King of the Jungle: The Mayan Empire of Archaeologist Richard Hansen

The main reason the 300,000-odd tourists who visit Tikal every year don’t flock in equal numbers to the Mirador Basin to look at its vastly larger wonders is because they can’t, unless they are intrepid or rich. El Mirador is either a two or three-day humidity-and-snake-plagued hike from the nearest road-accessible town, Carmelita, or a round-trip helicopter ride from Flores, the nearest town with an airport, that can run into the thousands of dollars. El Mirador’s roadless condition reflects a deliberate choice on Hansen’s part, with the cooperation of the Guatemalan government. “Doing anything else would facilitate the evils that are there” in chronically poor and crime-afflicted Guatemala, Hansen told me. “The looting, the poaching, the narco-trafficking, the prostitution, and all of the ills that come along with all of that.” (Hansen has for years pitched the construction of a small train that would cut the non-helicopter travel time to eight hours and provide some tourist business to Carmelita and other villages, so far to no avail.) But those who have managed to visit La Danta and its surrounding ruins have come away overwhelmed at the huge monument-studded area that might have supported as many as one million people during its heyday. El Mirador alone likely had a population of 200,000, in contrast to the mere 90,000 who lived in and built Tikal, Hansen believes. “It was boggling to think we were standing on the labor of thousands of people from antiquity, and to imagine their vanished metropolis,” Smithsonian magazine writer Chip Brown, who made the helicopter trip to the basin with Hansen, wrote in 2011.

But the sheer size of the Mirador Basin settlement isn’t what made Richard Hansen famous. It was the discovery he made at El Mirador, as a lowly graduate student in 1979, that utterly changed the way scholars of pre-Columbian American history looked at Mayan history. Before then, it was believed that nearly all the great monuments of Mayan civilization—the pyramids, the brilliantly painted murals, the elaborate stone carvings—dated no earlier than what is known as the “classic” Mayan period that ran from about 250 to 900 a.d., roughly corresponding to the early Middle Ages in Europe. After 900, that civilization appears to have collapsed, and the inhabitants of its impressive cities abandoned them precipitously. The Mayan ruins at Tikal, as well as those at such well-traveled tourist destinations as Uxmal and Palenque in southern Mexico and Copán in Honduras, all represent glorious architectural phases of the classic Mayan period. There was something of a resurgence of grand Mayan architecture in what is known as the “postclassic” period that lasted until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 1520s—although the post-classic style, best represented by the pyramid complex of Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula that flourished until around 1250, was heavily influenced by the cultures of the Toltec and Aztec Indians of central Mexico, who might even have invaded and subjected the Mayan territories.

Archaeologists were long aware that there had also been a “preclassic” Mayan period dating from roughly 1,800 b.c. to 150 a.d., but it was believed to have consisted of primitive village-settlements of hunters and maize-farmers practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in the densely forested Mayan lowlands. Their art? Some polished-looking but unadorned pottery, usually red but sometimes cream-colored or black, which contrasted starkly with the richly figurative creamware of the classic period. The most sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization of that early period was believed to have been that of the Olmec of southern Mexico (1,400-400 b.c.), famous for colossal stone sculptures of human heads and other carvings and ceramics. The best that the preclassic Maya could do, it was thought, was to erect a modest eight-meter pyramid at Uaxactún, a settlement about 12 miles north of Tikal. That low-slung structure was regarded as a precursor to the classic-era Mayan structures—much in the way that the small step-pyramids of Saqqara, Dashur, and elsewhere in pharaonic Egypt preceded the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

The gigantic El Mirador complex had first been discovered in 1926, and it was assumed that owing to its sheer size and elaborate layout, it represented yet another classic-period city like Tikal, only in worse condition. But while excavating a chamber in the bottom level of a structure at El Mirador known as the Jaguar Paw Temple (the jungle cat had totemic significance for the Maya), the 26-year-old Hansen came across fragments of polished-red pottery, undisturbed for centuries, that could only be preclassic in origin. “That ceramic was only produced in the Mirador Basin, and I was the first one who identified that,” he says.

It was a startling moment of revisionism: It meant that the entire El Mirador agglomeration dated at least five centuries earlier than anyone had thought, to a period that began before the time of Christ, and that the preclassic Maya, rather than being primitive forerunners of a more elaborate classic civilization, had built far bigger and produced an even more complex and powerful political and social organization than their medieval successors—until they, like their successors, precipitously abandoned their massive settlements during the middle of the second century. The preclassic Maya were also just as sophisticated artistically and culturally as their successors: Some of the stucco panels in a frieze at El Mirador depict the “Hero Twins,” the protagonists of the Mayan creation myth that would be written down nearly 1,500 years later in the Popol Vuh, one of the few surviving Mayan narrative texts. And as Hansen and other archaeologists later discovered, instead of practicing relatively inefficient slash-and-burn agriculture, which requires farmers to move their fields every few years as the soil becomes exhausted, the Maya of the Mirador Basin constructed terraces into which they hauled nutrient-rich mud from nearby swamps, enabling the cultivation of dense harvests of corn, squash, chili peppers, and beans that could feed tens of thousands of people on limited acreage. Hansen’s theories about the cultural refinement of preclassic Mayan civilization have been borne out by later archaeological findings. In 2001, for example, William Saturno, now an archaeology professor at Boston University, uncovered a set of brilliantly colored frescoes at the preclassic site of San Bartolo not far from Tikal that also recounted events narrated in the Popol Vuh. “In 1978, the preclassic Maya were thought to be hunters and gatherers,” Hansen says. “They had a pyramid 8 meters high at Uaxactún. Now we know they had pyramids 72 meters high.”

