Digging Deeper Into Aguada Fénix, the Oldest and Largest Maya Monument in Mexico

Recent discoveries in an archaeological site in Mexico sheds new light into the beginning of the Maya civilization, and how they perceived the passage of time

A large mound that looked like a natural hill in the state of Tabasco, in southwestern Mexico, turned out to be the largest prehispanic construction in the Maya area to date.

Named Aguada Fénix, the construction, as well as a series of canals, roads, and a dam built on the shore of a lagoon, was first located by researchers in 2017 while looking for indications of prehispanic settlements in the area, conventionally called the western Maya lowlands, where other Maya sites have been found.

Led by anthropology professors Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan of the University of Arizona, the team of archaeologists first used LiDAR to examine the site. After two years of excavations and analysis they got a better picture of the magnitude of the construction: between 10 and 15 meters high (around the height of a four or five-story building), 1,400 meters long and 400 meters wide, it is by far the largest Maya construction found to date. Radiocarbon dating estimates that it was built and renovated between 1050 and 700 BC.

"To study an area this large was unthinkable until a few years ago," Inomata said when he first published the Aguada Fénix findings in 2020. "LiDAR is transforming archaeology."

This discovery raised more questions about the origin of this Mesoamerican civilization, which spread across the south of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. It also provides evidence that the Maya may have been contemporaneous with the Olmec civilization; Aguada Fénix is in an area close to the Olmec region, and has similar features to other Olmec sites, like San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, Mexico.

“There have always been many debates over whether Maya civilization developed individually or with Olmec influence,” says Inomata.

So, what was Aguada Fénix built for? And who used it?

In a recent paper, Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southwest Mexico, published in Science Advances, the researchers go deeper into the center of the site to learn its purposes.

Up until recently, it was believed that the Maya would build great monuments for their elite and ruling heads, but Aguada Fénix seemed to have been designed to be a cosmogram, likely built by the community to celebrate public events and rituals.

“A cosmogram is a representation of the order of the universe, including space and time,” explains Inomata. “We think of it this way because the site is designed based on two intersecting axes in the directions of north, south, east and west.”

The east-west axis of the site aligns with the direction of the sunrises on the 17th of October and the 24th of February, which are separated by 130 days, half of the 260-day cycle of the Mesoamerican ritual calendar. This indicates that the place was used as a ritual site during important days in the Maya calendar.

“In the central complex, ritual specialists standing on the western mound could chart the directions of the sunrises over the eastern long building throughout the year,” said co-author Ashley Sharpe, a staff archaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute studying the history of peoples and cultures in the Americas.

In the plaza between the western mound and the eastern long building, the researchers found a pit in the shape of a cross, which the builders cut into the main plateau or platform, to be used for ritual deposits.

“This pit in the center of the platform is very large, and though there are also cross-shaped pits at other sites, this is the biggest,” points out Inomata.

“We excavated in the main plateau, going down to a depth of eight meters, which helped us understand a lot about this platform,” said co-author Verónica Vázquez López, a Mexican archaeologist from the Institute of Archaeology at the University College London, who has worked in Aguada Fénix since 2018.

In addition to the large cruciform pit, the plaza contained multiple caches, holes or cavities made to place objects for a ritual and then were buried to be hidden. These caches show that people conducted rituals repeatedly in this location. Items found in these deposits varied from axe-shaped clay objects, jade axes, ceramic vessels, and greenstone ornaments shaped like a crocodile, a bird, and a human female giving birth.

At the very bottom of the cruciform pit, archaeologists found another smaller pit, also in the shape of a cross, dug down into the bedrock. It contained three colored pigments and other objects laid out to match the cardinal points, the earliest known directional color symbolism in Mesoamerica.

“The cross shape and the colors are important in a lot of the Native American groups,” Sharpe says. “In a later period, each color would usually be associated with a specific cardinal point, but in this case the colors were different.”

The later Maya used white to represent the north, red for the east, yellow for the south, and black for the west. In Aguada Fénix, a blue azurite pigment was found in the north, green pigment made of malachite was laid in the east, and yellow pigment made of ochre was placed in the south, along with a valve of marine pearl oyster, which has a yellow golden color. No pigment was found in the western part, but there were an Atlantic milk conch and a valve of marine spiny oyster, which are naturally red. Another possibility would be that these shells could have represented water, as the later Maya associated the western direction with death and the watery underworld.

Next steps

To find out whether people who visited and used Aguada Fénix also took up residence near it, researchers have also been exploring the constructions surrounding the platform: the four sections of an unfinished canal extending to the west from Laguna Naranjito, a shallow body of water that has recently dried up.

“We have been researching the ceremonial areas, but now we are shifting our focus to the possible residential areas,” Inomata says. “We don’t know whether people lived there permanently, or how, and we want to focus on that. Some people may have been sedentary, staying at Aguada Fénix to observe the sun and stars, but many other people perhaps only came to help with construction and to be part of a ceremony and then left.”

Those mobile people may have come to Aguada Fénix during the dry season, as a place of gathering and adoration.

“We have been searching for possible houses, and we had several excavations in different points near the platform with that objective,” says co-author Melina García, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“We found a lot of trash, that could be from people living in houses or from feasts celebrated during rituals, like ceramics and animal bones and shells,” she adds.

The researchers suggest that community leaders with specialized skills and knowledge likely lived there year-round to do astronomical observations. These leaders could have also persuaded people to come to build the structures, and to participate in rituals. They may have also been essential in acquiring the objects, like the greenstone ornaments and pigments, to place in the ritual deposits.

These leaders were respected by people as holders of astronomical and other esoteric knowledge. Thus, they eventually became the prototype of future Maya rulers, who were seen as the embodiment of universal orders.

There are still many questions, but one thing is clear: Aguada Fénix was an ambitious project, and the place was used for a relatively short period of approximately 350 years. These findings help us understand the remarkable efforts and achievements that those early people made, and shed light on an obscure period of Mesoamerican history.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The institute furthers the understanding of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. Promo video.

Reference: Inomata, T. et al. 2025. Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southeastern Mesoamerica. Science Advances. 11, eaea2037. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea2037

Vanessa Crooks | Read More

Vanessa Crooks is a bilingual journalist and writer located in Panama City, Panama, working to bring science to all audiences. She is also an illustrator, graphic designer and animator.