Archaeologists found 96 homes showing a Maya city stayed inhabited for centuries after its collapse

Archaeologist Roberto Rosado-Ramírez has mapped 96 small house mounds inside the walled center of Aké, a Maya city in Mexico’s Yucatán, and the pottery on them dates to about A.D. 1100 to 1550. That is centuries after the city’s political collapse, a period when Aké was long assumed to be empty. His study appears in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

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At its height, around A.D. 900, as many as 19,000 people reportedly lived in Aké. The new work suggests ordinary families stayed on long after the kings and temples lost their purpose.

Ninety-six house mounds inside the ruins

As Archaeology magazine reported on Oct. 22, traces of 96 small structures were found at Aké, built with pole frames and thatched roofs. They sat on mounds inside the walled center, some of them on top of old plazas, roads and collapsed buildings, and the builders worked large stones from those ruins into their foundations. The pottery from the mounds and from a refuse pit dates the occupation to about A.D. 1100 to 1550, the magazine says. Rosado-Ramírez, identified by the magazine as a researcher at the University of Virginia, led the work with colleagues the magazine does not name.

The paper carries the identifier 10.1017/laq.2026.10210, and its details come as summarized by Greek Reporter on Oct. 21. The survey found 96 low mounds supporting houses. Excavations at several of them produced pottery dated to A.D. 1100 through 1550, and a dated refuse deposit fell between A.D. 1116 and 1218 without any clear break in activity. At least three-quarters of the smaller mounds reused stone from deteriorating large buildings.

The layout looks like family life. At least 76 mounds surrounded shared open areas in 12 patio groups, an arrangement associated with extended families. Grinding stones, broken pottery, stone tools, spindle whorls and animal bones point to cooking, food preparation and weaving. Five small shrine-like structures held ceramic incense burners, animal figurines and vessels, and one contained part of a carved monument from about A.D. 600, older than the settlement around it. The Greek Reporter summary also notes a burial placed within the rubble of older buildings.

Collapse without abandonment

Earlier work, the Greek Reporter summary says, treated Aké in its later centuries as a pilgrimage destination. Rosado-Ramírez describes something different: a resident community built around the ruins. In his words, “political collapse and ruination did not bring about abandonment.” The people he describes were not visitors passing through a sacred site but households that farmed, wove cloth and kept their own shrines amid the older monuments.

The upheaval itself is well documented in general terms. Drought, conflict and violence drove the political decline, according to Archaeology. A report on the study at Earth.com adds that the drought evidence comes from oxygen isotopes in a sediment core from Lake Chichancanab, and that builders reportedly raised a wall across a 20-mile limestone road, enclosing the core of Aké and blocking traffic toward Izamal. The same account says many houses sat in clusters of about six around shared patios, and it puts the community at 170 to 380 people without saying who made that estimate, so the figure deserves caution. It also quotes science writer Lizzie Wade, author of Apocalypse, saying that people today lack the perspective on their own time that archaeologists have on the Classic Maya collapse.

The Earth.com report lists Rosado-Ramírez’s affiliation differently from Archaeology, naming Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, while the University of Virginia hosts a faculty profile for him. The research itself is the same study either way.

How the Spanish era ended the settlement

The settlement’s end appears tied to colonial rule rather than the earlier collapse. A 1567 document may refer to Aké as an Indigenous community, but the place is missing from later colonial records. Residents may have been forcibly moved between 1567 and 1580, a span the magazine gives for their removal by the Spanish. About 350 people live in Aké today, per the Greek Reporter summary.

The finding fits a wider pattern that Archaeology has covered, including a May and June 2026 feature, The Last Maya Kingdom, on the Itzá people of Guatemala, who resisted the Spanish for nearly 200 years. Maya communities did not vanish when the great Classic-period centers fell; many kept going for centuries, and the Aké mounds are physical evidence of one of them. The interpretations here, including the household clusters and the shift from pilgrimage to residence, come from the author’s own survey and have yet to be tested by other teams. What the evidence offers is ordinary and concrete: pottery sequences, house foundations and refuse deposits showing a population that persisted after the monuments had lost their original purpose.

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

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