A Rural Sweat Bath at Piedras Negras, Guatemala

The great Maya center of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, is justly famous for its sweat baths, which are both numerous and monumental in scale. Eight are known from the site core, most located near palace structures, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff famously imagined how one of these was used (Fig. 1). Figure 1 Proskouriakoff's reconstruction (from Proskouriakoff 1978:29)…

Draining the swamp….

For any situation, there’s a suitable swamp for the evidence. unattributed quote from the internet From the moment that I began to study the ancient lowland Maya, I learned about the ground-breaking research conducted at Pulltrouser Swamp in northern Belize by Peter Harrison and B. L. Turner II in the 1970s and 80s (see Harrison…