Stela Plaza Complex

16.3142°N, 88.8019°W.

The Stela Plaza Complex at Nim Li Punit in the Toledo District of southern Belize is the ceremonial centre of a Late Classic Maya city built between approximately 700 and 850 CE, on a ridge above the Indian Creek tributary. The plaza supports more than 25 carved stone stelae, of which Stela 14 stands 9.3 metres tall — the second-tallest surviving Maya stela after Quiriguá Stela E. The stela bears a portrait of the local ruler in an enormous feathered headdress that gives the site its modern name ("Big Hat" in modern Q'eqchi' Maya). The pyramidal structures of the plaza are modest in scale but sit on a site that was clearly an important regional centre on a trade route between the Caribbean coast and the highland source-zones of jade. The site was investigated by Norman Hammond's Cambridge project in 1976 and consolidated by the Belize Department of Archaeology.

The Stela Plaza Complex is a small ceremonial centre that erected a stela almost as tall as the largest one ever raised by the Maya.