History

The site was inhabited as early as 300 BC, but Palenque’s true ascendancy began in the Early Classic period. Under Pakal, who assumed the throne at age twelve in 615 AD following a disputed succession, the city embarked on a decades-long programme of monumental construction. Pakal commissioned the Temple of Inscriptions — a nine-tiered pyramid — as his funerary monument, a project not completed until after his death in 683 AD. His son K’inich Kan B’alam II continued the architectural programme, building the three temples of the Cross Group that articulate the city’s cosmological vision in stone and carved relief.

In 1949, Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier noticed that one of the floor slabs inside the Temple of Inscriptions had finger holes — a feature suggesting it was meant to be lifted. In 1952, after three years of clearing a rubble-filled staircase, his team descended 24 metres into the pyramid’s heart and found the sealed crypt of Pakal. The sarcophagus lid, weighing five tonnes and carved with an intricate scene of the king’s descent into the Maya underworld, became one of the most photographed objects in all of pre-Columbian archaeology. The jade mosaic death mask and jade-encrusted remains of Pakal are now held in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The sarcophagus lid’s imagery was later, and without scholarly basis, misread by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods (1968) as a Maya astronaut — an interpretation rejected entirely by the archaeological community.

Palenque was abandoned around 800 AD during the broad Maya collapse, its final years marked by declining monument construction and probable political fragmentation. The forest reclaimed the city completely; European knowledge of its existence came only in the 18th century, and systematic excavation did not begin until the 20th.