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PSU Houses World's Largest Maya Skeleton Collection

Plattsburgh, New York - December 28, 2007

It might come as a surprise to some people that Plattsburgh State University has the world's largest collection of Maya skeletons. The college is doing research on the remains by checking their DNA.

The skeleton remains of 600 Maya Indians in the tiny Central American country of Belize were brought back to Plattsburgh by Anthropology professor Mark Cohen. Some of them are on loan to the University of Vermont. The rest are carefully laid out on tables ready to be analyzed for age, health patterns and their relation to other Indian tribes.

"I've had students in the intervening years sort people out to determine sex and age of individuals and the particular pathologies individuals exhibit," says Cohen.

They will then try to determine the nature of the disease and any functional change caused by it. The skeletons were all removed from a 16th century Christian graveyard in Belize. Cohen said all the legal arrangements were made for the removals.

Their observations show that the people back then were small and getting even smaller because of bad nutrition.

"Early populations and populations at the height of their power you get relatively tall people. When the Maya began to disintegrate, they begin to get smaller than ever. Modern Maya are shorter still," says Cohen.

Students from Plattsburgh have been working on the Belize project since the early 1980s. But there was some question if getting useful DNA from bones so old was possible.

"We had a lot of doubters because it was considered ancient DNA which is hard to isolate. It took us a long time to do it... four or five months to figure our the protocol. I had to consult with some experts in the field," says Nancy Elwess.

Undergraduates Melissa Kopp and Nishank Bhalla worked on the project and won international recognition for their work.

"I'm studying the migratory patterns based on genetic markers. It was previously determined that Maya traveled one of four possible routes. From Asia across the Bering Strait. We are looking at that to see how closely related the Maya skeletons here are to modern Maya," explains Kopp.

The research group at Plattsburgh State says that as new scientific inventions come on the scene they allow them to examine the bones further revealing more about the lost history of the Maya past.

Jack LaDuke - WCAX News