Temple III (Temple of the Jaguar Priest)

17.2242°N, 89.6261°W.

Temple III is the last great pyramid raised at Tikal in the Petén Basin of Guatemala, dedicated around 810 CE near the end of the city's monumental construction program. The pyramid rises 55 metres in three terraces of cut limestone, with a single steep staircase on its eastern face. The carved wooden lintel of the summit shrine, now in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Basel, depicts an obese figure draped in a jaguar pelt — possibly Dark Sun, the ruler whose reign closed the Late Classic at Tikal. The structure was first cleared by Alfred Maudslay in 1881 and excavated in detail by the Proyecto Nacional Tikal beginning in 1979. Within sixty years of its dedication the city's dynastic record stops and the long inscribed history of Tikal goes silent. The last dated stela at the city, Stela 11, was erected in 869 CE, only one generation later.

Temple III is a pyramid built at the moment a civilization ran out of stones to add to its own story.