History of the Xunantunich Mayan Ruins
A late Maya city, a century of digging, and a royal tomb nobody found until 2016.
Xunantunich is not the ancient name of this place. Nobody knows the ancient name. "Xunantunich" means "Stone Woman" — sometimes rendered "Maiden of the Rock" — and it is a modern Yucatec/Mopan Maya name attached to the site in the nineteenth century after a ghost story: a woman in white, appearing at the foot of El Castillo, vanishing into the stone.
The city
Xunantunich sat on a ridge above the Mopan River in what is now western Belize, watching the river valley. It was occupied for centuries, but the version you climb today — the great pyramid, the plazas, the friezes — belongs to a narrow and late window.
The city reached its height in the Late and Terminal Classic, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries CE. That is late. By the time Xunantunich was building its most ambitious architecture, the great Classic Maya centres to the west were already failing.
The collapse, read in the stones
Two structures date to the ninth century and only the ninth century: A-1 and A-13. Together they wall Plaza A-II off from Plaza A-I. Archaeologists read that as the ruling family physically separating itself from everyone else, at exactly the moment the Classic order was coming apart.
The upper levels of El Castillo went up in two phases, around 800 and around 900. The later phase buried most of the earlier frieze — the city built over its own most elaborate artwork.
Euan MacKie, excavating in 1959–60, proposed something more abrupt: a sudden disaster, possibly an earthquake, ending occupation. The interpretation is contested. The evidence of a rapid ending is not.
Panels 3 and 4 — spoils from a rival
Two carved panels at Xunantunich did not start here. They came from a ceremonial staircase at Caracol, commissioned in 642 CE, and their text — deciphered by Christophe Helmke — records the Snake-head dynasty's move from Dzibanche to Calakmul. Panel 3 carries a death statement for Lady Batz' Ek', who died in 638 CE.
How they got here is the interesting part. A monument commissioned by one city ends up dismantled and re-erected in another. That is either tribute, or loot.
The excavations
Thomas Gann
The first excavation, and the most costly. Gann returned in 1924 and removed burial goods and the carved glyphs from Altar 1. Their whereabouts are still unknown. A century later, the text on that altar is simply gone.
Teobert Maler
Working for the Peabody Museum, Maler produced the first photographs and the first plan of Structure A-6.
J. Eric S. Thompson
Built the first regional ceramic chronology — the framework that let everything found afterwards be dated relative to everything else.
Linton Satterthwaite
Further excavation and recording.
Euan MacKie — Cambridge Expedition
Excavated the A-11 upper building and A-15, and argued that occupation ended suddenly, possibly by earthquake.
Xunantunich Archaeological Project
Richard Leventhal and Wendy Ashmore. Their first act was to map the central precinct properly — the map everything since has been hung on.
Getty Conservation Institute
Conserved the friezes. What you see on El Castillo today is a replica. The originals are sealed underneath, protected from the weather that was destroying them.
Jaime Awe
Conservation of six core structures — the work that made the site safe to climb.
XACP / BVAR
Awe's ongoing project. In 2016 it produced the find below.
The 2016 tomb
In 2016, Awe's team opened a chamber in Structure A-9: an adult male, 20 to 30 years old, buried with 36 ceramic vessels, a jade necklace, 14 obsidian blades, and the remains of deer or jaguar.
It is the largest royal tomb found in Belize in more than a century of excavation. And the architecture is the strange part — the temple appears to have been built around the burial, rather than the burial being inserted into an existing building. That sequence is rare in Maya construction.
Gann had dug here in the 1890s. Maler photographed it in 1904. Thompson, Satterthwaite, MacKie, Leventhal and Ashmore all worked the site. The tomb was found in 2016.
1954 — opened to the public
Xunantunich was the first Maya site in Belize opened to the public, in 1954. Everything about visiting it — the ferry, the mile of road, the ticket booth — descends from that decision.