The story of archaeologist William Saturno's latest discovery has all of the elements of an Indiana Jones movie: danger and hardship, looters, poisonous fruit, a lost temple and a work of art that has been called one of the most important finds in Mayan archaeology in recent decades.

Saturno, a research assistant professor at UNH, is also a research associate at Harvard's Peabody Museum, where he works for the Corpus of Mayan Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Project. In March 2001, he was sent to verify the existence of Mayan stelae, or carved monuments, at some ruins that had been discovered in Guatemala near the Mexican border. He hired a tour company that specializes in ecotourism to help with his arrangements, but the planned trip fell through when his guides decided that they didn't have enough time to travel to that site. Bernie Mittelstaedt, the director of the tour company, suggested an alternative. "He told me that he had information about stelae near San Bartolo, a site farther south, and that it would be an easy day-trip," Saturno recalls. The trip to the site turned out to be neither short nor easy. It took Saturno, Mittelstaedt and four other guides twelve hours to get as close as they could by vehicle. Then they struck into the jungle on foot, thinking that they would return to the vehicles in five hours at most. The temperature was in the 90s, and Saturno was carrying 50 pounds of camera equipment. The jungle was much denser than they expected, and they needed to use machetes to chop through fallen trees that loggers had left behind.

After more than eight hours of hard slogging, they found the site, but they had run out of food and water. Guatemala lies on a limestone shelf, so there is essentially no surface water, and there are no rivers. The men tried to extract water from vines by filtering resin through their shirts, but it was the end of the dry season, and they were able to get only about half a gallon. "At one point, I was resting in my portable hammock, remembering that I heard somewhere that if you are really dehydrated, you can drink your own urine," Saturno says. "And then it occurred to me that I hadn't urinated for at least 24 hours. You know it's a really bad day when you regret the fact that you have no urine to drink."

While his guides searched for caves or clay pools that might have collected rainwater, Saturno explored the ruins, looking for the rumored stelae. He found an area that once had been a plaza, with a cluster of three mounds facing a vegetation-covered pyramid, about 80 feet high. Preclassical Maya, who lived from 2,000 B.C. to approximately A.D. 200, built their temples on top of such structures. Saturno could see that looters had recently visited the site. They had dug a trench to get to the base of the pyramid and a tunnel into it, probably hoping to find pottery that they could sell on the black market. But he saw no sign of any stelae.

Saturno's trip was turning from a disaster into a nightmare, fast. Overheated, exhausted and severely dehydrated, he crawled into the looters' tunnel to get out of the sun and cool down. Just inside the entrance to the tunnel was an opening into a small room.

Saturno went in and shined his flashlight up at the walls. There he saw a remarkably well preserved Mayan mural, partially uncovered by the looters. "I just laughed," Saturno says. "My first thought was, 'Oh my god, this is an amazing discovery!' And my second thought was, 'And I'm going to die right here. I'm going to be the skeleton that Indiana Jones finds later in the movie.'" Saturno knew immediately that the mural had to be close to 2,000 years old. The artistic style closely resembles that of the Tikal paintings, which were also found in Guatemala and have been dated to A.D. 100. But unlike the Tikal paintings, which are weather-beaten fragments, Saturno's mural is intact, and it appears to wrap around the entire room, which would make it nearly 60 feet long. "The looters definitely uncovered it," Saturno says. "They probably didn't know what they were looking at, and even if they did, it's not something that's easy to carry out of the jungle-not like a piece of pottery." Saturno found a scrap of newspaper dated April 1999 in which the looters had wrapped a tobacco leaf, so he believes that they had been digging at the site for two years. The director of the tour company had indicated that looters had left very recently, which is why he suggested the site to Saturno in the first place. Saturno also found a crude map that the looters had drawn to keep track of the tunnels they had made.

"It was probably a frustrating dig for them," he says, "because they wouldn't have found the polychrome pottery they were undoubtedly looking for. That kind of pottery wasn't made until A.D. 400, and there is strong evidence that San Bartolo was abandoned by that time."

