Archaeologists Found Alive Days After Attack

Five archaeologists missing in eastern Mexico since they were bushwhacked by Indian marauders while attempting to rescue a valuable Maya monument Friday stumbled into a small village Monday night, exhausted and naked, but apparently not seriously harmed.

The five were returned to the city of Palenque where they were recuperating, said Mexican archaeologist Alfonso Morales.

The team included archaeologists Peter Mathews of the University of Calgary, Mario Aliphat of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City and three graduate students who had accompanied them on the expedition. Mathews is a MacArthur “genius” award recipient for his studies of Maya writing.

Six Cholo Indians hired to help move the monument had escaped earlier and made their way back to the nearest city Saturday. The workers reported having been beaten with rifle butts and machetes, but none was seriously harmed.

Details of the Mathews team’s escape were sketchy Monday evening, but the group apparently worked their way back to civilization through the rain forests of nearby Guatemala.

Mathews, 47, has been working in Mexico for four years at a site called El Cayo along the Usumacinta, a broad river that has been called Central America’s Amazon.

His team had discovered a valuable artifact at the site and reburied it. The artifact was a large stone altar, about 4 feet in diameter and weighing 1,000 pounds. It has writing on the top, the sides and the three legs and is thus considered quite valuable because of what it can reveal about the history of El Cayo. Because Mathews was afraid that it would be stolen, he decided to ship it to a museum at Frontero Corozal.

Art historian Merle Green Robertson said Monday that one of the escaped workers, Martin Arcos Zarago, described the attack. According to Zarago, the group had gotten about five miles upriver when they were attacked by 80 to 100 Indians.

All were stripped of their clothes and boots. Mathews was robbed of about 5,000 pesos and $900 in cash and was forced to write a check for all the money in his bank account. All were beaten, Robertson said.

At one point, at least some of the group of 11 managed to break free. Some ran into the forest, while Mathews and a companion left in a canoe. The five archaeologists somehow joined up and made their way back to civilization, according to Morales. The altar is apparently still sitting on the bank of the river.

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