The only Maya city with an urban grid may embody a creation myth

For years, archaeologist Timothy Pugh thought he was simply following the cows as he walked across the site of Nixtun-Ch’ich’, an ancient Maya city in northern Guatemala. The site, whose name means, roughly, “a rocky place,” is located on a peninsula that juts out like a pointed finger into Lake Petén Itzá. It is now part of a cattle ranch, covered with tall grass—perfect grazing land. Most of the other Maya sites in the area are obscured by dense thickets of jungle, so this was a lucky break for Pugh and his colleagues. Still, the nearly knee-high vegetation wasn’t easy to move through. Pugh tended to follow the paths the cattle had already created as they tamped the grasses down with their hooves while they grazed, picking their way between mounds containing the remains of ancient ceremonial platforms up to 13 feet high.

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Rice knew, therefore, that Nixtun-Ch’ich’, like many other Middle Preclassic Maya cities, was probably built to be a kind of sacred landscape, embodying religious beliefs and creating a space for the community to celebrate them. The pairing of the cenote and the E-group was a feature of the urban plan that clearly had mythological significance. So, she wondered, could the grid also have its roots in Maya mythology?



From a cosmological perspective, the city’s location on a peninsula was evocative. Creatures that could move between land and water carried particular symbolic weight in Maya mythology, and were considered beings that could straddle the Earth and the underworld. In fact, a common origin myth throughout Mesoamerica involved a crocodile floating in a primordial sea. At the Maya city of Palenque, for example, glyphs specifically describe this creature as a crocodile with a hole in its back. According to the myth, the gods slit its throat, and in the torrent of blood the Earth was created from its body. When Rice imagined the peninsula of Nixtun-Ch’ich’ as a crocodile sliding into the lake, the grid suddenly took on a new meaning. “Scales,” she thought—the regularly spaced city blocks were the crocodiles’ scales. The cenote was the hole in the back of the sacred crocodile whose body would form the world. A defensive wall, lined with a ditch, that runs 1,000 feet north to south near the eastern tip of the peninsula, could have represented the gash the gods made in the crocodile’s neck. “Here we had this myth about a crocodile with a hole in its back floating in a primordial sea, and its throat being cut,” says Rice. “And I look at the map of Nixtun-Ch’ich’, and, my gosh, it’s there!”