Minanbé, the intact Maya city found in Campeche in May, was probably called Sakil, INAH says

The Maya settlement archaeologists named Minanbé, "there is no road", may at last have its own name back. Readings of its carved monuments suggest the city was called Sakil, a Maya word that denotes whiteness, Mexico's national archaeology institute, INAH, said on November 9. Its November bulletin says the site was found intact in May 2026 north of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, in Campeche; its June bulletin placed it in the forest of the reserve's northern sector. Octavio Esparza Olguín, an epigrapher at the Center for Maya Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), presented the readings for the first time at a conference organized by INAH's center in Campeche.

What the inscriptions say

Of the nearly 20 monuments found at the site, at least five keep traces of text or images, Esparza said, according to INAH's November bulletin. Much of what their reliefs recorded was lost, partly because the Maya themselves broke the monuments into pieces and partly through more than a thousand years of abandonment. Photogrammetric models helped him make out several of the surviving elements; INAH's June bulletin said the team had made three-dimensional models of each of the 14 altars and stelae discovered, from some 500 photographs.

The name came from two places. On Minanbé's Stela 7, which was cut into three parts, a ruler named Suutz', meaning bat, appears beside a place title made of the signs sak and ajaw. A step at Ocomtún, a major center 40 kilometers to the northwest, carries a title of similar structure. That step, designated Monument 1 and probably part of a doorway lintel before it was reused, shows a captive lying face down with his wrists tied, and the inscription beside him says he came from Sakil. Ocomtún itself was called Maatz', INAH says.

Esparza concluded that the two cities were not on friendly terms, at least during a stretch of the Late Classic period, which INAH dates to 600 to 900 AD. Altar 6 at Minanbé repeats Suutz's name with the title kalo'mte'. In the Classic period that title belonged to lords with regional power, but toward the end of the period it spread to smaller places, Esparza said, including Minanbé, a settlement of only 15 hectares.

How the site was found

INAH announced the discovery on June 22. A Mexican and Slovenian team led by archaeologist Ivan Šprajc, of the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, had gone back into the reserve's northern sector to survey on the ground a site west of Chactún, a regional center the same project had reported 13 years earlier, for which it already had airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data. Šprajc said it was the first site in three years that his team had found untouched, with no looters' trenches.

The June bulletin describes a pyramid temple more than 13 meters high with features of the Río Bec style, and 14 stelae and altars. Stela 1 shows a beheading scene and carries the calendar date 5 Ajaw, which the project equates with 849 AD, close to the abandonment of the region's cities in the 10th century.

Can visitors go?

Neither bulletin says whether the site will be opened to the public, or when. The name itself is a warning about access: to reach it, the archaeologists and workers from the community of Constitución cut a path about five kilometers long with machetes, rode quad bikes along it and then walked a similar distance, INAH said in June.

The Calakmul Biosphere Reserve was established as a natural protected area in 1989, according to UNESCO. Its World Heritage listing began in 2002 with the 3,000-hectare Ancient Maya City of Calakmul; extended in 2014 as the Ancient Maya City and Protected Tropical Forests of Calakmul, the property now covers 331,397 hectares. INAH's bulletins don't say whether Minanbé lies inside the World Heritage property itself.