Prince William and Kate release photo of daughter Charlotte to mark ninth birthday
Prince William and his wife Kate released a picture of their daughter Charlotte to mark the princess's ninth birthday on Thursday.
Archeologists in Guatemala uncovered evidence of a ritual where the human remains of royals during the early ninth century AD were burned, indicating that ancient Maya people used the event as a public display to highlight regime change.
A new study published in the journal Antiquity looked at textual sources from between AD 800 and 900, highlighting political upheaval in the Maya Lowlands, and that the Maya kingdom of K'anwitznal grew during the reign of Papmalil. The new discovery coincides with Papmalil's empire and suggests a dramatic show of power.
Christina T. Halperin, a professor from the University of Montreal and lead author of the research, says this discovery is unique because archeological research typically doesn't highlight precise moments when there is regime change.
"Much epigraphic and archaeological research in the Maya area has focused on the collapse of Classic Maya polities at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century AD," Halperin said in a news release. "However, key tipping points in history are rarely found directly in the archaeological record."
Halperin and the research team excavated a temple-pyramid in Ucanal, which was the K'anwitznal capital and is now present-day northern Guatemala. They discovered a deposit containing burnt human remains and ornaments, which included a greenstone mask usually saved for royal tombs, as well as jade and marine shell ornaments. This indicates it was the burial of Maya royalty.
Burnt and cracked greenstone ornaments, including a Hu'unal greenstone diadem and a round relief pendant of a human head. (Christina Halperin/University of Montreal)
Through radiocarbon dating, the research team was able to figure out that the burning event occurred some time after the royals had died, suggesting the tomb was re-entered specifically to burn the remains. It likely overlapped with Papmalil's takeover of the kingdom.
Halperin says the burning ritual would have been "a dramatic, public affair" that rejected the Late Classic Maya dynasty (AD 600-810) and introduced a new political order.
"The fire-burning event itself had the potential to be highly ceremonial, public and charged with emotion," Halperin said. "It could dramatically mark the dismantling of an ancient regime."
Through Maya hieroglyphic texts, the act of re-entering a tomb and burning royal remains is considered an act of desecration, and the public display of burning those remains symbolizes the dismantling of previously hardened institutions.
Halperin says this specific moment in history demonstrates not just the end of a dynasty, but a total transformation from what the K'anwitznal political structure and Maya Lowlands had been previously.
"The fire-burning event itself and the reign of Papmalil helped usher in new forms of monumental imagery that emphasized horizontal political ties and fundamental changes in the social structure of society," Halperin said.
Prince William and his wife Kate released a picture of their daughter Charlotte to mark the princess's ninth birthday on Thursday.
The trusted traveller program between Canada and the United States is extremely popular and almost two million Canadians have a Nexus card.
Scientists studying a Neanderthal woman's remains have painstakingly pieced together her skull from 200 bone fragments to understand what she may have looked like.
Inspections are underway at more than one Loblaws location in Ottawa after complaints were filed about tall Plexiglas barriers.
The makers of Ozempic say their weight-loss drug Wegovy will be available to patients in Canada starting Monday.
Archeologists have unearthed the skeletons of five people, missing their hands and feet, at a former Nazi military base in Poland.
A Canadian restaurant lowered its prices this week, and though news of price tags dropping rather than climbing sounds unusual, the business strategy in this case is not, according to experts in the field.
In an effort to balance the profitability of Mother's Day with the pain it causes some people, some brands are offering customers the choice to opt out of Mother's Day email advertising.
Just days before the seventh anniversary of the day Jack Letts was thrown in prison with thousands of suspected ISIS fighters, his mother, Sally Lane, delivered a small stack of envelopes to the headquarters of Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.
The lawyer for a residential school survivor leading a proposed class-action defamation lawsuit against the Catholic Church over residential schools says the court action is a last resort.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.