Oldest and biggest Maya temple was built to depict the cosmos

Cruciforms, or cross shapes, played an important role in the Maya monument's design in southeastern Mexico. (Middle Usumacinta Archaeological Project via CNN Newsource)

Spotted from an airplane by remote sensing equipment, a vast and ancient Maya complex was hidden from view for millennia by forest and fields before it was made public in 2020. Five years on, archaeologists are spilling more of the monumental structure’s secrets.

The artificial plateau made from earth, with connecting causeways, canals and corridors, was built in southeastern Mexico 3,050 years ago and used for around 300 years. Called Aguada Fénix, it forms the oldest and largest architectural site in the area occupied by the ancient Maya civilization — bigger than later Mesoamerican cities such as Tikal and Teotihuacán although without their distinctive stone pyramids.

The design of the site was a representation of how the community conceived the universe, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The site features crosses of increasing sizes with a cruciform pit containing precious ritual artifacts at its centre.

“It’s like a model of the cosmos or universe. They thought that basically the universe is ordered based on this cruciform pattern, and then that’s tied to the order of time,” said Takeshi Inomata, Regents Professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study.

The archaeological site was built during the beginnings of Maya civilization, which reached its height between AD 400 and 900, predominantly in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala. It was a time of development, with the construction of temples, roads, stone pyramids and other monuments, and developed complex systems of writing, mathematics and astronomy.

“Before this site there’s no substantial construction. There’s really nothing archaeologically; they were not even using ceramics,” Inomata said.

The team excavated several key places on the site, studied cores of soil and conducted an additional LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, survey of the area. The remote sensing technique, which can produce detailed models of any terrain, has revolutionized archaeology in recent years, revealing ancient structures covered by vegetation and trees, particularly in Central America.

The site is not immediately obvious on the ground, although the main platform would have once been almost 15 metres (50 feet) high, said Verónica Vazquez Lopez, a lecturer in Mesoamerican archaeology at University College London and co-author of the study. The builders didn’t use stone, and it’s easy to confuse their creation with a natural hill, she added.

“Most of the platform is used nowadays for agricultural activities,” she said. “It’s very subtle, and you don’t see it from the ground. That’s why it was only identified with LiDAR.”

Ancient calendar

The centre of the site is a large, raised rectangular platform or plaza with room for more than 1,000 people to gather. It is situated at the intersection of two long thoroughfares — one that runs north to south and a second that runs east to west — which might have been used as processional routes.

At the middle of the raised plaza, the archaeologists unearthed a cruciform-shaped pit that had stepped access from the platform above. Within it sat a smaller pit that contained a cache of jade artifacts, also arranged in the shape of a cross.

“There we found pigments tied to specific directions, blue to the north, green to the east, yellow to the south. West, we don’t know, but there’s a red shell so it might be red,” Inomata said.

The east-west axis of the monumental structure was aligned with the direction of the sunrise on October 17 and February 24, leading Inomata to think that the monument might have acted as a ritual site during important days of the Maya calendar year.

“The interval is 130 days. That’s half of 260, and that’s the main ritual calendar of the Mesoamerican people,” he said. “These directions and this kind of order was important to them, and they put in an enormous amount work to represent it on the ground.”

Inomata and his colleagues also believe that the site would have been built by willing participants, not compulsory labour used to construct many ancient wonders such as Egypt’s pyramids and later Maya cities. Their excavations revealed no signs of a social hierarchy, such as statues of specific individuals.

“If you have a king or rulers, often in Mesoamerica that’s represented in sculpture or painting, and then usually you find big buildings or palaces where those powerful people lived. And we don’t have that at Aguada Fénix,” he said.

Inomata said the dwellings they have uncovered at the site suggest it wouldn’t have been permanently occupied by a large number of people and was perhaps used as a place to gather and worship in the dry season.

The researchers estimated that more than 1,000 people would have been needed to build the site, spending a few months every year for several years. The canals and pond, which were aggregately 193,000 cubic metres in volume and appear to have no practical purpose, would have taken 255,000 days of labor by a single individual. The main plateau, which has a volume of 3.6 million cubic metres, would have required 10.8 million days of labour, the study reported. The canals did not appear to have been finished, Inomata added.

“We have this perception that to do a big thing, you have to have hierarchical organization and that’s the way it happened in the past. But now we are getting an image of the past which is different,” he said.

“People also did big things by organizing themselves, getting together and working together,” he added.

The research was thrilling and of great interest to archaeologists everywhere, according to Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University in Rhode Island.

“The finding here is that a common theme in Mesoamerican societies — situating the world according to ritual directions and colors attached to them — are laid out explicitly, and at an early date, at Aguada Fénix,” Houston said.

“This research is part of a larger intellectual movement in archaeology, to show that large constructions can take place in situations of relative equality.”

Andrew Scherer, a professor of archaeology and the ancient world, also at Brown, said the sheer size of the earthworks, their early age and the lack of a significant social hierarchy made the site particularly interesting.

“There was a tremendous amount of labour invested at Aguada Fenix — in not only raising its earthworks but also in importing and carving a large number of greenstone objects — and in no instance is there a clear case of something built or manufactured to celebrate a ruler or a particular subset of individuals,” he said via email.

“This is a time period that remains poorly understood in the history of Mesoamerica and so the latest finds reported by … (the) team are of utmost importance in making sense of this murky time period.”

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By Katie Hunt