Major Maya Cities and Archaeological Sites

The Maya built cities that still define the landscape of southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras more than a thousand years after their rulers last looked out over their plazas. Today, Tikal rises out of the Petén rainforest, its temples piercing the canopy; Calakmul sprawls across a limestone escarpment in Campeche with 114 carved stelae still standing where they were erected; Palenque perches on a series of artificial terraces above a rushing river in Chiapas; Copán preserves the longest royal inscription of the ancient Americas carved into a single staircase; and Chichén Itzá anchors the northern Yucatán with a geometric precision that made it one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. These are not isolated ruins: they were capitals of competing dynasties, hubs of trade, religious centers, and seats of writing and astronomy, networked by causeways and river corridors that have only begun to be mapped in detail. This page is a tour of the most important of those places, of how they were found, how they are interpreted, and what is being discovered about them now.

For the deep historical arc that runs through these cities, see the history of the Maya civilization. For the religious worldview that animated them, see Maya religion, mythology, and cosmology. For the art and architecture that made them visible, see Maya art, architecture, and monuments. For the writing system that recorded their kings, see Maya writing, language, and books.

The Petén heartland: Tikal and the Muutul

The central Petén lowlands of northern Guatemala contain the densest concentration of major Classic Maya cities anywhere in the world. The two whose names define the period are Tikal and Calakmul, the seats of two rival super-states that vied for control of the region for more than four centuries. To understand Maya urbanism at its peak, begin with these two.

Tikal

Tikal sits on a low, well-drained ridge above the swamps of the Petén, between two large bajos (seasonally flooded lowlands) that gave its kings access to fertile alluvial soil. Its earliest architecture dates to the Middle Preclassic, but the city we know was built primarily during the Late Classic, between roughly 250 and 869 CE. The four great radial temples that rise above the forest — labeled Temples I, II, III, and IV — are only the most visible pieces of a settlement that once covered more than 60 square kilometers and housed perhaps 60,000 to 120,000 people at its Late Classic peak. A second city center, the Lost World Complex, lies at the natural heart of the site and may have been its earliest ceremonial focus.

Tikal’s political reach, in the inscriptions of the Classic period, was framed by an emblem glyph read Muutul (sometimes “Mutal”). The dynasty traced its lineage back into the murky Late Preclassic, but its clearest history begins in the late 4th century CE, when a warlord named Siyaj K’ak’ (“Fire-Born”) arrived from the central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan in 378 CE and installed a new king, Yax Nuun Ahiin I. The so-called “entrada” of 378 ushered in a new style of rulership, of public art, and — apparently — of warfare.

Tikal’s archaeology has been continuous since 1848, when the site was first reported to the outside world by Modesto Méndez and Ambrosio Tut, the governors of Petén, and was visited almost immediately by the young United States traveler John Lloyd Stephens and his English artist companion Frederick Catherwood. Their 1841 book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan introduced the ruined cities of the Maya to a global reading public. Modern excavation began in 1956 under the University of Pennsylvania’s Tikal Project, led by Edwin M. Shook and later William R. Coe; the project ran until 1970 and produced the most thoroughly documented stratigraphic record of any Classic Maya city. Major monuments exposed by the Penn project include the North Acropolis, which turned out to be a 1,400-year accumulation of tombs and platform sub-structures stacked one on top of the other, and the magnificent Burial 116 of the late 4th-century king Yax Ehb’ Xook, the first ruler of the dynastic line, sealed beneath the Temple of the Great Jaguar (Temple I). For the broader dynastic history, see the dynasty of the 18 Rabbit at Copán and the dynastic warfare that repeatedly reshaped the region; for what makes a temple pyramid work as a piece of architecture, see Maya pyramids, temples, and sacred architecture.

The dynasty’s last dated monument was erected in 869 CE, and within a generation Tikal’s population had collapsed, its remaining inhabitants draining the reservoirs of the North Acropolis and living in the shadow of empty temples. The city was not rediscovered as a meaningful ruin until the Stephens and Catherwood expedition of 1840, and serious excavation waited more than a century.

