Because of his ‘derring-do’, Demarest has been portrayed in the media as a modern-day Indiana Jones.
Credit: Ray Rabinowitz
ARTHUR DEMAREST’S HOTEL room is a mess. Open suitcases are on the floor and newspapers are strewn about. He paces as he talks, pausing to sip a glass of red wine. Demarest is in St Louis, Missouri, to present several papers about his recent research at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference.
At the moment, however, things are not going well. “I’m having a crisis,” the 57-year-old says, washing down his blood pressure medicine with the wine – he takes the medication after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage in 1995.
The nature of the crisis is that he intended one of his papers to be eight pages, the approximate length for his 15-minute presentation, but somehow it mushroomed into 38 and, as his presentation is nearing, he’s struggling to find an expendable sentence.
This problem is characteristic: Demarest is a man of many words. He is articulate, amusing and prone to long, rambling digressions. He likes to talk, one of his employees observed.
Demarest recalls that, at the tender age of four, he declared his intention to become an archaeologist. Now the Ingram Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, he is one of the world’s leading Mayanists.
One of his most highly publicised discoveries was the three-storey royal palace at Cancuén, a Maya site in the Petén rainforest in northern Guatemala where Demarest has been working since 1999.
Cancuén, which was discovered in 1905, was thought to be a small site of minor importance until Demarest began working there. “This is a totally weird Maya site,” he says. It has no other pyramids and Demarest estimates its population to have been 5,000 to 10,000. Yet its palace was roughly the size of Tikal’s – a famous and much larger, Maya city.
He subsequently discovered 130 burials and an additional 51 perfectly preserved skeletons that he believes were members of Cancuén’s royal court. One was adorned with an ostentatious necklace containing 36 jaguar canines. A forensics team concluded the people were killed by spear thrusts to the spine or blows to the head. Though the Maya were known to engage in warfare, Demarest’s discovery is remarkable.
“The Cancuén massacre was unique because it was a ritual and total mass termination of the entire site and its royal dynasty, probably in just one day,” he says.
Demarest also thinks the Cancuén massacre played a pivotal role in the Maya’s fabled collapse. “It was a strategic site for the whole Maya world,” he says. “It sat at the head of navigation of the Pasión River system, which was the superhighway of the Classic Maya world.” The river was also connected to major land trade routes. When a number of Maya cities north of Cancuén collapsed, Cancuén took control of the trade routes and became very influential.
“It’s destruction in 800 AD was a pivotal point during the collapse process, because after it occurred, the western trade routes were shut down, the region was depopulated, and both the cut off of trade and the migration of peoples had a domino effect, accelerating the fall of other Maya kingdoms,” says Demarest.
