Palenque (Unearthing Ancient Worlds), by Deborah Kops

In reading this book I am perhaps a bit more harsh on this book than I might otherwise be if it was meant for adults. That is not to say that it is a bad book by any means–its pictures and its story is highly exciting and it gives a glimpse of archaeology and its history that is seldom reflected on and a human side of what are often considered to be intellectual and academic endeavors. That said, my main disappointment with the book, and the reason I could not rank it higher, is that the book says particularly little about the city of Palenque itself–namely it focuses on a single building and only a small number of rulers for a Mayan city that was around for hundreds of years and probably had thousands of citizens during its heyday, which ended in the period about a century or so before the collapse of the Classical Mayan civilization as a whole. We might say that Palanque was perhaps a marginal site, but there is a great deal more to the city than is revealed here and I do not feel that the city was sufficiently unearthed by this book.

That is not to say that the author does not attempt to do so. Indeed, one can get a sense of how it is that ancient ruins are understood by pointing to the sort of assumptions that were made by researchers about the site based on what could be understood from material remains alone. For example, there were widespread speculations that all pyramids spring from some sort of familiarity with Egyptian culture, while others pointed out (correctly) that the pyramids were built by the local population, which in the region still speak Mayan languages to this day, even if their civilization reached its peak more than a thousand years ago. Similarly, before the writing of the classic Maya was (partially) deciphered, a lot about the people who ruled over these cities was far more obscure, though know we can at least gather the names of the rulers of the cities, at least from inscriptions which have survived, so that is progress I suppose. It should be noted, though, although the book does not draw attention to it, that the lives of common people in Palenque are not focused on at all here, and if such lives remain obscure, that is something that would well be worth unearthing and bringing to light.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit less than 100 pages in length and is divided into six chapters. The book begins with a short introduction, after which it begins with the “discovery” of the city of Palenque in the 19th century by an American diplomat for various Central American countries who wrote a book detailing his own explorations there with the drawings of a companion. This is followed by chapters which examine the hidden staircase (2) in the main building focused on in this book, along with the dust, dirt, and rubble that had to be cleared for that staircase to be explored all the way to the bottom (3), and then the great discovery of the tomb of a great king of the city that was found at the base of the staircase (4). The author then discusses that what was thought to be an altar within the city’s main pyramid was not really an altar (5), and also comments on the identity of the man in the sarcophagus as he was understood to be once the language of the city’s inscriptions was partially deciphered (6). The book ends with an epilogue as well as a timeline, pronunciation guide, glossary, who’s who, source notes, selected bibliography, further reading and websites, and an index.