Calakmul and the Snake dynasty

If Tikal defines the Muutul super-state, Calakmul — set deep in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the Mexican state of Campeche, only about 30 kilometers south of the Petén border — defines its principal rival. Calakmul was the seat of the Kaan (Snake) dynasty, a lineage that reached its apogee in the 7th century under rulers who installed and deposed kings throughout the central lowlands.

The city itself is one of the largest of the ancient Maya. Survey work in the 1990s, supplemented by LiDAR coverage published in 2018 by the PACUNAM Foundation in partnership with the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), demonstrated that Calakmul’s built-up area covered at least 30 square kilometers, with a dense network of houses, terraces, reservoirs, and causeways feeding the great civic core. More than 114 carved stelae have been documented in the central precinct — more than at any other Maya city — along with an equal number of altars, and a great acropolis crowned by two enormous pyramids known simply as Structure I and Structure II, the latter rising about 45 meters above the plaza.

Calakmul’s history is dominated by the wars with Tikal. After a generation of cold war in the 6th century, the Snake kings finally broke Muutul power in 695 CE, when Siyaj K’ak’ K’awiil II (“Obsidian Sky”), the Kaan king of Calakmul, captured the Tikal ruler Jasaw Chan K’awiil I’s successor and installed his own candidate on the throne. Tikal recovered under Jasaw Chan K’awiil I himself, who in 695 — the very year of the Calakmul triumph — defeated the Snake dynasty so decisively that the Snake kings abandoned Calakmul for almost a century. The back-and-forth is documented in excruciating detail in the Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions carved on the stelae themselves.

A more detailed account of these wars, the geography that shaped them, and the modern LiDAR work that has revealed the full scale of the Calakmul state is in why Calakmul was such a powerful rival to Tikal. For a guided tour of the site and the broader Snake network, see Calakmul, Caracol, and the Snake kingdom.

Caracol

In the foothills of the Maya Mountains, deep in western Belize, lies Caracol, a city that grew to dwarf Tikal during the 7th century. Caracol’s claim to importance rests on its alliance with Calakmul and on a series of wars, recorded in the inscriptions of the site, by which its ruler K’an II defeated Tikal in 562 CE — the so-called “Star War” — and broke Muutul power for a generation. By the late 7th century Caracol covered an estimated 200 square kilometers of settlement, with the central Canaa (Sky-Place) pyramid rising 43 meters above the forest floor. The site was rediscovered in 1938 by the Belizean forester A. Hamilton Anderson; major excavation began in 1985 under Diane and Arlen Chase of the University of Central Florida, whose work has documented the enormous scale of the city through pedestrian survey, road sampling, and (since 2009) LiDAR.

The Usumacinta cities: Palenque, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, Piedras Negras

The Usumacinta River and its tributaries form the natural western border of the Maya lowlands, and along its banks a string of powerful Late Classic city-states — Palenque, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, Piedras Negras, Toniná — waged an almost continuous series of wars and marriage alliances. These cities, set deep in the rainforest of Chiapas, Tabasco, and the Petén, are the heartland of Maya narrative art. For an overview, see Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta.

Palenque

Palenque is the most beautiful of all the Maya cities, set on a series of artificial terraces above the Grijalva River in Chiapas. The site grew in the 5th century CE under a dynasty that traced its origins to the mythological past, but its classical era opened in 683 CE with the accession of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who ruled for 68 years and presided over the most concentrated burst of artistic and architectural patronage in the ancient Americas.

The Temple of the Inscriptions, a stepped pyramid that rises above the central plaza, was built during Pakal’s reign and dedicated as his funerary monument. In 1952, the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier discovered the burial chamber deep within the pyramid, sealed by a great carved sarcophagus lid that depicts Pakal at the moment of his death, falling into the open jaws of the underworld. The painted stucco death mask of Pakal, recovered from the tomb, is one of the masterpieces of Maya art. The full significance of the find is laid out in the most important discovery at Palenque.

