Chichen Itza: History of the Great Maya-Toltec City

Chichen Itza was the most powerful city of the northern Maya lowlands between about AD 800 and 1000, a political, religious and trading capital on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Its monuments, including the stepped pyramid of El Castillo, the Great Ballcourt and the Sacred Cenote, blend Maya traditions with styles from central Mexico. Today it is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the Americas and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Setting and rise of the city

The northern Yucatán is a flat limestone plain with no rivers on the surface. Water collects in cenotes, natural sinkholes where the limestone has collapsed into underground streams. Chichen Itza grew up around two of these, and its name is usually translated as “at the mouth of the well of the Itza”.

The Itza were a Maya-speaking group whose origins are described in conflicting ways in colonial-era texts such as the Books of Chilam Balam. Some accounts present them as newcomers or foreigners, a theme that has shaped many modern theories about the city.

People were living at Chichen Itza by around AD 600, in the Late Classic period. The southern part of the site, sometimes called Old Chichen, contains buildings in the Puuc style common in western Yucatán, such as the Nunnery (Las Monjas), the Akab Dzib and the Red House.

The city’s great expansion took place during the Terminal Classic period, roughly 800–1000. While many cities of the southern lowlands were declining during the Classic Maya collapse, Chichen Itza grew into the dominant power of the north. Its rivals included Coba to the east and the Puuc cities to the west, such as Uxmal.

Rulers, trade and religion

Hieroglyphic inscriptions at Chichen Itza are concentrated in the 9th and 10th centuries. They name a lord called K’ak’ Upakal K’awiil, active in the late 9th century, as an important figure, along with several of his relatives.

Unlike southern Maya cities, Chichen Itza seems to have had fewer monuments celebrating single divine kings. Some historians have suggested that power was shared among a council of lords, a system later remembered as multepal. Others argue that strong individual rulers existed. The evidence is limited, and the question remains open.

The city’s wealth came partly from trade. Through its port at Isla Cerritos on the north coast, it handled salt, obsidian, cotton cloth, cacao and other goods, and objects of gold and copper from Central America and beyond reached the city.

Caves and water were central to the city’s religion. In 1959 a local guide found the cave of Balankanche, a few kilometres east of the centre, where hundreds of incense burners and other offerings had been left in a sacred chamber deep underground. Many of the burners bear the face of the central Mexican rain god Tlaloc, and they date from the city’s period of power.

El Castillo and the main monuments

The most famous building is El Castillo (“the castle”), also called the Temple of Kukulcan, a feathered-serpent deity. It is a square, stepped pyramid about 24 m high, plus a temple on top that brings it to around 30 m. Each of its four sides has a stairway of 91 steps; together with the top platform, they total 365, the number of days in the solar year.

Inside, archaeologists in the 1930s found an earlier pyramid. Its summit temple held a reclining stone figure known as a chacmool and a throne painted red and carved in the shape of a jaguar, inlaid with jade. Later research has detected a still earlier structure inside.

The northern stairway ends at its base in two large carved serpent heads. The nine terraces on each side are split by the stairways into 18 sections, which some writers link to the 18 months of the Maya solar calendar, though such interpretations are hard to prove.

To the east stands the Temple of the Warriors, fronted by rows of carved columns, part of the Group of the Thousand Columns. A chacmool reclines at the top of its stairway, and pillars carved with warriors once supported a roof. Murals recorded by the Carnegie team in the 1920s show villages, battles and a coastal scene with canoes. Other notable buildings include El Caracol, a round tower thought to have been used for observing the sky, perhaps including the movements of Venus, and the Osario, a smaller pyramid over a natural cave.

The Great Ballcourt and the Sacred Cenote

The Great Ballcourt is the largest known in Mesoamerica, about 168 m long and 70 m wide. Two stone rings are set high on its side walls, about 6 m above the ground. The Mesoamerican ballgame was played with a heavy rubber ball, struck mainly with the hips.

