Xunantunich: Unearthing Belize

Near the western border of Belize’s Cayo district, the Mayan site of Xunantunich (zshoo-NAHN-too-neech) has been dug/coaxed/dynamited out of the Earth bit by bit over the past 115 years.  Much of it still lies buried, though; it awaits either a sign from a long-gone god, or a financial windfall.

Hopefully, Belize’s bright tourism future will help further illuminate its Mayan past.

Xunantunich is the Yucatec Mayan name for “stone lady,” but ancient Mayans who lived here between 600 A.D. and 1000 A.D., when most of the site’s architecture was built, used the name  Ka’at Witz, or “supernatural mountain.” If you ask me, the latter seems a better fit.

When our travel bloggers group first hiked up to the main plaza, led by a guide from the tour company Yute Expeditions, a bright green iguana scampered up a rocky hill and a dark blue bird with a ghostly screech called from high above in a Ceiba tree.  Enormous Ceibas can grow to more than 200 feet, and were sacred to the Mayans; they were thought to connect the mythical underworld with the heavenly home of the gods.

While the central compound here (about one kilometer square) may not be as architecturally impressive as Mexico’s Chichen Itza, it’s certainly lush, mysterious and exciting.  Situated on a high limestone ridge, the main, ornately-carved temple of El Castillo offers astonishing views; to the east, Belize is a thick carpet of jungle dotted with open space, while to the west, heavily deforested Guatemala looks more like a rolling wave of grassy hills peppered with houses.

Views from El Castillo: L, Guatemala in the distance; Center, the site's main plaza; R, jungly Belize

El Castillo from below and above

Largely hidden for almost 900 years, the site was rediscovered by an adventurous British doctor, Thomas Gann, in 1894. Several small archaeology teams came here between 1938 and 1980, including one led by Sir J. Eric S. Thompson, another by Euan MacKie of the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, and a group from the University of Pennsylvania.  Tragically, some of the earliest unearthing was done with dynamite, losing hundreds of years’ worth of valuable strata.

Views of the still-unearthed main plaza

Diorama of Xunantunich in the on-site museum

However, as a result of these excavations, as well as a larger and more organized archeological effort in the mid-1990s, a detailed (but possibly erroneous) picture of Xunantunich has formed.  Besides the main plaza, which comprises El Castillo and about 24 other temples and palaces, there are also, over a several kilometer sprawl, three segregated ceremonial plazas bordered by homes of the elite and lower classes.  For a visual of the whole shebang, the on-site museum features an amazing diorama (that I can only wish I had made).

Xunantunich was a success story of the Classic Period, outlasting collossal, nearby Tikal by a good one hundred years and thriving right up until the end of the Mayan era.  However, its demise remains a mystery with only a few clues.  In the 1950s, Euan MacKie discovered that a giant earthquake had rocked this area, sparking a theory that the people here had lost faith in their gods and changed their way of life for the worse.  Our guide shared another theory: Hallucinogenic drug abuse by the elite classes led to several generations with increasingly dire birth defects, yielding an eventual society of ineffective (and here, his word and not mine) “veggies.”

There are possibly more pieces of the puzzle, but not every one of them remains here.  Throughout the site’s long archeological history, a healthy portion of its booty has been officially removed from Belize or has just plain disappeared.

Soldiers on guard in the main plaza

After the intrepid Thomas Gann returned here in 1924, many artifacts, including intricately carved hieroglyphs, seemed to vanish with him.  In the early 1950s, another Brit, Michael Stewart, came as an amateur archaeologist and left with a stash of ceremonial pieces; without asking permission of anyone, much less the Mayans who still live in the adjacent town of Succotz, he donated these to the Museum of Archeology & Anthropology in Cambridge, England and to Hamburg, Germany’s Museum of Ethnology.  Looting was a common occurrence until the 1980s; today, Xunantunich is heavily guarded by armed soldiers.

What remains today are in-place reproductions of the carved friezes atop El Castillo and, inside a small shaded house, a few treasured stelae.  Our guide said there’s little money here for the glass cases that would best protect these stone tablets;  the stelae are badly faded, but still bear traces of their use in communication, education and religious ceremonies.  Having seen great historical treasures carefully and expensively displayed in museums across North America and Europe, I felt sad about this neglect…and conflicted about the treasures that got away.

Two views of the reproduced frieze atop El Castillo

VISITING: Xunantunich is about 8 miles west of the bustling Cayo district town of San Ignacio; if driving, take the Western Highway to the Benque Viejo Road and the small Mayan village of San Jose Succotz.  Or, catch a bus bound for Benque Viejo del Carmen from the main terminal in San Ignacio.  The free ferry across the Mopan River, open from 8am to 4pm, is on the right side of the road beside a series of small food/souvenir stands.  Once across the river (and you can bring your vehicle with you), it’s about one mile uphill to the site entrance.  The entrance fee is $5 US per person.  The visitor’s center by the parking lot has food, drinks, swag and restrooms.

See also
Ka’ana: A Belizean Sense of Place