Texas husband-and-wife archaeologists unearth long-lost tomb of ancient Mayan ruler

Discovering the tomb of an ancient Mayan ruler may sound like something out of “Indiana Jones,” but for a couple of Texas archaeologists, it’s far from fiction.

Drs. Arlen and Diane Chase, University of Houston professors, recently unearthed the tomb of Te K’ab Chaak, the ruler of the ancient Mayan city of Caracol, now in present-day Belize.

The two have led the university’s Caracol Archaeological Project for nearly 40 years, but this latest discovery may be their biggest yet – contributing much to understanding more about the ancient Mayan civilization.

The Chases joined the Standard to discuss what makes this discovery so monumental. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Diane, let’s begin with you. I understand you and Arlen have been excavating at this particular site in present-day Belize for decades. Why this area in particular? What have you been looking for? Tell us more about its importance.

Diane Chase: We’ve been working at the site of Caracol for almost 40 years, which means we know a lot about it. And we originally started working at this site because we were interested in a place where we could compare history and archaeology. There are historic Maya texts in terms of hieroglyphs and archaeological remains.

We’ve been able to do a lot of really interesting things. But this year in particular we were looking for any data that would help us understand better the relationship between the ancient Maya and the peoples that lived in Teotihuacan, outside of Mexico City. So that was the reason for this particular field season set of excavations.

You two have become authorities on Mayan civilization through this work that you’ve done over the decades, but this latest discovery seems particularly monumental.

Arlen, tell us more about this tomb that you two discovered and its significance.

Arlen and Diane Chase have been leading the University of Houston’s Caracol Archaeological Project for nearly 40 years. Ben Corda / University of Houston

Arlen Chase: Well, this tomb is actually the first chamber that we’ve found since we started excavating at Caracol that we can identify as a ruler. And it’s built on all of the work that we have done there.

We went back to a trench that we had originally opened in 1993 and went through an earlier tomb chamber that dated to around 600 A.D. because we dug almost everything on all sides of that chamber. And this was the only front part of that trench that we hadn’t tested.

And we had lots of other deposits that dated to around 350 A.D. or earlier that were in association with this building. And we thought it was a good locus to be able to find something like this tomb.

Diane Chase: If I could add to what Arlen said, it’s the first chamber that we found that we could associate with a ruler at Caracol, but it is also the only one that we’ve found that we can identify by name. So that’s the first ruler in the actual dynasty at Caracol.

Arlen Chase: And the reason we could identify it as a ruler, there’s multiple: One, it was a chamber over seven cubic meters in size, which we’d already noted for other chambers that we’ve dug at Caracol. That indicates it’s a royal chamber.

When we were able to look in, we could see it was covered in red cinnabar, which is highly unusual, but it’s also usually a sign of royalty. And then when we started into the chamber, we could see ceramic vessels at approximately the right time period, but they were covered in dirt, and excavation revealed three sets of jadeite ear flares, which is the most we’ve found in any tomb at all.

Maureen Carpenter and Edwin Chan, members of the Caracol Archaeological Project, peering into the entry point for the Te’ Kab Chaak tomb. The royal tomb was accessed in 2025 by carefully excavating through the floor of an earlier tomb built above it, first discovered in 1993. Caracol Archaeological Project / University of Houston

You open, what, was there a kind of obvious portal or door that you …?

Arlen Chase: No, we actually came in through the roof of the chamber. We excavated this earlier chamber we’d seen in 1993.

We had not gone through the floor, and we had barely gone through the floor 20 centimeters when we could see a slight hole. And that hole then turned into a massive cavity that was in fact the constructed tomb. And the floor of that tomb is over four meters below ground surface.

Diane Chase: So we came in through the capstones, essentially, or the side of the roof.

So you move the capstone away. What did you literally see, and what was your reaction when you saw it?

Arlen Chase: Well, we saw an air hole that went down for over two meters. And we knew at that point that we had found something important. We had no idea at that time how important it was. And that was because the dirt that covered the floor of the chamber and a lot of the vessels, what needed to be excavated.

