Chichén Itzá

In 1904, the American consul in Yucatán lowered a dredging bucket into a green sinkhole at the edge of a ruined Maya city and started pulling up the bottom. Edward Thompson had bought the hacienda that contained Chichén Itzá for almost nothing, and he had read in a sixteenth-century account that the Maya had thrown precious things, and people, into the Sacred Cenote as offerings to the rain god. For years the bucket came up with mud. Then it came up with jade, gold discs, copper bells, fragments of cloth and human bones. Thompson shipped most of it to the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Mexico called it looting and took him to court. Some of the objects came home in 1959, more in 1976.

The City At The Mouth Of The Well

The name means roughly "at the mouth of the well of the Itzá", and the well is literal. Northern Yucatán has no rivers; the limestone is porous and water collects in natural sinkholes, the cenotes. Chichén Itzá grew from around the sixth century, but its great period ran from roughly the ninth to the eleventh centuries, just as the big Maya cities to the south were collapsing. While the south emptied, this place became the commercial, ceremonial and political hub of the north.

What makes it strange is its architecture. Part of the city is pure Maya, in the Puuc style of intricate stone mosaic. Part of it looks like something from central Mexico, seven hundred kilometres away, especially the city of Tula: feathered-serpent columns, reclining Chac Mool figures, ranks of carved warriors. For most of the twentieth century the standard explanation was an invasion by the Toltecs. Many archaeologists now read it differently, as the product of a shared trade network and a political style that spread across Mesoamerica without an army.

The Temple of Kukulcán, usually called El Castillo, is the emblem of that meeting. Nine tiers, four stairways of 91 steps each, plus the top platform: 365. Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the late-afternoon sun throws the corner of the stepped tiers onto the side of the north stairway, and a chain of seven triangles of light joins the stone serpent head at the bottom. The serpent appears to crawl down the pyramid. Next to it is the Great Ball Court, the largest known in Mesoamerica at around 168 metres long. The reliefs along its walls show a player being beheaded at the end of a match.

Abandoned, Rediscovered, Bought

By the thirteenth century political power had moved to Mayapán. Chichén Itzá was never fully deserted; pilgrims kept coming to the cenote until the Spanish arrived. In the 1530s Francisco de Montejo tried to make the ruins the base for his conquest of Yucatán and was driven out within a couple of years. The forest took over. John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood came through in 1841, and Catherwood's drawings were the first time most of the outside world saw the place.

And here is the part almost nobody knows. After Thompson, the land passed to the Barbachano family, and it stayed with them. Mexico's federal government protected the monuments, but the ground they stood on remained private property. Chichén Itzá became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988 and was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007 while still, on paper, belonging to a family. Only in 2010 did the state of Yucatán buy the land for a sum in the hundreds of millions of pesos.

Pyramids Inside The Pyramid

Archaeologists have known since the 1930s that El Castillo was built over an older, smaller pyramid, which still holds a red-painted jaguar throne with jade eyes. In 2015 a Mexican team using electrical resistivity imaging found that the whole structure sits directly above a cenote, a pocket of water under the rock. The following year they announced a third, smaller structure inside the second. In Maya thought, the mountain and the water-filled cave are the elements of creation, and it is tempting to say the builders chose the spot for that reason. No inscription says so.

Then there is the sound. Clap your hands at the foot of the main stairway and the echo that comes back off the steps is a high, descending chirp. Some acousticians have argued it was engineered to mimic the call of the quetzal. It is not proven, but on an equinox afternoon, when a few thousand people clap at once, the pyramid does sing.

Today

The site is run by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, INAH. Climbing El Castillo has been banned since a visitor fell to her death on the stairs in 2006, so more than two million people a year now look at it from the ground. The pressure is the crowd and everything that feeds on it: hundreds of vendors inside the archaeological zone, day-trip buses from Cancún, the new Tren Maya railway passing nearby. The city was built over water. The long-term question for Chichén Itzá, as for all of Yucatán, is what happens to the cenotes.