Naachtun: A Lost City of the Maya

Page 3 of 9

• 1. An abandoned city
• 2. Wartime affiliations
• 3. History of investigations
• 4. Gathering the evidence
• 5. The Kingdom of Masuul
• 6. Traces of ritual
• 7. Changing allegiances
• 8. Defensive fortifications
• 9. Find out more
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History of investigations

Naachtun was rediscovered by the archaeologist Sylvanus Morley, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, on 3 May 1922. Morley had heard of the site from a chiclero - a person who collects sap, used for making chewing gum, from chicle trees - named Alfonso Ovando, who first saw the site in 1916. Morley and a Filipino photographer, Juan Sopeña, subsequently spent a total of seven days at the site, where they investigated many of the standing buildings and discovered 19 of Naachtun's 40+ stelae.

'They... realised that Nohoxna and Naachtun were in fact one and the same place.'

Morley named the large Maya city Naachtun because of the site's extreme inaccessibility (naach meaning 'far' and tun meaning 'stone', in Mayan). In fact Naachtun is still one of the most remote sites in the Yucatan peninsula, and one of the least known of all major Classic Maya centres.

The next western visitor to Naachtun was Cyrus Lundell, who reached the site on 5 January 1932. He spent three days exploring and mapping it, in the company of one Garcia, a chiclero guide. He also discovered eight new stelae. But while Morley and company had reached Naachtun from the south, Lundell had reached it from the north, and mistakenly thought he had found a new site about 20km (12 miles) north of the Mexico-Guatemala border. He named the supposedly new site 'Nohoxna'.

In 1933, thinking that Lundell had discovered a new site, the Carnegie Institution of Washington sent an expedition into southern Mexico to find and document it. This expedition, whose members were Karl Ruppert, John H Denison Jr and JP O'Neill, spent 12 days there in May 1933. They discovered many new stelae, as well as several new buildings, and O'Neill completed the map of the site that is in use today. It was only when Ruppert, Denison and O'Neill returned from the field and compared their photos with those from Morley's earlier expedition that they realised that Nohoxna and Naachtun were in fact one and the same place.

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