The Jaguar Shaman

The sunrise crept up over the jungle. The village was asleep except for a pair of coupling itzcuintli, the domesticated dogs kept by the people of Central America for centuries. A strange smell wafted from the nearby jungle, inciting the dogs bark a warning. While this was a peaceful Brunka village one hundred fifty men, women and children, generations removed from the last attack by raiders, the men were accustomed to the dangers that living on the edge of tropical jungle presented. Jaguars were the largest predators brave enough to venture into the village in search of a desperate meal. The village men rose quickly, grabbing spear and bow, prepared to repel the invading cat. As they gathered on the edge of the village facing the danger in the jungle, what appeared was no majestic cat. It was an army of men made of shining metal with fair skin and dark hair covering their faces. They made noises when they moved and many were mounted on the backs of great metal beasts. The intruders on foot had strange metal heads with a tall central fin that reached from brown to nape. The villagers froze in fear and awe. Were these the warriors of Tlatchque, come to reward or punish them?

The chief of the village, flanked by two elders and the shaman appeared from behind the line of fifty armed hunters. The chieftain was adorned by his traditional garb, leather and feathers and bone. The holy man was covered in tattoos; the most prominent was a black jaguar that wrapped his body climbed over his shoulder and growled from his chest. They approached the line of Spaniards cautiously, but without guile or intent. To them, the intruders were creatures of wonder, not men like themselves. The first shot rang out, sound of thunder echoing in the jungle. The chieftain fell. The shaman raised his arms in subservience and the invaders closest to him took note he carried no weapon, but his wrists and ankles were adorned with stone bracelets and around his neck he wore a stone sphere. For the briefest moment these appeared to glow before the acrid smell of gunpowder signaled the volley that cut him down as well.

It was a slaughter after the initial salvo. The steel men killed all in their path save a small group that disappeared in the tall grasses that stood between the village and the sea. Then they scavenged what puny riches the village contained and rode north, looking for another village to plunder. The chieftain and jaguar shaman were left were they fell. Neither man had any adornments of gold, silver, copper or tin. Their stone necklaces were objects of scorn to the invaders, not worthy of even being cut from the necks of the fallen. One of the halberdiers, who had thought he had seen the shaman’s stone glow, thought maybe they had caught the reflected light of the morning. He took the time to examine them closely and also left them be as uninteresting and not worth their weight in the bother it would be to carry them away.

The next morning thirty women and children appeared from the grasses. They gathered the corpses and arranged them in a ceremonial pile. The shaman was laid to rest at one end, the chieftain at the other. The survivors buried their friends and family members in a simple earthen mound. When they finished their job, they laid two dozen stone spheres on the mound and slipped into the jungle. Where they went and what came of them has been lost to time. But the mound they left would become a place other men sought five hundred years after, so at least one of the survivors would tell the tale.

———

It was a hot, dry Friday afternoon. To the dozen graduate and undergraduate students and two professors, it was a welcome change. They were dispersed around the two acre compound, paired off under canopies that kept the sun off their backs while they turned their faces to the ground, always digging. Even under the shade of the canopies, the heat was stifling and the undergraduates had it the worst. Being unused to the relentless heat, they were sweating profusely. The graduate students and the professors had been to Costa Rica before and were somewhat accustomed the tropics. They only sweat heavily.
When the group had arrived at Farm Three, the eight month wet season was winding down. Still, it four weeks of hot and humid days, punctuated by frequent warm downpours that did little to bring relief from the relentless Costa Rican fall heat which is indistinguishable from the relentless Costa Rican spring heat and only slightly more bearable than the even more relentless Costa Rican summer steam furnace. The daily rains were followed by hours of agonizingly humid air that left the skin prickled from the heat. The only let up came when the sun went down and the cooling offshore breezes bathed the coast and turned the western Costa Rica from purgatory to paradise.

But this Friday afternoon marked the end of the first week of the dry season. There was a noticeable improvement in the spirit around the camp. The ground was dry, the chaffing of personal areas had lessened, and the weather was slightly cooler. In the preceding seven weeks, beginning the first of October, the cadre of America students from five different universities had been digging at the Punta Llorona site south of the Diquis Delta. They would be on site another five weeks, until just after the New Year.