Pakal was succeeded by his sons, especially K’inich Kan B’ahlam II (r. 684–702 CE), who erected the Cross Group of three temples — the Temple of the Cross, the Temple of the Sun, and the Temple of the Foliated Cross — and a great palace built around a unique four-story tower, the Palace, with its famous square observation tower. The site is also famous for the oval Palace Tablet, packed with 617 glyphs recounting dynastic history, and for the Stucco Frieze of the Palace, with its three-dimensional portraits of captured lords. A dedicated tour is in Palenque, art and court of Pakal.

Yaxchilán

Set on a bend of the Usumacinta directly across the river from the modern Guatemalan town of La Libertad, Yaxchilán was a powerful Late Classic city famous for its carved stone lintels spanning the doorways of its major buildings. Three of these lintels — Lintel 24, Lintel 25, and Lintel 26 — were removed from the site in the 1880s by the British archaeologist Alfred Maudslay and are now in the British Museum. They depict Lady Xoc, the wife of the ruler Itzamnaaj B’ahlam II (r. 681–742 CE), drawing a thorned rope through her tongue in a vision-inducing bloodletting rite. The iconography is read in detail in Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta. The city’s monuments and the broader political life of the Usumacinta are surveyed in the same page.

Bonampak

A small site in the rainforest of Chiapas, Bonampak is famous above all for its murals, painted in three rooms of the so-called Temple of the Paintings in 692 CE under the rule of Chaan Muan II. The three rooms — labeled Rooms 1, 2, and 3 by the restorer Agustin Villagra Carretón who conserved them in the 1950s — show in vivid color a war, a victory celebration, a bloodletting rite, and a long procession of lords and captives. They are the only complete narrative mural program to survive from the Classic Maya world. For a deeper reading, see what the Bonampak murals show.

The site was discovered in 1946 by two young American conscientious objectors, Carlos and Giles Healy, working with the Mexican-American archaeologist Frans Blom of Tulane University, and was visited shortly afterward by Sylvanus Morley and the photographer Pierre Matisse. The murals are now the centerpiece of Bonampak National Park, a small reserve administered by the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Piedras Negras

A few kilometers upstream of Yaxchilán, on the Guatemalan side of the river, lies Piedras Negras, the city that produced the most accomplished three-dimensional sculpture of the Late Classic. The site was first mapped in the 1920s by the Carnegie Institution’s Maudslay–Spinden–Ricketson expeditions and excavated intensively between 1931 and 1939 by Linton Satterthwaite of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The monuments of Piedras Negras, including the great Stela 14 of Ruler 7 and the elaborate Throne 1 of Ruler 4, are central to the decipherment of Maya dynastic history. For more on the river cities, see Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta.

Toniná

On a steep ridge above the fertile valley of the Tulijá River in Chiapas, Toniná rises some 80 meters above the valley floor in a sequence of thirteen acropolis platforms. The city is best known for its military exploits and for the reign of its Ruler 3, K’inich Baaknal Chaak, who in 711 CE captured the Palenque king K’an Joy Chitam II in a war that is recorded in the inscriptions of both cities. Excavation of Toniná has been led since the 1970s by Juan Yadeun Angulo and (since 2001) by Emilio Gallaga Murrieta of INAH. A wider tour of the Usumacinta is in Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta.

The southeastern frontier: Copán and Quiriguá

In the southeastern Maya lowlands, in what is now western Honduras, the Copán Valley was the seat of a long-lived dynasty that produced some of the most accomplished public sculpture of the ancient Americas. A separate but linked history unfolds at Quiriguá, on the floodplain of the Motagua River in Guatemala.

Copán

Copán sits on the banks of the Copán River, an eastern tributary of the Motagua, and was the center of a substantial secondary-state network during the Late Classic. The first stelae are dated to the early 5th century, but the site reached its apogee between 695 and 738 CE under its greatest ruler, Waxaklajuun Ubaah K’awiil, popularly known as 18 Rabbit. The Hieroglyphic Stairway of the West Court of the acropolis is a single inscription running up the risers of 62 steps, with 2,200 individual glyphs in 1,260 glyph blocks — the longest known Maya text. It records the royal genealogy of the Copán dynasty from its founding.

