It added, with specific precision, to what is known about specific people who were part of a civilization that never disappeared.

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— EXTENDED SECTIONS —

Chichén Itzá: The City That Changed the Maya World

Before understanding what a chultún full of children’s bones means for Maya archaeology, it helps to understand the specific character of the city in which it was found.

Chichén Itzá is not simply a large Maya site.

It is a city that, at specific points in its history, represented a genuinely new kind of political and architectural statement in the northern Maya lowlands — one that drew on traditions from across a wide region of Mesoamerica and that produced built forms that have no straightforward parallels among earlier Maya sites.

The architectural vocabulary of Chichén Itzá’s main ceremonial precinct is strikingly cosmopolitan.