The academic entrepreneur

Archaeological digs are usually a summertime affair—at El Mirador the excavations run from May to September in order to accommodate the school year for professors and students—so I met with Hansen in the off-season, late February, when he was temporarily back in Rupert, Idaho, where he is the second-most famous native son after television personality Lou Dobbs (who was born in Rupert but no longer lives there).

What Idaho is most famous for, though, are the potatoes, all of which are grown in the Snake River valley, a crescent-shaped rolling plain that tracks the Snake River for 400 miles across the southern portion of the state from the Oregon border nearly to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Rupert is a town of 5,500 near the center of the valley, a few miles north of the Snake, and surrounded by vast potato and sugar-beet fields.

Hansen was flying in from Los Angeles after a whirlwind Southern California fundraising expedition among wealthy donors with Mayan interests who, along with corporations, family foundations, and organizations such as the National Geographic Society, finance his Mirador Basin Project-focused nonprofit, the Foundation for Anthropological Research & Environmental Studies (FARES). One of the FARES board members is actor and director Mel Gibson; Hansen was the archaeological consultant for Gibson’s 2006 Mayan movie, Apocalypto.

Despite his impressive credentials, his extraordinary discoveries, and a list of scholarly publications with team members that runs to more than 200, Hansen is essentially an academic entrepreneur, a solo traveler without a tenured professorship or salary who over the years has had to pay for some of his excavations out of his own pocket and even go into debt. Shortly after that weekend in Rupert, he would be back in Guatemala entertaining a top NASA official and ferrying around some VIPs from the National Geographic Society—more fundraising, that is.

The weekend in Rupert itself had a whirlwind quality. Hansen, who holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, still has a loose connection to academia: He is an adjunct professor at the University of Utah, a gig that doesn’t pay much but allows him to sit on doctoral-dissertation committees. He had two of the graduate students he has been helping to supervise in tow when we met at the Salt Lake City airport for our flight to Twin Falls, Idaho, the airport closest to Rupert: Carlos Morales, a Guatemalan-born doctoral student at the Sorbonne in Paris who is helping Hansen construct digital maps of the Mirador Basin Project, and Pilar Vásquez, writing a dissertation on Mayan iconography at Complutense University of Madrid. The four of us would be joined in Rupert by Hansen’s California-born wife Jody, a self-taught artist who meticulously illustrates his archaeological finds (the two met on a dig in Israel that Richard Hansen was supervising between college and grad school), and their 15-year-old son, Weston, the youngest of seven Hansen children, including an adopted Guatemalan daughter.

Roaring along Interstate 84 and the back roads of the Snake River valley in his GMC Sierra, the ebullient Hansen showed off the twin falls of Twin Falls, which were nearly paralyzed by winter ice, and the mom-and-pop truck stops and hamburger stands that dotted a rural roadscape too sparsely populated to support many chain fast-food outlets (“That’s what makes America work,” Hansen, a Rupert booster, boasted about the family-owned businesses.) We rolled past a beet-sugar processing plant, its steam swirling high and snow-white in the frigid air, a Chobani yogurt factory, a snow-blanketed golf course (Hansen: “We now have moose coming up—they chase the golfers—it could be a whole new sport!”), the handsome period downtown of Rupert, the Minidoka County High School currently attended by Weston (three other Hansen children were valedictorians), and a now-shuttered potato-processing plant that once supplied nearly all the frozen French fries served worldwide by McDonald’s.

Hansen comes from a potato-farming family himself; he sold off his agricultural interests only in 2003, to his two younger brothers who continue to run the business. One of the stops on our tour was Mart Produce, a state-of-the-art potato storage, sorting, and packing plant that Hansen’s brothers and several other potato-farming families own and operate. It was an impressive sight: empty and still on a Saturday morning except for hundreds of thousands of boxed or bagged Idaho potatoes of every conceivable size (some spuds weighing up to three pounds are too big for baking but perfect for commercial French fries) awaiting shipping. At the end of our visit Hansen pushed one of the 10-pound bags of smaller russets bearing a Kroger’s logo into my hands to cart back to Washington in my suitcase, and—I admit it—I violated the unwritten rule of journalism that you don’t accept anything more valuable than a cup of coffee from the people you’re writing about. (I baked and sautéed the potatoes after I returned, and they were delicious.)