The site was rediscovered in 1839 by the Guatemalan envoy Juan Galindo, and was visited in 1839–1840 by Stephens and Catherwood, whose drawings made it famous. Major excavation began under the Peabody Museum of Harvard University in 1891, was continued by the Carnegie Institution of Washington between 1935 and 1942, and has been led since 1975 by a project of Pennsylvania State University and (since 1990) the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH) under Robert Sharer, David Sedat, and Ellen Bell. The dynastic politics of Copán are recounted in what happened at the ancient city of Copán.

Quiriguá

A short distance down the Motagua, on the floodplain of the river, Quiriguá had been a small dependency of Copán until 724 CE, when its ruler K’ahk’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat (popularly “Cauac Sky”) captured 18 Rabbit of Copán, who was then executed in the great plaza. The event, one of the most dramatic in the entire Maya record, is described in detail in what happened at the ancient city of Copán. Quiriguá’s victory ushered in a short-lived florescence, with the tallest stela in the Maya world — Stela E, more than 10 meters high — erected in 756 CE. The site was first visited by Stephens in 1840, was mapped in 1910 by the archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett of the School of American Research, and has been the focus of major restoration work by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Guatemalan government since 1975.

Río Azul and the eastern frontier

In the far northeastern corner of the Petén, near the modern Mopan Maya town of Melchor de Mencos on the Belizean border, lies Río Azul, a medium-sized Late Classic city famous for the richest burials of the entire Maya world. The site was first mapped in the 1960s by the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Tikal project, and was excavated in detail in the 1970s and 1980s by Ray T. Matheny of Brigham Young University and (since 1983) by the joint National Geographic Society / Brigham Young project. The tombs at Río Azul contained a remarkable set of Early Classic polychrome murals (c. 530 CE) and a corpus of jade masks, shell mosaics, and polychrome ceramics of the highest quality. The site sits at the meeting point of the central Petén and the eastern coast traditions, and its art and political relationships are in the broader treatment of the history of the Maya civilization.

The northern lowlands: Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Mayapán, Edzná

The Yucatán Peninsula, north of the Petén, is a flat limestone shelf with no surface rivers, and Maya cities of the north are organized around natural sinkholes (cenotes), the deep underground caves that gave the region its distinctive hydrology, and the great limestone-paved roads that joined them.

Chichén Itzá

Chichén Itzá, in the heart of the northern Yucatán, is the most visited Maya site in the world, drawing millions of tourists a year to its great Pyramid of Kukulkan (popularly El Castillo), the Temple of the Warriors, the Great Ball Court, and the Cenote of Sacrifice. The site’s history is unusually long: the first major construction dates to the Late Classic, but the city reached its public apogee between roughly 900 and 1200 CE, in a period long after the collapse of the great lowland cities to the south. The cultural complex of this later phase, with its strong stylistic links to central Mexico, has been debated for more than a century. The interpretive question is laid out in is Chichén Itzá Maya or Toltec.

Chichén Itzá is the site at which the Cenote of Sacrifice was dredged between 1904 and 1907 by Edward H. Thompson on behalf of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. Thompson’s dredging recovered thousands of artifacts — jade, gold, copper, pottery, copal incense, the famous parry sticks of the ballgame, and (eventually, by computer analysis in 2000) a handful of human bones — and created a famous legal controversy with the Mexican government that lasted more than seventy years. The site is part of the Pueblo Mágico program and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988. For a deeper cultural history, see Chichén Itzá, Yucatán’s great capital.

Uxmal

Southwest of Chichén Itzá, in the Puuc Hills of Yucatán, lies Uxmal, the seat of the Xiu dynasty and the architectural center of a regional tradition known as the Puuc style. The city flourished between roughly 600 and 900 CE, a generation longer than most of the great lowland cities to the south, and its monuments — the Pyramid of the Magician, the Governor’s Palace, the Nunnery Quadrangle — are decorated with extraordinarily fine stone mosaics of stylized serpent heads, masks of the rain god Chaac, and interlaced geometric panels. Uxmal was first described in modern literature by Stephens in 1842; the principal modern excavator was the Mexican archaeologist Jorge R. Acosta in the 1940s, and the site was restored and consolidated under INAH from the 1950s onward. The Puuc region also includes Kabah, Sayil, Labná, and Loltún, all connected by ancient sacbeob (raised stone causeways) and now part of a single Puuc cultural-route tour.

