The Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá

A real Maya sacrificial well, a doorway to the underworld

The northwestern Yucatán is a limestone plain with no rivers or streams, lakes or ponds, only sinkholes, the cenotes, that open onto the water table. Chichén Itzá grew up beside two of them, and UNESCO renders its name as at the edge of the well of the Itzaes. The Sacred Cenote is 60 metres across, with sheer cliffs dropping some 27 metres to the water, and a raised road, a sacbe 300 metres long, joins it to the city's civic precinct. In Maya cosmology such wells were occasional residences of the gods and portals to the watery underworld, and this one belonged to Chaac, the god of rain and thunder.

Friar Diego de Landa, who visited in 1566, wrote that in times of drought people were thrown alive into the well as a sacrifice, along with precious stones and other prized things, and that if the country had possessed gold, most of it would be in this well. The excavations of the 20th century bore him out. They recovered thousands of objects of gold, jadeite, copal, pottery, flint, obsidian, shell, rubber and cloth, and wooden weapons, sceptres and idols that the water kept from rotting; jade was the largest category. None of the gold, copper or jade is native to the Yucatán, so it was brought from elsewhere in Central America, and many pieces were broken on purpose first, as if to kill them as offerings. The human remains include males and females and young children. A 2007 study by de Anda suggests most victims were killed before they were thrown in, often far away.

Edward Herbert Thompson, an American diplomat who bought the Hacienda Chichén, and the ruins with it, for three hundred pesos in 1894, dredged the cenote from 1904 with a bucket on a pulley. In 1909 he went down himself with two Greek divers from the Bahamas and found gold, jade and copper bells in the cracks of the floor, beneath a layer of blue pigment about 5 metres thick. Mexico had outlawed the export of antiquities in 1897, but he smuggled the finds piecemeal to the United States in the luggage of friends and associates. Several jade and gold works have since gone back, but nearly thirty thousand objects, human remains among them, are still at Harvard's Peabody Museum. Mexico's INAH returned to the water with new expeditions in 1961 and in 1967 and 1968.