Tuesday 3rd September – wow I’m writing this back in England in MARCH going by the little notes I wrote on the day.
Dzibilchaltun
This place was a major city for early Maya, with an estimated 200,000 people living there and over 8000 buildings during its history. Its been around since about 700ad and still had people living there with the Spanish arrived in the 1500’s.
It’s an interesting ruin site, it was nowhere near as preserved as Uxmal but it was stunning and wowed my imagination no less than yesterday. It was spread across a fairly large area, like a town would be. There was a building called Temple of the Dolls which was off to one edge of the settlement. The temples doorways were built in alignment with the rising sun so that the rays pass through them on the equininoxes. They really did have such a wonderful and detailed knowledge of the sun and stars. The reason its called Temple of the Dolls is because of seven figurines found inside it in the 1950’s when they were being explored. The temple had actually been build over by a larger pyramid and had been forgotten.
We walked around the site, walking up the big steps of the ruins and overlooking the grounds. There was a very out of place looking old church in the centre, which was built in the 16th century by the catholics who dismantled a lot of the maya buildings to build their own buildings. We then went to see the cenote which was an absolutely beautiful freshwater pool which went to a depth of 44m. You wouldn’t know it though, the water is so clear it looks about 2 meters deep and you can see all the fish inside and the beautiful water plants. When they first explored the area they found thousands of pottery shards and other artifacts as well as human and animal bones. The cenotes are a very important aspect of maya culture, which I’m going to assume I’ve written about in later blogs…if not then I will add details in at a later date.
