Chichen Itza

Our day tour to Chichen Itza was a long day on the bus, very hot, also some rain, and we got to stop in three great locations. I want to include some of the history and anthropology in this blog entry, while my memories are sort of fresh. A bus met us at the hotel, and we received wrist bands and boarded. The tour guide said that this bus was going to Xel-Ha, but don't worry, we will get you to Chichen Itza. Very hopefully we got on the bus, trying not to worry like they said. It turned out that Xel-Ha, in addition to being an amazing eco-park which we visited later, has kind of a transfer station where a whole lot of other tour buses meet and leave from, so that turned out just fine. Yay.

Matt took some pictures out the bus window of the things that we were passing on the road. It's kind of a long straight main road - we ended up deciding we could have driven in the Yucatan just fine if we had maps on our phones (the streets seem pretty easy but are not marked).

It was raining a little bit when we arrived, after about 1 1/2 hours of driving, and momentarily a little chilly, so we brought a bunch of umbrellas and put on our jackets. Immediately after that we were sweltering and totally sorry we'd worn them and also regretted carrying the umbrellas - the little bit of rain felt good because it was really hot.

The first thing we saw was the huge pyramid. We admired it for awhile while our tour guide gave us a bunch of information. I am copying information from chichenitza.com and www.world-mysteries.com/chichen_kukulcan.htm and inserting it along with my memories and just a few pictures that we took. (Ha.)

Chichen Itza, meaning “at the mouth of the Itza well”, is a Mayan City on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, between Valladolid and Merida. It was established before the period of Christopher Colombus and probably served as the religion center of Yucatan for a while. Today it is the second most visited site of Mexico. Apart from one of the new seven wonders of the world; The Kukulkan Pyramid (shown below).

We had headsets so that we could listen to the tour guide and still look around. Good idea.

"Possibly the best known construction on Chichen Itza is Kukulkan's Pyramid. El Castillo (The Kukulkan Pyramid), a square-based, stepped pyramid that is approximately 75 feet tall. Kukulkan Pyramid was built for astronomical purposes and during the vernal equinox (March 20) and the autumnal equinox (September 21) at about 3pm the sunlight bathes the western balustrade of the pyramid's main stairway. This causes 7 isosceles triangles to form imitating the body of a serpent roughly 37 yards long that creeps downwards until it joins the huge serpent's head carved in stone at the bottom of the stairway. Mexican researcher Luis El Arochi calls it "the symbolic descent of Kukulkan" (means the feathered serpent), and believes it could have been connected with agricultural rituals."

The top of the temple is offset, not centered above the stairstep platform. Our tour guide thought it was for astronomical reasons (I can't find this substantiated but I might just be missing it).

This map shows the relative locations of El Castillo, the giant pyramid, and some of the other structures. One thing that is interesting at Chichen Itza is that they have the whole main area cleared. I bet that was a lot of work but it's obviously necessary, because the jungle really swallows structures up in no time.

This is the Temple of the Warriors, across the plaza from El Castillo.

Then we walked over to the Great Ball Court. We saw other ball courts (at Coba) but this was by far the largest that we saw. "The Mayans were great sportsmen and build huge ballcourts to play all their games. The Great Ballcourt of Chichen Itza is 225 feet wide and 545 feet long overall. It has no vault, no discontinuity between the walls and is totally open to the blue sky."

There were some great lizards in the ruins, so cool.

Inside the ball court looks like this.

The two hoops that the ball had to pass through. They were really high and surprisingly small (also well preserved!). The game is believed to have been played without using hands or feet. A team of 7 players would have a turn to try to get the ball through the hoop, and when their turn was done, the other team got a chance.

The balls were heavy and hard. The players wore padding but were probably still bruised after playing. Games were played to a winning score of 7, but sometimes neither team might reach 7, so then another system of points was used. Games could last multiple days.

"Each end of the arena has a raised temple area. A whisper from end can be heard clearly enough at the other end 500 feet far away and through the length and breath of the court. The sound waves are unaffected by wind direction or time of day and also night. Archaeologists engaged in the reconstruction noted that the sound transmission became more and more strong and clear as they proceeded. This is the temple at the north end, where the king watched."

This was a platform that spectators are presumed to have used.

The back side of the Temple of the Jaguars.

Some cool details.

Along the walls of the ball court were carved murals. They were elaborate and also kind of hard to puzzle out. Matt got more pictures than I did.

