Word: copan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...across a broad swath of disciplines ever since an American lawyer and explorer named John Lloyd Stephens stumbled across something strange in the Honduran jungle. In Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841), Stephens impressionistically described what was later identified as the ruined Maya city of Copan: "It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction...
Among the first modern Westerners to be captivated by the Maya were the American Stephens and English artist Frederick Catherwood, who started in 1839 to bushwhack their way into the Central American rain forest to gaze at the monumental ruins of Copan, Palenque, Uxmal and other Maya sites. The book Stephens wrote about his trek was an enormous popular success and sparked others to follow him and Catherwood into the jungle and into musty Spanish colonial archives. Over the next half-century, researchers uncovered, among other things, the Popol Vuh (the sacred book of the Quiche Maya tribe...
...archaeologist, unearthing relics is as incidental as filing tax returns. But last week an excavation among the ancient ruins of Copan, in western Honduras, turned up a find so extraordinary that archaeologists are digging for the proper superlatives to describe it. The discoverers believe that they have uncovered the tomb of a 6th century Mayan king who died before he was 30 years old. Archaeologists stumbled across the temple during a routine dig, and are now calling it the find of their careers. Five hundred tombs have been excavated at Copan during the past 18 years, but only two others...