Buried secrets, luminous find.

• Author: Brady, James E.
• Position: New archeological discovery in Honduras sheds light on the development of early Mesoamerican society

Archaeologists have unearthed an astounding deposit of skeletons and burial offerings in a cave in northeastern Honduras, shedding new light on the rise of early Mesoamerican society

In April 1994 Jorge Yanez and Desiderio Reyes led a group of nearly a dozen companions into the Cueva del Rio Talgua in northeastern Honduras. Set a little above the eastern bank of the Rio Talgua, the cave is located approximately four miles northeast of the town of Catacamas in the Department of Olancho. The cave, through which runs a tributary of the river, had been known and visited by the residents of Catacamas for generations. In fact, it had been professionally mapped ten years earlier; yet little did these young explorers realize what they would find.

While the rest of the group waited below, Yanez and Reyes scaled a sheer thirty-feet-high wall inside the cave and found a previously unknown passage containing large quantities of human bone and almost two dozen intact or restorable vessels. This surprising discovery has contributed dramatically to our appreciation of the richness of Honduras's pre-Columbian past. But one of the most interesting aspects derives from the Olancho area's position on the border between the two great American culture areas - Mesoamerica on the north and the Andean or South American. The Talgua region may hold a key to how cultures survived and thrived in the buffer zone between these two.

Throughout the Americas, caves were of paramount importance to indigenous religions because they were believed to be entrances to the sacred, animate earth. While few persons would have difficulty in believing that gods controlling plant fertility would live in the earth, rain in all areas of Mesoamerica was also believed to be a terrestrial phenomenon. Clouds, lightning, and rain were believed to form in caves before the rain deities sent them into the sky. Caves, therefore, became associated with the most important elements to an agricultural people. Also, since caves penetrate the earth, they became entrances to the underworld, where the souls of the dead reside. Cave burial, then, would speed that journey, and perhaps ensure that the soul of the dead did not wander lost in the world of the living.

The discovery of the Talgua cave ossuary is important because only a few burial caves have been reported from Honduras, and this is one of the first to be well investigated. Further, our subsequent examinations have also revealed a level of wealth and sophistication in an area that has generally been considered archaeologically marginal, that is, outside of the mainstream.

Attention in Honduras has traditionally focused on the magnificent Maya site of Copan. Known for its exquisite sculpture and long hieroglyphic texts, Copan is the southeasternmost of the major ruins considered to be part of the southern Maya lowlands, and one of the few not located in the tropical jungles of Belize, Guatemala, and Yucatan. Copan was thought to be a major trade center where products from the Maya area and lower Central America were exchanged. Although the spectacular ruins seen today date from the Classic Period (300-900 A.D.), the earliest settlement at the site dates to about 900 B.C.

Slightly before that time, about 1000 B.C., the Talgua cave ossuary was already being used for burial rituals that included elements possibly borrowed from the Maya area over two hundred miles west. To put the Talgua site into Maya perspective, the Talgua people may have been interacting with the Maya and had developed a level of civilization equal to any society known in the Maya area at that time.

Because of the danger of looting, the young explorers photographed many of the vessels in place, removed them from their contexts, and reported the discovery to Miguel Rodriguez, head of the Department of Protection of Cultural Patrimony at the Instituto Hondureno de Antropologia e Historia (IHAH). Rodriguez immediately visited the site and accepted delivery of the vessels for registry, study, and storage at the IHAH facilities in the capital, Tegucigalpa, where at the present time...