page_title: Qʼumarkaj
section_title: Site description
hierarchical_section_title: Qʼumarkaj / Site description
caption_attribution_description: English: Remains of the Tohil Temple in the ruins of Q'umarkaj (Utatlán), Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala. Engraving made by Frederick Catherwood during his visit to the site in 1840.Español: Escombros del Templo de Tohil en las ruinas de Q'umarkaj (Utatlán), Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala. Por Frederick Catherwood realizado durante su visita al sitio en 1840.
context_page_description: Qʼumarkaj is an archaeological site in the southwest of the El Quiché department of Guatemala. Qʼumarkaj is also known as Utatlán, the Nahuatl translation of the city's name. The name comes from Kʼicheʼ Qʼumarkah "Place of old reeds".
  Qʼumarkaj was one of the most powerful Maya cities when the Spanish arrived in the region in the early 16th century. It was the capital of the Kʼicheʼ Maya in the Late Postclassic Period. At the time of the Spanish Conquest, Qʼumarkaj was a relatively new capital, with the capital of the Kʼicheʼ kingdom having originally been situated at Jakawitz and then at Pismachiʼ. Qʼumarkaj was founded during the reign of king Qʼuqʼumatz in the early 15th century, immediately to the north of Pismachiʼ. In 1470 the city was seriously weakened by a rebellion among the nobility that resulted in the loss of key allies of the Kʼicheʼ.
  Archaeologically and ethnohistorically, Qʼumarkaj is the best known of the Late Postclassic highland Maya capitals. The earliest reference to the site in Spanish occurs in Hernán Cortés' letters from Mexico. Although the site has been investigated, little reconstruction work has taken place.
context_section_description: The site can be visited, although little restoration work has been done to it. Various temple pyramids, the remains of palaces (mostly reduced to mounds of rubble) and a court for playing the Mesoamerican ballgame can be seen in the site core. In the Greater Qʼumarkaj area there were four ballcourts, one in each of the four major political divisions of the city, testifying to the central role of the ballgame ritual in the sociopolitical organisation of the city.
  Cut stone originally facing the buildings was taken to build the new buildings of Santa Cruz del Quiché; the ruins were still being mined for construction material through the late 19th century, doing extensive damage to the remains of the old buildings.
  The major structures of Qʼumarkaj were laid out around a plaza, which had a plaster floor. The Kʼicheʼ colonnaded buildings at Qʼumarkaj appear to indicate ties with the distant city of Mayapan in the Yucatan Peninsula. The parallels also include skull imagery, effigy figure censers, squatting figures and the generous application of stucco. A combined aerial and surface analysis of the ruins has revealed a strongly patterned arrangement with repeating combinations of pyramids, long structures and multipatio residential complexes. These repeating combinations appear to be linked to the different nimja lineages. In addition there appears to be a larger division of the site, separating it into northwestern and southwestern halves. The dividing line runs from the west along a street to the central plaza, crosses the ballcourt and the plaza, then separates the northern and eastern branches of the site up to the rim of the canyon on the eastern side. This larger site division places six nimja complexes in the northern half and six in the south, although this larger division may not have been strictly along lineage lines, since Kaweq-linked structures are found in both halves of the site. The Kaweq and their allies dominated most of the site, with the Nijaib occupying the eastern portion, possibly as far as the satellite site of Atalaya.
caption: The Temple of Tohil as drawn by Frederick Catherwood in 1840
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