San Bartolo (Maya site)

San Bartolo is a small pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site located in the Department of Petén in northern Guatemala, northeast of Tikal and roughly fifty miles from the nearest settlement.

[1] San Bartolo's fame derives from its splendid Late-Preclassic mural paintings still heavily influenced by Olmec tradition and from examples of early and as yet undecipherable Maya script.

[2] In 2001, in the base of a pyramid, a team led by William Saturno (a researcher for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology)[1] discovered a room with murals that were carbon-dated as from 100 BC, making them the oldest ones to date.

[4] Besides the murals, the oldest known Maya royal tomb was discovered in San Bartolo, by archaeologist Monica Pellecer Alecio.

As Saturno, Stuart and Taube have argued, the murals on the northern and western walls of the chamber in the base of the temple pyramid ('Pinturas Sub-1') depict elements of Maya creation mythology reminiscent of the Popol Vuh as well as of Yucatec cosmological traditions.

The Maya maize god is shown in the midst of a group of men and women, while receiving (or perhaps bequeathing) a vine calabash.

The other scene shows four babies, with their umbilical cords still attached, surrounding a calabash, which has now split up and from which a fifth, and fully clothed male emerges.

[9] The calabash scene of the northern mural, on the other hand, may constitute (as Van Akkeren has suggested)[10] an illustration of a Pipil myth concerning a group of young boys (rain deities) born, together with their 'youngest brother' (Nanahuatzin), from a gourd tree.