The victorious warriors of Tikal swarmed up the front of the acropolis at Waka’ and into the hastily abandoned palace gallery. Inside, they looted precious bundles of cloth and jewels, and smashed brightly painted stucco figures of gods, queens, and kings, throwing the shattered fragments down to companions. Some cut away the exquisite carved steps at the base of the stairway leading up to the palace and flung the blocks onto the plaza. Such desecration was aimed at killing the living building and driving out the spirit of rulership that had brought it into being half a century earlier.
Within the gallery, the rampaging warriors found a royal tomb that perhaps held King K’inich Bahlam II (whose name translates as Radiant Jaguar). He had ceremonially danced on the acropolis steps when the building was new, in a costume sprouting gleaming plumes of green feathers. The Tikal invaders pitched the bones in the tomb out onto the plaza and carried away his jewels. Afterwards, the survivors from Waka’ would bury the palace gallery itself in an attempt to preserve the memory of what it had been in its glory.
Fifty years after the Tikal onslaught, the last king of Waka’, Aj Yax Chow Pat (He of the New Battle Helmet) returned to the buried gallery. By digging down into its rooms and conducting fire ceremonies and sacrifices, Aj Yax Chow Pat hoped to entice the soul of King K’inich Bahlam II back into the building. A stone altar was created, depicting K’inich Bahlam II but renaming him Tum Yohl Akh (Covered is the Heart of the Cosmic Turtle). The turtle that inspired this new name was the place of resurrection for the first king of the Maya world, the Maize God, and remained visible in the night sky. There, the great Three Stars – known to us as Orion’s Belt – marked the back of the turtle.
Excavating the CA Archive: North Wales