Mayan monument as large as a city is discovered, but it's not attached to a king

About 3,000 years ago, people in an area known as Aguada Fénix, in what is now Tabasco, Mexico, built a flat Mayan monument nearly a mile long. It rises up to 50 feet and is the oldest and largest known monument in the Maya region.

A new study argues that this place was designed as a cosmogram, a planned layout that represents the universe.

At its center, builders created a buried ritual deposit of precious offerings, turning the ground into a map of space.

Mayan monument Aguada Fénix

The work was led by archaeologist Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on early communities across Mesoamerica, the ancient cultural region that includes parts of Mexico and Central America.

Earlier surveys at Aguada Fénix used LiDAR, a laser mapping method that reveals ground shapes beneath thick forest.

That research uncovered an enormous earthen plateau surrounded by radiating causeways and dozens of smaller ceremonial centers.

The team traced these causeways and corridors outward from the plateau, showing that they created a set of nested cross shapes around it.

A dam and long canals were part of this pattern, forming a hydraulic system, a built network that manages moving and storing water.

Measured as a whole, the cross shaped design stretches about 5.6 miles north to south and 4.7 miles east to west.

That footprint equals or exceeds some later Maya cities, but here the emphasis was a cosmic diagram on the ground, not dense housing.

Jade, pigments and birthing

At the center of the Aguada Fénix platform, archaeologists uncovered a large cross shaped pit cut down into the limestone and then filled in long ago.

Near the bottom, a smaller cross shaped hollow held blue, green, and yellow pigments in separate arms, plus carefully shaped marine shells.

Archaeologists see this as directional color symbolism, a ritual system that links certain colors to east, west, north, and south in Maya thought.

One member of the research team noted that it is the first time these pigments have been found placed in association with each specific direction.

Later offerings at the same spot included jade and greenstone pieces shaped like crocodiles, birds, and a plaque showing a woman giving birth.

By placing such intimate, everyday imagery at the core of their monument, the builders tied cosmic order to human bodies and family life.

Chemical analyses show that the blue azurite and green malachite in the cache likely came from copper rich zones far beyond the lowland forests.

Bringing those minerals, shells, and jade together in one hidden place meant weaving distant mountains, coasts, and rivers into the same ceremonial story.

Calendars written in earth and sky

The central plaza at Aguada Fénix is an E Group, a layout of western mounds facing an eastern platform for tracking the sun. Its main axis lines up with sunrises on October 17 and February 24, two dates separated by 130 days.

That span is half of a 260 day ritual calendar, a cycle of ceremonies that research traces in architecture about 3,000 years old.

At Aguada Fénix, the alignment suggests that these early builders were already tying ceremonies, farming, and human gestation to a shared rhythm of days.

Causeways raised above the ground and corridors cut into it run straight out from the plateau in the four cardinal directions, inviting long processions.

Because some corridors cross wetlands that flood during the rainy season, archaeologists think the biggest gatherings happened in the dry months.

Across Mesoamerica, many early ceremonial centers show similar alignment tricks, using sunrises and sunsets to count days and signal planting seasons.

The Aguada Fénix pattern fits that wider picture, suggesting that sky watching and calendar keeping were shared skills long before famous Maya dynasties appeared.

Building a city without kings

For all its scale, Aguada Fénix shows no palaces, royal tombs, or carved portraits of rulers, only open plazas and simple campsites.

Samples of charcoal, dated with radiocarbon dating, a method that estimates age from radioactive carbon, place its main use between about 1050 and 700 BCE.

To build the main platform and long canals, the community moved millions of cubic feet of soil, probably by hand in baskets.

Inomata and colleagues estimate that more than 1,000 people could have contributed labor, showing how shared ritual goals can organize huge projects without kings.

Even without kings, some people at Aguada Fénix probably spent all year watching the sky and coordinating ceremonies from the central plaza.

Their authority rested on knowledge rather than force, which may have helped convince visiting groups to return each season and keep building together.

Archaeologists have found very few permanent houses near the monument, suggesting that many participants came from scattered villages or mobile camps.

For them, gatherings at Aguada Fénix may have felt less like life in a city and more like a festival of building and ritual.

Lessons from Aguada Fénix

Other projects in the region tell a similar story, including canal networks in Belize that trapped fish long before later Maya cities rose.

These systems also appear to have been built by communities with limited social hierarchies, ranked layers of power in a society, highlighting cooperation.

Some canals at Aguada Fénix remain unfinished, and parts of a western plateau look like work that never quite started.

Together with the completed platform and cosmogram, they show a community experimenting with how far cooperation, belief, and observation of the sky could take them.

Together, these examples challenge the old idea that only centralized states or powerful elites can organize huge public works.

They point instead to stories where shared beliefs, regular gatherings, and strong local networks supply the planning muscle usually credited to rulers.

Aguada Fénix shows that early Mayan communities could turn earth, water, and sky into a single symbolic landscape without leaning on sharp inequality.

That past offers a starting point for thinking about how large groups might work together on projects without leaving many people behind.

The study is published in Science Advances.

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