Louis XVI woke up at five in the morning, dressed with the help of his valet, confessed to an Irish priest and left the Temple prison in a carriage. After an hour of walking he arrived at the Plaza de la Revolución. They cut his hair, removed the collar of his shirt and took him to the scaffold to lie him down on the wooden plank of the guillotine. The rest is history.
The public execution of the French monarch on January 21, 1793 was one of the most important events of the French Revolution, the uprising that brought about the end of the Ancien Regime. The event was the violent way that the revolutionary leaders chose to cut ties with an outdated system. But it wasn't the first time it happened.
At the beginning of the 9th century, in the Mayan city of Ucanal (Guatemala), an excited crowd probably waited at the foot of a pyramid. The remains of the royal family were buried in the building, which were desecrated and publicly burned, as explained by archaeologists from the University of Montreal in an article published in the magazine Antiquity.
Their research has revealed that the ancient Mayan peoples did not simply passively observe the collapse of their dynastic models at the end of the Classic period, between the 8th and 9th centuries AD. “They actively reworked their political systems to create new governments,” experts say.
Documentary sources indicate that at the beginning of the 9th century there was great political upheaval in the Mayan lowlands. The political power of the K'anwitznal kingdom grew from the reign of a new leader, Papmalil, who may have been a foreigner.
“Key turning points in history are rarely found directly in the archaeological record,” says Dr. Christina T. Halperin, lead author of the research. But this time it turned out to be that way. Together with her team, they excavated a temple-pyramid in Ucanal, the capital of K'anwitznal, and discovered a deposit containing burned human remains and ornaments.
The objects in the deposit include many personal ornaments made of valuable materials, such as a green stone mask usually placed in royal tombs along with the deceased ruler, suggesting that the burial was that of Mayan royalty.
His remains were burned, archaeologists say, during a political act that served to reject a Mayan dynasty of the Late Classic period (600 to 810 AD) and exemplified a new era of political order on the eve of the Terminal Classic period. “This would have been a dramatic and publicly visible event that overlapped in time with Papmalil's takeover of the kingdom,” the specialists add.
Radiocarbon dating indicates that the fire occurred between 773 and 881 AD, some time after the royals' deaths, suggesting that the tomb was re-entered specifically to burn the remains, which They were then deposited in the construction of a new phase of the temple-pyramid.
"Because the event itself had the potential to be highly ceremonial, public and emotionally charged, it could dramatically mark the dismantling of an old regime," says Dr. Halperin.
The ritual of re-entering tombs and burning royal remains is known from Mayan hieroglyphic texts and has often been interpreted as an act of desecration. The burning event also coincides in time with the dismantling and reuse of elite buildings on a monumental scale in Ucanal.
"The fire event itself and the reign of Papmalil helped usher in new forms of monumental images that emphasized horizontal political links and fundamental changes in the social structure of society," explains Halperin.
The researcher from the University of Montreal concluded that it was not only “the end of an era, but a turning point around which the K'anwitznal political entity, and that of the southern Lowland Maya in general, emerged. They transformed into something new.”
