Archaeologists once considered Caracol a minor site barely worth their time, but its remoteness turned out to be an asset. Other Maya strongholds like Tikal in Guatemala and Chichén Itzá in Mexico were first encountered by European colonists in the 19th century.

Caracol, hidden in dense tropical forest, had barely been excavated when the Chases arrived in the 1980s. Over the following decades their painstaking work exploded a number of misleading myths about the Maya.

For centuries, most scholarly assumptions about this ancient civilization came from the writings of Friar Diego de Landa, a 16th-century Spaniard who lived as a missionary among the Maya communities in the Yucatán. By his own account, de Landa burned most of the Maya’s hieroglyphic codices.

“These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences,” de Landa wrote in Yucatán Before and After the Conquest. “We found a great number of books in these letters, and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil, we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.”

As American scholar William Gates wrote, introducing his English translation of de Landa’s writings, the bishop “burned 99 times as much knowledge of Maya history and sciences as he has given us.”