ABSTRACT
The pre-Columbian pilgrimage destination and now archaeological-tourist site of Chichén Itzá owns innumerable distinctions. Not the largest of ancient Mayan sites nor, by any assessment, the most architecturally beautiful, Chichén Itzá is, and has been for the past several hundred years, the most high-profile and oft-visited of Mayaland ruins. Forever located on a main Yucatan thoroughfare, the long-abandoned city figures large in the accounts of 16th-century conquistadors and priests, 19th-century antiquarians, and 20th-century archeologists, including those who, from the 1920s through to the 1940s, made this the base of operations for a huge Carnegie Institution of Washington initiative to explore the entire Mayan zone. More recently and at present, the great Maya capital, the least pristine and most “Disneyfied” of Mesoamerican ruins, continues to be the object of on-going excavations and major reconstruction efforts in parts of the ancient city that remain hidden from all but the most intrepid tourists. 1
