Komchén

Komchén is a comisaría of Mérida municipality, about 15 km north of the city and some 20 km from the Gulf coast, close to the archaeological zone of Dzibilchaltún. Its Maya name is translated as "in the well of the hollow". It is a modern village with paved streets, schools up to a bachillerato college, a municipal library, an IMSS clinic and sports parks. On the main park stands the yellow church of the Purísima Concepción, with a stepped belfry and a scrolled gable.

Komchén's claim to fame lies about 2 km from the village: the remains of a Maya town that is far older than most sites in the north of the peninsula. People first settled here in the Middle Preclassic in a small community of perishable houses. In the Late Preclassic it grew into a sizeable town, and building peaked between about 350 and 150 BC, now in permanent stone masonry. By around AD 250 the site had been abandoned, and it was later partly reoccupied by people from the growing city of Dzibilchaltún.

The site was studied in the 1960s and especially in the early 1980s, when a Tulane University project led by E. Wyllys Andrews V excavated it. The team mapped nearly 1,000 house structures in about 2 square kilometres, a core of five large platforms, the tallest 8 metres high, and a sacbé (a raised Maya causeway) that is one of the earliest identified in Yucatán. Together with Dzibilchaltún, Komchén showed that the north of Yucatán was home to Preclassic Maya. Today the ruins are low mounds of stone in the dry scrub; what you can see easily is the village itself, which makes a short detour on the way to Dzibilchaltún or the coast.