Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza is the ruin of a great Maya city in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula, about 115 km east of the modern city of Mérida. Its name in Yucatec Maya, Chichʼen Itzaʼ, is usually translated “at the mouth of the well of the Itza”; the Itza were a powerful lineage group of the northern lowlands. Maya texts also preserve an older name for the place, Uuc Yabnal, whose meaning is debated.

The city was built on a flat limestone plain with no surface rivers. Water came from cenotes, natural sinkholes where the roof of an underground river or cave has collapsed. Several cenotes lie within the site, the most famous being the Sacred Cenote north of the main pyramid.

From the ninth to the eleventh centuries Chichen Itza was the dominant power of northern Yucatán, controlling trade routes by sea and land. Its buildings mix local Maya styles with forms that recall central Mexico, especially the city of Tula. This mixture has made Chichen Itza one of the most debated sites in Mesoamerican archaeology. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Mexico’s most visited monuments.

Chichen Itza was not built all at once. Its core covers at least 5 km², with groups of buildings on levelled platforms linked by white plastered causeways called sacbeob (singular sacbe, “white road”). Low walls once separated the groups.

In the south lie the older sections, including Las Monjas (“the Nunnery”, in fact probably a palace complex), the Akab Dzib, the Casa Colorada (“Red House”) and the area archaeologists call Old Chichen. Many of these buildings are in the Puuc style of northern Yucatán, with plain lower walls and upper façades covered in stone mosaics of geometric patterns and masks of a long-nosed god often identified as the rain god Chaak. Hieroglyphic inscriptions, concentrated here, name a ruler called Kʼakʼupakal and other lords of the ninth century.

In the north, on a huge artificial platform, stand the monuments most visitors know: the Temple of Kukulcán (El Castillo), the Great Ball Court, the Temple of the Warriors with its Group of a Thousand Columns, a skull platform (tzompantli), and platforms decorated with eagles and jaguars devouring hearts. These buildings use colonnades, feathered serpent columns, reclining chacmool statues and imagery of warriors that have close parallels at Tula, in central Mexico. A causeway about 270 m long leads north from this plaza to the Sacred Cenote.

Between these areas stands El Caracol (“the Snail”), a round tower on a rectangular platform, named after the spiral staircase inside. Its windows appear to be aligned with the positions of Venus and other celestial events, and it is widely interpreted as an observatory, although how it was used is still discussed.

The Temple of Kukulcán, called El Castillo (“the castle”) by the Spanish, is a stepped pyramid about 30 m high, including a temple on top. It has nine terraces and a staircase on each of its four sides. Kukulcán, the Feathered Serpent, was a Maya deity closely related to the central Mexican Quetzalcoatl. Great carved serpent heads lie at the foot of the northern staircase.

The pyramid reflects the Maya calendar. Each staircase has about 91 steps; four times 91 plus the top platform makes 365, the number of days in the solar year (called the Haabʼ). The nine terraces on each side are divided by the staircase into eighteen sections, matching the eighteen “months” of that calendar. Archaeologists debate how exactly these numbers were intended, but they show how architecture and time were connected.

Around the spring and autumn equinoxes, in the late afternoon, the stepped corner of the pyramid casts a row of triangular shadows on the side of the northern staircase, creating the image of a serpent’s body joining the stone head at the bottom. Thousands of people gather to watch. Some researchers point out that the effect can be seen for weeks around the equinoxes, so it would not have been a precise way to mark a date; whether it was designed on purpose remains uncertain.

El Castillo hides an older pyramid inside. In the 1930s Mexican archaeologists tunnelled in and found an earlier temple containing a chacmool and a throne in the shape of a jaguar, painted red and inlaid with jade. More recent geophysical surveys have detected a still earlier construction phase and a cenote beneath the pyramid.

Thirteen ball courts have been found at Chichen Itza. The Great Ball Court, 168 m long and 70 m wide, is the largest known in ancient Mesoamerica. Its walls rise about 8 m, with a carved stone ring set high in the middle of each. Players struck a solid rubber ball with their hips, and sending it through a ring was probably very rare. Reliefs along the base of the walls show two teams of players; in the centre, a player has been beheaded and streams of blood become serpents and flowering plants. The ballgame had religious and political meanings connected with cosmic struggle, fertility and sacrifice, as well as being a sport.

