A joint Slovenian-Mexican archeological team has discovered an undisturbed Mayan city in a remote area of Campeche, Mexico. Located deep within the jungles of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, the city—which the researchers have named “Minanbé,” a Maya Yucatec phrase meaning “there is no road”—had been hidden by vegetation for over a thousand years.
The site features a 43-foot-high pyramid temple (about the height of a four-story apartment building), and 14 carved altars and stelae, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which authorized the expedition. The discovery is the culmination of lead archaeologist Ivan Šprajc’s three-decade-long exploration of the Central Maya Lowlands, home to between 9 and 11 million people during the Maya civilization’s Late Classic period (600–900 CE).
This year’s expedition followed on the team’s discovery, in 2013, of the Mayan city of Chactún. Airborne LiDAR mapping of the area had shown a 37-acre urban center under the forest canopy just east of Chactún, with squares surrounded by palaces and temples, terraces, and hydraulic channels.
To conduct a surface reconnaissance of Minanbé, the archaeologists and community workers cleared a path with machetes for three miles, then advanced on foot and by ATVs to the site. The absence of old logging roads leading there was a good sign, said Šprajc. “Compared to other places where we did surface surveys,” he noted, “access here was much more difficult; however, in the last three years, this is the first one we’ve found intact, with no signs of looting.”
Archaeologists Atasta Flores Esquivel, Israel Chato López, Quintín Hernández Gómez, and Vitan Vujanović carried out the physical survey of Minanbé. Speaking of the pyramidal temple, Vujanović said it had the characteristics of classic Río Bec style, a form of Maya architecture of the 7th to 12th centuries cE. “This is the first time I have recorded a temple that is more or less well-preserved,” he said.
Of particular interest is Stele 1, which depicts a decapitation scene, as well as a calendrical sign with the date 5 Ajaw (849 CE). “This is an important clue,” notes the project’s epigraphist, Octavio Esparza Olguín, “because we can assume that the entire group of monuments, or some of them, were erected during that period of the Terminal Classic, close to the abandonment of the sites in the region, which occurred in the 10th century [CE].”
Also noteworthy is an altar that appears to have been intentionally broken. It has hieroglyphic cartouches on its sides and the figure of a ruler with a feathered headdress. One of the hieroglyphic texts contains part of a Long Count date that likely refers to a period in the late 7th century CE, making it one of the earliest inscriptions in the region. Its defacement raises the possibility of an incursion by groups from the northern Yucatán Peninsula to the abandoned city.
The discovery of Minanbé is one of several in the Campeche region that have been found via LiDAR in recent years.