The students called this location “Farm Three”. They called it Farm Three because it was half the size and half as well-known as Farm Six, and it was on part of an old jungle plantation that had played out early in the 1800’s but the similarity ended there. So far it’s only significance consisted of one ceremonial burial mound and even that was of no remarkable size. For the past ten years, under the authorization of the National Museum of Costa Rica, American students and their professors have been trekking to the Pacific Coast of southern Costa Rica to delve in the mud and revel when it turned to dust. For the next three months the digging would be good. They searched for the famous Diquis Stones, nearly perfectly round stones from centimeters to meters in diameter, weighing anywhere from ounces to fifteen tons. This site had produced at several stones per digging season, but so far this season they had discovered nothing.

The origins of the stones were as shrouded in history as was their creators. The Diquis people disappeared entirely shortly after the arrival of the Spaniards. Perhaps they fled but more likely they died from diseases carried by the Spanish or perished at the hands of the invaders. A few Diquis may have survived as slaves to other villages, while a few may have been taken back to Spain and into slavery there. Little oral history existed from the region and less remained in written form. The priests that traveled with the Spaniards were relentless in removing native iconography and anything of quasi-religious nature. It made their job of converting the natives to Christianity that much easier.

In the 1920’s, an obscure professor from the University of Chicago doing research in the National Library of Mexico City found a Mesoamerican codex of even more obscure origin. It was singularly remarkable in that had been translated to Latin by the invading Spanish who had several priests in their numbers. This obscure document had never been translated again, but this particular professor was searching for something groundbreaking to publish and leave his mark behind. He thought the translation would be his ticket to having his name known in every household in America, like Einstein, Curie, Planck and Pavlov.

The codex had described a people of somewhat mystical origin who had inhabited the region that would become southern Costa Rica. They regulated their lives entirely by their own calendar, which celebrated monthly feasts to honor Tlatchque, the God of Thunder. In homage to Tlatchque, they crafted stone spheres and aligned them in a pattern only they understood the significance of. The professor from Chicago was failed to unearth any great archaeological find and after twenty fruitless years, he and his quest faded into obscurity and his name faded with him. He retired to a ranch straddling the White River in northwestern Nebraska. He had a single small round artifact to remind him of his fruitless career. He led local excavations when they turned up dinosaur bones or native America sites, but mostly he raised cattle and horses and thought about the jungle in Central America.

In 1985, an inquisitive University of Chicago undergraduate, Wayne Eschelmann, had come across the archival remnants of that same obscure professor buried deep in the library archives. There was something about the story and the two decades of futile searching that piqued his curiosity. By the time Eschelmann had discovered the dusty archives, the first of the great Diquis Spheres had already been discovered, but no one had ever dug at site first opened by the obscure professor. It was hard to reach, it was deep within Corcovado National Park, and there were no roads. It was approached by sea the first twenty fruitless years of early digging. Eschelmann and Lowe also came by sea their first year, but their discovery of the first spheres of any size had prompted the Museum Nacional to fund a crude road that stretched east and west from Highway 245 to the dig site. It was fifteen miles as the crow flies, but closer to thirty miles as the van travels.

The original Diquis Spheres ignited a great deal of curiosity in the archaeological world. It was an easy matter for Eschelmann in his doctoral student years, to obtain initial funding for a six month dig at his proposed site. In the summer of 1990 the first group of six undergrads and two graduate students, Eschelmann and Curtis Lowe, began their dig in weed covered clearing that was part of the defunct banana plantation on the southern peninsula. They discovered their first two spheres by happenstance. They weren’t unearthed in the initial excavation; they were noticed on top two alabaster plinths that marked the entrance to the former plantation great house. While the house had long been reclaimed by the wild forest, the two plinths remained spheres intact. Each was nearly meter in diameter and weighed close to a thousand pounds, much too heavy to load on the expedition boats. With the permission of the National Museum, they were removed, photographed, weighed, measured, x-rayed and tested for radioactivity. When the new road was completed, they were taken out on the same heavy equipment trucks that had built the road and delivered to the Museum Nacional where they were put on permanent display by the national museum. Eschelmann and Lowe co-wrote a paper on the spheres and subsequent funding was even easier to obtain. Before the end of the following academic year, each had defended his dissertation and both were young professors. The University of Chicago extended and offer to each to join the faculty which they accepted. Now, twenty-five years later, Eschelmann and Lowe seldom left the conditioned air comfort of their offices in Chicago, and left the digging to trusted graduate students and adjuncts that fought to get on their exploration team.