The Sacred Cenote is a nearly round sinkhole about 60 m across, with sheer walls dropping some 27 m to the water. It was a pilgrimage place for centuries, even after the city declined. The Franciscan friar Diego de Landa, writing in the 1560s, reported that people were thrown into it alive as offerings to the gods in times of drought, along with precious objects.

Between 1904 and 1910 the American Edward H. Thompson, who owned the land, dredged the cenote and recovered gold, copper and jade ornaments, pottery, copal incense, wooden objects, textiles and human bones. Many were shipped to the Peabody Museum at Harvard; some have since been returned to Mexico. Later underwater expeditions in the 1960s, supervised by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), recovered more. The finds show that Chichen Itza received offerings from far away, including gold from Central America.

The human remains from the cenote include children and adults of both sexes. Some show signs of violence, while others do not, and researchers continue to debate how many were sacrificed and how many were placed there after death. Written accounts from the colonial period must be read with caution, because they were written long after the city’s peak and reflect Spanish perspectives.

Chichen Itza rose as the great cities of the southern Maya lowlands, such as Tikal and Calakmul, were declining during what is called the Classic Maya collapse (roughly 800–950 CE). In the north, by contrast, cities such as Uxmal, Ek Balam, Cobá and Chichen Itza flourished for a time. By the tenth century Chichen Itza had defeated or overshadowed rivals like Cobá and Yaxuna and dominated much of northern and central Yucatán.

Its wealth came from trade and tribute. Through its port at Isla Cerritos on the north coast, it took part in canoe trade around the peninsula, obtaining obsidian from central Mexico, turquoise from farther north, gold from southern Central America and salt, cotton and other goods from the coasts. Tribute from conquered or allied communities supported its rulers and builders.

How it was governed is debated. Inscriptions name a powerful lord, Kʼakʼupakal, in the ninth century. Some scholars have argued that in its later phase the city was ruled by a council of elite lineages, a system later called multepal, rather than by a single divine king. Others see a more conventional kingship. The abundance of warrior imagery, rather than portraits of individual kings, fits a society in which military orders and elite groups shared power.

The population was probably diverse, including people from different parts of the Maya world and perhaps from central Mexico. A genetic study published in 2024 of children buried in an underground chamber near the Sacred Cenote found that they were all boys, that some were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, and that they were from local Maya populations, with genetic continuity to Maya people living in the region today.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Chichen Itza’s role as a regional capital ended by about 1100, perhaps somewhat later; building activity stopped and power shifted. Later Maya chronicles, the books of Chilam Balam, tell of a ruler of Mayapán named Hunac Ceel who overthrew Chichen Itza, but archaeologists now think that Chichen had declined before Mayapán became the dominant city in the thirteenth century. The chronicles blend history, prophecy and politics, and their dates are difficult to correlate with archaeology.

Chichen Itza was never forgotten. The Sacred Cenote remained a place of pilgrimage, and people continued to live in the area. In the 1530s the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Montejo the Younger tried to establish a Spanish town at Chichen Itza; Maya resistance forced the Spanish to abandon it in 1534. Yucatán was conquered only in the 1540s. Diego de Landa, who later ordered the burning of Maya books at Maní in 1562, nevertheless left one of the key written descriptions of Chichen Itza. The land became part of a Spanish cattle estate.

In the nineteenth century the site entered international imagination through John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), illustrated by Frederick Catherwood. Photographers and explorers such as Désiré Charnay, Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon, Teobert Maler and Alfred Maudslay followed. Augustus Le Plongeon excavated a reclining statue in 1875 and called it “Chaacmol”; the name, as chacmool, is now used for all such figures across Mesoamerica.

In 1894 Edward Thompson, the United States consul in Yucatán, bought the Hacienda Chichén, which included the ruins. His dredging of the Sacred Cenote and the export of its treasures later led the Mexican government to accuse him of theft and seize the property in 1926; the Mexican Supreme Court ruled in 1944 that he had broken no laws, and his heirs sold the estate to the tourism pioneer Fernando Barbachano Peón.

