Vibrant Maya Ruins: Community Territorialization in Ake, Yucatán, Mexico

The ruination of many Maya cities in the northern Yucatán Peninsula toward the end of the Classic period (AD 300–900) did not necessarily bring about abandonment in those spaces. On the contrary, the transformation of monumental Maya architecture to heaps of rubble fostered new relations among humans, matter, and other-than-human entities in ancestral places. This article examines the formation and dissolution of a community in Ake’s epicenter, an ancestral Maya city located in present-day Yucatán, Mexico, from approximately AD 1100 to 1550. By AD 1000, monumental buildings were transforming into ruins due to human neglect and the action of gravity, erosion, humidity, and vegetation. These ruins were vibrant entities that prompted the growth of plants, attracted animals, materialized deities and ancestors, and generated human affects, conditions that assembled community life after political collapse. This article offers a glimpse into an ancestral Maya perspective on ruins. This Indigenous perspective was relational, nonhuman centered, and conceived of ruins as lively entities in more-than-human communities.