Archaeologists are exploring a ruined kingdom in Guatemala to work out how it survived centuries of conflict in the ancient Mayan Indian world before being abandoned to the jungle more than 1200 years ago.

The city-state of Naachtun, which means "distant stone" in Mayan, played a strategic and possibly unique diplomatic role in the turbulent politics of the time.

Earlier this month, a 32-person expedition team led by Canadian archaeologist Associate Professor Kathryn Reese-Taylor, from the University of Calgary, left Guatemala City for the remote Peten jungle area near the border with Mexico to excavate the site.

The team, which includes Professor Peter Mathews from La Trobe University in Australia, will try to explain how Naachtun survived the collapse of the great pre-classic Mirador civilisation and then went on to blossom during centuries of conflict that followed.

Naachtun appears to have flourished between about 500 and 800 AD, believed to be a time of almost constant warfare in the Mayan area. At the time, two regional superpowers Tikal and Calakmul were locked in a frequently vicious fight for supremacy.

"Tikal and Calakmul hated each other's guts, fought wars, captured each other's kings and more to the point they generated alliances around them," said project co-director, Mathews.

Naachtun was located between the two great powers and came to be important to both the war and trade strategies of the rival kingdoms.

"If Tikal or Calakmul ever needed to launch an attack directly on the other they would have to go through Naachtun," said Reese-Taylor.

Archaeologists are not sure whether Naachtun was neutral territory, like Switzerland where people from both sides would come in and discuss issues, or more like Afghanistan, a strategically placed entity where warring third parties would vie for influence.

The team also believes the remote site's real name is actually Masul, one of a handful of Mayan kingdoms named in hieroglyphic carvings the precise location of which has long been a mystery.

U.S. archaeologist Sylvanus Morley named the site Naachtun arbitrarily in the 1920s.

Shifted allegiances

Naachtun, which is 130 kilometers north of the city of Flores, was founded around 400 BC and is believed to have been home to up to 20,000 people at the peak of its powers.

The site is studded with pyramids, numerous stone carvings and a sprawling four hectare palace complex.

Hieroglyphic records shows that the heavily fortified city shifted allegiances repeatedly, unusual in the highly polarised classic era of Mayan civilisation.

One explanation is that the rival powers recognised the importance of the site as a frontier between them and wanted to control it to use it as a kind of early warning system.

Tikal finally won the upper hand over Calakmul. But after centuries of fighting the two great civilisations began to unravel at the end of the eighth century.

This time Naachtun didn't survive either, and the kingdom was abandoned from around 800 AD. Gum tappers rediscovered the site at the start of the 20th century.

Renewed pressures

Researchers from the Carnegie Institution in Washington were the last to try and explore Naachtun. The three-week expedition in 1933 produced the only map of the site.

Cash-strapped Guatemalan authorities welcome the latest archaeology team, which will carry out vital restoration work and pay for rangers to protect Naachtun from looters.

But Yvonne Putzeys, who heads the Guatemalan government's archaeological institute, warns that the Mirador Basin, of which Naachtun is a part, is at risk from population pressure and economic interests.

Many sites in the Mirador Basin suffer extensive looting of valuable artefacts, and the digging of innumerable looter trenches often damages the foundations of ancient monuments.

At the same time, illegal loggers active in the region trade in rainforest hardwoods, threatening the habitat of rare species such as jaguars and tapirs.

"It is essential that we implement systematic protection right away, to stop the cultural and natural destruction," Putzeys said.

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