The Hansens live in a compound dotted with fir trees on the rural outskirts of Rupert: a two-story house for the family (Weston is the only child still at home) and the “lab,” as Hansen calls it, an adjacent three-story brick structure ornamented with a distinctive “cross-stitch” motif typical of classic Mayan architecture, in which the stonework on walls often imitated textiles. The lab doesn’t house any Mayan artifacts (all of Hansen’s findings from the Mirador Basin remain in another lab of his in Guatemala City) but functions as a warren of offices and living spaces, including a kitchen and laundry room, for Hansen’s graduate-student assistants and guests. Hansen had the structure built two years ago after he moved his operating base to Rupert from Idaho State University in Pocatello, where he had been an assistant professor. When I visited, the lab was housing Vásquez and Morales along with Stanley Guenter, whose doctoral dissertation on Mayan epigraphy for Southern Methodist University Hansen had helped supervise and who has coauthored several papers with him. The biggest office, occupying the entire second floor and sporting an enormous unlit fireplace housing a collection of petrified logs, belongs to Hansen himself. Its bookshelves, occupying all four walls of the room, were crammed with every volume and periodical on Mayan civilization that had seemingly ever been written, reproductions of classic-era Mayan pottery, and binders filled with Hansen’s field notes over the past four decades (some of them stacked in “Idaho Potato” boxes from Mart Produce) and the detailed annual reports of his findings that Hansen writes in Spanish for the Guatemalan government. They also held, perhaps most tellingly, dozens of jawbones of prehistoric mammoths and mastodons and framed collections of Indian arrowheads, all found by Hansen himself when he roamed the hills and rolling farmlands of the Snake River valley as a boy. “This is what led me to become an archaeologist,” he says.

The Hansens are practicing Mormons. I discovered this only when they took us on a tour of their own living quarters, stuffed with antique Spanish-colonial furniture and folk art picked up at secondhand stores on Guatemala City’s side streets and gorgeously embroidered huipiles—the colorful, usually handwoven cotton blouses still worn by many Guatemalan women—that Jody Hansen collects as a hobby. Crowning the mantelpiece in the living room was a portrait of Jesus in the hyper-realistic Latter-day Saints iconographic style. Mine was a mini-version of Hansen’s lightbulb recognition that he was looking at preclassic, not classic, pottery at the Jaguar Paw pyramid in 1979.

It was also quite a surprise. My husband and I had met Hansen a few months earlier on a National Geographic group tour of ancient Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala, including Tikal. Hansen had been the chief guide. Tall, blue-eyed, slightly portly, eternally tousle-haired, and possessed of seemingly boundless energy (he was 63 at the time), he regaled and sometimes horrified our genteel group with yarns from his nearly 40 years of excavations at El Mirador. Some of the stories were merely hair-raising—such as the time he almost stepped on a fer-de-lance, the deadly and highly aggressive pit viper that menaces the Mesoamerican jungle lowlands—but others had a distinctly Chaucerian flavor.

The most ribald of all involved a walk after dark by Hansen through the dig’s tent-camp, when he noticed a crowd of men sitting dead-silent and transfixed staring at the wall of one of the tents. It seemed that a student-intern from an Ivy League university had taken up with one of the local workmen, and she liked to illuminate their nightly trysts with romantic candlelight, inadvertently creating an enthralling shadow play on the tent canvas for the ever-increasing crowd outside. “Her favorite position was on top!” Hansen recounted merrily, as the faces of some in our group paled. (He had advised the young woman the next morning that liaisons with workmen in this female-scarce environment could provoke jealous violence; mortified, she headed home the next day.) Other Hansen stories involved the archaeology professor who fell into the camp latrine after a floorboard broke and the young woman who slipped and slid out of a camp shower down a muddy hill “buck-naked,” as Hansen put it. Since my main previous experience with Mormons had consisted of following clean-cut and buttoned-down Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential campaign in 2012, I had taken Hansen for yet another profane and thoroughly secular academic, although of an unusually extroverted variety. What little religion was discussed on that tour mostly dealt with Mayan gods.

Even during the weekend I spent at his compound in Rupert, Hansen was not without a tale or two that might make a nun blush—such as his yarn about working with Gibson on Apocalypto in 2004, just as Gibson was coming off his pious giga-hit, The Passion of the Christ: “I was at a restaurant in Santa Monica, and one of the waitresses comes up and plops out her breast and gives him a Sharpie to sign it,” Hansen relates, laughing uproariously. And Gibson, Passion of the Christ or no Passion of the Christ, gamely signed, Hansen says.

When I asked Hansen about his faith—which had never arisen in any of the numerous press accounts I had read about him, he became indignant: “It’s irrelevant!” he nearly shouted. He says that he hasn’t deliberately concealed his religious affiliation in interviews, merely that he’s “never asked about it.”

The Mormon connection

Yet it turns out that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides a key to Hansen’s presence and his spectacular achievements at El Mirador. The ancient Maya, seven million of whose descendants still live in scattered villages in southern Mexico and Central America, created the most complex and fascinating civilization that existed in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. There are thousands of Mayan sites in Mesoamerica, and new archaeological discoveries seem to emerge every couple of weeks. The Maya, alone of all pre-Columbian New World cultures, invented an extremely economical—because largely phonetic—system of writing that allowed them to record events on the carved friezes that adorned their structures. A few other groups—the Aztec and Mixtec peoples of central Mexico, for example—also had writing, but it was of a clumsier, quasi-pictographic variety that enabled them to mark down the names of people and places but little else. The Inca of South America, for all their impressive construction exploits such as Machu Picchu and their complex political and economic organization, never developed writing at all. The Maya also invented a positional numerical system somewhat analogous to the West’s Arabic system (although based on sets of 20 instead of 10) that enabled them to express and calculate extremely large numbers in relatively small spaces. Mayan arithmetic was fundamental to the Mayan calendar, an interlocking series of lunar and solar cycles that could extend as long as 63 million years (the Maya were avid astronomers).

