A monumental complex built by the Maya around 3,000 years ago was modeled on a map of the cosmos, new fieldwork has revealed.
A detailed survey of the Aguada Fénix site reveals that not only was the monument significantly larger than initial surveys suggested – laid out in the shape of a cross with axes measuring 9 and 7.5 kilometers (5.6 and 4.7 miles) – but it was also designed as a cosmogram, an architecture symbolizing the cosmos.
What’s even more remarkable about the structure is that the site contains none of the trappings of social inequality, such as elite residences or sculptures of rulers.
This strongly implies that egalitarian cultures were capable of monumental building works without the application of coercive force through a stratified social hierarchy ruled by a king.
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The discovery of Aguada Fénix by way of LIDAR surveys, in the Mexican state of Tabasco near the Gulf of Mexico, was fascinating for a number of reasons.
The first was its size; it was the largest Maya site ever found, even going by the more modest initial estimate of 1.4 kilometers along its longest axis. And it wasn’t hidden in the forest, as so many lost Mesoamerican, Central American, and South American structures are, but under a populated area. Plus, there was the aforementioned lack of evidence for social hierarchy.
Now, a team of archaeologists led by Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona has conducted additional LIDAR operations, fieldwork, and excavations. They discovered that Aguada Fénix is far more extensive and complex – not just in its physical scope, but also in what it can reveal about the people who built it between 1050 and 700 BCE.
“Along with the appeals of collective ceremonies, feasting, and the exchange of goods, the construction of a cosmogram, materializing the order of the Universe, likely provided a rationale for a large number of people to participate without coercive force,” the researchers write in their paper.
“The development of Aguada Fénix exemplifies the capabilities of human organization without prominent inequality, but it also hints at the challenges that earlier builders faced.”
The layout of the monument, the researchers found, is a sort of nested cross, with long axes leading to the monument’s hub. That hub, located on an artificial plateau, contains two nested cross-shaped pits at its center.
The long axes each consisted of a corridor and a pair of causeways, with the corridor dug into the ground and the causeways built up above ground on either side of it. The longest corridor, extending towards the northwest, measures 6.3 kilometers. The researchers speculate that these may have been used for ritual processions in and out of the ceremonial center of the monument.
Around the western axis, where the structure crosses Laguna Naranjito, the builders began work on a system of canals that may have reflected the ritual importance of water. These canals were left unfinished, suggesting that the builders ran into limitations, both in their skills and their ability to organize the construction.
It’s the ceremonial center of Aguada Fénix on the Main Plateau that yielded some of the most fascinating treasures of the dig. Right at the center of the nested cross pits, the archaeologists found deposits of pigment in a special cache, placed in a directional order. Blue azurite pigment was placed at the north; green malachite to the east; and yellow ochre containing goethite to the south.
This represents the earliest known example of Mesoamerican directional color symbolism, a motif that would later appear in Maya cosmograms, associating the cardinal directions of the world with the elements encoded in the colors.
“We’ve known that there are specific colors associated with specific directions, and that’s important for all Mesoamerican people, even the Native American people in North America,” says Inomata.
“But we never had actual pigment placed in this way. This is the first case that we’ve found those pigments associated with each specific direction. So that was very exciting.”
Within these pits, the researchers also found offerings of seashells and carved jade and greenstone – crocodiles, birds, and even a woman giving birth, all arranged in the same cross-shape. This, too, seems consistent with the cosmogram layout, with the shells placed on the sides denoting water.
The findings, the researchers say, offer important insights into both the limitations and possibilities of human organization. On the one hand, construction remained unfinished, even though Aguada Fénix was used for possibly hundreds of years.
On the other, the sheer scale of the monument is just mind-blowingly impressive, requiring an estimated 10.8 million person-days to build the Main Plateau alone, and an additional 255,000 person-days for the canals and dam.
“The construction of a cosmogram representing the order of the Universe and time likely motivated many people to participate in building activities without being coerced,” the researchers write.
Inomata elaborates: “People have this idea that certain things happened in the past – that there were kings, and kings built the pyramids, and so in modern times, you need powerful people to achieve big things,” he says.
“But once you see the actual data from the past, it was not like that. So, we don’t need really big social inequality to achieve important things.”
The paper has been published in Science Advances.
