Thompson's Dredging and What It Recovered

Edward Herbert Thompson, an American who served as United States consul to Yucatan and purchased the hacienda containing the Chichen Itza ruins, began systematically dredging the Sacred Cenote in 1904 using a mechanical bucket dredge, later supplementing that work with early diving equipment, recovering thousands of artifacts over more than a decade of intermittent work and shipping much of it to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, a removal that later became a point of dispute between Mexico and the United States over cultural property. Thompson's methods were crude by later archaeological standards, disturbing stratigraphy and context in ways that limited what could be learned from many of the finds.

More careful investigation followed in the twentieth century, notably a National Geographic Society sponsored diving expedition in the 1960s using modern scuba equipment and controlled recovery methods, which recovered further material and allowed more systematic study of the cenote's contents and their distribution. Together, the two phases of excavation established the Sacred Cenote as one of the richest single sources of Postclassic Maya ritual material recovered anywhere, confirming through physical evidence what colonial-era written sources, including Diego de Landa, had already described about offerings cast into the cenote.