Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza is a Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, with a stepped pyramid among the most visited ancient sites in the Americas. The city matters because it contradicts the usual telling of the "Maya collapse" as an endpoint: the southern lowlands emptied, but Maya civilisation continued in the north for centuries. Its architecture mixes Maya tradition with central Mexican forms, once explained as Toltec conquest; recent scholarship reads it rather as exchange and deliberate borrowing. The cenote at the site was used for offerings, documented by dredging from 1904.