La Corona - The Search For 'Site Q'

The Search For 'Site Q'

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? ). 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, an environmentalist, studying scarlet macaws found La Corona in 1996, and Ian Graham with a team from Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology investigated the site later that year. The team found references to Maya ball players who were featured on Site Q artifacts at La Corona, leading them to believe that La Corona was the lost city. More data was needed, however to confirm this link.

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