Ek Balam Tour with Archeologist

When we asked K what he wanted to do in Valladolid, he said ruins, so ruins it is!

In the early 2000s, you could climb on the structures in Chichen Itza. You can't any longer, which is probably a good thing; over 2 million tourists visit Chichen Itza, which is up to 4 million feet that would be wearing down the ruins yearly. 

In Ek Balam, though, a site only 40 minutes away from Valladolid, you can still climb the structures - in fact, to get a good look at the sculptures, you have to climb the huge pyramid. 

We were lucky enough to get not just an archeologist to lead our tour of Ek Balam, but one of the first archeologists on the site when the ruins were being uncovered in the 1990s. (I repeat: in the 1990s - when Matt and I were in middle and high school, ancient buildings and tombs were being unearthed. And, as every guide tells us, pointing to hills of rocks held together with tree roots, there is still so much to uncover. History is not all figured out.) 

We had also seen an exhibition on Ek Balam at a museum in Merida, and it was very cool to see the pieces fit together. (That's the kind of thing that happens only on long travel, I think - when you've stayed a place so long that you're like, Well, what else can we do here? So you go to an exhibit on something that you're planning to see the real thing of just weeks later.) At the museum, we learned that Ek Balam's king was very interested in the arts, and the Maya calligraphy here is some of the best and most stylistic that has been found. At the Merida museums, K also learned how to read aloud a few of the symbols that have been decoded. (Maya writing has both phonetic parts, like English, but at the whole syllable level, and also hieroglyphic bits, bits that give you the meaning, not the sound, kind of like Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics. (I'm overgeneralizing a bit for simplicity - here's more if you want to know some history of the decoding, which includes some help from a 15-year-old!)

Some of the inscriptions - this one is about when the stairs were built.

Our guide helped us to see things that we probably wouldn't have envisioned without his help; there are no signs in Ek Balam. At the very first stop, he explained the chronology. He noted that even though the buildings of Ek Balam were not lived in when the Spanish arrived, Mexican people still lived in the area of Ek Balam. This message, that the Maya did not "disappear," is echoed in a lot of the other things we see down here, like the light shows, and the museum displays about spoken Mayan language still being taught in school and still being a first language of many the people in the south. 

Our guide also helped us to see the outer walls and how they helped with defending the city. It isn't a wall like the great wall of China. It's a base of rocks a little below hip height, which would have had a wooden wall on top about the height of the people who lived inside. The walls were set close together, so that attackers would have to come in single file and zig-zag; they wouldn't be able to storm in a group. The gate also had a steep, smooth slope which would have been hard for attackers to run up. We could imagine potential attackers and the people defending their city. 

Most of the buildings we've seen in ruins have been temples; I think this is the first time we've seen places where people live. There are bedrooms with stone platforms that would be a bed. They're pretty small; maybe the size of a rectangular walk-in closet, with the stone platform at the end. Our guide told us that the platform would be covered with cushions and a curtain would be across the doorway. The bedrooms are along the edge of the pyramid; the pyramid is still a solid throughout. 

At the ball court, we learned that there was only one ring because the other was in rough shape and had been sent to a museum in Merida - which we had seen! Our guide told us how we really don't know how exactly the game was played, and that it's possible everyone played a little differently. The Spanish, when the wrote about the game, wrote about the Aztecs; the Maya were not playing the game by the time the Spanish came. In the carvings at Chichen Itza, we saw players with bats, which did not seem to be part of the game as described elsewhere, and the slanted walls were too narrow and steep to play the game on; maybe they played in the flat center field. We learned that there was a religious component to the game; the Maya were re-enacting their creation myth (a very cool story, which K and I learned a little about in Storm Runner, the Maya-Percy-Jackson-esque book, supplemented with Wikipedia). It makes me think of how as a girl we would watch the nativity scenes recreated in church. We learned, though, that the game was also played recreationally by kings, because there are pottery pieces showing neighboring kings playing each other; the game didn't always end in bloody sacrifice. Our guide also threw doubt on the claim that only the winners were sacrificed, and that it was an honor. He said that this was based on an old idea that the Maya were a peaceful people, instead of just like every other culture. There is physical evidence that the sacrifices were of enemies, and the enemies would have been tortured and humiliated. There were voluntary sacrifices that were seen as a honor, but the evidence of voluntary sacrficies were the drownings in the cenotes, and these remains did not show any trauma such as decapitation. This type of sacrifice was different; it tended to be children, and the idea was not that you were killing children; you were sending children to live with the gods, in Xibalba. (X is pronounced sh here.)

Just for a soapbox break - when I learn about the Spanish being all upset about Maya human sacrifice or hear in some documentaries the Maya described as blood-thirsty, I kind of want to lose my mind. There are sacrifices in the Judeo-Christian tradition (remember Abraham?). The Spanish were straight up murdering unarmed native Mexicans. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the conflicts going on right now in Israel & Palestine and Russia's invasion of Ukraine - people and governments kill "enemies" in the name of God or nationalism or just because they want the stuff the other guy has. And we create and watch bloody, gross, violent movies for fun. All violence is terrible, but if the Maya were bloodthirsty, then maybe our current world is blood-thirsty, too. Maybe we're more similar than different. Ok, now back to your regularly programmed family travel blog. 

One of the other things I really liked learning about was what it means for archeologists to restore these structures. They use the orginal stones, they might replace wooden parts with new wooden parts of the same kind, and they use clues to see which parts might go together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. But they don't do it perfectly - they might not be able to tell if a block was at level 3, 4 steps over or level 6, 3 steps over if they're all the same kind of block, and that's ok. So it's not like they're just dusting off what lies underneathe; there's some rebuilding and puzzling going on, too. 

The best part was climbing up the biggest pyramid in the way back. This one had administrative offices and bedrooms and also had a tomb for the king. The tomb was up high and it was highly decorated with all of these cool sculptures, and then immediately covered up with stucco. That's why the sculptures are so well preserved, whereas for some of the sculptures in other ruins, you need a guide to see the carving, or an outline in black and white, because of the erosion over hundreds of years. 

The entrance to the king's tomb is a monster's mouth, with teeth and claws and two figures holding his eye lids open so that he is always watching. There are sculptures of earlier kings, too, some that had physical differences, like unequal arms or extra fingers, which was common among the royalty then and thought to be a sign of divinity. 

The Yucatan is flat, so up at the top of the pyramid, you could see incredibly far, all across the jungle. A hawk swooped down and K and me. It was super windy. The sky was so blue. It felt like the top of the world. 

After, we stopped by a cenote that was just 2 km nearby; there were bikes to borrow. We stopped partway where a couple had a set up of plastic chairs and a campfire that they cooked us banana and cheese empanadas on. The cenote had little black cat fish, some underwater rock features, stalagtites, ceiba roots hanging down, and a rope swing. M did the rope swing; I preferred to snorkel; K explored the shelf, where there were mysterious bubbles and sand clouds. After all of the climbing, it was a great way to cool off. 

Ek Balam was my favorite ruins so far; it was the last of the ruins we would see in the Yucatan. I'm so glad we got to hear from a real archeologist all about their work and what they've learned about the ancient Maya people.