Massive 3,000-year-old Maya site in Mexico depicts the cosmos and the ‘order of the universe’.
Aguada Fénix is located in the state of Tabasco, Mexico. This archaeological site is known for being the largest and oldest Mayan structure discovered to date.
A 3,000-year-old Maya site is actually a giant, city-size map depicting the “order of the universe,” researchers say. The ruin, in what is now southeastern Mexico, was a cosmogram — a representation of how ancient people at the site viewed the cosmos, a new study suggests.
The site, known as Aguada Fénix, is the “oldest and largest monumental architecture in the Maya area” and is larger than many ancient cities in Mesoamerica, according to the researchers’ study. Although its construction was a major endeavor, its cultural significance likely motivated people to help construct it, meaning its builders were probably not coerced into labor, the researchers suggested.
In effect, building Aguada Fénix may have been a celebrated communal activity for ancient people, just like Stonehenge likely was in prehistoric England.
Aguada Fénix dates to 1050 B.C., before the Maya’s writing system was invented, so there are no written records of the site. It was abandoned around 700 B.C. Scientists investigated the site between 2020 and 2024 to gain a deeper understanding of it. They not only excavated Aguada Fénix but also used lidar (light detection and ranging), a technique in which lasers are pulsed out from an aircraft, and the reflected light is then measured and used to create imagery of the landscape.
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Source: Science.org
