Inside Xunantunich: A Guide to Every Structure, Plaza and Carving

Xunantunich is small enough to read in three hours and dense enough to reward every one of them — if you know what you are looking at. Nothing here is labelled. This guide is the labels.

There is no inside

First, a correction to the shape of the question. Xunantunich has no interior, no rooms, no tour route through a building. It is an open-air ridge-top core: plazas with structures ranged around them, under the sun, with a pyramid at one end.

What you walk through is the ceremonial heart of a city that peaked in the Late and Terminal Classic — the eighth and ninth centuries CE. That is late for a Maya centre. Xunantunich was building its most ambitious architecture while the great cities to the west were already failing, and the buildings record that.

El Castillo — Structure A-6

130 feet. About 40 metres. The second-tallest structure in Belize, after Caana at Caracol. It stands at the south end of Plaza A-I and it is the reason the coach parks are where they are.

You climb it by a series of stone staircases threading through hollow chambers — one operator counts roughly 200 steps. A traveller who did it described the climb as broken into enough stages that it was not difficult. Another, aged 75, was walked up by her guide. It is steep, not technical. From the top the view runs west, across the Mopan valley, into Guatemala.

The detail worth carrying up with you: the upper levels were built in two phases, around 800 and around 900 CE. The second phase buried most of the first phase's frieze. The city built over its own best work — which brings us to the thing most visitors photograph without understanding.

"El Castillo" is a modern Spanish nickname for this one building. It is not the Maya name, and it does not describe the site.

The frieze, and what is underneath it

Below the upper temple runs a band of moulded stucco. It is the most photographed thing at Xunantunich and the least understood.

What you are looking at is a replica. The originals are sealed underneath it.

The Getty Conservation Institute worked here from 1992 to 1996, because the weather was destroying the real frieze faster than it could be recorded. Their solution was to seal the originals and reproduce them on the surface. So the frieze is simultaneously not real and the only reason anything real survives.

It originally wrapped all four sides of the A-6-2nd roof panel. Fragments survive east and west. The east frieze carries a World Tree, a sun god, the moon and Venus, with Chaac — the rain god — probably at the centre.

The visitor centre holds a full-scale replica at ground level. Five minutes there before you climb changes what you see when you arrive.

Structure A-9 and the 2016 tomb

In 2016, Jaime Awe's team opened a chamber here and found the largest royal tomb discovered in Belize in more than a century: an adult male, 20 to 30 years old, with 36 ceramic vessels, a jade necklace, 14 obsidian blades, and the remains of deer or jaguar.

Consider the timeline. Thomas Gann dug here in the 1890s. Teobert Maler photographed the site in 1904. Thompson, Satterthwaite, MacKie, Leventhal and Ashmore all worked it across the twentieth century. The tomb was found in 2016.

The architecture is the strange part: the temple appears to have been built around the burial rather than the burial cut into a finished structure. That sequence is rare in Maya construction, and it means the building exists because the body does.

Structure A-1 — a wall with an argument in it

A-1 separates Plaza A-I from Plaza A-II. Physically it is unremarkable. Chronologically it is the most interesting thing on the site.

It was built — along with A-13 — only in the ninth century. Not earlier. At the very end, as the Classic order was coming apart across the Maya world, Xunantunich's rulers put up a structure that closed the ceremonial core off from everyone else.

Archaeologists read that as a ruling family walling itself in. You can stand between the two plazas and see the decision.

Structure A-13

Linear, roughly 223 feet / 67 metres long, with a dozen or more chambers. Ninth century, like A-1, and part of the same closing-off. Long, low, and easy to walk past.

Structure A-11 and the palace

The residential complex of the ruling family, on its own plaza — A-III. Euan MacKie excavated the upper building in 1959–60, during the Cambridge expedition that produced his argument that occupation here ended suddenly, possibly in an earthquake.

Panels 3 and 4 — carved somewhere else

Two carved panels at Xunantunich did not start life at Xunantunich. They came from a ceremonial staircase at Caracol, commissioned in 642 CE.

Their text, deciphered by Christophe Helmke, records the Snake-head dynasty's move from Dzibanche to Calakmul — one of the defining political events of the Classic Maya world. Panel 3 carries a death statement for Lady Batz' Ek', who died in 638 CE.

A monument commissioned by one city, dismantled, and re-erected in another. That is tribute or it is loot, and either way it is a piece of Caracol's history standing in Xunantunich's plaza.

The plazas

They are mown grass, open to the sky, with no shade anywhere. That is worth knowing at midday.

Groups B, C and D, the Aguada, the sacbeob

Beyond the core sit outlying settlement groups — B, C and D. Most visitors never reach them and most tours do not go.

Two other features are worth naming. The Aguada is the reservoir: a city on a ridge has no river at hand, and someone had to solve that. And the sacbeob — raised causeways — run into Plaza A-I, which tells you the plaza was built to be arrived at.

The ball court that isn't there

What to look at, in what order

1. The visitor centre frieze replica. Five minutes. It teaches you what to look for.
2. Plaza A-I. Stand at the north end and look at El Castillo whole before you climb it.
3. The frieze on A-6. East and west faces. Find the World Tree.
4. The climb. Take it in stages. Look west from the top.
5. A-1, from the gap. Stand where the wall divides the plazas.
6. A-13, then A-11 and Plaza A-III.
7. Panels 3 and 4. Last, because by now you know why they matter.

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