From 1924 the Carnegie Institution of Washington, under a Mexican government permit and with Sylvanus Morley as leading figure, excavated and restored the Temple of the Warriors, El Caracol and other buildings, while Mexican government archaeologists worked on El Castillo and the Great Ball Court. These campaigns produced the reconstructed city visitors see today; some reconstructions have since been criticized as more complete than the evidence allows.

The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988 and, in 2007, El Castillo was named one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World” in a commercial online vote. The land under the main monuments remained privately owned until 2010, when the state of Yucatán bought it; the archaeological zone is federal property managed by INAH. Mass tourism brings income to the region but also pressure on the monuments, and climbing El Castillo was prohibited in 2006. Local Maya communities, including many artisans and vendors at the site, have sought a greater share in decisions about the heritage of their ancestors.

For its builders, Chichen Itza was a sacred landscape. The Temple of Kukulcán stands roughly at the centre of a cross formed by four cenotes, suggesting that it was seen as an axis linking the heavens, the earth and the watery underworld. Later Mesoamerican traditions speak of great cities called Tollan, “Place of Reeds”, where civilization and legitimate kingship originated; many scholars think Chichen Itza was regarded as one such Tollan in the eastern world.

Today Chichen Itza is a national symbol of Mexico and a symbol of Maya civilization worldwide. It appears in textbooks, films and tourism campaigns, and the equinox gatherings at El Castillo have become a modern ritual, sometimes framed by New Age ideas that have little to do with Maya religion. For the Yucatec Maya who live around the site today, and for Maya peoples as a whole, it is part of a living heritage rather than the relic of a vanished people.

Toltec conquest or shared culture? Early twentieth-century scholars noticed striking similarities between Chichen Itza’s northern buildings and those of Tula, the Toltec capital in central Mexico. Combined with later legends about Quetzalcoatl (Kukulcán) leaving Tula and arriving in Yucatán, this led to the influential theory that Toltec invaders conquered Chichen Itza around 1000 and created a “Toltec-Maya” city over an older Maya one. Since the late twentieth century many archaeologists have argued instead for long-distance interaction among elites, a shared “international” style centred on the cult of the Feathered Serpent, and even the possibility that some influences flowed from Chichen Itza to Tula rather than the reverse.

Chronology. The traditional model divided the site into an earlier “Maya” (Puuc) phase and a later “Toltec” phase. Ceramic studies, radiocarbon dates and re-analysis of inscriptions have led many specialists to propose that the two styles overlapped substantially in time, and that most major construction took place between about 800 and 1000. The dating of the city’s decline, and its relationship to Mayapán, also remains debated. INAH’s own publications still describe the city in terms of Maya and Toltec cultural blending.

Sacrifice and interpretation. Human sacrifice at Chichen Itza is attested by imagery, by the skull platform and by some remains, but popular images of maidens thrown into the cenote owe more to colonial and nineteenth-century romantic accounts than to evidence. Recent bioarchaeological and genetic work, such as the 2024 study of the boys from the underground chultun, has made it possible to ask who the dead were and how they were chosen, but interpretations of the ritual context still differ.

Astronomy. The alignments of El Castillo and El Caracol with the sun and Venus are real enough to show careful observation, but scholars differ on which alignments were intended and on the reliability of popular claims, such as the equinox serpent being designed as a calendar marker.

Inscriptions. Chichen Itza has fewer hieroglyphic texts than southern Classic cities, and most date from about 832 to 998. Epigraphers have used them to identify lords, rituals such as fire ceremonies and the older names of buildings. Their scarcity in the later northern monuments is itself evidence of changing political styles.

Colonial texts. Landa’s account, the Chilam Balam books and other colonial documents preserve Maya memories and Spanish observations but were produced after conquest, for new purposes, and often mix prophecy with history. They are best used critically alongside archaeology.

Archaeology and science. Excavation, ceramic typology, radiocarbon dating, analysis of human remains (isotopes and ancient DNA), and geophysical techniques such as electrical resistivity tomography and lidar are rewriting the site’s history. Geophysical work has mapped cenotes and hidden construction phases without excavation, and lidar has revealed settlement extending beyond the tourist zone.

The problem of reconstruction. Much of what visitors see was rebuilt in the 1920s–1940s. Researchers must use excavation reports and early photographs to distinguish original fabric from restoration. Chichen Itza thus illustrates how archaeological interpretation, national identity and tourism have together shaped the image of an ancient city.