The 40-foot-tall pyramid is the highest point in the city, offering an eye-straining view of the Tikal pyramids that peak above the jungle to the east. In 2010, Garrison and his colleagues - at the time led by Brown University’s Stephen Houston, a living legend in the Maya archaeology community - brought international attention to El Zotz when they uncovered the intact tomb of a Maya king beneath the Temple of the Night Sun in a pyramid known as “El Diablo” perched atop the royal hill across from the Five Temples. Even with the archaeologists camped near the site and soldiers guarding the biological preserve where it sits, any open tomb is vulnerable once word of its existence gets out. Often rich with bowls, figurines and other valuable goods, tombs are a tempting trove for looters. (USC Photo/Robert Perkins)Įl Zotz alone has 230 trenches and tunnels cut into the site’s pyramids and other structures by cunning, unscrupulous diggers who make a slim profit selling cultural artifacts on the black market. Garrison comes face to face with a mask inside one of the site’s pyramids. The team also faced the ever-present threat of looters, endemic in the world of Maya archaeology.
With mere days left in the excavation season - before heavy rains transform the already-muddy roads that lead to El Zotz into an impassable sludge - Garrison and his crew had to work around the clock to excavate the tomb. Today the jungle has reclaimed the valley, obscuring it with a thick canopy of trees and vines - much of it sprouting within the old Maya structures. When the Maya inhabited it 1,500 years ago, they had deforested the whole region, offering the royals above a commanding view of their subjects. Its name is a modern appellation, taken from the Maya word for “bat” - hundreds swarm the skies every evening and then sleep in a nearby cave where the Maya believed that the sun dwelled when not illuminating the world.ĭuring the time of the Maya, it was known as “Pa’chan,” meaning “fortified sky.” He now works to inspire the same love of exploration into the past through his course offerings at USC and through two “Problems Without Passports” courses (“Maya Resilience” and “Field Research in Maya Archaeology”), both of which allow him to take USC undergraduates on explortions of Maya ruins in the jungles of Guatemala.Įl Zotz, his home and office every spring, spreads out over roughly two square kilometers of jungle, which includes a massive royal palace and temple on a hill overlooking groups of temples and smaller dwellings in the valley below. His love for the field was kindled during a junior-year study trip to Oaxaca, during which he visited the Maya site of Palenque. Garrison discovered archaeology as an undergraduate at Connecticut College, when he enrolled in an intro course as a freshman. But El Zotz has proven to be a font of information for archaeologists, helping them to piece together an understanding of the region’s changing political dynamics, and by extension, the Maya people.
Tikal is like the Los Angeles to El Zotz’s Pasadena - so large, impressive and close that it tends to eclipse its neighbor in the public eye. Garrison refers to El Zotz in the royal “we” - as in, when describing its turbulent past, he describes how “we invaded Tikal” - and for that matter, has an appropriately antagonistic take on El Zotz’s more famous big brother to the east.
Garrison, an assistant professor (teaching) at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is the principal investigator running the archaeological exploration of El Zotz, an isolated and overgrown Maya ruin to which he returns each spring.Īt 6-feet-3, he’s an imposing man with an impish grin and an impressive knack for being able to recount any detail of Maya language or history on command. “You need to get back here right now,” Román declared.īack at El Zotz, a ruined Maya city hidden deep within Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, one of his archaeological teams had hit paydirt - a burial chamber in the Five Temples section of the site that could contain the remains of royalty. Tom Garrison was four hours away from camp - headed into the city down a bumpy jungle road to get treated for poisonwood exposure - when he got a call from his co-director Edwin Román.
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