Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza is a large pre-Columbian city in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, between the modern towns of Valladolid and Mérida. Built by the Maya and at its height between roughly 900 and 1050 CE, it became one of the most powerful centres of the northern lowlands. Its stepped pyramid, great ball court and sacred well are among the best-known monuments of ancient America.

The northern Yucatán is a flat limestone plain with no rivers on the surface. Water came from cenotes, natural sinkholes reaching down to the water table, and four visible ones lie in and around the site. The Itza, the group whose name the city carries, are thought to have arrived around 800 CE; an older name for the place survives in colonial Maya books. The core layout took shape between about 750 and 900 CE. The earliest date found in its hieroglyphic inscriptions corresponds to 832 CE and the latest, carved at the temple known as the Osario, to 998.

From around 900 the city dominated central Yucatán and the north coast. Through the island port of Isla Cerritos it joined a seaborne trade network, obtaining obsidian from central Mexico and gold from lower Central America. Older rival cities such as Coba and Yaxuna declined in the tenth century, possibly in part because of its expansion.

The main monuments mix local Maya building styles, such as Puuc, with features borrowed from central Mexico. The Temple of the Warriors closely resembles a temple at Tula, the city associated with the Toltecs. Earlier scholars took this as proof of a Toltec invasion or migration; most now see it as the result of contact and the spread of shared ideas, and the question of how the city was governed also remains open.

The pyramid called El Castillo, or the Temple of Kukulcan, rises about 30 metres in nine terraces, with a temple on top. At the equinoxes the shadows on its stairway are said to form the shape of a serpent. The Great Ball Court, about 168 by 70 metres, is the largest known in Mesoamerica. Nearby lies the Sacred Cenote, a well about 60 metres across, into which offerings, and according to some interpretations people, were thrown; how often sacrifice took place there is still debated. Other buildings include El Caracol, a round structure often interpreted as an observatory.

Colonial-era Maya chronicles say that Hunac Ceel, ruler of Mayapan, conquered the city in the thirteenth century. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that it had already lost its regional importance by about 1100, before Mayapan rose, and the exact sequence has not been settled. The city was largely abandoned, though the Sacred Cenote remained a place of pilgrimage.

Francisco de Montejo received a royal charter to conquer Yucatán in 1526 on behalf of the Spanish Empire. His son reached Chichen Itza late in 1532 and tried to make it a Spanish town, naming it Ciudad Real, but in 1534, having lost some 150 soldiers, he abandoned it under cover of darkness. In 1588 a land grant turned the site into a working cattle ranch.

The American writer John Lloyd Stephens and the artist Frederick Catherwood made the ruins widely known through a book published in 1843. In 1894 the American Edward Herbert Thompson bought the hacienda that included the site, and between 1904 and 1910 he dredged the Sacred Cenote, recovering gold, jade and human remains. From 1923 the Carnegie Institution carried out long-term excavation and restoration under Sylvanus Morley, with permits from the Mexican government, after delays caused by the Mexican Revolution and the First World War. Mexico charged Thompson with theft in 1926 and seized the estate, but in 1944 the Supreme Court found he had broken no law and returned it to his heirs.

A 1972 law placed all pre-Columbian monuments under federal ownership, though the ground beneath them stayed in private hands until the state of Yucatán bought it in 2010. The national institute of anthropology and history, INAH, manages the site and has barred climbing on some monuments since a fatal fall in 2006. UNESCO listed Chichen Itza as a World Heritage Site in 1988, and INAH recorded more than 2.6 million visitors in 2017, making it one of the busiest archaeological sites in Mexico.