Temple of the Warriors

20.6833°N, 88.5683°W.

The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, immediately east of El Castillo, built between approximately 900 CE and 1200 CE during the Maya–Toltec phase of the city. The structure is a stepped pyramid 11 metres tall surmounted by a temple, fronted by a colonnade of approximately 200 carved stone columns each depicting a Toltec warrior in full regalia — the largest surviving programme of human-figure stone columns from any Mesoamerican site. The summit temple preserves a chacmool — a reclining stone figure holding a bowl on its abdomen — at its entrance, the canonical example of this Toltec sculptural form which appears identically at Tula in central Mexico more than 1,000 kilometres away. The architectural and sculptural parallels between Chichén Itzá and Tula are sufficiently exact that the relationship between the two cities has been one of the central debates of Mesoamerican archaeology for a century: invasion, alliance, migration, or shared religious lineage all remain proposed and unsettled.

A pyramid fronted by two hundred stone soldiers, with a Toltec sacrificial dish at its summit, in a Maya city whose architecture mirrors a city in central Mexico beyond Maya territory.