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Archaeologist Thomas Lee
In 1997, Thomas Lee joined an expedition of
archaeologists and spelunkers to the Chiapas region of
Mexico. There, in a series of caves hundreds of feet above
the Rio La Venta, the expedition members found the remains
of a people called the Zoque who once inhabited the
region. Some 20 miles from the caves, the archaeologists
also stumbled across a large ceremonial site, which they
named El Tigre. In the following interview, Lee recounts
the highlights of that expedition, and his hopes for
future work in the region.
NOVA: Why are the Zoque important?
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Rio La Venta
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TL: Well, they got started 1,500 years earlier than the
Maya. They were the beginnings of settled village life and
participated in the very beginnings of ceramics and adaptation
of agriculture in this part of Mesoamerica; that makes them
very important in the general history and the evolution of the
Maya, and everyone else who comes alongside them or behind
them in time. They were the Olmecs.
NOVA: How did you first come to know about the caves
along Rio La Venta?
TL: What happened was that some hunters in the 1940s
acquired cloth and some other archaeological materials from a
cave and gave those to Tulane University. Tulane published
that and I was able to locate the guide who had taken those
hunters into the canyon and he took me back to that cave in
the late '60s. And so I excavated in that cave. And that's
what we call Media Luna. Media Luna was really the first
modern archaeological excavation in that area.
Partially-excavated remains of a child
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NOVA: In one of the caves, you found the remains of
children who had been sacrificed. Were these the children of
the people who were doing the sacrificing? Or were these
possibly children that were taken from another community to be
sacrificed?
TL: Well, Sahagun describes this for the 16th century
among the Nahuatl, the Aztec. He said the priests went out and
went towards the market and looked for women who were selling
their children—their babes in arms. And so I think it's
probably pretty logical that, if you had slave children, you
would use them first. If you didn't have anybody else, maybe
you'd have to sacrifice one of your own children. It sounds
pretty—boy, it couldn't be much more terrible. But it's
gone on again and again all over the world.
NOVA: Is the work that you carried out early in 1997
the beginning of a larger project?
TL: Yeah, a long project, we plan on carrying out
there. The canyon offers dry caves, which present the
possibility of recovering materials that we can't find
anywhere else—cloth, cords, vegetable remains, and whole
burials with clothing still on them, and that sort of thing.
We knew the people were living
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Zoque cloth
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and weaving cotton cloth, but now we have the cotton cloth.
And it's very beautiful as a matter of fact. It's like a lace
weave, the design is woven in on the loom. So it's, it's a
very beautiful cloth.
NOVA: Tell us more about the textiles you found.
TL: Well, you know, I saw them against the light for
just a few minutes. I haven't seen them since. I suppose some
day I will. But since they're delicate, they were supposed to
go off to Mexico and be conserved. And then come back, and
then we could study and photograph them. I don't even have
photographs of them. The Zoques had cloth with up to 70 to 80
threads per inch. And that was all, of course, spun by hand
and woven by hand. The designs we've seen so far were not
embroidered. They were actually worked into the weaving, which
is a much more difficult process.
NOVA: You found incense burners in some of the caves;
what was burned in them?
TL: Well, incense. But also cloths that were used to
catch the blood of the auto sacrifice—from the nose or
the fingers or the genitals or the ears—the blood is
caught in this special cloth and is burnt. Food was also burnt
as part of the offering. And even parts of the body were
burnt, like the heart and other things were special offerings
to the gods.
NOVA: As a way of providing nourishment to the gods?
TL: Yes.
Incense burner
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NOVA: You also found a mirror. What do you suspect that
was used for?
TL: Well, the mirrors were for devination; the shamans
used them. But they were also a great status symbol, because
they were very difficult to make. And as you may recall, in
the history of the conquest, Montezuma supposedly foresaw the
coming of Cortez by looking in his mirror. So he had one. And
in some of the principle burials at the sites we've excavated,
we find the highest individual often has a mirror. Sometimes
the mirrors are oxidized and what we really wind up with is
the back part. So that mirror in that cave is really special
because we've never seen a mirror in the country - in these
open sites - that had some kind of fabric woven to it.
NOVA: Tell us about the expedition itself.
TL: You know, it's really merciless country to work
in—too hot and rugged for a 63-year-old man. But I had
the time of my life, I'll tell you. I'd do it again. Because
you know, things are exciting. I've worked a lot of Zoque
archaeology, but I never worked a building with the wall
standing and a doorway you could walk into and covered with
beautiful decoration.
NOVA: You're referring to the large "El Tigre" site
that you found on the expedition—what kind of shape was
it in?
TL: It's basal platform was filled in with rubble,
and—it's a real snake pit, I'll tell you. It's just got
a leaf mulch on top and then all these little caves are just
filled with snakes.
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Pyrite mirror
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NOVA: Literally with snakes.
TL: Literally with snakes. Yeah, it's no fun. It's a
bad area in that sense. You know, the two guys who took us
down in there said, "We're not going to sleep here because
we're afraid of the tigers." So we built a big fire and didn't
hear even one that night. But I got to talking to one of these
guys and he said, "You know, it's funny, we're all afraid of
the tiger, but there are more people that die from snake bite
than tigers. We haven't lost anybody from a tiger here, but
we've lost three or four people from snake bites." Tigers are
fierce but they're not that lethal.
NOVA: Did you find that the structures at El Tigre had
astronomical alignment?
TL: Yeah, I can't prove it because we didn't have the
time, but they obviously did—all the sites are laid out
astronomically.
NOVA: What are some of the celestial markers that were
used?
TL: Well, we won't know until we've actually worked it
out. Because it changes in different places. This would have
to be done by an expert, in order to really come up with
specifics in terms of one celestial body or another. You have
to have really precise measurements. I wouldn't, at this
point, dare say, "It's aligned with Venus."
NOVA: Could you tell how large a population lived at El
Tigre?
Stone wall at El Tigre
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TL: Well, we really needed to get a better handle on
the other possible sites in the area. But certainly, it had to
run into the hundreds. Because there's just so much work
invested there in terms of moving those rocks around. There's
lots of rocks in there that would take 50 men to move, you
know, with rollers and crowbars.
NOVA: So, in thinking about your return trips, is your
greatest hope still to find a book?
TL: Yeah.
NOVA: It's a dream?
TL: Yeah, that's what draws me on. I'd rather find one
page of a book than a chest of gold, you know. I'd settle for
a half a page. That's why I went into the cave in the '60s,
because I thought, if there's any place where there's a book,
it's going to be down in one of these dry caves where people
haven't gotten into it. For one thing, it's an isolated area,
and the other thing is that the preservation is such that the
book could have resisted the centuries. But, you know, I'll
probably never find it.
Thomas A. Lee is professor at the University of Sciences
and Arts of the State of Chiapas. He took his Master's
degree in 1966 in anthropology at the University of Arizona,
Tucson, and has spent 35 years working as an archaeologist
in southern Mexico. Lee has published over 100 scientific
books and articles, and was recently awarded the Premio
Chiapas in Science by the Chiapas State Government in
recognition of his service in writing the ancient history of
the area.
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| Updated November 2000
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