It was hoped that a sliver chiseled from the back of a limestone tablet covered in Mayan hieroglyphs in the University of Maine’s Hudson Museum would help confirm the location of a lost Mayan city known simply as Site Q.

But test results from the thousand-year-old sliver, as well as from samples gathered from ruins at a site called La Corona deep in the Guatemalan jungle, failed to conclusively confirm the original location of the UM tablet, and thus Site Q.

The samples were taken and the testing done at the behest of a British television program called “To the Ends of the Earth,” last fall.

However, while not confirming the original location of the panel, the analysis left open the possibility that La Corona and Site Q are the same place. More extensive fieldwork is needed before it can be said with definitiveness that La Corona and Site Q are one and the same, according to researchers at a university in England.

Stephen Whittington, director of the Hudson Museum, agrees.

“I think it points in the direction for future research,” Whittington said. “Now it’s a matter of going back [to Guatemala] and taking more samples to strengthen the conclusions.”

Going back is easier said than done. From the nearest major town, it takes twelve hours to drive 150 miles to the end of the road at a village that is still four hours by foot and mule from La Corona.

Neil Brodie of the Illicit Antiquities Research Center at Cambridge University in England led the expedition to gather samples at La Corona.

In a telephone interview Tuesday, Brodie said, “My feeling is that the results are encouraging … but we have to do a lot more work yet to reach a definite conclusion.”

Archaeologists began puzzling over Site Q more than 30 years ago.

In the mid 1960s, 20 exquisitely carved limestone tablets, some covered with Mayan hieroglyphics others with depictions of the Maya’s ritual ballgame, appeared in western art markets, having been spirited out of the Central American jungle from unknown ruins.

One of the tablets eventually reached the Hudson Museum in 1982 through the bequest of William Palmer III, a UM graduate and renowned collector of Central American antiquities, who bought the panel from a dealer in New York City in 1968.

Two panels ended up at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the rest were dispersed among private collections.

The tablets appear to be a set, possibly panels alongside a stairway originally.

In 1997, an American specialist in Mayan hieroglyphics, David Stuart of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, was led to previously unknown ruins in the Guatemalan jungle by locals who gather chicle for chewing gum.

There he found a tablet that mentioned a Maya named Red Turkey. Stuart knew the name because one of the panels in the Chicago Institute of Art shows a ballplayer named Red Turkey. He wondered whether the site, known as La Corona, was the original location of the stairway panels.

It was hoped that chemical and microscopic analysis of chips taken from limestone carvings at La Corona, other sites in Guatemala and from the piece in the Hudson Museum would reveal the panels’ origin.

Though not precedent setting, it is rare that a museum allows a piece to be chipped out of one of its artifacts.

The two big issues are “conservation and restitution,” Brodie said. On the conservation side, museums don’t want to risk damaging their artifacts.

On the restitution side, he said, curators don’t want to find out items in their collections have been looted or stolen. Such a revelation could leave the museums open to demands that they compensate the nations from which the artifacts originated or return them.

“It was quite a good and interesting decision that Steve Whittington made,” Brodie said.

“A lot of curators are worried about opening a Pandora’s box,” explained Whittington, an expert in Mayan archeology. “One of my goals is to use the Palmer Collection in support of archeological research.”

But the testing did not produce unequivocal results.

The Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Manchester analyzed the sliver from the UM tablet, plus five samples from La Corona. They also tested nine samples from the Usumacinta River, which comprises part of the border between Guatemala and Mexico, and runs straight through the heartland of Maya ruins. They also studied samples from five specimens in a warehouse at the ancient Maya city of Tikal in northern Guatemala.

While some testing revealed that the UM sample and the La Corona specimens were similar in make up, other testing revealed a “clear difference” between them, indicating they may have come from different places, according to the report written by Dr. Chris L. Hayward of the University of Manchester.

However, the chip from the UM panel is “in some ways” similar to one of the samples from La Corona, known as LC2.

But, “the data available at this time cannot be interpreted without ambiguity,” states the report’s conclusion, “and can be used to argue either for or against [the UM sample] being part of the same panel as sample LC2.”

The two samples, when looked at microscopically, are “similar” and are “chemically sufficiently similar” enough for them to be interpreted as being from the same type of limestone, the report says.

But “in conclusion, it is currently impossible to state, on the basis of petrographic and chemical data, that [the UM sample] is from the same block as LC2,” according to the report.