And then when we excavated that, we noticed there was a pile of jadeite plaques and some shell pieces off to one side, and originally we said, “oh it must be some kind of decorative piece.” And it wasn’t actually until we were in the process of removing it that it became clear it was an upside-down and broken jadeite mask because it had a huge nose and it had ear flares and you can see figures with the shell eyes …

Diane Chase: It literally was the very end of the excavation – after we’ve photographed everything, we’ve drawn everything, at that point did we start to remove the pieces. And only then was it clear that it was this upside-down and broken mask.

So is it fair to say that when you encountered this area again after all of these years –  1993 I believe you said you first encountered this area – but was this something you were searching for expressly?

Diane Chase: If we could have searched for this expressly, we absolutely would have. We didn’t imagine what we were going to be able to find.

So again, for almost 40 years at the site and having never encountered someone we could actually identify as a ruler … So that in and of itself is incredible.

Arlen Chase: But this was also in an elite residential group that we not only dug in 1993, we went back and did excavations there from 2010, we did it more in 2015 and 2016, and then off and on over the course of the years.

So we have a lot of information from this one elite residential group, and we can relate this tomb to other deposits in the group, which helps explain why it’s so important. Because its importance goes beyond simply being a ruler.

Say more about that: Its importance goes beyond simply being a ruler. What does this tell you as someone who’s worked at this site for so long?

Diane Chase: For us, what is particularly important about this chamber is it helps us talk about the relationships between Caracol and other places in Mesoamerica. It says that this rulership, this dynastic rulership, is Maya – that it wasn’t imposed from someplace else.

But in combination with the other kinds of things that we found in this residential group, it makes it clear that the Maya, at this point in time, are traveling. They’re trading with, they’re communicating with people across Mesoamerica. So it isn’t just an inward-looking society.

Arlen Chase: There’s another elite deposit that we excavated in 2010, which was exceedingly unusual, because it was a burial in the style of central Mexico, which hadn’t been seen before. And it had green obsidian in it, a lot of green obsidian artifacts that only come out of central Mexico.

And so that was the impetus for going back to this area, was trying to explain what that was doing there, and we had a radiocarbon date on that – it was approximately 330 to 350 A.D., and our epigraphic or our hieroglyphic text tell us the ruler came to power in 331 AD.

So we were also trying to look at the relationship between this clearly Teotihuacan-style interment and Maya kingship. And this is what the tomb shows: It dates before this Teotihuacan internment.

Arlen, when you first set out to explore this particular region, did you have a sense of its importance at all? Were there any clues or hints?

Arlen Chase: Absolutely not. When we started at Caracol in 1985, we had a map that showed it to be 78 structures. We had no idea that it had over 100,000 people at 650 A.D. and was a major Maya city that was spread over 240 square kilometers with agricultural terraces in the middle of the city.

So the city is in fact … There’s over around 500 to a thousand people per square kilometer. But it is growing its own food and it’s self-sustaining. These people were exceedingly wealthy during the classic period, and this is the individual who sort of put it all into play.

What more do you know about this individual ruler? Have you been able to make any determinations based on artifacts found inside, or are you sort of bringing in pieces from other parts of the site that sort of flesh out the story?

Diane Chase: So there’s a lot that we know already. We can talk about the artifacts that are inside there. And we can talk about the individual.

The individual was a male, older – so old that there were no teeth remaining in his mandible or in his maxilla and that the bone is completely worn over. We know that the tomb itself is full of some important symbolism about rulership.

But there’s a lot more to be done. We have sent remains out to be analyzed by specialists, colleagues of ours at George Mason and Vanderbilt, who are looking at ancient DNA and working to reconstruct the sequence to look at stable isotopic analysis, which will help us know what his diet was like and whether he was a Caracol native for his entire life.

