Why go
El Castillo, the Temple of the Warriors and the Great Ballcourt are easier to read when you know that restoration shaped their present appearance. The history of the Sacred Cenote also raises questions about the removal and study of objects found there.
The full story
John Lloyd Stephens brought Chichen Itza to a broad readership with his 1843 account of travels in Yucatán; Frederick Catherwood’s images showed monuments amid vegetation. Désiré Charnay photographed the site in the 1860s, and Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon excavated a reclining figure in 1875 that became known as a Chac Mool. Teobert Maler and Alfred Maudslay added extensive photographic records in the 1880s. Edward Herbert Thompson later explored the ruins and dredged the Sacred Cenote from 1904 to 1910, recovering objects and human remains. Much of what he recovered went to Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and the Mexican government later accused him of removing artifacts unlawfully. A Carnegie Institution program authorized in 1923 worked on the Temple of the Warriors and El Caracol, while Mexican teams restored El Castillo and the Great Ballcourt. Research continued after these major campaigns, including excavation beside El Castillo begun in 2009 to study earlier construction. The visible site is therefore both a Maya city and a record of changing archaeological methods.