Mayapán

A few hours west of Chichén Itzá, near the modern city of Mérida, the site of Mayapán was the political capital of the northern Yucatán between roughly 1200 and 1450 CE, dominating the post-Chichén Itzá power vacuum and ruling over a population that may have reached 15,000–17,000 people in a tightly packed walled enclosure of more than 4 square kilometers. The site was excavated in the 1950s by a joint Carnegie Institution / Yale University / INAH project led by Rupert Piña Chan and Sidney M. Ekholm, and was the focus of major renewed investigations in 2018–2022 by Arizona State University, INAH, and the National Science Foundation, which used LiDAR and geophysical survey to map the dense settlement within the walls.

Edzná

In the central Yucatán, between the Puuc cities and the Caribbean coast, Edzná is a hybrid site that combines a Preclassic canal-and-reservoir system with Late Classic and Postclassic public architecture. The great Gran Acrópoli of Edzná is a single platform supporting five buildings arranged around a sunken courtyard, and the site is surrounded by a network of raised agricultural fields and hydraulic works. Excavation has been led since the 1990s by Antonio Cú Vairol of the INAH Campeche center.

The Petexbatun region: Dos Pilas, Aguateca, and the Petexbatun wars

West of Tikal, in the Petexbatun region of the south-central Petén and the adjacent state of Alta Verapaz, a small cluster of powerful Late Classic city-states fought a generation of brutal wars in the late 7th and early 8th centuries CE. The political history of the region is documented in great detail by the Petexbatun Archaeological Project of Vanderbilt University, led by Arthur Demarest between 1989 and 1996, and by the more recent Southern Maya Region (SMR) Project of Tulane University.

The great city of the region is Dos Pilas, founded in 648 CE as a breakaway dynasty from Tikal by Itzamnaaj B’ahlam II of Tikal, who had been denied the throne. Dos Pilas formed an alliance with Calakmul and was a major participant in the wars of the late 7th century, including the catastrophic 695 CE events. The great El Duende stairway at Dos Pilas, with 17 hieroglyphic steps, is one of the densest political texts of the entire Late Classic. The neighboring city of Aguateca is famous for its Late Classic rapid abandonment — the result of a final attack in 810 CE — and for the remarkably preserved set of elite residences, with the Hieroglyphic Stairway of the royal palace and the Seibal-style monuments of the late 7th century. The wider context of the wars is in the Petexbatun wars and the broader account of the history of the Maya civilization.

The political and military background of the Petexbatun region is essential to the full story of the central Maya lowlands in the late Classic, and the Demarest project has been particularly important for the development of the agency-centered models of Maya political history that have dominated the field since the 1990s. The role of prisoner-of-war sacrifice in the dynastic politics of the region is treated in warfare, captives, and human sacrifice.

The Preclassic giants: El Mirador, Nakbe, and San Bartolo

The great Classic cities of the Petén are not the first cities of the Maya lowlands. A generation of recent LiDAR survey, especially the Mirador-Calakmul Basin (MCB) LiDAR Initiative of 2015–2018 led by Richard Hansen of the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies (FARES) and of Idaho State University, has revealed an entire Preclassic urban tradition in the northern Petén that rivaled the Classic cities in scale. The leader of this Preclassic tradition is El Mirador, a vast Middle and Late Preclassic site in the far north of the Petén, on a low escarpment at the heart of the Mirador-Calakmul Basin.

El Mirador is dominated by the La Danta pyramid, a Late Preclassic structure with a volume of more than 2.8 million cubic meters — one of the largest buildings by volume in the world. The site is also home to the great El Tigre pyramid complex and a dense network of causeways, reservoirs, terraces, and settlement that LiDAR has shown to be more than 1,600 square kilometers of built environment. The Preclassic cities of the Mirador basin — El Mirador, Nakbe, Cival, El Tintal, Xulnal, Temoaya — were abandoned by the middle of the 1st millennium CE and have been extensively looted, but the conservation work of the FARES foundation and the Asociación Mirador has documented and protected a substantial part of the site. The work is in the wider context of the history of the Maya civilization and the Preclassic Period origins of the Maya.

