The trail into the ancient Maya ruins of Chac, Yucatán, winds through a low gray-green scrub forest where everything seems to have thorns. In the dry heat of March, when the land is without rain, a narrow path of dusty red soil takes me around stunted, gnarled trees and up and down stepped outcrops of gray limestone, pitted and shaped by thousands of rainy seasons. I have made many treks in the thorn forest of northwestern Yucatán during the past four decades. As an archaeologist, I know all too well that many remains of the ancient Maya still lie hidden here, much as they did in the dry season of 1841-42, when the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens arrived.
Plagued by heat, lack of water, and infestations of ticks, the Stephens party came upon marvel after marvel. At Labná they stood amazed by the facade of a lofty temple “ornamented from top to bottom and from one side to another with colossal figures and other designs in stucco . . . such as the art of no other people ever produced.” At Sayil they gazed upon the Casa Grande, the massive remains of an ornate three-tiered palace.
The area Stephens explored in those eight months is known as the Puuc (pronounced pook), Maya for “ridge” and, by extension, “hill country.” The Puuc covers more than 2,300 square miles (5,957 square kilometers) of rugged limestone hills and valleys in the northwestern interior of the Yucatán Peninsula.
Archaeologist and National Geographic grantee Michael Smyth estimates that the Puuc, from some time around A.D. 800 to about 1000, supported some 150 thriving towns and cities such as Uxmal, Kabah, and Sayil and may have held 500,000 people. To sustain such places in a world of little water, ancient engineers constructed thousands of cisterns below plazas and courtyards to catch, direct, and store rainwater. |