Saturno attributes the mural's excellent condition to the care the Mayans had taken in sealing up the room so many centuries ago. Mayans built their pyramids onion-style; when they decided they needed a bigger pyramid, they built on top of the existing one. Saturno says that the San Bartolo pyramid appears to have six layers of construction. Before the mural room was buried under a new pyramid, Mayan workmen ceremonially killed it by filling it with rubble. But before they did that, they smeared the mural with mud to protect it. Presumably, the room remained sealed off from light and the elements for almost 2,000 years, until the looters punched through the wall.

Experts who have seen the uncovered part of the mural or pictures of it think that it depicts part of the myth of the Mayan maize god, in which he travels to the underworld and is eventually resurrected. It is clear that the mural is an important discovery. "There appear to be many more scenes and figures behind the dirt and fill of the chamber," says Stephen Houston, a professor at Brigham Young University and an expert on Mayan archaeology and writing. "The discovery is rather like finding a new Maya book, and all of us are drooling to see what's to come.

"The Preclassic period presents a frustrating paradox, because it had immense cities and monumental architecture, yet little is known of its society or system of rulership," Houston says. "The mural may resolve this paradox with a considerable body of well-preserved images and, we fervently hope, new hieroglyphic texts. From this we may learn more about how the Preclassic Maya linked religious belief to the organization of society."

While his guides were still off looking for water, Saturno photographed the mural and left the tunnel, saying nothing of his discovery when they returned. "You have to be very careful," he explains. "I didn't know anything about these guides. One of them actually went into the tunnel and found the mural, and I was very nonchalant about it-'Oh, yeah, we archaeologists find stuff like this all the time.'"

Saturno and his guides did eventually get out of the jungle safely. It took them a full day to get back to their Land Rovers, and Saturno didn't think about the mural at all. All he could think about was getting back alive to his wife, Jaime, and his children, Cenzo, 4, and David, 2. "On the day that we hiked out, the guides started to worry, and that's when I knew we were really in trouble. We hadn't found any water, and I started passing out from dehydration. And then we found pinuela, 'little pineapple' or poison fruit. They're about three inches long, but only the middle inch of the fruit is edible. The sections at either end are poisonous. And you're only supposed to eat one, because if you eat more than one, your tongue will start to burn."

A burning tongue seemed relatively comfortable at this point in the trip. Saturno ate several pinuela, walked 50 feet, had to rest, ate several more, walked 50 feet, rested, and so on, until he finally made it out. As he was driving his Land Rover back to civilization, his hands cracked from dehydration and started to bleed. And to add insult to injury, he got a flat tire. He was ill for several days after the trip ended and had to leave Guatemala ahead of schedule so he could recover at home in Boston.

He went back to Guatemala a month later to register his find with the minister of culture, who is extremely excited about the mural, as is the entire Mayan research community. Four full-time guards were hired to protect the site, and Saturno decided not to publicize his find until all the paperwork had been filed with the Guatemalan government and plans to excavate the temple complex were complete. He announced his find to the press in March of this year, and his story appeared in the April issue of National Geographic.

Saturno returns to Guatemala in June to spend 15 months mapping the site and figuring out how large the mural is and how best to conserve it. "We will need to monitor the environment closely before any more uncovering is done," he explains. "We need to measure the humidity in the cave, in the fill, see how temperature affects the environment and so on. This way we'll be able to devise a stable plan for uncovering it."

Saturno wants this to be a model archaeological project, a blend of old-fashioned field work and state-of-the-art technology. His stationery for "Proyecto San Bartolo" shows a maize god with a satellite circling his head. "We will be using computers, radar imagery, a complete wireless network in the jungle," Saturno says. "And we'll be digging with a pick and a shovel." Saturno hopes that excavation of the temple complex at San Bartolo will enable him to analyze how this site fit into the larger Mayan geopolitical system. He'll be taking his family with him for the next phase of the project. At this point, his sons don't want to be archaeologists. "Cenzo wants to be Captain Hook, and David wants to be a whale," Saturno says. "But they haven't seen the jungle yet."

It is certainly premature to call the mural the discovery of Saturno's lifetime. For one thing, he is only 32. But he also possesses a winning combination of what his grandmother called "capo tosto," or hardheadedness, and "buona fortuna," or good luck. Who knows where his next unscheduled day-trip might take him, or what he'll find when he gets there. ~

Anne Downey '95G is a free-lance writer who lives in Eliot, Maine.