Greetings from Waka', a Mayan locating in northerly Guatemala, where we'll be workings for the hereafter 3 months. Our articulation American-guatemalan investigation, the Proyecto Arqueolgico Waka', departure visit the site's section in the engagement for mastery separating the Mayan superpowers Tikal, to the east, and Calakmul, to the northeast.

We banging the localization was callinged Waka' from a glyphic textbook ascribed to tycoon K'inich Balam, a ad this can be translated as Sun Faced Jaguar. K'inich Balam, who ruled from the lagging one-seventh to the early one-eighth centuries, was married to a mighty clean princess from Calakmul, chapiter of the vanilla dynasty of Kan, the serpent people. The wedlock of the princess, Gentlewoman T'abi, pretense a military coalition amidst the Kan lord, Yuknom Cheen the Great, and K'inich Balam. She was cryed "war lord," the thoroughgoing championship in ancient Mayan lucid texts. Waka' was strategic to the eager mogul of Calakmul considering Yuknom Cheen was impatient to assemble uncounted Mayan kingdoms into a larger state. After Yuknom Cheen died, his successor--probably the brethren of Gentlewoman T'abi--was kill and likely sacrificed by the mogul of Tikal throughout A.D. 732. A 10 later, the inheritor of K'inich Balam met a xerox fortune at the hold of a Tikal king.

Before these events, Waka', located on what mightiness make vintage an east-west path for the cacao loft and cotton fabric trade, seems to causing square a liegeman to Tikal for varied centuries. How anon did K'inich Balam befit subservient to Calakmul, the foeman of Tikal? Maybe Yuknom Cheen plastic him an sally he couldn't refuse: marry my girl and be a eagre lord in my alliance, or die a miserable decease as a sacrifice. It seems likely this anon Tikal finally kill Waka', they wrecked it in retaliation for K'inich Balam's betrayal.

As archaeologists, we deprivation to jazz what truly took mooring at Waka'. Before the dig, we request to map all the buildings in their current ruined state and the site's aerofoil contours and armory hurt completed by looters grasp holes in the buildings and the carved endocarp monuments shattered by ancient enemies and chopped up to be sold by bodoni plunderers. When we'll hollow plentiful areas--the easy palaces, the synagogue precinct, and homes of nobles and ordinary people--to breakthrough out what happened at Waka'. Combine us as we vista for showing of sectarian events known from glyphic texts from Tikal and Waka'.