La Corona

La Corona is the name given by archaeologists to an ancient Maya court residence in Guatemala's Petén department that was discovered in 1996, and later identified as the long-sought "Site Q", the source of a long series of unprovenanced limestone reliefs of exceptional artistic quality. The site's Classical name appears to have been Sak-Nikte' ('White-Flower').

During the 1960s looted Maya reliefs referring to a then-unknown city surfaced on the international art market. One of these reliefs, showing a ball player, is now in the Chicago Art Institute; another is in the Dallas Museum of Art. Peter Mathews, then a Yale graduate student, dubbed the city "Site Q" (short for ¿Qué? [Spanish for "what?"]). Some researchers believed that the inscriptions referred to Calakmul, but the artistic style of the artifacts was different from anything that had been found there.

Santiago Billy and Carlos Catalan, environmentalists studying scarlet macaws, came upon the remote ruins in 1996, and Ian Graham and David Stuart from Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology investigated the site the following year, naming the new site La Corona. Among the broken sculptures left by looters, Stuart found textual references to a place name and to historical figures who were featured on Site Q artifacts, leading him to believe that La Corona was Site Q.

In 2005 Marcello A. Canuto, then a Yale professor, found a panel in situ at La Corona that mentioned two Site Q rulers. The panel had been quarried from the same rock as the Site Q artifacts, providing convincing evidence that La Corona was indeed Site Q.

Since 2008, the site has been investigated by the La Corona Archaeological Project (PRALC) co-directed by Marcello A. Canuto (Director, Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University) and Tomás Barrientos (Director, Dept. of Archaeology, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala).

In April 2012, PRALC discovered a row of 12 staircase risers with many different relief scenes; another 10 sculpted risers were found looted from their original context but then discarded for being too eroded to be worth selling on the illicit antiquities market.

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Wikipedia