What Is the Most Important Find at Palenque?

The single most important archaeological find at Palenque — and one of the most important of the ancient Americas — is the tomb of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, discovered deep inside the Temple of the Inscriptions by the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier in June 1952. The find was the first royal tomb of a Classic Maya ruler to be discovered in a modern excavation, the first to be documented in its original architectural context, and the first to provide the kind of rich burial assemblage (jade, shell, stucco, and a magnificent carved sarcophagus lid) that the older literature had only imagined from the looting reports of the previous century. It transformed the discipline of Maya archaeology and is the foundation stone of the modern study of Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology, Maya art, architecture, and monuments, and Maya writing, language, and books.

For a broader account of the site, see Palenque: art and court of Pakal, and the wider survey of Maya cities and archaeological sites.

Pakal and the Temple of the Inscriptions

K’inich Janaab’ Pakal I — Pakal the Great — came to the throne of Palenque on 29 July 683 CE at the age of 12. He ruled for 68 years, the longest reign in the documented history of the ancient Maya, and presided over the most concentrated burst of artistic and architectural patronage in the entire Maya world. The Temple of the Inscriptions, the great stepped pyramid that rises above the central plaza, was his funerary monument, and it is named for the three large hieroglyphic panels carved into the upper façade of the temple, with 617 glyphs that record the dynastic history of Palenque from the 1st century BCE to the dedication of the temple in 692 CE.

The temple was discovered in 1746 by the Spanish friar Antonio de Solís, who reported the inscription in a letter to his superiors, and the building was visited in 1807 by the Mexican geographer Guillermo Dupaix, who made the first drawings. The American travelers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood visited in 1840, and Catherwood’s lithographs of the temple were widely circulated in their 1841 book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. By the mid-20th century, the temple was known as one of the great Maya pyramids, but no one had yet found the tomb inside.

The 1949–1952 excavation of Alberto Ruz

The modern excavation of the Temple of the Inscriptions was begun in 1949 by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) of Mexico, under the direction of the young archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier. Ruz had joined INAH in 1930, had worked at the great site of Chichén Itzá and at Comalcalco, and had become one of the most experienced field archaeologists in Mexico. He began the Palenque project in 1949 with a small team, working first on the central platform and on the Temple of the Cross Group, before turning to the Temple of the Inscriptions in 1951.

The tomb was not easy to find. Ruz’s team had to clear the rubble of centuries, secure the roof comb, and follow a long concealed stairway that began in the floor of the inner sanctuary of the temple and led down through a series of blocked passages and stairways to the burial chamber at the heart of the pyramid. On 15 June 1952, after more than three years of careful work, Ruz’s team broke through a wall of rubble into the burial chamber at the base of the pyramid, 27 meters below the upper floor of the temple. The tomb is treated in the wider context of Maya pyramids, temples, and sacred architecture, and the long history of pyramid-as-tomb architecture is in how Maya pyramids were built without metal tools.

The sarcophagus of Pakal

At the heart of the burial chamber stood a great limestone sarcophagus, more than 3 meters long, 2 meters wide, and almost 1 meter high, carved in a single piece. The body of Pakal — a man of advanced age, more than 80 years old at his death — lay inside, dressed in the regalia of a Late Classic Maya king, with a painted stucco death mask covering his face. The mask, the most famous single object from the site, is a portrait of a serene, somewhat ascetic old man, with the features of the dynasty’s iconography painted in Maya Blue and red.

The sarcophagus lid is the masterpiece. The slab, weighing more than 5 tons, was carved in low relief to depict the moment of Pakal’s death, falling into the open jaws of the underworld, framed by the world tree and a complex iconographic program of celestial bodies, ancestors, and maize gods. The iconography is one of the most discussed in Maya studies, and has been interpreted in many ways: as a literal representation of the king’s journey to the underworld, as a cosmic diagram of the world tree, as a depiction of the maize god’s journey to the place of death, and — in more popular accounts — as the famous “ancient astronaut” figure, an interpretation that is rejected by all serious scholarship.

The sarcophagus lid is read in detail in Maya art, architecture, and monuments and in the Maya murals, painting, and iconography survey. The religious context of the underworld journey is in Xibalba: the Maya underworld and Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology.

The burial assemblage

The tomb’s burial assemblage is one of the richest ever recovered from a Maya excavation. The principal objects, in approximate order of significance, are:

The carved sarcophagus lid of Pakal.
The painted stucco death mask of Pakal, recovered from the body in 1952.
A mosaic mask of jade and shell, found on the chest of the king, depicting a stylized ancestor face.
A series of earflare ornaments of jade and Spondylus shell, found beside the body.
A necklace of jade beads with a small carved pendant of the K’awiil lightning deity.
A pair of ceramic vessels of the Late Classic polychrome tradition, in the fine “orange-slipped” style associated with the Petexbatun region.
A series of small carved jade plaques depicting deities and ancestors.
A small assemblage of cinnabar and hematite nodules, used to paint the royal body.
A pair of eccentric obsidian flints of the kind associated with Maya elite burials.

The assemblage is read in the wider context of Maya pottery, jade, and material culture and Maya rituals, bloodletting, and sacrifice.

The importance for Maya epigraphy

The find was central to the modern decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs and the glyph system. Pakal’s sarcophagus, his carved death mask, and the long inscription on the temple together gave epigraphers a richly cross-referenced set of dates, names, and titles that could be read against the contemporaneous monuments of other cities. The long text on the side panels of the sarcophagus — recording the date of Pakal’s death, the calendrical position of his birth, and the names of his parents and ancestors — is one of the most important passages of Maya writing.

Pakal’s tomb was also the first Classic royal tomb to be documented in its full architectural context, and the techniques developed by Ruz to photograph, conserve, and remove the tomb’s contents set the standard for subsequent work at other sites. The methodological implications for Maya archaeology are in the history of the Maya civilization pillar.

The afterlife of the find

The principal objects from the tomb are now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, in the Museo de Sitio de Palenque (Alberto Ruz Lhuillier), and (in the case of the painted stucco mask) on permanent display in the main hall of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. A small but well-curated site museum in the entrance complex of the Palenque archaeological park displays reconstructions and finds from the broader site.

The modern reopening of the tomb has been the focus of major conservation work by INAH. The tomb was reopened in 1994 by the Proyecto Arqueológico Palenque for a program of conservation and documentation, and the painted stucco mask was removed for restoration in 2010. The conservation work has been led by the Coordinación Nacional de Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural of INAH, in cooperation with the Getty Conservation Institute and the Fundación Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya.

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