A short distance from El Mirador, the site of San Bartolo has produced the oldest known Maya murals, dating to c. 100 BCE. The murals of San Bartolo were discovered in 2001 by William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire and Archaeology Southwest, and they depict a courtly scene of maize gods, a mythic tree, and a procession of richly dressed figures wearing jade and quetzal ornaments. The find transformed the understanding of Preclassic Maya art and is the subject of the broader treatment of Maya murals, painting, and iconography.

The Caribbean coast: Tulum, Cobá, and the east coast sites

A separate regional tradition flourished on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in the Postclassic period. The principal sites are Cobá, Tulum, San Gervasio (on Cozumel Island), Xcaret, and Tancah, all connected by a network of sascabera (rough paved roads) and sacbeob (raised causeways). The political background of the region is the League of Mayapán, the late Postclassic political confederation that dominated the Yucatán between c. 1200 and 1450 CE.

Cobá, the largest of the east coast sites, is famous for the great Nohoch Mul pyramid, 42 meters tall and the tallest pyramid in the Yucatán. The site is also famous for its sacbeob network, with one causeway running nearly 100 kilometers west to Yaxuná, near Chichén Itzá. The principal modern excavator of Cobá is Carmen Varela Torrecilla of INAH Quintana Roo. Tulum, a small fortified port built on a cliff above the Caribbean, was a major trading center in the 13th–15th centuries and is treated in the broader account of Maya trade, markets, and economy and the post-Classic period transformation and change.

The Pacific piedmont and highland outliers: Kaminaljuyú, Comalcalco, Izapa

Beyond the great lowland cities lie several regional centers whose histories are tightly bound to the wider Mesoamerican world.

Kaminaljuyú

Set on a highland plateau in the Valley of Guatemala, the modern site of Kaminaljuyú lies under much of Guatemala City. In the Late Classic, Kaminaljuyú was a powerful highland capital heavily influenced by Teotihuacan, with stone-faced temple pyramids decorated with stucco modeled in Teotihuacan style. The site was first professionally excavated in the 1920s by Alfred V. Kidder of the Carnegie Institution; in 1986 the Guatemalan archaeologist Juan Antonio Valdés and the Japanese project PAKU (Proyecto Arqueológico de Kaminaljuyú) began the major research that continues today. The site is under serious threat from urban development and earthquake damage, and is the focus of a long-running conservation battle involving the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and UNESCO.

Comalcalco

The westernmost of the great Maya cities lies at the foot of the Tierra Caliente in Tabasco. Comalcalco is unique in that the Maya there, lacking access to building stone, used fired clay bricks (some of them stamped with hieroglyphs) faced with lime stucco. The site was the seat of the Chontal dynasty of Putún, who played a major role in the Late Classic and Postclassic period of the central lowlands. Major excavation has been led since 1990 by the Mexican archaeologist Ladrón de Guevara and, since 2003, by the INAH Tabasco project under María del Carmen Carboney Loranca.

Izapa

On the Pacific piedmont of Chiapas, Izapa is a Preclassic site famous for its 89 carved stelae and altars, many of which preserve imagery that has been linked to the Popol Vuh, the highland Maya creation narrative. The site is one of the largest of its period, with more than 100 mounds, and was the focus of excavations in the 1960s by E. Wyllys Andrews of Tulane University and the New World Archaeological Foundation. A more focused modern project is now under way at the site under the Fundación Cultural Rodolfo Sancio and a joint UNAM / INAH project.

The LiDAR revolution and hidden cities

The most important development in Maya archaeology of the 21st century is the systematic use of airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a technology that strips the forest canopy from aerial imagery to reveal the contours of the ground beneath. Beginning with the pioneering work of Arlen and Diane Chase at Caracol in 2009, and continuing with the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative of 2016–2018 (which mapped more than 2,100 square kilometers of the Petén), the technology has revealed entire city complexes, networks of raised causeways, fortified hilltop positions, terraces, reservoirs, and dense rural settlement that had been invisible to traditional survey.

