general pattern shared by large sites on the northern portion of the Buenavista Valley. El Zotz and La Brisanta both have settlement on either side of their valley opening, yet the dynastic or elite cores sprawl to one side only. That placement was probably conditioned by access to water in reservoirs or cisterns, cavities known as chultunes that in some cases likely held water for the humbler residences (Beach et al. 2015). Alcover Firpi (2016) also mapped a defensive feature east of El Zotz. Most likely, this circular redoubt, El Fortín, monitored movement in the north–south valleys and the low-lying areas beyond. Momentous finds from lidar, a technology to be described in the final chapter, through measurements determined as this book went to press, show that such redoubts encircled the El Diablo sector of El Zotz, and an especially extensive area due north from El Palmar. This last, since named La Cuernavilla, had walls to the north, on a route leading to Bejucal, and what appears to be a double-moated, garrison facility with orderly buildings at the base of the escarpment. At present, this may be one of the largest citadels in the Maya region. Our hunch, too, is that it dates largely to the Early Classic period, by direct analogy with the chronology of El Diablo.
The valley itself presents severe obstacles to vehicular traffic. Depending on the rains, even off-road pickups quickly bog down in the bajo mud characteristic of these seasonal swamps. The low-lying bajos were probably not a focus of settlement by Classic times, which favored hillsides or prominences. If the flatlands did have settlement, it was mostly of perishable construction. The overriding impression, while atop palace complexes like Las Palmitas or El Diablo, or while viewing from the Str. L7-11 pyramid, is the optical reach of El Zotz and its environs (Doyle et al. 2012). By Late Classic times, those on pyramids or the Buenavista escarpment could see clearly to Tikal, even in stormy conditions. Today, the naked eye can perceive Tikal's Temple IV and, from El Diablo, all major pyramids. Nonetheless, it is well to add that the major features during most of El Zotz's occupation were not those buildings at Tikal but the Mundo Perdido complex or the South Acropolis. They appeared on a far horizon as large, mounded heaps of masonry, not up-thrust architecture with high roofcombs. Bejucal (figure 1.3) to the northeast was also visible from the El Diablo hill, at least hypothetically. For much of its existence, the city of El Zotz and its outliers was a place to see and be seen. When cleared of vegetation, even a casual pedestrian would be glimpsed far below while moving along the valley floor. The intent was more to control a central, dry route through the valley and to position the major settlement, El Palmar (figure 1.4), with respect to the Laguna El Palmar as a water source. There must also have been striking effects of sunrise and sunset on the Laguna. The "E-Group," solar temple built close to its edge took full advantage of that shimmering view (Doyle 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Doyle and Piedrasanta, chapter 2, this volume).
The site layout of El Zotz is distinctive from other settlements in the central lowlands. At its main pyramid, El Zotz lies 23 km from the main plaza at Tikal, by far the largest settlement in this part of Guatemala (figure 1.5). The known epicenter embraces an area ca. 700 × 700 m, with a major causeway or ceremonial path connecting pyramids to the east and south. A ballcourt lies at the point where the causeway turns to the south. Possibly it aligned with an as-yet-undetected tomb under Str. L7-11 to the north (Houston 2014): energetic excavation by Arredondo cleared out a looter tunnel within but found only a single cache (see Carter et al., chapter 4, this volume). The orientation of the east–west causeway corresponded to the direction of the sinkhole where El Zotz's bat population resides as well as the site's main aguada (manmade water source); sight-lines from the Diablo complex to other monumental features of Early Classic El Zotz may also have informed the layout of the city (Houston, Newman, Román and Garrison 2015:figure 1.5). Such causeways went far back indeed. In 2016, Alcover Firpi found a Preclassic road leading northeast from El Palmar, perhaps indicating that the early urban planners of El Zotz determined to mimic the earlier center. Data from the 2016 PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative showed yet other causeways, revealing that El Palmar was far larger than earlier thought. Preclassic buildings have a distinctive, formal "signature," with gentle, modulated shapes that come from centuries of added erosion; by contrast, Classic buildings exhibit crisp edges and corners. At El Zotz, several plazas, most likely the setting of civic rituals such as royal dances or processions, occur near its main causeway (Grube 1992; Inomata 2006). Pyramids of considerable size cluster in the northern area of the site, just by the palace complex, or "Acropolis" (Carter et al., chapter 4, this volume). Structure L7-11, for example, reaches at least 27 m in height, with well-preserved room foundations. Its construction greatly changed the visual properties of El Zotz, and its bulk loomed over the Acropolis to dominate the city epicenter. The palace is an area of many courtyards near the juncture where the causeway turns south. It is easily the most massive construction at the site and the probable residence of the local dynasty (see Martin 2001, for comparative examples in the Maya region). A string of palaces atop the escarpment was later documented by Edwin Román, Rony Piedrasanta, and Nicholas Carter (see Carter 2014). Possibly these were alternative residences for royalty or the seats of minor members of the dynasty. The lidar campaign in 2016 highlighted even more grandiose buildings to the north of Carter's dissertation work in the Las Palmitas Group.
