Queen of Maya stelae.

• Author: Hardman, Chris
• Position: !Ojo! - Archaeological discovery

An international team of archaeologists has uncovered the earliest known portrait of a Maya woman at the remote city of Naachtun, in northern Guatemala. The image was carved on a stela--a six-foot high, three-feet wide stone monument--and dates back to the fourth century A.D., making it one hundred years older than any previous discoveries of Maya female portraits.

"I've worked in the Maya area a long time and I've never seen anything like it," says team co-director Professor Kathryn Reese-Taylor of the University of Calgary in Canada. She suggests that this fred indicates that Maya women held positions of power early in the Classic Maya period, when the city of Naachtun was at its peak.

Although the stela was discovered in 2004, the team had to wait a year before they could excavate it. Project co-director Martin Rangel Guillermo, an archaeologist from Guatemala, found the stela sticking out of a looter's trench. "He came to me and said, 'I think we have something really important and I need you to come look at it,'" explains Reese-Taylor. They could see that the stela had intricate carvings on the side, but it was deeply buried inside the trench, and it would take much longer than the five days they had left to dig it out. The rainy season was rapidly approaching, and they knew they wouldn't have enough time to study the stela before the site became inaccessible. So after consulting with the Guatemalan government, they made the tough decision to bury their incredible find and wait nearly a year until they could return and examine it.

Now the researchers are trying to figure out who this woman was and why she was important enough to document in stone. The first clues to her identity are in the portrait's headdress, where a series of three glyphs spells out the name Ix Tzutz Nik, or "Lady Completion Flower." "What we're...