Revisiting the Xunantunich Palace: The 2003 Excavations

II.  Changing Access to the Upper Building

The first modification we can document in Str. A-11 represents a substantial change in the building’s layout. The Maya closed off the interior stairway that provided access to the upper building, blocking the stairway’s lower entrance with large cut stone blocks and filling the entire stairway with a solid, dense mass of well-laid limestone rubble, cobbles, and plaster, some of which can still be seen in situ in Figure 12.

Similarities in masonry style suggest that this modification coincided with the construction of the upper building’s Room 5, which necessitated an extension of the northwest sector of the platform (Figure 9). A steep stairway, shown on Figure 17, below, was laid against the north face of Str. A-11’s substructure platform, and it provided access up to Room 5 and the rest of the upper building from the alley that extended off the northwest corner of Plaza A-III between Strs. A-10 and A-12.  This change to Str. A-11’s layout altered the ways in which the ruler could interact with his/her subjects, eliminating direct access to the ruler’s living quarters from the lower building and shunting that access to an alley off the structure’s northwest corner, where it was hidden from the view of people in Plaza A-III.

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