Archaeologists find 40 carved stone discs at a rare Maya beekeeping site

Archaeologists working ahead of railway construction near Tulum, Mexico, have uncovered 40 carved limestone and coral discs inside a stone structure built specifically for raising stingless bees, a discovery Mexico’s antiquities institute is calling a rare, largely intact example of Maya beekeeping architecture. Each disc measures between 10 and 20 centimeters across, and researchers believe they once capped the ends of hollow wooden logs called jobones, the traditional hives still used by some Maya communities today. The structure itself runs 19.5 meters long, 3.9 meters wide and 1.2 meters high, oriented west to east along a low stone wall archaeologists first mistook for a simple boundary marker.

The find sits near Aktun Chen Natural Park, in a stretch of Quintana Roo jungle cleared for Section 5 of the Maya Train, and was actually excavated back in 2022 during routine salvage work — one of thousands of features Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has logged along the rail corridor before construction crews move through. Most of those finds are foundations, house platforms and pottery scatter; a beekeeping structure specific enough to identify its function is far rarer.

A boundary wall that turned out to be a bee house

Archaeologist Marisela Salazar Carrillo led the excavation, according to a Mexican outlet’s report on the find, which describes the structure’s formal designation as a ná’ajil kab, or “house of the bee.” Its layout was built horizontally rather than vertically specifically to maximize surface area for rows of jobones laid side by side, an arrangement distinct from ordinary Maya house platforms found nearby.

Two to six courses of masonry sit directly on bedrock, with no deeper foundation trench, which archaeologists take as a sign the structure was purpose-built and low-maintenance rather than adapted from another use. That shallow, ground-hugging construction also explains why the structure survived clearing work well enough to be recognized at all, instead of being flattened and logged as an unremarkable stone alignment.

Forty discs, and a case still being tested in the lab

Luis Ernesto Narváez Mac of Centro INAH Quintana Roo, who has interpreted the find publicly, said the discs “possibly functioned as covers for the jobones,” sealing each hollowed log at one or both ends. Alongside the discs, excavators recovered ceramic vessel fragments HeritageDaily reports were likely used to store the honey the hives produced, plus stone tools including a metate and mano typical of a working household rather than a ceremonial space.

That identification is not yet final. Soil samples are being analyzed in Yucatán laboratories, and ceramic and stone materials are undergoing separate study in Quintana Roo and Campeche to check for wax residue on the discs — the physical evidence that would confirm the beekeeping interpretation beyond its architectural logic.

A tradition older than the structure itself

Narváez Mac has described meliponiculture, the practice of keeping native stingless bees rather than the European honeybee, as a tradition dating back approximately 2,000 years in the region, with methods that have changed comparatively little since. The structure near Aktun Chen most likely dates to the Late Postclassic period, between AD 1200 and 1521, based on its construction style, though researchers have not ruled out that it remained in use into the early Spanish contact period that followed.

Nearby features reinforce that this was a working part of a larger household compound rather than an isolated curiosity: low stone terraces, foundation platforms for perishable structures, what may be a small shrine, and a cenote and cave system within roughly a hundred meters. Regional coverage of the discovery places it within a residential-productive solar, the household unit that anchored everyday Maya life outside the ceremonial cores of sites like nearby Tulum itself.

Stingless-bee honey mattered well beyond the household that kept it. Sixteenth-century chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés described Maya meliponiculture as already well established when Spanish colonizers arrived, noting bees kept in hollow logs stacked and sealed much as archaeologists now think the Aktun Chen discs were used. That written record, until now, was the closest thing scholars had to a physical description of how a pre-Hispanic meliponary was actually built.

What survives when a rail line cuts through the jungle

Structures like this one rarely survive in a form specific enough to identify, since wooden hives, organic wax and honey-storage vessels decay quickly in a tropical climate. The stone discs and masonry platform are the exception — durable enough to outlast the perishable jobones they once capped by roughly eight centuries. Wood, wax and the bees themselves are long gone; the limestone and coral that sealed their hives is what is left to argue over.

Whether the wax analysis confirms Narváez Mac’s reading or complicates it, the discs themselves are staying in Quintana Roo, cataloged as monument T5_23001 for future study rather than moved off-site. That keeps the evidence close to the honey-keeping communities the find is meant to shed light on in the first place.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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