The following article is from the New York Times (National Edition), 26 January 1995, page A14, and is the copyrighted material of that organization. It is presented here on a nonprofit informational basis because of its inherent news value. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Age of Burials in Honduras Stuns Scholars New Society May Be The Region's Oldest by JOHN NOBLE WILFORD A laboratory analysis of material from a Honduran cave filled with human skulls and bones, which archaeologists examined for the first time last September, has produced two potentially significant surprises. People were burying their dead in the cave as long ago as 3,000 years, about the time King David was capturing Jerusalem and before the founding of Rome. This was a considerably earlier time than previously estimated and means that the cave holds the earliest scientifically dated evidence for the emergence of complex society in Honduras. It may be that only the Olmec society of southern Mexico is older in Central America. The humble beginnings of the great Maya city Copa'n in northwestern Honduras probably came a century or so later, and the classic period of Maya civilization throughout upper Central America and southern Mexico was in the first milennium A.D. Even more puzzling to archeologists than the early date was an analysis of bones indicating that the people buried in the cave apparently had not eaten corn. This pre-Columbian dietary staple was domesticated in the tropical lowlands in Mexico about 7,000 years ago, and scholars have generally linked cultivated corn with the rise of complex societies in much of the Americas. The results of these studies were described on Monday by Dr. James E. Brady, an archeologist at George Washington University in Washington, who has led the scientific investigation of Cueva de Rio Talgua, the Cave of the River Talgua, near the edge of the rain forest. He is a specialist in Maya cave archeology. Last April, amateur cave explorers found the remote burial chamber with the skeletal remains of perhaps 100 to 200 individuals, the skulls of which sparkled with tiny calcium crystals from the limestone cave. This inspired the site's nickname, Cave of the Glowing Skulls. On their first visit to the site in September, Dr. Brady and other archaeologists surmised on the basis of ceramics that the burials could have occurred from 300 B.C. to A.D. 500. But at Dr. Brady's direction, Beta Analytic Inc. of Miami ran radiocarbon tests on two charcoal samples found among the skulls and bones. The first sample, which was also associated with a ceramic vessel, was dated at about 800 B.C., plus or minus 20 years. The second ash sample was even older, dated at 980 B.C., with a range of 905 to 1030 B.C. Dr. Brady said this was the earliest radiocarbon date for cultural material in Honduras. Among the artifacts in the burial chamber were broken pieces of jade, 20 intact or restorable ceramic vessels and two large marble bowls. Less than a mile from the cave, the archeologists discovered mounds of a village that was probably occupied at the time of the cave burials. People did not live in the cave. Surveys of the site by George Hasemann, an American archeologist with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History in Tegucigalpa, showed that the settlement stretched over an area more than a quarter of a mile wide, making it the largest occupation site known in Honduras from such an early time The buried traces of dwellings and their arrangement suggested that the villagers represented a well-organized and probably socially stratified population resembling other cultures in Mesoamerica, the region of Mexico and much of Central America. Dr. David McJunkin, director of the University of Wisconsin's Radiocarbon Laboratory in Madison, reported that he was able to extract bone protein from two skeletal samples taken from the cave. An analysis of the carbon isotope ratios indicated that neither person was subsisting on corn, he said. Dr. Brady said, "We have an interesting situation in which the site combines a Mesoamerican architectural pattern with a lower Central American subsistence pattern." If the people did not depend on corn, as was customary by this time in Mexico and most of upper Central America, then their staple was probably manioc, Dr. Brady said. These dietary differences could be further evidence tha the indigenous people of Honduras represented, as early Spanish accounts indicated, a mixture of ethnic groups occupying borderlands between the prevailing cultures of lower Central America and the upper territory. "It will require years of painstaking archeological investigation and extensive scientific analysis to prove incontrovertibly than an advanced, complex civilization did flourish in the Mosquitia region of Honduras more than 3,000 years ago," said Dr. Brady, who plans to resume research on the cave and the village site this summer.