The History of Xunantunich

Xunantunich was a modest place for most of its life and then, briefly, an important one. The interesting part of its history is the end of it — and the 130 years of digging that worked out what happened. If you would rather start with the buildings, the structures page takes them one at a time.

A city on the ridge, and when it mattered

The centre sits on a limestone ridge that the Maya levelled by hand, above the Mopan River in what is now the Cayo District. Settlement in the Belize River valley runs far deeper than Xunantunich itself; the city's own moment came in the Late and Terminal Classic, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries CE, when it grew fast and built big. El Castillo took its final form in that window, in two phases around 800 and around 900.

Its neighbours were older. Cahal Pech, ten minutes away above modern San Ignacio, was settled around a thousand years before Xunantunich's peak. That difference in age is the reason the two sites feel so unalike to walk.

The ninth century, when Plaza A-II was walled off

Something changed at Xunantunich late in its life. Structure A-1 was raised, with A-13, only in the ninth century, and it divides the main ceremonial plaza from the one behind it. Archaeologists read that wall as an act of separation: the ruling family closing off its own space as the Classic political order across the region came apart.

It is a small piece of architecture with a large argument attached to it, and it is one of the few places where you can stand in front of a Maya wall and see a political decision in it.

Abandonment, and what actually ended it

The site was abandoned during the Terminal Classic, along with most of the lowland Maya centres, and the cause is still argued. Euan MacKie's 1959 excavation proposed a sudden disaster — possibly an earthquake — that ended Classic occupation here abruptly. Later work has favoured the slower regional collapse that took the whole lowland system with it.

Both readings survive in the literature, and the honest answer is that the evidence supports a decline rather than a single event.

Thomas Gann and the first digging, 1894

The excavation record starts with a doctor. Thomas Gann dug here in 1894 and 1895, and returned in 1924 — on that second visit he removed burial goods and the glyphs from Altar 1, and where they went is not known. That loss is part of the site's story now, and it is why the epigraphic record here is thinner than it should be.

Maler, Thompson, Satterthwaite: mapping and dating

Teobert Maler photographed the site for the Peabody Museum in 1904 and drew the first plan of El Castillo. J. Eric S. Thompson followed in 1938 and built the first ceramic chronology for the region, which is the work that made everything after it datable. Linton Satterthwaite recorded and excavated further in 1950.

MacKie's earthquake, 1959

The Cambridge expedition of 1959 and 1960 excavated the upper building of Structure A-11 and Structure A-15, and produced the earthquake hypothesis that still gets quoted. MacKie's reading has not held up as the whole explanation, but the excavation itself remains one of the best-recorded at the site.

From the Xunantunich Archaeological Project to BVAR

Modern work begins in 1991. Richard Leventhal and Wendy Ashmore's Xunantunich Archaeological Project ran to 1997, and its first task was a new map of the central precinct — still the basis of the ground you walk. The Getty Conservation Institute worked on the El Castillo friezes between 1992 and 1996. Jaime Awe conserved six core structures between 2000 and 2004, which is why the plazas are walkable and the stairs are climbable today.

Awe is still here. Since 2015 the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance project has kept digging, and in 2016 it opened the royal tomb in Structure A-9 — the largest found in Belize in a century of work.

The excavation record at a glance

A guide on the ground will tell you which of these excavations produced the thing you are looking at, which is the single best argument for taking one. Xunantunich Tours compares the departures that include a licensed guide, and the facts page collects every date and figure here in one table. The excavation story continues in the facts post, where the 2016 tomb gets the space it deserves.