Archaeologists Say They've Found a 3,000-Year-Old Map of the Cosmos at an Ancient Maya Site in Mexico

New research sheds light on a cross-shaped pit found at Aguada Fénix, a monumental complex discovered several years ago

Mary Randolph - Staff Contributor

November 13, 2025 2:19 p.m.

Experts think the cross-shaped pit reflects the Maya view of the universe. University of Arizona

Five years ago, archaeologists announced they had discovered a massive Maya structure in southeastern Mexico. Built between 1000 and 800 B.C.E., the complex is known as Aguada Fénix, and researchers are still unraveling its secrets.

“The question was, ‘Why was it built?’” says Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona and leader of the excavation, to Scientific American’s Humberto Basilio.

Now, Inomata’s team has published a study in the journal Science Advances that answers some of those questions.

After the discovery, excavations revealed a cross-shaped pit, which features a network of passageways and canals coming out from it. Archaeologists say this structure is a cosmogram, or a map of how ancient Maya communities perceived the universe.

“Based on what we know of Mesoamerican science and religion, the cruciform pit would have anchored everything to the cosmos,” David Stuart, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved with the study, tells Scientific American. “It helped to make it a sacred space for the community that built it.”

Researchers think the ancient Maya associated each cardinal direction with a color. University of Arizona

Inside the pit, researchers found colored pigments that correspond with the four cardinal directions. For instance, blue is used to mark north, while yellow is associated with south.

Additionally, the east-west axis of the structure aligns with the sunrise on October 17 and February 24—“a 130-day span that probably represents half of the 260-day cycle of the Mesoamerican ritual calendar,” according to a statement from the university.

The monumental structure was built many years before the development of ancient Maya hierarchies. As such, researchers think Aguada Fénix wasn’t constructed using forced labor. If more than 1,000 workers came together to complete the project, the structure could have been finished “within several years,” according to the researchers.

“We have this perception that to do a big thing, you have to have hierarchical organization, and that’s the way it happened in the past,” Inomata explains to CNN’s Katie Hunt. “But now we are getting an image of the past which is different.”

Inside the cross-shaped pit, researchers also found jade sculptures of a crocodile, a bird and potentially a woman during childbirth. They say these items reflect everyday experiences, providing additional evidence for the lack of hierarchy.

“Usually, if you have kings or rulers, they are represented in sculptures or paintings, or they live in big palaces,” Inomata tells Benjamin Taub of IFL Science. “We don't have any of those at Aguada Fénix.”

In the early stages of the research, the archaeologists used lidar, a technique that involves emitting pulsed lasers from an airplane and measuring how long it takes them to return. Using this data, experts can create a map of the landscape’s surface.

Quick fact: How archaeologists use lidar

In a study published earlier this year, a researcher used lidar scans to reveal traces of a 600-year-old city in southern Mexico.

Technologies like lidar are helping archaeologists uncover traces of history that are hiding in plain sight.

“I think it’s very cool that new technologies are helping to discover these new types of architectural arrangements,” co-author Xanti S. Ceballos Pesina, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, says in the statement. “And when you see it on the map, it’s very impressive that … people with no centralized organization or power were coming together to perform rituals and to build this massive construction.”

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