One of the undergraduates for this season was a typical appearing archeology wonk named Paul David from the University of Nebraska. He was paired with Kari Hatfield, a dedicated doctoral student from Duke who was anything but a typical looking archeology wonk. It took weeks for Paul become accustomed to working with the gorgeous Kari long enough to stop being tongue-tied and look Kari in the eyes when she spoke to him. Kari knew Paul had a crush on her, but she didn’t tease or flirt with him. She let him work through his feelings as best he could until he could come to grips with the fact he was working with a former Miss America contestant from North Carolina and focus on his digging. Now that Paul was nearly immune to the physical attractiveness of his partner/mentor, they were getting along like old colleagues and good friends. Kari was impressed by Paul’s work ethic. He dug without complaint or any chauvinism toward Kari. He asked the right question and listened to the answers. Occasionally he followed up with another question that would impress Kari. He was listening to her and taking her seriously. She thought of him more like a kid brother than peer or student. Kari grew attached to this bright and shy farm boy. They ate nearly all of their meals together and frequently sat on together after hours to enjoy the stillness of the tropical nights and regale each other with stories of their families and hometowns. Each of the other male students had taken a shot at attracting the Kari’s attention, but she was as driven to be a successful archaeologist as she had been to be a pageant contestant. She was used to the attention and paid it no mind. She was gentle and kind in her rebuffs and they all went away wistful, not resentful or with wounded pride. She wasn’t interested in romance but she was interested in friendship and learning.

“Hey, look at this!” Paul exclaimed, uncovering what he thought was the top of a small sphere about seven inches in diameter. Kari knelt in the dirt beside him and the two put their heads together over the depression Paul was excavating. “I think we may have found one.”

The pair was working on the north end of the burial mound pit. They had spent five weeks slowly removing layers of dirt hoping to find that the mound extended further than was originally mapped. The use of ground penetrating radar had given indication that there was something worth digging for.

“I’ll get the camera and the tape,” Kari replied. “We need to document this properly.” She gave him a kiss on the forehead. “Good job Paul David! You may make a decent scientist yet.”

She got to her feet and climbed from the covered pit and crossed the site to the cataloging tent. She came back with a digital camera and steel measure tape that would be used to pinpoint exactly where the newest sphere was uncovered. A few of the other teams heard the commotion and climbed from their own excavation pits to look down on the new discovery. After a time they went back to digging. The other teams had found spheres before and weren’t impressed any longer. This sphere didn’t appear to be of any significance.

Paul and Kari took turns slowly shaving away the dirt around the sphere until the top third was exposed. “There’s something else here,” whispered Kari as she attempted expose more of the sphere and found part of it missing. “Get the sat phone and the laptop.” Paul felt his pulse quicken by the tone and urgency in his partner’s voice. He scrambled out of the pit and dashed to the cataloging tent, returning with the IBM ThinkPad and satellite phone that would connect them to Eschelmann and Lowe. Kari tapped a few keys on the keyboard and three thousand miles away, a different laptop chirped and twittered to get the attention of anyone nearby.

“Good afternoon Kari, it’s always a pleasure to receive a call from you. You must have something special to call during digging hours,” smiled Wayne Eschelmann. Kari McCoy’s reputation for being all business was well-earned.

“I think we have something to show you,” she smiled in acknowledgement.

“Have a look.” She moved the laptop to the work area, adjusting it until the sphere filled the screen. What became apparent was that this was no sphere.