In the summer of 2020, an international team led by a University of Arizona archaeologist reported the discovery of the largest monumental construction known today in the Maya area in the state of Tabasco, near Mexico's southeastern border.
The monument, found at a site called Aguada Fénix, measures nearly a mile long and a quarter-mile wide, ranges from 30 to 50 feet high and dates to 1,000 B.C.
In the five years since that discovery, the team, led by Regents Professor of anthropology Takeshi Inomata and Fred A. Reicker Distinguished Professor of anthropology Daniela Triadan , has pieced together evidence about Aguada Fénix and the nearby area, finding that nearly 500 similar, smaller sites dotted the landscape in southeastern Mexico.
Now, Inomata and his team have unearthed the latest and clearest evidence that Aguada Fénix was a cosmogram – a model to represent the order of the universe, seen at other Maya sites – which could make it among the most significant ceremonial sites for the Maya area. The latest excavation revealed a cross-shaped pit, called a cruciform, that held a cache of ceremonial artifacts, which provide unprecedented information on early Maya rituals.
The new findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.
The study, Inomata said, is further evidence opposing the long-held belief that Mesoamerican cultures grew gradually, building increasingly larger settlements, such as Tikal in Guatemala and Teotihuacan in central Mexico, whose pyramid monuments are icons for Mesoamerica today. Aguada Fénix predates the heydays of those cities by nearly a thousand years – and is as large or larger than all of them.
"What we are finding is that there was a 'big bang' of construction at the beginning of 1,000 B.C., which really nobody knew about," said Inomata, a researcher in the School of Anthropology , in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences . "Huge planning and construction really happened at the very beginning."
'This is the first case'
Inomata and his colleagues first found clues of Aguada Fénix in 2017 using lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging. The technique uses lasers from an airplane flown overhead to scan through jungle and forest to create 3D maps of humanmade structures.
The team had already used lidar in 2015 in nearby Guatemala to discover early constructions at the Maya site of Ceibal . Aguada Fénix was arranged similarly to Ceibal, Inomata said.
At Aguada Fénix, the monument's centerline aligns with the rising sun on Oct. 17 and Feb. 24 – a 130-day span that probably represents half of the 260-day cycle of the Mesoamerican ritual calendar, Inomata said, based on analyses by colleagues who are experts on ancient astronomy. This arrangement is similar to other Maya sites that also had ceremonial caches, Inomata said, giving researchers some indication that they might find something similar at Aguada Fénix, on what is now rural ranchland in eastern Tabasco.
The team used radiocarbon to date the cruciform pit and the construction layers above it. Researchers also analyzed sherds of ceramic material that helped date the cruciform.
Their first significant find was several axes made of jade, which researchers recognized from previous excavations as ceremonial.
"That told us that this was really an important ritual place," Inomata said.
As they excavated the cruciform further, the team found ornaments carved from jade that they recognized to represent a crocodile, a bird, and what they believe is a woman giving birth. At the bottom of the pit was a smaller cruciform, where they found mineral pigments – small piles of blue, green and yellowish soil – arranged to correspond to cardinal directions.
"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," Inomata said. "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."
The builders, researchers suspect, arranged the pigments and other materials as an offering, then filled it in with sand and soil. Radiocarbon dating estimates the cache dates to 900-845 B.C. People likely returned to the site for later rituals to leave behind the jade objects.
The study also revealed a network of raised causeways and sunken corridors that Aguada Fénix's builders used to walk to and through the site, as well as canals and a dam to divert water from a nearby laguna. The causeways, corridors and canals followed axes that ran parallel to Aguada Fénix's orientation with the sun and extend as far as six miles away from the settlement's main plateau.
Monumental achievements without a single ruler
While some sites, like Tikal in Guatemala, were presided over by a singularly powerful king, the team has so far found no evidence that Aguada Fénix was constructed under that model. Inomata's theory is that the settlement did have leaders, but rather intellectual ones who made astronomical observations and led the design and planning for the site.
"These leaders didn't have power to force other people," Inomata added. "Most came probably willingly, because this idea of building a cosmogram was really important to them, and so they worked together."
Xanti S. Ceballos Pesina, a doctoral student in the School of Anthropology and a co-author on the study, helped excavate a smaller complex within Aguada Fénix. Ceballos, who grew up in Mexico, has visited numerous Maya sites as an archaeologist.
Looking at Inomata's lidar map of Aguada Fénix, Ceballos said she was still blown away at how extensive Aguada Fénix is, and how it eluded researchers for so long.
"I think it's very cool that new technologies are helping to discover these new types of architectural arrangements," Ceballos said. "And when you see it on the map, it's very impressive that in the Middle Preclassic Period, people with no centralized organization or power were coming together to perform rituals and to build this massive construction."
Inomata said the findings from Aguada Fénix have clear implications about how modern society can evolve.
"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 said. "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."
