You're coming to the end of your 10-day whirlwind tour of the Yucatan. You're leaving the Puuc Route and driving northeast out of Santa Elena and Ticul. You're stopping at the ruins of Mayapan on Highway 18 before heading back on the main highway to drop off the rental car. Don't rush - look around Mayapan for a couple hours.
Mayapan established itself in the 1200s, after the fall of Chichén Itzá located some miles to the east. As was often the case the founders of Mayapan erected their pyramids on top of and around the smaller, existing pyramids of their predecessors. 19th-Century archaeologists called everyone they found on the Yucatan Peninsula "Maya" after having discovered the ruins of Mayapan. The name stuck.
Mayapan's greatest asset back in the 1200s was abundant fresh water: within the old city boundaries archaeologists have found 26 cenotes (natural limestone sinkholes that act as cisterns). I'm guessing that even in the 1200s, the climate was growing hotter and drier. Oh if they could only see it now.
Scholars like Coe don't think much of Mayapan's architecture, calling it a "smaller, shoddier version of Chichén Itzá." Certainly by the 1200s the Mayan political and economic structure was declining, and the climate was changing; so there were at least those factors that could have influenced quick and cheap construction of public buildings. Never seen THAT before. None of this diminishes Mayapan's impact on the casual tourist, however. Especially since you've already visited some museums on this trip that display some very impressive artifacts excavated from...cheaper, shoddier Mayapan.
Mayapan's main pyramid is the Temple of Kukulcan and OK, it's a copy of the Castillo at Chichén Itzá. There is also an observatory that may or may not be a ripoff of the design of Chichén Itzá's observatory. Fine. Yes, and there are temples with long rows of columns, just like in....[sigh]. Well, at least in Mayapan, you can still climb on the ruins and enter the observatory. So there.
You want to know what else Mayapan has, that no other Mayan ruin can comes close to? Vast amounts of impeccably preserved stucco, still in its original colors. If you've never seen what the color "Mayan blue" refers to, here it is, on one Mayapan palace's interior wall:
There's more stucco in the colonnaded halls Mayapan allegedly copied from Chichén Itzá. Unlike Chichén Itzá's plain columns, Mayapan placed life-size stucco replicas of warriors in front of each and every column, each warrior facing the main plaza. Judging from the photo the warriors seem to have been GB's size, which for a petite folk like the Maya means that these stucco warrior gentlemen must have been very...imposing.
You find the most impressive stucco work all up and along the walls of the south side of the Temple of Kukulcan. The stucco here is crafted into life-size forms of warriors, each with a different pose and different set of clothing, suggesting to me they were fashioned in the likenesses of real people. Except, where the warriors' heads should be? There is no stucco - just a wee stucco-lined niche, about the size of an actual decapitated head of an actual warrior. Where it looks like the actual decapitated heads of actual warriors were actually displayed. And the stucco ribs are pushing through the stucco person's skin and clothing, and their stucco hands look like they're waving "Hi!" but the stucco birds are picking at the fingers...
YEESH.
Protip: if a Mayan ever asks you to sit for a portrait, SAY NO.
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