While excavating an ancient royal palace deep in the Guatemalan rain forest, archaeologists made a rare discovery — the 1,200-year-old tomb and skeleton of a Mayan queen. Archaeologists announced the find Thursday, and said the woman appears to have been a powerful leader of a city that may have been home to tens of thousands of people at its peak. They found her bones on a raised platform, with evidence of riches scattered around her body. "We find clues of people's existence in the past all the time, from the garbage they left or the buildings they built. ... But when you actually come face-to-face with human beings, it's a deeply sacred moment for all of us," said David Freidel, an anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University, which sponsored a team of 20 archaeologists excavating the site. The discovery in the ancient Mayan city of Waka' in northwestern Guatemala was made in February but was not made public until Thursday. Word of the find comes two days after a Vanderbilt University archaeologist, whose work is supported by the National Geographic. Society, publicly described excavation of a little-known Guatamalan site called Cival, which housed as many as 10,000 people at its peak some 2,000 years ago. Stephen Houston, a Brigham Young University professor specializing in Mayan archaeology and writing who was not involved in the project, called the tomb discovery significant. "We haven't found to date many tombs of Maya queens," he said. The tomb is the first discovered at Laguna del Tigre, Guatemala's largest national park, where SMU began its excavation project in 2002. The queen's skull and leg bones were missing, probably removed sometime after the body had decomposed to be used as relics. Other than that, the tomb — measuring 11 feet long by 4 feet wide by 6 feet high — was untouched. The queen is thought to have been 30 to 45 when she died, but archaeologists have uncovered no clues as to her name, dynasty or cause of death. Freidel, who leads the excavation team with archaeologist Hector Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, said the power the queen held is evident in the 1,600 artifacts found in the tomb — especially the remains of a plated helmet.
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