Mayan pictorial art—sculpture, carvings, painted murals, ceramics, and, starting in the classic period, illustrated fan-like bark-cloth books called codices—combined exquisite aesthetic sensibilities (harmonious composition and detailed attention to birds, animals, flowers, ornaments, and textiles) and even wit, with a fascination with pain, bloodletting, cruelty, and the degradation of one’s enemies, who were typically depicted bound and kneeling in postures of abjection at the feet of their victorious foes. Religious ceremonies, at least for the Mayan elite, looked gruesome as depicted in the art: men piercing their penises with stingray spines and royal women running threads through their punctured tongues. The participants in those ceremonies dripped their shed blood onto paper, which they burned as an offering to the gods. The classic Maya, like other cultures in pre-Columbian America, practiced human sacrifice via the extraction of the living victim’s heart—although it seems that, unlike the Aztecs with their mass sacrifices of captives, they limited the practice to criminal executions of individuals.

Yet because so many Mayan sites had been abandoned and camouflaged by tropical vegetation long before or shortly after the Spanish arrived, very little was actually known about ancient Mayan civilization until the middle of the 20th century. The overgrown temples and palaces that remained barely visible seemed to have no connection to the local peasant culture, which regarded them, as the Yale Maya scholar Michael Coe wrote, as “the haunted abodes of ancestors and mythic beings.” The few Europeans and North Americans who visited the splendid ruins during the early 19th century believed they must have been constructed by culturally advanced outsiders: Tartars, Welshmen, survivors from the lost continent of Atlantis. Only in the 1840s did an adventurous American diplomat, John Lloyd Stephens, recognize that the structures had been built by the very people whose offspring still lived there.

Archaeological excavations didn’t begin in earnest until the 1920s, and it wasn’t until the 1950s, with the advent of radiocarbon-dating, that accurate dates could be assigned to the layers of human settlement and the artifacts they contained. And it wasn’t until the 1950s that scholars finally deciphered most of the classic and post-classic Mayan scripts and were thus able to read the stone glyphs. A 16th-century Spanish bishop in Yucatán, Diego de Landa, had recorded a Mayan “alphabet” that eventually provided the key to the glyphs, but owing to idiosyncratic transcriptions by de Landa’s Mayan scribe, it took three centuries for de Landa’s work itself to be decoded. Furthermore, to this day neither Hansen nor anyone else can read the preclassic glyphs at El Mirador and elsewhere; those early Maya spoke and wrote a different—and as yet unknown—language from that of their classic-era successors.

Among those most fascinated by the mysteries that swirled around Mayan monuments during the 19th century were Mormons. The Book of Mormon, believed by members of the LDS church to have been translated into English from gold plates handed by an angel during the 1820s to the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, relates that a group of Israelites fled the city of Jerusalem after it was conquered by the Babylonians in 597 b.c. They ended up in the Americas, where they built huge cities, warred with one another, and constructed a civilization that lasted through the fourth century a.d. As the existence of large ancient Mayan cities became gradually known, thanks to the travel books of Stephens, gorgeously illustrated by the artist Frederick Catherwood, who had accompanied Stephens on his Mesoamerican journeys, many Mormons came to believe—as many still do today—that the magnificent complexes were the handiwork of those wandering Israelites.

Some Mormon amateurs set off to explore Mexico and the Guatemalan lowlands in an effort to find artifacts or bits of writings that might confirm an Israelite presence there. One was Thomas Stuart Ferguson (1915-1983), a Mormon lawyer from California who made numerous trips with his shovel to Mayan lands during the late 1940s. He came up empty-handed (it proved impossible to find any traces of the chariots and iron implements that the Israelites were said to have used, since the New World Indians had only stone blades and used the wheel only in children’s toys), and he was reported to have lost his faith during his last years. But in 1952, with the financial backing of the Mormon hotelier J. W. Marriott and, later, the Church of Latter-day Saints itself, Ferguson set up the New World Archaeological Foundation. He had two cofounders, Gordon Willey (1913-2002), a towering figure in Mayan studies at Harvard who was regarded as the dean of New World archaeology, and Alfred V. Kidder (1885-1963) of the Carnegie Institution. Ferguson hoped to help prove the Book of Mormon’s literal historicity, but Willey and Kidder simply wanted to do archaeology, and they gave the foundation solid scientific respectability. In 1961 the foundation became affiliated with Brigham Young University—but the LDS-owned school’s first action was to get rid of Ferguson as the foundation’s head. Many of Brigham Young’s archaeology professors were devout churchmen, but they hoped to build an archaeology program that would steer clear of doctrinal preoccupations—perhaps not unlike Hansen’s vehemence when I asked him about his religion. Only one trace of Ferguson’s legacy remains at the foundation: a focus on the Mayan preclassic period, which roughly corresponds to the Israelite presence in the New World as recounted in the Book of Mormon.

Excavating for funding

The New World Archaeological Foundation helped sponsor the dig at El Mirador where Hansen found the preclassic Mayan pottery in 1979. After graduating from Minidoka County High School, he served a two-year stint, as many young Mormon men do, as a missionary in Bolivia, where he became fluent in Spanish. He then majored in Latin American literature at Brigham Young and, after graduation and his stint in Israel, enrolled in Brigham Young’s master’s program in archaeology. His mentor was Ray T. Matheny, a professor of anthropology who only the year before, in 1978, had begun the very first excavations at the jungle-shrouded site, along with Bruce Dahlin (1941-2011), then an archaeology professor at the Catholic University of America. Hansen as a graduate student worked alongside Matheny and Dahlin at El Mirador for several years.

