Toniná

Start with your feet. The ground here climbs in hard, uneven steps of grey limestone, worn smooth in some places and sharp in others. Around you the Ocosingo Valley opens out in green pasture and low hills. You may hear cattle somewhere below, and the wind moving through the grass. Then you look up. A whole hillside rises in front of you, cut and faced with stone, terrace above terrace, all the way to the sky.

This is Toniná, a city of the Classic Maya, built in the highlands of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The name you know it by comes from Tzeltal, the Maya language still spoken across this region today. It is usually translated as something close to house of stone. The ancient inhabitants had their own name for the place. Scholars who read the glyphs often render it as Po, or Popo. Either way, the stone part is honest. Almost everything you see was shaped by human hands.

The great structure in front of you is called the Acropolis. It is not one pyramid. It is a natural hill that the Maya reshaped over centuries into a stack of seven broad terraces. On those terraces they placed temples, palaces, stairways and shrines. From the plaza at the bottom to the highest temple, the climb is often described as roughly seventy metres. That makes it one of the tallest built complexes in the Maya world, taller than many of the famous pyramids further north.

Here is the first thing most visitors do not expect. Toniná was not a peaceful mountain retreat. It was a military power, and its rulers wanted everyone to know it. The art on this hill returns again and again to one subject: captives. Prisoners with their arms tied behind their backs. Prisoners kneeling, stripped of their fine clothing. Their names were sometimes carved right on their bodies, so that every visitor could read who had been defeated.

The most famous rival was Palenque, the elegant city of temples about a long day's travel to the northeast. For years the two cities fought. In 711, according to inscriptions here, Toniná captured a king of Palenque named K'inich K'an Joy Chitam. A carved panel from this site shows him bound. It is a rare thing in Maya history: a royal prisoner from a great dynasty, recorded by the enemy who held him.

The second surprise is in the sculpture itself. Most Maya cities carved their rulers on flat stone slabs, almost like pages of a book. Toniná did something different. Its sculptors often worked in the round. Their kings stand as full three-dimensional figures, with fronts, backs and sides. Many have lost their heads over the centuries. Even so, as you walk the terraces, you feel watched by bodies, not by pictures.

As you climb, look for the stucco frieze on one of the middle terraces. It is usually protected by a roof. Archaeologists often call it the Frieze of the Four Eras. Feathered frames divide the wall into panels. In one, a skeletal figure, a lord of death, holds a severed head by the hair. Around him are creatures and symbols linked to the underworld and to the turning of time. It is unsettling and very beautiful at once.

Nearby, on a lower level, the builders made a structure that visitors often call the labyrinth. Narrow passages turn and double back inside the stone. The air is cooler there, and the light fades quickly. Its true purpose is still debated. Many researchers connect it to ritual and to the underworld, a place the Maya imagined as a real landscape below this one. Walk carefully, and give your eyes a moment to adjust.

Down in the main plaza, close to the foot of the hill, you will find a ball court. The Maya ball game was played with a heavy rubber ball, kept in motion with the hips. It was sport, but it was also ceremony. At Toniná, the markers set into this court were carved as bound captives. Players would have moved across the ground with the images of defeated enemies under their feet.

Now the third surprise, and perhaps the strangest. Toniná outlasted almost all of its neighbours. During the ninth century, one great Maya city after another stopped raising dated monuments. Royal courts fell silent. Yet here the carving went on. A monument from this site carries a date in the year 909. It is one of the very last dates recorded in the Long Count, the precise calendar of the Classic Maya. After that, the record stops.

What happened next is not fully known. The great court seems to have faded, and the hill slowly gave way to grass and trees. But the people did not disappear. The Tzeltal Maya families of this valley are descendants of the wider Maya world. On market days in Ocosingo, the nearby town, you can hear the language spoken in the streets, more than a thousand years after the last king of this city was carved in stone.

Before you leave, spend some time in the site museum near the entrance. Many of the best sculptures were moved inside to protect them from rain and weather. Here you can stand close to the faces, the headdresses and the glyphs. You can see the carved cords around the arms of the captives. Seeing them up close helps you picture the terraces as they once looked, crowded with stone figures.

If you have the energy, finish your climb at the top. Turn around slowly. The plaza lies far below, and the valley stretches out in every direction. Long ago, the lords of Toniná stood near here and looked out at the same hills. Now feel the stone under your hand, warm from the sun. Listen to the wind and the distant cattle. As you walk back down, notice each step of the terraces... and how much effort it took to build each one.