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Maya Water World




By Priit J. Vesilind
Mission to the underworld complete, Arturo González rose up the narrow well shaft dangling in a metal chair, his black wet suit dripping, the rope inching through the squeaking pulley above his head. González, a Mexican underwater archaeologist, had just dived to the bottom of a hidden sinkhole that lies 70 feet below an old stone well in the thorny jungle of the Yucatán. In his hands he held a lidded plastic tub.

Encircled by the strong arms and expectant faces of his team when he reached the surface, González sought out Carmen Rojas, the young archaeologist who was co-director of his research project, and handed her the tub. "Don't drop it," said González, a boyish 37-year-old with a stout heart and a perpetually quizzical look on his face. Rojas ignored the comment and carried the tub to the open-sided conservation lab behind the abandoned hacienda, where Alejandro Terrazas, a physical anthropologist, waited impatiently.

They removed the lid and looked inside. Terrazas slowly picked up the skull and cradled it in his hands. He smiled. It was hundreds of years old and darkened to the color of burled oak, but he could envision how flesh and skin had filled out the young man's Maya face, and how his dark eyes might have stared, if not smiled, back at him.