Forty years ago, the antiquities market in Europe and the United States was flooded with looted artifacts from the Petén rain forest of Guatemala. Their artistic style and inscriptions suggested to scholars that the monumental stones came from an abandoned seventh-century Maya city at some unidentified remote place, which became known as Site Q.

Now, archaeologists think the mystery has been solved in the little-known ruins of a place called La Corona. Last week they reported finding a well-preserved stone monument in two sections carved with more than 140 hieroglyphs that bear dates and tell stories of two kings mentioned prominently in the Site Q texts.