An important feature of El Zotz is that its pyramids bear close similarities to pyramids built later at Tikal (figure 1.6). That is, El Zotz demonstrates a pattern of local innovation in architecture. The summits display large axial passages and small lateral rooms (Coe 1967:29). Evidently, the vaults over the rooms helped to stabilize the central passage, but they were not themselves very spacious or useful for storage or ritual use. What has become even more apparent, however, is the role of water supply in founding the community. A team led by Timothy Beach and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach discovered evidence for the sudden construction of large reservoirs near the South Group at El Zotz, possibly with sequenced pools to filter water by removing sediment (see Beach et al., chapter 7, this volume). Minor settlement too, of the sort to house non-elites and supporting staff for the royal court, were probed in Alyce de Carteret's (2017) doctoral research at Brown. Test pits and focused excavations of the I10 Group to the west of the main reservoirs at El Zotz shows robust occupation in the Late to Terminal Classic periods. The paradox is that monumental construction at El Zotz diminished when such modest settlement went into active phases of building, at limited scale to be sure. The suspicion is strong that El Zotz was, in this sense, inversely related to Tikal. With the decline of the latter city's power, settlement rebounded at El Zotz, albeit in selective ways. De Carteret's dissertation made this pattern eminently clear, with abundant, late settlement across the city. This was also when El Zotz began to re-erect stela, if soon to be broken up and incorporated into masonry (see below; Carter et al., chapter 4, this volume; Newman et al., chapter 5, this volume). Prior research by Houston and his team at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, hinted at a similar trajectory, royalty in active decay but with a surprising degree of trade and humbler construction (e.g., Golden 2002).
The Plundering of El Zotz
The first notice of El Zotz and its area comes from the Tikal Project of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. Robert Carr (personal communication, 2012), a mapper of that effort, sent a reliable worker to do a sketch map of rumored ruins to the west of Tikal. This proved to be El Palmar (Doyle and Piedrasanta, chapter 2, this volume). Thereafter, reports became more distressing, from the late 1960s on. Large-scale looting, supposedly sponsored by a brother to the then-president, Kjell Laugerud García, punctured almost every mound or building in the region. Not even El Palmar escaped such damage, which included the violation of an Early Classic royal tomb in its main triadic group (Doyle and Piedrasanta, chapter 2, this volume). This destruction affected all sites from the smallest, such as La Avispa (figure 1.7), to the largest, El Zotz. Direct reports exist from those who stumbled across soldiers massed into platoons for looting. The current tally of such trenches, tunnels, and pits far exceeds 200, leaving, as at Bejucal, an entire pyramid gutted from the inside (Str. S6-3), held together by tree roots and some rubble or fill in between. A conservative tally soon rises to over 100 looter trenches across El Zotz, many more in the region, with well over 1,000 m of fill removed.
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