Topoxte Archaeological Project

Invisible Infrastructure in Northern Guatemala

The Topoxte Islands are a group of small archaeological sites located at the southwestern end of the Laguna Yaxhá, in the Department of Peten in northern Guatemala. The three principal sites—Topoxte, Paxte, and Cante—are rare examples of dense (arguably urban), well-preserved, and well-protected Postclassic Maya settlements in the Peten.

Topoxte, Paxte, and Cante are in fact only sometimes islands. When the water level of the lagoon is low, the "islands" become part of the mainland.

Despite their small size, the Topoxte Islands have been extensively modified. Their ancient inhabitants raised artificial platforms, created stepped bedrock terraces, leveled plazas, excavated multi-lobed cisterns and underground chambers, and built long docks and dense settlements.

Current work by the Projecto Arqueológico Topoxte (PAT) aims to explore this invisible infrastructure of the Topoxte Islands. Although the Postclassic period was once considered a time of decline, decadence, and depopulation in Maya history, people in the past thoroughly transformed these islands, remaking the lagoon's landscape as they wanted it to be. Those investments were monumental and long-lasting, in some ways more so than the architecture and artifacts that usually dominate archaeological interests.

Who Built the Topoxte Islands?

Like many other Maya sites in the Peten, the Topoxte Islands were first inhabited during the Preclassic period (c. 500 BCE) and abandoned sometime around 800 CE. Unlike many of their neighbors, however, the Topoxte Islands were later reoccupied by migrants arriving from northern Yucatán, sometime between 1200-1400 CE.

Most of the visible structures now covering the islands seem to have been built by those Postclassic newcomers. They include several structural arrangements known as “temple assemblages,” local versions of contemporary architecture found in northern Yucatán, especially at the distant metropolis of Mayapán. But those ruins are arranged in levels of increasingly restricted concentric circles — a distinctive pattern that requires massive manipulation and modification of the underlying landscape.

Was the total reshaping of Topoxte, Paxte, and Cante the result of gradual accumulations or a singular, massive investment? Was it the Postclassic migrants who invested the labor required to raise and recreate the natural islands or did they find a ready-made monument left behind by their Classic-period antecedents?

To answer these questions, we use a combination of targeted excavations and aerial (drone-based) and terrestrial lidar surveys to shed light on the both the chronology and the extent to which people in the past transformed the Topoxte Islands.