Q'umarkaj - Site Description

Site Description

The site can be visited, although little restoration work has been done to it. Various temple pyramids, the remains of palaces (mostly reduced to mounds of rubble) and a court for playing the Mesoamerican ballgame can be seen in the site core. In the Greater Q'umarkaj area there were four ballcourts, one in each of the four major political divisions of the city, testifying to the central role of the ballgame ritual in the sociopolitical organisation of the city.

Cut stone originally facing the buildings was taken to build the new buildings of Santa Cruz del Quiché; the ruins were still being mined for construction material through the late 19th century, doing extensive damage to the remains of the old buildings.

The major structures of Q'umarkaj were laid out around a plaza, which had a plaster floor. The K'iche' colonnaded buildings at Q'umarkaj appear to indicate ties with the distant city of Mayapan in the Yucatan Peninsula. The parallels also include skull imagery, effigy figure censers, squatting figures and the generous application of stucco. A combined aerial and surface analysis of the ruins has revealed a strongly patterned arrangement with repeating combinations of pyramids, long structures and multipatio residential complexes. These repeating combinations appear to be linked to the different nimja lineages. In addition there appears to be a larger division of the site, separating it into northwestern and southwestern halves. The dividing line runs from the west along a street to the central plaza, crosses the ballcourt and the plaza, then separates the northern and eastern branches of the site up to the rim of the canyon on the eastern side. This larger site division places six nimja complexes in the northern half and six in the south, although this larger division may not have been strictly along lineage lines, since Kaweq-linked structures are found in both halves of the site. The Kaweq and their allies dominated most of the site, with the Nijaib occupying the eastern portion, possibly as far as the satellite site of Atalaya.