We’re working with other colleagues that are gonna be looking at the iconography on vessels and helping us make other kinds of interpretations. So there’s a lot we know now, but a lot more we hope to gain.

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I have to ask each of you individually – what drew you to a study of Mayan civilization? What was it that first attracted you into this kind of research to begin with?

Arlen, you want to begin?

Arlen Chase: Sure. I had a class in high school in Mesoamerican archaeology about which I knew nothing. And it was during my senior year. And the individual who taught it was very well-known in the field and actually brought me down to Guatemala for five weeks as part of her research.

And that stimulated me into getting into Maya archaeology because of the things that we found then and also the realization of how much needed to be done throughout Mesoamerica in order to understand this unusual past. And so that was what got me going in this.

Diane Z. Chase in the tomb of Te K’ab Chaak with vessels in the foreground and jadeite mask to the left and the south wall niche. Caracol Archaeological Project / University of Houston

Diane, what kindled that flame?

Diane Chase: I always loved, you know, stories and history that related to the past, but particularly the past that wasn’t written. The past that you could learn about through excavation, the past you could understand from material things.

And what I love is that sense of discovery, the ability to ask really tough questions and figure out the answers with data – data that you can only get by doing excavation or analysis.

One of the reasons I wanted to ask you both that was I was thinking, not knowing a lot about the field myself, but thinking, gosh, a find like this, a discovery like this … How do you top this?

I mean, this must be the sort of thing that you dream of finding one day.

Arlen Chase: You are absolutely right, but at the same point it raises all kinds of other questions.

Because what we’re interested in is, what is the connections between this individual and the later individuals who we’ve found at Caracol? What happens in these certain time periods, and how is it going to be reflected if we can find those kinds of deposits over the next hundred years?

Diane Chase: Caracol has continued to surprise us over time. Each time that we find something spectacular, incredibly informative, there’s something else.

So, you know, in one of the first field seasons, we found a ball court marker, and it describes warfare and the conquest of the great site of Tikal by the people of Caracol. I never thought we would find anything as spectacular as that.

Then as we moved on in time, we came to realize that what was once perceived to be this tiny city was really huge – that there were road systems that went out kilometers at any one distance, that it was a planned community that had agricultural fields, housing and markets inside of it.

So again, I think every time we find the best thing, we find something else. And as Arlen always notes, we have more questions.

I guess some people listening may have concern for what happens to the artifacts inside. What sort of cooperation and collaboration – do you have a partnership with the local government there, and how do you protect a site like this?

Diane Chase: So the site of Caracol is inside an archaeological reserve. It is protected by the country of Belize. It’s an archeological reserve inside a forestry reserve.

On site, there are caretakers from the Institute of Archaeology, their Tourism Belize, and actually the Belize Defense Force is in the area outside of it. That being said, it’s a remote place, and it is hard to actually be sure that there won’t be any looting or incursions anywhere in the site, because it’s so large.

Our work at Caracol is not the work of two people. It’s the work of a huge project each year. And it’s done with a permit from the Institute of Archaeology in Belize. They have been incredibly helpful in our work throughout all of these years – initially guiding us to Caracol as a great place to do our research and then helping us in numerous ways in each of the field seasons.

But in addition to that, it’s important to note that the artifacts don’t belong to us. They don’t belong to the university. They belong to the people of Belize. And immediately after finding them and recording them, we transfer them to the Institute of Archaeology. And that’s the place where they will ultimately be displayed in the National Museum in Belize or in other places that the institute decides.

But I gather from what you’re saying, there’s still a lot of work between now and then. What comes next? You’ve been doing this now, as I was saying, for decades. How does this work continue?

Arlen Chase: Well, one of the things we will do is present these results at a conference that was already in the works dealing with the Maya and Teotihuacan in central Mexico. And this will be held at the Santa Fe Institute in August. It’s a closed conference where most of the major scholars in Mesoamerica will be for two days discussing this topic.

And then, come January of next year, we will return to the field for our, actually, 40th field season of excavation.

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