Art: Green Priest

Since February archeologists had been delving into a 30-foot mound in the mountains of Guatemala. This week they announced their prize discovery: “The finest single piece of Mayan jade carving ever found.”

It was an apple-green breastplate, about six inches wide, carved in the 9th Century. Cut into the jade was the figure of a priest, or ruler, presiding over a circle of deities (see cut). To make it, the Mayan artist had labored with wooden bow drills, and smoothed his work down with abrasive sand. Carnegie Institution diggers found the breastplate and an assortment of gold-leaf ornaments, copper bells “and one alabaster vase amid the rotted bones in an ever-deepening series of graves.

The graves were in a mound, one of two dozen on the outskirts of Nebaj, at the end of a winding new road, ten hours from Guatemala City. The local Indians, descendants of the ancient Mayans whose bones rested below, make daily sacrifices of flowers and incense before the mounds, while praying to their curious pantheon: to rain and wind gods of their old faith, and to Dios and Maria of the Catholicism they have since embraced.