The City of the Sacred Well

The Sacred Well at Chichen Itza was a portal to the Mayan underworld, a place where jade and copper were cast into dark waters along with human offerings. When American archaeologist Edward Herbert Thompson began dredging its depths in the early 1900s, he pulled up treasures that had languished in darkness for a millennium. This is the story of that expedition - part adventure narrative, part psychological excavation of a vanished world. T. A. Willard, drawing on Thompson's journals and his own visits to the site, weaves a vivid account of the ancient city: its towering pyramids, its mysterious astronomical alignments, its ball courts where losers faced ritual death. But the heart of the book is the well itself - that gaping cenote that the Maya believed connected the living to the rain god Chaac. What Thompson found there forms a haunting portrait of a civilization that built beauty and brutality into the same stones. For readers drawn to lost worlds and the archaeology of mystery.