Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza

The northern Yucatan peninsula has no rivers on its surface; rainfall drains almost immediately through the region's porous limestone bedrock into an underground water table, reaching the surface only through natural sinkholes called cenotes, and this made cenotes both the region's principal water source and, for the Maya, a natural point of contact with the watery underworld and the deities associated with rain and fertility, chief among them Chaac. The Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, separated from the city's main ceremonial plaza by a raised stone causeway built specifically to connect them, was maintained as a dedicated site of offering rather than a source of drinking water, its counterpart, a second cenote closer to the city center, served the practical function instead.

Drought anxiety appears to have driven much of the votive activity at the Sacred Cenote, and the range and value of recovered offerings, jade beads and figurines, gold discs worked with elaborate scenes, worked shell, textiles, copal incense, alongside the human remains of both adults and children, indicates a site treated as capable of carrying petitions directly to the rain gods in a way ordinary ritual space could not.

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.