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A ruthless Maya warrior queen may have ordered the building of an elaborate road more than 1,000 years ago to encroach upon a upstage city and to counter the uprise big businessman of another , archeologist say .
They think the queen of the Maya metropolis of Cobá , Lady K’awiil Ajaw , may have ordered the route ’s grammatical construction around A.D. 680 so her armies could travel along it to conquer and take control of the city of Yaxuná , about 60 miles ( 100 km ) to the west , in what is now Mexico ’s Yucatán Peninsula .
Archaeologists have surveyed the Mayan road with airborne lidar technology to reveal the ancient structures along its length.
Lady K’awiil Ajaw was one of the most brawny and warlike rulers of ancient Cobá , and carved I. F. Stone memorial show her stick out over captive , says archeologist Travis Stanton of the University of California , Riverside .
" Given the bellicose nature of her memorial , " she may have been the swayer who extend the road to control Yaxuná , Stanton sound out .
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The 1,300-year-old road between the cities of Cobá and Yaxuná on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula is the longest ever built by the Maya.
The route was raised above the surrounding countryside and pave with a sticking plaster made from limestone , resulting in the name " sacbe " — " white road " in Mayan . TheMayabuilt many such roads , but the sacbe between Cobá and Yaxuná is the longest of these , and it would have been a big investment funds in time and resource , said Traci Ardren , an archeologist at the University of Miami .
" We tend to interpret them as natural process which sort of proclaim the power of one civil order , or at least , the alliance of some nature between the two polities , " Ardren said .
Ancient road
Stanton and Ardren are guide archeological site of ancient settlements along the road between Cobá and Yaxuná . Most recently , they used lidar , or light detection and ranging , to follow the sacbe . By using lidar , which bounces hundreds of laser pulses off the landscape every second , the researchers were capable to see beneath dense hobo camp canopies . The time it takes for each laser beat to return to the root give an estimation of the aloofness and can give away the topography of a control surface . Lidar equipment is often used from small aircraft to create a precise three - dimensional map of the landscape below .
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In the thirties , archaeologists from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington , D.C. , traveled the length of the road and reported that it formed a straight cable between Cobá and Yaxuná , Ardren secernate Live Science .
Cobá was one of the most powerful ancient Mayan cities and Lady K’awiil Ajaw was one of its most warlike rulers.
But the late lidar surveys show the ancient route is not absolutely straight ; in some places , it bend to hap through what would have been modest settlement , she said . " The motivation for the route was not just to reach Yaxuná and check Yaxuná , but also to let in and probably control these intervening closure , " she said .
Ardren and Stanton have lead expedition to excavate several households of Maya fellowship in Cobá and Yaxuná , and they design to return this yr to excavate phratry households at a smaller resolution near the center of the road .
They hope their archeological research will divulge how life there may have modify after the route was built , she said .
Maya kingdoms
Cobá ’s intrusion may have been due to the growing great power of yet another Maya city — that ofChichen Itza , about 15 miles ( 23 km ) north of Yaxuná , Ardren explain .
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Archaeological grounds suggest that Cobá began to decline in power after the sovereignty of Lady K’awiil Ajaw , but Chichen Itza became more powerful in the century that followed , she said .
The invasion of Yaxuná may have been an attempt by Cobá to countercheck the grow top executive of Chichen Itza , by establishing a stronghold in the center of the Yucatán Peninsula , she said .
" Cobá represents a very traditional definitive Mayan metropolis in the form of a dynastic kinsfolk , which holds all the power and is pore on one place , " she said .
But Chichen Itza had a different economic and political model , more " plug in " to other share of Mesoamerica ; archaeologic finds suggest it had contact with very aloof region , such as Costa Rica and the American Southwest , she said .
" I guess that there was a shift in how power was expressed and the find political ideology in that area of the peninsula of Yucatán , " she said .
It ’s not known how long it take to work up the road , or if it was build by Tennessean — those are among the questions the archaeologists go for to answer with cue from their next excavation .
" you may retrieve of one extreme , of Cobá arrive in and forcing people to participate in the building of this ; or it may have been something that many of these community of interests were willing to take part in , " Stanton said . " It ’s really difficult to make love . "
Ardren and Stanton depict their lidar findings in the February exit of theJournal of Archaeological Science : Reports .
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