The gory part of the ball court is the belief that the winning team was sacrificed after their victory. "Legends say that the winning Captain would present his own head to the losing Captain, who then decapitates him. While this may seem very strange reward, the Mayans believed that this to be the ultimate honor. The winning Captain getting a direct ticket for heaven instead of going through the 13 high steps that the Mayan's believed they had to go through in order to reach peaceful heaven."

Some of these murals show the losing captain holding the head of the victor.

Next we saw the Wall of Skulls or Tzompantli. "Tzompantli is called The Wall of Skulls, which is actually an Aztec name for this kind of structure, because the first one seen by the horrified Spanish was at the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan."

"The Tzompantli structure at Chichen Itza is a very interesting Toltec structure, where the heads of sacrificial victims were placed; although it was one of three platforms in the Great Plaza, it was the only one for this purpose."

"The platform walls of the Tzompantli have carved beautiful reliefs of four different subjects. The primary subject is the skull rack itself; others show a scene with a human sacrifice; eagles eating all human hearts; and skeletonized warriors with arrows and shields."

There are a lot more cool things about El Castillo. "Kukulcán's pyramid is essentially a nine-step structure culminating in a flat platform that supports a two-story temple. The height to the top platform is 24 m, the temple adding another 6 m."

El Castillo's design is thought to relate to the Mayan calendar. Each of the four faces incorporates a broad, steep staircase consisting of 91 steps that ascends to the top platform. Counting the top platform as an additional step gives a total of 365 steps: 1step for each day of the year. The staircases rise at an angle of 45 degrees to the horizontal, while the average inclination of the stepped pyramid itself is 53.3 degrees. The faces of the individual steps are sloped at a greater angle, approximately 73 degrees. The nine main platforms of the pyramid are thought to represent the 18 months of the haab, and the 52 panels represent the number of years it takes for a calendar round date to recur.

"Kukulcán's pyramid is notable for the fact that at the spring and fall equinoxes (March 21 and September 22) the sun projects an undulating pattern of light on the northern stairway for a few hours in the late afternoon—a pattern caused by the angle of the sun and the edge of the nine steps that define the pyramid's construction. These triangles of light link up with the massive stone carvings of snake heads at the base of the stairs, suggesting a massive serpent snaking down the structure." (obviously this is not my picture)

Additionally, when one looks at the western face during the winter solstice, the sun appears to climb up the edge of the staircase until it rests momentarily directly above the temple before beginning its descent down the other side. The orientation of the pyramid is approximately 17 degrees east of magnetic north, in an area where the declination is approximately 2 degrees east, so the actual orientation is around 19 degrees east of true north. Several other major structures on the site are oriented in approximately the same way." (Also not my picture.)

We had a chance to wander around and we got a good group picture with only a couple of people in the way, who I later photoshopped out of our shot. :)

One of the coolest things about El Castillo is that when you stand in front of the steps and clap your hands loudly, the echo sounds like a bird chirping, or like our guide said, like a quetzal's wings as it flies. Here is a little more information:

"The Chirping Pyramid Tourists delight in the strange chirping echoes they produce when they clap their hands at the base of the steep staircases that sweep up the face of Kukulkan, a 1,300-year-old Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan. While amusing themselves, the tourists may unwittingly be replicating an ancient Mayan ritual, says David Lubman, an acoustical consultant based in California. The echoes are eerily reminiscent of the call of the quetzal, a bird the Maya considered a representative of the gods. The long-tailed quetzal of Mexico and Central America was associated by the ancient Maya and Aztecs with the plumed serpent god Quetzalcoatl. They used its magnificent tail feathers in religious ceremonies. Lubman recorded the enigmatic echoes while on vacation in Mexico and analyzed them when he returned home. The echoes sound like chirps, he realized, because the sound from the tapping doesn't hit a solid wall but hundreds of small steps, producing hundreds of echoes. The difference in the distance traveled by echoes bouncing off lower steps is rather small, so the echoes follow each other closely and make a high-pitched sound; the distances and intervals between successive echoes returning from the higher steps, however, are longer, so their pitch is lower. When the echoes reach a listener's ear, the change in pitch sounds like a chirping bird. The dimensions of the steps, it turns out, are the key to the effect. Each step is tall, but the tread, where the foot is placed, doesn't cut deeply into the pyramid. If the stairs were deeper and not so high, the effect on the echoes would not be as great, and they wouldn't sound like a chirp. That Lubman noticed the similarity between the echo and the quetzal's call was a "lucky hunch," he says, but the Maya, he thinks, knew exactly what they were doing when they built the staircase at Kukulkan. "For about 1,000 years before this, they had been building stone staircases in the open, where you are going to get an echo," he says. "All it would take is one person in 1,000 years to notice that when you shorten the staircase tread, the pitch of the tone rises." The Maya could have used the sound in ceremonies conducted at the pyramid, which was clearly linked to the sacred bird. Kukulkan is a Mayan deity whose name shares the same root as the Mayan word for "quetzal" and who is often depicted with the bird on his back."

