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1994
A crack in a stairway, a flashlight and a mirror led to the tomb in 1994
In the spring of 1994 the archaeologist Fanny López Jiménez was doing routine stabilization work on a temple next to the Temple of the Inscriptions. She noticed a small crack in the stairs, partly covered by masonry and weeds. With a flashlight and a mirror she peered into a narrow passageway. The team later cut a hole fifteen centimeters square in a stucco wall and saw a sarcophagus and what looked like a perfectly intact tomb.
Cinnabar
She is called the Red Queen because everything was covered in red dust
The skeleton, the objects and the inside of the sarcophagus were entirely covered with a bright red dust made of cinnabar, the ground ore of mercury. The lid took fourteen hours to lift by twenty centimeters. Inside lay a woman on her back, among jade and pearl objects, bone needles and shells, with a diadem of flat circular jade beads round the skull and the malachite pieces of a funeral mask.
Who was she
DNA showed she was not Pakal's mother, and her identity is unsettled
Tests showed that she was about sixty when she died, had severe osteoporosis and ate a lot of meat. No inscription in the chamber says who she was. At first it was suggested she was the mother of Pakal, but DNA tests showed she shared no DNA with him. The theory as of August 2013 is that she was Ix Tz'akbu Ajaw, his wife. The source says the mystery of her identity remains unresolved.
Two servants
Two people lay beside the sarcophagus, apparently sacrificed
At the west end of the sarcophagus lay the badly preserved skeleton of a male about eleven years old, apparently a servant who had been sacrificed to go with the Red Queen on her last voyage. At the east end lay a woman of 30 to 35 years, who also appeared to have been sacrificed. The tomb is inside Temple XIII, which has been dated to between 600 and 700 AD.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Tomb of the Red Queen, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.