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34.0. Cobá 553 or village that he decided the difficulty in trying to get there was too daunting. For much of the rest of the middle of the 1800s the site could not be visited by outsiders because of the Caste War of Yucatán. Maler visited Coba in 1893 and took at least one photograph, but unfortunately did not publish it and the site remained unknown to the archeological community. Thomas Gann was brought to the site by some local Maya hunters in 1926 and he later published the first description of the ruins later that year. Gann gave a short description to the archeologists of the CIW Chichén Itzá Project, which sent out an expedition under J. Eric S. Thompson. Thompson’s initial report of a surprisingly large site with many inscriptions prompted Morley to mount a more thorough examination of the site. Thompson made a number of return visits to the site through 1932, in which year he published a detailed description. The site remained little visited due to its remoteness until the first modern road was opened up to Coba in the early 1970s. The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia began archeological excavations in 1972 under the direction of Carlos Navarrete. At the beginning of the 1980s another T H E C A R N E G I E M A Y A Coba is located around five small lakes. A series of elevated stone and plaster roads (sacbes) radiate from the central site to various smaller sites. Some of these causeways go east to the Caribbean coast, and the longest runs over 100 km to the west to the site of Yaxuná. The site contains several large temple pyramids, the tallest, known as Nohoch Mul, being 42 meters in height. Coba is estimated to have had at least 50,000 inhabitants at its peak of civilization, and the built up area extends over some 80 square km. The site was occupied by a sizable agricultural population by the first century . The bulk of Coba’s major construction seems to have been made in the Middle and Late Classic periods, about 500 to 900, with most of the dated hieroglyphic inscriptions from the 600s. However Coba remained an important site in the Postclassic era and new temples were built and old ones kept in repair until at least the 1300s, and possibly as late as the arrival of the Spanish. Knowledge of this expansive site was never completely lost, but it was not examined by scholars until the 1920s. John Lloyd Stephens mentioned hearing reports of the site in 1841, but it was so distant from any known modern road 554 COBÁ road to Coba was opened, regular bus service begun, Coba became a tourist destination with many visitors visiting the site on day trips from Cancun and the Riviera Maya. Only a small portion of the site has been cleared and restored. 34.1. SYLVANUS G. MORLEY The Four Cobá Expeditions YB 25:274–277, 1926 The most important contribution of the year, indeed of the past five years in the field of Middle American archaeology, was the discovery, by the Institution’s Third Cobá Expedition, on May 24 of the site of Macanxoc, 50 mi. east and slightly south of Chichén Itzá. This site lies a mile and a half [2.4 km] southeast of the main group of Cobá, the existence of which has been known for 85 years, and is chiefly important because of the presence of eight sculptured monuments presenting eight Initial Series dates, practically trebling the number of Initial Series previously known in the entire peninsula of Yucatán, and promising to throw a flood of light on the early history of the country. The ruins of Cobá were first noted by John Lloyd Stephens in 1841, although he did not visit the site personally.1 Teobert Maler, the Austrian explorer, seems, however, to have been at Cobá, since a photograph of the so-called Castillo there taken by him is in the Museum of History and Archaeology at Mérida. Dr. T. Gann and E. L. Crandall, the latter being the staff photographer of this First Expedition, visited the site on February 23 and 24, on behalf of the Institution, discovering two sculptured monuments (Stelae 11and 12), both of which were so badly weathered, however, as to prevent the decipherment of their inscriptions. Dr. A.V. Kidder and J.E.S. Thompson, G...

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