Under a Maya ball court, archaeologists in Mexico have uncovered a fascinating underground building with painted walls.
While digging the ball court—the venue for the ceremonial game of ball played by the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples—the team discovered the building.
“We located parts of an earlier building that had painted walls, but only further excavations may reveal the shape of that underlying building and what its function was,” the excavation’s director, Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist at Slovenia’s Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, said.
The finding is “evidently a very important structure, because ball courts are normally found only at major Maya sites, which were centers of the regional political organization,” Šprajc stated in an email. According to a translated statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, the edifice may have been built in the Early Classic period (A.D. 200–600) and is coated in a coating of painted stucco.
In the past, Šprajc and his associates used lidar—a method that uses millions of laser pulses fired from an aircraft—to study a sizable portion of the Maya Lowlands in the Mexican state of Campeche. The topography of the terrain may then be mapped by researchers thanks to these pulses that bounce off the ground and back to the aircraft’s equipment.
“We have found several ancient Maya settlements, with remains of residential buildings and temple pyramids,” Šprajc added. The team discovered Ocomtún in 2023, a long-lost Maya metropolis with multiple massive pyramids dating back to the Maya Classic era (between A.D. 200 and 900). According to him, the newly discovered location lies in an uncharted region south of Ocomtún.
According to the statement, the crew also found another site that had a rectangular water reservoir, a 52-foot-high (16-meter) pyramid, and a plaza. Archaeologists discovered several offerings atop the pyramid, including pottery vessels, a ceramic animal leg that might have belonged to an armadillo, and a spear point or knife made of chert.
According to Šprajc, these offerings “were deposited on top of the temple in the Late Postclassic period (last centuries before the arrival of Spanish conquerors),” which lasted from 1250 to 1524.
The central Maya Lowlands were already a politically chaotic region by the Late Postclassic. Yet individuals “remained in the area after the crisis that led to the drastic demographic decrease in the 9th and 10th centuries, caused by overpopulation, soil depletion, climatic change (prolonged droughts) and destructive warfare,” according to him.
“The offering indicates that, even after most of the Classic period Maya settlements had been abandoned, small and impoverished human groups were still rambling around, putting offerings on or near the buildings of their forebears,” Šprajc said.