The body of a headless man has been unearthed in an ancient Mayan chamber which is adourned with paintings depicting various acts of torture.

Found under the Temple of Murals at the Maya site of Bonampak, the man was either a captive warrior who was sacrificed—perhaps one of the victims in the mural—or a relative of the city’s ruler, scientists speculate.

Whoever he was, “the place of the burial tells us that the person buried there was special,” said anthropologist Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta via e-mail.

At the time of the murals’ creation, about A.D. 790, Bonampak was a city of thousands. Today its most prominent vestige is a long-overgrown, partially excavated acropolis in the middle of a vast tropical rain forest in the southern state of Chiapas.

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USA Today has posted an interesting article about the fountain found late last year in the Mayan city of Palenque.

Excavations reveal the 217-foot-long, spring-fed “Piedras Bolas” aqueduct underneath Palenque was designed to narrow at its end, producing a high-pressure fountain.  It’s the first example of deliberately-engineered hydraulic pressure in the New World, prior to the arrival of the conquistadors in the 1,500’s. Now eroded, the conduit dates from 250 A.D. to 600 A.D.

“Palenque is unique in that it is a major center where the Maya built water systems to drain water away from the site,” says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois, by email. Most Maya centers stored water in reservoirs for the winter dry season.  ”Palenque, thus, is a unique site; we would not expect to find such water systems elsewhere. That said, there is lots of lit on the different kinds of water systems. For example, all centers with large plazas have drainage systems to keep the plazas dry during rain. “

The conduit lay underneath several households and could have stored water during the dry season, suggest the study authors. Another possibility, the conduit’s flow may have, “created the pressure necessary for an aesthetically pleasing fountain, and perhaps served as an aid in the filling of water jars.”

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A wall full of Mayan glyphs has been found in the Tonina Archaeological Zone in Chiapas.

Epigraphists point out that the finding will bring in new information regarding Maya grammar, since it shows linguistic features yet to be deciphered.

The discovery adds up to the sarcophagus recently uncovered by specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The wall dated in 708 AD was detected at El Palacio; a stucco portrait of K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk, the most powerful seignior of the ancient Maya city, was found as well.

Dr. Juan Yadeun Angulo, coordinator of Tonina Conservation and Research Project, declared that K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk forged “one of the greatest military seigniories of Maya history before Mexica people arrived to the region”.

Two vaulted rooms found with the wall and portrait are part of El Palacio or Casa de las Luciernagas (Palace or House of Fireflies), an architectural complex at the Acropolis, which is “one of the greatest pyramidal structures of Mexico and the world”.

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A 1,100-year-old tomb discovered discovered in Tonina, Mexico, may shed some light on why the Mayan civilization collapsed.

Archeologist Juan Yadeun said the tomb, and ceramics from another culture found in it, may reveal who occupied the Mayan site of Tonina in southern Chiapas state after the culture’s classic period began fading.

Many experts have pointed to internal warfare between Mayan city states, or environmental degradation, as possible causes of the Maya’s downfall starting around AD 820.

But Yadeun, who oversees the Tonina site for Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, said artifacts from the Toltec culture found in the tomb may point to another explanation. He said the tomb dates to between the years 840 and 900.

“It is clear that this is a new wave of occupation, the people who built this grave of the Toltec type,” Yadeun said Wednesday. “This is very interesting, because we are going to see from the bones who these people are, after the Maya empire.”

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A huge Mayan sculptured head has been found in a remote region of Guatemala, hinting at the possible existence of what was a significant city.

The stucco sculpture, which is 10 feet wide and 11.5 feet tall, was buried for centuries at the Chilonche ruins, close to the border with Belize.

The recent discovery of the head, which dates from the early Classic period between 300 to 600 AD, means the site is much older than previously thought. The Maya often constructed new buildings using older ones as foundations.

“It could be an imaginary being, something from the underworld, perhaps linked to a Mayan deity,” Polytechnic University of Valencia professor Gaspar Munoz, part of the team of archeologists that found the head, told Reuters.

Unlike Guatemala’s famous Mayan cities of Tikal and El Mirador, little excavation has been carried out at Chilonche.

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