Chunchucmil

Chunchucmil is a village in the municipality of Maxcanú, in the dry flatlands of far western Yucatán, about 25 km west of the town of Maxcanú and some 27 km inland from the Gulf of Mexico. It grew up around a henequen hacienda, and its name comes from the Maya Ch'en Chun Chukum, "the well at the foot of the chukum tree". In the 1970s archaeologists borrowed the village's name for the ancient city whose remains spread across the surrounding countryside, on the ejido lands of Chunchucmil, Kochol, San Mateo, Coahuila and Halachó.

That ancient city was one of the most densely settled in the Maya world. Its compact core covers about 25 km², or some 64 km² counting suburbs and farmsteads, and at its peak, between about AD 400 and 650, it is estimated to have held 31,000 to 43,000 people. It flourished even though this is the driest part of the Maya area, with less than 800 mm of rain a year, thin soils and bare limestone, which is why researchers think it lived from trade: goods moved between the Gulf coast, its probable port at Canbalam and the interior, obsidian blades arrived from El Chayal in Guatemala, nearly 1,000 km away, and excavations point to one of the earliest known Maya marketplaces. The city declined in the later Classic and was largely empty until cattle ranches and haciendas arrived. John Lloyd Stephens passed within a few kilometres in the 1840s, but the site drew little attention for more than a century; serious study only began in the 1990s with the Pakbeh Regional Economy Project led by Bruce Dahlin.

What survives is not a showpiece site but a landscape: more than a dozen pyramids 8 to 18 metres tall, now grassy mounds, standing around plazas in what archaeologists call quadrangle groups; residential lots enclosed by low dry-stone walls (albarradas) and linked by stone lanes; raised causeways (sacbeob) between the main groups; and a stone barricade around the centre. One shrine in the Lool group, built in the talud-tablero style of Teotihuacan, was excavated and consolidated. There are no visitor facilities, ticket office or marked trails that we could find, and the ruins lie on village farmland, so ask in Chunchucmil before walking out, and bring water and sun protection: there is little shade.