Abstract

IWANISZEWSKI, Stanislaw  and  GALINDO TREJO, Jesús. La orientación de la estructura 33 de Yaxchilán: una reevaluación. Estud. cult. maya [online]. 2006, vol.28, pp.15-26. ISSN 0185-2574.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Carolyn Tate analyzed a group of rituals from the inscriptions of Yaxchilan that occurred at the end of the month Yaxkin, roughly corresponding to the date of the summer solstice in Julian calendar, and suggested there was a relation between these rituals and the solar event. Some of the textual evidence was placed on lintels of Structure 33. Apart from the epigraphic and iconographic evidence, Tate observed that Structure 33 was oriented to the summer solstice sunrise and its rooms were illuminated on those dates in such a way that sunrise light was falling on statue of Bird Jaguar IV. Our measurements carried out within the city have shown the fallacy of such assumptions leading to the rejection of Tate's ideas of the use of the summer solstice sunrise in city planning.