Why did the Maya build splendid cities in the jungle and then walk away from them? How did a people without metal tools carve a skull from a single block of quartz? And who, exactly, is the figure reclining on the lid of Pakal's sarcophagus at Palenque?
 
Sacred Enigmas of the Americas travels the continent from the Bering land bridge to the shores of Rapa Nui in search of the questions archaeology has not closed. Michel Marcel-Levy does not sell answers: he lays out the evidence, weighs the hypotheses - the cautious and the daring alike - and lets the reader decide where the ground gives way.
 
The journey begins with the peopling of the Americas and with the travelers who may have arrived long before 1492: Vikings, an Irish monk, a Welsh prince, an emperor of Mali who sailed west and never returned. It moves on to the Maya - Tikal, Copan, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Palenque - and to the abandonment that no theory fully explains. It descends into the cenotes and caves of Yucatan, the passages the Maya believed led to the underworld, and it reads the seven prophecies drawn from the Chilam Balam, the book that turned 2012 into a household date long before the internet did.
 
At the heart of the book lies Pakal the Great and the sarcophagus lid that some read as a Maya cosmogram and others as an astronaut at the controls of a capsule. From there the enigmas multiply: the crystal skulls, and the Mitchell-Hedges skull with its separately carved jaw; the Olmec colossal heads and the Cascajal block, the oldest writing in the Americas; the perfect stone spheres of the Diquis delta, carved from a rock that does not outcrop there.
 
A long chapter confronts human sacrifice without flinching and without appetite, drawing on the sixteenth-century chroniclers and on the archaeology that has since either confirmed or corrected them: the methods, the ritual calendar of eighteen twenty-day months, and the uncomfortable question of how much the Spanish chroniclers exaggerated.
 
Then the Andes. Machu Picchu and Hiram Bingham's discovery. The Nazca lines, drawn to be seen from a sky no one could reach. Tiahuanaco at four thousand meters, its Gate of the Sun and its trepanned skulls whose edges healed. And at last Rapa Nui, its moai, and the rongo-rongo tablets: a script still unread, whose alternate lines run in reverse.
 
Thirty-five original illustrations, drawn for this edition, accompany the text: maps, site plans, cross-sections and codex-style plates.
 
First published in Spanish in 2008 and now available in English for the first time, this is a book for readers who prefer a well-posed question to a comfortable answer.