Carved panels along the walls show two teams of players. In one scene, a player is decapitated and streams of blood turn into serpents and plants. These images link the game to sacrifice and fertility. Whether winners or losers were sacrificed is not known, and the carvings may show a ritual rather than ordinary games. A rack for displaying skulls, the Tzompantli, stands nearby.

North of El Castillo, a raised causeway leads to the Sacred Cenote, a near-circular sinkhole about 60 m across, with walls dropping more than 20 m to the water. It was not used for drinking water but for offerings to the rain god Chaak and other deities.

Between about 1904 and 1910, the American consul Edward H. Thompson dredged the cenote and sent thousands of objects to the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Finds included jade, gold and copper discs, copal incense, textiles and human bones. Many objects were later returned to Mexico. Later underwater investigations in the 1960s recovered more material.

The Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, writing in the 16th century, recorded that people were thrown into the cenote in times of drought. The skeletal remains include many children and adult men as well as women.

Toltec connections

Many buildings at Chichen Itza closely resemble those at Tula, the Toltec capital in central Mexico: colonnaded halls, chacmool sculptures, feathered-serpent columns and reliefs of warriors and eagles and jaguars. Kukulcan, the feathered serpent, is the Maya equivalent of the central Mexican Quetzalcoatl.

Earlier scholars explained this with a Toltec invasion of Yucatán, linked to legends of a ruler named Quetzalcoatl who left Tula and travelled east. Today most archaeologists see the similarities as the result of wider contacts among elites across Mesoamerica, with influence flowing in both directions. Which city influenced the other first, and how closely they were linked, remains debated.

Decline, rediscovery and restoration

Chichen Itza’s political power declined in the 11th and 12th centuries. Dates are uncertain: many archaeologists now place the end of its major construction around 1000–1100, while older chronologies extend its dominance to about 1200. Drought, conflict and changing trade routes are all suggested as causes.

Mayapan later became the leading city of northern Yucatán, and colonial texts describe conflict between the two. Even after its decline, the Sacred Cenote remained a pilgrimage destination. In the early 1530s the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Montejo the Younger briefly tried to establish a settlement at Chichen Itza, before being driven out.

The American travel writer John Lloyd Stephens and the English artist Frederick Catherwood visited in 1842 and published descriptions and drawings that made the site famous. From 1924 the Carnegie Institution of Washington, under Sylvanus G. Morley, carried out large excavations and restorations, while the Mexican government restored El Castillo.

UNESCO listed Chichen Itza as a World Heritage Site in 1988. In 2007 it was named one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World” in a popular online vote, and today it receives well over two million visitors in a typical year. Climbing El Castillo has been banned since 2006.

Myths and facts

The equinox “serpent” on El Castillo is real and spectacular, but whether the builders designed it on purpose is debated, since the effect can be seen for several days around each equinox. Similarly, the popular claim that only young virgins were sacrificed in the cenote is not supported by the bones recovered.

Another common belief is that the Maya “disappeared” when Chichen Itza declined. In fact, millions of Maya people live in Yucatán and neighbouring regions today, and Yucatec Maya is still widely spoken.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 600: Settlement at Chichen Itza is established.
• c. 800–900: Rapid growth; Puuc-style buildings in the south of the site.
• Late 9th century: K’ak’ Upakal K’awiil is named in inscriptions.
• c. 900–1000: Height of power; El Castillo and the Temple of the Warriors in use.
• c. 1100–1200: Political decline; Mayapan later rises.
• 1530s: Francisco de Montejo the Younger briefly occupies the site.
• 1904–1910: Edward H. Thompson dredges the Sacred Cenote.
• 1924: Carnegie Institution excavations begin.
• 1988: Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Why it matters

Chichen Itza shows that the Maya world did not simply collapse at the end of the Classic period but reorganised around new centres in the north. Its mix of Maya and central Mexican styles reveals how ideas and goods moved across Mesoamerica, and its monuments remain among the most recognisable symbols of Mexico’s ancient past.