Travel: Lost city of the Jaguar

Amazing Mayan city of Ek Balam has been pulled from the jungles

By JOHN BORDSEN
McClatchy Newspapers

EK BALAM, Mexico -- The view from near the summit of The Tower is pure Yucatan. Even with humidity as heavy as a grandmother's afghan, it is breathtaking: low and level scrubland as far as the eye can see, though studded here and there by small, tree-covered mounds.

The Tower has an unsurpassed view because it is one of the taller ancient Mayan ruins -- a six-level palace and religious compound 100 feet tall -- the equivalent of a 10-story building. It is larger than the famed Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, 40 miles southwest.

Look down from The Tower. You won't see the warren of souvenir booths that surround Chichen Itza. You won't see hundreds of tourists, either.

Now turn to face The Tower. Ek Balam -- Mayan for "Black Jaguar" or "Star Jaguar" -- was abandoned and covered with dirt and vegetation long before the Spanish conquistadors looted the Mayan heartland. It was only in the last two decades that archaeologists carefully peeled back the earth to expose an untouched limestone metropolis decorated with stucco grotesqueries -- 1,000-year-old bone-colored statuettes that could scare gargoyles from the spires of Notre Dame.

In 1986, a 34-year-old grad student named Bill Ringle began to awaken Ek Balam. He was wrapping up his work in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, and visited Valladolid, a market town in the middle of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, in connection with his dissertation.

Ringle today is a professor of anthropology at Davidson College, in suburban Charlotte, N.C. Here's what happened on that visit:

"An explorer named Charnay had been there in the 1880s and even took some photographs, so it's not like we 'discovered' Ek Balam. Still, it had pretty much been ignored. But I was interested in seeing it because of what light it might shed on how much control Chichen Itza had on the rest of the Yucatan. My wife and I went out to take a look.

"Ek Balam was difficult to get to, and was completely covered with trees 60 to 80 feet tall. You could tell a huge mound was there only when you walked up this big hill. We ate lunch right on top of it -- unaware we were literally on top of a beautifully preserved building."

"I could see bits and pieces of things on the ground -- stone covered with plaster. You could see walls in the vicinity, and a shaft that went down into the heart of something large.

"Again, keep in mind everything was overgrown: It was an adventure just to get from one building to another."

And it was a financial stretch to get much done: Ringle's war chest was somewhere between $700 and $1,000 -- enough to map the site for a couple of weeks.

Much of what he sought was truly underfoot. There's not a lot of soil in the Yucatan flatlands, but the centuries covered the site with 6 inches to a foot of dirt.

Still, Ringle had seen enough.

In 1986, a year after his dissertation, he and George Bey, a colleague from Tulane, received a grant from the National Geographic Society to explore Ek Balam. "We kind of built on that," Ringle says, "and we worked there most years until 1999."

Ringle and Bey -- now with Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. -- were the principal investigators. They recruited some of their students to come and help. They also hired farmers from around Ek Balam as the excavation crew, anywhere from 10 to 90 of them.

"They were subsistence farmers, and this was a chance for them to make a little extra money in summertime," Ringle recalls. "It was pretty much the same crew summer to summer. Some began as young teenagers; they were adults by the time we finished. They learned the ropes and learned what we were trying to do."