AILSA CHANG, HOST:
All right, big archaeological news dropped this week. An ancient altar was found in Tikal, Guatemala. But the real discovery is who built the altar and where. So get this - Tikal, Guatemala, is a Mayan location. But the altar that was discovered is distinctly Teotihuacan, a location 600 miles away from Tikal right smack-dab in central Mexico. To break down what's really behind the Tikal altar is archaeologist and coauthor of the study Andrew Scherer. He's a professor of anthropology and of archaeology at Brown University. Welcome.
ANDREW SCHERER: Thank you for having me.
CHANG: Thanks for being with us. OK, so first off, what does this altar even look like?
SCHERER: So it's a rectangular altar. It's about a little over 1 meter tall. And what's really fascinating about it is it's painted on four sides with imagery that's in classic Teotihuacan style.
CHANG: And how was this altar used, exactly?
SCHERER: It is the kind of altar that at Teotihuacan is found in residential complexes, and so probably the area that it was found is serving a similar sort of function. And it would've been used for making offerings and other sort of rituals related to people's interactions with their gods.
CHANG: Oh, cool. OK, so the fact that there is some mixing of cultures, what does that tell us about what was going on in that whole region back then?
SCHERER: So this is sort of one of the sort of central questions of this research. Exactly what was the nature of this interaction? And the growing sense of things is that rather than just a few folks coming down from central Mexico to sort of trade or interact at Tikal, they were more deeply embedded in the politics and the daily life, to the point that there were actually settlers who had - were sort of living permanently at Tikal in this particular part of the site. We know in the year A.D. 378 that there was arrival of emissaries from what appeared to be central Mexico. And a day after that arrival, the local Tikal king dies. And so...
CHANG: That seems kind of suspicious (laughter).
SCHERER: Exactly, exactly. It's very provocative evidence that, you know, something significant was sort of at play. And what we know is the next king that goes into power, his father is this ambiguous figure that we as scholars have nicknamed Spearthrower Owl.
CHANG: So, like, if you could take a time machine back to then and speak directly to someone from Tikal or Teotihuacan, you know, from that time, what is, like, the burning question you would want to ask that person?
SCHERER: I think it would be, you know, I would ask somebody from the Maya area how they really thought about or understood Teotihuacan and vice versa, because clearly both places were deeply interested in these faraway places. And so Teotihuacan is in the arid highlands of central Mexico, whereas Tikal is in the humid lowlands of Guatemala. Very different environments.
CHANG: Yeah.
SCHERER: Very different resources and very different artistic traditions. But yet at the same time, they both were fascinated with one another. And I really would be interested to hear what folks from Teotihuacan or from a Maya city like Tikal thought about one another.
CHANG: This is so fascinating. Andrew Scherer, professor of anthropology and archaeology at Brown University. Thank you so much for joining us.
SCHERER: Oh, thank you for having me.
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