🇬🇹 Guatemala · Petén and the north
Uaxactún is at once a Maya archaeological site and a small jungle village in Petén, some 23 km north of Tikal, at the end of a dirt road that pushes into the Maya Biosphere Reserve. It was one of the most studied Maya cities in history: here, in the 1920s, the Carnegie Institution carried out the first major scientific excavations of a Maya site, laying the foundations of modern archaeology in the region.
Its great jewel is Group E, considered the first identified Maya astronomical 'observatory': a pyramid-and-platform arrangement aligned so that, viewed from a fixed point, the sun rises exactly over certain temples at the solstices and equinoxes. This pattern, now called an 'E-Group complex', was later recognized at dozens of Maya sites. Visiting on an equinox, with the sunrise framed by the temples, is a unique experience.
This guide covers the practical side of Uaxactún: how to get there (almost always via Tikal), what to see in its architectural groups, what the village is like —also famous for the chicle, allspice and xate harvested in the jungle— and how to organize the visit, ideally combining it with Tikal or using it as a launching point for the great expedition to El Mirador.
Uaxactún was a Maya city occupied from the Middle Preclassic to the Late Classic, celebrated for its astronomical Group E and for having been, in the 1920s, the scene of the first systematic scientific excavations in the Maya world, carried out by the Carnegie Institution. Its modern name was coined by the archaeologist Sylvanus Morley. The city was first a rival and later a vassal of neighboring Tikal, which conquered it in AD 378 in an episode linked to the arrival of influences from Teotihuacan. Today it is both an archaeological site and a jungle village living from forest products such as chicle and xate.
Read the full history ↓The vast jungle department of the north, cradle of Maya civilisation: home to Tikal, El Mirador, Yaxhá and dozens of thousand-year-old cities, to Tayasal, the last independent Maya kingdom (defeated in 1697), and to the enormous Maya Biosphere Reserve.
Read the history of Petén →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1916, the American archaeologist Sylvanus Morley pushed into the jungle of northern Petén on the trail of a lost city and found a stela with a date carved in the Maya calendar that appeared to be the oldest known at the time. He needed a name for the site, which had no modern one. Morley combined the Maya words 'waxac' (eight) and 'tun' (stone, and also the 360-day period), and christened the place Uaxactún, 'Eight Stone', in reference to that baktun 8 inscription. But the name also carried a private wink: it sounded rather like 'Washington', home of the Carnegie Institution that funded his expeditions. And so one of the most important cities in Maya archaeology bears a name that is at once an ancient date and an in-house joke.
What Morley couldn't have imagined is that this city with its invented name would become the cornerstone of all modern Maya archaeology. Uaxactún sits some 23 km north of Tikal, inside what is now the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Its occupation goes back to the Middle Preclassic, around 600 BC, when farming communities settled the area, and continued unbroken for more than a thousand years, into the Late Classic. Over that time it became a center of remarkable importance, with great Preclassic ceremonial complexes —such as the celebrated pyramid E-VII-sub, faced in white stucco and flanked by enormous masks representing the Jaguar of the Underworld (the night sun)— and, later, with Classic-period acropolises and palaces. The city's original Maya name, according to the inscriptions, would have been something else, tied to its emblem glyph.
If Uaxactún holds a place of honor in the history of archaeology it is, above all, for its Group E. This is a complex made up of a pyramid to the west (E-VII) and a long platform to the east, on which stand three small temples. The researchers who studied it in the 1920s noticed that, observing from the pyramid, the sun rose exactly over the central temple at the equinoxes and over the end temples at the solstices. Here was tangible proof that the Maya had built architectural complexes to observe and mark the movements of the sun through the year.
The finding had enormous repercussions: the pattern was named the 'E-Group complex' (after this very group at Uaxactún) and, once identified here, archaeologists recognized it at dozens of Maya sites in the Lowlands, many of them far older. Today there is debate over whether all these complexes had a strictly astronomical function or whether many were, above all, ceremonial spaces with strong solar and calendrical symbolism. Either way, Uaxactún's Group E remains the emblematic example and the starting point for the study of astronomy in Maya architecture.
Uaxactún's political history was dominated by its relationship with powerful neighboring Tikal, barely a day's walk to the south. For much of the Preclassic and the Early Classic, the two cities were rivals for control of the region. That rivalry culminated in a celebrated episode: in AD 378, according to the inscriptions, Tikal subdued Uaxactún in an event known as the 'entrada' (in Maya, tied to the lord Siyaj K'ak', 'Fire Is Born'), which most specialists connect with the arrival of political and military influences from the distant metropolis of Teotihuacan, in central Mexico.
From then on, Uaxactún was subordinate to Tikal and within the orbit of the new dynasty installed in the region. The city remained inhabited and kept building through the Classic, but its trajectory was bound to that of its powerful neighbor. With the Classic Maya collapse, between the 8th and 9th centuries AD, Uaxactún —like Tikal and so many others— steadily emptied, and the jungle ended up covering its temples and plazas for centuries.
Uaxactún occupies a founding place in modern Maya archaeology. Between 1926 and 1937, the Carnegie Institution of Washington carried out there the first major scientific and systematic excavations of a Maya site, under the direction of Oliver Ricketson and with the participation of figures such as Sylvanus Morley and Edith Bayles Ricketson. It was the region's first large-scale architectural excavation to combine the analysis of artifacts and ceramics with dating and a detailed interpretation of the construction chronology. The stratigraphic work made it possible, for the first time, to establish a sequence of Lowland Maya ceramic styles running from the Formative to the Classic (roughly 300 BC–AD 900). Before radiocarbon dating became widespread, that sequence was the most reliable tool for dating sites across the whole region, and it remains the starting point for almost every chronology since. Those campaigns marked the shift from the adventurous exploration of the 19th century to a methodical archaeology: at Uaxactún, the 'dirt archaeology' of the Maya world was born.
In parallel, a village grew up beside the ruins tied to one of the great economies of the Petén jungle: chicle. Uaxactún developed as a chiclero camp —the sapodilla sap used to make chewing gum was flown out from an airstrip cut into the jungle, around which the settlement is still laid out today. When industrial demand for chicle fell away, the community diversified its livelihood toward allspice and xate (an ornamental palm harvested in the jungle and exported for floral arrangements). Today Uaxactún combines its dual status as archaeological site and living village of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, and it is also one of the starting points for expeditions to the great Preclassic city of El Mirador.
After the Classic collapse, the Petén jungle swallowed Uaxactún for more than a thousand years. Its temples became mounds covered in roots and its plazas a green carpet, until Morley and the chicleros cutting trails in search of sapodilla stumbled on them again at the start of the 20th century. That's one of Petén's paradoxes: it was the chicle gatherers, not the archaeologists, who first walked among the ruins again, because the very trees that yielded the chewing gum grew on top of the dead cities.
Today Uaxactún is one of the most rewarding Maya sites for anyone after archaeology without the crowds. While Tikal receives hundreds of visitors a day, here it's normal to walk Group E, Groups A and B and the pyramid E-VII-sub practically alone, with the sound of howler monkeys and toucans in the background. The visit is almost always combined with Tikal —23 km away on dirt road— and those who stay overnight in the village's rustic guesthouses can get up early to watch, at the March and September equinoxes, the sunrise line up over the central temple of Group E, exactly as Maya astronomers observed it more than two thousand years ago. It is also one of the gateways to the great jungle expedition to El Mirador. Uaxactún brings together, in a single place, the science that founded Maya archaeology, the living culture of the forest and one of the cleanest skies in Central America.