The implications have been profound. The 2018 PACUNAM results, published in Science by Marcello Canuto and colleagues, suggested that the population of the central Maya lowlands may have been on the order of 7 to 11 million people at the Late Classic peak — perhaps twice as many as the older estimates of 2 to 5 million. The map of Calakmul and its rivals, of Caracol’s sprawl, of Tikal’s outlying settlements, of the enormous pre-Classic city of El Mirador in the far north of the Petén, has been redrawn within a single decade. For the implications, see the history of the Maya civilization and the broader treatment of the causes of the Classic Maya collapse, which has had to be re-evaluated in light of the new population data.

Conservation, UNESCO, and the future of the sites

The protection of the great Maya sites is a long-running and unfinished project. Of the cities described above, the following are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Tikal (1979), Chichén Itzá (1988), Copán (1980), Palenque (1987), Antigua Guatemala (1979, including nearby sites), Uxmal (1996, together with the Puuc region), Calakmul (2002, together with the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve), and Mayapán (as a candidate site). Several others, including Quiriguá (1981) and Kaminaljuyú, are on a tentative list.

Conservation of these sites is led by national institutions: INAH in Mexico, the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia in Honduras, the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes through the Dirección General del Patrimonio Cultural y Natural in Guatemala, the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) in Belize, and a range of university-based projects. The challenges are familiar: looting, encroachment by agriculture and urban development, the impact of mass tourism, climate change, and the constant battle against the rainforest itself. The Getty Conservation Institute has run major programs at Maya sites since the 1970s, including its long-running Quiriguá project; the World Monuments Fund has placed several Maya sites on its biennial Watch list; and a generation of binational archaeological projects has done most of the on-the-ground work.

The modern Maya are not just visitors to these cities: they are descendants of the people who built them. Engagement with descendant communities — Q’eqchi’, Mopan, Yucatec, Ch’orti’, Ch’ol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojol-ab’al, and many others — is increasingly a part of conservation work, and a generation of community-led archaeological projects (such as the Ch’orti’ Maya project led by the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán in Copán) has begun to integrate local knowledge and priorities into research design. The wider context is the topic of the overview on the living Maya, their heritage, and modern descendants.

Visiting the major Maya sites today

Every major Maya site is now a working tourist destination, and the experience of visiting them varies enormously. The most accessible, and the most visited, are Chichén Itzá (about 2.5 million visitors a year), Tikal (more than 200,000), Tulum (more than 2 million, though it is a much smaller site), and Coba, with a similar total to Tulum. Palenque, Copán, and Uxmal are major mid-range destinations with well-developed visitor infrastructure; Calakmul, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, Piedras Negras, El Mirador, Quiriguá, and Toniná are remote, lightly visited, and generally accessible only with a guide. The deep forest sites of the Petén — El Mirador, El Tintal, Nakbe, La Corona, San Bartolo — are typically reached by multi-day guided expeditions.

Heritage tourism and community-led archaeology

A generation of community-led tourism initiatives has begun to integrate the descendants of the ancient Maya into the management and interpretation of the great sites. In Guatemala, the Fundación Patrimonio Cultural y Natural Maya works with Q’eqchi’, Mopan, Itzá, and Lacandón Maya communities on stewardship of the sites. In Mexico, the K’uk’ulkan Balam community archaeological project works with Chol and Tzeltal Maya communities in the Tulijá Valley around Toniná. In Honduras, the Ch’orti’ Maya of the Copán Valley have been integrated into the Copán Archaeological Park staff, and the Casas de la Cultura Ch’orti’ in Copán Ruinas offers language and craft programs. The wider context is in the overview on the living Maya: heritage and modern descendants.

