17.5483°N, 89.4039°W.
San Bartolo is a Late Preclassic Maya site in northeastern Peten, Guatemala, occupied principally between approximately 400 BCE and 100 CE. The site is dominated by the Pinturas pyramid, which encloses the buried Las Pinturas chamber — a small ritual room whose walls bear the earliest known intact polychrome murals from the Maya world, dated to roughly 100 BCE. The murals were discovered by William Saturno in 2001 when he sheltered from the heat in a looters' tunnel and shone his flashlight on the painted wall above his head. Subsequent excavations by Saturno and Heather Hurst exposed murals depicting the Maize God's birth and accession, a bound ruler offering blood, and a sequence of cosmological scenes painted in red, yellow, black, blue, and pink mineral pigments on lime plaster. Glyphic captions in the murals are among the earliest legible Maya writing.
The Pinturas chamber survived because it was deliberately filled and sealed by the Maya themselves before the next construction phase was raised over it.