Tulum Caribbean Archeological Maya

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Photography by Bill Bell

Tulum ( (Tulu'um in Modern Maya) ; in Spanish orthography, Tulum) is the site of a Pre-Columbian Maya walled city serving as a major port for Cobá. The ruins are located on 12-meter (39 ft) cliffs, along the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula on the Caribbean Sea in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. One of the best-preserved coastal Maya sites, Tulum is today a popular site for tourists.The Maya site may have been formerly also known by the name Zama, meaning city of Dawn. Tulúm is also the Yucatec Mayan word for fence or wall (or trench), and the walls surrounding the site allowed the Tulum fort to serve as a defense against invasion. From the numerous depictions in murals and other works around the site, Tulum appears to have been an important site for the worship of the Diving or Descending god.

Tulum Quintana Roo Mexico Mayan Ruins

The city was first mentioned by Juan Díaz, part of Juan de Grijalva's expedition of 1518.[1] The first detailed description of the ruins was published by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in 1843 in the book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood first visited Tulum in the mid-19th century AD. As they arrived from the sea John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood first saw a tall building that impressed them greatly. This was most likely the great Castillo of the site. They made accurate maps of the site’s wall and other buildings while Catherwood made some stunning sketches of the Castillo, along with others, which would have been as close to a photograph as possible at the time. Stephens and Catherwood also discovered an early classic stela at the site that had an inscribed date of AD 564 that was most likely brought in from a nearby town to be reused. Work conducted at Tulum continued with that of Sylvanus Morley and George P. Howe beginning in 1913. The work was continued by the Carnegie Institution from 1916 to 1922, Samuel Lothrop in 1924 who also mapped the site, Miguel Angel Fernandez in the late 30s and early 40s, William Sanders in 1955, and then later in the 1970s by Arthur G. Miller. Through these investigations done by Sanders and Miller it has been determined that Tulum was occupied by the late Postclassic around AD 1200. The site continued to be occupied until contact with the Spanish was made in the early 16th century with the site being abandoned completely by the end of the 16th century.[