Then, in 1983, a single-engine Helio Courier carrying the Hansens and their eldest daughter, Micalena, age 2, crashed into the jungle a few minutes after takeoff from El Mirador. Everyone survived, including the pilot, jumping to the ground seconds before the downed plane exploded, taking with it Hansen’s only two copies of his master’s thesis, which he had to rewrite from scratch in a hurry in order to receive his degree in 1984. The plane (whose burnt wreckage Hansen says can still be seen in the tree where it came to rest) had belonged to Matheny, who had been part of a World War II bomber crew, and the crash marked the end of Matheny’s career in the Mirador Basin. The Guatemalan government “wanted to work with Richard,” says Jody Hansen. That was where Hansen’s youthful service as a missionary in Bolivia paid off. Matheny couldn’t speak Spanish very well, Hansen says, but Hansen had become as fluent as a local. Furthermore, “I learned how to interact with Latin Americans. I could see how they perceived each other, and I was able to react.” (Matheny, who went on to supervise other excavations elsewhere and is now an emeritus professor at Brigham Young, did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Hansen would go on to apply for a grant from the Guatemalan government to excavate at Nakbe, an even older preclassic Mayan site about eight miles south of El Mirador—and the officials broadened the grant essentially to include most of the Mirador Basin. Hansen had understood how to get an official permit: “You ask about their families, you crack a few jokes.” His study of Latin American literature had paid off, too; in 1980 he had dazzled then-Guatemalan president Fernando Lucas García over lunch with knowledgeable disquisitions about Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda.

“I learned a lot from [Ray Matheny], I learned an awful lot from him,” Hansen says. “I learned a lot from his mistakes, the mistakes made as project directors, and I improved on them.” He also candidly admits that he has made “mistakes all the time” of his own. “Last year alone I made a mistake running two big projects at the same time simultaneously. It ran me ragged. I ran a big project at Nakbe and a big project at Mirador at the same time. At Nakbe I needed a conservator to work that day. So I had to send a runner for five hours to [El Mirador] to notify him, and he had to stop what he was doing over there and [take] another five hours to get back. So I lost 10 hours of crucial time when we could have resolved the problem in 30 seconds. I hate that inefficiency.”

By the late 1980s, Hansen owned much of the Mirador Basin in a sense—but his life, with an expanding family to support while trying to complete his doctoral work at UCLA, wasn’t easy. Archaeology—at least for those who oversee excavations—is one of the most expensive academic endeavors and one of the most difficult to find funding for. I talked to two archaeologists lucky enough to have tenured professorships that at least cover their living expenses and provide some technical backup—and they both described their academic lives as scrambles to raise enough money to feed and make payroll for the dozens to hundreds of people, including highly specialized scientists, who do the hard and meticulous work of excavating sites (Hansen’s payroll includes, besides soil and preservation experts, two physicians to tend to injuries in the remote basin). Only at, say, hugely endowed Harvard, whose Mayan program, reflecting Gordon Willey’s legacy, is the nation’s flagship, can archaeology professors rest easy about funding.

“Most people have no knowledge of what archaeologists do,” says Jodi Magness, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, pointing out that the standard image of an archaeologist is a plane-hopping Indiana Jones-style swashbuckler into whose hands antiquities fall as if by magic. “They think we dig all the time,” says Magness. A professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Magness leads an excavation team at Huqoq in Galilee that has unearthed a Roman-era synagogue adorned by spectacular floor mosaics depicting biblical scenes. But Magness and her crew can afford to dig for only one summer month out of the year, and she spends the other 11 months hunting down the $200,000 it costs just to fund that single month. “We get student fees from a field school we operate, we get random grants, and we have private donors,” says Magness.

Federal money for archaeology is nearly nonexistent. The National Science Foundation’s annual budget is $7.5 billion, but it allocates only from $500,000 to $1 million to archaeological excavations. Some 100 to 200 scholars file grant applications for those limited dollars, and “only 15 percent of the proposals are ever funded,” says Vernon Scarborough, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Cincinnati who has spent much of his career at a Mayan site, Cerros, in northern Belize, where he became an expert on Mayan water conservation (the ancient Maya were adept at constructing cisterns, irrigation ditches, and canals in order to grow crops and support large populations in a landscape that features a long dry season). “It’s time-consuming to produce those grant applications,” Scarborough says. “And then you have to get them past a panel of archaeologists to approve them.” Scarborough and Magness agreed that the general lack of establishment funding for archaeological projects has made archaeology one of the few academic fields where a gifted solo practitioner—such as Richard Hansen—can gain the same scholarly respectability as an Ivy League professor who has carefully climbed the rungs of the tenure ladder.

That may be all well and good, but it seemed less so to Hansen as he struggled to put together a crew to meet the financial and logistical challenges of excavating the Mirador Basin, whose Mayan structures were already fragile and crumbling owing to their great age and the 1,800-odd years’ worth of dense jungle undergrowth that had weakened their walls and foundations. He placed a magazine ad begging for volunteers to excavate a “lost” Mayan city that drew hundreds of responses. In the roadless Mirador Basin nearly all supplies and provisions had to be trekked to the site on the backs of mules (as they still do), and the mules themselves had to be fed. Hansen figured out that he could cut freight and feed costs by having the mules graze on the leaves of the ramón, or breadnut, tree ubiquitous in the Central American rainforest. That was where his farming background with its focus on thrift and efficiency paid off. “I can do with a million dollars what most projects can do with two million dollars,” he says.

