STORIES TOLD IN BONE Trained in both medicine and archaeology, Vera Tiesler has revealed unknown sides of life in the Maya world. BY ERIK VANCE 168 | NATURE | VOL 566 | 14 FEBRUARY 2019©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. FEATURE NEWS he Autonomous University of the Yucatán, in the Mexican neglected to inform her parents, who eventually called Interpol in a panic. city of Mérida, holds one of the most comprehensive libraries “I saw Mexico in a way that I fell in love with,” she says. on Earth. But few books line the shelves on the bottom floor They made plans to get married, but her fiancé died suddenly in 1987 of the anthropological sciences building. Instead, boxes are while Tiesler was in Germany studying medicine. She vowed to go to stacked from floor to ceiling in almost every corner of the Mexico and do what he always wished he could — become an archae- Tlaboratory, with labels naming Calakmul, Pomuch or Xcambo and other ologist. Against the wishes of her family, she enrolled at the National ancient Maya ruins. Inside every box is a set of human bones. Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City and has lived in Mexico ever since. Bodies from some 2,000 burials are stored here, with another 10,000 Tiesler finished her medical degree in Mexico and later earned her records of others in a database. The remains of some of the most famous doctorate in anthropology from the National Autonomous University of Maya kings have passed through this room at the university. Ancient Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Back then, few people were interested in paupers, warriors, priests, scribes, lords, ladies and artisans — the lab the bones of the ancient Maya; Mexican archaeology was about temples, has seen them all. pottery and jade masks. Those who did study bones typically collected And tucked in the middle of it, surrounded on all sides by the remains only the most basic information. of long-dead civilizations, sits bioarchaeologist Vera Tiesler. Over the past “They figured they had done everything they could. They had measured quarter of a century, Tiesler has carved out a reputation as the world’s pre- them, they had classified them,” says Manuel Gándara, an archaeologist mier specialist on ancient Maya remains, which has helped her to unlock who oversaw her work at the time, and is now at the National School secrets of their lives and culture. On a drizzly November day, she pulls out of Conservation, Restoration and Museography in Mexico City. “And one of her favourite bones, a flat strip no bigger than her finger, and puts here comes this lady saying, ‘Oh but we haven’t taken samples of tissue it under a magnifying lens. It’s a sternum bone from a young man who t o a n a l y s e’.” was probably sacrificed. She points to a deep V-shaped cut over the centre Tiesler was introducing a field often called taphonomy, which was of the chest, and she marvels at the skill of the person who inflicted it. gaining popularity in Europe at the time, and goes beyond classifying “You’d need a lot of strength — a lot of force — and you’d need to know bones by trying to reconstruct the body that once hung from them. But exactly where to hit,” she says. “Because if not, you’d have these false starts, the practice had never been applied to ancient Mesoamericans. She began it would be a mess.” looking through Mexican museums at various collections of skulls, which Trained as a physician and an archaeologist, Tiesler reads the region’s she considered the most interesting parts of the body. She became fasci- history in its bones. By bringing a medical eye to ancient Maya civiliza- nated with the practice of head shaping, whereby a mother tied boards to tion, she has changed how scientists perceive that society, putting some an infant’s head to shape its growth. of its seemingly more unusual traditions into context and shedding light It didn’t hurt the baby and was a surprisingly common practice around on the lives of key individuals. the world. Archaeologists who study the Maya assumed that the practice Through studies of thousands of bodies, she has helped to illuminate had something to do with religion, but knew little more than that. how the Maya’s knowledge of human physiology was an integral part of Tiesler noticed that certain regions tended to have specific head styles. their society — from birth to death. How they shaped the heads of their After looking at a few hundred skulls, she found that people during the babies reveals insights into their family traditions and spirituality. And Classic period (250–900) along the coast of today’s Veracruz had a verti- her investigations into many of the deaths suggests that ritualized sacrifice cal, pear-shaped style, those in the lowlands had a sloping, tubular style, was perfected to a high art — an idea that challenges popular views of and those along the coast of the Caribbean Sea had wide, flat heads. Over the Maya world as a society of peaceful stargazers. Throughout, she has time, that shape became popular, and dominated the late Classic period1. uncovered a rich culture in which the human body was deeply woven into By looking at drawings and carvings from the time and comparing religion, tradition and politics. them to skull shapes, she deduced that head styles follow matrilineal tra- “I always look at things from a different angle,” Tiesler says. “That way ditions: children tend to have the mother’s style. She, along with others, it never loses its attraction. It’s like it triggers me. I find it thrilling.” found a possible reason, based on Maya traditions in colonial times. The Tiesler is an anomaly in Mexican archaeology. Born in Germany ancient Maya saw babies as not-yet human, and at risk of losing their and trained in Mexico, where she has lived for decades, she has crossed essence through a few points in their skulls, she says. By shaping the head, cultures to make partnerships and discoveries around one of the most the Maya kept the essence in place2. famous ancient civilizations. “There are very few people with those kinds of credentials,” says LIVES OF THE KINGS Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University in Providence, By the time Tiesler got her PhD in 1999, she was already fleshing out much Rhode Island. “She represents this collegial internationalism — a kind of of ancient Maya culture and soon began excavating royal tombs. The global approach to knowledge in which people at their best, in the best ancient Maya spanned from the northern Yucatán peninsula southwards conditions, work together.” towards modern-day Honduras (an area about the size of today’s Egypt), and Tiesler has examined many of its important kings or queens found THE POWER OF LOVE over the past 100 years. She was part of the team that examined Pakal the Quiet and bookish as a child, Tiesler had always felt out of place in the Great (or K’inich Janaab’ Pakal) of Palenque and his companion, the Red small German village near the border with France where she grew up. She Queen, between 1999 and 2006. She found that their relatively luxuri- just saw things differently. Although her friends went to James Bond films ous lifestyle gave them premature osteoporosis, visible in their thinning to see the hero, she was more interested in his steel-toothed nemesis Jaws. bones. Their teeth were barely worn from eating soft, decadent food their And she yearned to travel. whole lives3. So she enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, Tiesler excavated the bones of a king named Lord of the Four Sides of where she avoided its famously boisterous campus life and graduated the Flint (or Ukit Kan Le’k Tok) of Ek Balam, depicted in a painting in his after just one year, with honours, at 19 in 1985. Afterwards, she took a opulent vault with a double lip. She found that he had a disfigured upper little money that she had won in an art competition and flew to Mex- jaw with teeth that were dislodged and had then healed at angles, possibly ico City for two weeks before returning to Germany to start a medical from a blow to the face during battle, given that he was eager to show it off. degree. In Mexico, she met a young doctor and Tiesler’s favourite kings are the ones for which she oversaw the exca- Vera Tiesler examines archaeology enthusiast, who offered to take her vation process from start to finish. Take Fiery Claw (or Yukom Yich’ak the remains of a to the ruins of Teotihuacán just outside the city K’ahk’) of the Classic Snake dynasty. The Snakes were a line of kings who person buried in with his friends. They fell in love, and spent a moved into the Maya world in 560 and, over 150 years, built the closest Mexico during early week driving thousands of kilometres through thing the Maya ever saw to an empire. PIM SCHALKWIJK colonial times. the Maya region to visit sites — although she The first of these, Sky Witness, was found in a moderately humble ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserve14d. FEBRUARY 2019 | VOL 566 | NATURE | 169 NEWS FEATURE grave, shared with a handful of other elite warriors who died in battle.