There’s a good reason scholars never knew about the people who disarticulated their dead, dyed the bones and arranged them in precise formations. These people of the cave lived in the shadowof the Mayan civilization, which invented a calendar, practiced astronomy, built cities such as Tikal and thrived from 300 to 900. Scholars never got around to exploring cultures in the shadows. Now it looks as if they had overlooked a settlement that was not only the largest in Honduras at the time, but one that predates the great Mayan cities. According to radiocarbon analysis, bits of charcoal found among the bones date to about 1000 B.C., making the remains twice as old as Brady estimated last fall. Thepeople of the cave – whoapparently lived in a just-discovered village with 16-foot-high pyramids – had an organized society about a century before the Mayan city of Copan was founded. “The arrangement of their dwellings, their formal architecture, the likelihood that [their society was] hierarchical and well organized – all this makes me believe they were every bit as sophisticated as what the Maya were doing at the time,” says Brady.
So who were they? An analysis of the protein in bones from thecave shows the people did not eat corn,the staple of most Mesoamerican diets. (The Hondurans seem to have preferred manioc.) That evidence supportsthe long-held hunch that the ancient Hondurans represent a distinct culture – they weren’t just Mayan suburbanites. Red ocher used as ritualistic paint on some bones in the cavesuggests the Mayans’ hallmark polychrome painting. Says anthropologist John Hoopes of the University of Kansas, “There’s a very good possibility that this unknown society had an influence on the Maya,” whose origins are lost in the fog of prehistory. All of which is making archeologists wonder how many other ancient societies remain, undiscovered, in the shadows.
