An ancient Mayan monument found at Mexico’s Aguada Fénix site in 2020 has now been revealed by archaeologists as a cosmogram, a model of the universe as these ancient people understood it, constructed under what may have been an unusual political system for the region.
The Maya site lies close to Mexico’s southeastern border in the state of Tabasco and dates back to 1,000 BC. Since its discovery, the mile-long and quarter-mile-wide site has been joined by the discovery of almost 500 smaller, yet similar sites in the region, illuminating the area’s early civilization through modern technology.
Aguada Fénix
Since Aguada Fénix’s initial discovery, the work has been led by University of Arizona professors Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, culminating in a new paper recently published in Science Advances, on which both were authors. In addition to being the largest Maya construction in the region, the researchers now believe that it may also be one of the most important ceremonial sites.
In the most recent excavation, the University of Arizona team discovered a cache of ceremonial artifacts nestled in a cruciform, a type of cross-shaped pit. This collection of objects could reveal an unparalleled trove of knowledge about the Maya’s earliest rituals.
Additionally, the dig has provided new evidence that questions the traditional assertion that Mesoamerican civilization grew slowly. Aguada Fénix matches or exceeds the size of Tikal in Guatemala or Teotihuacan in central Mexico, yet predates those settlements by almost a millennium.
“What we are finding is that there was a ‘big bang’ of construction at the beginning of 1,000 B.C., which really nobody knew about,” said Inomata, a researcher in the School of Anthropology, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. “Huge planning and construction really happened at the very beginning.”
Discovering the Site
The modern story of uncovering Aguada Fénix began in 2017, when the University of Arizona team found the first clues to the site’s existence in aerial lidar scans. The laser scans produced 3D maps revealing artificial structures hidden beneath the dense jungle. This wasn’t the researchers’ first such discovery, either, as they had previously used lidar data to discern hidden Maya constructions at the Ceibal site.
“I think it’s very cool that new technologies are helping to discover these new types of architectural arrangements,” said co-author Xanti S. Ceballos Pesina. “And when you see it on the map, it’s very impressive that in the Middle Preclassic Period, people with no centralized organization or power were coming together to perform rituals and to build this massive construction.”
Cosmic Alignment
Aguada Fénix’s cosmological significance is evident in how its centerline perfectly aligns with the rising sun on October 17 and February 24, dates that mark one half of the Mesoamerican 260-day ritual calendar, according to ancient astronomical researchers. Other Maya sites display similar astronomical markings co-located with ceremonial objects. Among the ritual objects were jade axes, similar to ones recovered from other Maya ceremonial sites.
“That told us that this was really an important ritual place,” Inomata said.
Deeper in the cruciform, the researchers uncovered more times made of jade, including figures of a crocodile, a bird, and a woman giving birth. When they reached the bottom of the pit, they found the four cardinal directions were marked in small piles of blue, green, and yellow mineral pigments.
“We’ve known that there are specific colors associated with specific directions, and that’s important for all Mesoamerican people, even the Native American people in North America,” Inomata said. “But we never had actual pigment placed in this way. This is the first case that we’ve found those pigments associated with each specific direction. So that was very exciting.”
The University of Arizona team interpreted the find as an offering filled with sand and soil, dating to sometime around 900-845 BC. However, they believe the Maya probably returned later to continue adding to the cache, specifically some of the jade items. The site also revealed quite a bit of infrastructure, including causeways and corridors for navigating the island itself, as well as a dam and canals to bring in water from a nearby lagoon. Intriguingly, all of these features were laid out parallel to the site’s orientation to the sun and extended as far as six miles.
Building Aguada Fénix
While there have been many notable ceremonial analogues to sites such as Tikal, there is little evidence of political similarities. Tikal contains clear evidence of a powerful king, while Inomata interprets Aguada Fénix as likely lacking such hierarchical political leaders. Instead, intellectual leaders would have designed and planned the site based upon their astronomical observations, he suggests.
“These leaders didn’t have power to force other people,” Inomata said. “Most came probably willingly, because this idea of building a cosmogram was really important to them, and so they worked together.”
“People have this idea that certain things happened in the past – that there were kings, and kings built the pyramids, and so in modern times, you need powerful people to achieve big things,” Inomata concluded. “But once you see the actual data from the past, it was not like that. So, we don’t need really big social inequality to achieve important things.”
Establishing what life at Aguada Fénix may have been like in both the political and religious spheres offers archaeologists and anthropologists much to reconsider about the development of civilization in the region.
The paper, “Landscape-wide Cosmogram Built by the Early Community of Aguada Fénix in Southeastern Mesoamerica,” appeared in Science Advances on November 5, 2025
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on X @mdntwvlf.