He spent those years living on one of the family properties farming by day (“I could spend quality time with my kids and help Jody out”), writing up his archaeological research by night, and plowing whatever he earned from the potatoes into the Mirador Basin. Still, by 1986 he was ready to throw in the towel on archaeology: “It was starting to look like an expensive hobby.” But then, suddenly, the rewards of his astonishing discoveries at El Mirador started flowing in. He was named a National Graduate Fellow, a Jacob Javits Fellow, a UCLA Distinguished Scholar, UCLA’s Outstanding Graduate Student of the year, and a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in research money followed, and Hansen was basically free to pursue his entrepreneurial career in the Mirador Basin—and make a living at it. “If I was full-time [in a university tenure-track position], I couldn’t do what I’m essentially doing,” Hansen says. “I’d have to be teaching. I do teach, .  .  . but if I had a full-time professorship, they’d have my fanny at a desk down there and attending faculty meetings. You’ve got classes. You can run small projects, but not a project on this scale. This is the largest project in the history of Guatemala.”

‘As human as Napoleon and Hitler’

Hansen’s freedom from the strictures of academia also helped him become one of the very first archaeologists to exploit a brand-new technology that has been to Mayanists of the second decade of the 21st century what carbon-dating was to the Mayanists of the 1950s: light detection and ranging, or LiDAR. The technology—using airborne lasers to “map” the topography of a given area digitally, revealing the natural peaks and valleys, as well as manmade structures, beneath the dense jungle canopies that otherwise mask them—had been used for decades by NASA to create digital maps of planet surfaces. In 2007 archaeologist Arlen Chase, now at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who had been excavating a huge classic Mayan site at Caracol in Belize since 1985, figured out that LiDAR could be used to transform what had been a snail-slow process of mapping sites such as his own, which was bigger than Tikal. The technique until then had consisted essentially of using machetes to clear the overgrowth and doing sample pit-digs. “By 2003 I was tired of mapping, and we’d done only 23 square kilometers,” Chase says. In 2007 he applied for a grant from NASA for LiDAR flyovers at Caracol that during one single year in 2009 added 200 more square kilometers to the Caracol map at a resolution of one meter. “It blew us away. I couldn’t believe what we were able to see,” Chase says. He rushed his findings to the public: an article in Archaeology magazine, a front-page New York Times story, a National Geographic Society video, and, in 2011, a full-fledged scholarly paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hansen was among the first archaeologists to take advantage of the “paradigm shift,” as Chase called it, promptly contacting Chase and then importing LiDAR to the Mirador Basin. The work I saw Carlos Morales doing in Rupert consisted of making maps from the raw LiDAR data.

Still, there is an academic establishment in Mayan studies, and it is an establishment with whose reigning ideology Hansen has often found himself at cross-purposes. Like the 19th-century Mormons who believed that they could find traces of an Israelite civilization in Mesoamerica, many progressive North American secular intellectuals of the 20th century constructed their own mythology about the people who built the temples and palaces. Since the jungle had overgrown and masked the populous human settlements that maintained Mayan economic and political life, it was assumed that the ancient Mayan complexes consisted of sparsely populated peasant villages ruled by high-minded priest-kings who inhabited the temples and spent their days speculating about astronomy and working out the Mayan calendar. Individual carvings might depict warfare, bloodshed, and supplicating captives, but they were assumed to record purely mythological events. “In the liberal mentality of our liberal colleagues, the Maya were star-gazing, poetry-reciting, peace-loving people in harmony with their forests,” Hansen says. “It’s a crock. They were as human as the Romans, as human as the Greeks. They were as human as Napoleon and Hitler. They had all the virtues and vices of contemporary society.”

When scholars in the 1950s learned how to read the glyphs, they discovered that the Maya’s chief artistic obsession had actually been recording the history of their own rulers; most of those supposed gods and goddesses painted and carved in clay, stucco, and stone turned out to be historic kings and queens celebrating their victories at war and the defeat and death of their enemies. We now know the names of entire dynasties of Mayan rulers, even some of the dynasties of the preclassic period, owing to decorated pottery made during classic times. During the classic period, the Guatemalan lowlands were a hive of warring city-states jostling for dominion and tribute-collection, with the kingpins Tikal and its powerful rival Calakmul, about 60 miles north and on the other side of today’s Mexican border, engaged in an incessant series of bloody conflicts between 500 and 838 a.d. On the National Geographic tour in which my husband and I participated, Hansen delighted in pointing out the warrior bands crushing their foes and the kings executing their manacled rivals that were a routine pictorial theme of Mayan artwork.

