It is also when someone buried three babies in the courtyard, each one near the corner of the altar (the fourth corner once contained offerings but no bones). Each burial required the stone floor to be broken, the small remainder was placed underneath, and the holes were filled with crushed limestone. It’s not the way most people in Tikal buried their infants, but that’s exactly how several archaeologists discovered buried in a very similar courtyard in the faraway Teotihuacan.
In other words, those who lived in this compound and used this courtyard and painted altars were probably from Teotihuacan or grew up in the Teotihuacan enclave in the sector south of Tikal. This compound is essentially in the shadows of the feathered snake pyramid of Teotihuacan and the replica of its walled square. There, archaeologists unearthed Teotihuacan-style incense burners made from local ingredients.
This rendering shows how the altar looked in its heyday.
Credit: Heatherhurst
The end of the era
The foreign enclaves of Tikal have closed based on radiocarbon dating from AD 654 between AD 550 and 654. That was when the power of the distant Teotihuacan was beginning to collapse. But simply leaving wasn’t enough. Important buildings had to be ritually “slayed” and buried. It meant burning the area around the altar, but it also meant that people buried altars, courtyards, compounds, and most enclaves of Teotihuacan in the southern Tikal, beneath a few meters of earth and tile ble.
Anyone who buried it became a problem to make the whole thing look like a natural hill. Ramirez and his colleagues say that it’s rare. Because, usually, when a building is ritually killed and abandoned, something new is built on the body.
“The Maya regularly filled the buildings and rebuilt them,” Brown University archaeologist Andrew Scheller, who co-authored the recent study, said in a statement. “But here, they buried the altar and surrounding buildings, even though they were major real estate centuries later, and left. They treated it like a monument or radioactive zone.
Ancient, 2017. doi: 10.15184/aqy.2025.3 (About DOI).
