Uxmal Ruins

February 09, 2009

About a hundred miles from Campeche in the state of Yucatan we find the Uxmal Ruins, Hotel, Archaeological site, park, and restaurant. We took over a parking lot across from the restaurant, bar and pool. Many enjoyed the pool and bar. We all enjoyed a delightful “Mayan Buffet”. I would characterize it as darn good Mexican Cooking by anyone's standard. The night was balmy, the sleep was restful and the morning brought a tour of the most significant ruins yet.

The Maya World covers the Yucatan, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. Mayan technology varies greatly between Mayan regions. There are even differences in how daily life was lived. Water is often the center of concern, and methods for getting and handling this precious necessity vary by availability and opportunity.

In some areas of the Yucatan water is as available as your nearby stream. Life is different on the broad, flat Yucatan plateau. In some areas sink-holes (“Cenotes”) provide an endless -if hard to reach- supply as they expose underground rivers. In some areas the land is so porous that no surface water exists – even a day or so after a rain! In Uxmal the Maya built cisterns fed by patios, roofs and courtyards during the rainy season to serve the entire community as the only source of drinking water. Hundreds of cisterns held hundreds of thousands of liters of water – enough water storage has been found at Uxmal to support 50,000. In the tropics standing water like these cisterns will last as little as two weeks becoming fetid. Along with other technologies the Maya developed the methods of adding fish, frogs, plant life, and even turtles to the cisterns to create self-balancing ecosystems that kept the cisterns clean enough to use throughout the dry seasons.

Another technology exploited by architects of Maya is acoustics. Staircases are used as reflective surfaces to produce a “row” of echoes. These echoes sound as a tone when one claps hands or makes any sharp sound. This phenomenon was designed into gathering areas and used by the priests as “The Voice of Quetzl”. Without any physics, the common person was arguably in awe of the priest's abilities.

Different Mayan cities seemed to place different levels of importance on different gods. Uxmal seemed to revere most the god Chaak. The City of Edzna seemed to be all about the god Quetzl.

Stone work at Uxmal is considerably more intricate and precise than any we've seen at the other sites. The “stone bank” contains a stock of beautifully smoothed precisely square pieces ready to be drawn, worked and installed. Where other sites made stucco friezes and carved the stucco, the masons here at Uxmal carved the decorative reliefs directly in limestone. The process involves taking stone from moist ground, smoothing and squaring it while it is still wet. This is done because it is softer than it will be when it is dry. Dried stone is carved into the relief elements because it doesn't fracture as easily. Since it is harder, however the Maya had to trade for harder stone to use as tools for the process.

The carved stone remains where in many locations the stucco has dissolved away. The crispness of the figures and even the marks of individual blows that worked the stone make a firm link between the artist and the viewer across more than a thousand years.


Now we travel beyond Uxmal but my mind will bring me back to this magical spot.