Mayan society was rigidly hierarchical—the default condition of human societies, Hansen believes. Although the peasant farmers occupying the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder didn’t starve and seemed to live in relative security, they were the ones that had to do the literal heavy lifting of building the imposing structures that their rulers demanded: hauling thousand-pound limestone blocks from quarries in a culture that lacked draft or any other kind of domestic animals (Hansen estimates that it took a dozen men to carry each block, and that building the 45-acre La Danta pyramid required some 15 million man-days of labor). Toil on the pyramids wasn’t exactly slave labor, but it was definitely a form of taxation that only the elite class could escape—and that class paid the price in its own way, should its warriors be captured by their enemies in the ceaseless battles. Rigidly authoritarian, ancient Mayan society was glued into cohesion by shared religious ideology, the strength of the king’s personality, and naked force, Hansen believes—and it’s a belief that still rattles many sentimental academics who think that indigenous peoples possessed a superior political wisdom to that of the colonizing West: elders sitting around the campfire governing by consensus. “Everybody goes for these egalitarian models,” Hansen says. “Everybody’s equal, we’re all going to live together the same, we’re all equal. That’s a crock. That’s baloney. And the reason is there’s no such thing as an egalitarian society. Somebody can always run faster, somebody’s always the better shot, somebody’s the better fisherman, they’re the ones that are going to excel. When you see changes in society, they’re never done by society. They’re done by charismatic individuals—how charismatic and how powerful the ruler had to be to make that happen.”

What happened?

No controversy over the ancient Maya is so fraught with academic disputation as the sudden abandonment of preclassic Mayan settlements during the mid-second century and of classic Mayan settlements sometime at the end of the ninth century. The word “collapse” is frequently used by archaeologists to describe those apparent catastrophes, with the word’s implications of a demographic free-fall, as it seems to have become impossible for the settlements to feed the large populations that they had once supported, with mass starvation and die-offs the likely ensuing consequences. Hansen has an explanation for the collapse of the preclassic cultures of the Mirador Basin, and it is a politically incorrect one, if amply documented by the soil scientists who have been part of Hansen’s team: that the preclassic Maya, far from living in harmony with the surrounding rainforest, exploited it brutally. They were obsessed with adorning their temples and other structures with thick layers of plaster—“conspicuous consumption,” Hansen calls it. To make the lime for the plaster, they had to burn limestone from their quarries, which in turn necessitated chopping down trees by the ton to stoke the fires. The massive deforestation led to massive erosion during the annual rainy season, which in turn dumped tons of sterile mud into the swamps whose nutrients had supplied the terraced fields that once fed hundreds of thousands of people. Hansen believes that a similar deforestation process ultimately killed off the classic Mayan civilization some 800 years later, although the evidence isn’t quite so clear; other archaeologists have posited as alternative explanations a deadly series of droughts, a failure of the Mayan kingship system, and the economic, political, and social strain of the endless warfare among the classic-era city-states.

But lately, it seems to have become fashionable in academia to argue that there was no such thing as a Mayan “collapse”—on the ground that any theory that the ancient Maya might have engineered their own culture’s self-destruction is demeaning to the millions of present-day Maya Indians. Public intellectual Jared Diamond, in his best-selling 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, used the abandonment of classic Mayan settlements in 900 a.d. as an object lesson for 21st-century politicians inclined to ignore global warming or environmental degradation—and this rankled a new generation of revisionists. In a 2009 paper “Bellicose Rulers and Climatological Peril?: Retrofitting Twenty-First Century Woes on Eighth-Century Maya Society,” Patricia A. McAnany, an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Tomás Negrón of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History pooh-pooh the ideas that Mayan kings had been war-prone and Mayan farmers had failed to practice conservation. McAnany and Negrón contend that instead of dying off, the inhabitants of the classic Mayan centers simply packed up and moved away from their landlocked interior cities to the coastlines in order to pursue trading and other mercantile activities, demonstrating a cultural “resilience” that presents a more flattering image to today’s Maya. “Certainly, total systemic failure makes for a more dramatic plot-line, but with a descendent community of several million people, it is hardly an accurate assessment and is even denigrating to descendants who read that their ancestors supposedly ‘died out’ by the tenth century and that they are not related to the Classic Maya who built the cities—now in ruins—on which a mega-million-dollar tourist industry has been built,” McAnany and Negrón write.

Such solicitude for the feelings of the present-day Maya is in keeping with a seismic postmodernist shift in the way many anthropologists (archaeology is a subfield of anthropology) regard themselves: as advocates for the groups of people they study rather than simply as scholars with claims to objectivity. Hansen’s former grad student Stanley Guenter told me that he had been at an academic conference at which an attendee stood up and said, “I am a descendant of the Aztecs, and all those stories about human sacrifice were all lies of the Spanish.”

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, with its plot line involving a Mayan rainforest dweller who narrowly escapes having his heart ripped out in an orgy of human sacrifice just before the first Spaniards arrive in the early 16th century, became a lightning rod for revisionist fury among academic Mayanists. Gibson had brought in Hansen as a consultant after seeing a 2003 National Geographic documentary, Dawn of the Maya, in which Hansen had shown off his excavations at El Mirador. Adding to the fury: A few months before the film’s release in December 2006, Gibson had erupted in an anti-Semitic tirade to a police officer arresting him for drunk driving, lending credence to critics’ allegations that The Passion of the Christ had been tinged with anti-Semitism. No sooner did Apocalypto arrive at the movie theaters than complaints poured in from enraged professors at Harvard and elsewhere charging that the movie was loaded with historical inaccuracies, had turned the ancient Maya into “slashers,” and was “offensive” to present-day Maya.