Along the path to another area of the site were many many vendors who really wanted us to buy their souvenirs. They were pretty excited about it.

Matt did get a tree of life souvenir and a little turtle for Zoe which she loves.

And now referring back to the map - we walked over to the El Caracol Observatory, where there is a complex of other structures.

Along the way we passed the High Priest's Grave. "This step-pyramid temple dominates the platform, on a small scale. Like its larger neighbor, El Castillo, it has four sides with staircases on each side. There is a temple on top, but different from El Castillo, at the center is an opening into the pyramid which leads to a natural cave 12 m. below. Edward H. Thompson excavated this cave in the late 1800s, and because he found artifacts such as jade beads and several skeletons, he named the structure The High Priests' Temple. But archaeologists today do not believe that the structure was either a tomb or that the personages buried in it were priests.

There were other ruins all over the place too - we didn't learn names of many of them.

"El Caracol means winding staircase or snail. This building is dated between 600 AD to 850 AD. It was remodeled also from 800 AD to 1200 AD. The tower is 48 feet high with many windows which allowed for observing the equinoxes and summer solstice. This tower sits high on a four-cornered but not quite square platform and gives excellent unobstructed views of the skies and surrounding landscape. In particular, it seems to be carefully aligned with the motions of Venus. Venus had tremendous significance for the Maya community; this bright planet was considered a war god and the sun’s twin. Mayan leaders used the changing position of Venus to plan appropriate times for battles and raids. El Caracol was used as an observatory."

To the side of the observatory is a set of ruins called the Nunnery. "This building named Casa de las Monjas by the Spanish who were reminded of convent buildings back home. This building called as nunnery,and it is considered by most a residential palace, but scholars are divided as to whether it represents the residence of the founding family of Chichen or a priest's house, or a council house (or Popal Nah ) structure. The building has five dedicatory glyph strings, one of which dates it to AD 880. The original building was constructed on a 30 foot high platform, with a central reinforced wall and two wings. During a later remodeling, a second floor added and the base was widened. Above the 2nd floor is a mat-weave lattice. The decoration and architecture is typically Puuc Maya so The Nunnery is strictly a Puuc style building. The rubble core walls were originally veneered with indented stepped frets in cubes decorated with beautiful flowers. A sacrificial stone which is in front of this building, and a jaguar throne was found within, showing its continued use also after the Toltec arrival."

In our last bit of free time at the site we explored by the Temple of the Warriors and the Thousand Columns.
"The Temple of the Warriors is one of the most impressive and important structures at Chichen Itza. It might be the only known late classic Maya building sufficiently big enough for really large gatherings. The temple consists of four platforms, flanked on the south and west sides by 200 round and square columns. All square columns are carved in low relief, with Toltec warriors; in some places they are cemented together in sections, painted in brilliant colors and covered with plaster. The Temple of Warriors is approached by a broad stairway with a plain, stepped ramp on either side, and each ramp has figures of standard-bearers to hold flags. Before the main entrance a chacmool reclined. On the top, serpent columns which had S shaped supported wooden lintels (now gone) above the doorways. Astronomical signs and decorative features on the head of each serpent are carved over the eyes. On the top of each serpent head is a shallow basin that could have been used as an oil lamp."

The Thousand Columns are amazing - they cover a much larger area than we first thought. "All columns once supported a frieze and a roof which have since collapsed. The exact nature of the roof is not certainly known. It may have been made of mortar, wood or thatch. It is believed that these were great meeting halls. Remains of the painted frieze indicate that it was decorated with motifs and Chaac masks representing an earlier priestly class who governed the city. And the addition of warriors on the pillars must have made the citizens aware of the military religious aspect of this site. This vast space has a quadrangular floor plan. It is surrounded by several important structures including the Mercado (marketplace), the Temple of the Warriors and some structures still to be reconstructed."

On our way out these guys were near the entrance in costume:

I would have loved to have stayed for a lot longer, but eventually it was time to go. Our next stop was the town of Valladolidad. We first stopped to explore a beautiful cenote, which is a sinkhole that is filled with water. Some people swim in them, in fact there was someone swimming, but we didn't really have time.

Then we went to a really neat buffet restaurant for dinner. It was really good and supposedly had very authentic food. Like I said, all you can eat buffets played a big part in this vacation.