Mayapán Mayapán is a major archaeological site in the northern Mayan lowlands, in the northern part of the The site is quite large: a nine-kilometer long defensive wall encloses an area of approximately 4.2 square kilometers. Within this area, the Maya built over 4000 buildings. Most of the buildings are residential: the site was densely inhabited by perhaps 10,000-15,000 people. The residential architecture closely matches Bishop Diego de Landa’s sixteenth century description of Maya houses, and so the identification of the residential structures is definite and precise. At other Maya sites, there have been debates about the identification of dwellings. At Mayapán, several hundred public, religious, and elite buildings were concentrated in the ceremonial center in the west-central part of the site. <Mayapán enjoys the rare distinction of being one of the few "lost" cities of the ancient Maya that was never misplaced. Mayapán was known to both Maya and Spaniard during the Colonial period, as the Documentos de Tabi reveal. The earliest of the Spanish chroniclers refer to the city, including Cuidad Real, Landa and López de Cogolludo, to mention only the most prominent. Ralph Roys has reviewed the ethnohistorical documentation most directly associated with the site in great detail. H. E. D. Pollock has reviewed the history of archaeological research at Mayapán up to the beginning of the Carnegie Institution project conducted there during the 1950s.Not surprisingly, modern exploration of the
ruins of Mayapán
began with John Lloyd Stephens and his irascible but indefatigable
British
companion, Frederick Catherwood. They
spent a day at the ruins and provided clear descriptions and
illustrations of
the two principal temples in the ceremonial center, the "Castillo"
(Str. Q-162) and the "Caracol" (Str. Q-152). As
always, Stephens' observations were as
astute as they were charming. He rightly
assessed Mayapán as the ruin of a Maya city, in spite of the
obvious
differences between it and the other cities with which he was more
familiar, like
Approximately two decades later, Brasseur de Bourbourg visited the site and provided a few additional details. He attempted to correlate some of his observations with Landa's description of the site. In general, however, "all of Brasseur's work is a weird pot-pourri of sound sense, great learning, absurd theories, groundless fantasies, and proof that is no proof, the whole in a spirit as remote as possible from the scientific" (Bernal 1980:108). Brasseur de Bourbourg was followed by the colorful Augustus Le Plongeon in 1881, whose theories were even more remote from reality than Brasseur's. It has been reported that the peripatetic Teobert Maler drew Stela 1, but there is no published mention of a trip to the site itself. Early Work of the Carnegie Institution of In the earliest decades of the twentieth
century, no
substantive work was done at Mayapán. It
wasn't until the 1930s that more modern and scientific archaeologists
took a
look at the site. Not surprisingly, most
of those archaeologists were affiliated with the Carnegie Institution
of
Washington and its Hydra-like program of Maya research.
Lawrence Roys visited the site in 1936
(Pollock 1962: 3) and wrote an article that attempted to trace the
evolution of
Maya architecture ( The first serious and detailed work at Mayapán was a survey undertaken by Ralph T. Patton, partly at his own expense, but under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution. The survey was conducted because "the archaeological importance of Mayapan...appeared to be far less than its political preeminence in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries...would have demanded" (Morley 1938:141). In other words, Morley thought the ruins called Mayapán seemed much too shabby to really be the Mayapán of song and story. This recalls Thucydides' observation: Suppose,
for example, that the city of Patton's survey followed the Great Wall in its circuit around the site and also included the ceremonial center. He traced the circuit of the great wall and briefly described its construction. He showed that the masonry was dry-laid of large irregular blocks. It measured about 9 km long, 3 to 4 m in thickness, and about 2 m in height on the exterior. The parapet along the outer edge, the interior stairways, and nine of the portals were identified. The survey of ceremonial center revealed the presence of colonnades and four round structures, both rare forms of architecture in the Maya canon. The survey also located a number of stelae with short-count dates that Morley interpreted (Morley 1938:142). It is apparent from other evidence described below that Patton located and mapped the main sacbe at the site and the large residential groups associated with it. Morley concluded that "although Mayapan reached a position of first importance only at the close of Maya history when architectural decadence was well under way, its size satisfactorily agrees with the political preeminence ascribed to it by both the native and the Spanish chroniclers" (1938:142). Although Pollock later avowed that Patton's map was of great help to Morris Jones in making the final site map (Pollock 1962: 3), Patton's work was never published, although Brainerd used part of his map of the ceremonial center as an illustration (Brainerd 1958: 347). Not long thereafter, in 1942, George Brainerd undertook the first intensive excavations at Mayapán, again under the auspices of the Carnegie (Brainerd 1942, 1948: 21-23). Thirteen trenches were excavated, yielding a collection of more than 32,000 sherds. Brainerd was able to identify limited stratigraphic change in pottery types, notably the succession from "coarse slateware" (now Peto Cream ware) to "coarse redware" (now Mayapan Red ware), and the increasing frequencies of effigy censer fragments through time. In these observations, he adumbrated the findings of Robert Smith (1971) and established the main features of the Mayapán ceramic sequence. Brainerd's analysis and conclusions were not published, regrettably, until the later and much more detailed investigations of the Carnegie Institution at Mayapán were almost complete. Toward the end of Brainerd's work at the
site, E. Wyllys
Andrews IV arrived and spent a month studying the architecture. He cleared, largely or completely, eight
buildings, in addition to performing a number of other small
excavations
(Andrews 1942: 261). He noted the reuse
of Puuc-style stones in the Mayapán-period architecture, but
observed no
standing Puuc architecture. He recognized
the Later Work of the Carnegie Institution Extensive and detailed investigations were conducted at the site by a large team of experienced archaeologists over a period of five years (1951-1955) under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Major preliminary researches preceded that period, and the investigation trailed off slowly into the late 1950s, so that the entire project stretched out over a period of nearly ten years. The staff of the project included many of the prominent Mayanists of the day, including Edwin Shook, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Robert Smith, A. L. Smith, J. Eric S. Thompson, H. E. D. Pollock, and Karl Ruppert, not to mention a passel of graduate students and others who directly the daily work and wrote up the field reports. The Carnegie Institution mapped the entire site, the first time that a whole, large Maya site had been mapped. They recorded the architecture in great detail. They excavated a number of ceremonial structures and quite a few domestic buildings, some modest, some elaborate. Robert Smith described the ceramics and established a ceramic sequence. Tatiana Proskouriakoff described the other artifacts, including the lithic artifacts. Clifford T. Brown, now a professor at Carlos Peraza Lope, an archaeologist affiliated with the Yucatán office of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, has been excavating and consolidating the major buildings in the ceremonial since 1996. He has uncovered remarkable murals on several buildings. He also found a rather shocking scatter of human bones that may date to the destruction of the site. Marilyn Masson, of the State University of
New York at The site is easily accessible and open to
the public. To get
to Mayapán from Mérida, the capital of Yucatán,
take wither 63rd or |