The American Anthropological Society devoted an entire session of its 2007 meeting to critiquing Apocalypto as “a big budget manipulation of cultural history,” in the words of one attendee. Some of the academics obviously “hadn’t even seen the movie” before they talked to the press, Hansen says. One professor, for example, assuming that Apocalypto’s theme was the ninth-century collapse of classic Mayan civilization, told a reporter that “the last Mayan city was abandoned” 100 years before the Spanish conquests. In fact, Hansen says, he had worked carefully to help Gibson re-create the Aztec-influenced postclassic Mayan civilization that was still very much alive on the coast of southern Mexico when the first conquistadors made landfall there. Hansen had used postclassic Mayan sites such as Chichén Itzá, where racks of human skulls and images of mass human sacrifice reflected bloodthirsty Aztec-inspired practices, as models for the fictional city that Gibson created for the movie. (The film does contain one glaring anachronism from which Hansen says he had tried to dissuade Gibson: a reproduction of a vivid preclassic mural from San Bartolo showing a deer sacrificed on an altar by having its heart torn out; Gibson changed the deer image to that of a human being for maximum dramatic effect.)

The Apocalypto furor was an object-lesson for Hansen. No scholar wants to meet the fate of the politically incorrect Napoleon Chagnon, the longtime professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose studies of the Yanomami rainforest dwellers of Venezuela during the 1960s and 1970s made him a target of revisionist opprobrium decades later. Chagnon, despite his obvious affection for his hunter-gatherer subjects (he would occasionally dress—or undress—as a nearly naked but elaborately painted Yanomami warrior), described them as ferocious, filthy, and fighting incessantly and murderously over women. This not only undercut the myth of the noble savage; it interfered with prevailing Marxist-materialist theory that people go to war only over scarce resources or for other economic reasons. Chagnon was accused of fabricating data, fomenting violence among his subjects, projecting his own aggressive personality onto them, and even exposing them to a deadly measles outbreak in order to test a claim about their racial lack of immunity (he had actually initiated a mass vaccination campaign for the group). The American Anthropological Association never reached a consensus over whether Chagnon had done anything wrong, but he remains a controversial figure.

“We have to be careful,” Hansen says. “If we come out vociferously against [political correctness], I’ll never get a grant proposal passed, never get publications out, get poor reviews on publications, because, uh, you know, he’s one of those right-wing, gun-slinging, you know, Bible-toting, you know, pencil-neck geeks.” Indeed, Hansen may already be controversial among his fellow academics. While researching this article, I sent emails to more than a dozen archaeology professors at prestigious universities. Many either failed to reply or declined to be interviewed.

Order of the Quetzal

Hansen instead has made himself an advocate for the present-day Maya on the ground. The Mirador Basin Project holds literacy classes for the local Guatemalan workmen, many of whom have never seen the inside of a school, having gone to work at age 5 to help out on family farms or harvest the sap from the chicle or sapodilla trees that forms the basis of chewing gum. As for the local schools, he says, “we bought them 72 computers.” He pays out of his own pocket (even selling one of his farms in 1992) for year-round security guards at the site, in order to protect it from looters. And the rainforest itself is his passion. The Mirador Basin is in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, some 8,000 square miles of forest hosting plants and animals found nowhere else on earth, but half of the reserve has already been destroyed by aggressive logging. A tiny national park surrounding the El Mirador complex itself saves some of the rest, and the Mirador Basin Project recently spent a half-million dollars to purchase logging rights that protect about 55,000 more acres (“It bought the rights, but it doesn’t log”). He has campaigned for years—so far without effect—for the Guatemalan government to get logging entirely out of the basin by declaring it a roadless wilderness in perpetuity. “The loggers have to put roads in to get the logs out, and when you get the roads, you get the narcos. Then come the poachers, the looters.”

In March Richard Hansen flew back to Guatemala to receive the Order of the Quetzal, the highest honor that the Guatemalan government has to offer. Accompanying him were Jody Hansen, all seven of the Hansen children (three sons, four daughters), a son-in-law, and a baby grandson. My husband and I flew down as well, and the transformation from ice-bound Rupert to the perpetual flowery spring of Central America was startling. The Hansens had traded rugged boots and winter parkas for dressed-up suits and, in Jody Hansen’s case, high-heeled sandals. The award—the draping of Richard Hansen in a silk sash in Guatemala’s national colors of azure and white displaying an enormous medal featuring the long-tailed iridescent-green quetzal that is Guatemala’s national bird—took place inside the green-tinted volcanic-stone Palacio Nacional de Cultura in downtown Guatemala City. The ancient Guatemalan Maya built to impress—and so have their modern-day successors. The Palacio, constructed in the 1930s with prison labor, was a monument to showy extravagance: an interior brilliant with gold leaf, stained-glass windows, two-ton chandeliers, molding on every surface, including column capitals and bases, fringed-velvet valances, and the most elaborate coffered ceilings I have ever seen.

During his acceptance speech in flawless if American-accented Spanish, Hansen had tears in his eyes. He also delivered a gentle but pointed lecture, a lesson from the preclassic Maya of El Mirador for Guatemalan residents of today: that destroying the environment can destroy a civilization.

In Rupert, Hansen had said, “The wonderful thing about archaeology that no other science can do is that we can see the origins, the dynamics, and the collapse of a civilization in one window. Whereas you and I can’t see our origins that occurred in 1776. We can’t see our collapse because that’s somewhere in the future. When you look at it through the window of archaeology, you can see the whole story. You can see the things they had to do that were right, and you can see the things that took them to hell.”

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.