Eleanor Linafelt
Chief Copy Editor

In 2012, Olivia Navarro-Farr, professor of archaeology at The College of Wooster, made the news with her discovery in Guatemala of the royal tomb of Lady K’abel, a seventh-century Mayan ruler. This past summer, as part of an investigation that Navarro-Farr’s research grant funded, a group of Guatemalan archaeologists made an even earlier discovery of a fourth-century royal Mayan tomb in El Perú-Waka’, one that Navarro-Farr said is “the earliest tomb that our project has ever found, and it’s maybe one of the earliest in the region thus far discovered.” This discovery is instrumental in allowing archaeologists better understand the history of the Waka’ dynasty.

Navarro-Farr cited the tomb’s age as the main factor in its significance. “Given that it’s so early, it’s probably going to be really useful for our understanding of the earliest periods of the dynasty at the site, perhaps even the foundation of the dynasty, so that’s really interesting for us,” Navarro-Farr said. Though she was not at the site at the time of the discovery, her three-year grant from the Alphawood Foundation supported the research at the site. “This past summer was the first season of research under that grant that my colleagues were working with when they made this discovery,” she explained.

Navarro-Farr is fascinated by the role of royal women in the Waka’ dynasty, an interest of hers that was particularly piqued when she discovered the royal burial site of Lady K’abel in 2012.

“That, of course, got me very interested in the connection of royal women to the dynasty and their importance which has been maybe not as emphasized in our literature,” she said. This most recent and much earlier discovery adds greater depth to the timeline of the Waka’ dynasty. “We look at multiple periods in a site’s occupation and that occupation in the case of this site is many centuries long, so it’s interesting,” Navarro-Farr said.

Though Wooster archaeology students were not involved in making the discovery, Hannah Paredes ’19, Hannah Bauer ’19 and Sarah Van Oss ’16 were working in the project’s lab in Guatemala City at the time. Paredes is interested in doing an epigraphic analysis of Mayan writing in her Independent Study (I.S.), something that this discovery will aid.

“There are two vessels from the tomb, one of which she will look at for her I.S., which has text on it and that will be something that she will study,” Navarro-Farr said. This past summer, Bauer became interested in the ceramics that she was working with that Navarro-Farr had excavated for her dissertation. Van-Oss is now applying to graduate school and plans to continue her own archaeological research. “She’s come from an undergraduate level status where she’s learning and assisting to now running her own research as a potential graduate student; this is the kind of trajectory that is nice for Wooster students,” Navarro-Farr said.

Though archaeologists still know very little about this early period in Mayan history, Navarro-Farr believes the discovery of this tomb from the Waka’ dynasty gives them a significant amount of new insight. “We now know a great deal more about those earlier phases of the palace and of course the location of this very early classic interment, this fourth-century interment,” she said.

“I think it’s really going to broaden our understanding of that period.”