Saturday, March 1, 2008

EkBalam (Dark Jaguar)


I have blogged about this 2000 year old Mayan Temple Pyramid before, but it is always enchanting to be here. It has some of the best preserved stucco relief of any of the structures I have been to. Those palapa roofs were built to protect the marvalous ornate decorations that you can see in the following photographs. Imagine the entire pyramid covered in the smoothed plaster that was painted in brilliant colors!! And remember all this done without metal tools, beast of burden or the wheel!
We were there for a nice rain that darkened much of the stone and gave us a nice reprieve from the afternoon heat.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Cynthia
Were some type of palapas or shelter for the art always a part of the structure, or were they added much later? Hard to tell from the pix whether some of those strut holes were original or not.
George

Cynthia Castle said...

Jorge,
I believe the palapa roofs are fairly recent....as I was reading that the reconstruction was fairly new, but I will try to find out more.....cynthia