Looting and the antiquities trade

The great sites of the Maya area have been the target of massive looting for more than a century, and the loss of cultural material has been incalculable. The most heavily looted sites include the great Preclassic cities of the Mirador basin, the Classic sites of the Río Motagua and the San Juan area, and many of the smaller Petén sites that have been opened up by road builders and timber operations. The international response has been led by the UNESCO 1970 Convention and by the Interpol Works of Art Database, with national legislation in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras strengthened since the 1970s. The National Stolen Art File of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Caribbean Corridor initiative of the U.S. Department of State are major recent efforts. A broader context is in the history of the Maya civilization pillar.

The logistics of reaching Tikal from the Guatemalan capital are detailed in how to visit Tikal from Guatemala City. For travelers planning to combine Maya sites with broader trips, the Turismo de Aventura networks in Guatemala, the Caminos del Mayab in Yucatán, and the Ruta Puuc in southern Yucatán are well-marked circuits. The practicalities of visiting Palenque and the Pakal tomb are discussed in the most important find at Palenque, which sets the discovery in its modern museum context.

Lesser-known but historically important sites

A generation of small but historically important sites rounds out the map of Classic Maya cities. Quirigua is famous for the political events of 724 and 738 CE. Naranjo, in the northeastern Petén, is the seat of a long-lived dynasty whose Stela 24 of Itzamnaaj K’awiil is the largest monument at the site and records the famous Blood-Road war of 711 CE. Altar de Sacrificio is the source of many of the most important bloodletter ceramics of the Late Classic. Yaxha, on a beautiful lakeside in the northeastern Petén, was the seat of a small dynasty closely connected to Tikal and Naranjo, and the great Temple of the Red Hands is one of the most photographed monuments in the southern Petén. Topoxte, an island in the Yaxha lake, is the latest Maya site in the region, occupied until the 15th century. La Corona is a small site in the northwestern Petén famous for its Ruler 1 stelae, which have been the focus of major DOT Project readings of the political relationships of the late 7th century. Holmul, in the Mopan valley, has produced some of the earliest known Long Count inscriptions outside the central Petén. The wider context is in the history of the Maya civilization and in the Preclassic Period origins of the Maya.

The future of the sites

The next generation of Maya archaeology is being shaped by three intersecting programs. First, the systematic LiDAR mapping of the entire Maya lowlands, with new initiatives planned in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Second, a generation of community-led archaeological projects, working with the descendants of the ancient Maya on their terms. Third, the integration of digital humanities with the older archaeological record, including the digitization of the Proyecto Atlas, the Carnegie Institution archives, and the Tikal Reports. The expectation is that the next two decades will see a complete re-drawing of the map of Maya cities, with the current picture of a few great urban centers and many small villages replaced by a much denser, much more integrated urban landscape, with cities connected by networks of causeways, intensive agricultural systems, and a system of political relationships more complex than the older literature had assumed. The wider implications are in causes of the Classic Maya collapse and the history of the Maya civilization.

Related pages

• Tikal: Heart of the Classic Maya World
• Palenque: Art and Court of Pakal
• Chichén Itzá: Yucatán’s Great Capital
• Copán: Dynasty of the 18 Rabbit
• Calakmul, Caracol, and the Snake Kingdom
• Bonampak, Yaxchilán, and the Usumacinta
• Why Calakmul Was Such a Powerful Rival to Tikal
• How to Visit Tikal from Guatemala City

Sources

• Martin, S. & Grube, N. (2008). Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens (2nd ed.). Thames & Hudson. — link
• Fash, W. L. (2001). Scribes, Warriors and Kings: The City of Copán and the Ancient Maya. Thames & Hudson. — link
• Stuart, D. & Stuart, G. E. (2008). Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya. Thames & Hudson. — link
• Demarest, A. A. et al. (1997). The Petexbatun Regional Archaeological Project: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Maya Collapse. Vanderbilt University (final reports). — link
• Canuto, M. A. et al. (2018). Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala. Science 361 (6409), eaau0137. — link
• Chase, A. F. & Chase, D. Z. (2014). Ancient Maya Cities and the Caracol Project. University of Pittsburgh Latin American Archaeology. — link
• Miller, M. E. (1986). The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton University Press. — link