Maya pools await diving explorers

Dan Vergano -

Cara Blanca's sacred Maya pools, hidden in the warm hills of Belize, still beckon.

Cobalt blue waters, draped vines and beads of sweat are what you remember from your first visit to these forest cenotes, as the pools are known.

Two years ago, a USA TODAY report filled readers in on researchers' plans to dive deep into the cenotes, surrounded by the ruins of Maya sweat lodges from 800 A.D. And a look at the first dives into the pools this summer was a Top 10 video on National Geographic's website this year.

But it's worth a second look at the ruins there, and not just because winter has fully arrived in the Northern Hemisphere and the fact that the location's average temperature is a balmy 79 degrees.

In fact, the continuing story of exploration at the pools in the northwestern forest of tropical Belize, offers more than warm thoughts. Archaeology doesn't happen overnight and the progress at Cara Blanca has raised more questions so far than answers, says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who heads exploration efforts at the pools, located a few miles from the Maya ruin of Yalbac.

The Classic Maya are famed for the pyramid-topped cities, which were abandoned throughout Central America sometime around 900 A.D. Xibalba (Shee-BAL-buh), the underworld where various evil spirits and the rain god, Chac, could be found, was part of their mythology, a particularly important place for people dependent on rain to water their crops.

"Cenotes were seen as an opening into the underworld by the Classic Maya," Lucero says.

Cenotes at sites such as Mexico's Chichen Itza have yielded sacrificial objects, human bones and the famed "Maya Blue" pigment in sediment layers explored by scholars for a century.

At Cara Blanca's pools, mapped by archaeologist Andrew Kinkella of Moorpark (Calif.) College, Lucero and colleagues such as cave diver Patricia Beddows of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., sought to plumb the depths of the cenotes, looking for similar activities among the Maya of Belize, some 250 miles south of the Yucatan.

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Photo Dan Vergano

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