Maya archaeologist's statement a startling detection, a fresh-looking stucco statue exterior a covered tomb portrays the estimating of a Maya ruler.

Guatemalan relic officials proclaimed the breakthrough of the stucco frieze, some 30 feet long and 6 feet tall, discovered on the in the interior of a pyramid at the Maya city site of Holmul.

"It is one of the most tremendous things I have ever seen," says archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of the Holmul Archaeological Project. "The conservation is magnificent as it was very vigilantly crammed with grime earlier than they in progress building over it."

The frieze was on one side of a staircase crypt that was inside a pyramid built by the later rulers of the site. Tinted red, with particulars in blue, yellow and green, it depicts three men wearing bird headdresses and jade jewels seated cross-legged over the head of heap strength. It is likely a representation of the crowning of a new ruler at the site around the year 590, according to Estrada-Belli, whose team's efforts were supported by the National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program. "We did not have the details of the ceremonies to fix a new king as we have here, until now," he says.

At Holmul, a dedication offers the frieze to an influential king in the nearby Snake kingdom, named "Ajwosaj Chan K'inich," who claims to have restored Holmul's rulers and gods to their equitable place in the ceremony it depicts. Fundamentally Holmul had switched sides alongside Tikal, the one-time pre-eminent power of the region, some 25 miles southwest of the site. 

Dug into a stairway, the tomb within the exposed building yielded the skeleton of a man, his front teeth drilled and filled with jade beads, bounded by pots depicting the nine gods of the Maya gangland as well as other icons."He was certainly a member of the ruling class," Estrada-Belli says.