Secondly, if we are with a manual or excursion group, I will frequently use images as an excuse to distance myself from the pre-packaged experience, deliberately tuning out the whole lot round me. I attempt to envision the metropolis because it changed into 1200 years ago, bustling with pastime because the Belize Valley region’s pinnacle Maya civic ceremonial center.
Lastly, I believe the reverence neighborhood citizens have to have felt as they gazed up on the pyramid regarded as “El Castillo” (the second one tallest shape in Belize, at a hundred thirty feet). I do my fine to disregard our contemporary-day global of computers, cars, and mobileular phones, in order that I can attempt to discover the Mayan ruins of Xunantunich thru the eyes of a person from the after and Terminal Classic eras.
This is how I try to see the metropolis, now no longer simply as an historic archaeological relic from a few remote past, however as a tangible tie to our contemporary-day idea of “civilization.”
The History of Xunantunich
Xunantunich is positioned on pinnacle of a ridge above the Mopan River, approximately eighty miles west of Belize City withinside the Cayo District. You ought to take a quick ride (50-60 feet) on a hand-cranked ferry throughout the river to get to the site, that’s positioned simply one kilometer east of the Guatemalan border. But the ferry is loose (even in matter you self-drive), and the doorway loose to peer the historic Mayan ruins is simply 10 BZD.
There’s proof to signify the metropolis changed into settled as early because the ceramic segment of the Preclassic period, which lasted from round a thousand BC to four hundred AD. But it wasn’t till Xunantunich mounted a political reference to the close by metropolis of Naranjo (in Guatemala’s Petén Basin) someday among 670 and 750 AD that it certainly started to grow.
Compared to a number of the opposite important Mayan sites, the records of Xunantunich is fairly quick in phrases of human habitation. Archaeologists agree with that creation of the primary homes started round 800 AD, simply as Naranjo and different Mayan civilizations have been starting to crumble. Some have counseled that Xunantunich’s hilltop place gave it a strategic advantage, making it an awful lot less difficult to defend.
The middle metropolis– which incorporates six plazas, extra than dozens palaces and temples, pok ta pok ball courts, and loads of mounds which might be nevertheless but to be unearthed– is round one rectangular mile and crafted from limestone rock raised from the ridge upon which it sits. But it is surrounded with the aid of using fertile farmland that after contained villages divided into own circle of relatives corporations, all of which have been economically self-sufficient.
Some historians have theorized that Xunantunich grew swiftly after Naranjo faltered, as counseled with the aid of using the important creation efforts on Structure Al, the Castillo (Str. A6), and different homes. But the ultimate date formally recorded at Xunantunich (on Stela 9) is 830AD.
Though constructing pastime endured into the Early Postclassic period (AD 900-a thousand), the tempo of boom slowed dramatically. There is proof to signify that the population all through this period may also honestly had been smaller corporations who moved in after the Mayan citizens had deserted Xunantunich altogether.
