The offerings had been placed in the cache area, at the base of the pyramid, all at the same time, on a floor of red, claylike soil. The clay floor had been specially smoothed and prepared to display these objects. Analysis revealed that it was a type of red earth called laterite, which forms much of the basement soil of the valley—an intriguing echo of Cortés’s Old Land of Red Earth.
The offering or shrine was far from a disorganized heap: Everything had been carefully arranged on the clay foundation. The pieces had been organized around a key central sculpture: an enigmatic standing vulture with drooping wings. Surrounding that were ritual stone vessels, whose rims were decorated with vultures and snakes. Some vessels had carvings depicting a bizarre, humanoid figure with a triangular head, hollow eyes, and an open mouth, perched on a small, naked male body. Dozens of metates had been arranged around this central cluster of artifacts, including the were-jaguar. Many of them were beautifully made and decorated with dramatic animal heads and tails, the legs and rims incised with glyph-like markings and designs.
No carbon dating of the cache could be done, as the high acidity and wetness of the jungle environment had destroyed any organic artifacts and bones. But based on style and iconography, the objects date to the Mesoamerican Post-Classic phase, between AD 1000 and circa 1500, also called the Cocal Period by archaeologists who prefer not to use the Mesoamerican dating system for a non-Mesoamerican culture.
Most of the objects in the cache were metates. Normally the word “metate” describes a stone for grinding corn. But these metates, found not only in Mosquitia but across Lower Central America, are different, and nobody knows exactly what they were for or how they were used. They are indeed shaped like tables or platforms for grinding, and they are found with stone grinding rollers. The puzzle is that most of these metates are too large and awkward to be used for efficient grinding. Archaeologists believe instead that they might have been thrones or seats of power. Pottery figurines have been found that depict people sitting on big metates. That they were designed to resemble real corn-grinding stones might be because corn was sacred in the Americas; a Maya creation myth says that human beings were formed from cornmeal dough. Because metates are sometimes found on top of graves, almost like tombstones, some believe they may have also been used as seats for carrying the dead to their final resting place.
The triangular-headed humanoid figures found on the rims of some jars in the cache, which Chris and his team fondly called alien babies, presented another conundrum. Chris believes they might depict a “death figure,” perhaps the bundled-up corpse of an ancestor. They might also represent bound captives, ready for sacrifice; captives were often depicted in humiliation with their genitals exposed.
But these metates and jars might have served an even darker purpose. I sent some of the images to John Hoopes, who is a leading authority on Central American ceramics. Despite being a critic of the project, he was impressed and was willing to share with me his ideas, which he emphasized were speculative. “I think they may also have been grinding bones,” he said, referring to the metates. The Chibchan-speaking people farther south in Costa Rica and Panama, he said, collected trophy heads and bodies. “Perhaps they were using those metates,” he said, “to pulverize heads and bodies” of their enemies as a “way of terminating that individual permanently.” He pointed out that in the Maya realm, when a king was defeated, before being executed he was sometimes forced to witness the killing of his entire family and the desecration of his family’s tombs, in which the corpses were removed and ritually destroyed in a public place. “He sees not only his family being destroyed,” Hoopes said, “but his entire dynasty being erased.” Some metates in Costa Rica, he noted, are decorated with tiny trophy heads, which might connect them to ceremonies of bone grinding and erasure. The depiction of what look like bound captives on some jars supports this idea.* Eventually the jars and metate surfaces will undergo “residue analysis,” which could determine what offerings might have been inside them, or what substances, if any, were ground up on them.
I also showed pictures of some of the artifacts to Rosemary Joyce, another critic willing to share her thoughts. Joyce is a leading authority on iconography in pre-Columbian Honduran art, and she disagreed with all the above. The humanoid figure, she said, is not a body bundled for burial or a captive. The key, she points out, is that the figure appears to have an erection. This, she said, is typically how monkeys are portrayed in ancient Honduran pottery: shown as part human and part animal, with round circles for eyes and mouth—and an erection. In the mythology of some indigenous tribes in Honduras, monkeys were the first people, banished into the forest when humans arrived. Monkeys played a central role in the creation of the world and in Honduran stories and myth. This is probably where the idea of a “City of the Monkey God” came from; some early reports from explorers say the Indians told them stories of monkey gods and half-monkey, half-human beings living in the forest, who terrorized their ancestors, raiding villages and stealing human women to maintain their hybrid race.
The cache is rich in animal imagery: vultures, snakes, jaguars, and monkeys. Joyce explained that, throughout the Americas, traditional shamans and priests claim special relationships with certain animals. The “were-jaguar” head is a classic example of half-human, half-animal beings portrayed in ancient pottery and sculpture. According to creation stories and myths, jaguars, monkeys, vultures, and snakes were all seen as animals with great power, and were adopted by shamans as their avatars or spiritual doppelg?ngers.
Each species of animal has a spiritual being, a “master,” who watches over and protects them. The human hunter must appease this master of animals in order to successfully hunt that particular kind of animal. After killing it, the hunter must ask forgiveness of the master and make an offering. The master ensures that human hunters do not wantonly kill the animals under his protection, and he rewards only those hunters who are respectful, observe the rituals, and take just what they need.