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)…