When Anthropology Professor Dr. Ellen Bell talks about the “Lost Maya Kings” in her classes, she’s speaking from personal, on-the-scene discovery experiences that CSU Stanislaus students are now sharing.

A member of the University faculty since 2007, Bell has been conducting archaeological research in the ongoing search for the 16

Maya kings who ruled in the Copan kingdom more than 1,500 years ago. She has made many ventures to western Honduras to participate in archaeological projects that are documenting the Maya kings and their civilization that once thrived in an area from southern Mexico to Central America.

Participating in the discovery of what is believed to be a founding king’s royal burial chamber early in her archaeological career convinced Bell that Honduras would be her regular destination for many years to come.

“As soon as I got to Honduras for the first time, I knew it was what I wanted to do for a career,” Bell said. “I’ve been lucky enough to be able to keep doing it ever since.”

Bell’s work has been documented in publications and included in a 2001 Public Broadcast Station (PBS) “Nova” program called “Lost King of the Maya.” Her research will soon take her to Washington, D.C. for a prestigious Harvard University fellowship project.

Bell gained her first Honduras experience in 1990 as a student at Kenyon College in Ohio while she was working under the tutelage of the noted husband-wife professor duo Edward M. Schortman and Patricia Urban. A few years later in the mid 1990s, when she was a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, came payoff experiences in the burial chambers of the founding king and his queen who ruled during the fifth century AD in what is now western Honduras.

Bell recalls that she was in a group digging in the lower layers of the Copan Acropolis when a stone fell out of a wall, creating an opening to a burial chamber in the tomb. Inside the chamber, and probably viewed for the first time in more than a thousand years, were bones believed to be that of the founding king, jewels, pottery, utensils, and an assortment of other artifacts. An earlier dig discovered a nearby burial chamber for the queen.

“It was an incredible experience, finding a tomb of one of the Maya founding fathers, their George Washington,” Bell said.

Now focusing her research on the El Paraíso Valley and other nearby areas of Western Honduras near the Guatemalan border, Bell is documenting a pair of large Maya centers that suggest Copan hierarchy may have mobilized an innovative administrative strategy to rule a diverse population through regional centers.

Seven CSU Stanislaus students accompanied Bell to Honduras during the summer of 2009, three joined her in 2008, and more are making plans to participate in a field course with her there in early summer 2010. The students help supervise local workers on dig sites, determine excavation locations, and document findings that provided information for Bell’s “On the Edge of the Maya World” project. They focused on rural commoner household sites, unearthing a variety of domestic items that were used more than a thousand years ago.

“Participating in this kind of a project provides students with a way to study and live abroad while getting some first-hand archaeological experience,” Bell said. “Their findings in 2009 confirmed the hypothesis that people in these rural communities seemed to be more tied to the local centers than to the kingdom’s ruling city.”  

In addition to their work in the El Paraiso Valley, Bell and the CSU Stanislaus students were able to venture into the tunnels at the Classic Maya Center of Copan Acropolis where the anthropology professor participated in her exciting discoveries many years before.

Bell noted that there was an element of intrigue during their stay when the Honduran army ousted President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009, triggered by his bid to make it legal to seek another term in office. The CSU Stanislaus group saw no evidence of the military action during their time in Honduras and were never in danger, but it was definitely a hot topic of conversation in the region while they were there, Bell said.

Students who participated in this year’s five-week research dig co-authored an article that they planned to present at the Society for the American Anthropology meeting in St. Louis in April 2010.

Their efforts have generated dreams that perhaps CSU Stanislaus students will someday experience similar exciting discoveries in the ruins of the Maya cities abandoned more than a thousand years ago.

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