Kabah Archaeological Zone

Kabah was the second-largest city of the Puuc region after Uxmal, flourishing between roughly 750 and 950 CE and connected to Uxmal by a raised stone sacbe road roughly 18 kilometers long, marked at its terminus by a freestanding corbeled arch. The site's principal structure, the Codz Poop or 'Palace of Masks,' is covered across its entire facade in more than 250 individually carved stone masks of the rain god Chaac, an obsessive architectural repetition unmatched elsewhere in the Maya world and read by archaeologists as a direct response to the Puuc region's total dependence on rainfall, since the area has no rivers, lakes, or accessible groundwater. Some of the mask elements originally formed a stairway leading up over the god's mouth to the temple doorway, though most have since collapsed. Kabah's other structures, including the Palace complex and Great Temple, remain only partially excavated, with substantial mounds still unrestored in the surrounding forest. INAH presents the site as a short loop from the Codz Poop to the Great Pyramid and across the highway to the sacbe arch. Restoration efforts through the 20th century have focused on stabilizing and re-erecting fallen Chaac masks on the Codz Poop, many of which were found scattered on the ground when excavation began.