Just a stone’s throw from the centre of Tikal – the vast Maya city in the heart of modern-day Guatemala – archaeologists have unearthed a chilling new clue to one of the most turbulent periods in ancient Mesoamerican history.
At the heart of a buried residential compound, researchers discovered an altar built in the style of a faraway civilisation. Around it, they found skeletons – including infants – arranged with disturbing precision.
The discovery sheds new light on the mysterious relationship between the Maya and a powerful foreign metropolis nearly 1,000 kilometres away: Teotihuacan, a sprawling city in what is now central Mexico.
At its peak, Teotihuacan was the largest urban centre in the Americas. And for a time, it seems, its influence reached deep into Maya territory.
“This is, in essence, the footprint of empire,” Prof Stephen Houston, an anthropologist at Brown University and co-author of the new study published in the journal Antiquity, tells BBC Science Focus.
“Everything about it screams non-Maya. Everything about it suggests a massively penetrative impact on a foreign civilisation.”
A foreign altar in the Maya heartland
The structure in question – a modest, painted altar built around the late 4th century AD – was found in a complex of buildings just east of Tikal’s ceremonial core.
Decorated with red, black and yellow murals depicting gods, the altar shares striking similarities with religious installations in Teotihuacan.
But the most disturbing finds lay buried around it. Excavations around the altar uncovered the remains of at least three infants at its edges. A fourth offering was found at the southwest corner, this time without human remains.
The layout suggests a ritually charged placement, closely resembling Teotihuacan practices of sacrificing infants at key spatial points around sacred structures.
“These are very young children,” Houston says. “Were they sacrificed? It’s a little hard to say at this point. But the fact that they’re positioned there, more or less at the same time, and all about the same age, would indicate to us that these are sacrifices.”
Houston believes these offerings were meant to activate or empower the altar. “Basically, they kill them and then position them around this altar, which would endow it with, we presume, all sorts of special powers,” he says.
“This is something that’s particularly associated in this region with Teotihuacan and its presence.”
Elsewhere on the site, beneath an earlier phase of construction, archaeologists uncovered the grave of an adult male buried with grave goods, including a green obsidian point – a trademark of Teotihuacan stonecraft – along with shell jewellery and ceramics in foreign styles.
In another nearby tomb, a 2–4-year-old child was found seated with flexed limbs, a highly unusual position in Maya mortuary tradition but common in Teotihuacan.
“A kind of emotional wasteland”
The researchers believe this complex was part of a larger foreign enclave established during a period of profound disruption in Tikal.
In 378 AD, inscriptions suggest that a foreign force – likely from Teotihuacan – overthrew the local dynasty, replacing the king with a puppet ruler. Subsequent excavations, including remote sensing scans, revealed a citadel just outside the city centre that appears to be a scale replica of Teotihuacan’s central compound.
“It’s like the Green Zone in Baghdad,” says Houston. “A heavy foreign presence moving into the capital of another country and setting up this heavy-handed precinct right there in the middle of government.”
What’s even stranger is what happened next. After a century or so, the entire compound – altar, buildings and all – was deliberately buried and never reoccupied. In a city that typically built layer upon layer over sacred spaces, this spot was left alone for centuries.
“This is prime real estate,” Houston says. “I can’t emphasise enough how strange it is that the Maya never went back here. It has a kind of a taboo aspect, as though they didn’t want to touch or go near this area again – a kind of emotional wasteland.”
Foreign gods and foreign hands
Teotihuacan remains an enigma to archaeologists. Unlike the Maya, it left behind few decipherable inscriptions. But in Tikal, scholars are piecing together its story through Maya eyes – a rare case of an empire seen not from the centre but from the receiving end of its influence.
The altar, with its foreign iconography and foreign gods, would likely have served as a place of ritual observance – perhaps to sanctify the presence of foreign elites or empower their local rule. It may well have been used to perform sacrifices itself.
“These people, we think, lived here,” Houston says. “They were the power behind the throne. A kind of grey eminence you sometimes hear about in European history. They didn’t seem to want to take control directly – they were ruling through local quislings or proxies.”
It’s a story that feels uncomfortably familiar. An imperial power imposes its gods, rituals and architecture on a local population, and even centuries later, the trauma echoes through the archaeology.
“It’s part of a much bigger story about how foreign powers establish their presence through local mechanisms,” Houston added.
What’s next?
The altar and its eerie sacrificial burials may be just the beginning. Houston and his colleagues are continuing to excavate the surrounding area – and early signs suggest there’s much more to uncover.
“We’ve been digging up an area a stone’s throw from this site,” Houston explains, adding ominously: “It’s this building that looks just like a structure in Teotihuacan – and it’s full of human sacrifices.”
About our expert
Stephen Houston is the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science, a professor of anthropology, and a professor of history of art and architecture at Brown University. His research has been published in the Journal of Field Archaeology, Ancient Mesoamerica and the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, among others.
Read more: