Mayapan

Mayapan (meaning "Standard [Banner] of the Maya") is a Late Postclassic Maya site located twenty-four miles southeast of Mérida, Yucatán. According to Bishop Diego de Landa, the city was established by a Chichén Itzá lord named Kukulcan, who decreed that the native lords of Yucatán should live there. After Kukulcan's departure, Mayapan was ruled by the Cocom, an Itzá lineage who established themselves between 1263 and 1283. Mayapan subsequently was the capital of Yucatan's northern plains until its Cocom rulers were deposed by the rival Tutul Xiu lineage during the Katun 8 Ahau between 1441 and 1461.

Mayapan traditionally was referred to as Ichpa ("within the enclosure"), and archaeology has confirmed that Mayapan was a walled city, containing a population of 11,000 to 12,000. Some 3,500 buildings occupy about 1.6 square miles, including about 100 larger masonry temples or ceremonial structures.

Dominating Mayapan is the centrally located Castillo or Temple of Kukulcan (structure Q-162), a radially symmetrical pyramid temple that is a small, poorly constructed imitation of the Castillo at Chichén Itzá. Nearby is a circular building derived from, but smaller than, Chichén Itzá's Caracol structure. "Colonnaded halls," rectangular-plan buildings with frontal and medial colonnades and benches along the rear walls, front several plazas grouped around the central temples.

Located near Mayapan's center are elite residential buildings with open front rooms and one or more private rear chambers that may contain small "family shrine" altars. These "palaces" have crude block walls, beam-and-mortar roofs, and a thick plaster facing, often modeled into architectural sculpture. Some 2,000 smaller houses, with perishable upper walls and thatch roofs, surrounded the upper-class dwellings.

Mayapan possesses thirteen carved stelae, one of which, Stela 1, features a 10 Ahau glyph probably corresponding to 11.11.0.0.0 (a.d. 1441). Its distinctive polychrome hollow ceramic figurine incensarios (Chen Mul Modeled Type) portray both Maya and central Mexican deities.

See alsoCaracol; Chichén Itzá; Landa, Diego de; Quetzal.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diego De Landa, Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, translated by Alfred M. Tozzer (1941).

H. E. D. Pollock, Ralph L. Roys, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and A. Ledyard Smith, Mayapan, Yucatán, Mexico (1962).

Robert E. Smith, The Pottery of Mayapan: Including Studies of Ceramic Materials from Uxmal, Kabah, and Chichén Itzá (1970).

Additional Bibliography

Masson, Marilyn A., Timothy S. Hare, and Carlos Peraza Lope. "Postclassic Maya Society Regenerated at Mayapán." In After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies. edited by Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006.

Pugh, Timothy W. "The Exemplary Center of the Late Postclassic Kowoj Maya." Latin American Antiquity 14, No. 4 (Dec. 2003): 408-430.

Sharer, Robert J., and Loa P Traxler. The Ancient Maya. 6th ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

                                         Jeff Karl Kowalski