From Coba, we backtracked a little to the west to reach the site of Ek Balam, the last Mayan city we would visit on this trip. Ek Balam is a small, compact site, only partially excavated. But the main building, Structure I, also known as the Acropolis, is a marvelous display of Mayan art. The Mayans commonly built new buildings over existing structure; often a new layer would be built over an existing structure in 52 year intervals. At Structure I, this meant that the lastest wall was built over the older temple, which fortunately preserved the older artwork in beautiful detail. In 1990, when trying to remove a tree growing on the Acropolis, workers accidently dislodged the outer wall and discovered the well preserved freize beneath - a fortuitious accident indeed!

We spent our afternoon wandering through all the buildings at Ek Balam and admiring the artwork. It really is unique, so I am glad we were able to visit this site.

From a sign at the Ek Balam entrance:

Ek'Balam is a Yucatec Maya name - which may be translated as the bright jaguar or bright star-jaguar. The enormous dimesions of the buildings are what stand out at this site, as well as the fact that the central part is surrounded by two walls, an uncommon attribute. The most important structures are found within the walled enclosure of less than one square kilometer and are distributed within two large, connected plazas, refered to as the Central and South Plazas. Numerous constructions of different sizes are found around there.

The walls have five entrances in different sections of it perifery and five sak be'oo (roads) which depart from them in direction of the four cardinal points. The south side of the wall is a special case, as it has two entrances and two sak be'oob.

The most important cultural period at Ek'Balam was the Late Classic (700-1000 A.D.); however, the early inhabitants arrived earlier and remained living there until after 900 A.D., as demonstrated by a few small constructions built after this date. Their characteristics are very different from the older buildings, which makes it clear that the society suffered some changes and dedicated less resources and work to construction.

All the graphic images are my own design, but the textured background is taken from a site, EOS development, that offers non-profit users free use of their graphics. Click below to visit their site.