Rise of Chichén Itzá
Chichén Itzá became the dominant city of the northern Yucatán around 900, as the great Maya cities to the south were being abandoned. The southern collapse is the context. Between roughly 800 and 950 the cities of the Petén — Tikal, Calakmul, Copán, Palenque — stopped raising monuments, stopped recording dates, and lost most of their population, in what is now generally attributed to a combination of prolonged drought recorded in lake sediments, soil exhaustion from intensive maize agriculture, and endemic warfare between kingdoms whose legitimacy rested on victory. Chichén Itzá rose in that gap and was organised differently. Its inscriptions name a council rather than a single divine king, and its architecture is full of central Mexican elements — the feathered serpent, colonnaded halls, chacmool figures, tzompantli skull racks — which used to be explained by a Toltec invasion from Tula and is now more often read as a two-way exchange between elites across Mesoamerica. The city controlled a port at Isla Cerritos and traded obsidian, gold, turquoise and salt over long distances. Its water came from limestone sinkholes; the Sacred Cenote has yielded jade, gold, copal and human remains, including many young adults and children, thrown in as offerings to a rain deity. El Castillo is aligned so that the equinox sun throws a serpent of shadow down the northern balustrade. The city declined by about 1200 and Mayapán succeeded it. Maya people did not disappear and number several million today. The Spanish arrived in the 1520s and took decades to subdue the peninsula, and the last independent Maya kingdom at Nojpetén held out until 1697. The city was bought by an American consul in the 1890s who dredged the cenote and shipped its contents to Harvard, and much of it has since been returned.
- Year: 900 CE
- Category: Cultural
